I read an opinion once that the reason the US government is so incompetent and inefficient is because we as Americans expect it to be. Since then I've decided it's kind of true, can you imagine working at a job where people are always blaming you for being inefficient, bad workers and lazy? Who would want to work there?
My sis-in-law works in the Federal court system as a paralegal, basically. Their enormous office building has exactly the minimum legal number of required bathrooms, and one drinking fountain, on the ground floor. When she asked why, she was told that if they put in comfy bathrooms and drinking fountains within a short walking distance of desks, there would be a huge public outcry about how gummint workers had cushy jobs and were too lazy to walk to get a drink -- which is exactly what happened when they DID try and modernize the building. So now she and her coworkers pay out of their pockets to get a Deep Rock water jug once a week. It has to sit on someone's desk, too, because they're not allowed to use floor space for non-governmental property. I'm glad the job pays her reasonably well because it sounds fairly hellish. I have a sink 8 meters from my desk, and our company pays for refrigerators stocked with free drinks, but that's okay because I'm in industry.
I may be wrong about this, since I'm neither an architect nor a structural engineer, but my understanding was that the 3" requirement was for where steel or iron exited the concrete to the outside, as local water infiltration and rust buildup at the concrete/steel/air interface would cause the concrete to crack. Where the steel is contained fully within the concrete the clearance is way less because the assumption is that the steel is in anaerobic conditions. That's just what I learned when I was doing concrete work.
Are you sure about that? Over here, the metallic element is silicon, and the polymerized siloxanes, combinations of silicon, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, are called silicone, from breast implants through industrial vacuum pump oil to tub and window caulking.
I agree. Silicon tits are disgusting. I can't see the attraction at all. Anyway, more than a handful is a waste!
They're also very poky and clanky. Silicone implants, however, aren't bad. Anyway: if you can tell they're artificial it's been poorly done, at one level or another.
I think many of the posters here, who all have great ideas and suggestions, are missing the point of the OP.
...
The Linux community shouldn't be saying "try this" or "tweak that" or "install this device driver" or "switch your hardware"... they should be working on building those into the next revs of the OS and making them part of the default configuration (or at least an easy prompt like XP offers).
Well, if you're expecting someone to immediately respond with "oh, okay, you're right, here's Ubuntu11, that we just released in the thirty seconds since this was posted, but with all your problems fixed" you're going to be disappointed. Presumably people *are* going to start working on this set of problems, given the high visibility of this website among the open source community. In the meantime, during the six months to two years that this process is likely to take, why not give the person who asked the question some suggestions about what can be done as quick attempts to fix the problem?
I'd assumed AC input, yeah. I should've said something about that. (Ya can do it with DC but then you've just reinvented the switching boost converter, which might not be what you intended.)
Switchers that use caps rather than inductors are nice for several reasons, but I've not seen any that can handle higher (over 30VDC) voltage outputs. They may very well exist, but you run into the same issues you do with inductive boosters: you have to find silicon processes that can handle very high voltages, while handling low voltages efficiently, and that's somewhat tricky.
By the way, thanks for all your hard work. I've used tutorial stuff on your website extensively for projects I've done.
Boost converters are pretty easy to make, these days. But you can also use a diode/capacitor-based voltage doubler (tripler, quadrupler...) and get to the same place, which is often easier because you don't have to worry about finding a high-voltage switcher or building some sort of accurate voltage divider so a boost converter controller doesn't get fried through overvoltage. You can use LTSpice to model a doubler and make sure it's actually going to be able to produce the voltage/amperage you need with real-world components, as well. Or you could wind your own transformer on a toroid, if you're feeling particularly adventurous.
Imposing a cost on sending of email is not going to work.
You forget that many times spammers are criminals using botnets composed of hijacked machines, whose innocent owners would wind up paying the price while the spammer cheerfully pays his chump change to the botnet operator.
If the machines are hijacked, they no longer belong to the people who have physical possession of them: they are owned by the botnet operator. As such, it is still the spammer's hardware that is paying the computational cost of sending spam. It has the happy side-effect of letting the people who have physical possession of the machines, know that they no longer own their machines and they better do something about it.
Multitasking in humans is a myth. You might be able to rapidly switch between tasks, but processing more than one thing simultaneously can't be done.
And for all of us who are capable of walking whilst chewing gum, does that make us aliens?
My dad had a stupid party trick. He could count out loud while multiplying three digit numbers in his head, and usually had the answer before he got to 50. Even my *dog* can run without hitting into things, while visually tracking a ball I've thrown and calculating when to jump to catch it. We multitask all the time when we need to.
Since I don't see responses saying the sort of things I'd say, I'll go ahead and say what I was going to say.
Retroviral treatment sometimes works. The problem is we don't have any way of telling where to put the genes we're inserting, and if they insert in the wrong place, the cell could do nasty things: become cancerous, start pumping out odd hormones, start pumping out herpesvirus, are a few that come to mind. It can be done, and has been done, but it's not easy.
Replacement of the entire auto-immune system is really difficult. People have done this experimentally. I worked on a project that was curing feline leukemia virus by doing this. We had a 30% cure rate, a 10% failure rate (cat ended up dying of FLV anyway), and a 60% mortality rate. The problem is that it's very difficult to kill off 100% of the patient's immune system without killing the patient, and if there's anything left, then you have an immune system sumo fight inside the person's body.
Growing a new pancreas is absolutely the best option, and people are working on exactly this, very hard. The main problem is that it's difficult to get larger, more complex organs to grow because they rely on adjacent tissues to get their structure right -- it's a fractal sort of process. So unless you grow the whole body, it's hard to do. But (as someone else mentioned) building what amount to micro-pancreas structures in small encapsulated chunks and putting them in the body, seems to be a good approach.
I think Type I diabetes will be fixed within 15 years. It's easier than Type II. But it's still not easy.
I've made a couple of spotwelders in my time. It's difficult to homebuild a spotwelder that has sufficient amperage to fry a hard disc for at least the following reasons: the power from a 110V, 20A outlet is unlikely to be sufficient to destroy a hard drive. Transformers for a DIY spotwelder, that can handle over 2kW, get breathtakingly expensive even if you're just talking raw materials to wind your own (which I did) so even if you have a 220V, 30A outlet. Aluminum, from which hard drive cases are made, is *very* difficult to destroy with a spotwelder because it's so conductive, so you have to do semi-exotic tricks with semi-exotic metals for your contacts, rather than standard Miller copper-beryllium electrode tips.
If you want to DIY, make your own plasma cutter and slice the thing up. It's a lot easier, if a bit more dangerous.
This thread is replete with people who think it normal that businesses collude to strenghten their position in the labour market. And yet watch the howls go up if someone suggests that the employees do the same.
From "Silk Stockings"
Ninotchka: "So, tell me, Mr. Canfield, in America, are you one of the oppressors, or one of the oppressed?"
Steven Canfield: "Oh, an oppressor, absolutely. And, as one oppressor to another, we both know it's the best place to be."
Technical people often identify not with who they are, but with who they wish to become. We can generalize that: people often support ideas that hurt them, because they think they're going to end up in a place where those same ideas will help them out. Look at Joe The Plumber's question to Obama: he basically wanted to know, "if a miracle happens and I'm suddenly filthy rich, will I have to pay more in taxes?" to which the answer was "yes." So he was very upset because he believed that a miracle was going to happen to him. Same thing holds with many slashdotters.
The satire's better because the target is more interesting. It's easy to model Microsoft as this nearly all-powerful obelisk of pure evil, and there's nothing funny, ironic, or edgy about criticizing pure evil. Apple, however, can be modelled as just as evil as Microsoft but with a cheerful, shiny exterior, like an M&M: crunchy and bright-colored on the outside, but filled with darkness. Suddenly there's room for a lot more range of critical approaches, and a lot more targets, especially the people who only see the shiny exterior.
So what if he increments every time listed in the schedule by 1 minute? Then it bears little resemblance to the original text but is still useful. The added plus is that in order to show that his schedule is based on their schedule, they have to violate the DMCA.
When I see something like "walla!" I think it's funny. That is: I think the person put it in there knowing it was only a vague approximation of the original. But when I see a there/they're/their substitution, or 'where' for 'were', I think the person doesn't know the difference. That tarnishes the person's credibility in my mind. That's probably not warranted: there are plenty of bright people who make spelling and grammar errors. I'm probably going off an obsolete mindset, that most people who are writing in a public space are paid to do it well, and I haven't accommodated to a world in which everyone who has an opinion can present it globally. (Emily Dickinson: "There are a lot of people reading and writing who would be better employed keeping sheep.") I base my bias on my judgment of the mistake's motivation: clever, or stupid? 'Walla' so off-base it's probably clever. Homonym substitution, probably stupid. While I understand that carelessness might let things through, at least for my own part I don't make homonym substitution errors in the first place, so (all elitist and snotty-like) I eye people who do make those mistakes warily.
If we can do it I don't see any reason why major auto manufacturers can't do it since we used their parts
union contracts
I don't understand this comment. It's like replying "the invisible unicorns did it" as far as I can tell. Unions are part of the company -- they're made up of the people who actually do the work on putting cars together. If the company goes out of business, the union is out of business as well, and all the people who are a part of it. They want their company to survive and thrive, to be competitive, because that's how they stay alive. Unions exist to extract the maximum amount of concessions possible out of a company, while returning the minimum possible work, in exactly the same way that a company tries to extract the maximum amount of money out of consumers while providing the minimum possible product. Unions are just groups behaving as rational actors engaging in a business transaction.
If you want to look at someone who doesn't care much about the company surviving, look at top executives, who are going to get paid regardless, and who are well-served by obeying short-term interests and slashing costs, then moving on to another company while the one they just left collapses as a result of their efforts to inflate their resumes at the cost of the company. Again, they're rational actors engaging in a business transaction, but their motivations aren't necessarily aligned with the company's success.
We're currently researching spoofing methods that may disguise the PTTFs until after the connection is made. However, current attempts to make a Punch To The Face look like a Hug From A Friend or Sex With A Girl have been unsuccessful.
I think I've found your problem, outlined in bold above. Perhaps try "Click Here To Start Star Trek Trivia Contest" might work better?
There's a neat article in The New Yorker, about teaching self-control that discusses the marshmallow experiment in considerable detail. What I thought was interesting was that the original experiment was just to see how children dealt with self-control issues, but the psychologist realized, half a dozen years later, in talking to his children (who were part of the experiment) that the kids who had done well in the original experiment were doing much better in school than the kids who hadn't done well, and from that realization he managed to come up with a whole different group of observations and experiments. He ended up showing that there's evidence if you teach children how to distract themselves to increase their sense of self-control, you give them lifelong benefits in terms of decision-making, and those benefits show up in better grades, better jobs, and better health.
>there is no way to prove that there isn't some password that will decrypt this block of bits into meaningful information.
To be more precise, *every* large random block of information, when XORed with a specific key, is child porn, or nuke designs, or the text of the Bible. It's an equation with two unknown variables. Not only is it impossible to prove that the data isn't illegal, it is possible to prove that any string of data *is* illegal. You just have to choose your key.
The Bible is a string of random data that when correctly XORed, provides complete plans to make nerve gas, just the same as every other chunk of data.
Perhaps you think Finland must be tiny, in fact it's land area is 305470 sq km, that's bigger than Arizona. There are only five US states larger than Finland.
Oh, man, I've seen so many deceitful dogs. I love it, especially when it's transparent: the dog *thinks* he/she is doing a great job of fooling you.
My childhood dog knew very well she wasn't supposed to be in my room staring wistfully and hungrily at my pet mice. I'd walk in the room and find her there, right beside the mouse cage, thoughtfully sniffing at... the floor. Where there wasn't anything. Or checking out the wall. And then she'd casually wander out of the room as if to say "nope, no dangerous spots THERE, nosirree!"
Likewise, my brother's dog isn't supposed to jump up on people. However, they don't get upset at her if she jumps up to stretch, for some reason... so suddenly she spends an inordinate amount of time stretching.
However, the best is that wild dogs do the same sorts of things: they actively attempt to deceive. That's what convinces me that it isn't domestication that's lent them this ability. A while back I was out riding my mountain bike cross-country, where there were no roads or paths or anything, probably 15km from the nearest house, and while I was riding down a gulley I saw a coyote behind me a ways. I looked at it, and it was busily sniffing at some bushes, maybe 30 meters away from me. I thought "hey, cool, a coyote!" and rode on a bit further, and looked back, and there was the coyote, still sniffing at some bushes... about 25 meters away from me. Not looking at me, not paying any attention to me, no, not at all. So I rode on, and would quickly look back, and every time I wasn't obviously watching it, it was watching and following me, but every time I stopped it started watching everything *but* me. Good hunting behavior.
What makes it more interesting is that my sis-in-law saw her childhood dog hunted by coyotes doing something similar: one coyote would walk up near her dog, casually, and her dog would run over to say hi or warn it off, and a half-dozen other coyotes would suddenly appear out of bushes behind her dog. It was a distraction/flanking maneuver designed perfectly to deceive a single big dog. So I wonder if the one coyote I saw wasn't part of a pack.
I'd like to think that learning-electronics-kits would work. But I don't think it would because nobody would be interested.
Some people do hobbies for fun, but commercially viable hobby work seems to be in areas that are still developing rapidly enough that many individuals can make useful contributions to the state of the art. I think electronics has passed this point, with wide use of ultra-small components and tight coupling of software and hardware (fpga's.) So now electronics is where blacksmithing was in the 1930's and manual lathes and mills in the 1970's: the few people who can still do relevant work already are doing it, and nobody really thinks their kids could have a good future in the industry when there are so many more attractive careers.
I'm saying that as someone who is very interested in blacksmithing, lathes, and electronics.
Even Jameco has better pricing and will get you stuff in your hands in 3 days.
And that's exactly what you're buying when you pay for horribly overpriced resistors at Radio Shack: three days, and all the overhead required to sell individual resistors. When I buy from digikey, I often find it's cheaper to buy a reel of 2500 resistors than it is to buy 200 resistors cut-tape. And Radio Shack has to buy those dumb-looking shirts and keep a zillion bad cellphones in stock on its shelves, as well as all the resistors I don't need that day.
I really miss TechAmerica, Radio Shack's ill-fated attempt to restart electronics components stores, where I only paid maybe 3x what jameco costs, and could get nearly anything in under an hour. Those only lasted 3 years, as I recall.
Slashdot Mirror
I read an opinion once that the reason the US government is so incompetent and inefficient is because we as Americans expect it to be. Since then I've decided it's kind of true, can you imagine working at a job where people are always blaming you for being inefficient, bad workers and lazy? Who would want to work there?
My sis-in-law works in the Federal court system as a paralegal, basically. Their enormous office building has exactly the minimum legal number of required bathrooms, and one drinking fountain, on the ground floor. When she asked why, she was told that if they put in comfy bathrooms and drinking fountains within a short walking distance of desks, there would be a huge public outcry about how gummint workers had cushy jobs and were too lazy to walk to get a drink -- which is exactly what happened when they DID try and modernize the building. So now she and her coworkers pay out of their pockets to get a Deep Rock water jug once a week. It has to sit on someone's desk, too, because they're not allowed to use floor space for non-governmental property. I'm glad the job pays her reasonably well because it sounds fairly hellish. I have a sink 8 meters from my desk, and our company pays for refrigerators stocked with free drinks, but that's okay because I'm in industry.
I may be wrong about this, since I'm neither an architect nor a structural engineer, but my understanding was that the 3" requirement was for where steel or iron exited the concrete to the outside, as local water infiltration and rust buildup at the concrete/steel/air interface would cause the concrete to crack. Where the steel is contained fully within the concrete the clearance is way less because the assumption is that the steel is in anaerobic conditions. That's just what I learned when I was doing concrete work.
Are you sure about that? Over here, the metallic element is silicon, and the polymerized siloxanes, combinations of silicon, carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, are called silicone, from breast implants through industrial vacuum pump oil to tub and window caulking.
I agree. Silicon tits are disgusting. I can't see the attraction at all. Anyway, more than a handful is a waste!
They're also very poky and clanky. Silicone implants, however, aren't bad. Anyway: if you can tell they're artificial it's been poorly done, at one level or another.
I think many of the posters here, who all have great ideas and suggestions, are missing the point of the OP.
...
The Linux community shouldn't be saying "try this" or "tweak that" or "install this device driver" or "switch your hardware"... they should be working on building those into the next revs of the OS and making them part of the default configuration (or at least an easy prompt like XP offers).
Well, if you're expecting someone to immediately respond with "oh, okay, you're right, here's Ubuntu11, that we just released in the thirty seconds since this was posted, but with all your problems fixed" you're going to be disappointed. Presumably people *are* going to start working on this set of problems, given the high visibility of this website among the open source community. In the meantime, during the six months to two years that this process is likely to take, why not give the person who asked the question some suggestions about what can be done as quick attempts to fix the problem?
Switchers that use caps rather than inductors are nice for several reasons, but I've not seen any that can handle higher (over 30VDC) voltage outputs. They may very well exist, but you run into the same issues you do with inductive boosters: you have to find silicon processes that can handle very high voltages, while handling low voltages efficiently, and that's somewhat tricky.
By the way, thanks for all your hard work. I've used tutorial stuff on your website extensively for projects I've done.
Boost converters are pretty easy to make, these days. But you can also use a diode/capacitor-based voltage doubler (tripler, quadrupler...) and get to the same place, which is often easier because you don't have to worry about finding a high-voltage switcher or building some sort of accurate voltage divider so a boost converter controller doesn't get fried through overvoltage. You can use LTSpice to model a doubler and make sure it's actually going to be able to produce the voltage/amperage you need with real-world components, as well. Or you could wind your own transformer on a toroid, if you're feeling particularly adventurous.
Imposing a cost on sending of email is not going to work.
You forget that many times spammers are criminals using botnets composed of hijacked machines, whose innocent owners would wind up paying the price while the spammer cheerfully pays his chump change to the botnet operator.
If the machines are hijacked, they no longer belong to the people who have physical possession of them: they are owned by the botnet operator. As such, it is still the spammer's hardware that is paying the computational cost of sending spam. It has the happy side-effect of letting the people who have physical possession of the machines, know that they no longer own their machines and they better do something about it.
Multitasking in humans is a myth. You might be able to rapidly switch between tasks, but processing more than one thing simultaneously can't be done.
And for all of us who are capable of walking whilst chewing gum, does that make us aliens?
My dad had a stupid party trick. He could count out loud while multiplying three digit numbers in his head, and usually had the answer before he got to 50. Even my *dog* can run without hitting into things, while visually tracking a ball I've thrown and calculating when to jump to catch it. We multitask all the time when we need to.
Retroviral treatment sometimes works. The problem is we don't have any way of telling where to put the genes we're inserting, and if they insert in the wrong place, the cell could do nasty things: become cancerous, start pumping out odd hormones, start pumping out herpesvirus, are a few that come to mind. It can be done, and has been done, but it's not easy.
Replacement of the entire auto-immune system is really difficult. People have done this experimentally. I worked on a project that was curing feline leukemia virus by doing this. We had a 30% cure rate, a 10% failure rate (cat ended up dying of FLV anyway), and a 60% mortality rate. The problem is that it's very difficult to kill off 100% of the patient's immune system without killing the patient, and if there's anything left, then you have an immune system sumo fight inside the person's body. Growing a new pancreas is absolutely the best option, and people are working on exactly this, very hard. The main problem is that it's difficult to get larger, more complex organs to grow because they rely on adjacent tissues to get their structure right -- it's a fractal sort of process. So unless you grow the whole body, it's hard to do. But (as someone else mentioned) building what amount to micro-pancreas structures in small encapsulated chunks and putting them in the body, seems to be a good approach. I think Type I diabetes will be fixed within 15 years. It's easier than Type II. But it's still not easy.
If you want to DIY, make your own plasma cutter and slice the thing up. It's a lot easier, if a bit more dangerous.
ITYM "TL;DR" HTH HAND
This thread is replete with people who think it normal that businesses collude to strenghten their position in the labour market. And yet watch the howls go up if someone suggests that the employees do the same.
From "Silk Stockings"
Ninotchka: "So, tell me, Mr. Canfield, in America, are you one of the oppressors, or one of the oppressed?"
Steven Canfield: "Oh, an oppressor, absolutely. And, as one oppressor to another, we both know it's the best place to be."
Technical people often identify not with who they are, but with who they wish to become. We can generalize that: people often support ideas that hurt them, because they think they're going to end up in a place where those same ideas will help them out. Look at Joe The Plumber's question to Obama: he basically wanted to know, "if a miracle happens and I'm suddenly filthy rich, will I have to pay more in taxes?" to which the answer was "yes." So he was very upset because he believed that a miracle was going to happen to him. Same thing holds with many slashdotters.
The satire's better because the target is more interesting. It's easy to model Microsoft as this nearly all-powerful obelisk of pure evil, and there's nothing funny, ironic, or edgy about criticizing pure evil. Apple, however, can be modelled as just as evil as Microsoft but with a cheerful, shiny exterior, like an M&M: crunchy and bright-colored on the outside, but filled with darkness. Suddenly there's room for a lot more range of critical approaches, and a lot more targets, especially the people who only see the shiny exterior.
So what if he increments every time listed in the schedule by 1 minute? Then it bears little resemblance to the original text but is still useful. The added plus is that in order to show that his schedule is based on their schedule, they have to violate the DMCA.
When I see something like "walla!" I think it's funny. That is: I think the person put it in there knowing it was only a vague approximation of the original. But when I see a there/they're/their substitution, or 'where' for 'were', I think the person doesn't know the difference. That tarnishes the person's credibility in my mind. That's probably not warranted: there are plenty of bright people who make spelling and grammar errors. I'm probably going off an obsolete mindset, that most people who are writing in a public space are paid to do it well, and I haven't accommodated to a world in which everyone who has an opinion can present it globally. (Emily Dickinson: "There are a lot of people reading and writing who would be better employed keeping sheep.") I base my bias on my judgment of the mistake's motivation: clever, or stupid? 'Walla' so off-base it's probably clever. Homonym substitution, probably stupid. While I understand that carelessness might let things through, at least for my own part I don't make homonym substitution errors in the first place, so (all elitist and snotty-like) I eye people who do make those mistakes warily.
If we can do it I don't see any reason why major auto manufacturers can't do it since we used their parts
union contracts
I don't understand this comment. It's like replying "the invisible unicorns did it" as far as I can tell. Unions are part of the company -- they're made up of the people who actually do the work on putting cars together. If the company goes out of business, the union is out of business as well, and all the people who are a part of it. They want their company to survive and thrive, to be competitive, because that's how they stay alive. Unions exist to extract the maximum amount of concessions possible out of a company, while returning the minimum possible work, in exactly the same way that a company tries to extract the maximum amount of money out of consumers while providing the minimum possible product. Unions are just groups behaving as rational actors engaging in a business transaction.
If you want to look at someone who doesn't care much about the company surviving, look at top executives, who are going to get paid regardless, and who are well-served by obeying short-term interests and slashing costs, then moving on to another company while the one they just left collapses as a result of their efforts to inflate their resumes at the cost of the company. Again, they're rational actors engaging in a business transaction, but their motivations aren't necessarily aligned with the company's success.
We're currently researching spoofing methods that may disguise the PTTFs until after the connection is made. However, current attempts to make a Punch To The Face look like a Hug From A Friend or Sex With A Girl have been unsuccessful.
I think I've found your problem, outlined in bold above. Perhaps try "Click Here To Start Star Trek Trivia Contest" might work better?
There's a neat article in The New Yorker, about teaching self-control that discusses the marshmallow experiment in considerable detail. What I thought was interesting was that the original experiment was just to see how children dealt with self-control issues, but the psychologist realized, half a dozen years later, in talking to his children (who were part of the experiment) that the kids who had done well in the original experiment were doing much better in school than the kids who hadn't done well, and from that realization he managed to come up with a whole different group of observations and experiments. He ended up showing that there's evidence if you teach children how to distract themselves to increase their sense of self-control, you give them lifelong benefits in terms of decision-making, and those benefits show up in better grades, better jobs, and better health.
To be more precise, *every* large random block of information, when XORed with a specific key, is child porn, or nuke designs, or the text of the Bible. It's an equation with two unknown variables. Not only is it impossible to prove that the data isn't illegal, it is possible to prove that any string of data *is* illegal. You just have to choose your key.
The Bible is a string of random data that when correctly XORed, provides complete plans to make nerve gas, just the same as every other chunk of data.
Perhaps you think Finland must be tiny, in fact it's land area is 305470 sq km, that's bigger than Arizona. There are only five US states larger than Finland.
...and Texas is two of them.
And Alaska is all the others and then some...
I have my bill down to 35$ a month though AT&T...
Oh yeah? I have mine down WAY lower than that. *WAY* lower.
Here are the steps I took. You have to do them all, in order, to get the low low price.
1. Get an AT&T Go Phone, so you only pay as you use the thing, plus a small yearly charge to keep your number.
2. Forget to pay your yearly charge, for, like, two or three years.
3. Run your phone through the clothes washer repeatedly.
Then your cellphone bill will be *awesomely* low.
Next, I can tell you how to get an amazingly low monthly ISP bill, but I bet you already know the NO CARRIER punchline...
My childhood dog knew very well she wasn't supposed to be in my room staring wistfully and hungrily at my pet mice. I'd walk in the room and find her there, right beside the mouse cage, thoughtfully sniffing at
Likewise, my brother's dog isn't supposed to jump up on people. However, they don't get upset at her if she jumps up to stretch, for some reason... so suddenly she spends an inordinate amount of time stretching.
However, the best is that wild dogs do the same sorts of things: they actively attempt to deceive. That's what convinces me that it isn't domestication that's lent them this ability. A while back I was out riding my mountain bike cross-country, where there were no roads or paths or anything, probably 15km from the nearest house, and while I was riding down a gulley I saw a coyote behind me a ways. I looked at it, and it was busily sniffing at some bushes, maybe 30 meters away from me. I thought "hey, cool, a coyote!" and rode on a bit further, and looked back, and there was the coyote, still sniffing at some bushes... about 25 meters away from me. Not looking at me, not paying any attention to me, no, not at all. So I rode on, and would quickly look back, and every time I wasn't obviously watching it, it was watching and following me, but every time I stopped it started watching everything *but* me. Good hunting behavior.
What makes it more interesting is that my sis-in-law saw her childhood dog hunted by coyotes doing something similar: one coyote would walk up near her dog, casually, and her dog would run over to say hi or warn it off, and a half-dozen other coyotes would suddenly appear out of bushes behind her dog. It was a distraction/flanking maneuver designed perfectly to deceive a single big dog. So I wonder if the one coyote I saw wasn't part of a pack.
Some people do hobbies for fun, but commercially viable hobby work seems to be in areas that are still developing rapidly enough that many individuals can make useful contributions to the state of the art. I think electronics has passed this point, with wide use of ultra-small components and tight coupling of software and hardware (fpga's.) So now electronics is where blacksmithing was in the 1930's and manual lathes and mills in the 1970's: the few people who can still do relevant work already are doing it, and nobody really thinks their kids could have a good future in the industry when there are so many more attractive careers.
I'm saying that as someone who is very interested in blacksmithing, lathes, and electronics.
Even Jameco has better pricing and will get you stuff in your hands in 3 days.
And that's exactly what you're buying when you pay for horribly overpriced resistors at Radio Shack: three days, and all the overhead required to sell individual resistors. When I buy from digikey, I often find it's cheaper to buy a reel of 2500 resistors than it is to buy 200 resistors cut-tape. And Radio Shack has to buy those dumb-looking shirts and keep a zillion bad cellphones in stock on its shelves, as well as all the resistors I don't need that day.
I really miss TechAmerica, Radio Shack's ill-fated attempt to restart electronics components stores, where I only paid maybe 3x what jameco costs, and could get nearly anything in under an hour. Those only lasted 3 years, as I recall.