In 1974 I had the following book, plus I was unemployed, there was an energy crisis underway, and I had an HP-21 programmable calculator and a BA in American Studies.
An Introduction to Scientific Research - Edgar Bright Wilson - 1990
The result was I started a social systems research project that I am still doing.
My project is neither a success nor a failure. If anything, social system research results in perceiving the culture. Culture is an object that we usually live within. The framework of culture is usually invisible to those living within it.
My microscopic level of notoriety is my blog comes up first when doing a search for "Put carts on the public bus"
So, I recommend you get the Wilson book through inter-library loan. I also recommend you develop your library access and research system.
If you do research, hang on to your records. I did measurements back in the 80's that are unexpectedly out of synch with recent measurements. Fortunately I saved the record logs and eventually I will go back and try and understand the differences.
I have been fixing my own cars for 40 years and I just came in after spending 40 hours fixing oil and water leaks in my 245,000 mile 93 Dodge Caravan. In extension cars never transcend.
The craft of fixing cars is 1/2 tools and 1/2 knowledge. Even as a tinkerer you will need both.
On the "knowledge" part, I recommend both getting a good shop manual and then doing Internet searches.
Car manufacturers do withhold information and they do set things up so the effect is to "screw the independent mechanic". (Example: Shallow Torx screws on the crankshaft pulley of a MBZ '92 190e. You can't see them, so you strip a few by blindly using a hex bit. It took me 6 months to figure out how to get them out. Got'em out in 10 minutes when I discovered a new tool: external bolt head extractors at a hardware store. I probably would have read about the solution if I had spent more time scrounging on the Internet.)
On the Internet, you will find others who have tried the same task and learned something.
If anything, what I wish for is a syntactically sensitive auto repair search engine. A real AI challenge to be sure, but at least the vocabulary is more limited. (Something to make a structured Wiki out of the jumble a Google search returns.)
The information amateur mechanics like you and me need is scattered among 7 or 8 websites plus another 20 generic "how to fix it" enterprise sites.
There is a ton of stuff that needs to be reverse engineered, described and published accessibly on the internet.
As a tinkerer you can replace the brushes in an electric window motor ($10.50 vs $175 replacement), get the dog paw sand out of a Mercedes console window switch ( $0 and 15 minutes vs $17), figure out the electrical circuit in a '93 Isuzu electric window master switch ( $3 vs. $326) and more.
The key to all this is quality tinkering or reverse engineering and publishing at least some of your findings back on the Internet for others to follow.
And remember, take a deep breath (CO2 ~360 ppm and rising). There is a huge body of information needed to counteract the industry wide effort to exclude the independent mechanic and simplify repair to a "component exchange only" scheme.
There are immense environmental issues now evident about problems with the American auto centric societal scheme. All this stuff is meta information about cars not contained in any shop manual. Perfect action material for the clear eyed tinker and the non-romantic greasy fingernail home mechanic.
One might consider what Robert Pirsig suggested, the thing being worked on is in a way you.
The letter reported is a very serious sign of great trouble in the social fabric. The letter is partly driven by the Virginia elected official launching a fraud investigation of a climate scientist.
Another recent sign of great trouble was the Chinese led blocking of global CO2 emission goals. That was a national political decision to ignore the science and seek a few more years of national economic advantage.
Right here at home, I did a spreadsheet working out the energy savings of 1/3 to 1/7th if we bought a new refrigerator.
The significant other vetoed all energy considerations, saying "It has to be a stainless steel household refrigerator that will increase the resale value of the house. If you buy anything else, you will have to take it back."
So we have this enormous problem; science pointing one way, and a lot of forces pulling the other way saying "Not yet... not yet..."
I think the stumbling point of your project is Linux users (like myself at least) can't find through Google or boot loader man pages a dependable, simple way to boot Linux from a USB-stick on older computers.
I have been playing with a secure Linux on a USB-stick project. One problem is how to boot Linux from a USB-stick on an older computer. My 11 year old machine is a case example.
I reached a point of exhaustion trying to find a sequence of grub boot loader commands that would load Linux from a bootable Linux USB-stick.
I already had the Grub boot loader on the hard disk. I tried every combination of grub commands trying to get grub to read and load vmlinuz from the USB-stick.
The older hardware may never access the USB-stick at boot time, so we may need a CD or even a floppy disk with a grub boot loader program on it.
Some sites I found on search described a grub boot CD and I have not seen an example yet that I can understand, copy and adapt.
It seems to me, that the "boot a Linux USB stick on any PC with a CD drive" problem needs a documented solution.
Speaking strictly for myself, after reading some of the grub bootloader documentation, I still couldn't understand what commands to issue and in what order. Booting is no longer a matter of jumping to 0x0100.
Once the bootloader problem is solved or bypassed, there is a great sourceforge tool for downloading and burning bootable-Linux-USB-sticks at:
unetbootin.sourceforge.net
When the computer does boot from USB-sticks, I like Knoppix, Slax and Mint, all mentioned above.
I have also found the Free BSD boot loader program does wonderful things at finding and loading bootable-Linux-USB-sticks.
Your post suggests that the cost of tuition for math make up courses is a problem.
That comment indirectly suggests to me that you live a long way from a Junior College.
You need a nearby Junior College to supply reasonable cost preparatory courses and you also need a nearby 4 year College to award a degree.
I suggest you explore moving to put yourself and your family as close to your chosen college and a nearby junior college as possible.
I presently live in an "educational saddle" place that is 8 airline miles distant from any Junior College and any 4 year institution.
While the rugged coastline is beautiful, nobody I know is keeping up the commute to get a degree. I also don't know anybody going to Junior college for career change education either.
I got my BA by commuting from a parent's house that was 4 miles airline to college.
Every time I have lived close to a college, I wound up studying something. Distance makes it much more difficult to pursue formal education.
I have a refrigerator that I tested with a KillAWatt energy usage meter. The refrigerator came in at about 2x the energy usage of current models.
I decided to find out why it was so bad: Is the energy usage due to poor insulation, leaky doors, too many door opening events or a worn out compressor?
I eliminated "poor insulation" by scabbing a 2 foot x 4 foot piece of 2" foam onto one refrigerator wall and measuring the the "delta T" between the inside, outside and between the insulation and the cabinet. Some algebra with the surface area of the refrigerator convinced me the original insulation is excellent.
While programming an Arduino to measure how often and long the doors are open, a fellow from England mentioned his new refrigerator is really efficient because it has inner doors that prevent cold air from falling out when the door is opened.
This much work has persuaded me that Energy Star is a fraud because the testing standard for refrigerators probably does not measure the effect of opening the doors during the test.
Also, there is no direct email on the Department of Commerce web site to contact a technical specialist and get a clear explanation.
The path to reading the ASTM refrigerator energy consumption test description is encumbered. The test description is apparently not available for free public reading.
His comments about the Internet, while they do seem dated, did push me on to a further view of the Internet.
One of the recent formulations points out that the Internet is so fast and so vast that the resource now in short supply is human attention. I thought about Gelernter's "information streams" and demur: There is data on the Internet that sometimes becomes information in the mind of the beholder. Natural language text processing does only modest specific tasks in a data processing manner. Attention is the thing a human applies to data to reach a state of "readiness to act" that Donald MacKay once defined.
Here is what I suggest is a further view:
The Internet is a data transmission medium of revolutionary low cost. There is an abundance of low quality data but the higher levels are stalled due to the shortage of high quality input data. An instance of solving the high quality input data problem is Wikipedia. But symphony music, Building Codes, scientific papers, journals and books are stalled for economic reasons. Our society with it's economic structure is mismatched with the cheap bandwidth and flexibility of the Internet as a publishing solution.
I did a super budget prototype web site with self-hosting.
The factor that got me to do self hosting is the low power consumption of the WindPC. It consumes only 36 watts, which works out to around $6 per month. The system was strictly a prototype and I had no traffic during the trial period.
Self hosting didn't work as smoothly as I hoped. I had to set a fixed IP number in the home router to make the no-ip redirection work. So the WindPC served web pages. But the same change canceled the ability of the WindPC to do dns lookups and I ran out of energy relearning tcp-ip. A small but annoying project glitch. Another limit is I could not figure out how to make the WindPC run multiple web sites at the same time. Multi-homing it is called.
The system had these parts: A WindPC with 2 gigs of memory and 160 mb disk (on loan from a friend, I had to buy the memory), free dns service from no-ip.com, CentOs 5.0, and the Rails application was the substruct open source ruby on rails. I copied the application or files between a development machine and the production box with SSH.
------------ I looked at Google AppEngine and I wrote a review of the O'Reilly book on the subject.
But the hard part about GoogleAppEngine is you can start a site for free. The hard thing about "free" is it drags the entire design and hosting solution towards GoogleAppEngine if you don't have any other choice criterion than out of pocket hobbyist cost.
You can have some fun with your project with bootable Linux distributions installed on USB memory sticks.
The thing Windows simply cannot do is not be the #1 Internet hacking target of all time. A Linux distro moderately tweaked for security is potentially quite robust.
The memory sticks cost $8.25 each for 2 gigabyte size and loading a Linux distribution is dead simple. The only problem is which distribution out of so many good ones?
The USB memory stick advantage is: Much less futzing with the hardware. Just plug it in, maybe twiddle the BIOS boot settings and go.
The disadvantage, so far for me is some USB Linux distros are intended as intermediates for a hard disk install, other distros are intended for troubleshooting the guest hardware. I am not clear yet on which one is best for long term use from the USB drive.
What I have been looking for is a Linux desktop distribution optimized like this:
Designed for the operating system to stay on the USB drive.
Has a browser, user capabilities, and file system already tuned for security.
Has a tripwire system to spot any operating system modifications.
Secure enough to connect directly to the internet without a home-router type front end, i.e. not hackable even by a determined intruder and not compromised by the legions of browser exploits.
Has ability to set up proprietary wireless driver devices without a temporary physical ethernet cable.
Runs flash and the problem video codecs, or allows you to add them as needed.
Will not let a Windows program erase files from the USB memory stick.
There is a utility program on sourceforge called unetbootin-linux that makes burning memory sticks a 3-click process.
So far here are my favorite bootable Linuxes:
Knoppix... offers to set up a user file on the hard disk at boot time. Really neat graphical desktop.
Mint... as mentioned by others it is pretty neat.
Slax a bootable desktop version of the venerable and famous Slackware.
CentOS needed a live version downloaded manually by me. Comfortable, conservative and solid.
See? Your simple Ask Slashdot question really means you can become your own distribution architect/connoisseur in your spare time.
The original article has a blast of articulate disagreement in the comments.
The article has an out of fashion viewpoint that some social coaching might help some kids avoid being bullied.
The much more current view being implemented in American public schools is: no-bullying in school settings.
I work with limited intellectual functioning kids (as an aide, not an expert). Some of these kids really do benefit from social coaching. To cue him in to how to act, he had "social stories" that he read to remind him how to behave in public. The coaching worked well enough for him to avoid being kicked out of school.
Looking beyond the linked article, I don't think we can tell if the original research study was misquoted or over simplified.
The "bullying problem" is a subset of a really interesting problem: How to help young adults and the group activities they engage in stay as sane and constructive social activities. How do we teach the young people being drafted in to the two Mexican gangs who attend the high school campus where I work to get along without fighting and seriously injuring each other?
This is another instance of meanness to others that appears in bullying. If we could develop communication and teaching to bring out kindness and tolerance in bullies and gangs then we could also have a starting point for redirecting other destructive social groups like Al Quaida.
On the teaching problem, a really interesting development I just heard about (on NPR) is "Terror Theory" which seems to cast some light on why groups of people become receptive to authoritarian control. Elsewhere, I am reading "The Unconquerable World" by Johnathan Schell, looking for another angle on the social peace teaching problem.
Well I wonder what on sourceforge is worth blocking? And why apply the blocking to just a few countries? The answer is, almost nothing on slashdot is worth blocking and the countries matter very little.
Look at this event in the context of the "Google considering leaving China" blog entry earlier this week.
The US government has very few tools for dealing with the alleged organized, systematic and large scale theft of data and email that was mentioned in the Google blog entry.
That same blog entry contained a link to a US Government position paper. That US position paper alleges the Chinese have a philosophy of Internet warfare.
Other articles describe the observed practice, they use teams, they systematically penetrate individual user's systems, they have download lists, they construct staging areas, they build CD size archive files. With this kind of stuff going on, no wonder Google didn't want to hang around and get hacked more.
Blocking sourceforge to the existing list of international bad player countries is a trial or demonstration. Several governments around the world are watching this American trial maneuver.
Right now I am reading: The unconquerable world : power, nonviolence, and the will of the people by Jonathan Schell and I simply wish I could understand the forces driving these conflicts on and over and about the Internet.
With these militaristic morons prowling the Internet, I think a prudent personal need is to have a really well hardened home gateway and at least one really hard to hack home system.
In my journal I discuss a comparison of three open source distributions as a base for setting up a relatively secure home desktop. Conclusion: use the Linux or FreeBSD you know best. Unresolved: how to secure the browser.
I look at American cell phone service as an astoundingly overpriced emulation of the past century's plain old telephone service.
But I have kids and a wife with cell phones and I occasionally need to track them down or find out what she wants from the grocery store.
Their three phones are billed at $120 per month from Verizon. The entire family plan is justified by my 16 year old who sends 400 text messages (otherwise 20 cents each) per month.
A friend gave me a Tracfone specific Motorola W175 (they are $20 retail) and I bought a 90 day prepaid phone card. Customer service as described on the Internet is poor, and the credit card portion of their website requires a browser not running Privoxy.
My costs are: About $12 per month and $.13 per minute. I have voice and text but I still use the home phone for long calls.
So I mention TracFone as another option in the range of services mentioned here.
I criticize cell phone service like this: Except for phone calls and brief text messages, all the other data transfer processes are bottled up in proprietary bundles of hardware + software + carrier + 2 year contract deals.
Just like every other cell phone, on my TracFone every voice sounds the same. The small audio bandwidth is matched by an equally small "meaning bandwidth".
As a curmudgeon, why the heck can't cell tower operators sell the huge bandwidth and instant connection switching for $.02 per hour instead of $.13 per minute?
Retail cell service provides a tiny fraction of the raw potential of the system. Look at it like this: A cell phone tower may consume 2 kw, that is about $.30 per hour for hosting 100 to 1000 connections. Double that price to pay for the hardware. The result is the basic cost of a cell phone data link is only a microscopic part of the amount charged at retail for the link wrapped in what we call "cell phone service".
Also as a curmudgeon, lets call conventional cell phone design crummy: If I didn't sit in a closed car, you would hear me from 15 feet away just like every other cellphone user. Uhh, not enough sidetone so everybody bellows robustly.
I just deleted a long post. I noticed everything in my post was a restatement of some news item I have read about China over the last few years.
I point out something that is happening as I hear the news about China: The media seems to be building a box of news reports about China.
This media box process is causing me, like you, to rethink "Gee, is buying stuff from China really a good idea?"
The meta point I want to make to Slashdot readers is: We are all being media boxed. The last year of headline news about China is doing a lot to cause many of us to reassess our regard for China and Chinese products.
Remember how a vocal fraction of the US population shouted down the Kennedy McCain Immigration Reform Bill a few years ago? I think the adverse news items about China are building another opinion storm cloud.
On the anniversary of copyright extension and Jaron Lanier's comment about wanting a single site dispensing cultural expression files by payment -- there is a good idea that I think needs to come out.
The idea I offer is: the price for downloading a file should be no more than the time apportioned cost of the downloader's proportional cost of using the internet. A user pays say $15 for an internet connection plus $15 for unlimited downloading of copyrighted digital data.
This should be called statutory digital paid copy in lieu of copyright payment.
This "cheapest digital copy" scheme is a compromise... the copyrighted file remains copyrighted and the owner gets a direct payment. But the copies are always reasonably priced and cheap, meaning whether you download 1 Avatar file or 10,000 files as part of a research project, you still pay only $15 per month, which is what I might average in book purchases anyway.
At the library, the same copyright payment scheme would mean $.05 for the copier and $.05 to the copyright holder. That is not $2.75 for a scientific journal article but the low page fee means many more pages will be copied.
Example, my fraction of the family internet bill is $15 this month. The same amount, another $15 would be distributed proportionally to all the sites I might visit and download from in a month. So if Avatar takes 1 hour to download, the Avatar producers would get 1 hour out of the month's total downloading. If I downloaded 24 hours per day, Avatar would get $.02. But no human can pay attention to that much material. But Avatar plus a few books and some newspapers might total 3 hours. Avatar still gets $5.
The price == downloading cost is inspired by the physics of optimum power transfer. When the impedance of the sink equals the impedance of the source, the maximum power is transferred. The other inspiration is the recent point made that we are in an attention limited environment. Our lifetime of attention is the limit on what digital information we can receive.
Marketing professionals are pricing digital works based on charging "slightly less than the price of a paperback book". This digital era needs a price based on "all that you can usefully pay attention to".
Another way of looking at this payment scheme is from the server side. The server delivering copies of Avatar receives revenue of somewhere between $.02 and $15.00 for each connection-hour of operation.
All the quality music and writing I would like to access is unavailable on the Internet at a reasonable price.
One of the problems is the quality music and writing is available, but only through a Corporate copyright holder. The anecdote as I gather ( see Janis Ian's website, she escaped) is the payment formula used for many musicians pays a lot to the corporation and a trickle to the artist.
Here is another writer who is developing a nuclear reactor based low-CO2 future scenario. Read it carefully, his book is an interesting exploration, but not "the solution".
Thorium for reactors, and the larger context of using nuclear electric generation to replace CO2 emitting coal generation is discussed in:
Whole Earth Discipline An Eco-pragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand
Here is an online book that organizes a huge spectrum of CO2 reduction schemes. This is worth reading for gaining perspective on just what fraction of the CO2 problem might be addressed using nuclear electricity generation.
Just yesterday I wished to make some progress toward a low carbon lifestyle. I started up my van [ 243,000 miles at 22.7 miles/gallon x 7 lb of carbon per gallon of gas x 3 lb of CO2 per pound of carbon ] and thought oops did I just emit 224,000 pounds of CO2?
I have been reading the posts trying to figure out why so many of these iconic technical-industrial organizations have slid.
Most of the posts associate the decline of organizations with a change of management. The management stories tell similar tales: where there is a replacement of management, the decline is expressed as selling off low performing assets and re-organizing to reduce costs.
Most of this discussion doesn't dwell on the massive de-industrialization of the USA. Around 1980, factories in the Far East were making electronic assemblies for less than the price of the American parts and American labor in a Heathkit kit.
But with the shift to tech manufacturing in the far East, did American corporations lose control of the products they made?
Here is a question; Have Apple and Hewlett-Packard done something different with their manufacturing organization? Do Apple and H-P own offshore factories in a way that enables them to prevent their proprietary products from being copied by others? Do these two companies retain a manufacturing control that prevents them from becoming a rented out brand like Bell & Howell?
I know from anecdote that the 80's era computer maker Morrow had great difficulty with it's computer mother board. The board was engineered in Silicon Valley and the Japanese board maker either sent no boards or way way too many. The result was first Morrow had trouble meeting demand, then it had too many boards as the market changed. Morrow went out of business around 1983 leaving behind a warehouse of unsold components that became one of Oakland's best computer surplus stores for several years afterward.
Robert Samuelson's The Great Inflation and It's Aftermath sort of tells the story of the decline of American manufacturing. The USA and Canada exited World War II with their manufacturing plants intact. By the end of the Regan Presidency, the de-industrialization of America was a sideshow mixed in with high interest rates and the second energy crisis.
Well, it is an interesting conclusion, with major logical problems. This finding by itself is not adequate for the appropriate apprehension of the issue before us.
A quality effort to enumerate the entire energy and CO2 reduction issue is:
On the threat "otherwise we have to build 1 atomic power plant per day..."
I recommend Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline An Ecopragmatist Manifesto". Mr. Brand favors emphasis on nuclear power and a number of other innovative approaches to dealing with the global warming problem.
The CO2 reduction task will require substantial changes to the American business and social system. We are in a formative phase right now.
Also, you can visit my "Put carts on the public bus" blog, for charts and dismal economic analyses galore:
I'll tell you about my password system built around vim, apg and cat.
This system is a variation of the single encrypted file that enables gnarly passwords and user identifications and challenge response answers.
This system has two points of weakness. One is: never print out a reference copy of your decrypted password file to a printer attached to a Windows computer. And as the vim "help X" text notes, a process running as you or root could read passwords while the file is open. The leading risk is a browser java, javascript or browser plugin.
Here is how it works: The vim editor supports ":X" for write a file encrypted with a pass phrase. That is the key feature this scheme uses.
Steps: On a sheet of paper write out an encryption pass phrase.
Choose a file name for the passwordfile.
Generate a nice big nasty list of passwords using "apg" and "wc".
Set aside a printed paper copy of a complete separate set of passwords to use if you must change passwords due to a security breach.
Using the unix ">" direct the passwords into the filename for your passwordfile.
Open the file in vi like "vi passwordfile"
Write the file out using the:X command and using your encryption pass phrase.
Exit and re-open the passwordfile with vi, to ensure you have the passphrase working.
For each password you store in the file. Create a text entry like this:
website-url date-established userid password other security information
Every time you use a password from the pre-generated list, mark the password with a mark to prevent any password being used twice.
When copying userids and passwords, use the Linux mouse copy instead of typing. Open the password file in a separate window from the Web Browser. If you figure out a few vi editing shortcuts, getting into the password file, and logging on is a fast process.
For fire safety and disaster recovery, I periodically make a plain text printout of the password file using the vi ":ha" command. As I said: don't print out a almost certainly infected Windows printer.
A security issue to watch is: don't mix entertainment browsing with banking or online purchase activity, don't put your passwordfile on a machine that you don't own and control.
The drill if you discover a security breach of this system is: Either somebody got into your account without your password or your Linux password file may be completely breached. Using the spare password file printed on paper noted above, change important passwords post haste.
I have two conflicting feelings about electrical conversions.
First, I have an aging Dodge Caravan that I use to commute 22 miles every day. I'd love to remove the engine and drop in an electrification kit of components. But it is still one guy in one oversize car. And the whole stupidity of driving 22 miles to do the modest job that I do? This society needs it's employment location matrix annealed.
Second, a little birdie in the back of my head says no, the future needs autonomous vehicles, aggressive ride sharing, collision avoidance radar, vehicle scheduling to eliminate stops, and ride systems based on cell phones talking to passing vehicles.
Plus, the society needs it's matrix of jobs and worker-locations annealed so that everybody gets a chance to work close to home.
The underlying vehicles can be a mechanical zoo. But I can see a 50% reduction in commuter CO2 emitting miles simply by raising the load factor in commuter vehicles from ~1 rider per car to ~2.5 riders per car.
Your life outside of computers may suggest a career for you.
My switch from IT to special ed aide is partly for a retirement benefit and partly based on 18 years as parent of a special ed kid and partly due to no more hiring pull from the computer field.
I was laid off (or fired) from a low level web site monitor job and I wasn't getting much interest in my resume. So I took the opportunity to begin working as a special education aide or Paraeducator. My 18 years of home experience with my daughter was my preparation for this career change.
While the pay is modest, I have the prospect of vesting for a very small pension (If I avoid physical injury from lifting kids, etc.) as this is a Union Position. That is better than any of the numerous temporary IT jobs I held.
I think a feature of this career switch is everyday I work with absolutely individual unique kids. Every one of them reveals another aspect of what it is to be human and how learning takes place. Norbert Weiner, Piaget, operational amplifiers, missing feedback loops, language processing, visual processing. So many subtle things one can see every day.
While I am just an aide, the kids you meet in this work are really interesting in a way that is parallel to how computers are really interesting machines.
I'd also mention
Shop Class as Soul Craft
by Matthew Crawford as interesting philosophy. I got a copy by book reserve from the local county public library.
As several posters have pointed out, the present patent system is biased against small inventors and more.
The kind of benefits conferred by the present patent and copyright system are a destructive mix where a little technological improvement is revealed. In return the patent game is to block others, charge money, and cross license to save the game for the few big players only.
So it is a toxic soup of some small social benefits and a few trolls hoping to make big money from legal fees and settlements and a very large fabric of cross-licensing deals that can be a tax free way to drive most of the players off of the playing field.
The thing that the people playing the patent game all want is the unlimited, unregulated and untaxed privilege to withhold licensing of a patent or re-production of a copyrighted work except under terms of the patent owner's choosing.
Think of the patent and copyright process is a "game" in the sense of game theory. I think we should re-tune the inputs and outputs of the patent game to eliminate the unfettered monopoly aspect of the patent benefit. Instead, reward the widest possible sharing and communication of the patented or copyrighted object. Provide for a statutory license fee of about 2%.
Any patents or copyrights you use, list them in the header text of your software product. Have a 4% Value Added Tax on all products and publications containing patented or copyrighted material.
The Govt takes the 4% and distributes the 2% share to the patent holders and copyright holders named.
Then, "tuning" the patent system would be a matter of changing the duration of patents, the allocation of patent tax revenue, and the percentage kept by government.
It is my conjecture that progress toward effective electric automobiles is being held up by a combination of business secrets and patent holders that have not cross licensed several key battery technologies yet.
Remember the years of Xerox copier monopoly? There was nobody out there with something equal to the Xerox patents to do a cross license deal.
I say, a 2% vat at the wholesale level is a good economic exchange where "automatic licensing" replaces the unstructured monopoly of existing patents and copyrights.
Automatic licensing changes the thrust of the "intellectual property" game to an information type process where the more products that use your patents and copyrighted material, the more money you get.
Another income stream with this kind of Patent licensing would be consulting and certification services for users of patents. Suppose an African country wanted to make their own aids drugs. Can they brew the stuff in an old Soviet vodka factory? Good consulting job, it might pay more than 2% too.
I agree with previous posters: the Arduino, opamps, and 555 timers are a good entry point into the art and technology of electronics.
But the really fascinating physical phenomena are buried inside a plastic capsule.
How about refocus the goal around working with a fundamental physical phenomenon and then deploy some simple instrumentation?
PN junction electronics:
I have some metal can transistors where I sawed the can off and looked at the junctions with a 10x hand lens.
Photo transistors are really neat gadgets. I have played with them and wished I could get a little closer to the junction physics. Is one incoming photon actually releasing one electron at the junction?
How about playing with the copper-copper oxide junction? It is the original electrical mystery phenomena that led to solid state physics.
I learned a lot by hanging a transistor and some current limiting resistors and using a voltmeter to develop an understanding of what is a "current amplifier".
There was a lady at MakeFair who demonstrated making FET transistors and photo cells with a tabletop ceramics kiln, some $4 wafers bought online.
Bridges and revisiting the problem of finding the first fundamental units.
How about a Whetstone bridge? It is the classic device for measuring things. As an extra credit project: see if any of the kids can solve for the exact current through the cross leg when the bridge is unbalanced.
Projects built around interference rings. I have tried building an inferometer using a solid state LED laser and I couldn't convince myself I was seeing diffraction bands nor interference patterns. So I didn't try to do a Michaelson inferometer.
How about see if you can use a monochrome LED with microscope slides to make interference bands? Measure or weigh something with the resulting device.
I used the Tab Book "Electronics Self Taught" which suggested a 4" x 8" plywood board with 4 nails and two strands of bus bar wire to make a prototype board. Tack solder pieces and let everything hang in the air.
At least 22 years ago a computer magazine columnist suggested make the entire UI a separate chunk of code. Have the same word processor "kernel" accept a variety of plug in interface designs. ------------ Then have a package that contains alternate UI designs and a.pdf UI Design Lab Guide. Let groups or students use the packages and report back about the best UI's. ------------- Open source software needs a UI development process. UI research is a discipline separate from programming.
Hiring a degreed UI research person and running a UI research workshop is at least a $100 per hour undertaking. I understand there is a university in Washington State that has a reputation as a strong center for UI research. Probably Microsoft benefits from such expertise being close at hand.
Use the UI design package to progressively refine one aspect of the interface, then another. ------------- I'd also like a "Crash Wrapper and bug documenter" that runs on top of the programs. The crash wrapper would save user data and keystroke sequences, and would accept problem descriptions.
I wish there was a Crash Wrapper last month while I was trying out Open Office 3.0. Somewhere between the UI and the program the app has a bug related to turning on page numbers. I turned 5 hours of work into a 0 byte file due to either a bad UI or a program bug.
What could be done to alter the business framework so that these data and file format incompatibility games stop dominating the American software business landscape?
In the last few months I have been puzzling about why the American economic system continues to make it a good business strategy to continually introduce data format changes that render old formats incompatible and unusable.
The rationale behind this churning change is described in the book "Information Rules" by Shapiro and Varian.
Essentially, companies like Microsoft and Adobe are trying to maximize their revenue stream for their proprietary products by changing the user data storage format.
The problem is, the changes in data storage format imposes enormous costs in wasted time on everybody that is not a user of the dominant company's software.
So here is the puzzle: Can the American proprietary software file format change game be altered?
How many billions of man-hours are wasted screwing around upgrading to the "latest Flash player" or "saving to word-95 format" or "removing blank lines to make a.doc file print right in open office"?
In any case the waste probably is 1000 times greater than the direct economic benefit to the dominating software player who introduced the incompatibility.
Adobe is forcing everybody to upgrade their Flash and.pdf readers. Microsoft is elaborating one of their file formats.
The book mentioned:
Information Rules, A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts, c. 1999.
One approach would be adding to the fair use terms of copyright and patent law. Any reading or writing of user data containing patent or copyright features for import or export purposes is a fair use.
A second approach would be data formats could be made not subject to copyright (accounting and data collection forms used to be excluded from copyright).
A third approach would be it is contrary to the public interest for software to be sold without a published and described file format
Slashdot Mirror
In 1974 I had the following book, plus I was unemployed, there was an energy crisis underway, and I had an HP-21 programmable calculator and a BA in American Studies.
An Introduction to Scientific Research - Edgar Bright Wilson - 1990
The result was I started a social systems research project that I am still doing.
My project is neither a success nor a failure. If anything, social system research results in perceiving the culture. Culture is an object that we usually live within. The framework of culture is usually invisible to those living within it.
My microscopic level of notoriety is my blog comes up first when doing a search for "Put carts on the public bus"
So, I recommend you get the Wilson book through inter-library loan. I also recommend you develop your library access and research system.
If you do research, hang on to your records. I did measurements back in the 80's that are unexpectedly out of synch with recent measurements. Fortunately I saved the record logs and eventually I will go back and try and understand the differences.
I have been fixing my own cars for 40 years and I just came in after spending 40 hours fixing oil and water leaks in my 245,000 mile 93 Dodge Caravan. In extension cars never transcend.
The craft of fixing cars is 1/2 tools and 1/2 knowledge. Even as a tinkerer you will need both.
On the "knowledge" part, I recommend both getting a good shop manual and then doing Internet searches.
Car manufacturers do withhold information and they do set things up so the effect is to "screw the independent mechanic". (Example: Shallow Torx screws on the crankshaft pulley of a MBZ '92 190e. You can't see them, so you strip a few by blindly using a hex bit. It took me 6 months to figure out how to get them out. Got'em out in 10 minutes when I discovered a new tool: external bolt head extractors at a hardware store. I probably would have read about the solution if I had spent more time scrounging on the Internet.)
On the Internet, you will find others who have tried the same task and learned something.
If anything, what I wish for is a syntactically sensitive auto repair search engine. A real AI challenge to be sure, but at least the vocabulary is more limited. (Something to make a structured Wiki out of the jumble a Google search returns.)
The information amateur mechanics like you and me need is scattered among 7 or 8 websites plus another 20 generic "how to fix it" enterprise sites.
There is a ton of stuff that needs to be reverse engineered, described and published accessibly on the internet.
As a tinkerer you can replace the brushes in an electric window motor ($10.50 vs $175 replacement), get the dog paw sand out of a Mercedes console window switch ( $0 and 15 minutes vs $17), figure out the electrical circuit in a '93 Isuzu electric window master switch ( $3 vs. $326) and more.
The key to all this is quality tinkering or reverse engineering and publishing at least some of your findings back on the Internet for others to follow.
And remember, take a deep breath (CO2 ~360 ppm and rising). There is a huge body of information needed to counteract the industry wide effort to exclude the independent mechanic and simplify repair to a "component exchange only" scheme.
There are immense environmental issues now evident about problems with the American auto centric societal scheme. All this stuff is meta information about cars not contained in any shop manual. Perfect action material for the clear eyed tinker and the non-romantic greasy fingernail home mechanic.
One might consider what Robert Pirsig suggested, the thing being worked on is in a way you.
The letter reported is a very serious sign of great trouble in the social fabric. The letter is partly driven by the Virginia elected official launching a fraud investigation of a climate scientist.
Another recent sign of great trouble was the Chinese led blocking of global CO2 emission goals. That was a national political decision to ignore the science and seek a few more years of national economic advantage.
Right here at home, I did a spreadsheet working out the energy savings of 1/3 to 1/7th if we bought a new refrigerator.
The significant other vetoed all energy considerations, saying "It has to be a stainless steel household refrigerator that will increase the resale value of the house. If you buy anything else, you will have to take it back."
So we have this enormous problem; science pointing one way, and a lot of forces pulling the other way saying "Not yet... not yet..."
I think the stumbling point of your project is Linux users (like myself at least) can't find through Google or boot loader man pages a dependable, simple way to boot Linux from a USB-stick on older computers.
I have been playing with a secure Linux on a USB-stick project. One problem is how to boot Linux from a USB-stick on an older computer. My 11 year old machine is a case example.
I reached a point of exhaustion trying to find a sequence of grub boot loader commands that would load Linux from a bootable Linux USB-stick.
I already had the Grub boot loader on the hard disk. I tried every combination of grub commands trying to get grub to read and load vmlinuz from the USB-stick.
The older hardware may never access the USB-stick at boot time, so we may need a CD or even a floppy disk with a grub boot loader program on it.
Some sites I found on search described a grub boot CD and I have not seen an example yet that I can understand, copy and adapt.
It seems to me, that the "boot a Linux USB stick on any PC with a CD drive" problem needs a documented solution.
Speaking strictly for myself, after reading some of the grub bootloader documentation, I still couldn't understand what commands to issue and in what order. Booting is no longer a matter of jumping to 0x0100.
Once the bootloader problem is solved or bypassed, there is a great sourceforge tool for downloading and burning bootable-Linux-USB-sticks at:
unetbootin.sourceforge.net
When the computer does boot from USB-sticks, I like Knoppix, Slax and Mint, all mentioned above.
I have also found the Free BSD boot loader program does wonderful things at finding and loading bootable-Linux-USB-sticks.
Your post suggests that the cost of tuition for math make up courses is a problem.
That comment indirectly suggests to me that you live a long way from a Junior College.
You need a nearby Junior College to supply reasonable cost preparatory courses and you also need a nearby 4 year College to award a degree.
I suggest you explore moving to put yourself and your family as close to your chosen college and a nearby junior college as possible.
I presently live in an "educational saddle" place that is 8 airline miles distant from any Junior College and any 4 year institution.
While the rugged coastline is beautiful, nobody I know is keeping up the commute to get a degree. I also don't know anybody going to Junior college for career change education either.
I got my BA by commuting from a parent's house that was 4 miles airline to college.
Every time I have lived close to a college, I wound up studying something. Distance makes it much more difficult to pursue formal education.
I have a refrigerator that I tested with a KillAWatt energy usage meter. The refrigerator came in at about 2x the energy usage of current models.
I decided to find out why it was so bad: Is the energy usage due to poor insulation, leaky doors, too many door opening events or a worn out compressor?
I eliminated "poor insulation" by scabbing a 2 foot x 4 foot piece of 2" foam onto one refrigerator wall and measuring the the "delta T" between the inside, outside and between the insulation and the cabinet. Some algebra with the surface area of the refrigerator convinced me the original insulation is excellent.
While programming an Arduino to measure how often and long the doors are open, a fellow from England mentioned his new refrigerator is really efficient because it has inner doors that prevent cold air from falling out when the door is opened.
This much work has persuaded me that Energy Star is a fraud because the testing standard for refrigerators probably does not measure the effect of opening the doors during the test.
Also, there is no direct email on the Department of Commerce web site to contact a technical specialist and get a clear explanation.
The path to reading the ASTM refrigerator energy consumption test description is encumbered. The test description is apparently not available for free public reading.
His comments about the Internet, while they do seem dated, did push me on to a further view of the Internet.
One of the recent formulations points out that the Internet is so fast and so vast that the resource now in short supply is human attention. I thought about Gelernter's "information streams" and demur: There is data on the Internet that sometimes becomes information in the mind of the beholder. Natural language text processing does only modest specific tasks in a data processing manner. Attention is the thing a human applies to data to reach a state of "readiness to act" that Donald MacKay once defined.
Here is what I suggest is a further view:
The Internet is a data transmission medium of revolutionary low cost. There is an abundance of low quality data but the higher levels are stalled due to the shortage of high quality input data. An instance of solving the high quality input data problem is Wikipedia. But symphony music, Building Codes, scientific papers, journals and books are stalled for economic reasons. Our society with it's economic structure is mismatched with the cheap bandwidth and flexibility of the Internet as a publishing solution.
I did a super budget prototype web site with self-hosting.
The factor that got me to do self hosting is the low power consumption of the WindPC. It consumes only 36 watts, which works out to around $6 per month. The system was strictly a prototype and I had no traffic during the trial period.
Self hosting didn't work as smoothly as I hoped. I had to set a fixed IP number in the home router to make the no-ip redirection work. So the WindPC served web pages. But the same change canceled the ability of the WindPC to do dns lookups and I ran out of energy relearning tcp-ip. A small but annoying project glitch. Another limit is I could not figure out how to make the WindPC run multiple web sites at the same time. Multi-homing it is called.
The system had these parts: A WindPC with 2 gigs of memory and 160 mb disk (on loan from a friend, I had to buy the memory), free dns service from no-ip.com, CentOs 5.0, and the Rails application was the substruct open source ruby on rails. I copied the application or files between a development machine and the production box with SSH.
------------ I looked at Google AppEngine and I wrote a review of the O'Reilly book on the subject.
But the hard part about GoogleAppEngine is you can start a site for free. The hard thing about "free" is it drags the entire design and hosting solution towards GoogleAppEngine if you don't have any other choice criterion than out of pocket hobbyist cost.
http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/UsingGoogleAppEngine
You can have some fun with your project with bootable Linux distributions installed on USB memory sticks.
The thing Windows simply cannot do is not be the #1 Internet hacking target of all time. A Linux distro moderately tweaked for security is potentially quite robust.
The memory sticks cost $8.25 each for 2 gigabyte size and loading a Linux distribution is dead simple. The only problem is which distribution out of so many good ones?
The USB memory stick advantage is: Much less futzing with the hardware. Just plug it in, maybe twiddle the BIOS boot settings and go.
The disadvantage, so far for me is some USB Linux distros are intended as intermediates for a hard disk install, other distros are intended for troubleshooting the guest hardware. I am not clear yet on which one is best for long term use from the USB drive.
What I have been looking for is a Linux desktop distribution optimized like this:
Designed for the operating system to stay on the USB drive.
Has a browser, user capabilities, and file system already tuned for security.
Has a tripwire system to spot any operating system modifications.
Secure enough to connect directly to the internet without a home-router type front end, i.e. not hackable even by a determined intruder and not compromised by the legions of browser exploits.
Has ability to set up proprietary wireless driver devices without a temporary physical ethernet cable.
Runs flash and the problem video codecs, or allows you to add them as needed.
Will not let a Windows program erase files from the USB memory stick.
There is a utility program on sourceforge called unetbootin-linux that makes burning memory sticks a 3-click process.
So far here are my favorite bootable Linuxes: ... offers to set up a user file on the hard disk at boot time. Really neat graphical desktop.
Knoppix
Mint... as mentioned by others it is pretty neat.
Slax a bootable desktop version of the venerable and famous Slackware.
CentOS needed a live version downloaded manually by me. Comfortable, conservative and solid.
See? Your simple Ask Slashdot question really means you can become your own distribution architect/connoisseur in your spare time.
The original article has a blast of articulate disagreement in the comments.
The article has an out of fashion viewpoint that some social coaching might help some kids avoid being bullied.
The much more current view being implemented in American public schools is: no-bullying in school settings.
I work with limited intellectual functioning kids (as an aide, not an expert). Some of these kids really do benefit from social coaching. To cue him in to how to act, he had "social stories" that he read to remind him how to behave in public. The coaching worked well enough for him to avoid being kicked out of school.
Looking beyond the linked article, I don't think we can tell if the original research study was misquoted or over simplified.
The "bullying problem" is a subset of a really interesting problem: How to help young adults and the group activities they engage in stay as sane and constructive social activities. How do we teach the young people being drafted in to the two Mexican gangs who attend the high school campus where I work to get along without fighting and seriously injuring each other?
This is another instance of meanness to others that appears in bullying. If we could develop communication and teaching to bring out kindness and tolerance in bullies and gangs then we could also have a starting point for redirecting other destructive social groups like Al Quaida.
On the teaching problem, a really interesting development I just heard about (on NPR) is "Terror Theory" which seems to cast some light on why groups of people become receptive to authoritarian control. Elsewhere, I am reading "The Unconquerable World" by Johnathan Schell, looking for another angle on the social peace teaching problem.
Well I wonder what on sourceforge is worth blocking? And why apply the blocking to just a few countries?
The answer is, almost nothing on slashdot is worth blocking and the countries matter very little.
Look at this event in the context of the "Google considering leaving China" blog entry earlier this week.
The US government has very few tools for dealing with the alleged organized, systematic and large scale theft of data and email that was mentioned in the Google blog entry.
That same blog entry contained a link to a US Government position paper. That US position paper alleges the Chinese have a philosophy of Internet warfare.
Other articles describe the observed practice, they use teams, they systematically penetrate individual user's systems, they have download lists, they construct staging areas, they build CD size archive files. With this kind of stuff going on, no wonder Google didn't want to hang around and get hacked more.
Blocking sourceforge to the existing list of international bad player countries is a trial or demonstration. Several governments around the world are watching this American trial maneuver.
Right now I am reading: The unconquerable world : power, nonviolence, and the will of the people by Jonathan Schell and I simply wish I could understand the forces driving these conflicts on and over and about the Internet.
With these militaristic morons prowling the Internet, I think a prudent personal need is to have a really well hardened home gateway and at least one really hard to hack home system.
In my journal I discuss a comparison of three open source distributions as a base for setting up a relatively secure home desktop. Conclusion: use the Linux or FreeBSD you know best. Unresolved: how to secure the browser.
I look at American cell phone service as an astoundingly overpriced emulation of the past century's plain old telephone service.
But I have kids and a wife with cell phones and I occasionally need to track them down or find out what she wants from the grocery store.
Their three phones are billed at $120 per month from Verizon. The entire family plan is justified by my 16 year old who sends 400 text messages (otherwise 20 cents each) per month.
A friend gave me a Tracfone specific Motorola W175 (they are $20 retail) and I bought a 90 day prepaid phone card. Customer service as described on the Internet is poor, and the credit card portion of their website requires a browser not running Privoxy.
My costs are: About $12 per month and $.13 per minute. I have voice and text but I still use the home phone for long calls.
So I mention TracFone as another option in the range of services mentioned here.
I criticize cell phone service like this: Except for phone calls and brief text messages, all the other data transfer processes are bottled up in proprietary bundles of hardware + software + carrier + 2 year contract deals.
Just like every other cell phone, on my TracFone every voice sounds the same. The small audio bandwidth is matched by an equally small "meaning bandwidth".
As a curmudgeon, why the heck can't cell tower operators sell the huge bandwidth and instant connection switching for $.02 per hour instead of $ .13 per minute?
Retail cell service provides a tiny fraction of the raw potential of the system. Look at it like this: A cell phone tower may consume 2 kw, that is about $.30 per hour for hosting 100 to 1000 connections. Double that price to pay for the hardware. The result is the basic cost of a cell phone data link is only a microscopic part of the amount charged at retail for the link wrapped in what we call "cell phone service".
Also as a curmudgeon, lets call conventional cell phone design crummy: If I didn't sit in a closed car, you would hear me from 15 feet away just like every other cellphone user. Uhh, not enough sidetone so everybody bellows robustly.
I just deleted a long post. I noticed everything in my post was a restatement of some news item I have read about China over the last few years.
I point out something that is happening as I hear the news about China: The media seems to be building a box of news reports about China.
This media box process is causing me, like you, to rethink "Gee, is buying stuff from China really a good idea?"
The meta point I want to make to Slashdot readers is: We are all being media boxed. The last year of headline news about China is doing a lot to cause many of us to reassess our regard for China and Chinese products.
Remember how a vocal fraction of the US population shouted down the Kennedy McCain Immigration Reform Bill a few years ago? I think the adverse news items about China are building another opinion storm cloud.
On the anniversary of copyright extension and Jaron Lanier's comment about wanting a single site dispensing cultural expression files by payment -- there is a good idea that I think needs to come out.
The idea I offer is: the price for downloading a file should be no more than the time apportioned cost of the downloader's proportional cost of using the internet. A user pays say $15 for an internet connection plus $15 for unlimited downloading of copyrighted digital data.
This should be called statutory digital paid copy in lieu of copyright payment.
This "cheapest digital copy" scheme is a compromise... the copyrighted file remains copyrighted and the owner gets a direct payment. But the copies are always reasonably priced and cheap, meaning whether you download 1 Avatar file or 10,000 files as part of a research project, you still pay only $15 per month, which is what I might average in book purchases anyway.
At the library, the same copyright payment scheme would mean $.05 for the copier and $.05 to the copyright holder. That is not $2.75 for a scientific journal article but the low page fee means many more pages will be copied.
Example, my fraction of the family internet bill is $15 this month. The same amount, another $15 would be distributed proportionally to all the sites I might visit and download from in a month. So if Avatar takes 1 hour to download, the Avatar producers would get 1 hour out of the month's total downloading. If I downloaded 24 hours per day, Avatar would get $.02. But no human can pay attention to that much material. But Avatar plus a few books and some newspapers might total 3 hours. Avatar still gets $5.
The price == downloading cost is inspired by the physics of optimum power transfer. When the impedance of the sink equals the impedance of the source, the maximum power is transferred. The other inspiration is the recent point made that we are in an attention limited environment. Our lifetime of attention is the limit on what digital information we can receive.
Marketing professionals are pricing digital works based on charging "slightly less than the price of a paperback book". This digital era needs a price based on "all that you can usefully pay attention to".
Another way of looking at this payment scheme is from the server side. The server delivering copies of Avatar receives revenue of somewhere between $.02 and $15.00 for each connection-hour of operation.
All the quality music and writing I would like to access is unavailable on the Internet at a reasonable price.
One of the problems is the quality music and writing is available, but only through a Corporate copyright holder. The anecdote as I gather ( see Janis Ian's website, she escaped) is the payment formula used for many musicians pays a lot to the corporation and a trickle to the artist.
Here is another writer who is developing a nuclear reactor based low-CO2 future scenario. Read it carefully, his book is an interesting exploration, but not "the solution".
Thorium for reactors, and the larger context of using nuclear electric generation to replace CO2 emitting coal generation is discussed in:
Whole Earth Discipline An Eco-pragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Here is an online book that organizes a huge spectrum of CO2 reduction schemes. This is worth reading for gaining perspective on just what fraction of the CO2 problem might be addressed using nuclear electricity generation.
David MacKay: Without Hot Air
http://www.withouthotair.com/
Just yesterday I wished to make some progress toward a low carbon lifestyle. I started up my van [ 243,000 miles at 22.7 miles/gallon x 7 lb of carbon per gallon of gas x 3 lb of CO2 per pound of carbon ] and thought oops did I just emit 224,000 pounds of CO2?
I have been reading the posts trying to figure out why so many of these iconic technical-industrial organizations have slid.
Most of the posts associate the decline of organizations with a change of management. The management stories tell similar tales: where there is a replacement of management, the decline is expressed as selling off low performing assets and re-organizing to reduce costs.
Most of this discussion doesn't dwell on the massive de-industrialization of the USA. Around 1980, factories in the Far East were making electronic assemblies for less than the price of the American parts and American labor in a Heathkit kit.
But with the shift to tech manufacturing in the far East, did American corporations lose control of the products they made?
Here is a question; Have Apple and Hewlett-Packard done something different with their manufacturing organization? Do Apple and H-P own offshore factories in a way that enables them to prevent their proprietary products from being copied by others? Do these two companies retain a manufacturing control that prevents them from becoming a rented out brand like Bell & Howell?
I know from anecdote that the 80's era computer maker Morrow had great difficulty with it's computer mother board. The board was engineered in Silicon Valley and the Japanese board maker either sent no boards or way way too many. The result was first Morrow had trouble meeting demand, then it had too many boards as the market changed. Morrow went out of business around 1983 leaving behind a warehouse of unsold components that became one of Oakland's best computer surplus stores for several years afterward.
Robert Samuelson's The Great Inflation and It's Aftermath sort of tells the story of the decline of American manufacturing. The USA and Canada exited World War II with their manufacturing plants intact. By the end of the Regan Presidency, the de-industrialization of America was a sideshow mixed in with high interest rates and the second energy crisis.
So what is the attack system used to get "tens of millions of dollars"?
Do they collect 10,000 user names and passwords from personal computer users?
Do they somehow take over a merchant deposit account and transfer funds out of it?
Do they emulate a bank-to-bank transaction and modify the bank-to-bank back end transaction?
Well, it is an interesting conclusion, with major logical problems. This finding by itself is not adequate for the appropriate apprehension of the issue before us.
A quality effort to enumerate the entire energy and CO2 reduction issue is:
http://www.withouthotair.com/ ; A book by David MacKay
On the threat "otherwise we have to build 1 atomic power plant per day..."
I recommend Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Discipline An Ecopragmatist Manifesto". Mr. Brand favors emphasis on nuclear power and a number of other innovative approaches to dealing with the global warming problem.
The CO2 reduction task will require substantial changes to the American business and social system. We are in a formative phase right now.
Also, you can visit my "Put carts on the public bus" blog, for charts and dismal economic analyses galore:
http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/
I'll tell you about my password system built around vim, apg and cat.
This system is a variation of the single encrypted file that enables gnarly passwords and user identifications and challenge response answers.
This system has two points of weakness. One is: never print out a reference copy of your decrypted password file to a printer attached to a Windows computer. And as the vim "help X" text notes, a process running as you or root could read passwords while the file is open. The leading risk is a browser java, javascript or browser plugin.
Here is how it works: The vim editor supports ":X" for write a file encrypted with a pass phrase.
That is the key feature this scheme uses.
Steps: On a sheet of paper write out an encryption pass phrase.
Choose a file name for the passwordfile.
Generate a nice big nasty list of passwords using "apg" and "wc".
Set aside a printed paper copy of a complete separate set of passwords to use if you must change passwords due to a security breach.
Here is a big command line to play with:
(/usr/bin/apg -a 1 -n 99 -m 11 -x 14 -M CL; /usr/bin/apg -a 1 -n 100 -m 18 -x 23 -M NCL ) | cat -n
Using the unix ">" direct the passwords into the filename for your passwordfile.
Open the file in vi like "vi passwordfile"
Write the file out using the :X command and using your encryption pass phrase.
Exit and re-open the passwordfile with vi, to ensure you have the passphrase working.
For each password you store in the file. Create a text entry like this:
website-url date-established
userid
password
other security information
Every time you use a password from the pre-generated list, mark the password with a mark to prevent any password being used twice.
When copying userids and passwords, use the Linux mouse copy instead of typing. Open the password file in a separate window from the Web Browser. If you figure out a few vi editing shortcuts, getting into the password file, and logging on is a fast process.
For fire safety and disaster recovery, I periodically make a plain text printout of the password file using the vi ":ha" command. As I said: don't print out a almost certainly infected Windows printer.
A security issue to watch is: don't mix entertainment browsing with banking or online purchase activity, don't put your passwordfile on a machine that you don't own and control.
The drill if you discover a security breach of this system is: Either somebody got into your account without your password or your Linux password file may be completely breached. Using the spare password file printed on paper noted above, change important passwords post haste.
I have two conflicting feelings about electrical conversions.
First, I have an aging Dodge Caravan that I use to commute 22 miles every day. I'd love to remove the engine and drop in an electrification kit of components. But it is still one guy in one oversize car. And the whole stupidity of driving 22 miles to do the modest job that I do? This society needs it's employment location matrix annealed.
Second, a little birdie in the back of my head says no, the future needs autonomous vehicles, aggressive ride sharing, collision avoidance radar, vehicle scheduling to eliminate stops, and ride systems based on cell phones talking to passing vehicles.
Plus, the society needs it's matrix of jobs and worker-locations annealed so that everybody gets a chance to work close to home.
The underlying vehicles can be a mechanical zoo. But I can see a 50% reduction in commuter CO2 emitting miles simply by raising the load factor in commuter vehicles from ~1 rider per car to ~2.5 riders per car.
Your life outside of computers may suggest a career for you.
My switch from IT to special ed aide is partly for a retirement benefit and partly based on 18 years as parent of a special ed kid and partly due to no more hiring pull from the computer field.
I was laid off (or fired) from a low level web site monitor job and I wasn't getting much interest in my resume. So I took the opportunity to begin working as a special education aide or Paraeducator. My 18 years of home experience with my daughter was my preparation for this career change.
While the pay is modest, I have the prospect of vesting for a very small pension (If I avoid physical injury from lifting kids, etc.) as this is a Union Position. That is better than any of the numerous temporary IT jobs I held.
I think a feature of this career switch is everyday I work with absolutely individual unique kids. Every one of them reveals another aspect of what it is to be human and how learning takes place. Norbert Weiner, Piaget, operational amplifiers, missing feedback loops, language processing, visual processing. So many subtle things one can see every day.
While I am just an aide, the kids you meet in this work are really interesting in a way that is parallel to how computers are really interesting machines.
I'd also mention
by Matthew Crawford as interesting philosophy. I got a copy by book reserve from the local county public library.
As several posters have pointed out, the present patent system is biased against small inventors and more.
The kind of benefits conferred by the present patent and copyright system are a destructive mix where a little technological improvement is revealed. In return the patent game is to block others, charge money, and cross license to save the game for the few big players only.
So it is a toxic soup of some small social benefits and a few trolls hoping to make big money from legal fees and settlements and a very large fabric of cross-licensing deals that can be a tax free way to drive most of the players off of the playing field.
The thing that the people playing the patent game all want is the unlimited, unregulated and untaxed privilege to withhold licensing of a patent or re-production of a copyrighted work except under terms of the patent owner's choosing.
Think of the patent and copyright process is a "game" in the sense of game theory. I think we should re-tune the inputs and outputs of the patent game to eliminate the unfettered monopoly aspect of the patent benefit. Instead, reward the widest possible sharing and communication of the patented or copyrighted object. Provide for a statutory license fee of about 2%.
Any patents or copyrights you use, list them in the header text of your software product. Have a 4% Value Added Tax on all products and publications containing patented or copyrighted material.
The Govt takes the 4% and distributes the 2% share to the patent holders and copyright holders named.
Then, "tuning" the patent system would be a matter of changing the duration of patents, the allocation of patent tax revenue, and the percentage kept by government.
It is my conjecture that progress toward effective electric automobiles is being held up by a combination of business secrets and patent holders that have not cross licensed several key battery technologies yet.
Remember the years of Xerox copier monopoly? There was nobody out there with something equal to the Xerox patents to do a cross license deal.
I say, a 2% vat at the wholesale level is a good economic exchange where "automatic licensing" replaces the unstructured monopoly of existing patents and copyrights.
Automatic licensing changes the thrust of the "intellectual property" game to an information type process where the more products that use your patents and copyrighted material, the more money you get.
Another income stream with this kind of Patent licensing would be consulting and certification services for users of patents. Suppose an African country wanted to make their own aids drugs. Can they brew the stuff in an old Soviet vodka factory? Good consulting job, it might pay more than 2% too.
I agree with previous posters: the Arduino, opamps, and 555 timers are a good entry point into the art and technology of electronics.
But the really fascinating physical phenomena are buried inside a plastic capsule.
How about refocus the goal around working with a fundamental physical phenomenon and then deploy some simple instrumentation?
PN junction electronics:
I have some metal can transistors where I sawed the can off and looked at the junctions with a 10x hand lens.
Photo transistors are really neat gadgets. I have played with them and wished I could get a little closer to the junction physics. Is one incoming photon actually releasing one electron at the junction?
How about playing with the copper-copper oxide junction? It is the original electrical mystery phenomena that led to solid state physics.
I learned a lot by hanging a transistor and some current limiting resistors and using a voltmeter to develop an understanding of what is a "current amplifier".
There was a lady at MakeFair who demonstrated making FET transistors and photo cells with a tabletop ceramics kiln, some $4 wafers bought online.
Bridges and revisiting the problem of finding the first fundamental units.
How about a Whetstone bridge? It is the classic device for measuring things. As an extra credit project: see if any of the kids can solve for the exact current through the cross leg when the bridge is unbalanced.
Projects built around interference rings. I have tried building an inferometer using a solid state LED laser and I couldn't convince myself I was seeing diffraction bands nor interference patterns. So I didn't try to do a Michaelson inferometer.
How about see if you can use a monochrome LED with microscope slides to make interference bands? Measure or weigh something with the resulting device.
I used the Tab Book "Electronics Self Taught" which suggested a 4" x 8" plywood board with 4 nails and two strands of bus bar wire to make a prototype board. Tack solder pieces and let everything hang in the air.
At least 22 years ago a computer magazine columnist suggested make the entire UI a separate chunk of code. Have the same word processor "kernel" accept a variety of plug in interface designs. .pdf UI Design Lab Guide. Let groups or students use the packages and report back about the best UI's.
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Then have a package that contains alternate UI designs and a
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Open source software needs a UI development process. UI research is a discipline separate from programming.
Hiring a degreed UI research person and running a UI research workshop is at least a $100 per hour undertaking. I understand there is a university in Washington State that has a reputation as a strong center for UI research. Probably Microsoft benefits from such expertise being close at hand.
Use the UI design package to progressively refine one aspect of the interface, then another.
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I'd also like a "Crash Wrapper and bug documenter" that runs on top of the programs. The crash wrapper would save user data and keystroke sequences, and would accept problem descriptions.
I wish there was a Crash Wrapper last month while I was trying out Open Office 3.0. Somewhere between the UI and the program the app has a bug related to turning on page numbers. I turned 5 hours of work into a 0 byte file due to either a bad UI or a program bug.
What could be done to alter the business framework so that these data and file format incompatibility games stop dominating the American software business landscape?
In the last few months I have been puzzling about why the American economic system continues to make it a good business strategy to continually introduce data format changes that render old formats incompatible and unusable.
The rationale behind this churning change is described in the book "Information Rules" by Shapiro and Varian.
Essentially, companies like Microsoft and Adobe are trying to maximize their revenue stream for their proprietary products by changing the user data storage format.
The problem is, the changes in data storage format imposes enormous costs in wasted time on everybody that is not a user of the dominant company's software.
So here is the puzzle: Can the American proprietary software file format change game be altered?
How many billions of man-hours are wasted screwing around upgrading to the "latest Flash player" or "saving to word-95 format" or "removing blank lines to make a .doc file print right in open office"?
In any case the waste probably is 1000 times greater than the direct economic benefit to the dominating software player who introduced the incompatibility.
Adobe is forcing everybody to upgrade their Flash and .pdf readers. Microsoft is elaborating one of their file formats.
The book mentioned:
Information Rules, A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts, c. 1999.
One approach would be adding to the fair use terms of copyright and patent law. Any reading or writing of user data containing patent or copyright features for import or export purposes is a fair use.
A second approach would be data formats could be made not subject to copyright (accounting and data collection forms used to be excluded from copyright).
A third approach would be it is contrary to the public interest for software to be sold without a published and described file format