Yeah, but this isn't even remotely the same thing -- to add this functionality to Ubuntu takes a few clicks and downloads, all free, all easy, and with no limits on how many apps you can run, etc. You want CUPS or some other component that you consider a basic OS requirement? Click, wait while download and install completes, and you have 'em. This is simply an initially "lite" OS install, offered as a matter of convenience to the end user.
MS isn't offering a lite OS install with free option to get the parts that are useful to you. They're paring away basic functionality (like the ability to run 4 or 5 apps at a time) and the only way to get it back is to buy it. If you choose the wrong set of features, you'll probably have to buy again, unless you habitually buy the package with the complete feature set.
MS seems to me to be working on their own downfall. As RAM gets less expensive and more widely available, and processors supply more cores, and displays get less expensive and multi screen displays get easier and easier to implement...
MS is artificially limiting the number of apps you can run to just a few, releasing many varieties of the OS so that developers have a very inconsistent target to aim at, and pricing it in the $200 or so range so that it really hurts the pocketbook. It's not very compatible, very much like Vista, so that one of the key features (yes, I mean compatibility) is missing from the OS.
It is certainly their right to make these decisions, but I am just as certainly not going along for the ride.
XP will continue to work in its virtualized, insulated-from-the-Internet sandbox under OSX, and I'm perfectly happy with the performance and ability to run the older apps I came to depend upon before MS went off on the Vista/W7 boondoggle. In the meantime, OSX allows me to run as many apps as I like, including both XP and Linux in virtualized containers, and unlimited apps underneath those, too. I can't imagine what Microsoft is thinking, or if they are thinking at all.
If the US cared so much about the "safety" of its citizens it simply has to outlaw guns.
...because only people who obey gun laws shoot other people? Is that your... reasoning?
You do realize that making guns (or any other weapon) illegal doesn't cause them to magically disappear from the hands of criminals, don't you? And that criminals are likely to consider a situation where they are armed, and the general population isn't, as being of significant advantage to them?
I mean, really, I appreciate your concern for our safety, but perhaps you should think the whole cause and effect thing out again.
You're an idiot. This power was given directly from congress and has been tested in the Supreme Court.
Just like the ex post facto laws on firearms and offender registration. Adding to punishment after sentencing is explicitly forbidden to the feds or the states. SCOTUS passed both anyway. The fact is, SCOTUS is not infallible (they're not even reliable.)
o Order the heads of the military to immediately commence an orderly and rapid withdrawal of all troops and equipment from Iraq and Afghanistan.
o Issue a formal, succinct apology to the people of Iraq for all acts of violence and coercion under the aegis of George Bush and his cronies, and formally disavow those acts.
o Order the heads of military to plan orderly and rapid closure of all military bases outside the borders of the United States and its possessions, including the return of all troops, the return of all equipment that is practical, and to execute the immediate sale or destruction of all weapons and defense systems that cannot be transported within a 90-day period.
o Issue a blanket pardon for all non-violent drug offenders
o Issue an executive order invalidating any past, present or future law that infringes upon the personal liberty to choose to import, grow, manufacture, carry, sell or consume any consumable substance as a matter of informed choice. This would in no way shield drug users from consequences of actions taken while under the influence of drugs.
o Order the closure of Guantanamo Bay and all other similar facilities, and the transfer and release of all prisoners to their country of origin, or to asylum in the US if they prefer
o Issue at least one executive order to strike down one of the myriad unconstitutional laws violating the bill of rights
o Issue at least one executive order to strike down one of the myriad unconstitutional laws that does not pass muster under the enumerated congressional powers
o Issue at least one executive order to strike down one of the myriad unconstitutional laws that depends upon the topsy-turvy interpretation of the commerce clause
o Issue at least one executive order to have a supreme court judge arrested for violating the constitutional oath they swore as part of their office. Perhaps Scalia should go first, based on his treasonous and unconstitutional assertion in Heller that the government has the authority to tell citizens where they may carry arms.
o Issue at least one executive order to have a congressman arrested for violating the constitutional oath they swore as part of their office. For the first one of these, I'd probably choose the top sponsor of the bill that attempted to suspend habeas corpus, I think it was in the Military Commissions Act.
o Make a short fireside-style speech explaining the difference between coercive, arbitrarily exercised government power, and authorized use of power as delegated to the government by the constitution. Go on to say that you consider it your job to defend the country and its possessions at their borders from foreign military aggression; to undo as much harm as possible that has been caused by out of control, coercive, unauthorized exercise of federal and state government power; to restore the income, property and liberties taken from US citizens by previous state and federal government misdeeds; to restore *authorized* power to the states, while reminding them they are absolutely bound by the bill of rights and other constitutional direction specifically to them; and finally, speak to the citizens about personal liberty and personal responsibility, explaining the concept that their right to exert personal power ends where another person's body, property and family begin. State your intent to focus the government on the jobs of providing and maintaining transport and communications infrastructure, education, and healthcare in an environment where the greatest possible safety and security of the individual, property and family from aggression from any quarter was assured. Announce your intent to institute a program that assured any individual a safe bed, practical clothing, and (extremely) basic sustenance, should they fall through to the bottom of the country's economic system.
Don't think it can't happen. The hysteria-over-liberty mode of thinking that pervades every level of our legal and court system has resulted in significant erosion of all manner of what would, to a sensible person, seem to be rock-solid and unmovable declarations of constitutional rights.
We have seen the right to remain silent turn into the right to be tortured until you say what they want to hear; we have seen the 4th amendment turned into an irrelevancy by nattering idiocy about your papers being in digital form; we have seen the commerce clause turned on its very head; we have seen the establishment of "free speech zones" and other 1984-ish/esque crushing of liberties; censorship is the accepted norm for "solving" disagreements about what we see, say and hear insofar as it might offend some poor, weak-willed moron; screams of "save the children", "terrorists" and "global warming" drive legislators to write, and pass, the most odious, anti-liberty and outright anti-American legislation on a daily basis.
There's no limit to this, either; we have seen the specific directive not to pass ex post facto laws ignored at the congressional level and then whistle right through the supreme court; we have seen the explicit directive of the 2nd amendment's operative clause turned into the most moronic and sophist idiocy about "what is a militia?", a non-issue mined blindly and moronically out of the prefatory clause.
Don't think it can't get worse. Ask yourself instead, why should you expect it to get any better?
I don't see the problem. I didn't want them to remove DRM so I could ignore the copyright on the music, I wanted them to remove it so I could use it on any device I wanted to listen to it on. They did that; now I can, as far as I'm concerned, we're all good now.
If you interpret the lack of DRM as permission to ignore copyright, and you end up in trouble because you did so...
Nope, don't see the problem.
....sharing the files on P2P networks may be an extremely bad idea
Good grief. "Sharing" copyrighted music files on a P2P network was always an extremely bad idea. If you ever had any fraction of an excuse for doing it (and frankly, I don't really think you did, but...) it is gone now, at least as far as iTunes purchases go. What has changed is it is now reasonable to purchase music, because you'll actually get to own it, use it on *all* your gear, back it up, etc.
The only thing I can think of that is really affected by this is your ability to legitimately resell recording of a tune you own, because you bought it. And for that issue, I give it.... maybe an hour before someone comes up with a tool to ZOT that name and email address right out of there. Maybe it'll even put the new one in. Pride of ownership and all that.
Like how EVERY SINGLE PROJECT that is worth its salt first starts with a business case.
No. Some start because they seemed like fun to do. Some start because of a simple code fork for something that appeared to be minor, but turned out not to be. Some start as demonstration projects. Some start as academic proof of concept, no initial business intent at all. Some are intended from day one to be public domain, and some are intended to be free to anyone *but* commercial enterprises, unless the commercial enterprise conforms to certain conditions. Some start as a favor to the spouse. Some start because of a personal need. Some start to entertain the kids. Some are outright accidents.
Business is not the be-all and end-all of human goals. It never was; one has to hope it never will be.
I've lived many years - decades - in many metro areas. I came to Montana because, among other things, the traffic sucketh considerably less. I still drive to both coasts several times a year and become somewhat refreshed on the current state of metro traffic viz NYC, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, LA, Seattle and Portland. So don't worry too much about my expertise. There's enough there to hazard an opinion or two, despite where I choose to make my home.
Wow, this guy doesn't seem to know what he is talking about when he mentions running separate circuits.
Really?
For the record, I was describing your case one, and you actually READ my post, you'll see every element you mention described there (except for the mistakes you made, which I address below.) The manual transfer switch is mentioned in main bullet three; mine has eight breaker positions and it is from there that I run the separate circuits for (in my case) the furnace, and my two salt water tanks.
There is obviously a considerable amount of detail not in my post; it was meant as an outline. Anyone who does this needs to either (a) hire it done or (b) learn all about each step before lifting a single finger. There are piles of little details like how sub-panels are grounded; How to 4-wire or 3-wire the sub-panel from the line and how one correctly wires a 120 vac generator as opposed to a 220vac generator; how the generator itself is grounded; operating temperature ranges for the generator and what role the shed plays in seeing to it that these are met... I could go on for a while.
But in general, the configuration I described is safe, as dependable as the generator chosen, and conforms to code assuming you route the wiring and mount the generator switch properly.
You would move the circuits for important stuff that you wanted on the generator into this sub panel. This is why you don't need to run entirely new circuits.
This isn't always (or even often) practical. For instance, the outlet the refrigerator is plugged into is highly unlikely to come back to a breaker without supplying something else (for instance, other outlets in the kitchen. Especially in older kitchens.) The line to the furnace is probably isolated; but you have to make sure that *everything* involved with the furnace is powered (for instance, the condensation removal pump; electrostatic filter bank(s); duct controllers; any AC-powered thermometer widgets or other modern heat-control wizardry that isn't battery powered. Finally, and this can be a real problem, sometimes there simply isn't enough wire to run the old circuit over to the new transfer switch / breaker box, and this is very much an issue if the building lines are in conduit. Also (and I admit this is a personal tweak) I simply don't like splices. In the end, the practical -- and definitely the most convenient and dependable for the years you will presumably be using the system -- thing to do is bite the bullet and run new, dedicated line.
The last thing you want to do when the power fails is troubleshoot your installation.
...and the pain in the ass of having to unplug your appliances and plug them into the other outlets. Sounds complex when you can do it all at the panel with a single switch.
The configuration I suggested does not have this problem. With the generator switch in the "line" position, the sockets are fed from the normal utility source. When power fails, you start the generator, and flip the switch over to the generator position; now the devices are powered from the generator. You leave the devices (furnace, refrigerator, fish tanks) plugged into / attached to the same sources all the time.
When the utility power comes back on, if you're smart, you'll kill the breakers in the transfer switch panel (because the AC of the utility is unlikely to be in-phase with your generator), give everything a minute to wind down, then flip back to the line position, and you're back on utility power.
A fair amount of 14- or 12-gauge wire (wire is expensive... go measure)
wire from generator switch breaker to each device
wire from generator to generator switch (needs to be underground / outdoors rated)
wire from main service to generator switch
instructions are generally with generator switch - study hard. Errors can be disastrous
A 15A or 20A socket at each power location (fridge, furnace)
A manual generator to line switch ($150 or so on Ebay)
A generator. I suggest MINIMUM 3500 watts
Even though a furnace doesn't pull a lot when running, at the time that the blower starts up, there can be a VERY large startup current. The fridge the same, to a lesser extent.
A shed -- you can't put a gas generator indoors, generally speaking - very dangerous
I strongly suggest a strong table to mount the generator on for maintenance
Some way to bolt the table down, and bolt the generator to the table
High temperature exhaust hose for the generator (actually kind of difficult to come by)
high-temperature pass through for exhaust to go thru shed wall - hot!
You can get a lot fancier than this, but this will function perfectly as long as you are there to do the switching soon enough after power fails that your building doesn't get too close to pipe-freeze (I wouldn't want to go below 40 degrees f, pipes are often in walls that are cooler than the rest of the house.)
If that won't do, you're looking at an auto-start system with an auto-generator switchover, and the only thing I can tell you about that is prepare your wallet for deep excavation.
The only communications the government listened in on were calls FROM this country TO other countries. IF the call was routine, then it was dropped. If the call was about terrorism, then your asses were protected from it. Got it?
The 4th amendment forbids this. Telecommunications laws based on the 4th amendment forbid this. Even the most basic analysis of privacy forbids this.
Just because something may be of benefit to the government does not mean the government has permission to do it. There are other issues, and some of them are intended to take priority. No matter how annoying that might be to the government.
Absent probable cause, oath or affirmation, a description of what they are searching for, and a warrant, they are forbidden to search or seize the communications of the people.
Fact: that argument was weak the first time we saw it, when it was used to rationalize our shitty internet access.
It's not an argument. It's a fact. City (local) metros are not national transport; national transport consumes huge proportions of petroleum products; US national transport is by and large built around highways. If you think you can get congress to do something that the PACs and lobbyists don't want it to do, more power to you, and please go ahead.
It does not explain why you can't do that from Seattle to San Francisco or from Boston to Miami.
What? You can get from Seattle to SF, *and* from Boston to Miami. We've got rails in between many major cities. I regularly go to both coasts from where I live (Montana) via rail. Major cities, however, do not comprise a reasonable subset of destinations for travel in the US. That's the problem. Rail will not work as national transport infrastructure; because it won't work in that role, it won't replace road transport. It can't.
Furthermore, even in cities with decent rail transport (NYC, for instance), road transport is still a significant factor. When I was a boy, I lived in NYC, and I went all *over* the place by subway. It was very reasonable. There were areas that you had to go for a bus, but by and large, Manhattan at least was extremely accessible if you could walk a few blocks, which most people can. But these are very much local solutions, and they cover VERY small fractions of the country. They can't bring anything to the table that will allow us to back off of road transport or vehicles for road transport nationwide.
The coasts are just as heavily populated as parts of Europe that have great train systems - time for the the U.S. to at least join the 20th Century when it comes to rail.
You need to do a little research. It isn't metro transport that controls this issue. We have coastal transport. East and west, also north and south, and a whole lot in between. What we *don't* have is passenger service on those lines, or the ability of those lines to serve the areas in between them, nor is it the least bit likely that we will ever get such a thing. You may want it really badly, but that's not a factor.
Fact: We have far more space to cover than most countries, and we cover it with highway, not rail. The auto industry knew, and knows, this. The problem is simply that the means of propulsion is in transition. Peak oil (see chart) seems to have pretty clearly passed, and even if it hasn't, geopolitical issues are having the same effect. So motive power is really the key issue here.
What Detroit needs to do -- and what I think it will be forced to do -- is convert to long range electric vehicles, that's all. Light through heavy. That's what the environment needs, that's what petroleum product availability will require, and that's what works with the US infrastructure.
They can do this. It's all about the power sources. Batteries are getting close to what we might be able to put up with, and the promise of ultracaps is still somewhere over the horizon (and if it ever gets here, that'll pretty much be the end of batteries.)
As for rail, land is too expensive / valuable in the US for any real rail development. Look at the highline, an east-to-west rail passage that is extremely busy; but no amount of congestion has been able to get the rails or the government to invest in a second line so that they don't have to delay trains by side-tracking them to spurs to let one train pass by another. This is where they already own the right of way. Nothing is going to get them to open new right of way. Financially speaking, it is incomprehensible.
Electric is the coming thing. Petroleum, hydrogen, hybrid, ethanol, all these will fall by the wayside, because nothing can compete with the distribution system or the mass efficiency of large electricity generating stations. Even petroleum produces far more power in a central electric generation situation, even accounting for transmission losses (which are not as high as most think) than it does being consumed on a per-car basis. But that's not the kicker; the kicker is that we can transition to any mix of any type of generation we want once the transport system is electricity based, because any type of electricity generation system can add power to the entire grid. That means a measured transition to nuclear, solar, wind, wave, geothermal, anything reasonable that comes along.
The problem - as always - is getting US concerns, both political and corporate, to invest in systems and ideas that extend beyond the next quarter, or at most, fiscal year. Everything is about the next quarterly report or the next election. The obvious weight, horsepower, pollution and efficiency advantages of electric should have anyone with any sense investing their heads off. Detroit will get the message eventually. That, or they'll die. And in that case, we'll have a whole new industry springing up, good riddance to the old.
Hmm. I don't really see the difficulty. Are you saying that because $HOME etc. may be defined at a level you can't get at without adding more cron lines, the rest of the parsing isn't useful, or that the command / event has to be completely parsed, as opposed to displayed as written?
My thought was that a useful output might be:
Next CRON event @ 10:00pm: mail -s "It's 10pm" joe%Joe,%%Where are your kids?%
This would appear days 1-5, and not the other two, and accompanied by the monthly event when appropriate. All you really have to do is figure out the time encoding, which is trivial, then anything that is past, you skip, while the very next event, you dump. Not difficult. For most things, I think you'd know just what you were looking at, too, at least if you had an interest in such things in the first place.
Doesn't tell you the mail will go to paul; but then again, if it's your crontab, you probably knew that anyway, eh?
All those people walking and garbage cans knocked over by the wind just make driving more exciting if you don't see them coming.
You're in the habit of over-driving your headlights in an area that features people and garbage cans as driving hazards? Forgive me if I only wish for a police officer to catch you.
Also, when I'm walking at night, I really hate seeing at all.
Flashlight. Modern invention. Look into it. Has the benefit of actually illuminating where you're walking, without wasting hundreds of watts of energy; serves as a bludgeon and a blinding tool against assailants in a pinch; can be directed into dark corners streetlights miss; they can be used as a help beacon; they can carry a siren; they make everywhere accessible instead of just little pools of light in town; etc.
This rule will not allow sufficient traffic to move at posted speeds with the number of lanes available in most US highway configurations. So while the rule is a great guide for safety purposes, it is effectively useless in or near a city, because no one wants to spend extra hours on the road on the one hand, and the government won't allow high enough speeds to make those spacings practical for the vehicle density that is a modern fact of life.
And this, by the way, is one of the reasons I live and work in rural Montana.
Most US highway designs are so bad - insufficient to the task of safe and timely travel - that the only hope we really have is over-the-horizon technological. Car to car radar and status; automated response to same; deep infrared (heat) sensors; vastly improved light rail; isolation of travel corridors from debris, wildlife and pedestrians; the vague and unlikely hope that inexpensive flying capability will decongest the ground paths (and recover immense amounts of real estate.)
I've always thought that a truly advanced society would at least master how to contain and conserve light gases and go for personal airship transport, with elevated setups such as monorails for mass and heavy transit. Roads are such a waste of land, such a risk to wildlife, such resource- and maintainance-hogs...
But then again, we're still using and wasting power with streetlights long after they became obsolete. That whole advanced society thing... not us.
the best we have is new versions of the same programs with layer upon layer of feature creep
It's not feature creep. It's slower technologies being used to create the products. Go back to C, use decent programming techniques, and your apps will fly unless they're waiting on resources like the HD (and even that is going away... SSDs, etc.)
I'm responsible for an app that has hugely appreciated in features, and has not slowed down even a fraction, because the architecture of the app was designed well enough in the first place, and the core technologies chosen (C) such that it flies perfectly happily under all versions of the OS and underlying hardware to date. It ran fine on a 200 MHz 486 with 16 megs of RAM; it bloody well tears up the road on a 3 GHz machine with 4 gigs of RAM.:o)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but this isn't even remotely the same thing -- to add this functionality to Ubuntu takes a few clicks and downloads, all free, all easy, and with no limits on how many apps you can run, etc. You want CUPS or some other component that you consider a basic OS requirement? Click, wait while download and install completes, and you have 'em. This is simply an initially "lite" OS install, offered as a matter of convenience to the end user.
MS isn't offering a lite OS install with free option to get the parts that are useful to you. They're paring away basic functionality (like the ability to run 4 or 5 apps at a time) and the only way to get it back is to buy it. If you choose the wrong set of features, you'll probably have to buy again, unless you habitually buy the package with the complete feature set.
MS seems to me to be working on their own downfall. As RAM gets less expensive and more widely available, and processors supply more cores, and displays get less expensive and multi screen displays get easier and easier to implement...
MS is artificially limiting the number of apps you can run to just a few, releasing many varieties of the OS so that developers have a very inconsistent target to aim at, and pricing it in the $200 or so range so that it really hurts the pocketbook. It's not very compatible, very much like Vista, so that one of the key features (yes, I mean compatibility) is missing from the OS.
It is certainly their right to make these decisions, but I am just as certainly not going along for the ride.
XP will continue to work in its virtualized, insulated-from-the-Internet sandbox under OSX, and I'm perfectly happy with the performance and ability to run the older apps I came to depend upon before MS went off on the Vista/W7 boondoggle. In the meantime, OSX allows me to run as many apps as I like, including both XP and Linux in virtualized containers, and unlimited apps underneath those, too. I can't imagine what Microsoft is thinking, or if they are thinking at all.
Can I have a piece of cake?
Now, have you seen the memo about the TPS reports?
You do realize that making guns (or any other weapon) illegal doesn't cause them to magically disappear from the hands of criminals, don't you? And that criminals are likely to consider a situation where they are armed, and the general population isn't, as being of significant advantage to them?
I mean, really, I appreciate your concern for our safety, but perhaps you should think the whole cause and effect thing out again.
Just like the ex post facto laws on firearms and offender registration. Adding to punishment after sentencing is explicitly forbidden to the feds or the states. SCOTUS passed both anyway. The fact is, SCOTUS is not infallible (they're not even reliable.)
As for my "idiocy", here's my detailed take on the 4th and how it applies to surveillance and warrants, as a component in the overall subject of investigating what privacy means. Be sure to let me know where I've made my mistakes. Us idiots need all the help we can get. Thanks.
Yes, exactly. Thank you.
The US has devolved into a place where safety trumps constitutional authorization, judicial honesty, liberty, and honor.
The government might as well change the national motto to "Safety at Any Cost."
Yes. And now:
Please, President Obama, on your first day:
o Order the heads of the military to immediately commence an orderly and rapid withdrawal of all troops and equipment from Iraq and Afghanistan.
o Issue a formal, succinct apology to the people of Iraq for all acts of violence and coercion under the aegis of George Bush and his cronies, and formally disavow those acts.
o Order the heads of military to plan orderly and rapid closure of all military bases outside the borders of the United States and its possessions, including the return of all troops, the return of all equipment that is practical, and to execute the immediate sale or destruction of all weapons and defense systems that cannot be transported within a 90-day period.
o Issue a blanket pardon for all non-violent drug offenders
o Issue an executive order invalidating any past, present or future law that infringes upon the personal liberty to choose to import, grow, manufacture, carry, sell or consume any consumable substance as a matter of informed choice. This would in no way shield drug users from consequences of actions taken while under the influence of drugs.
o Order the closure of Guantanamo Bay and all other similar facilities, and the transfer and release of all prisoners to their country of origin, or to asylum in the US if they prefer
o Issue at least one executive order to strike down one of the myriad unconstitutional laws violating the bill of rights
o Issue at least one executive order to strike down one of the myriad unconstitutional laws that does not pass muster under the enumerated congressional powers
o Issue at least one executive order to strike down one of the myriad unconstitutional laws that depends upon the topsy-turvy interpretation of the commerce clause
o Issue at least one executive order to have a supreme court judge arrested for violating the constitutional oath they swore as part of their office. Perhaps Scalia should go first, based on his treasonous and unconstitutional assertion in Heller that the government has the authority to tell citizens where they may carry arms.
o Issue at least one executive order to have a congressman arrested for violating the constitutional oath they swore as part of their office. For the first one of these, I'd probably choose the top sponsor of the bill that attempted to suspend habeas corpus, I think it was in the Military Commissions Act.
o Make a short fireside-style speech explaining the difference between coercive, arbitrarily exercised government power, and authorized use of power as delegated to the government by the constitution. Go on to say that you consider it your job to defend the country and its possessions at their borders from foreign military aggression; to undo as much harm as possible that has been caused by out of control, coercive, unauthorized exercise of federal and state government power; to restore the income, property and liberties taken from US citizens by previous state and federal government misdeeds; to restore *authorized* power to the states, while reminding them they are absolutely bound by the bill of rights and other constitutional direction specifically to them; and finally, speak to the citizens about personal liberty and personal responsibility, explaining the concept that their right to exert personal power ends where another person's body, property and family begin. State your intent to focus the government on the jobs of providing and maintaining transport and communications infrastructure, education, and healthcare in an environment where the greatest possible safety and security of the individual, property and family from aggression from any quarter was assured. Announce your intent to institute a program that assured any individual a safe bed, practical clothing, and (extremely) basic sustenance, should they fall through to the bottom of the country's economic system.
Don't think it can't happen. The hysteria-over-liberty mode of thinking that pervades every level of our legal and court system has resulted in significant erosion of all manner of what would, to a sensible person, seem to be rock-solid and unmovable declarations of constitutional rights.
We have seen the right to remain silent turn into the right to be tortured until you say what they want to hear; we have seen the 4th amendment turned into an irrelevancy by nattering idiocy about your papers being in digital form; we have seen the commerce clause turned on its very head; we have seen the establishment of "free speech zones" and other 1984-ish/esque crushing of liberties; censorship is the accepted norm for "solving" disagreements about what we see, say and hear insofar as it might offend some poor, weak-willed moron; screams of "save the children", "terrorists" and "global warming" drive legislators to write, and pass, the most odious, anti-liberty and outright anti-American legislation on a daily basis.
There's no limit to this, either; we have seen the specific directive not to pass ex post facto laws ignored at the congressional level and then whistle right through the supreme court; we have seen the explicit directive of the 2nd amendment's operative clause turned into the most moronic and sophist idiocy about "what is a militia?", a non-issue mined blindly and moronically out of the prefatory clause.
Don't think it can't get worse. Ask yourself instead, why should you expect it to get any better?
I don't see the problem. I didn't want them to remove DRM so I could ignore the copyright on the music, I wanted them to remove it so I could use it on any device I wanted to listen to it on. They did that; now I can, as far as I'm concerned, we're all good now.
If you interpret the lack of DRM as permission to ignore copyright, and you end up in trouble because you did so...
Nope, don't see the problem.
Good grief. "Sharing" copyrighted music files on a P2P network was always an extremely bad idea. If you ever had any fraction of an excuse for doing it (and frankly, I don't really think you did, but...) it is gone now, at least as far as iTunes purchases go. What has changed is it is now reasonable to purchase music, because you'll actually get to own it, use it on *all* your gear, back it up, etc.
The only thing I can think of that is really affected by this is your ability to legitimately resell recording of a tune you own, because you bought it. And for that issue, I give it.... maybe an hour before someone comes up with a tool to ZOT that name and email address right out of there. Maybe it'll even put the new one in. Pride of ownership and all that.
No. Some start because they seemed like fun to do. Some start because of a simple code fork for something that appeared to be minor, but turned out not to be. Some start as demonstration projects. Some start as academic proof of concept, no initial business intent at all. Some are intended from day one to be public domain, and some are intended to be free to anyone *but* commercial enterprises, unless the commercial enterprise conforms to certain conditions. Some start as a favor to the spouse. Some start because of a personal need. Some start to entertain the kids. Some are outright accidents.
Business is not the be-all and end-all of human goals. It never was; one has to hope it never will be.
I've lived many years - decades - in many metro areas. I came to Montana because, among other things, the traffic sucketh considerably less. I still drive to both coasts several times a year and become somewhat refreshed on the current state of metro traffic viz NYC, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, LA, Seattle and Portland. So don't worry too much about my expertise. There's enough there to hazard an opinion or two, despite where I choose to make my home.
Really?
For the record, I was describing your case one, and you actually READ my post, you'll see every element you mention described there (except for the mistakes you made, which I address below.) The manual transfer switch is mentioned in main bullet three; mine has eight breaker positions and it is from there that I run the separate circuits for (in my case) the furnace, and my two salt water tanks.
There is obviously a considerable amount of detail not in my post; it was meant as an outline. Anyone who does this needs to either (a) hire it done or (b) learn all about each step before lifting a single finger. There are piles of little details like how sub-panels are grounded; How to 4-wire or 3-wire the sub-panel from the line and how one correctly wires a 120 vac generator as opposed to a 220vac generator; how the generator itself is grounded; operating temperature ranges for the generator and what role the shed plays in seeing to it that these are met... I could go on for a while.
But in general, the configuration I described is safe, as dependable as the generator chosen, and conforms to code assuming you route the wiring and mount the generator switch properly.
This isn't always (or even often) practical. For instance, the outlet the refrigerator is plugged into is highly unlikely to come back to a breaker without supplying something else (for instance, other outlets in the kitchen. Especially in older kitchens.) The line to the furnace is probably isolated; but you have to make sure that *everything* involved with the furnace is powered (for instance, the condensation removal pump; electrostatic filter bank(s); duct controllers; any AC-powered thermometer widgets or other modern heat-control wizardry that isn't battery powered. Finally, and this can be a real problem, sometimes there simply isn't enough wire to run the old circuit over to the new transfer switch / breaker box, and this is very much an issue if the building lines are in conduit. Also (and I admit this is a personal tweak) I simply don't like splices. In the end, the practical -- and definitely the most convenient and dependable for the years you will presumably be using the system -- thing to do is bite the bullet and run new, dedicated line.
The last thing you want to do when the power fails is troubleshoot your installation.
The configuration I suggested does not have this problem. With the generator switch in the "line" position, the sockets are fed from the normal utility source. When power fails, you start the generator, and flip the switch over to the generator position; now the devices are powered from the generator. You leave the devices (furnace, refrigerator, fish tanks) plugged into / attached to the same sources all the time.
When the utility power comes back on, if you're smart, you'll kill the breakers in the transfer switch panel (because the AC of the utility is unlikely to be in-phase with your generator), give everything a minute to wind down, then flip back to the line position, and you're back on utility power.
No plugging and unplugging at all.
Transfer switch was the third item in the list.
At a minimum, you need:
Even though a furnace doesn't pull a lot when running, at the time that the blower starts up, there can be a VERY large startup current. The fridge the same, to a lesser extent.
You can get a lot fancier than this, but this will function perfectly as long as you are there to do the switching soon enough after power fails that your building doesn't get too close to pipe-freeze (I wouldn't want to go below 40 degrees f, pipes are often in walls that are cooler than the rest of the house.)
If that won't do, you're looking at an auto-start system with an auto-generator switchover, and the only thing I can tell you about that is prepare your wallet for deep excavation.
The 4th amendment forbids this. Telecommunications laws based on the 4th amendment forbid this. Even the most basic analysis of privacy forbids this.
Just because something may be of benefit to the government does not mean the government has permission to do it. There are other issues, and some of them are intended to take priority. No matter how annoying that might be to the government.
Absent probable cause, oath or affirmation, a description of what they are searching for, and a warrant, they are forbidden to search or seize the communications of the people.
Got it?
It's not an argument. It's a fact. City (local) metros are not national transport; national transport consumes huge proportions of petroleum products; US national transport is by and large built around highways. If you think you can get congress to do something that the PACs and lobbyists don't want it to do, more power to you, and please go ahead.
What? You can get from Seattle to SF, *and* from Boston to Miami. We've got rails in between many major cities. I regularly go to both coasts from where I live (Montana) via rail. Major cities, however, do not comprise a reasonable subset of destinations for travel in the US. That's the problem. Rail will not work as national transport infrastructure; because it won't work in that role, it won't replace road transport. It can't.
Furthermore, even in cities with decent rail transport (NYC, for instance), road transport is still a significant factor. When I was a boy, I lived in NYC, and I went all *over* the place by subway. It was very reasonable. There were areas that you had to go for a bus, but by and large, Manhattan at least was extremely accessible if you could walk a few blocks, which most people can. But these are very much local solutions, and they cover VERY small fractions of the country. They can't bring anything to the table that will allow us to back off of road transport or vehicles for road transport nationwide.
You need to do a little research. It isn't metro transport that controls this issue. We have coastal transport. East and west, also north and south, and a whole lot in between. What we *don't* have is passenger service on those lines, or the ability of those lines to serve the areas in between them, nor is it the least bit likely that we will ever get such a thing. You may want it really badly, but that's not a factor.
Fact: We have far more space to cover than most countries, and we cover it with highway, not rail. The auto industry knew, and knows, this. The problem is simply that the means of propulsion is in transition. Peak oil (see chart) seems to have pretty clearly passed, and even if it hasn't, geopolitical issues are having the same effect. So motive power is really the key issue here.
What Detroit needs to do -- and what I think it will be forced to do -- is convert to long range electric vehicles, that's all. Light through heavy. That's what the environment needs, that's what petroleum product availability will require, and that's what works with the US infrastructure.
They can do this. It's all about the power sources. Batteries are getting close to what we might be able to put up with, and the promise of ultracaps is still somewhere over the horizon (and if it ever gets here, that'll pretty much be the end of batteries.)
As for rail, land is too expensive / valuable in the US for any real rail development. Look at the highline, an east-to-west rail passage that is extremely busy; but no amount of congestion has been able to get the rails or the government to invest in a second line so that they don't have to delay trains by side-tracking them to spurs to let one train pass by another. This is where they already own the right of way. Nothing is going to get them to open new right of way. Financially speaking, it is incomprehensible.
Electric is the coming thing. Petroleum, hydrogen, hybrid, ethanol, all these will fall by the wayside, because nothing can compete with the distribution system or the mass efficiency of large electricity generating stations. Even petroleum produces far more power in a central electric generation situation, even accounting for transmission losses (which are not as high as most think) than it does being consumed on a per-car basis. But that's not the kicker; the kicker is that we can transition to any mix of any type of generation we want once the transport system is electricity based, because any type of electricity generation system can add power to the entire grid. That means a measured transition to nuclear, solar, wind, wave, geothermal, anything reasonable that comes along.
The problem - as always - is getting US concerns, both political and corporate, to invest in systems and ideas that extend beyond the next quarter, or at most, fiscal year. Everything is about the next quarterly report or the next election. The obvious weight, horsepower, pollution and efficiency advantages of electric should have anyone with any sense investing their heads off. Detroit will get the message eventually. That, or they'll die. And in that case, we'll have a whole new industry springing up, good riddance to the old.
Hmm. I don't really see the difficulty. Are you saying that because $HOME etc. may be defined at a level you can't get at without adding more cron lines, the rest of the parsing isn't useful, or that the command / event has to be completely parsed, as opposed to displayed as written?
My thought was that a useful output might be:
Next CRON event @ 10:00pm: mail -s "It's 10pm" joe%Joe,%%Where are your kids?%
This would appear days 1-5, and not the other two, and accompanied by the monthly event when appropriate. All you really have to do is figure out the time encoding, which is trivial, then anything that is past, you skip, while the very next event, you dump. Not difficult. For most things, I think you'd know just what you were looking at, too, at least if you had an interest in such things in the first place.
Doesn't tell you the mail will go to paul; but then again, if it's your crontab, you probably knew that anyway, eh?
Read the crontab(s); parse 'em; look at the current time; pick next event. Be just a few lines of Python, certainly not a big deal.
You're in the habit of over-driving your headlights in an area that features people and garbage cans as driving hazards? Forgive me if I only wish for a police officer to catch you.
Flashlight. Modern invention. Look into it. Has the benefit of actually illuminating where you're walking, without wasting hundreds of watts of energy; serves as a bludgeon and a blinding tool against assailants in a pinch; can be directed into dark corners streetlights miss; they can be used as a help beacon; they can carry a siren; they make everywhere accessible instead of just little pools of light in town; etc.
This rule will not allow sufficient traffic to move at posted speeds with the number of lanes available in most US highway configurations. So while the rule is a great guide for safety purposes, it is effectively useless in or near a city, because no one wants to spend extra hours on the road on the one hand, and the government won't allow high enough speeds to make those spacings practical for the vehicle density that is a modern fact of life.
And this, by the way, is one of the reasons I live and work in rural Montana.
Most US highway designs are so bad - insufficient to the task of safe and timely travel - that the only hope we really have is over-the-horizon technological. Car to car radar and status; automated response to same; deep infrared (heat) sensors; vastly improved light rail; isolation of travel corridors from debris, wildlife and pedestrians; the vague and unlikely hope that inexpensive flying capability will decongest the ground paths (and recover immense amounts of real estate.)
I've always thought that a truly advanced society would at least master how to contain and conserve light gases and go for personal airship transport, with elevated setups such as monorails for mass and heavy transit. Roads are such a waste of land, such a risk to wildlife, such resource- and maintainance-hogs...
But then again, we're still using and wasting power with streetlights long after they became obsolete. That whole advanced society thing... not us.
Depending the the tolerance level at your job for some of these; mix and match as many as you like, just give 'em ID headers:
It's not feature creep. It's slower technologies being used to create the products. Go back to C, use decent programming techniques, and your apps will fly unless they're waiting on resources like the HD (and even that is going away... SSDs, etc.)
I'm responsible for an app that has hugely appreciated in features, and has not slowed down even a fraction, because the architecture of the app was designed well enough in the first place, and the core technologies chosen (C) such that it flies perfectly happily under all versions of the OS and underlying hardware to date. It ran fine on a 200 MHz 486 with 16 megs of RAM; it bloody well tears up the road on a 3 GHz machine with 4 gigs of RAM. :o)