Ok, they've got a few days left, but they've currently got $72000 vs. their $10000 goal. Cool project, interesting applications.
(But since we're talking Kickstarter here, I'd like to put in a plug for the Drip Clip kickstarter. They've designed a small drip-counter to be used for measuring medicine in intravenous bags, especially for applications like disasters, third-world hospitals, and the like. The prototype used Arduinos and baling wire, but the production version is going to be manufactured plastic with a simple count-down display on it.
Chimps and Gorillas are basically black, with lighter-colored palms of their hands. We didn't turn light-skinned till we moved north and needed the extra vitamin D.
I'm a mutant, you're a mutant, he's a mutant, we're all mutants here.
I'm fortunate to have the Northern European "able to digest milk as an adult" mutation, which gives me a few more dietary choices. (I rarely actually drink milk without lots of coffee in it, but having the option makes being a vegetarian a lot more convenient than it otherwise would be.)
Telco equipment traditionally used 23" rack instead of 19", so my underground laboratory at work is full of a bunch of telco racks with shelves to accommodate all the 19" equipment. (We've gradually been converting to 19" rack, but it means a lot of disruption, because this is an old lab in California, so everything's bolted to the floor and anchored to the overhead cable tray and power railings, and there are all sorts of different heights of racks, and it's usually been a lot easier to just buy some more shelves than fight the jigsaw puzzle, especially because some of our equipment is desktop stuff instead of rack-mount anyway.)
And they had to make this 600mm instead of 580, so we can't even use the old telco stuff?
What they told the minorities was pretty much "If you've got good credit, you can buy a house! You can't lose as long as prices keep going up!"
The real trick was increasing the division of labor and decreasing the breadth of auditing and oversight in the banking and finance business so that lots of players could make money whether the loans were good or bad, and using badly-understood derivatives to let the banks that originally made the loans pass on the risks to other people.
That's why, instead of getting a slump where the marginal buyers lose their houses and banks end up holding a lot of unsold inventory they've foreclosed on for a couple of years instead of making profits for their stockholders, like we did with Neil Bush's S&L scams in the 80s that cost a few billion dollars, we got 2008's Chaos! Anarchy! Dogs and Cats Living Together! Mass Hysteria! bank bailout costing the Feds a few Trillion dollars. But all y'all Republicans can still blame the subprime-loan-buying minorities if you like.
Are you kidding? You should hear what the Occupy crowd say about the Democrats and their bankster buddies!
Sure, if you bought a house you couldn't afford, because some mortgage sales person (who got a commission whether or not you could afford it) told you it would work fine as long as prices kept going up, then Barney Frank wasn't really such a good friend, and writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates point out that this consistently happens to poor and black people during every housing bubble of the last century or so. Of if you bought a house you could afford, as long as you and your spouse were both working, because it was a great investment and rents in Silicon Valley were going up even faster than house prices, especially in the neighborhoods with decent schools, and one of you got sick or lost your job when your startup collapsed, then you also lost badly.
But Barney Frank didn't tell banks to repackage those subprime or prime-but-risky loans into complex derivatives, report the values dishonestly, extract the good bits and use the remaining toxic assets as collateral for Credit Default Swaps, and use those as markers in a floating craps game, while using their expected winnings to make the Federally-insured parts of their banks look better than they were. You might want to talk to Phil Gramm about that - he didn't spend all his time encouraging fiscal responsibility the way he did with Gramm-Rudman.
If you actually look at it, the mortgage meltdown wasn't just because builders built more and bigger houses then the market needed and banks helped sell them to people who couldn't afford the payments - normally when that happens, there's a bit of a slump until the market catches up, a few banks fail and many more disappoint their stockholders, and many people who've lost their jobs lose their savings and maybe their houses, but it's not a massive meltdown.
This was about the banks and investment companies taking all of those marginal loans, packaging them together into securities that didn't necessarily make sense even to the sellers, getting formerly-respected auditors to call them "AAA+++ WOULD BUY AGAIN", and successfully selling them to investors who didn't do the due diligence to realize just how worthless an investment in the margins of a package of marginal loans could be, leading everybody else to need to compete against unsustainable investment rates by doing similarly risky things.
Barney Frank may have told the banks they'd better start making loans to poor people - he didn't tell them to lie about the securities they packaged the loans into, or to invest the profits in a floating crap game by buying up similar bad securities from other scammers. And funny, most of those derivatives and credit default swaps and such were unregulated because of a law the otherwise-conservative Phil Gramm got passed on his way out the door.
Yes, if you use your credit card over unencrypted wifi or leak the passwords to your bank account, all that data is fair game to thieves and you should have encrypted it to protect yourself.
But the government aren't supposed to be data thieves; they're supposed to get warrants when they want to wiretap you, just as they're supposed to get warrants before walking into your house even if you've left the door unlocked.
The protocol provides for authentication if you want authentication, and provides for encryption of authenticated traffic, because that matched the most common business model of the businesses who got the standards passed. It doesn't provide for encrypted guest mode, so there's no direct way to get privacy while allowing anybody to access your internet connection; you can fake it by setting your SSID to "Password=guest" or some such. There have even been some recent newspaper articles on a proposal to allow default backdoor access for emergency personnel like firefighters, most of which doesn't recognize that they're really looking for guest access. (5-10 years ago, you could just use "linksys" as your roaming internet access provider, and it'd usually work, but wifi routers pretty much all want the owner to configure security these days.)
Yes, if you want to keep your communications private from private eavesdroppers, you'll have to do that yourself, though they'll let you use the courts for civil lawsuits in some kinds of privacy violation cases.
But this isn't about private wiretapping, it's about government wiretapping, the kind that many people think should be covered by the Fourth Amendment. It's an entirely different issue. After all, if the government wants to open all of your mail and read it, or climb into your house if you forgot to lock all the windows, or break down your door with a battering ram, or tap your phone wires even though they're not encrypted, they used to have to get a warrant first. Same thing should apply here.
There's also a standards problem - the original Wifi security models were designed for business users, so encryption and access authentication are bundled together; they didn't provide an allow-anybody-and-encrypt-everything guest mode. (You could argue that an encrypted open guest mode is susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks, so it's a false illusion of security, but I'd still rather have it be the default.)
I did that for a while. You want one of the doors with a doorknob hole already drilled in it, so you can run your electrical wires conveniently. But for a standing desk, that's not going to be tall enough, though you can still do the plank-and-cinder-block thing on top of it.
Ninja Standing Desk is a couple of lightweight shelves on straps that hang on a wall. You can hang it over a door, or attach it to sheetrock with picture hangers, or whatever. Laptop goes on the top shelf, keyboard on the bottom. They demoed at Maker Faire this year, and they're orderable online after doing a Kickstarter. Designed at Techshop, and you can pay in Bitcoin, so you can check off a whole lot of Hipster Style Points boxes at once, but it seems to be fairly simple and practical, and if you don't like it you can fold it up until somebody else wants to use it. (And their business cards are the obvious throwing-star shape:-)
Get a cheap 19" rack, the two-rail kind without an enclosure, and a couple of shelves. Monitor goes on one, keyboard or laptop on the other, adjust the heights however you want. With an extra shelf or two, it's easy to use it for both sitting and standing, or you can do the barstool thing.
Or yeah, just use a wooden box, or a board and cinder blocks.
I used one of those for a while - cost about $25. No need to get the overpriced chair version. It wasn't entirely comfortable at first, but I got used to it, and it did strengthen my core muscles a bit.
Then one day I rolled back from the desk and didn't see that my cat was behind me. He got startled when it hit him, yowled, and slashed at the ball. I started sinking gradually toward the floor as it deflated.:-) I suppose I should drag out the bicycle patch kit and find where I left the pump to reinflate it, but I haven't bothered.
You may need to pay the tax, but that doesn't mean they'll actually let you. It was originally enacted in the 1930s as a side-door way to ban machine guns, and the Supreme Court upheld it as a tax (even though it would have otherwise potentially violated that Second Amendment.) After that succeeded, the Prohibitionists got Congress to pass a similar tax on Marihuana, that evil weed that causes Reefer Madness, but just because there was a tax didn't mean that you could actually pay it and get permission to use the marijuana. And once they got away with that, we've moved on to the War On Drugs.
There are 3D printers under $500, though most of them aren't big enough to make the bigger gun parts, they're mostly designed for hobbyists who might very well modify them to print bigger things. Or you can join TechShop for about $100/month, and take classes on using their 3D scanner and 3D printers instead of buying your own. The material used to be expensive, but these days you can use ABS or other cheap plastics, and free CAD programs while you're at it.
Remember, the "Print Your Own Gun" folks are saying that they're not printing the barrel or firing pin or a couple of other parts that need to be really precise - most of it's just fine with the 0.2mm printer resolution, and it's not like real-world AK47s were machined more precisely than that. And since this whole thing is really more of a political statement than a practical exercise, remember that a lot of state assault weapon bans haven't just been about how many bullets get fired how fast when you pull the trigger, they're also about how long the barrel is and how scary-looking the stock and attachments are.
And I bet there'll be CAD models for converting your rifle or shotgun into a Zombie Defense Weapon floating around the internet by the end of the year.
No, I'm living in the real California, where Governor Pete Wilson foisted the whole "no driver's licenses for immigrants" thing on us, back in the early 90s. If this were the alternate universe, Pete Wilson would have been State Reptile instead of Governor when he did that.
Yeah, that gets to the "holding it close to my face" part, although I suppose some lampstand expandable arm thingy could help. Typing on glass is easier to fix using an external keyboard (and would be even easier if Apple supported USB directly off the pad, though Bluetooth is an alternative.)
A couple of years ago I finally got an external monitor for my work PC that had more pixels than the Sun 3 I'd used back in the 1980s. (We mainly worked with laptops, and our IT department always thought that having more color depth was more important than more pixels, even though most of us work with text and simple graphics and 16-bit color was plenty. Some years they also thought portability was important, which was nice of them, but had the price of only getting 1024x768.)
Back when I was younger, 1280x1024 pixels was annoyingly small to do development work in, because it limits how much text you could fit on a screen. Now that I need reading glasses, I not only want more pixels than that, but I want a bigger screen to put them on, and holding the latest generation iPad/MacBook close to my face just means typing is awkward.
Replace my primary data storage with cloud services? Not a chance. Run my applications cloud-based off cloud-based storage rather than on local storage? No, that's way too slow; even serving disks across Wifi is slow. Not only is it not cost-effective, and not performance-effective, but more importantly, I don't control my data that way.
Get most of my TV from Google/Hulu/Netflix/etc. instead of Comcast? Meh. Most of it's probably there, and digital broadcast TV probably looks better than analog most of the time, but still, it doesn't strike me as worth the trouble.
There's far more variability within Africa than there is within Europeans (or for that matter between Europeans vs. some Africans.) Some of those groups of people headed north, some headed west, some south, they spread around different parts of Africa with different climates and terrains.
It's not so much that you'll find diversity between people in a given community, as it is between people in different parts of Africa. (Obviously this is except where modern trade and migration have brought lots of different people together, and by "modern" I'm including the Arab spread across northern Africa after Mohammed and the slave trade years in sub-Saharan Africa.) Humans had a few hundred thousand years of spreading around the continent, finding ecological niches where they could survive, and becoming more diverse. Somewhere along the line a smaller group of them headed north and became Neandertals, and later modern humans headed north and met them and the Denisovans, but a lot of really different people stayed behind.
Slashdot Mirror
And it it responds "Sorry, Dave, I can't do that", then I'm formatting the drive...
Ok, they've got a few days left, but they've currently got $72000 vs. their $10000 goal. Cool project, interesting applications.
(But since we're talking Kickstarter here, I'd like to put in a plug for the Drip Clip kickstarter. They've designed a small drip-counter to be used for measuring medicine in intravenous bags, especially for applications like disasters, third-world hospitals, and the like. The prototype used Arduinos and baling wire, but the production version is going to be manufactured plastic with a simple count-down display on it.
Chimps and Gorillas are basically black, with lighter-colored palms of their hands. We didn't turn light-skinned till we moved north and needed the extra vitamin D.
I'm a mutant, you're a mutant, he's a mutant, we're all mutants here.
I'm fortunate to have the Northern European "able to digest milk as an adult" mutation, which gives me a few more dietary choices. (I rarely actually drink milk without lots of coffee in it, but having the option makes being a vegetarian a lot more convenient than it otherwise would be.)
Arrrgh, no! Do Not Want!
Telco equipment traditionally used 23" rack instead of 19", so my underground laboratory at work is full of a bunch of telco racks with shelves to accommodate all the 19" equipment. (We've gradually been converting to 19" rack, but it means a lot of disruption, because this is an old lab in California, so everything's bolted to the floor and anchored to the overhead cable tray and power railings, and there are all sorts of different heights of racks, and it's usually been a lot easier to just buy some more shelves than fight the jigsaw puzzle, especially because some of our equipment is desktop stuff instead of rack-mount anyway.)
And they had to make this 600mm instead of 580, so we can't even use the old telco stuff?
What they told the minorities was pretty much "If you've got good credit, you can buy a house! You can't lose as long as prices keep going up!"
The real trick was increasing the division of labor and decreasing the breadth of auditing and oversight in the banking and finance business so that lots of players could make money whether the loans were good or bad, and using badly-understood derivatives to let the banks that originally made the loans pass on the risks to other people.
That's why, instead of getting a slump where the marginal buyers lose their houses and banks end up holding a lot of unsold inventory they've foreclosed on for a couple of years instead of making profits for their stockholders, like we did with Neil Bush's S&L scams in the 80s that cost a few billion dollars, we got 2008's Chaos! Anarchy! Dogs and Cats Living Together! Mass Hysteria! bank bailout costing the Feds a few Trillion dollars. But all y'all Republicans can still blame the subprime-loan-buying minorities if you like.
Are you kidding? You should hear what the Occupy crowd say about the Democrats and their bankster buddies!
Sure, if you bought a house you couldn't afford, because some mortgage sales person (who got a commission whether or not you could afford it) told you it would work fine as long as prices kept going up, then Barney Frank wasn't really such a good friend, and writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates point out that this consistently happens to poor and black people during every housing bubble of the last century or so. Of if you bought a house you could afford, as long as you and your spouse were both working, because it was a great investment and rents in Silicon Valley were going up even faster than house prices, especially in the neighborhoods with decent schools, and one of you got sick or lost your job when your startup collapsed, then you also lost badly.
But Barney Frank didn't tell banks to repackage those subprime or prime-but-risky loans into complex derivatives, report the values dishonestly, extract the good bits and use the remaining toxic assets as collateral for Credit Default Swaps, and use those as markers in a floating craps game, while using their expected winnings to make the Federally-insured parts of their banks look better than they were. You might want to talk to Phil Gramm about that - he didn't spend all his time encouraging fiscal responsibility the way he did with Gramm-Rudman.
If you actually look at it, the mortgage meltdown wasn't just because builders built more and bigger houses then the market needed and banks helped sell them to people who couldn't afford the payments - normally when that happens, there's a bit of a slump until the market catches up, a few banks fail and many more disappoint their stockholders, and many people who've lost their jobs lose their savings and maybe their houses, but it's not a massive meltdown.
This was about the banks and investment companies taking all of those marginal loans, packaging them together into securities that didn't necessarily make sense even to the sellers, getting formerly-respected auditors to call them "AAA+++ WOULD BUY AGAIN", and successfully selling them to investors who didn't do the due diligence to realize just how worthless an investment in the margins of a package of marginal loans could be, leading everybody else to need to compete against unsustainable investment rates by doing similarly risky things.
Barney Frank may have told the banks they'd better start making loans to poor people - he didn't tell them to lie about the securities they packaged the loans into, or to invest the profits in a floating crap game by buying up similar bad securities from other scammers. And funny, most of those derivatives and credit default swaps and such were unregulated because of a law the otherwise-conservative Phil Gramm got passed on his way out the door.
You are in a maze of cheesy little movies, all alike?
Yes, if you use your credit card over unencrypted wifi or leak the passwords to your bank account, all that data is fair game to thieves and you should have encrypted it to protect yourself.
But the government aren't supposed to be data thieves; they're supposed to get warrants when they want to wiretap you, just as they're supposed to get warrants before walking into your house even if you've left the door unlocked.
The protocol provides for authentication if you want authentication, and provides for encryption of authenticated traffic, because that matched the most common business model of the businesses who got the standards passed. It doesn't provide for encrypted guest mode, so there's no direct way to get privacy while allowing anybody to access your internet connection; you can fake it by setting your SSID to "Password=guest" or some such. There have even been some recent newspaper articles on a proposal to allow default backdoor access for emergency personnel like firefighters, most of which doesn't recognize that they're really looking for guest access. (5-10 years ago, you could just use "linksys" as your roaming internet access provider, and it'd usually work, but wifi routers pretty much all want the owner to configure security these days.)
Yes, if you want to keep your communications private from private eavesdroppers, you'll have to do that yourself, though they'll let you use the courts for civil lawsuits in some kinds of privacy violation cases.
But this isn't about private wiretapping, it's about government wiretapping, the kind that many people think should be covered by the Fourth Amendment. It's an entirely different issue. After all, if the government wants to open all of your mail and read it, or climb into your house if you forgot to lock all the windows, or break down your door with a battering ram, or tap your phone wires even though they're not encrypted, they used to have to get a warrant first. Same thing should apply here.
There's also a standards problem - the original Wifi security models were designed for business users, so encryption and access authentication are bundled together; they didn't provide an allow-anybody-and-encrypt-everything guest mode. (You could argue that an encrypted open guest mode is susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks, so it's a false illusion of security, but I'd still rather have it be the default.)
I did that for a while. You want one of the doors with a doorknob hole already drilled in it, so you can run your electrical wires conveniently. But for a standing desk, that's not going to be tall enough, though you can still do the plank-and-cinder-block thing on top of it.
Ninja Standing Desk is a couple of lightweight shelves on straps that hang on a wall. You can hang it over a door, or attach it to sheetrock with picture hangers, or whatever. Laptop goes on the top shelf, keyboard on the bottom. They demoed at Maker Faire this year, and they're orderable online after doing a Kickstarter. Designed at Techshop, and you can pay in Bitcoin, so you can check off a whole lot of Hipster Style Points boxes at once, but it seems to be fairly simple and practical, and if you don't like it you can fold it up until somebody else wants to use it. (And their business cards are the obvious throwing-star shape :-)
Get a cheap 19" rack, the two-rail kind without an enclosure, and a couple of shelves. Monitor goes on one, keyboard or laptop on the other, adjust the heights however you want. With an extra shelf or two, it's easy to use it for both sitting and standing, or you can do the barstool thing.
Or yeah, just use a wooden box, or a board and cinder blocks.
I used one of those for a while - cost about $25. No need to get the overpriced chair version. It wasn't entirely comfortable at first, but I got used to it, and it did strengthen my core muscles a bit.
Then one day I rolled back from the desk and didn't see that my cat was behind me. He got startled when it hit him, yowled, and slashed at the ball. I started sinking gradually toward the floor as it deflated. :-) I suppose I should drag out the bicycle patch kit and find where I left the pump to reinflate it, but I haven't bothered.
You may need to pay the tax, but that doesn't mean they'll actually let you. It was originally enacted in the 1930s as a side-door way to ban machine guns, and the Supreme Court upheld it as a tax (even though it would have otherwise potentially violated that Second Amendment.) After that succeeded, the Prohibitionists got Congress to pass a similar tax on Marihuana, that evil weed that causes Reefer Madness, but just because there was a tax didn't mean that you could actually pay it and get permission to use the marijuana. And once they got away with that, we've moved on to the War On Drugs.
There are 3D printers under $500, though most of them aren't big enough to make the bigger gun parts, they're mostly designed for hobbyists who might very well modify them to print bigger things. Or you can join TechShop for about $100/month, and take classes on using their 3D scanner and 3D printers instead of buying your own. The material used to be expensive, but these days you can use ABS or other cheap plastics, and free CAD programs while you're at it.
Remember, the "Print Your Own Gun" folks are saying that they're not printing the barrel or firing pin or a couple of other parts that need to be really precise - most of it's just fine with the 0.2mm printer resolution, and it's not like real-world AK47s were machined more precisely than that. And since this whole thing is really more of a political statement than a practical exercise, remember that a lot of state assault weapon bans haven't just been about how many bullets get fired how fast when you pull the trigger, they're also about how long the barrel is and how scary-looking the stock and attachments are.
And I bet there'll be CAD models for converting your rifle or shotgun into a Zombie Defense Weapon floating around the internet by the end of the year.
No, I'm living in the real California, where Governor Pete Wilson foisted the whole "no driver's licenses for immigrants" thing on us, back in the early 90s. If this were the alternate universe, Pete Wilson would have been State Reptile instead of Governor when he did that.
Yeah, that gets to the "holding it close to my face" part, although I suppose some lampstand expandable arm thingy could help. Typing on glass is easier to fix using an external keyboard (and would be even easier if Apple supported USB directly off the pad, though Bluetooth is an alternative.)
A couple of years ago I finally got an external monitor for my work PC that had more pixels than the Sun 3 I'd used back in the 1980s. (We mainly worked with laptops, and our IT department always thought that having more color depth was more important than more pixels, even though most of us work with text and simple graphics and 16-bit color was plenty. Some years they also thought portability was important, which was nice of them, but had the price of only getting 1024x768.)
Back when I was younger, 1280x1024 pixels was annoyingly small to do development work in, because it limits how much text you could fit on a screen. Now that I need reading glasses, I not only want more pixels than that, but I want a bigger screen to put them on, and holding the latest generation iPad/MacBook close to my face just means typing is awkward.
What did you think the "Motor Voter" bill was about a couple of years ago?
Meanwhile, the DMV seems to have decided that the robots don't speak Spanish, so it's ok to let them drive.
Replace my primary data storage with cloud services? Not a chance. Run my applications cloud-based off cloud-based storage rather than on local storage? No, that's way too slow; even serving disks across Wifi is slow. Not only is it not cost-effective, and not performance-effective, but more importantly, I don't control my data that way.
Get most of my TV from Google/Hulu/Netflix/etc. instead of Comcast? Meh. Most of it's probably there, and digital broadcast TV probably looks better than analog most of the time, but still, it doesn't strike me as worth the trouble.
There's far more variability within Africa than there is within Europeans (or for that matter between Europeans vs. some Africans.) Some of those groups of people headed north, some headed west, some south, they spread around different parts of Africa with different climates and terrains.
It's not so much that you'll find diversity between people in a given community, as it is between people in different parts of Africa. (Obviously this is except where modern trade and migration have brought lots of different people together, and by "modern" I'm including the Arab spread across northern Africa after Mohammed and the slave trade years in sub-Saharan Africa.) Humans had a few hundred thousand years of spreading around the continent, finding ecological niches where they could survive, and becoming more diverse. Somewhere along the line a smaller group of them headed north and became Neandertals, and later modern humans headed north and met them and the Denisovans, but a lot of really different people stayed behind.