I have a Canon GPS watch I received as a present about 5 years ago. I think the price was about $500 then. No altimeter, and no GPS altitude reading either. It's a bit big and clunky as a watch, but it had immediate geekiness-cred (:-) and was quite enjoyable.
On the other hand, as a GPS, it's even slower and less sensitive than the earliest ~$100 GPSs back then. I forget if it did 8 satellites or 12, but it was serial rather than parallel reception, so it takes a while to get an initial reading. It doesn't work near buildings or too many trees, either, which limits its usefulness. It's presumably possible to do a much better job today, but you do sacrifice some things by fitting it into a watch. Also, it uses special batteries, which don't have really long life and aren't rechargeable, while I can run my pocket GPS on NiMHs or rechargeable alkalines.
Slashdot won't let me post this in all caps, so you'll just have to imagine it
Subject: Urgent Business Proposition Dear %s:
My late uncle, Solicitor Frederick M'Bogo, was the lead data processing outsourcing agent for the New York City Department of Transportation Parking Ticket Bureau, which has used Nigerian data services since 2003. After my uncle died of an acute case of lead poisoning, our family discovered that he had acquired $8,765,432 from over-invoicing of New York City parking tickets. Unfortunately, this money is held in a bank account in New York City, and we are unable to repatriate the money to Nigeria directly due to accounting regulations, and we need an American citizen to accept the money. We would like to offer you 20% of the money in exchange for your assistance in this matter. With kindest regards, Jar-Jar M'Bogo.
P.S. If you're living in New York City but _not_ an American citizen, you won't be able to help with this project, but we'd be happy to offer you a 50% discount on parking tickets.
Nigeria was being discussed, and the Anonymous Coward correctly pointed out that Nigeria *is* "well known as one of the most corrupt and scam ridden countries in the world." Its human rights record continues to be bad, they murder journalists who print negative things about government officials or their relationships to big oil companies.
And those 500 scam artists who got arrested mostly got let off for "lack of evidence. I suspect the dismissal process was rather along the lines of a 50% cut of the profits from the guilty and a possibly smaller bribe from the unsuccessful scammers.
Filtration is pretty effective
on
Just Add, Umm, Water
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Peter's posting is the first technically interesting comment I've seen here, because it differentiates these filters from the more common type.
Basic filtration is a fairly well-solved technology - campers can buy yuppie-priced water-filters that can turn pond scum into nice clear safe drinking water as long as the problems are bacteria, giardia, dirt, etc. rather than soluble chemicals, and they help on some of the chemicals as well. They won't fix overdoses of salt, or heavy metals, and most of them won't help much with nasty organics like pesticides, but they can solve most of the world's basic safe drinking water needs in places that have dirty fresh water. The issue is making them in appropriate quantities and price ranges.
Y2K paranoia was a great excuse to go buy camping gear:-) Water filters, propane stove, etc.
I haven't read Beck's book, though I've heard him on the radio and read just about all the other books from that disastrous climbing day on Everest's summit, up in what's called The Death Zone for very good reasons. So much was disorganized and broken about their processes, too many people on the mountain, not enough oxygen tanks, not enough communications radios, bad communications between climbing teams, confusion about who was placing ropes when, all at an altitude that humans weren't meant to live at with extremely cold temperatures and high winds. If you're planning to do that a lot, then yeah, eye surgery may not be a good choice for you, but neither are contacts or glasses - consider getting gills installed.
My father was a chemical engineer, and while his vision was good, he always wore eyeglass-style safety glasses when he wasn't wearing heavier eye protection. Eventually when he got older they got replaced with bifocals.
My junior-high-school metal shop teacher was a fairly hefty guy with huge hands and a battleaxe on the wall. One day a kid walked into the shop with some bureaucratic note and no glasses. He got about 5 feet from the door before the teacher grabbed him, picked him up, and slammed him against the lockers, and held him off the floor until they'd finished having a discussion about what the sign about not coming in without safety goggles meant.
There are two cases - either they're a scam or they're not. If they're not, then they've got a bunch of problems:
Asking for a deposit upfront sounds a lot like they don't actually have enough working capital for the orders they're getting, and don't have enough credit line of their own to cover it either. Companies that start off with inadequate amounts of capital are almost always doomed, so even if they don't _intend_ to be a scam that takes your money and runs, they can still take your money and crash.
Not having web-page credit cards support ready when they launched the product means (at best) that they're not willing to delay their web page launch for a day or two while they arrange with one of the hundreds of online credit-card-handling services out there. They seem to have fixed that now, but especially when they're asking for a dubious-looking up-front deposit, it's hard to inspire trust...
"Escrow accounts" can be real, or can be a fake rip-off. Their web page doesn't name any actual escrow service provider, so it sounds like they're just keeping the money themselves.
The other reason eating dairy products and eggs results in dead cows and chickens is that producing them requires producing lots of baby cows and chickens. The female babies get to grow up to produce milk or eggs; the male babies grow up to go to McDonald's.
A lot of ISPs force you to use their server for outbound mail; it's one of the things that really annoyed me when my old Netcom dialup account morphed into Earthlink. Some do it transparently. Some ISPs also restrict you to using _them_ as the From: address, but fortunately evolution has mostly fixed that. There are some newer SASL-authenticated and SSL-encrypted versions of SMTP submitting protocols that use ports other than 25, which let you use SMTP servers that are better than your ISP's.
This proposal is different, though - it's saying that ISPs should restrict Port 25 by default, but let customers have it turned on if they do want to. That means that you can still do what you want, but if you weren't using it, and you get some Outlook virus because you're careless, you won't got spamming everybody. Some cable modem companies have started doing this, and it's much more reasonable than the policies that they used to have.
Next best thing is that you can get large chocolate bars (about 220grams) with whatever pictures you want on them. Price is about UKP 9.95, ships in 2-3 days in the UK. US/Canada about 10-14 days and shipping's a bit extra. A friend of mine who had worked for them gave out smaller pieces of chocolate as his business card... you may not keep it around, but you won't forget it.
It's convenient for small bookstores to instantly have large inventories available to them, but another advantage is that you can print out LARGE PRINT books on demand. Even the big box bookstores typically have a really lame selection of large-print, typically well under 10% of their titles (more like for science fiction and technical books - it's mostly lame Readers' Digest stuff and kids' picture books.) Printing on demand would let them carry their regular selections, in whatever mixture of paperbacks and hardbacks they want, and crank out large print titles of anything that anybody wanted.
I'm just starting to reach the age where reading glasses help a bit, but my mom has needed them for a few decades.
I'm guessing that your small town must be more than 50 miles from Portland. Otherwise, you could go to Powell's Books, and surely in their several city blocks of bookstore space there's a used copy of what you want. And you can check them on the web too, though as you say there's the cost of shipping.
But yes, it would be nice to have access to things that are hard to find nearby.
Many of the old-fashioned 419 scammers want you to send them your bank account number so they can suck money out of it. These scammers give you a bank account number in Nigeria. It should be easy to glue the two together, such as by telling Mariam Abacha that you've got a bank account in Nigeria because your late uncle Fred was an engineer in the oil drilling business and he left it to you in care of Barrister Charles I Allen or Secretary Togowalla.
Plus you can send the assassins mail saying "My name is Laurent Kabila. You killed my Father. Prepare to die!" from whatever address the regular 419ers are using.
If these scammers are really in Nigeria, then what matters most legally is whether Nigerian law counts emailing a death threat to some foreigner to be a violation of Nigerian law. What matters most in practice is whether you get caught, which depends on whether some police official there feels motivated to do the work to catch you. Under several recent Nigerian administrations, this is closely related to the probability that you've successfully scammed enough money from suckers to be worth hitting up for a piece of the action.
US law and US Executive Branch practice are hypocritical and schizophrenic. The US doesn't have any jurisdiction outside the US, and the Executive Branch has the policy that US laws don't apply to US government officials outside the US, but they might or might not apply to citizens, and if you do something overseas they don't like, they can kidnap you and haul you in, or confiscate your boat in the "war on drugs" or whatever.
The chances of getting realistic proactive police support from the US Feds are relatively low, but if you did actually lose money, it's possible that they'll help track down the bank, but they'll probably hit a dead end quickly. The more useful support would be something like telling their embassy that we're more pissed off about death threats than the usual scams against greedy people, or freezing US assets of Nigerian banks that don't cooperate in tracking down the miscreants, but I'm not optimistic.
If the bank account's real, it's traceable. Sounds like a good opportunity to get the Fedz involved, deposit a dollar, and see where it goes.
Of course, that assumes that you're not planning to actually _go_ to Nigeria any time soon. The 419ers do sometimes kidnap and kill suckers who've gone there hunting for their money.
You probably won't see this, because I didn't see your posting until now when I was metamoderating. Sorry.
There are some non-doctor things you can try -
Melatonin's one of the popular ones (it's more direct than tryptophan or 5-HTP).
Cutting out caffeine's pretty obvious, or only having small quantities in the morning or early afternoon.
Exercise is usually good; some people here insist that morning's best, others say evening.
Television usually isn't good.
If you're having a lot of stress, try to do something about it.
Food - most people find that sugar is bad, but some people with bloodsugar problems react differently. Try a high-protein diet with only complex carbs, or try carbs and fats in the evenings and proteins in the morning.
Electric blankets help some people, including me, and obviously make sure you've got a good bed.
Be sure to spend enough time in bed with the room really dark and quiet, even if you're just staring at the ceiling.
Diphenhydramine antihistamines like Benadryl, Sominex, and Tylenol PM work for some people.
But basically, go see a doctor - have a regular doc make sure that there's nothing major wrong with your blood sugar or breathing or whatever, but then go see a specialist. Psychiatrists these days usually aren't the Freudian talk-therapy types, they're chemists who might talk with you for 15 minutes and then give you one or more of a wide range of chemicals that mess with the neurotransmitters in your brain, usually serotonin and adrenaline. If you're drinking heavily or using pot to medicate your self to sleep, you've probably got a chemical imbalance of the type they know how to mess with. Manic-depressive / bipolar and hypomanic problems seem to push people toward those forms of self-medication, so even if you don't have enough of a problem to be emotionally disturbed, it can still be messing up your sleep.
I've generally found that IE is slower and uglier than the Mozilla / Firefox browsers (at least if you run the "Leave Mozilla Preloaded" stuff.) There are exceptions - Slashdot has their "break Mozilla" features, but usually I get better performance with Mozilla. There's also the issue of tabs, which saves me the time I'd spend hunting through lots of windows.
It's a design bug, not just an implementation bug. A feature that lets a web page specify an arbitrary command for the browser to tell the operating system to execute is rabidly dangerous on just about any operating system, except possibly for a few researchy capability-based OSs like EROS and KeyKOS. A feature that hands commands to the shell to execure on Linux would be obviously ravingly stupid, unless you _like_ "rm -rf $HOME" -- so the idea that anybody would even dream of doing it on Windows is far worse.
Do you know it only affects Windows? If Mozilla is handing unrecognized commands to an operating system's native command interpreter to do things with, then it's a dangerous Mozilla bug, unless the people who wrote it knew the OS couldn't do anything dangerous with it, and face it, nobody'd say that about Windows and keep a straight face. If it only affects Windows and not Unix-like OSs, that's because the syntax for handing commands to the operating system's command interpreter is different on the different OSs and they either were too lazy to write it for Unix once they'd done it for Windows, or else the Unix maintainers had more sense, but not quite enough sense to realize that it had been done for Windows.
Go away until you can spell "r00tkit" and "affect"...
You wouldn't allow an uncontrolled remote arbitrary command execution on a Unix system just in case the executor wanted to trash the user's files or knew about a r00t hole. And that's on Unix, where there's some semblance of security, even though root-capable bugs do show up on occasion - "rm -rf $HOME" is almost as nasty for the average user as "rm -rf/", since most of the rest can be reconstructed from your favorite Linux distro disk.
So WHY the [expletive deleted in compliance with new FCC rules] would Mozilla's developers allow it on Windows? _Do_ they also allow it on Linux, or is it _only_ on Windows? Why didn't the Mozilla users community notice it earlier? When was it added?
I've been using Firefox for a while, and eventually got fed up and shifted over to Mozilla, but Slashdot doesn't work right with either one of them. It's got something to do with vertically-aligned ads, I think. I'm assuming that the problem is that Slashdot's web pages aren't following HTML standards, as opposed to Mozilla not implementing them correctly, but somebody's messed up here, and it's really annoying that the big Anti-Microsoft Pro-Open-Source Discussion Site needs IE to render correctly....
If you're on a Windowz box which doesn't have whois, you can use a site like betterwhois.com to check.
Please don't be rude to people who own real domains by using them, even if they're cute-sounding domains like no.com or nowhere.com, many of which are owned by old internet hackers who got the names when you could still get cool names like foo.com. It's fine to use example.com, which was set up specifically for that purpose. If you use domains that actually don't exist, you'll be hitting the TLD name servers, which really don't need that abuse either.
If you do want to be rude and pick an existing domain, at least pick somebody who's got the resources to handle it. President@whitehouse.gov, billg@microsoft.com, uce@ftc.gov. Alternatively, pick a service like mailinator.com or dodgeit.com that accept email for anybody, put it on a web page where you can retrieve it (with no password, so don't use it for anything real private), and garbage-collect old space after a while.
Example.com used to not exist - it was reserved by IANA, but there were no DNS records. It now resolves to an IP address, and there's a minimal web server and no email server (and thanx to the Anon.Coward who nmap'd it!) I don't remember when they changed this - the whois record was last changed in March 2004, but I think it happened before then.
Slashdot Mirror
That and 37n122w are the closest to Silicon Valley.
On the other hand, as a GPS, it's even slower and less sensitive than the earliest ~$100 GPSs back then. I forget if it did 8 satellites or 12, but it was serial rather than parallel reception, so it takes a while to get an initial reading. It doesn't work near buildings or too many trees, either, which limits its usefulness. It's presumably possible to do a much better job today, but you do sacrifice some things by fitting it into a watch. Also, it uses special batteries, which don't have really long life and aren't rechargeable, while I can run my pocket GPS on NiMHs or rechargeable alkalines.
Subject: Urgent Business Proposition
Dear %s:
My late uncle, Solicitor Frederick M'Bogo, was the lead data processing outsourcing agent for the New York City Department of Transportation Parking Ticket Bureau, which has used Nigerian data services since 2003. After my uncle died of an acute case of lead poisoning, our family discovered that he had acquired $8,765,432 from over-invoicing of New York City parking tickets. Unfortunately, this money is held in a bank account in New York City, and we are unable to repatriate the money to Nigeria directly due to accounting regulations, and we need an American citizen to accept the money. We would like to offer you 20% of the money in exchange for your assistance in this matter.
With kindest regards, Jar-Jar M'Bogo.
P.S. If you're living in New York City but _not_ an American citizen, you won't be able to help with this project, but we'd be happy to offer you a 50% discount on parking tickets.
And those 500 scam artists who got arrested mostly got let off for "lack of evidence. I suspect the dismissal process was rather along the lines of a 50% cut of the profits from the guilty and a possibly smaller bribe from the unsuccessful scammers.
Basic filtration is a fairly well-solved technology - campers can buy yuppie-priced water-filters that can turn pond scum into nice clear safe drinking water as long as the problems are bacteria, giardia, dirt, etc. rather than soluble chemicals, and they help on some of the chemicals as well. They won't fix overdoses of salt, or heavy metals, and most of them won't help much with nasty organics like pesticides, but they can solve most of the world's basic safe drinking water needs in places that have dirty fresh water. The issue is making them in appropriate quantities and price ranges.
Y2K paranoia was a great excuse to go buy camping gear :-) Water filters, propane stove, etc.
I haven't read Beck's book, though I've heard him on the radio and read just about all the other books from that disastrous climbing day on Everest's summit, up in what's called The Death Zone for very good reasons. So much was disorganized and broken about their processes, too many people on the mountain, not enough oxygen tanks, not enough communications radios, bad communications between climbing teams, confusion about who was placing ropes when, all at an altitude that humans weren't meant to live at with extremely cold temperatures and high winds. If you're planning to do that a lot, then yeah, eye surgery may not be a good choice for you, but neither are contacts or glasses - consider getting gills installed.
My junior-high-school metal shop teacher was a fairly hefty guy with huge hands and a battleaxe on the wall. One day a kid walked into the shop with some bureaucratic note and no glasses. He got about 5 feet from the door before the teacher grabbed him, picked him up, and slammed him against the lockers, and held him off the floor until they'd finished having a discussion about what the sign about not coming in without safety goggles meant.
Thanks for mirroring the photos..
The other reason eating dairy products and eggs results in dead cows and chickens is that producing them requires producing lots of baby cows and chickens. The female babies get to grow up to produce milk or eggs; the male babies grow up to go to McDonald's.
This proposal is different, though - it's saying that ISPs should restrict Port 25 by default, but let customers have it turned on if they do want to. That means that you can still do what you want, but if you weren't using it, and you get some Outlook virus because you're careless, you won't got spamming everybody. Some cable modem companies have started doing this, and it's much more reasonable than the policies that they used to have.
Next best thing is that you can get large chocolate bars (about 220grams) with whatever pictures you want on them. Price is about UKP 9.95, ships in 2-3 days in the UK. US/Canada about 10-14 days and shipping's a bit extra. A friend of mine who had worked for them gave out smaller pieces of chocolate as his business card... you may not keep it around, but you won't forget it.
I'm just starting to reach the age where reading glasses help a bit, but my mom has needed them for a few decades.
But yes, it would be nice to have access to things that are hard to find nearby.
Plus you can send the assassins mail saying "My name is Laurent Kabila. You killed my Father. Prepare to die!" from whatever address the regular 419ers are using.
US law and US Executive Branch practice are hypocritical and schizophrenic. The US doesn't have any jurisdiction outside the US, and the Executive Branch has the policy that US laws don't apply to US government officials outside the US, but they might or might not apply to citizens, and if you do something overseas they don't like, they can kidnap you and haul you in, or confiscate your boat in the "war on drugs" or whatever.
The chances of getting realistic proactive police support from the US Feds are relatively low, but if you did actually lose money, it's possible that they'll help track down the bank, but they'll probably hit a dead end quickly. The more useful support would be something like telling their embassy that we're more pissed off about death threats than the usual scams against greedy people, or freezing US assets of Nigerian banks that don't cooperate in tracking down the miscreants, but I'm not optimistic.
Of course, that assumes that you're not planning to actually _go_ to Nigeria any time soon. The 419ers do sometimes kidnap and kill suckers who've gone there hunting for their money.
There are some non-doctor things you can try -
But basically, go see a doctor - have a regular doc make sure that there's nothing major wrong with your blood sugar or breathing or whatever, but then go see a specialist. Psychiatrists these days usually aren't the Freudian talk-therapy types, they're chemists who might talk with you for 15 minutes and then give you one or more of a wide range of chemicals that mess with the neurotransmitters in your brain, usually serotonin and adrenaline. If you're drinking heavily or using pot to medicate your self to sleep, you've probably got a chemical imbalance of the type they know how to mess with. Manic-depressive / bipolar and hypomanic problems seem to push people toward those forms of self-medication, so even if you don't have enough of a problem to be emotionally disturbed, it can still be messing up your sleep.
I've generally found that IE is slower and uglier than the Mozilla / Firefox browsers (at least if you run the "Leave Mozilla Preloaded" stuff.) There are exceptions - Slashdot has their "break Mozilla" features, but usually I get better performance with Mozilla. There's also the issue of tabs, which saves me the time I'd spend hunting through lots of windows.
Do you know it only affects Windows? If Mozilla is handing unrecognized commands to an operating system's native command interpreter to do things with, then it's a dangerous Mozilla bug, unless the people who wrote it knew the OS couldn't do anything dangerous with it, and face it, nobody'd say that about Windows and keep a straight face. If it only affects Windows and not Unix-like OSs, that's because the syntax for handing commands to the operating system's command interpreter is different on the different OSs and they either were too lazy to write it for Unix once they'd done it for Windows, or else the Unix maintainers had more sense, but not quite enough sense to realize that it had been done for Windows.
Go away until you can spell "r00tkit" and "affect"...
So WHY the [expletive deleted in compliance with new FCC rules] would Mozilla's developers allow it on Windows? _Do_ they also allow it on Linux, or is it _only_ on Windows? Why didn't the Mozilla users community notice it earlier? When was it added?
I've been using Firefox for a while, and eventually got fed up and shifted over to Mozilla, but Slashdot doesn't work right with either one of them. It's got something to do with vertically-aligned ads, I think. I'm assuming that the problem is that Slashdot's web pages aren't following HTML standards, as opposed to Mozilla not implementing them correctly, but somebody's messed up here, and it's really annoying that the big Anti-Microsoft Pro-Open-Source Discussion Site needs IE to render correctly....
Please don't be rude to people who own real domains by using them, even if they're cute-sounding domains like no.com or nowhere.com, many of which are owned by old internet hackers who got the names when you could still get cool names like foo.com. It's fine to use example.com, which was set up specifically for that purpose. If you use domains that actually don't exist, you'll be hitting the TLD name servers, which really don't need that abuse either.
If you do want to be rude and pick an existing domain, at least pick somebody who's got the resources to handle it. President@whitehouse.gov, billg@microsoft.com, uce@ftc.gov. Alternatively, pick a service like mailinator.com or dodgeit.com that accept email for anybody, put it on a web page where you can retrieve it (with no password, so don't use it for anything real private), and garbage-collect old space after a while.
Example.com used to not exist - it was reserved by IANA, but there were no DNS records. It now resolves to an IP address, and there's a minimal web server and no email server (and thanx to the Anon.Coward who nmap'd it!) I don't remember when they changed this - the whois record was last changed in March 2004, but I think it happened before then.