But patents are not "knowledge-sharing restrictions." In fact the whole point of patents is to trade a restriction on everyone except the inventor for a complete and careful sharing of the inventor's knowledge. If the patent doesn't explain how to make, produce, or create the device, chemical, or process patented, in such a way that a reasonably knowledgable person in the field can do it, then the patent is invalid.
Even copyrights aren't really restrictions on sharing knowledge, they are restrictions on a specific kinds of commercial exploitations of the work.
And of course trademarks are not knowledge at all. Trademark law is essentially like the registry of brands burned into wood in the back of old Texas courthouses. It's just a system of keeping the origin of products and business's reputations in order.
Like "intellectual property," "knowledge-sharing restrictions" or any single phrase just lumps too much together if you refer to all of trademarks, patents, and copyrights.
Nice, but it's not a computer monitor. That may not matter if you have TV out or something. I don't think you can hook it up the norhtec device, but some of the mini-ITX boards might have a hookup (especially the ones designed for use in building DVD players and digital video recorders).
I think there are 640x480 VGA LCDs for sale in Circuit Cellar and Nuts n' Volts and similar places. That would be fine for my purposes, which is basically a linux text-only console, but I think they are generally higher than $100. The prices will come down though.
I see no reason why a linux floppy distro should be unable to have USB. It may be easier to modify a floppy router than you think. I have done it, and I'm no genius, just persistent.
If you have a particular floppy router you want to start with, first make sure it boots the machine and that evrything works except the USB device.
Then you need a linux machine to build the kernel on, and to build any other utilities you might need. You will configure the kernel in the normal way (make menuconfig) and add in USB and any other support you need. Since this might make the whole system too big for a floppy, go and find things that you don't need and remove them. You should be able to make a custom kernel smaller than the original one.
You will have to find out how your router floppy is assembled. The simplest will be if it has a ramdisk image and the kernel on a FAT formatted floppy with syslinux as the boot loader; in that case you will copy your new kernel to the floppy and run the command "syslinux/dev/fd0".
Don't be intimidated, people tend to over hype the difficulty of these things. It's more just tedious details. If you want to try, send me email and I will be glad to answer questions.
I fully agree with you. If you read the newsgroups of the Association of Shareware Professionals you will find that all of them are simply writing commercial software and distributing demos. In fact, in their "What is Shareware?" page they are at pains to explain exactly how they are different from every company out there that offers a free trial (including Microsoft) -- they resort to saying "you can give our free trials to your friends" which hardly seems all that distinctive.
The ASP should simply define themselves as a guild for "independent" or one-man software shops, because that's what they are. They have no relation to shareware any more. I don't mean to be too critical of them, however, because such a guild or association is badly needed, to do everything from help people buy their own health insurance to lobby against bad copyright laws and zoning that stops you from working from your garage.
The original deal offered in shareware was "here is a fully functional version, if you want it to be worth my time to make more versions, send me a small amount of money." The first adulteration of that was the nag screen which went away once you paid. If you pay to make the nag screen go away, then you are not paying because you want the author to keep writing software.
Sometimes you sent money and you didn't want the software author to keep working on this program, which was perfectly fine and you weren't about to upgrade to something with new features that got in the way. You sent money because you figured, "if this guy has spare time he will probably write something interesting and maybe useful, so it's worth $10 to see what happens."
The spirit of Shareware lives on today in the Free Software authors who have paypal donation buttons and cafepress t-shirt shops. Not in the crippled demos which fill up download.com.
The "hydrogen economy" is like the "battery economy". If we run everything off of batteries, we still have to charge them. Hydrogen and fuel cells are just better batteries.
If oil has peaked (I'm a Texan, I've been hearing that since I could read) you still need to find a way to make hydrogen without using oil. Hydrogen is just the transport method; it's as silly as talking about switching from coal to a "copper economy" because we will all get our electricity from a copper wire. There has to be something on the end of wire, and you have to make the hydrogen.
As for oil peaking, perhaps you would care to place a bet on the price of gas in 3 years ? Pick what you think the lowest price gas could be as we continue to run out.
Nothing will think for you. But if you are the type of person who studies by accumulating a pile of books, reading random pages and then looking up the interesting terms in the indexes of several other books, then you may be able to do that with electronic documents.
Here are some links to indexing and searching software. There is a lot of stuff oriented towards providing search functionality on web pages, but you may want something that just searches your local drive.
MG (it is not necessary to buy the book just to use it).
DesktopDig; nice graphical interface, I had trouble installing it.
Clucene, a C++ version of Lucene. Stay away from Lucene, it's in Java.
Perhaps one of the reasons why google ignores new pages and pages designed to screw their rankings is that people like me, who are google's customers, don't want brand new pages in the rankings, and don't want control over the ranking passed to anybody who can spew out hundreds of pages linking to the same thing. Why should the Glade2 tutorial be in google now ? It is on slashdot. The question is, 18 months from now, will I be able to find the Glade2 tutorial ? Only if you bookmark it, and much more easily if you publish your bookmarks.
My point is that Google is just a re-packaging of your own work. If you say "Wah wah wah, the world is so unfair, my favorite pages aren't in google" you are just complaining about your own failure to publish to the web your favorite pages. Google just re-hashes what we all do. If you think the glade2 tutorial is awesome, then you must tell the world about it. All google does is agregate and re-mix our collective published works.
Think of Google as a sort of P2P system for all of our links. If you aren't publishing your bookmarks and other links, you are just a leacher, and as such shouldn't complain about the lack of what other people are offering.
I can't comment on comparing this bill to others as I have not read the others.
However, fraud is illegal. Why do we also have to make it against the law to commit fraud in certain peculiar ways ? What about the telecommunications industry makes them deserve special protection against fraud that other industries don't get ? In fact, when is the Texas Legislature going to make it illegal for telecommunications companies to defraud Texans ?
I think the "intent" escape clauses are weak. Intent is difficult to prove or disprove. In general, all intention based laws are weak and constitutionally suspicious, because they amount to making certain thoughts illegal. The proposed bill contains this language, apparently an attempt to get around the difficulty in proving or disproving intent:
"Sec. 31.145. PRESUMPTION FOR OFFENSES AFFECTING
COMMUNICATION SERVICE. For purposes of the prosecution of an offense under Section 31.12, 31.13, or 31.14, it is prima facie evidence of the actor's intent to harm or defraud a communication service provider that the actor failed to respond within 30 days to written notice from the provider stating that:
(1) there is an unauthorized connection between the actor's property and a system, network, or facility owned or operated by the provider;
(2) the provider has reason to believe the actor is in possession or control of a communication device that is connected in a manner that facilitates the unauthorized access, acquisition, decryption, interception, receipt, transmission, or retransmission of the provider's communication service; or
(3) the provider has reason to believe the actor is in possession of five or more communication devices or unauthorized access devices for a purpose that is prohibited by law."
So "intent to defraud" can really mean you had possesion of a computer capable of NAT'ing and did not take it down when then sent you a letter. In fact, the "intent" doesn't have to involve any crime; you have criminal intent if you don't obey notice from the telecommunications provider.
This law could say it was illegal to use certain products to defraud. That would be analogous to increasing the penalty for murder when it was committed with a particular weapon. But it doesn't say that; it simply says that it is illegal to possess a tool that might be used to commit a fraud, after an extra-legal entity (the phone company) has sent a letter.
Note this interesting section on what damages they can recover from you:
"Sec. 135.002. EQUITABLE REMEDIES. A claimant, including a communication service provider, aggrieved by a communication services offense may obtain a declaratory judgment or other equitable remedy, including a preliminary or final injunction to prevent or restrain the conduct that constitutes the communication services offense. The claimant may obtain a remedy under this
subsection regardless of whether the claimant proves that the claimant has suffered or is threatened with actual damages or
irreparable harm or lacks an adequate remedy at law."
How do you know ? Presumably you turned them on while on board a commercial flight, and they all gave you the same number. So what do that tell you ? The satillite is sending the same broken information ?
If you look at the email they sent you, the url to the new agreement contains a long random looking string which then re-directs to actual agreement, which has a human-sensible url.
It is likely that they are tracking which email addresses generated a visit to the page.
I've pasted below the URL's from my message, perhaps someone else can do the same for there's, and we can confirm they are different.
Feel free to visit these URLs and help screw up their stats a bit.
I believe that one of the biggest things that the manpages lack are the "Examples" section filled out thoughtfully and appropriately. For examples of manpages done nicely, look at the man pages for mkisofs and cdrecord. Now, there are about 40 pages of tedious descriptions of options no one uses, but once you teach people to page down to the examples section, they can cut and paste and modify one and quickly get stuff done. The rest of the documentation is there if you need it for the strange cases.
Another good one is the simple.xinitrc examples given in the manpages for startx and xinit.
Focusing on examples sections for commands such as tar would be a way to hit some easy low-hanging fruit on the linux documentation front.
And not all distributions man pages are the same -- debian seems to re-write and modify a number, and add them were they are lacking in the original package (syslinux).
I shop at places that don't deal in credit cards whenever possible; also, places that actually manage to get away with charging a higher fee on the credit cards always get my patronage. PCSForEveryone in Cambridge, MA used to give a 2.5% discount for anyone using cash, and cach meant a check as well as greenbacks. (They may still do that). The Albertson's grocery store chain in Texas is fighting the credit card scam, you can tell because if you go to pay with a card, it always asks you for a PIN, trying to force you into debit card mode; only after special action by the register girl does the POS box switch to credit card mode.
I am not being an asshole self-righteous parasite. Regardless of the asshole self-righteous part, I am the HOST, not the parasite, as is anyone who pays in cash.
It is a fact as you point out that you have to deal with scum bags sometimes to get by in life. But that is no reason to deal with them when you don't have to, and that is no reason to just roll over, throw your morals away, and embrace some relativist utilitarian "whatever works for me is right" crap.
That's why it's ok with me if my federal tax money is spent trying to catch Tony S.
But as for the credit problem, the most harm comes to the people who keep paying money to credit agencies thinking the records are correct. Your police thing is a red herring. Landlord, potential bosses, etc, can all be cheaply advised of their mistake; some will persist and suffer the loss of your business.
You say it's everybody's problem. It will be, if there are enough people like you. After all, if 1/2 the population douses themselves with gasoline, burn treatment becomes "everybody's problem." That doesn't mean you can't stop now.
I have many friends and family members just as stupid as you are. Some use plastic because of necessity -- being a student with an unsteady source of income, for example. But many have more than enough money to live richly and save up for everything they would ever need to do, and I hear them nervously discussing the fact that if they get laid off they have only 2 months rent in the bank and nothing for food and other expenses.
If they get laid off it will be my problem too. I will pay their welfare even if I refuse to offer them my couch. I'll have to deal with it.
But I won't not blame them. They earn more than me and somehow have less than me.
I put addicts to the consumer credit world in the same boat. Hell, I would pull credit card reports on potential employees to discriminate against them -- except that I have never, ever, heard of someone who looked at a credit report and didn't find at least one thing absolutely false on it. Now you fuckers are building up a potential disaster. You know you are doing it, otherwise you wouldn't be so nervous about stories about id fraud, you wouldn't be posting in places like this.
You can choose not to fund the people who make "identity theft" possible. You can use a debit card, and take other measures to make sure your money doesn't go towards creating this weird incompetent corporate-consumer secrete database of everyone. But you throw your money in it anyway, and even have the nerve to sit here and argue AHEAD OF TIME that we should bail out your sorry, third class bailing wire and duct tape system.
It is technically possible to do much better in making electronic transactions and credit available without fraud. Just start with the debit card, for example. Why is there such a small portion of charges disputed on debit charges as opposed to credit ones ? Why can't the credit card companies do whatever the banks are doing ?
Likely they can, at some relatively minor cost to the ease and availability of credit cards. But they won't as long as people like you prefer to just cover the cost of the fraud . . . and people like you will always be more likely to stick by it as long as you get spread a little of it over to people like me.
I don't come by my viscious opposition the credit card system lightly. If you want to continue to hold your position that society owes you protection from your own choice of a bullshit way to handle money and reputation, at least read "Paying With Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing" by David Evans and Richard Schmalensee. It's an overview of the scam from someone who doesn't make ethical judgements on it, and indeed seems to approve of the "industry". (It focuses a lot on how credit cards beat their way through the chicken-or-egg problem of getting people to get credit cards when no merchants accepted them and getting merchants to accept them when no people had them.)
If you don't want to go out and buy the book (please not with a credit card) there are numerous other studies available on the web. Here's one that focuses on how non-card holders pay for it:
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/schwarm2/papers/ CardsJan02.pdf
Ultimately, credit reports will not be accurate until consumers refuse to support a heap crap like we have now. The Federal Government isn't going to help anything with regulations; they are part of the problem, busy merging more and more crap databases full of lies into bigger and bigger systems. Only you can put a stop to it, and what you have to do is not use it.
You have to face it: the credit card / credit report system is already fucked. The credit report people have no incentive to not accumulate false information, and the credit card people have no incentive to fight fraud as long you help them make me pay for it. You know that as of this minute. So sometime in the next ten years when you are trying to round up enough cash to retain a lawyer to threaten the credit agencies into actually changing a database record, remember that you made the choice to have this happen to you.
I realize that the identies that are stolen are not from people who used credit cards. After all, this article is about identies being stolen from people who are looking for a job on monster. A non-credit card user can send in the resume.
But the supposed HARM comes only if you want to get more credit cards. The direct cost of the actual fraud will be absorbed by a merchant and/or credit card company, and spread amoung all users of the card or among all customers of that merchant. The indirect cost which you are so absorbed by, is the intense trouble someone wanting to get a new line of credit is subjected to, because the criminal happened to use their name.
To make your Soprano's analogy more correct, Person B's knees get broken only later when THEY GO TO TONY for a loan. All I'm saying, is that they knew they were going to a knee-breaker, I'm not paying the medical bills.
The direct and indirect costs of fraud in the credit card system have to be born by the users of that system. We can't all subsidize it. Otherwise, there is no incentive to make it work in a secure manner.
You need to internalize the fact that the risk of "identity theft" and loosing your comfy little spot in the consumer credit world is part of the cost of that system. You can deal with it by reducing your risk by hiding personal information; you can not deal with it; you can deal with it by saving enough that loss of the credit record won't fuck you that hard, at least not before you have time to fight back; but what you cannot do is pretend it is my problem.
Like the people who build houses in hurricane zones and demand the government subsidize their insurance because it is too high, you somehow have taken this particular cost of your actions and converted it from a cost of a particular product to some entitlement.
All I ask for is:
1) when I buy in cash I do not share the cost of the credit card system, it's fraud, and it's exploitative clearing houses.
2) when I pay my taxes I do not pay the repair bills of people who like to drive fast on icy roads, the rebuilding costs of people who like to build houses on the beach in hurricane zones, or the fraud costs of people who like to get credit for filling out a form and then whine when someone else got their credit by filling out a form.
If you are willing to participate in the system, you have no right to complain.
It's like asking Tony Soprano for a little loan to tide you over. You know what you are getting into so don't bitch. You are just inflating the difficulty of living on your own money to make it easier for you to live with yourself. None of which I have a problem with, I just don't want Congress using my money to bail out your whole little system, I want you to pay for your own needs with the fees/interest on the cards.
-- Buying a house. It can be done in cash, it can be done on an owner-financed loan. But even without that, the first step in house shopping is to go to a couple of banks and get pre-approved for a mortgage up to a certain amount, so that when you talk to sellers you have the proof you are serious. Enough money is involved that loan officiers will investigate and make phone calls. You have to shop around to a few banks anyway, and if a credit agency is lying about you you will have to write and sign a few statements and visit a few extra places. That's all.
-- Rent an apartment. In my experience and on stories from friends it might be harder to rent an appartment with no credit record than buy a house. This is probably because they can always take the house back, keep whatever payments you did manage to make, and come out ahead. But it still can be done. Scumbags all over the US manage to live indoors, so you can to, if you are not a scumbag but some agency says you are.
-- Buy/lease/rent a car. I bought my car for $2,200 cash. A car that is "sufficient", i.e., safe and reliable, can be had for 2 to 4 month's pay (think about a 10 year old Corolla). If you can't save up that you are fucked for life anyway, not my problem, I just don't want to subsidize your need for a plastic card to substitute for lack of discipline in your upbringing.
-- Obtain Airline tickets. Get the flight number and price off of the web, then call and reserve them and say you will pay at the counter. Your ass will be searched, but that's a different flamewar.
--Get a job. Sure, some employers are now checking credit records amoung everything else -- I heard the NPR story also. It might make it harder to get a job, but it doesn't make it impossible, and the kinds of places that are doing that are shitholes anyway, using another piece of database info to filter resumes just because it is available. But in the end, if a credit rating agency lies about YOU and costs you a job, don't bitch. You kept them in business with your plastic habit. *I* can bitch if it happens to me, because I was trully defamed out of the blue. YOU did business with known liars and defamers and now want to come whining to big mommy government.
"All of the above is more aggravated by the fact that the credit card companies, far from being inconvenienced much by the theft, acutally BENEFIT in the form of offering you only extremely high interest loans for some very important things." Like I said in the Soprano analogy, you know exactly what kind of filth you are dealing with. You lie with dogs, get fleas. I'm not cleaning up the mess.
"Try to buy a house in the SF Bay Area . .." If you would even contemplate that, you have other problems. It's proof that America really is a vast land of opportunity, that fools like you don't starve to death, and manage to actually semi-prosper.
" . . . but people whose reputations in a digital world get tarnished are victims, and DO deserve recourse." Ok, if the credit agency lies about you you can sue them. Now, what about people who fund the system ? What about people the people who get their "identity stolen" and still go back for more ? If someone's house is robbed because they left the door open, we feel sorry. The tenth time we just laugh. Until they want us to pay for the missing stuff, then it's time for mercy lynching.
While you choose to live an expensive consumer life of convenience and I don't, I do think we would be in almsot perfect agreement if we agreed on just a couple of points:
1) Any bail out of corporate enablers of "identity theft" fraud comes from a base of fees levied on credit card users, not the general tax fund. As the tax on airplane tickets funds the Air Traffic Control system, so people who don't fly don't pay, and the gasoline tax funds road construction. As taxes on beef auctions pay for meat safety inspections. None of my money gets sent that way.
2) All credit card fees must be explicit on reciepts as additional fees, kind of like another sales tax. Australia recently passed a law to this effect, which is being fought tooth and nail by VISA and other assorted henchmen/lobbiests. So if I go the gas pump and pay with a debit card, I get more gas for $10 than I do if I pay with a credit card.
If those were enforced, the vast mass of plastic addicted people could fuck their way into mutual bankruptcy with their enabling credit card companies WITHOUT BOTHERING ME.
I bought my car for $2,200 in cash and it has served me well for five years. People do buy houses through owner financing or in cash. I fuel my car at any hour of the night with cash, but a debit card (ATM card) works just as well. While I have to show a credit card as gaurantee at some places to rent a car, I never pay by that method -- because I know the rental agency gets to keep more of the money if I pay another way, keeping prices down overall. I know of several (well, ok, 2) middle-class families that have purchased homes outright; and in any case, when you want to buy a house, enough money is involved that you can sit down with the loan officier of the bank, explain the situation, and it's worth their time to make a few phone calls and check it out. I purchase things on line quite regularly; I pay for ebay auctions with US Postal Money Orders (has the added advantage I can send a letter to the Postmaster General if I am ripped off) and I buy books by going to abe.com, finding the phone number of the place that has the best price, calling and reserving it and mailing them a check.
The fact is, you are inflating the restrictions that the unavailability of consumer credit places on your life. They are mostly the loss of convenience, not the loss of ability. It is not a disaster to have a credit agency lie about you.
In any case, even if it WAS a major fucking disaster and relegated you to holding a cardboard sign on a street corner, that would be between you and your credit agencies, and NOT MY PROBLEM. All I ask is that the people who feel terrified (as you do) by the prospect of not being able to get fast, expensive, small amounts of electronic credit PAY FOR THE SYSTEM THEY USE. I don't want to support your little emotional plastic card safety net, I want you to support it with the fees you pay on your purchases.
What ever happened to personal responsibility ? Just because you want to use an insecure, unstable electric money system just suck up the occasional costs. Why drag in the government, other consumers, etc to bail you out ?
When your "identity is stolen" do you forget who you are ? Can your friends not tell the difference between you and the criminal ? Does money disappear from your bank account ? Clearly, this "identity theft" is one of those nasty memes designed to talk us into being ripped off, like "intellectual property" and "savings and loan bailout" and "double taxation" and "child porn" and "social security."
If someone goes to a credit card company and fraudulently get money, does that involve you ? No. Do you loose anything by it ? Only if you are stupid enough to keep using a company that gets ripped off and spreads the cost over it's customers. When you get a bill in the mail for $5,000 in online porn subscriptions, have you been robbed ? No, you just write a certified letter (notarized if a N.P. is handy) explaining the situation -- you are out a half hour of annoyance.
"Oh, but what about my credit record ?" It's the credit company's job to keep accurate records. If they sell inaccurate records, well, that's the problem of the people who bought those inaccurate records -- the credit card companies. Not you. Don't ever pay money to see your credit history; you already know it, for one thing, and for another it's probably a lie.
"Oh, but what if I need to borrow money to buy groceries ?" What if you need to sell drugs to buy groceries ? That's just your unfortunate situation, and you have to deal with the fact you have not saved enough money to make sure you don't have to deal with criminals. Remember, if you use credit cards you already pay for "identity theft" along with other much larger sources of fraud because those costs are spread accross all the accounts.
Most importantly, the fact that YOU choose to do business with people who cannot keep track of money or identities and thus get ripped off is not part of MY business. So, I would like to see the whining in congressional testimonies stop. The credit company got ripped off. If they can track the guy down, we have laws. Either way, they should adjust their plan of business so they don't get robbed again.
Because we all know where this is going. All of our collective tax monies are going to be used to pay off the loses of credit card companies which would rather a fat hand-out than spend the attention to fix their way of business. They want to spread the cost of their broken business over the whole nation instead of just their customers.
This is just what the credit card companies to with respect to their very model of business -- they charge %3.5 percent of every purchase you make to the merchant, but if the merchant explicitly passes that cost on to you, they will not handle that merchant's account, and that merchant can't accept credit cards. Thus, when you pay in cash at a business that accepts credit cards, the cash price is still slightly higher because you are paying for an insecure form of financial transactions THAT YOU DON'T EVEN USE. now these parasites have found a new way to sensationalize a part of their costs and try to get the whole world to pay for them.
So, let's get one thing straight. There is one way to be a victim of identity theft, and that is by WILLINGLY participating in the system, by WILLINGLY paying off that fraudulant bill just to keep your credit record. The Federal Government isn't about to use my tax dollars to track down cheaters on Everquest, because it is understood by all that if you don't like the people running Evercrack you can take your money and your spare time somewhere else. Similarly, credit card addicts should be allowed to rot in the high rates and fees of the system they created, without our enabling subsidies.
There is just one plate in an electrolytic capacitor, not two. The "other plate" is a plastic mylar like separator. There is just the electrolyte-soaked cardboard and the foil.
The dialectric is a film of oxide on the aluminum foil. The goo can't make a noise by moving because it's already painted right on the aluminum, it can't move closer when the thing charges up.
When I blow them up by putting a reverse voltage on them, I see dried goo and some white fiberous stuff.
However, the two I just ripped apart (these are the high-temp one, from the collection I have for re-soldering blown caps on motherboards) had one sheet of aluminum foil, a layer of brown paper soaked in goo, and then a foil layer of some other metal, and then a layer of mylar-like plastic, all rolled up tightly into a plug.
I don't think the two foil layers could expand away from each other and make an audible sound.
However, it did look conceivable to me that gas might expand and move the case or the rubber bung that closed the case. There seemed to be some air space between the aluminum case and the rolled up plug.
But these still aren't plates like in a plate capacitor. The plates don't hold charge, so they don't repel each other. The energy is stored in a chemical change in the goo. The reason for the long strips is to get as much surface area as possible so the charge can get in and out fast and so that it has smaller internal resistence (it's better to have the electrons go through the aluminum foil than go through the goo, I think).
Slashdot Mirror
A moderator needs to look up "honeypot" and realize why this is not off topic.
But patents are not "knowledge-sharing restrictions." In fact the whole point of patents is to trade a restriction on everyone except the inventor for a complete and careful sharing of the inventor's knowledge. If the patent doesn't explain how to make, produce, or create the device, chemical, or process patented, in such a way that a reasonably knowledgable person in the field can do it, then the patent is invalid.
Even copyrights aren't really restrictions on sharing knowledge, they are restrictions on a specific kinds of commercial exploitations of the work.
And of course trademarks are not knowledge at all. Trademark law is essentially like the registry of brands burned into wood in the back of old Texas courthouses. It's just a system of keeping the origin of products and business's reputations in order.
Like "intellectual property," "knowledge-sharing restrictions" or any single phrase just lumps too much together if you refer to all of trademarks, patents, and copyrights.
Nice, but it's not a computer monitor. That may not matter if you have TV out or something. I don't think you can hook it up the norhtec device, but some of the mini-ITX boards might have a hookup (especially the ones designed for use in building DVD players and digital video recorders).
I think there are 640x480 VGA LCDs for sale in Circuit Cellar and Nuts n' Volts and similar places. That would be fine for my purposes, which is basically a linux text-only console, but I think they are generally higher than $100. The prices will come down though.
Where do you get the Tiny LCD screens for $100 ?
If you have a particular floppy router you want to start with, first make sure it boots the machine and that evrything works except the USB device.
Then you need a linux machine to build the kernel on, and to build any other utilities you might need. You will configure the kernel in the normal way (make menuconfig) and add in USB and any other support you need. Since this might make the whole system too big for a floppy, go and find things that you don't need and remove them. You should be able to make a custom kernel smaller than the original one.
You will have to find out how your router floppy is assembled. The simplest will be if it has a ramdisk image and the kernel on a FAT formatted floppy with syslinux as the boot loader; in that case you will copy your new kernel to the floppy and run the command "syslinux /dev/fd0".
Don't be intimidated, people tend to over hype the difficulty of these things. It's more just tedious details. If you want to try, send me email and I will be glad to answer questions.
The ASP should simply define themselves as a guild for "independent" or one-man software shops, because that's what they are. They have no relation to shareware any more. I don't mean to be too critical of them, however, because such a guild or association is badly needed, to do everything from help people buy their own health insurance to lobby against bad copyright laws and zoning that stops you from working from your garage.
The original deal offered in shareware was "here is a fully functional version, if you want it to be worth my time to make more versions, send me a small amount of money." The first adulteration of that was the nag screen which went away once you paid. If you pay to make the nag screen go away, then you are not paying because you want the author to keep writing software.
Sometimes you sent money and you didn't want the software author to keep working on this program, which was perfectly fine and you weren't about to upgrade to something with new features that got in the way. You sent money because you figured, "if this guy has spare time he will probably write something interesting and maybe useful, so it's worth $10 to see what happens."
The spirit of Shareware lives on today in the Free Software authors who have paypal donation buttons and cafepress t-shirt shops. Not in the crippled demos which fill up download.com.
Right now, you get hydrogen from oil.
The "hydrogen economy" is like the "battery economy". If we run everything off of batteries, we still have to charge them. Hydrogen and fuel cells are just better batteries.
If oil has peaked (I'm a Texan, I've been hearing that since I could read) you still need to find a way to make hydrogen without using oil. Hydrogen is just the transport method; it's as silly as talking about switching from coal to a "copper economy" because we will all get our electricity from a copper wire. There has to be something on the end of wire, and you have to make the hydrogen.
As for oil peaking, perhaps you would care to place a bet on the price of gas in 3 years ? Pick what you think the lowest price gas could be as we continue to run out.
Here are some links to indexing and searching software. There is a lot of stuff oriented towards providing search functionality on web pages, but you may want something that just searches your local drive.
Until Scotty finally invents dilithium crystals, the cheapest way to get hydrogen is to take it out of oil, or fuel the splitting of water with oil.
Perhaps one of the reasons why google ignores new pages and pages designed to screw their rankings is that people like me, who are google's customers, don't want brand new pages in the rankings, and don't want control over the ranking passed to anybody who can spew out hundreds of pages linking to the same thing. Why should the Glade2 tutorial be in google now ? It is on slashdot. The question is, 18 months from now, will I be able to find the Glade2 tutorial ? Only if you bookmark it, and much more easily if you publish your bookmarks.
My point is that Google is just a re-packaging of your own work. If you say "Wah wah wah, the world is so unfair, my favorite pages aren't in google" you are just complaining about your own failure to publish to the web your favorite pages. Google just re-hashes what we all do. If you think the glade2 tutorial is awesome, then you must tell the world about it. All google does is agregate and re-mix our collective published works.
Think of Google as a sort of P2P system for all of our links. If you aren't publishing your bookmarks and other links, you are just a leacher, and as such shouldn't complain about the lack of what other people are offering.
Get a web page, and keep a list of links you find useful or interesting.
If enough people do that, then google will naturally work better.
However, fraud is illegal. Why do we also have to make it against the law to commit fraud in certain peculiar ways ? What about the telecommunications industry makes them deserve special protection against fraud that other industries don't get ? In fact, when is the Texas Legislature going to make it illegal for telecommunications companies to defraud Texans ?
I think the "intent" escape clauses are weak. Intent is difficult to prove or disprove. In general, all intention based laws are weak and constitutionally suspicious, because they amount to making certain thoughts illegal. The proposed bill contains this language, apparently an attempt to get around the difficulty in proving or disproving intent:
"Sec. 31.145. PRESUMPTION FOR OFFENSES AFFECTING COMMUNICATION SERVICE. For purposes of the prosecution of an offense under Section 31.12, 31.13, or 31.14, it is prima facie evidence of the actor's intent to harm or defraud a communication service provider that the actor failed to respond within 30 days to written notice from the provider stating that:
(1) there is an unauthorized connection between the actor's property and a system, network, or facility owned or operated by the provider;
(2) the provider has reason to believe the actor is in possession or control of a communication device that is connected in a manner that facilitates the unauthorized access, acquisition, decryption, interception, receipt, transmission, or retransmission of the provider's communication service; or
(3) the provider has reason to believe the actor is in possession of five or more communication devices or unauthorized access devices for a purpose that is prohibited by law."
So "intent to defraud" can really mean you had possesion of a computer capable of NAT'ing and did not take it down when then sent you a letter. In fact, the "intent" doesn't have to involve any crime; you have criminal intent if you don't obey notice from the telecommunications provider.
This law could say it was illegal to use certain products to defraud. That would be analogous to increasing the penalty for murder when it was committed with a particular weapon. But it doesn't say that; it simply says that it is illegal to possess a tool that might be used to commit a fraud, after an extra-legal entity (the phone company) has sent a letter.
Note this interesting section on what damages they can recover from you:
"Sec. 135.002. EQUITABLE REMEDIES. A claimant, including a communication service provider, aggrieved by a communication services offense may obtain a declaratory judgment or other equitable remedy, including a preliminary or final injunction to prevent or restrain the conduct that constitutes the communication services offense. The claimant may obtain a remedy under this subsection regardless of whether the claimant proves that the claimant has suffered or is threatened with actual damages or irreparable harm or lacks an adequate remedy at law. "
My best price ever was 6.5 cents for each pack, in a big 24-piece box.
How do you know ? Presumably you turned them on while on board a commercial flight, and they all gave you the same number. So what do that tell you ? The satillite is sending the same broken information ?
It is likely that they are tracking which email addresses generated a visit to the page.
I've pasted below the URL's from my message, perhaps someone else can do the same for there's, and we can confirm they are different.
Feel free to visit these URLs and help screw up their stats a bit.
http://member.ebay.com/ad/ck/1065-13204-1784-12?m= 3-40&e=c4894d627898
http://member.ebay.com/ad/ck/1065-13204-1784-12?m= 2-40&e=c4894d627898
http://member.ebay.com/ad/ck/1065-13204-1784-12?m= 1-40&e=c4894d627898
http://member.ebay.com/ad/ck/1065-13204-1784-12?m= 4-40&e=c4894d627898
The "m=" part goes up to 9.
I believe that one of the biggest things that the manpages lack are the "Examples" section filled out thoughtfully and appropriately. For examples of manpages done nicely, look at the man pages for mkisofs and cdrecord. Now, there are about 40 pages of tedious descriptions of options no one uses, but once you teach people to page down to the examples section, they can cut and paste and modify one and quickly get stuff done. The rest of the documentation is there if you need it for the strange cases.
.xinitrc examples given in the manpages for startx and xinit.
Another good one is the simple
Focusing on examples sections for commands such as tar would be a way to hit some easy low-hanging fruit on the linux documentation front.
And not all distributions man pages are the same -- debian seems to re-write and modify a number, and add them were they are lacking in the original package (syslinux).
I shop at places that don't deal in credit cards whenever possible; also, places that actually manage to get away with charging a higher fee on the credit cards always get my patronage. PCSForEveryone in Cambridge, MA used to give a 2.5% discount for anyone using cash, and cach meant a check as well as greenbacks. (They may still do that). The Albertson's grocery store chain in Texas is fighting the credit card scam, you can tell because if you go to pay with a card, it always asks you for a PIN, trying to force you into debit card mode; only after special action by the register girl does the POS box switch to credit card mode.
I am not being an asshole self-righteous parasite. Regardless of the asshole self-righteous part, I am the HOST, not the parasite, as is anyone who pays in cash.
It is a fact as you point out that you have to deal with scum bags sometimes to get by in life. But that is no reason to deal with them when you don't have to, and that is no reason to just roll over, throw your morals away, and embrace some relativist utilitarian "whatever works for me is right" crap.
That's why it's ok with me if my federal tax money is spent trying to catch Tony S.
/ CardsJan02.pdf
But as for the credit problem, the most harm comes to the people who keep paying money to credit agencies thinking the records are correct. Your police thing is a red herring. Landlord, potential bosses, etc, can all be cheaply advised of their mistake; some will persist and suffer the loss of your business.
You say it's everybody's problem. It will be, if there are enough people like you. After all, if 1/2 the population douses themselves with gasoline, burn treatment becomes "everybody's problem." That doesn't mean you can't stop now.
I have many friends and family members just as stupid as you are. Some use plastic because of necessity -- being a student with an unsteady source of income, for example. But many have more than enough money to live richly and save up for everything they would ever need to do, and I hear them nervously discussing the fact that if they get laid off they have only 2 months rent in the bank and nothing for food and other expenses.
If they get laid off it will be my problem too. I will pay their welfare even if I refuse to offer them my couch. I'll have to deal with it.
But I won't not blame them. They earn more than me and somehow have less than me.
I put addicts to the consumer credit world in the same boat. Hell, I would pull credit card reports on potential employees to discriminate against them -- except that I have never, ever, heard of someone who looked at a credit report and didn't find at least one thing absolutely false on it. Now you fuckers are building up a potential disaster. You know you are doing it, otherwise you wouldn't be so nervous about stories about id fraud, you wouldn't be posting in places like this.
You can choose not to fund the people who make "identity theft" possible. You can use a debit card, and take other measures to make sure your money doesn't go towards creating this weird incompetent corporate-consumer secrete database of everyone. But you throw your money in it anyway, and even have the nerve to sit here and argue AHEAD OF TIME that we should bail out your sorry, third class bailing wire and duct tape system.
It is technically possible to do much better in making electronic transactions and credit available without fraud. Just start with the debit card, for example. Why is there such a small portion of charges disputed on debit charges as opposed to credit ones ? Why can't the credit card companies do whatever the banks are doing ?
Likely they can, at some relatively minor cost to the ease and availability of credit cards. But they won't as long as people like you prefer to just cover the cost of the fraud . . . and people like you will always be more likely to stick by it as long as you get spread a little of it over to people like me.
I don't come by my viscious opposition the credit card system lightly. If you want to continue to hold your position that society owes you protection from your own choice of a bullshit way to handle money and reputation, at least read "Paying With Plastic: The Digital Revolution in Buying and Borrowing" by David Evans and Richard Schmalensee. It's an overview of the scam from someone who doesn't make ethical judgements on it, and indeed seems to approve of the "industry". (It focuses a lot on how credit cards beat their way through the chicken-or-egg problem of getting people to get credit cards when no merchants accepted them and getting merchants to accept them when no people had them.)
If you don't want to go out and buy the book (please not with a credit card) there are numerous other studies available on the web. Here's one that focuses on how non-card holders pay for it:
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/schwarm2/papers
Ultimately, credit reports will not be accurate until consumers refuse to support a heap crap like we have now. The Federal Government isn't going to help anything with regulations; they are part of the problem, busy merging more and more crap databases full of lies into bigger and bigger systems. Only you can put a stop to it, and what you have to do is not use it.
You have to face it: the credit card / credit report system is already fucked. The credit report people have no incentive to not accumulate false information, and the credit card people have no incentive to fight fraud as long you help them make me pay for it. You know that as of this minute. So sometime in the next ten years when you are trying to round up enough cash to retain a lawyer to threaten the credit agencies into actually changing a database record, remember that you made the choice to have this happen to you.
I realize that the identies that are stolen are not from people who used credit cards. After all, this article is about identies being stolen from people who are looking for a job on monster. A non-credit card user can send in the resume.
But the supposed HARM comes only if you want to get more credit cards. The direct cost of the actual fraud will be absorbed by a merchant and/or credit card company, and spread amoung all users of the card or among all customers of that merchant. The indirect cost which you are so absorbed by, is the intense trouble someone wanting to get a new line of credit is subjected to, because the criminal happened to use their name.
To make your Soprano's analogy more correct, Person B's knees get broken only later when THEY GO TO TONY for a loan. All I'm saying, is that they knew they were going to a knee-breaker, I'm not paying the medical bills.
The direct and indirect costs of fraud in the credit card system have to be born by the users of that system. We can't all subsidize it. Otherwise, there is no incentive to make it work in a secure manner.
You need to internalize the fact that the risk of "identity theft" and loosing your comfy little spot in the consumer credit world is part of the cost of that system. You can deal with it by reducing your risk by hiding personal information; you can not deal with it; you can deal with it by saving enough that loss of the credit record won't fuck you that hard, at least not before you have time to fight back; but what you cannot do is pretend it is my problem.
Like the people who build houses in hurricane zones and demand the government subsidize their insurance because it is too high, you somehow have taken this particular cost of your actions and converted it from a cost of a particular product to some entitlement.
All I ask for is:
1) when I buy in cash I do not share the cost of the credit card system, it's fraud, and it's exploitative clearing houses.
2) when I pay my taxes I do not pay the repair bills of people who like to drive fast on icy roads, the rebuilding costs of people who like to build houses on the beach in hurricane zones, or the fraud costs of people who like to get credit for filling out a form and then whine when someone else got their credit by filling out a form.
Keep your own house clean.
If you are willing to participate in the system, you have no right to complain.
." If you would even contemplate that, you have other problems. It's proof that America really is a vast land of opportunity, that fools like you don't starve to death, and manage to actually semi-prosper.
It's like asking Tony Soprano for a little loan to tide you over. You know what you are getting into so don't bitch. You are just inflating the difficulty of living on your own money to make it easier for you to live with yourself. None of which I have a problem with, I just don't want Congress using my money to bail out your whole little system, I want you to pay for your own needs with the fees/interest on the cards.
-- Buying a house. It can be done in cash, it can be done on an owner-financed loan. But even without that, the first step in house shopping is to go to a couple of banks and get pre-approved for a mortgage up to a certain amount, so that when you talk to sellers you have the proof you are serious. Enough money is involved that loan officiers will investigate and make phone calls. You have to shop around to a few banks anyway, and if a credit agency is lying about you you will have to write and sign a few statements and visit a few extra places. That's all.
-- Rent an apartment. In my experience and on stories from friends it might be harder to rent an appartment with no credit record than buy a house. This is probably because they can always take the house back, keep whatever payments you did manage to make, and come out ahead. But it still can be done. Scumbags all over the US manage to live indoors, so you can to, if you are not a scumbag but some agency says you are.
-- Buy/lease/rent a car. I bought my car for $2,200 cash. A car that is "sufficient", i.e., safe and reliable, can be had for 2 to 4 month's pay (think about a 10 year old Corolla). If you can't save up that you are fucked for life anyway, not my problem, I just don't want to subsidize your need for a plastic card to substitute for lack of discipline in your upbringing.
-- Obtain Airline tickets. Get the flight number and price off of the web, then call and reserve them and say you will pay at the counter. Your ass will be searched, but that's a different flamewar.
--Get a job. Sure, some employers are now checking credit records amoung everything else -- I heard the NPR story also. It might make it harder to get a job, but it doesn't make it impossible, and the kinds of places that are doing that are shitholes anyway, using another piece of database info to filter resumes just because it is available. But in the end, if a credit rating agency lies about YOU and costs you a job, don't bitch. You kept them in business with your plastic habit. *I* can bitch if it happens to me, because I was trully defamed out of the blue. YOU did business with known liars and defamers and now want to come whining to big mommy government.
"All of the above is more aggravated by the fact that the credit card companies, far from being inconvenienced much by the theft, acutally BENEFIT in the form of offering you only extremely high interest loans for some very important things." Like I said in the Soprano analogy, you know exactly what kind of filth you are dealing with. You lie with dogs, get fleas. I'm not cleaning up the mess.
"Try to buy a house in the SF Bay Area . .
" . . . but people whose reputations in a digital world get tarnished are victims, and DO deserve recourse." Ok, if the credit agency lies about you you can sue them. Now, what about people who fund the system ? What about people the people who get their "identity stolen" and still go back for more ? If someone's house is robbed because they left the door open, we feel sorry. The tenth time we just laugh. Until they want us to pay for the missing stuff, then it's time for mercy lynching.
While you choose to live an expensive consumer life of convenience and I don't, I do think we would be in almsot perfect agreement if we agreed on just a couple of points:
1) Any bail out of corporate enablers of "identity theft" fraud comes from a base of fees levied on credit card users, not the general tax fund. As the tax on airplane tickets funds the Air Traffic Control system, so people who don't fly don't pay, and the gasoline tax funds road construction. As taxes on beef auctions pay for meat safety inspections. None of my money gets sent that way.
2) All credit card fees must be explicit on reciepts as additional fees, kind of like another sales tax. Australia recently passed a law to this effect, which is being fought tooth and nail by VISA and other assorted henchmen/lobbiests. So if I go the gas pump and pay with a debit card, I get more gas for $10 than I do if I pay with a credit card.
If those were enforced, the vast mass of plastic addicted people could fuck their way into mutual bankruptcy with their enabling credit card companies WITHOUT BOTHERING ME.
I bought my car for $2,200 in cash and it has served me well for five years. People do buy houses through owner financing or in cash. I fuel my car at any hour of the night with cash, but a debit card (ATM card) works just as well. While I have to show a credit card as gaurantee at some places to rent a car, I never pay by that method -- because I know the rental agency gets to keep more of the money if I pay another way, keeping prices down overall. I know of several (well, ok, 2) middle-class families that have purchased homes outright; and in any case, when you want to buy a house, enough money is involved that you can sit down with the loan officier of the bank, explain the situation, and it's worth their time to make a few phone calls and check it out. I purchase things on line quite regularly; I pay for ebay auctions with US Postal Money Orders (has the added advantage I can send a letter to the Postmaster General if I am ripped off) and I buy books by going to abe.com, finding the phone number of the place that has the best price, calling and reserving it and mailing them a check.
The fact is, you are inflating the restrictions that the unavailability of consumer credit places on your life. They are mostly the loss of convenience, not the loss of ability. It is not a disaster to have a credit agency lie about you.
In any case, even if it WAS a major fucking disaster and relegated you to holding a cardboard sign on a street corner, that would be between you and your credit agencies, and NOT MY PROBLEM. All I ask is that the people who feel terrified (as you do) by the prospect of not being able to get fast, expensive, small amounts of electronic credit PAY FOR THE SYSTEM THEY USE. I don't want to support your little emotional plastic card safety net, I want you to support it with the fees you pay on your purchases.
What ever happened to personal responsibility ? Just because you want to use an insecure, unstable electric money system just suck up the occasional costs. Why drag in the government, other consumers, etc to bail you out ?
When your "identity is stolen" do you forget who you are ? Can your friends not tell the difference between you and the criminal ? Does money disappear from your bank account ? Clearly, this "identity theft" is one of those nasty memes designed to talk us into being ripped off, like "intellectual property" and "savings and loan bailout" and "double taxation" and "child porn" and "social security."
If someone goes to a credit card company and fraudulently get money, does that involve you ? No. Do you loose anything by it ? Only if you are stupid enough to keep using a company that gets ripped off and spreads the cost over it's customers. When you get a bill in the mail for $5,000 in online porn subscriptions, have you been robbed ? No, you just write a certified letter (notarized if a N.P. is handy) explaining the situation -- you are out a half hour of annoyance.
"Oh, but what about my credit record ?" It's the credit company's job to keep accurate records. If they sell inaccurate records, well, that's the problem of the people who bought those inaccurate records -- the credit card companies. Not you. Don't ever pay money to see your credit history; you already know it, for one thing, and for another it's probably a lie.
"Oh, but what if I need to borrow money to buy groceries ?" What if you need to sell drugs to buy groceries ? That's just your unfortunate situation, and you have to deal with the fact you have not saved enough money to make sure you don't have to deal with criminals. Remember, if you use credit cards you already pay for "identity theft" along with other much larger sources of fraud because those costs are spread accross all the accounts.
Most importantly, the fact that YOU choose to do business with people who cannot keep track of money or identities and thus get ripped off is not part of MY business. So, I would like to see the whining in congressional testimonies stop. The credit company got ripped off. If they can track the guy down, we have laws. Either way, they should adjust their plan of business so they don't get robbed again.
Because we all know where this is going. All of our collective tax monies are going to be used to pay off the loses of credit card companies which would rather a fat hand-out than spend the attention to fix their way of business. They want to spread the cost of their broken business over the whole nation instead of just their customers.
This is just what the credit card companies to with respect to their very model of business -- they charge %3.5 percent of every purchase you make to the merchant, but if the merchant explicitly passes that cost on to you, they will not handle that merchant's account, and that merchant can't accept credit cards. Thus, when you pay in cash at a business that accepts credit cards, the cash price is still slightly higher because you are paying for an insecure form of financial transactions THAT YOU DON'T EVEN USE. now these parasites have found a new way to sensationalize a part of their costs and try to get the whole world to pay for them.
So, let's get one thing straight. There is one way to be a victim of identity theft, and that is by WILLINGLY participating in the system, by WILLINGLY paying off that fraudulant bill just to keep your credit record. The Federal Government isn't about to use my tax dollars to track down cheaters on Everquest, because it is understood by all that if you don't like the people running Evercrack you can take your money and your spare time somewhere else. Similarly, credit card addicts should be allowed to rot in the high rates and fees of the system they created, without our enabling subsidies.
I just bookmarked this post. I presume there is a collection of similar little tutorials somewhere, or should we be writing it ?
http://www.faradnet.com/deeley/chapt_02.htm
The dialectric is a film of oxide on the aluminum foil. The goo can't make a noise by moving because it's already painted right on the aluminum, it can't move closer when the thing charges up.
When I blow them up by putting a reverse voltage on them, I see dried goo and some white fiberous stuff.
However, the two I just ripped apart (these are the high-temp one, from the collection I have for re-soldering blown caps on motherboards) had one sheet of aluminum foil, a layer of brown paper soaked in goo, and then a foil layer of some other metal, and then a layer of mylar-like plastic, all rolled up tightly into a plug.
I don't think the two foil layers could expand away from each other and make an audible sound.
However, it did look conceivable to me that gas might expand and move the case or the rubber bung that closed the case. There seemed to be some air space between the aluminum case and the rolled up plug.
But these still aren't plates like in a plate capacitor. The plates don't hold charge, so they don't repel each other. The energy is stored in a chemical change in the goo. The reason for the long strips is to get as much surface area as possible so the charge can get in and out fast and so that it has smaller internal resistence (it's better to have the electrons go through the aluminum foil than go through the goo, I think).