Cringely does seem to have a very thin grasp of these concepts. "renaming every varaible to a" I suppose means removing or zapping the naem table-- something real code crackers have done without for many decades (and had to before debug info in the binary was popular). If the code is obfuscated, what's keeping someone from patching the de-obfuscator so it dumps out the good code to a file? Sheesh. Besides, it's a FUN challenge to reverse-engineer code. Better than crossword puzzles, and more challenging than acrostics. Bring em on!
There's several issues being muddlesd together here.
Do you have to give a cop your ID?... You're probably within your rights to not volunteer that information.
Does any cop have a right to take whatever steps he has to to figure out who you are? Most certainly YES, otherwise every criminal could just walk around without ID and just walk away from any cop that asks him for ID.
In the Cowboy's case, it might have helped if the cop had said, "Ok, you can refuse to show me ID, but then you'll be standing here until we can find somebody to ID you, or until we fingerprint you and wait for the results. " That bit of simple explanation of the Cowboy's options may have helped the Cowboy mull over the consequences and thereby resolve the impasse.
Getting a sick PC to diagnose itself is a ridiculous and hopeless concept.
* If it's sick, how can you expect a diagnostic program to run?
* PC's are infinitely variable, and poorly documented. How can you expect ANY program to do what a human-mind can't do-- i.e. figure out that undocumented register PLSTHRHS on the AGP video card works okay in all modes, except if the CPU just made a 32-bit unaligned request while there's an interrupt pending and the PCI bus has requested a ECC cycle, asyncronous with a memory-refresh escapade during a protect-mode REP OUTSB instruction which was trapped by the DPMI monitor and reflected to both real and protect mode handers, the latter of which got a page-fault? (Repeat the above for 999,999 other registers, times 9E99 other unlikely combinations)
(Just keep some old obsolescent but known good coponents: video card, network card, hard disk, power supply, motherboard, and some RAM. For under $200 you'll have a complete set of spares)
Er, I suspect diamonds are *very* stable.
They've been in the ground for around a billion years, plus anything that hard is likely to have very strong and stable bonds.
>Please forgive my ignorance, but why can't you make the circuit with 3 components in series - the power supply, a 10k potentiometer (or an appropriately sized resistor for the second incarnation), and the battery tester?
That would work if the battery tester only drew a few milliamps. But I think in order to heat up the strip, it draws at least 100 milliamps, maybe as much as one amp. The serial port can only source a few milliamps at most.
Hmmm, the circuit looks like it will work, but it's rather overdone... You don't need the optoisolator, or the first transistor, just use a plain old 3 amp MOSFET.
And then you don't need the diodes or the switches and you can lower the supply voltage to 1.5 volts, as the MOSFET is a near-perfect switch.
I havent tried it yet, but it looks like you can replace the whole shebang with a 100K resistor, a power MOSFET, and a 1.5 volt D cell.
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Cringely does seem to have a very thin grasp of these concepts. "renaming every varaible to a" I suppose means removing or zapping the naem table-- something real code crackers have done without for many decades (and had to before debug info in the binary was popular). If the code is obfuscated, what's keeping someone from patching the de-obfuscator so it dumps out the good code to a file? Sheesh. Besides, it's a FUN challenge to reverse-engineer code. Better than crossword puzzles, and more challenging than acrostics. Bring em on!
There's several issues being muddlesd together here. Do you have to give a cop your ID? ... You're probably within your rights to not volunteer that information.
Does any cop have a right to take whatever steps he has to to figure out who you are? Most certainly YES, otherwise every criminal could just walk around without ID and just walk away from any cop that asks him for ID.
In the Cowboy's case, it might have helped if the cop had said, "Ok, you can refuse to show me ID, but then you'll be standing here until we can find somebody to ID you, or until we fingerprint you and wait for the results. " That bit of simple explanation of the Cowboy's options may have helped the Cowboy mull over the consequences and thereby resolve the impasse.
Getting a sick PC to diagnose itself is a ridiculous and hopeless concept. * If it's sick, how can you expect a diagnostic program to run? * PC's are infinitely variable, and poorly documented. How can you expect ANY program to do what a human-mind can't do-- i.e. figure out that undocumented register PLSTHRHS on the AGP video card works okay in all modes, except if the CPU just made a 32-bit unaligned request while there's an interrupt pending and the PCI bus has requested a ECC cycle, asyncronous with a memory-refresh escapade during a protect-mode REP OUTSB instruction which was trapped by the DPMI monitor and reflected to both real and protect mode handers, the latter of which got a page-fault? (Repeat the above for 999,999 other registers, times 9E99 other unlikely combinations) (Just keep some old obsolescent but known good coponents: video card, network card, hard disk, power supply, motherboard, and some RAM. For under $200 you'll have a complete set of spares)
Er, I suspect diamonds are *very* stable. They've been in the ground for around a billion years, plus anything that hard is likely to have very strong and stable bonds.
>Please forgive my ignorance, but why can't you make the circuit with 3 components in series - the power supply, a 10k potentiometer (or an appropriately sized resistor for the second incarnation), and the battery tester? That would work if the battery tester only drew a few milliamps. But I think in order to heat up the strip, it draws at least 100 milliamps, maybe as much as one amp. The serial port can only source a few milliamps at most.
Hmmm, the circuit looks like it will work, but it's rather overdone... You don't need the optoisolator, or the first transistor, just use a plain old 3 amp MOSFET. And then you don't need the diodes or the switches and you can lower the supply voltage to 1.5 volts, as the MOSFET is a near-perfect switch. I havent tried it yet, but it looks like you can replace the whole shebang with a 100K resistor, a power MOSFET, and a 1.5 volt D cell.