I built my dual-core AMD 4200+ computer a couple of years ago. It has a Gigabyte K8NS nVidia Socket 939 ATX motherboard, 2 GB of RAM and 2 hard drives. It also has a 256 MB video card which uses the nVidia FX5200 chipset. It's 370 Watt power supply has an 80+ certified energy efficiency rating. 80+ certified power supplies are designed to be at least 80% energy efficient when running at 20%, 50% and 100% of the rated load. I use Linux on the computer and have the AMD 64's Cool n' Quiet feature enabled which which drops the clock speed from 2.4 GHz down to 1 GHz during light usage to save power.
My other computer is a small book sized computer computer which uses only 23 Watts when idle (not counting the monitor). It has a 1.85 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB of RAM and Windows XP. One reason that it uses so little power is that it uses the same type of motherboard that a laptop computer would use.
Both of those computers are plenty powerful for the typical web browsing, word processing and checking my email that I do. Running both computers at once, 24 hours per day would not be much worse than leaving a 100 Watt light bulb on all the time. Of course I actually use the much more energy efficient CFL light bulbs instead of ordinary 100 Watt incandescent light bulbs.
That must be one monster, power hungry, computer to use that much power when idle with the monitor off. I suppose that would include the power that you air-conditioner uses to remove the computer's heat from your home. I seem to recall hearing that it takes about as much power for your A/C to remove the heat generated by appliances as what the appliance itself uses. So during the summer we could probably just double the actual power consumption figures of your computer.
If you had a Pentium IV with a power-thirsty high-end video cards with a cheap, inefficient power supply, it might possibly use as much as 250 or 300 Watts when idle (I don't know for sure). I don't know how much you are paying per KWH, but even including the effect on your air-conditioner, I would guess about $50 per month at most, for one computer, if I am calculating that correctly.
My computer probably uses less power than most desktop computers. It is plugged a Kill-A-Watt electricity usage monitor, at the moment, which shows that I am using 82 Watts (not counting the monitor). My LCD monitor uses an additional 38 Watts, but only uses 1 Watt when in the sleep state. If I left it on at night the the monitor would be in the sleep state using only 1 Watt. I also have a UPS, speakers and a few other things not on the meter so lets just round it off to 100 Watts.
A pay about 14 cents per KWH for my electricity where I live. If I am calculating this correctly, that would be about $10 per month. During the summer, I could probably call that $20 per month, if I include the added load my my air-conditioner. I hope I calculated that correctly, including the conversion from Watts to Killowatts and canceling of the units. Perhaps, some engineer or math geek could check my math. Here is my $10 per month calculation:
No, I was not suggesting that the thermostat had been lowered remotely with radio signals. Someone at the college had lowered the thermostat, because president Carter had said that was what everyone in the country should do. The college employees just did not realize that would make the air-conditioning come on.
That reminds me of something that happened at a college back in the 1970s during the energy crisis, when everyone was asked to save energy by lowering their thermostats to 68 degrees. I was taking some classes at a Junior College in Arizona at the time. They lowered the thermostats to 68 degrees during the winter to save energy, as requested, and then several weeks later they discovered that the air conditioning system had come on automatically to get the building down to 68 degrees.
Will these proposed new radio-controlled thermostats be designed well enough to avoid those kinds of mistakes? I still remember riding in a few cars from the 1970s which had government required seat-belt warning devices reminding people to buckle-up. It was annoying when the device could sense the weight of groceries on the passenger seat and repeatedly complain about that person not being buckled up. I suspect these new thermostats will end up annoying some home owners by making similar unfair stupid errors.
Personally, I think that well insulated energy efficient homes with a smaller capacity air-conditioner should be exempt from needing a radio-controlled thermostat for their air-conditioner. Suppose someone has a home with something like R-28 walls, extra insulation in the ceiling, extra insulation on the ducts and double-pane low-e glass in the windows. They are saving plenty of energy already. On the other had there are many homes out there with R-11 walls and single-pane windows. Since they are the ones that are using most of the energy, they should be the only ones to get the big-brother controlled thermostat.
Evaporative coolers should also be exempt from needing these special thermostats, since they use less energy anyway. Furthermore, if someone has a solar powered evaporative cooler, it should definitely be exempt. I don't know much about solar evaporative coolers, but apparently they use a photovotaic solar panel to generate the power to run the pump and fans and whatever is required to make an evaporative cooler work. By the way, from what I recall, evaporative coolers don't always cool as well, especially when the humidity rises.
I also have also a small collection of old hard drives. About a year ago, I bought an external enclosure and converted one of the larger parallel ATA hard drives into and external USB hard drive. To do that, I used a Vantec NexStar GX NST-370GX external hard drive enclosure. I now use it as a backup device for all the files that I have on my computer.
Later on, I assembled another Vantec external drive as an additional second backup for the contents of my computer. Most of the time I keep that second backup disk hidden in another building, somewhere else, just in case burglars or fire cause the loss of my computer and the other external hard drive.
There are also similar external hard drive enclosures with a USB interface made by other companies. Some are for parallel ATA hard drives and some are for serial ATA hard drives.
If I were to ever give one of my old hard drives to someone else or throw it away, I would wipe everything off of it by using Darik's Boot and Nuke on the drive first.
Occasionally, I have just wanted to temporarily hook up an old hard drive, to see what is on it. Fortunately, the Linux computer which I built, has a case which can easily be opened in a few seconds by pulling on the handle and removing the side panel. Then with the side panel off, I just place the hard drive on a cardboard box beside the computer and hook the hard drive to an unused 80-pin parallel ATA connector and to a power connector. I don't actually take the time to fully install it in the computer, I just leave it hooked up next to the computer and boot the computer up, with the cover off.
On all of my more recent hard drives, the jumpers were already in the default cable select position. On the older ones, some of the jumpers are set to "master" and some are set to "slave" and some to "cable select." Fortunately, most of my old hard drives have a small chart printed on them showing how to set each possible jumper position. I wear an anti-static wrist strap when working on the computer and fortunately, I don't have carpeting on my floor (which can generate static).
It looks like I will soon be going from 8 analog television channels to 2 digital channels. I live in the mountains of Northern Arizona where our television signals go through a mountaintop repeater station. It repeats the signals from the TV stations which are about 100 miles away and retransmits them on different channels.
I looked up my television listings TitanTV.com a few minutes ago and entered my Zip code which is 86301. Then I asked for the digital broadcast listings for my area. I listed only two digital channels for the 86301 Zip code. They are KAZTDT and KCFGDT. Next, I asked for the analog broadcast listings for my area and received a list of 10 stations for my Zip code. None of the major networks such as ABC, CBS, NBC, UPN or PBS were on the list of digital channels. One the two digital channels has mostly old 1960s shows such as the Brady Bunch, the Andy Griffith show and I Love Lucy and the other station is not much better. I have line of sight reception to the old repeater station where the old analog channels come from. However, there are several large hills between me and the transmitters for the two digital channels, so I may not be able to get them at all.
But anyway, I went ahead and applied for my two TV converter box coupons a few minutes ago anyway and will soon see if I can receive anything. I don't want to start paying a monthly fee for for satellite or cable, so if I can't receive much of anything, I might just rent occasional DVDs instead. I could also start getting my most of my news from alternative sources on the Internet and radio instead.
Online gambling is only one example of unelected WTO officials dictating national policy to individual contries. Another example is how the WTO and U.S. laws totally disagree on the availability of vitamins and supplements in health food stores. In 1994, in a grass-roots effort organized by health food stores, millions of American activists told Congress to keep vitamins and supplement dosages from being regulated. As a result, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) was passed which classifies supplements and herbs as foods which can have no upper limit set on their use.
However, in 1962 as a UN trade Commission created Codex Alimentarius to control the international trade of food. In recent years corporate interests such as pharmaceutical, pesticide, biotechnology and chemical industries have had a major influence in setting those requirements. Quoting from the Natural Solutions Foundation website: "Codex Alimentarius is backed up by the crippling trade sanctions of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Any non Codex-compliant nation would face huge economic punishment since they would automatically lose in any food-trade dispute with a Codex compliant country."
The Vitamin and Mineral Guideline (VMG) for Codex Alimentarius, is designed to permit only ultra low doses of vitamins and minerals. If I am not mistaken, it would also allow the use of foods gown with various pesticides which been banned in many countries.
I am a rabbit-ears antenna user in a small city up in the mountains of Northern Arizona. As far as I can tell, only one station is broadcasting on the new over-the-air HDTV channels where I live. In major cities, such as Phoenix, stations are currently broadcasting on their new ATSC HDTV channels. That does not appear to be the case up here, where we get our television signals through a mountaintop repeater. The last time I checked an online database, I entered my address and it said I would only be able to get one HDTV station (possibly split into two sub channels). Right now, I can barely receive that station's, soon to disappear, regular NTSC broadcast and have doubts about their higher frequency ATSC HDTV broadcasts being able to make it over the large hill between me and their antenna.
In a few months I plan to get one of those inexpensive converter boxes and see if I can actually get anything where I live.
Cable may possibly now be available where I live, but if not, a satellite dish would be another option. However, I do not want to pay a monthly free for either, especially since I have not watched much TV this last year. I might just sign up with Netflix so that I can get DVDs through the mail instead. I will soon be getting all of my news from newspapers, magazines, radio, podcasts and the Internet instead of television news.
I should have said that I had driving for over 35 years, not for over 55 years (I am only in my mid 50s now).
The slight extra space has also kept me from having to use the brakes much. I have nearly 150,000 miles on my truck and have not yet needed to have the pads on my front disk brakes replaced. That lack of wear on my brakes is also partially because I have a manual transmission and when I let up on the gas, that by itself slows me down more than an automatic would. Obviously, driving conditions, such as the amount of traffic and infrequent stop lights have also been factor in brake life.
On several occasions, I have had someone behind me who wasn't paying attention and have had to use up the extra buffer ahead of me space to avoid getting rear ended. On a couple of other occasions, over the decades, the extra space has saved me from my own lack of attentiveness.
I generally don't follow very closely and am generally aware of what the vehicles ahead me are doing. In heavy traffic I, tend to use that slight extra space as a buffer to smooth out the brief erratic variations of what is happening ahead of me. That way, the cars behind me are moving along nice and smoothly. Just watching the people ahead of me, I can usually easily predict what each car ahead of me is going to do and for how long. I can watch the waves increase or diminish as they approach. Of course I try not to let the buffer space got so large or it becomes too tempting of an opening for lane changers.
Sitting up high in my pick-up truck, I can see each car ahead of me brake or accelerate harder than the one ahead of it leading to an unnecessarily erratic traffic flow. Apparently, there aren't enough people doing what I am doing to compensate for their errors.
By the way, I have been driving driving for over 55 years and have not yet had my first accident (not counting several very minor off-road incidents with with a backhoe, dump truck, jeep and forklift). Not following as close might be one of the reasons. Living 50 feet from work and having a very short commute has also helped.
I have an old AT type connector on my favorite old keyboard. To connect it to the PS2 port on my computer, I had to use an AT-to-PS2 adapter.
My other computer does not have a PS2 port, but with the help of both a PS2-to-USB adapter and an AT-to-PS2 adapter, I have another one of those same keyboards hooked to it.
I have seen both USB and PS2 type keystroke loggers in computer parts catalogs. Looking behind my computer, just now, I am glad to see there is only an AT-to-PS2 adapter and no keystroke logger.
I use Kubuntu Linux and have both Firefox and Opera installed. Perhaps I should use Firefox as the Promiscuous browser and Opera as the safe browser. A family could have a safe computer and a promiscuous computer. The parents could use a Linux or Mac computer as the safe computer and let their kids use a Windows computer as the promiscuous computer.
What if someone actually did forged their long, complicated pass phrase? In that case, prosecutors would be trying to force someone to divulge a passphase that they don't even know.
On several occasions, I have briefly played around with encryption programs and made an extra copy of unimportant stuff and then encrypted it. Since it was usually just for practice, I did not always bother writing the passphrase down on the sheet of paper which lists all my passwords and passphrases. I may have not always got around to deleting those encrypted practice files and they may still exist somewhere on one of my old hard disks or on a USB key or somewhere or in the box of CDs that I have burned. I would have no idea what the password or passphrase was for those old practice encryption files.
I could easily imagine some prosecutor putting me in jail for not being able to come up with a passphrase to some old encrypted practice file. Then eventually, after getting out of jail, perhaps I would eventually find the passphrase on some old scrap of paper and they would discover that it was just an encrypted folder full of dozens of free 80 year old Gutenberg.net ebooks.
A person, such as myself, who has have never actually bothered to use encryption on a routine daily basis, would someone who is most likely to forget their passphrase. Perhaps I should dispose of all my old hard disks or wipe all the data with Darik's Boot and Nuke Of course, if there were indications that someone has recently used their encrypted partition, folders or files recently, that would be different. A recent time stamp on the file or folder would be one such clue.
Last August, there was a Slashdot discussion about a study showing that smarter teens have less sex. The study also showed that pattern persisting through adulthood. That was eerily similar to the basic premise of the Idiocracy movie, in which the less intelligent people have more children. In the movie, two subjects of a long-duration suspended animation experiment wake up in the future and are amazed to discover how dumb everyone has become.
In that study, the average teenagers actually lost their virginity sooner than either students with very low IQs or students with high IQs. So perhaps evolution is actually currently favoring averageness over either being too dumb or too intelligent.
The movie also gave an example of a "typical" highly intelligent couple who waited until after they went to college and established their careers and had financial security before they decided that they could afford to have children. Unfortunately by then, she was older and her fertility had declined and they never got to have kids. That actually does happen to many couples. People like them, are the evolutionary losers.
The movie also gave an the example of of a "typical" less intelligent family. That family is having trouble paying it's bills and has junk in the front yard and their loud obnoxious children are running around. The crude loudmouthed couple is shown arguing about the fact that she forgot to take her birth control pill again and is now pregnant again.
Lets also not forget the stereotype of computer geeks and science geeks not being able to get laid. Actually, it is probably just that anyone with a life and a girlfriend, would have better ways to spend their time than on their computer.
Apparently, you aren't the only one who didn't realize that Microsoft was still in business. Here is a woman in the local bookstore, who has never heard of Microsoft:
I forgot to mention that I also received a tetanus shot as a child after stepping on a rusty nail that was sticking up through some manure in a horse corral. But altogether, I don't think there were more than half a dozen vaccinations at the most. One of the vaccines came in the form of sugar cube which I had to swallow.
How many Vaccines do children get these day? When I was growing up back in the 1960s, we received several. If I remember correctly, I remember getting vaccines for smallpox, polio, diptheria and possibly whooping cough. They did not yet have vaccines for measles, chickenpox or mumps. Like all the other children in my grade school classes, I came down with most of the ordinary childhood diseases that everyone got as a child such as chickenpox, mumps and the less serious of the two types of measles like illnesses. I was the only one that I knew who never came down with the main type of measles, even though I have never been vaccinated for measles.
I don't know what to believe on the subject of vaccines. I am not a frequent YouTube viewer, but I have run across plenty of other websites arguing against flue vaccines and other vaccinations. I have heard claims of vaccines that contained mercury, other contaminant and even left miscellaneous bits animal viruses and tissues. I am not sure what to believe, but I got my usual flue shot this fall anyway.
To be open minded and hear both sides of the issue, when looking at the link to the JAMA article, I clicked "Full Text of this Article," to see what they had to say. It then asked me form my username, password and said something about subscribers. I guess, I won't get to read what JAMA has to say on the subject. Fortunately, other websites such as YouTube will let me hear what they have to say.
But anyway, how may vaccines do children receive today?
I help run a free Wi-Fi hotspot for a very small business. On average about two or three customers per day use our free hotspot. Most of our customers are travelers who come in for a few minutes to check their email and to do on-line banking and a little web browsing. It would be inappropriate to have me or anyone else looking over their shoulders while doing activities such as on-line banking, reading their email or typing in passwords. The two tables and chairs they use, give them a degree of privacy by allowing them to sit with a windowless wall behind them. When walking through a doorway near them, I might get a brief glimpse of what they are doing, a always walk quickly past them and politely avoid looking directly towards their screen.
It does not sound like they are asking me to monitor what people are doing,but that if I should happen to see them looking at illegal images, I will be required to report it. I hope that is all they are asking for.
The article goes on to talk further about Wi-Fi hotspots, social-networking sites and email providers all together. It says, that "it may require the complete contents of the user's account be retained for subsequent police inspection." Our Wi-Fi hot-spot customers do not have accounts. One of our customers wants to use the hotspot, we give them a unique log-in ID, that is good for a certain amount of time and limits them to a certain maximum percentage of the available bandwidth. Because it is free, we usually don't get to see their charge card number or other identification before giving them a log-in ID. We don't record which log-in ID went to which customer. A few things are recorded automatically for each log-in ID, such as their computers MAC address, when they logged-in, how long they were on and how much they uploaded and downloaded, but we don't know their names. The log-in IDs are mainly just keep the neighbors from stealing our bandwidth.
Our free Wi-Fi hotspot we have made some effort to block P2P file sharing even though I have never heard a hotspot owner being sued for one of their customers illegally downloading music. We keep some TCP/IP ports closed, although we don't get carried away with that, because we don't know each customer will need to do.
Hotspots in small business are typically small unsophisticated operations, run by people who are not computer experts. They frequently barely know how to keep their hotspot working and usually are not qualified to monitor what their customers are doing. Our government is determined to monitor what everyone is doing, supposedly in the name of fighting terrorism and protecting the children. The simple casual anonymous openness of WiFi hotspots, will probably eventually outlawed, sooner or later.
Our business does not have an e-mail address or have a need for one. Other than the hotspot, we aren't even computerized. We use old-fashioned hand-posted accounting records done in pencil. I'm not sure if the recent mandatory email retention requirements in Sarbanes-Oxley or other laws would affect a business as small as ours or not, but that thought has killed the idea of us ever getting an email address for our business or using e-mail.
The article mentions the possibility of storing passwords on a USB flash drive and carring it around your neck. A Corsair Flash Padlock USB flash drive would be ideal for that purpose because it has the added security of buttons on the side like a padlock. It is works with Windows, MAC or Linux. I don't know what type of encryption it uses, but it might not matter since they would have to slowly enter the various possibilities manually. The FBI or NSA might know how to splice directly into the electronics and get through, but it should keep out ordinary identity thieves and hackers.
If that is not enough, a person could put a free open-source password program such as Password Safe, KeePass or KeePassX on the Flash Padlock USB drive. The executable file for either of those programs could be stored on the Flash Padlock USB drive and run from there. On my Linux computer, I briefly tried running both Password Safe and KeePass under wine and and they both seem to run (I only tried running them under wine very briefly). I could then run either password program from the USB drive on either my Linux computer or my Windows computer.
I typically use fairly long passwords with a more or less random combination upper and lower case characters and numbers with a few punctuation characters thrown in. They are too complicated for me to remember, so they need to be written down, either on a piece of paper or stored encrypted in a password program on a Padlock USB drive or something like that. At the moment I have most of them on a piece of paper which I keep hidden somewhere.
As an added touch of paranoia, when first entering my vast collection of passwords into the Password Safe program on my Padlock USB drive, I would first unplug my ethernet cable and boot the computer from a Knoppix disk. That way I could be sure that no keystroke logging software was secretly capturing my keystrokes.
I have about 36 different variations of the doubleclick URL blocked in my hosts file and I did not have any trouble viewing the article. The article appeared as it should, other than for the missing advertisement's rectangle which said "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at ad.doubleclick.net." The article was there but the advertisement was missing. I use Mike's add blocking host file on both my Linux computer and my Windows computer. As a result, on many websites, I get one or more empty rectangles were an add would normally have appeared.
I have recently run across a few websites which would allow me view an article but not the print version of the article. On those few websites, when I try to view the print version, I get a message about not being able to connect to doubleclick. Sometimes after a few seconds the print version appears, sometimes not. On the Salon webpage I had no problem viewing either the regular version or the print version of the article.
For people who haven't already blocked DoubleClick, I seem to recall that another option was to go to the DoubleClick webpage and select the opt-out option. That would cause an opt-out cookie to be downloaded to the person's browser. Of course if they cleared the cookies from their browser they would need to go back and do the opt-out thing again.
The Bill Moyers Journal on PBS had two recent shows about the problem of media consolidation. In case anyone is interested, here are the transcripts to those two episodes:
According to a Groklaw article, it is a design patent, which is a patent on how it looks, not how it works. The article also says that the copyright on the design appears to have expired.
According to a Boston Globe article, Negroponte said the lawsuit is without merit, because OLPC uses a keyboard programming technique developed in 1996, long before the Nigerian patent was filed. The article also mentions that the founder of Lagos Analysis Corp., Ade Oyegbola, was convicted of bank fraud in Boston in 1990 and served a year in prison.
Don't forget the discussion, a couple of months ago, about about Wall-Mart selling $200 Linux PCs with a custom distribution of Ubuntu Linux. Between that and their support for MP3s, It doesn't sound like they are exclusively a Microsoft shop. Perhaps Wal-Mart is big enough and powerful enough to do whatever it wants. Even so, I can't help wondering about the politics behind those two decisions and the possible response from Microsoft, Hollywood and the music industry.
I receive quite a few Nigerian email messages every month, I must be on their mailing list. There is actually an online Museum of Nigerian Scam Letters with almost 5,000 examples. Perhaps I should submit a few more examples to their museum. The website classifies those as an "advance fee fraud."
A Groklaw article also says that it is just a design patent, which registers how it looks, not how it works. She says that "it turns out it's not a patent in the usual sense. It's a design registration." Her article, also says that the copyright on the design appears to have expired. Here is the link:
I get one of those Nigerian email messages every few days, I must be on their mailing lists. Typically, some dead person has abandoned millions of dollars in some bank in Nigeria and they want me to open an account, in my name in this country, for them to transfer the millions of dollars into. I would get to keep a certain percentage of the money for helping them with their abandoned money problem.
About half of those messages that I receive say they are from Nigeria. A few years ago, I read a Readers Digest article about Nigerian email scam messages. It said the messages claiming to be from other parts of Africa also actually usually come from Nigeria. According to the article, they send the Nigerians money to cover a few fees and other expenses, but they never receive their millions of dollars or hear from the Nigerians again. Is there anything they do in Nigeria besides emailing people about their latest scam?
Looking through my most recent email, I see one such example that is from Dr. Mrs. Kete Obi of NNPC-LAGOS,NIGERIA. She says that if I provide them with a foreign bank account, she and her colleagues will send me 28 Million dollars and that I will get to keep 30%.
Another recent email message was from both DR.Shamsudeem Usman,HONOURABLE honorable minister of finance and chief Ode Ojowo, economic advisor to the president. They have some unspecified amount of money that they want to quckly transfer to me from the Zenith bank of Nigeria. It is a limited time offer, where I need to reply within 48 hours before Dr. Mrs. Janet White and some other persons get the money.
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Yes, your computer is using quite a bit of power.
I built my dual-core AMD 4200+ computer a couple of years ago. It has a Gigabyte K8NS nVidia Socket 939 ATX motherboard, 2 GB of RAM and 2 hard drives. It also has a 256 MB video card which uses the nVidia FX5200 chipset. It's 370 Watt power supply has an 80+ certified energy efficiency rating. 80+ certified power supplies are designed to be at least 80% energy efficient when running at 20%, 50% and 100% of the rated load. I use Linux on the computer and have the AMD 64's Cool n' Quiet feature enabled which which drops the clock speed from 2.4 GHz down to 1 GHz during light usage to save power.
My other computer is a small book sized computer computer which uses only 23 Watts when idle (not counting the monitor). It has a 1.85 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB of RAM and Windows XP. One reason that it uses so little power is that it uses the same type of motherboard that a laptop computer would use.
Both of those computers are plenty powerful for the typical web browsing, word processing and checking my email that I do. Running both computers at once, 24 hours per day would not be much worse than leaving a 100 Watt light bulb on all the time. Of course I actually use the much more energy efficient CFL light bulbs instead of ordinary 100 Watt incandescent light bulbs.
That must be one monster, power hungry, computer to use that much power when idle with the monitor off. I suppose that would include the power that you air-conditioner uses to remove the computer's heat from your home. I seem to recall hearing that it takes about as much power for your A/C to remove the heat generated by appliances as what the appliance itself uses. So during the summer we could probably just double the actual power consumption figures of your computer.
If you had a Pentium IV with a power-thirsty high-end video cards with a cheap, inefficient power supply, it might possibly use as much as 250 or 300 Watts when idle (I don't know for sure). I don't know how much you are paying per KWH, but even including the effect on your air-conditioner, I would guess about $50 per month at most, for one computer, if I am calculating that correctly.
My computer probably uses less power than most desktop computers. It is plugged a Kill-A-Watt electricity usage monitor, at the moment, which shows that I am using 82 Watts (not counting the monitor). My LCD monitor uses an additional 38 Watts, but only uses 1 Watt when in the sleep state. If I left it on at night the the monitor would be in the sleep state using only 1 Watt. I also have a UPS, speakers and a few other things not on the meter so lets just round it off to 100 Watts.
A pay about 14 cents per KWH for my electricity where I live. If I am calculating this correctly, that would be about $10 per month. During the summer, I could probably call that $20 per month, if I include the added load my my air-conditioner. I hope I calculated that correctly, including the conversion from Watts to Killowatts and canceling of the units. Perhaps, some engineer or math geek could check my math. Here is my $10 per month calculation:
(100 W / hour) * (1 KW / 1000 W) * (24 hours / day) * (30 days / month) * ($ 0.14 / KW) = $10.08 / month
Kill a Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor
No, I was not suggesting that the thermostat had been lowered remotely with radio signals. Someone at the college had lowered the thermostat, because president Carter had said that was what everyone in the country should do. The college employees just did not realize that would make the air-conditioning come on.
That reminds me of something that happened at a college back in the 1970s during the energy crisis, when everyone was asked to save energy by lowering their thermostats to 68 degrees. I was taking some classes at a Junior College in Arizona at the time. They lowered the thermostats to 68 degrees during the winter to save energy, as requested, and then several weeks later they discovered that the air conditioning system had come on automatically to get the building down to 68 degrees.
Will these proposed new radio-controlled thermostats be designed well enough to avoid those kinds of mistakes? I still remember riding in a few cars from the 1970s which had government required seat-belt warning devices reminding people to buckle-up. It was annoying when the device could sense the weight of groceries on the passenger seat and repeatedly complain about that person not being buckled up. I suspect these new thermostats will end up annoying some home owners by making similar unfair stupid errors.
Personally, I think that well insulated energy efficient homes with a smaller capacity air-conditioner should be exempt from needing a radio-controlled thermostat for their air-conditioner. Suppose someone has a home with something like R-28 walls, extra insulation in the ceiling, extra insulation on the ducts and double-pane low-e glass in the windows. They are saving plenty of energy already. On the other had there are many homes out there with R-11 walls and single-pane windows. Since they are the ones that are using most of the energy, they should be the only ones to get the big-brother controlled thermostat.
Evaporative coolers should also be exempt from needing these special thermostats, since they use less energy anyway. Furthermore, if someone has a solar powered evaporative cooler, it should definitely be exempt. I don't know much about solar evaporative coolers, but apparently they use a photovotaic solar panel to generate the power to run the pump and fans and whatever is required to make an evaporative cooler work. By the way, from what I recall, evaporative coolers don't always cool as well, especially when the humidity rises.
Someone who built his own solar powered evaporative cooler
I also have also a small collection of old hard drives. About a year ago, I bought an external enclosure and converted one of the larger parallel ATA hard drives into and external USB hard drive. To do that, I used a Vantec NexStar GX NST-370GX external hard drive enclosure. I now use it as a backup device for all the files that I have on my computer.
Later on, I assembled another Vantec external drive as an additional second backup for the contents of my computer. Most of the time I keep that second backup disk hidden in another building, somewhere else, just in case burglars or fire cause the loss of my computer and the other external hard drive.
There are also similar external hard drive enclosures with a USB interface made by other companies. Some are for parallel ATA hard drives and some are for serial ATA hard drives.
If I were to ever give one of my old hard drives to someone else or throw it away, I would wipe everything off of it by using Darik's Boot and Nuke on the drive first.
Occasionally, I have just wanted to temporarily hook up an old hard drive, to see what is on it. Fortunately, the Linux computer which I built, has a case which can easily be opened in a few seconds by pulling on the handle and removing the side panel. Then with the side panel off, I just place the hard drive on a cardboard box beside the computer and hook the hard drive to an unused 80-pin parallel ATA connector and to a power connector. I don't actually take the time to fully install it in the computer, I just leave it hooked up next to the computer and boot the computer up, with the cover off.
On all of my more recent hard drives, the jumpers were already in the default cable select position. On the older ones, some of the jumpers are set to "master" and some are set to "slave" and some to "cable select." Fortunately, most of my old hard drives have a small chart printed on them showing how to set each possible jumper position. I wear an anti-static wrist strap when working on the computer and fortunately, I don't have carpeting on my floor (which can generate static).
It looks like I will soon be going from 8 analog television channels to 2 digital channels. I live in the mountains of Northern Arizona where our television signals go through a mountaintop repeater station. It repeats the signals from the TV stations which are about 100 miles away and retransmits them on different channels.
I looked up my television listings TitanTV.com a few minutes ago and entered my Zip code which is 86301. Then I asked for the digital broadcast listings for my area. I listed only two digital channels for the 86301 Zip code. They are KAZTDT and KCFGDT. Next, I asked for the analog broadcast listings for my area and received a list of 10 stations for my Zip code. None of the major networks such as ABC, CBS, NBC, UPN or PBS were on the list of digital channels. One the two digital channels has mostly old 1960s shows such as the Brady Bunch, the Andy Griffith show and I Love Lucy and the other station is not much better. I have line of sight reception to the old repeater station where the old analog channels come from. However, there are several large hills between me and the transmitters for the two digital channels, so I may not be able to get them at all.
But anyway, I went ahead and applied for my two TV converter box coupons a few minutes ago anyway and will soon see if I can receive anything. I don't want to start paying a monthly fee for for satellite or cable, so if I can't receive much of anything, I might just rent occasional DVDs instead. I could also start getting my most of my news from alternative sources on the Internet and radio instead.
TitanTV televison listings
Online gambling is only one example of unelected WTO officials dictating national policy to individual contries. Another example is how the WTO and U.S. laws totally disagree on the availability of vitamins and supplements in health food stores. In 1994, in a grass-roots effort organized by health food stores, millions of American activists told Congress to keep vitamins and supplement dosages from being regulated. As a result, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) was passed which classifies supplements and herbs as foods which can have no upper limit set on their use.
However, in 1962 as a UN trade Commission created Codex Alimentarius to control the international trade of food. In recent years corporate interests such as pharmaceutical, pesticide, biotechnology and chemical industries have had a major influence in setting those requirements. Quoting from the Natural Solutions Foundation website: "Codex Alimentarius is backed up by the crippling trade sanctions of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Any non Codex-compliant nation would face huge economic punishment since they would automatically lose in any food-trade dispute with a Codex compliant country."
The Vitamin and Mineral Guideline (VMG) for Codex Alimentarius, is designed to permit only ultra low doses of vitamins and minerals. If I am not mistaken, it would also allow the use of foods gown with various pesticides which been banned in many countries.
Codex Alimentarius Summarized in 7 Points
I am a rabbit-ears antenna user in a small city up in the mountains of Northern Arizona. As far as I can tell, only one station is broadcasting on the new over-the-air HDTV channels where I live. In major cities, such as Phoenix, stations are currently broadcasting on their new ATSC HDTV channels. That does not appear to be the case up here, where we get our television signals through a mountaintop repeater. The last time I checked an online database, I entered my address and it said I would only be able to get one HDTV station (possibly split into two sub channels). Right now, I can barely receive that station's, soon to disappear, regular NTSC broadcast and have doubts about their higher frequency ATSC HDTV broadcasts being able to make it over the large hill between me and their antenna.
In a few months I plan to get one of those inexpensive converter boxes and see if I can actually get anything where I live.
Cable may possibly now be available where I live, but if not, a satellite dish would be another option. However, I do not want to pay a monthly free for either, especially since I have not watched much TV this last year. I might just sign up with Netflix so that I can get DVDs through the mail instead. I will soon be getting all of my news from newspapers, magazines, radio, podcasts and the Internet instead of television news.
I should have said that I had driving for over 35 years, not for over 55 years (I am only in my mid 50s now).
The slight extra space has also kept me from having to use the brakes much. I have nearly 150,000 miles on my truck and have not yet needed to have the pads on my front disk brakes replaced. That lack of wear on my brakes is also partially because I have a manual transmission and when I let up on the gas, that by itself slows me down more than an automatic would. Obviously, driving conditions, such as the amount of traffic and infrequent stop lights have also been factor in brake life.
On several occasions, I have had someone behind me who wasn't paying attention and have had to use up the extra buffer ahead of me space to avoid getting rear ended. On a couple of other occasions, over the decades, the extra space has saved me from my own lack of attentiveness.
I generally don't follow very closely and am generally aware of what the vehicles ahead me are doing. In heavy traffic I, tend to use that slight extra space as a buffer to smooth out the brief erratic variations of what is happening ahead of me. That way, the cars behind me are moving along nice and smoothly. Just watching the people ahead of me, I can usually easily predict what each car ahead of me is going to do and for how long. I can watch the waves increase or diminish as they approach. Of course I try not to let the buffer space got so large or it becomes too tempting of an opening for lane changers.
Sitting up high in my pick-up truck, I can see each car ahead of me brake or accelerate harder than the one ahead of it leading to an unnecessarily erratic traffic flow. Apparently, there aren't enough people doing what I am doing to compensate for their errors.
By the way, I have been driving driving for over 55 years and have not yet had my first accident (not counting several very minor off-road incidents with with a backhoe, dump truck, jeep and forklift). Not following as close might be one of the reasons. Living 50 feet from work and having a very short commute has also helped.
I have an old AT type connector on my favorite old keyboard. To connect it to the PS2 port on my computer, I had to use an AT-to-PS2 adapter.
My other computer does not have a PS2 port, but with the help of both a PS2-to-USB adapter and an AT-to-PS2 adapter, I have another one of those same keyboards hooked to it.
I have seen both USB and PS2 type keystroke loggers in computer parts catalogs. Looking behind my computer, just now, I am glad to see there is only an AT-to-PS2 adapter and no keystroke logger.
I use Kubuntu Linux and have both Firefox and Opera installed. Perhaps I should use Firefox as the Promiscuous browser and Opera as the safe browser. A family could have a safe computer and a promiscuous computer. The parents could use a Linux or Mac computer as the safe computer and let their kids use a Windows computer as the promiscuous computer.
What if someone actually did forged their long, complicated pass phrase? In that case, prosecutors would be trying to force someone to divulge a passphase that they don't even know.
On several occasions, I have briefly played around with encryption programs and made an extra copy of unimportant stuff and then encrypted it. Since it was usually just for practice, I did not always bother writing the passphrase down on the sheet of paper which lists all my passwords and passphrases. I may have not always got around to deleting those encrypted practice files and they may still exist somewhere on one of my old hard disks or on a USB key or somewhere or in the box of CDs that I have burned. I would have no idea what the password or passphrase was for those old practice encryption files.
I could easily imagine some prosecutor putting me in jail for not being able to come up with a passphrase to some old encrypted practice file. Then eventually, after getting out of jail, perhaps I would eventually find the passphrase on some old scrap of paper and they would discover that it was just an encrypted folder full of dozens of free 80 year old Gutenberg.net ebooks.
A person, such as myself, who has have never actually bothered to use encryption on a routine daily basis, would someone who is most likely to forget their passphrase. Perhaps I should dispose of all my old hard disks or wipe all the data with Darik's Boot and Nuke Of course, if there were indications that someone has recently used their encrypted partition, folders or files recently, that would be different. A recent time stamp on the file or folder would be one such clue.
Last August, there was a Slashdot discussion about a study showing that smarter teens have less sex. The study also showed that pattern persisting through adulthood. That was eerily similar to the basic premise of the Idiocracy movie, in which the less intelligent people have more children. In the movie, two subjects of a long-duration suspended animation experiment wake up in the future and are amazed to discover how dumb everyone has become.
In that study, the average teenagers actually lost their virginity sooner than either students with very low IQs or students with high IQs. So perhaps evolution is actually currently favoring averageness over either being too dumb or too intelligent.
The movie also gave an example of a "typical" highly intelligent couple who waited until after they went to college and established their careers and had financial security before they decided that they could afford to have children. Unfortunately by then, she was older and her fertility had declined and they never got to have kids. That actually does happen to many couples. People like them, are the evolutionary losers.
The movie also gave an the example of of a "typical" less intelligent family. That family is having trouble paying it's bills and has junk in the front yard and their loud obnoxious children are running around. The crude loudmouthed couple is shown arguing about the fact that she forgot to take her birth control pill again and is now pregnant again.
Lets also not forget the stereotype of computer geeks and science geeks not being able to get laid. Actually, it is probably just that anyone with a life and a girlfriend, would have better ways to spend their time than on their computer.
Smarter Teens Have Less Sex
Apparently, you aren't the only one who didn't realize that Microsoft was still in business. Here is a woman in the local bookstore, who has never heard of Microsoft:
A local sales clerk who has never heard of Microsoft
Oops, I think I must have just accidentally wandered into a parallel universe where history is slightly different.I forgot to mention that I also received a tetanus shot as a child after stepping on a rusty nail that was sticking up through some manure in a horse corral. But altogether, I don't think there were more than half a dozen vaccinations at the most. One of the vaccines came in the form of sugar cube which I had to swallow.
How many Vaccines do children get these day? When I was growing up back in the 1960s, we received several. If I remember correctly, I remember getting vaccines for smallpox, polio, diptheria and possibly whooping cough. They did not yet have vaccines for measles, chickenpox or mumps. Like all the other children in my grade school classes, I came down with most of the ordinary childhood diseases that everyone got as a child such as chickenpox, mumps and the less serious of the two types of measles like illnesses. I was the only one that I knew who never came down with the main type of measles, even though I have never been vaccinated for measles.
I don't know what to believe on the subject of vaccines. I am not a frequent YouTube viewer, but I have run across plenty of other websites arguing against flue vaccines and other vaccinations. I have heard claims of vaccines that contained mercury, other contaminant and even left miscellaneous bits animal viruses and tissues. I am not sure what to believe, but I got my usual flue shot this fall anyway.
To be open minded and hear both sides of the issue, when looking at the link to the JAMA article, I clicked "Full Text of this Article," to see what they had to say. It then asked me form my username, password and said something about subscribers. I guess, I won't get to read what JAMA has to say on the subject. Fortunately, other websites such as YouTube will let me hear what they have to say.
But anyway, how may vaccines do children receive today?
I help run a free Wi-Fi hotspot for a very small business. On average about two or three customers per day use our free hotspot. Most of our customers are travelers who come in for a few minutes to check their email and to do on-line banking and a little web browsing. It would be inappropriate to have me or anyone else looking over their shoulders while doing activities such as on-line banking, reading their email or typing in passwords. The two tables and chairs they use, give them a degree of privacy by allowing them to sit with a windowless wall behind them. When walking through a doorway near them, I might get a brief glimpse of what they are doing, a always walk quickly past them and politely avoid looking directly towards their screen.
It does not sound like they are asking me to monitor what people are doing,but that if I should happen to see them looking at illegal images, I will be required to report it. I hope that is all they are asking for.
The article goes on to talk further about Wi-Fi hotspots, social-networking sites and email providers all together. It says, that "it may require the complete contents of the user's account be retained for subsequent police inspection." Our Wi-Fi hot-spot customers do not have accounts. One of our customers wants to use the hotspot, we give them a unique log-in ID, that is good for a certain amount of time and limits them to a certain maximum percentage of the available bandwidth. Because it is free, we usually don't get to see their charge card number or other identification before giving them a log-in ID. We don't record which log-in ID went to which customer. A few things are recorded automatically for each log-in ID, such as their computers MAC address, when they logged-in, how long they were on and how much they uploaded and downloaded, but we don't know their names. The log-in IDs are mainly just keep the neighbors from stealing our bandwidth.
Our free Wi-Fi hotspot we have made some effort to block P2P file sharing even though I have never heard a hotspot owner being sued for one of their customers illegally downloading music. We keep some TCP/IP ports closed, although we don't get carried away with that, because we don't know each customer will need to do.
Hotspots in small business are typically small unsophisticated operations, run by people who are not computer experts. They frequently barely know how to keep their hotspot working and usually are not qualified to monitor what their customers are doing. Our government is determined to monitor what everyone is doing, supposedly in the name of fighting terrorism and protecting the children. The simple casual anonymous openness of WiFi hotspots, will probably eventually outlawed, sooner or later.
Our business does not have an e-mail address or have a need for one. Other than the hotspot, we aren't even computerized. We use old-fashioned hand-posted accounting records done in pencil. I'm not sure if the recent mandatory email retention requirements in Sarbanes-Oxley or other laws would affect a business as small as ours or not, but that thought has killed the idea of us ever getting an email address for our business or using e-mail.
The article mentions the possibility of storing passwords on a USB flash drive and carring it around your neck. A Corsair Flash Padlock USB flash drive would be ideal for that purpose because it has the added security of buttons on the side like a padlock. It is works with Windows, MAC or Linux. I don't know what type of encryption it uses, but it might not matter since they would have to slowly enter the various possibilities manually. The FBI or NSA might know how to splice directly into the electronics and get through, but it should keep out ordinary identity thieves and hackers.
If that is not enough, a person could put a free open-source password program such as Password Safe, KeePass or KeePassX on the Flash Padlock USB drive. The executable file for either of those programs could be stored on the Flash Padlock USB drive and run from there. On my Linux computer, I briefly tried running both Password Safe and KeePass under wine and and they both seem to run (I only tried running them under wine very briefly). I could then run either password program from the USB drive on either my Linux computer or my Windows computer.
I typically use fairly long passwords with a more or less random combination upper and lower case characters and numbers with a few punctuation characters thrown in. They are too complicated for me to remember, so they need to be written down, either on a piece of paper or stored encrypted in a password program on a Padlock USB drive or something like that. At the moment I have most of them on a piece of paper which I keep hidden somewhere.
As an added touch of paranoia, when first entering my vast collection of passwords into the Password Safe program on my Padlock USB drive, I would first unplug my ethernet cable and boot the computer from a Knoppix disk. That way I could be sure that no keystroke logging software was secretly capturing my keystrokes.
Corsair padlock Flash Drive
I have about 36 different variations of the doubleclick URL blocked in my hosts file and I did not have any trouble viewing the article. The article appeared as it should, other than for the missing advertisement's rectangle which said "Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at ad.doubleclick.net." The article was there but the advertisement was missing. I use Mike's add blocking host file on both my Linux computer and my Windows computer. As a result, on many websites, I get one or more empty rectangles were an add would normally have appeared.
I have recently run across a few websites which would allow me view an article but not the print version of the article. On those few websites, when I try to view the print version, I get a message about not being able to connect to doubleclick. Sometimes after a few seconds the print version appears, sometimes not. On the Salon webpage I had no problem viewing either the regular version or the print version of the article.
For people who haven't already blocked DoubleClick, I seem to recall that another option was to go to the DoubleClick webpage and select the opt-out option. That would cause an opt-out cookie to be downloaded to the person's browser. Of course if they cleared the cookies from their browser they would need to go back and do the opt-out thing again.
The Bill Moyers Journal on PBS had two recent shows about the problem of media consolidation. In case anyone is interested, here are the transcripts to those two episodes:
Bill Moyers Journal Transcript for November 16, 2007
Bill Moyers Journal Transcript for November 2, 2007
According to a Groklaw article, it is a design patent, which is a patent on how it looks, not how it works. The article also says that the copyright on the design appears to have expired.
The Nigerian OLPC Dispute - How Does It Look? - Updated
According to a Boston Globe article, Negroponte said the lawsuit is without merit, because OLPC uses a keyboard programming technique developed in 1996, long before the Nigerian patent was filed. The article also mentions that the founder of Lagos Analysis Corp., Ade Oyegbola, was convicted of bank fraud in Boston in 1990 and served a year in prison.
One Laptop Per Child orders surge
Don't forget the discussion, a couple of months ago, about about Wall-Mart selling $200 Linux PCs with a custom distribution of Ubuntu Linux. Between that and their support for MP3s, It doesn't sound like they are exclusively a Microsoft shop. Perhaps Wal-Mart is big enough and powerful enough to do whatever it wants. Even so, I can't help wondering about the politics behind those two decisions and the possible response from Microsoft, Hollywood and the music industry.
$200 Linux PCs On Sale At Wal-Mart
I receive quite a few Nigerian email messages every month, I must be on their mailing list. There is actually an online Museum of Nigerian Scam Letters with almost 5,000 examples. Perhaps I should submit a few more examples to their museum. The website classifies those as an "advance fee fraud."
Nigeriam 4-1-9 Scam Lettery Exhibit
A Groklaw article also says that it is just a design patent, which registers how it looks, not how it works. She says that "it turns out it's not a patent in the usual sense. It's a design registration." Her article, also says that the copyright on the design appears to have expired. Here is the link:
The Nigerian OLPC Dispute - How Does It Look
I get one of those Nigerian email messages every few days, I must be on their mailing lists. Typically, some dead person has abandoned millions of dollars in some bank in Nigeria and they want me to open an account, in my name in this country, for them to transfer the millions of dollars into. I would get to keep a certain percentage of the money for helping them with their abandoned money problem.
About half of those messages that I receive say they are from Nigeria. A few years ago, I read a Readers Digest article about Nigerian email scam messages. It said the messages claiming to be from other parts of Africa also actually usually come from Nigeria. According to the article, they send the Nigerians money to cover a few fees and other expenses, but they never receive their millions of dollars or hear from the Nigerians again. Is there anything they do in Nigeria besides emailing people about their latest scam?
Looking through my most recent email, I see one such example that is from Dr. Mrs. Kete Obi of NNPC-LAGOS,NIGERIA. She says that if I provide them with a foreign bank account, she and her colleagues will send me 28 Million dollars and that I will get to keep 30%.
Another recent email message was from both DR.Shamsudeem Usman,HONOURABLE honorable minister of finance and chief Ode Ojowo, economic advisor to the president. They have some unspecified amount of money that they want to quckly transfer to me from the Zenith bank of Nigeria. It is a limited time offer, where I need to reply within 48 hours before Dr. Mrs. Janet White and some other persons get the money.