Can someone please tell me if this applies to AA and AAA batteries too? Or are those ones just unlikely to explode?
AA and AAA batteries are usually non-rechargable (alkaline, zinc-carbon or others?) or rechargable (NiCd or NiMH. Well, there's also rechargable alkaline, but I don't know much about those.)
If damaged in such a way that the battery shorts internally, they tend to get very hot very quickly, and may even emit steam, but they don't usually catch fire (though they can start a fire if there's something flammable nearby.) What's different about LiIon batteries (like used by your modern laptop or cell phone) is that the same thing happens, but the stuff that comes out is actually flammable, which is why they're so much more likely to burn (they generally don't explode, but can burn vigorously.) Also, if a LiIon cell gets hot enough, the electrolyte can start to react on it's own, no physical damage needed, causing a fire that way.
Damaged or overcharged lead-acid batteries (like in your car) can also emit hydrogen, which is explosive. I'll bet more of these have caused explosions than LiIon batteries ever have.
In any event, to answer your question, your AA/AAA batteries are almost certainly not going to explode or even catch fire. At worst, if you take a fully charged AA NiCd battery and beat it with hammer a few times, it'll get really hot and start steaming -- but probably won't catch fire on it's own, since there's nothing to burn. Do this in a pile of papers and it might start a fire, however.
Personally, I'm wondering what's changed recently -- we've been using LiIon/LiPo cells for years now, but we've almost never heard of fires caused by them in laptops or cell phones until recently. Suddnely, now it seems like every laptop is a fire waiting to happen! Is it that these fires happened before, but nobody reported them? Or are modern batteries more likely to catch fire?
I recall PC Gamer having a picture of Stevie Case on the cover, and talking about how she was one of the `Gaming Gods'. While I may not agree with you about John, I would have to say that Stevie was indeed rather attractive, though I tended to question her actual influence on the gaming industry at the time. I don't recall seeing her name in the list given today (and really didn't expect to see it, but I did look for it.)
You realize that journalists will still pay serious money for one of those.
I can see that. My original intention was to use it as a ham radio packet station, but I just never got around to it, and packet really isn't very popular anymore anyways. In the VHF bands there's a lot of APRS on 144.390 MHz, but that's not so interesting. Doing normal packet, there's just very few people to talk to. Perhaps on the HF bands, but there it's mostly PSK31 and I'm not aware of any TNCs for that -- most people just use a PC with a sound card to do that, but the TRS-80 isn't appropriate for that.
Still, I like my Model 100. If a journalist offers me enough money to buy a modern laptop for it, maybe I'll sell it, but since I don't see this happening, I'll probably hang onto it.
I'm surprised that people haven't used modern technology to make something with a similar size and power consumption, but with better specifications. Journalists, students... anybody who has to take notes could find it to be useful.
EXT3-fs: INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem.
EXT3-fs: write access will be enabled during recovery.
And here's a clue for you...
You mount it in ext2 mode. ext3 is just ext2+journalling, and you can mount a ext3 partition as ext2. This doesn't replay the journal, so you won't get to see any data actually in the journal, but the rest of the data you can see. And there are other ways that you can ensure that Linux will not write to the disk -- for example, `hdparm -r/dev/whatever' will tell the driver to not let Linux write to the disk, no matter what. That will certainly work for IDE drives, and probably other drive types as well.
However, the police don't generally do this, as it's not quite proof against writing *enough*. Instead, they generally connect the drive to a device that is certified to make writing to the drive IMPOSSIBLE (by cutting that wire, or filtering out those commands) and use the drive that way, either to poke around it or to dd the drive to another drive where you can do your work.
Of course, in this case, the guy is dead, so the standard rules of evidence probably don't need to be applied as carefully. It's not like this data will be used to convict him or something...
I have one of those! Got it at Goodwill back in 2001 or so for $9.95.
Of course, here's the funny story. I got the computer, and figured `ok, what do I do with it?'... so I tried to remember BASIC, and put in this program as soon as I got it working at the office --
10 I = I + 1
20 PRINT "HELLO THERE # ", I;
30 GOTO 10
(sorry if I got this wrong. This is the last time I did any BASIC, and it was years before that that I'd last done any.)
In any event, it's still running today. It's up to (let me check) 509176235. It's doing roughly 4.2 iterations/second, with most of the cpu obviously going to scrolling the display. Of course, if I do the math, that only works out to about four years, so I'm not sure what the discrepancy is.
In any event, it's lasted several office moves, and now it's in my garage, with a wal-wart transformer connected and some AA's in the battery slot. The batteries will run it for a remarkably long time, and I just replace them every year or so.
I've been tempted to pull it out and play with it a bit, but I'm reluctant to lose all my uptime...
I still have a Macintosh SE that I dust off and use every now and then.
Yes, but that system is still much more modern than a C-64. And the police would be able to take it's internal SCSI disk, hook it to a modern controller, and dd off an exact copy. I believe that a modern Mac or Linux box could even mount this disk with little trouble. Your floppies are also relatively easy to read. Or you could just put an ethernet card into your computer and copy the files over the network.
Still, if the police need data off the C64 media, they should have just posted to some C-64 forum stating that it was impossible to get the data copied to a modern computer, and they'd probably find a few people ready to prove them wrong.:)
By that crazy definition, I've got a 3" piece of wire that can `recieve' Wifi signals.
It's hardly crazy... the first definition of receive that I see is `To take or acquire (something given, offered, or transmitted); get' and I'd say my examples qualify. Your wire may not, however -- it will resonante with the WiFi signal and re-radiate it, but won't actually `take' it.
But you don't need wire... your flesh will happily receive (or at least absorb) WiFi signals too.
But you're right... I read the article, and not the law. In any event, I think the law is silly, as everybody ignores those California warning stickers anyways. Really? this fishing weight contains lead, which might cause cancer? Well damn! What am I going to have for lunch now?
A better law would have mandated enabling WEP/WPA by default, and including the (randomly generated I'd hope) key and instructions on how to use it. If somebody wants to disable encryption, fine, but they'll have to go in and do it manually. I still don't like the idea of this sort of thing being mandated, but it would be more effective than another sticker. Your AP probably already will have a `this product contains chemicals known in the State of California to cause cancer' sticker on it, so does it really need another?
Lots of gear can `receive' WiFI signals. I've got a cordless phone that uses 2.4 GHz -- it cannot decode WiFi signals, but it certainly can receive the signal. Same goes for a little low power video receiver I've got -- WiFi looks like noise on the screen, but it's clearly receiving the signal. `Receive' certainly is not the proper word.
The law seems like a good idea (or at least the idea is good, even if the fact that it's a law really isn't good), but having laws regarding technology made by people who don't really know the technology involved seems like a bad idea.
I could have picked a better cititation for this point. Yes, a sex offender is more likely to be convicted of a second sex crime than a non-sex-offender criminal, as is shown by the link I gave. However, the same holds true for anybody convicted of a certain type of crime.. if you're convicted of auto burglarly, you're far more likely to be convicted of auto burglarly again than somebody who was originally convicted of marijuanana possession.
A better citation would be this, though it doesn't give a nice breakdown of recidivism rates either, because such statistics vary greatly depending on what exactly you're looking at. And it's not really a citation, but wikipedia page gives some recividism figures that are a good deal lower than the similar figures for most non sex-related crimes.
As a parent, I cannot begin to say how important the Megan's Law website has been for me. I was shocked to see about 20 convicted child molesters live in my area. I had no idea how prevalent it was.
And as a parent myself, let me ask you this -- what useful things have you done with this very important information? Yes, you were shocked to learn that there were 20 convicted child molesters in your area (one question though -- is it 20 people actually convicted of child molestation, or 20 people on the sex offender registry? Many people don't make the distinction.)... what did you do with this specific knowledge that actually helped protect you and your children?
In my experience, people look up their zip code in the registries and are shocked at how many sex offenders live in their neighborhood. Of these, a smaller percentage look at each entry and learn about these people's crimes (had sex with his age 16 girlfriend when he was 19? public urination? Many states put these people on the sex offender list too.) (To be fair, not every state gives detailed information on the exact crimes these people are convicted of.) And of these, a much much smaller percentage actually do anything useful with this information, like warn their kids to stay from these specific houses. People will use this information to prove arguments, to drive by and check out these houses, etc.... but very few actually want their kids to avoid these houses, or to take another route to school. (And it's debatable how useful such measures would be anyways, since if somebody really wanted to prey on your children, they probably wouldn't do it from their front yard anyways.)
Personally, I don't think the sex offender registries are that useful. The only thing they seem to be used for is 1) for people to look at and be shocked, 2) amusement, to look at all the pictures and crimes of the criminals, and 3) to look for people to harass, either by doing things like putting up fliers warning the entire neighborhood about this guy, or in extreme cases doing things directly to the person, like destroying his property or even assaulting him.
Personally, I see the sex offender registries as policitcal constructs used to further the careers of various politicians on the backs of criminals who have generally already paid their debt to society (some are on probation or parole, but most are not.) People like to claim that sex offenders have a higher rate of recidivism, but the actual statistics say the opposite. And if a given criminal really is believed to be a danger to society, he should not be released from prison at all, sex offender or not.
I'd feel better (i.e. they wouldn't offend my sense of right and wrong so badly) about the criminal registries if they 1) only listed only the most serious crimes (non concentual rape? yes. child molestation? yes. concentual sex with your underage girlfriend? no!) and 2) also covered other serious non-sex related (but violent crimes) like murder, but alas, they do not.
Personally, that or something similar would be my response. Perhaps not because I felt that way, but just because I enjoy the shock value. That, and I think such a law is a remarkably poor idea.
Alas, I doubt I'm in the majority.
Other potential responses?
Ahh, porn... just like mom used to make!
But if they outlaw violent porn, how will I pay for my whips?
Want to see my cat o' nine tails?
No, because far more people have been hurt and killed by violence suggested by the Bible/in the name of God than by violence suggested by porn!
Actually, li-ion/lipoly prefers not to be fully charged and dishcarged. Charging it more often but by a smaller amount each time would probably give you slightly longer life.
But in practice a small solar cell on your phone would be next to useless, unless you make it a point to leave your phone in the sun whenever possible, in which case the solar cell might be just enough to keep the phone from requring any time being plugged in. But you'd have to leave it in direct sunlight for many hours each day, and not spend much time talking on it. Perhaps if the entire back of the phone was covered in solar cells it would work better, but even then it probably wouldn't get past the `gimick' stage for most users.
Solar charging: Isn't in there because battery technology (especially lithium ion) doesn't support that method of charging (constant slow charge, instead of sporadic fast charge).
Oh, bull. Li-ion/lipoly will handle that sort of charge just fine. So will NiCd and NiMH and lead-acid batteries, for that matter.
For NiCd and NiMH cells, you can just put a diode in the circuit to keep the battery from discharging back into the solar cells when there is no sun, but as long as the charge rate is less than C/10, you can pretty much leave it charging for days with little trouble. If you leave it going for days or weeks you'll run into some voltage depression (especially with NiCds, but NiMHs can do it too) (often mistakenly called `memory') but I doubt it would be a problem for a cell phone like this. [more later]
For li-ion cells, you'd still need that diode, and you'd need a circuit to prevent the solar cells from charging the li-ion cell past 4.2 volts, but that's it. It doesn't matter if the charge rate is C/2 or C/100. Li-ion have a low self discharge rate, so a charge rate of C/100 would probably be fine, as long as you don't mind your battery taking four days to charge. (Charging NiMH cells at C/100 probably wouldn't get you anywhere, as the self discharge rate will be similar. You could probably get the battery charged somewhat in a few days, but you'd never get it to 100%.)
A bigger problem is probably that a small solar cell just won't generate much power. Some back of the napkin calculations suggest that a 1 in^2 solar cell could generate about 100 mW of power under direct sunlight. Assuming no wasted power (which is a big assumption), it would take about 28 hours of direct sunlight to fully charge a 700 mAh Li-ion cell like you might find in a cell phone. So give it about four days to get fully charged? Granted, you might not need a full charge to make an emergency call, but I just don't see this being that useful unless you're trapped somewhere with a dead battery, but not too far from a cell tower, and you're going to die unless you can make a call. Let's hope it's sunny!
People do already make solar panels designed for charging your cell phone. But they're a lot bigger than your phone, so they're less portable. On the bright side, their charge rates are a lot more reasonable.
Fingerprint scanners: Aren't on phones because they're expensive and useless without infrastructure to support them. These will be launched as separate devices before they will get integrated into phones.
Well, he was talking `pie in the sky'...
I do suspect you're right about how it'll happen, and I do suspect that it will happen eventually. Maybe not everybody will have a biometric scanner in their phone, but some people will want it.
Intuitive dial: Requires GPS to tie it to location, which most phones don't have.
Again, pie in the sky.
And don't most new cell phones now have some way of determining their location, if only for E911? Either by getting the towers to tell them where they are approximately, or an actual GPS? (which won't work well inside, but perhaps it remembers it's localtion from when it was outside?)
Personally, I didn't think most of his `dream' features sounded very important, but then again, I'm pretty happy with my cell phone as-is. A built in GPS or it's equivilent would be nice, however. Actually, I'd be happier if it were a bit more rugged.
Yes, but that is irrelevant. The lawsuit against Napster was for contributory infringement and vicarious infringement.
Yes, but I asked for citations of where somebody was sued by the RIAA (though I'd be just as happy with a suit from a member or a similar organization) for downloading and not uploading. You provided one citation that matched my criteria (which is one more than I expected, so well done. Usually when I ask somebody for a citation like that, I don't get it.)
Most of the furor over this was the court denying the defendant a jury trial since it felt that there were no disputed facts or damages.
You must be looking at different furor than I am. From what I've read, the reason it didn't go to a jury for damages determination is that that the suers were only asking for the minimums, so a jury wouldn't change anything except maybe make the award go even higher than what was asked for.
Remember that the defendant downloaded music which she didn't own a copy of
Ironically, Gonzalez primarily downloaded songs she already owned on CD--the downloads were meant to help her avoid the labor of manually loading the 250 CDs she owns onto her computer
but maybe they weren't suing her for those songs. (And of course, the EFF does have an agenda here, so perhaps this isn't entirely accurate.)
It's because uploaders are easier to find than downloaders
It's trivial to find downloaders. You put something up for download, and log who downloads it.
Of course, if you put up the actual songs in question, then you're distributing them, which is probably illegal. And if you don't put up the actual songs but something else (like 5 minutes of your cat screaming in a file called Madonna-Vogue.mp3) then it would be hard to argue that the law was broken, unless your sound file was copyrighted, and you didn't OK it for distribution, which would be a bit... odd.
Of course, it's also trivial to find uploaders. You do a search, see what it matches, and then download the songs, and then listen to them and make sure that they're what the names say they are (and aren't five minutes of some guy's cat screaming.) Apparantly the RIAA has been skipping this last step, probably just because the burden of proof isn't very high in a civil case. That, and it takes some time.
And it's because RIAA, MPAA, et al, have made a strategic decision to prefer to sue downloaders rather than uploaders, due to the network effects. If you shut down an uploader, then anyone leeching off of that uploader will have to go elsewhere.
(You made a typo, getting downloaders and uploaders backwards. But I know what you meant...)
In any event, I don't agree with your analysis. It would make almost exactly as much sense if you just swapped `uploaders' with `downloaders' throughout that paragraph.
I suspect that the reason they go after uploaders rather than downloaders is possibly numbers (there's fewer uploaders than downloaders, so each uploader has a larger effect on things (you did sort of say this, but in a roundabout way), but also that it'll just be easier to make a strong case against an uploader.
If you're going after downloaders, and put up your warez and log who downloads it, well, somebody is likely to download only one or two files from you, with the rest of his downloads going to other people and you can't see the logs for those downloads.
If you're going after uploaders, you can identify a few interesting people by doing some searches on music that you can protect the rights to, then list everything they have. Then you can make arguments like `and it's likely that each of those songs will be downloaded by
No. `The Constitution may not be perfect, but it's better than what we have now.'
I think it is well past time that we started excluding the bad actors from this community
Except that it's not really up to you, though you do seem to have more control over it than most.
Exactly why are you so concerned about the scope of the remedy
My point was that you can ask for anything you want. It's just that I don't see the judge giving it.
If somebody were to steal your princess phone, I imagine you'd sue and ask for the judge to prohibit them from ever using a phone too?
Yes, people can make a living without computers. The Amish seem to do OK, for example. But it wouldn't surprise me if your garbage man example can't really avoid them entirely. After all, there may be a computer in the garbage truck that keeps track of people who need extra billing (around here, if you put out extra trash, you get billed extra.) Or perhaps he has to use a timeclock, but his timeclock is computerized? My car has a computer in it too...
Perhaps part of the probation/parole system that the criminal has to use involves logging into a computer somehow?
(In the post I originally responded to, you explicitly said ban them from INTERNET ACCESS, but in this post, you seem to be going for `ban them from using computers at all'.)
Like it or not, computers (and to a lesser degree, the Internet) are pretty much now ubiquious, and I don't see the judge prohibiting somebody from using one for life just because they stole something once. And if a judge did, I can see it getting overturned on appeal.
Two teens are barred from the Internet for life
And I'd say that the odds are good that they have myspace pages right now...
But if not, congratulations! You've personally helped make the Internet better for everybody, by reducing the number of myspace pages by two!
So what did these two teens do, anyways? Stealing a laptop would be the logical guess, but it's just a guess...
The Police seem to be somewhat arbitrary on what they will and won't investigate
Well, to be fair, there is no single `The Police' (except for the band, of course) -- instead, there's thousands of different police departments and divisions out there, all with different priorites and processes. And when you start aggregating anecdotes on the Internet, you get more and more different police departments involved.
If you can stick to a single police department, I suspect things will become a lot less arbitrary -- given the same cases and the same evidences, they'll probably respond to them in the same ways.
A&M Records v. Napster, 239 F.3d 1004, 1014 (9th Cir. 2001).
CoStar Group v. LoopNet, 373 F.3d 544, 551 (4th Cir. 2004).
In these cases, somebody wasn't sued for downloading. Napster was sued for facilitating downloading (and uploading, since you can't have one without the other), and LoopNet was sued for actually having the music on their servers for others to download, not for downloading it themselves.
BMG Music v. Gonzalez, 430 F.3d 888, 889 (7th Cir. 2005)
I'd say that qualifies. Thank you for providing a citation.
However, merely googling for the name of that suit finds lots of people arging that the judgement was wrong. Certainly, it doesn't seem to jive with the Betamax ruling many years ago.
And even with an example of the RIAA (or a member of the RIAA) suing somebody strictly for downloading, so far, the vast majority of the lawsuits that they're making are after those people uploading -- presumably because they have a much stronger case here.
the ircds and other servers they run tend to run best (or only) on Linux
It's been a while (around ten years?), but back when I ran a few (legitimate) IRC servers, I found that in general ircd on FreeBSD worked much better on the same hardware than Linux did, being able to handle roughly twice as many users and crashing (sometimes the entire box) far less often while doing so. ircd is pretty hard on your networking stack when you have hundreds (back then -- now servers do thousands) of simultaneous users. To be fair, Linux's networking code has certainly improved greatly since then, so maybe the difference is much smaller now.
Of course, there's probably 10x as many Linux servers out there as FreeBSD servers, and really, your arguments wouldnt' be any less spot-on if you replaced Linux with just `*nix' (except that it wouldn't surprise me if many of the new ircds only worked under Linux as you suggested -- portability isn't nearly as important to many as it used to be), so it's not really a big deal.
Yes, he should act fast, but the ISP should keep records for at least a little while allowing them to correlate an IP address and a specific time to a given user. The script doesn't have to be working *right now* for the police to knock on his door (but it wouldn't hurt.)
like a LIFETIME BAN ON INTERNET ACCESS
Even Mitnick was only prohibited from using computers for a while, and he did a lot more than just steal a laptop, and he was the `uber-cracker who could crack your computer just by whistling into a phone (imitating a modem)!'
Perhaps the courts might have done this 20 years ago when nobody knew about the Internet (but I doubt it, not just for a simple single theft), but now that everybody is at least aware of it, I don't see it happening. It would probably fall under `cruel and unusual punishment'.
Well, downloading can certainly be illegal, and there have been numerous opinions to that effect by district and circuit courts.
Citations, please. I'm not aware of any court rulings/opinions that stated that `downloading copyrighted music' was illegal, at least not in the US. I'm not quite ready to say it's legal (and I'm no lawyer), but I'm not aware of any cases where downloading by itself was found to be illegal.
And of course, even if you do produce these citations, that still doesn't mean that the RIAA has sued people for downloading. So far, every RIAA lawsuit I'm aware of has been about making music available and/or uploading, not downloading.
Really, no one even seriously argues otherwise.
I guess it depends on how you define `seriously', because I see people arguing otherwise all the time.
1) I don't think anybody has ever been sued by the RIAA merely for having music or even downloading music -- they've only sued people for uploading/sharing music (though they might like to claim `illegal downloading' and things like that.)
2) however, if you want to look at another industry that has had similar problems, look at the BSA, The Business Software Alliance. I'm not sure where they get the authority, but they do occasionally do raids on business and require that the business prove that it has legal licenses for all the software they use.
From what I've heard, in many cases even having the original media and license sticker things has not been deemed to be sufficient proof of ownership, and businesses have been forced to purchase additional licenses even though they had a seperate copy of the software for each computer it was installed on. However, I'm not certain of the details here, so I could be wrong.
Nonetheless, the phrase is still used by people to indicate that a particular argument or point-of-view is curmugeony, or that a person is a curmugeon.
Yes, I understand that.
But the phrase has really taken off in the last few years -- it's all over the `web' now. Like people were quoting a movie or something. But perhaps you're right -- perhaps people are really quoting a few thousand crotchety old people who aren't at all related except in their disdain for children upon their grass.
Slashdot Mirror
If damaged in such a way that the battery shorts internally, they tend to get very hot very quickly, and may even emit steam, but they don't usually catch fire (though they can start a fire if there's something flammable nearby.) What's different about LiIon batteries (like used by your modern laptop or cell phone) is that the same thing happens, but the stuff that comes out is actually flammable, which is why they're so much more likely to burn (they generally don't explode, but can burn vigorously.) Also, if a LiIon cell gets hot enough, the electrolyte can start to react on it's own, no physical damage needed, causing a fire that way.
Damaged or overcharged lead-acid batteries (like in your car) can also emit hydrogen, which is explosive. I'll bet more of these have caused explosions than LiIon batteries ever have.
In any event, to answer your question, your AA/AAA batteries are almost certainly not going to explode or even catch fire. At worst, if you take a fully charged AA NiCd battery and beat it with hammer a few times, it'll get really hot and start steaming -- but probably won't catch fire on it's own, since there's nothing to burn. Do this in a pile of papers and it might start a fire, however.
Personally, I'm wondering what's changed recently -- we've been using LiIon/LiPo cells for years now, but we've almost never heard of fires caused by them in laptops or cell phones until recently. Suddnely, now it seems like every laptop is a fire waiting to happen! Is it that these fires happened before, but nobody reported them? Or are modern batteries more likely to catch fire?
I recall PC Gamer having a picture of Stevie Case on the cover, and talking about how she was one of the `Gaming Gods'. While I may not agree with you about John, I would have to say that Stevie was indeed rather attractive, though I tended to question her actual influence on the gaming industry at the time. I don't recall seeing her name in the list given today (and really didn't expect to see it, but I did look for it.)
(Well, obviously the page isn't *entirely* static, as it gives your IP address. But even so, the CPU needed to do this is absolutely miniscule.)
Assuming that this is correct, even a 486 or so on a single T1 could probably handle over 100 hits per second.
Never saw Kangaroo Jack.
Still, I like my Model 100. If a journalist offers me enough money to buy a modern laptop for it, maybe I'll sell it, but since I don't see this happening, I'll probably hang onto it.
I'm surprised that people haven't used modern technology to make something with a similar size and power consumption, but with better specifications. Journalists, students ... anybody who has to take notes could find it to be useful.
You mount it in ext2 mode. ext3 is just ext2+journalling, and you can mount a ext3 partition as ext2. This doesn't replay the journal, so you won't get to see any data actually in the journal, but the rest of the data you can see. And there are other ways that you can ensure that Linux will not write to the disk -- for example, `hdparm -r
However, the police don't generally do this, as it's not quite proof against writing *enough*. Instead, they generally connect the drive to a device that is certified to make writing to the drive IMPOSSIBLE (by cutting that wire, or filtering out those commands) and use the drive that way, either to poke around it or to dd the drive to another drive where you can do your work.
Of course, in this case, the guy is dead, so the standard rules of evidence probably don't need to be applied as carefully. It's not like this data will be used to convict him or something ...
Of course, here's the funny story. I got the computer, and figured `ok, what do I do with it?' ... so I tried to remember BASIC, and put in this program as soon as I got it working at the office --
10 I = I + 1 ;
20 PRINT "HELLO THERE # ", I
30 GOTO 10
(sorry if I got this wrong. This is the last time I did any BASIC, and it was years before that that I'd last done any.)
In any event, it's still running today. It's up to (let me check) 509176235. It's doing roughly 4.2 iterations/second, with most of the cpu obviously going to scrolling the display. Of course, if I do the math, that only works out to about four years, so I'm not sure what the discrepancy is.
In any event, it's lasted several office moves, and now it's in my garage, with a wal-wart transformer connected and some AA's in the battery slot. The batteries will run it for a remarkably long time, and I just replace them every year or so.
I've been tempted to pull it out and play with it a bit, but I'm reluctant to lose all my uptime ...
Still, if the police need data off the C64 media, they should have just posted to some C-64 forum stating that it was impossible to get the data copied to a modern computer, and they'd probably find a few people ready to prove them wrong.
But you don't need wire
But you're right ... I read the article, and not the law. In any event, I think the law is silly, as everybody ignores those California warning stickers anyways. Really? this fishing weight contains lead, which might cause cancer? Well damn! What am I going to have for lunch now?
A better law would have mandated enabling WEP/WPA by default, and including the (randomly generated I'd hope) key and instructions on how to use it. If somebody wants to disable encryption, fine, but they'll have to go in and do it manually. I still don't like the idea of this sort of thing being mandated, but it would be more effective than another sticker. Your AP probably already will have a `this product contains chemicals known in the State of California to cause cancer' sticker on it, so does it really need another?
The law seems like a good idea (or at least the idea is good, even if the fact that it's a law really isn't good), but having laws regarding technology made by people who don't really know the technology involved seems like a bad idea.
A better citation would be this, though it doesn't give a nice breakdown of recidivism rates either, because such statistics vary greatly depending on what exactly you're looking at. And it's not really a citation, but wikipedia page gives some recividism figures that are a good deal lower than the similar figures for most non sex-related crimes.
In my experience, people look up their zip code in the registries and are shocked at how many sex offenders live in their neighborhood. Of these, a smaller percentage look at each entry and learn about these people's crimes (had sex with his age 16 girlfriend when he was 19? public urination? Many states put these people on the sex offender list too.) (To be fair, not every state gives detailed information on the exact crimes these people are convicted of.) And of these, a much much smaller percentage actually do anything useful with this information, like warn their kids to stay from these specific houses. People will use this information to prove arguments, to drive by and check out these houses, etc.
Personally, I don't think the sex offender registries are that useful. The only thing they seem to be used for is 1) for people to look at and be shocked, 2) amusement, to look at all the pictures and crimes of the criminals, and 3) to look for people to harass, either by doing things like putting up fliers warning the entire neighborhood about this guy, or in extreme cases doing things directly to the person, like destroying his property or even assaulting him.
Personally, I see the sex offender registries as policitcal constructs used to further the careers of various politicians on the backs of criminals who have generally already paid their debt to society (some are on probation or parole, but most are not.) People like to claim that sex offenders have a higher rate of recidivism, but the actual statistics say the opposite. And if a given criminal really is believed to be a danger to society, he should not be released from prison at all, sex offender or not.
I'd feel better (i.e. they wouldn't offend my sense of right and wrong so badly) about the criminal registries if they 1) only listed only the most serious crimes (non concentual rape? yes. child molestation? yes. concentual sex with your underage girlfriend? no!) and 2) also covered other serious non-sex related (but violent crimes) like murder, but alas, they do not.
Alas, I doubt I'm in the majority.
Other potential responses?
Ahh, porn ... just like mom used to make!
But if they outlaw violent porn, how will I pay for my whips?
Want to see my cat o' nine tails?
No, because far more people have been hurt and killed by violence suggested by the Bible/in the name of God than by violence suggested by porn!
But in practice a small solar cell on your phone would be next to useless, unless you make it a point to leave your phone in the sun whenever possible, in which case the solar cell might be just enough to keep the phone from requring any time being plugged in. But you'd have to leave it in direct sunlight for many hours each day, and not spend much time talking on it. Perhaps if the entire back of the phone was covered in solar cells it would work better, but even then it probably wouldn't get past the `gimick' stage for most users.
For NiCd and NiMH cells, you can just put a diode in the circuit to keep the battery from discharging back into the solar cells when there is no sun, but as long as the charge rate is less than C/10, you can pretty much leave it charging for days with little trouble. If you leave it going for days or weeks you'll run into some voltage depression (especially with NiCds, but NiMHs can do it too) (often mistakenly called `memory') but I doubt it would be a problem for a cell phone like this. [more later]
For li-ion cells, you'd still need that diode, and you'd need a circuit to prevent the solar cells from charging the li-ion cell past 4.2 volts, but that's it. It doesn't matter if the charge rate is C/2 or C/100. Li-ion have a low self discharge rate, so a charge rate of C/100 would probably be fine, as long as you don't mind your battery taking four days to charge. (Charging NiMH cells at C/100 probably wouldn't get you anywhere, as the self discharge rate will be similar. You could probably get the battery charged somewhat in a few days, but you'd never get it to 100%.)
A bigger problem is probably that a small solar cell just won't generate much power. Some back of the napkin calculations suggest that a 1 in^2 solar cell could generate about 100 mW of power under direct sunlight. Assuming no wasted power (which is a big assumption), it would take about 28 hours of direct sunlight to fully charge a 700 mAh Li-ion cell like you might find in a cell phone. So give it about four days to get fully charged? Granted, you might not need a full charge to make an emergency call, but I just don't see this being that useful unless you're trapped somewhere with a dead battery, but not too far from a cell tower, and you're going to die unless you can make a call. Let's hope it's sunny!
People do already make solar panels designed for charging your cell phone. But they're a lot bigger than your phone, so they're less portable. On the bright side, their charge rates are a lot more reasonable.
Well, he was talking `pie in the sky'I do suspect you're right about how it'll happen, and I do suspect that it will happen eventually. Maybe not everybody will have a biometric scanner in their phone, but some people will want it.
Again, pie in the sky.And don't most new cell phones now have some way of determining their location, if only for E911? Either by getting the towers to tell them where they are approximately, or an actual GPS? (which won't work well inside, but perhaps it remembers it's localtion from when it was outside?)
Personally, I didn't think most of his `dream' features sounded very important, but then again, I'm pretty happy with my cell phone as-is. A built in GPS or it's equivilent would be nice, however. Actually, I'd be happier if it were a bit more rugged.
Yes, but I asked for citations of where somebody was sued by the RIAA (though I'd be just as happy with a suit from a member or a similar organization) for downloading and not uploading. You provided one citation that matched my criteria (which is one more than I expected, so well done. Usually when I ask somebody for a citation like that, I don't get it.)
You must be looking at different furor than I am. From what I've read, the reason it didn't go to a jury for damages determination is that that the suers were only asking for the minimums, so a jury wouldn't change anything except maybe make the award go even higher than what was asked for.
Strange. This EFF paper/release says that
but maybe they weren't suing her for those songs. (And of course, the EFF does have an agenda here, so perhaps this isn't entirely accurate.)
It's trivial to find downloaders. You put something up for download, and log who downloads it.
Of course, if you put up the actual songs in question, then you're distributing them, which is probably illegal. And if you don't put up the actual songs but something else (like 5 minutes of your cat screaming in a file called Madonna-Vogue.mp3) then it would be hard to argue that the law was broken, unless your sound file was copyrighted, and you didn't OK it for distribution, which would be a bit ... odd.
Of course, it's also trivial to find uploaders. You do a search, see what it matches, and then download the songs, and then listen to them and make sure that they're what the names say they are (and aren't five minutes of some guy's cat screaming.) Apparantly the RIAA has been skipping this last step, probably just because the burden of proof isn't very high in a civil case. That, and it takes some time.
(You made a typo, getting downloaders and uploaders backwards. But I know what you meant ...)
In any event, I don't agree with your analysis. It would make almost exactly as much sense if you just swapped `uploaders' with `downloaders' throughout that paragraph.
I suspect that the reason they go after uploaders rather than downloaders is possibly numbers (there's fewer uploaders than downloaders, so each uploader has a larger effect on things (you did sort of say this, but in a roundabout way), but also that it'll just be easier to make a strong case against an uploader.
If you're going after downloaders, and put up your warez and log who downloads it, well, somebody is likely to download only one or two files from you, with the rest of his downloads going to other people and you can't see the logs for those downloads.
If you're going after uploaders, you can identify a few interesting people by doing some searches on music that you can protect the rights to, then list everything they have. Then you can make arguments like `and it's likely that each of those songs will be downloaded by
If somebody were to steal your princess phone, I imagine you'd sue and ask for the judge to prohibit them from ever using a phone too?
Yes, people can make a living without computers. The Amish seem to do OK, for example. But it wouldn't surprise me if your garbage man example can't really avoid them entirely. After all, there may be a computer in the garbage truck that keeps track of people who need extra billing (around here, if you put out extra trash, you get billed extra.) Or perhaps he has to use a timeclock, but his timeclock is computerized? My car has a computer in it too ...
Perhaps part of the probation/parole system that the criminal has to use involves logging into a computer somehow?
(In the post I originally responded to, you explicitly said ban them from INTERNET ACCESS, but in this post, you seem to be going for `ban them from using computers at all'.)
Like it or not, computers (and to a lesser degree, the Internet) are pretty much now ubiquious, and I don't see the judge prohibiting somebody from using one for life just because they stole something once. And if a judge did, I can see it getting overturned on appeal.
And I'd say that the odds are good that they have myspace pages right nowBut if not, congratulations! You've personally helped make the Internet better for everybody, by reducing the number of myspace pages by two!
So what did these two teens do, anyways? Stealing a laptop would be the logical guess, but it's just a guess ...
If you can stick to a single police department, I suspect things will become a lot less arbitrary -- given the same cases and the same evidences, they'll probably respond to them in the same ways.
However, merely googling for the name of that suit finds lots of people arging that the judgement was wrong. Certainly, it doesn't seem to jive with the Betamax ruling many years ago.
And even with an example of the RIAA (or a member of the RIAA) suing somebody strictly for downloading, so far, the vast majority of the lawsuits that they're making are after those people uploading -- presumably because they have a much stronger case here.
Of course, there's probably 10x as many Linux servers out there as FreeBSD servers, and really, your arguments wouldnt' be any less spot-on if you replaced Linux with just `*nix' (except that it wouldn't surprise me if many of the new ircds only worked under Linux as you suggested -- portability isn't nearly as important to many as it used to be), so it's not really a big deal.
Perhaps the courts might have done this 20 years ago when nobody knew about the Internet (but I doubt it, not just for a simple single theft), but now that everybody is at least aware of it, I don't see it happening. It would probably fall under `cruel and unusual punishment'.
I guess it depends on how you define `seriously', because I see people arguing otherwise all the time.And of course, even if you do produce these citations, that still doesn't mean that the RIAA has sued people for downloading. So far, every RIAA lawsuit I'm aware of has been about making music available and/or uploading, not downloading.
2) however, if you want to look at another industry that has had similar problems, look at the BSA, The Business Software Alliance. I'm not sure where they get the authority, but they do occasionally do raids on business and require that the business prove that it has legal licenses for all the software they use.
From what I've heard, in many cases even having the original media and license sticker things has not been deemed to be sufficient proof of ownership, and businesses have been forced to purchase additional licenses even though they had a seperate copy of the software for each computer it was installed on. However, I'm not certain of the details here, so I could be wrong.
But the phrase has really taken off in the last few years -- it's all over the `web' now. Like people were quoting a movie or something. But perhaps you're right -- perhaps people are really quoting a few thousand crotchety old people who aren't at all related except in their disdain for children upon their grass.