Glad you like it! As for scanners, I bought my first one secondhand on amazon for $45. It served me throughout Uni for the next 5 years, until I got a new one (it came as a 2-for-1 deal with a new printer). If that is beyond your budget I have seen them be thrown/given away (especially old parallel port ones), and a lot of them work well with Linux.
Yeah.. My site, like the rest of my non work life, is out of date and broken (the counter no longer increments, and it doesn't load properly, breaking the site). I am in the process of rewriting the backend, but time is short.
Thanks a lot, hopefully times will get better soon, and then I can devote some proper time to personal projects again:)
Good luck with your attempts to find a scanner as well!
Hope it is useful to you, or at least interesting:)
I don't think it is worth selling the script, it isn't that fancy, not to mention that then I would be on the hook for supporting it. Since the recession hit I've had to work 2 jobs, and I really don't have much time to devote to personal nerdy pursuits. Barely have time to sleep as it is:(
All I can do is publish and hope it helps others. That little script has made my life a lot easier and less cluttered. With any luck others with more time will improve on it and we all benefit:)
And it isn't your settings. I also get an invalid certificate on Firefox and Chromium. Something is up with the link, so I just went ahead and used the actual github.com site to host it.
My situation is the same, except that I move often, and have to keep legal documents for a few years (typically 5). I also have paper copies of invoinces and Bills (loads). I didn't want to have to lug boxes and boxes of paper, so I developed a script to do the following:
1) Scan the document page by page, and save as tiff (300dpi) 2) Run open source OCR on it, and save the resulting text to the tiff "comment" field on the metadata 3) Save it in my file server. 4) Index it with a desktop search program (here is a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_search). This has the nice facility of scanning the metadata and allowing you to search it. This way I can search documents by text, ignoring the fact OCR is not 100% correct (it is usually correct enough for me to find the document I want), while having the pure text in photocopy quality as a TIFF (this is very important for legal documents, as OCR'd versions are not acceptable replacments).
I have been wondering whether it would be worth open sourcing the script (for the moment it is a bit hacky, but it has been serving me well for years now). If the TIFFs take up to much space for you liking, subsitute with PNG/JPEG/etc...
So far it has served me well, I've been collecting hundreds of documents this way. The only manual step is the script requesting a filename (not a big deal for me, as I have to manually put each page into the scanner anyway).
If you are interested let me know, and I can post the script.
Meh, I cashed out my 300 bitcoins a few months ago, having mined them back when CPU's could unlock 50 within a couple of weeks. Somewhat kicking myself, as I sold them at $14 a bitcoin, and now they are something like $100.
Considered getting back into mining with FPGA's, but it is really hard to get much nowadays, so not sure if worth it. I had a good run, and made some decent coin, even though it is paltry compared to this.
Oh well, good thing I don't do investment as a business, I sure suck at it:o)
- I live round the London area, the M1 has speed cameras that don't seem to work, and I have seen people exceed 100mph there.
- The M20 has no cameras as far as I saw, but they do have unmarked and marked police cars. My only interaction with the coppers was with my mate in his car for doing 155mph, but only after we pulled over ourselves (i.e. no blue lights or anything, they just followed us), and we didn't get booked for speeding. They just asked us why we were in such a hurry.
- The M40 is more of the same. Once when I was in the far lane temporarily in order to overtake and I could not keep up with traffic while going at 100mph (my car can't safely go any faster). However on entry to London, especially where the M40 meets the A40, there are loads of speed cameras. Especially in the built up residential areas (40mph limit, and with good reason). On the way out of London I saw only average speed cameras here, but have no idea if they work. I certainly got no tickets from it so far.
- The A40 into Oxfordshire has no speed cameras, or police. So the locals seem to love hitting the gas down that strip.
- I got pulled over in Richmond, but they didn't seem to care about the speeding. They just checked my licence and asked me questions about the car.
- Don't speed in Essex, they really come down hard on you from what I have heard. Every time I have been there you can see their police helicopter following someone on the road.
That is just my experience/information, and I admit it is anecdotal. And yes, if there is traffic, you can't go fast. I am not saying the above happens 100% of the time, but there are opportunities and people seem to take them. It also depends on how you drive. If you are speeding in residential areas, weaving in and out of traffic, undertaking at speed or generally driving recklessly, expect a booking.
I feel that the changes might be due to a large influx of continental Europeans, who bring their cars and driving styles with them. Since the EU crisis started I am seeing more and more Germans/French and others about. Or the crisis has heavily cut the police traffic enforcement budget, I have no idea.
It is different in Europe, where speed limits are seen as recommendations. While driving across for a road trip we averaged 110mph throughout, including slow city driving. We only got stopped 3 times, and not once for speeding (in Belgium we were stopped only so the cops could look under the hood). Europe is without a doubt more car friendly, but the UK is not exactly the total pile of misery some people portray it as (except for speed bumps, god I hate those things, and London is getting more and more of them).
You would think so, but I have passed those average speed cameras many times, never actually going at the speed limit and just keeping in time with the traffic, and never got a ticket.
I honestly don't know if they even work, or if they just turn them on at set hours of the day or something (someone told me that they can't track lane switches, but I find that hard to believe).
I can only assume that budget cuts mean most of them no longer work. Since the coalition took over the number of camera's that actually work have reduced (I believe the Tories talked about reducing the cameras as part of their platform, along with other generic "easing the burden on the motorist" promises) .
Additionally, most speed cameras are not on motorways, but on A roads and smaller. Some motorways do have them, so as long as you know where they are and take care, you should be ok (just pay attention to the cars ahead, and leave a good amount of space. Every once in a while someone doesn't know there is a camera there and slams on their brakes. You don't want to end up in their rear).
It also depends on which county you are in. Some are car unfriendly, and will do everything they can to dissuade you from owning or using a car, including punitive chargers and speed cameras everywhere.
Others are really lax about it, and have things like free parking, little/no ticket wardens and few speed cameras (usually on actual dangerous roads, where they should be).
Clarkson lives in Oxfordshire, which from what the locals tell me. is a pretty car unfriendly place (only place I have seen 15/20mph speed limits on public roads).
Don't know where you live in the UK, but I have easily seen people hit 130mph on motorways (about 200km/h, which is the maximum recommended speed on autobahns).
In fact it is getting so that even the "slow lane" has people doing 70mph, the middle has 90mph, and 100mph+ is in the far lane.
Not sure about the death rate between the two countries, but I would have thought the UK's would be higher, primarily because people in the UK don't seem to know that you should slow down in adverse conditions. People seem to do 90mph no matter what. In clear weather, rain, fog, etc...
It seems the police will only stop you if you are driving dangerously, and they have the sense to know that isn't the same as driving fast.
I use lavabit.com, who say they store their emails encrypted in such a way that if you lose your password, they can't get it back.
No saying if this is true or not (from my experience), but they do seem to give it a good try. Make good use of GPG encryption (don't send email in plaintext) and it should be good enough for normal use (if you really are worried about the NSA spying on you, you will need to at least think of running your own infra).
Well, I remember when I looked into applying to do an undergraduate course in Belgrade, I was discouraged to find that most employers in the EU would not recognise it.
Essentially I would need to do an undergraduate course there, and then use that to get into a EU University (possible, but not guaranteed), from which I would have the credentials to get a job. Essentially adding 3 years (and quite a bit of cost) to my education.
So for now I stuck with being in a EU country, as that is recognised everywhere, even there.
Interesting, if I may ask, How difficult was it to buy a house in Montenegro and Belgrade? How much did it cost?
I remember when my parents bought a flat in Belgrade, when it came to sell it there was a problem, as some original documentation were missing. Essentially the paper saying we owned the flat was worthless, and we were close to losing the whole thing with no compensation. After a few thousand euro's and much arguing with lawyers and the government we got new documents affirming us as owners, and allowing us to sell.
However the whole thing put me off. The idea I could buy a property, then find out that I don't actually own it because a document went missing 10 years ago due to the wars/upheaval wasn't really tempting. Especially as you could be looking at tens of thousands of euro's lost.
What is wrong with the recent resurgence of Nationalism? Having spent so much time there, I found the level of nationalism to always have been there. It never really subsided. It doesn't seem to have altered much really. It may be more visible, but it isn't new nor unexpected.
Oh, and the bureaucracy, I remember getting my passport renewed. Unless you bribe someone, or know someone high up personally, it is so painful and slow, that getting my teeth pulled out without anesthetic would be preferable.
For me the main issue is finding a job that would allow me to work from abroad, yet pay me a western salary. My current employer is unwilling to let me do that as of yet, but I keep asking.
Still, I am very glad you are enjoying it, and may I welcome you to the completely crazy world that is the Balkans and its peoples:o) (I think we are an awesome lot once you get to know us, but then again I am biased:) )
It may have calmed, but until a lasting solution is found, it will be able to flair up at any moment. It just isn't tenable to have a province partly recognised as an independent country, and still held as part of another country.
At best it will end up like Nagorno-Karabakh, a small semi-recognized state with little future. Neither side could enter the EU (as since admitting in Cyprus, they have little appetite for taking in more countries where nobody agrees where the border is).
In the middle situation, you could have localised clashes , with EU/NATO having to have a long term presence to keep the two sides separate. Costly, and still not fixing the underlying issue. Essentially not so much "at peace" as much as "lack of war" situation.
At worst you could see a return to full scale hostilities, which, depending no whether the big powers decide to play geopolitics with the issue, could end up looking like a bunch of minor skirmishes, or like Syria now.
Still, the two sides are negotiating, which while I feel hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell of actually changing anything, it is better than blowing each others brains out.
Glad you had a nice time though. If you love history then you'll love the Balkans, pretty much everything is history. Even the current fight over Kosovo goes back some 800 years. There is so much history, there are entire university departments dedicated to it. Must be heaven to a history buff;)
Well, yeah it is nice, but if you want to have a family there, education is a big problem.
Especially as many of the local universities in the Balkans, despite being pretty good, are not recognised in the west, which makes it hard for your kids to get a western job that pays you to live so well in the Balkans.
Also, the security situation next door (Serbia/Kosovo) is... untenable to say the least. So in future that may cause problems.
Also, the legal structures... there is not so much protection of your investments. Lots of corruption, and ambiguity (especially amongst property ownership and rights).
Apart from that, the Balkans are a lovely place, and if I ever manage to find a job that allows me to work remotely for good money, I will go back there (At least until I decide to have kids).
(The points above are gathered from my friends and family, who still live down there. As well as my research into the possibility of returning).
I do wonder then if you can use other fuels as a propellant, anything from propane onwards can be compressed and ignited to force a projectile, not unlike in an IC engine.
What is the government going to do? Ban everything from Gasoline onwards? No flammable fuels anymore?
That does not even touch on the fact that gunpowder is trivial to make yourself. If people could make it hundreds of years ago with their technology level, I'm sure a suitably driven individual could do it now in his backyard.
Yeah, except back in the 2000's people would be thinking it is a cool idea, and would be at least 4 other people who have recently done it and can give tips.
Now it is just people saying "Meh, throw it away and buy newer more powerful boxes". True, and the rational choice, but still rather bland...
I remember when nerds here were willing to do all kinds of crazy things, even if they were not a good long term solution. Maybe we all just grew old and crotchety or something:P
(Spoken as someone who had a lot of fun building an openmosix cluster from old AMD 1.2GHz machines my uni threw out.)
No, you are not trying to stop. Ok, let me rephrase, the people might be trying to stop, but your governments are not, in fact they are doing it more and more.
The fact that governments in the west have become a law unto themselves and don't listen to the people is a problem that I don't see any good (non-violent) way of solving. Until that problem is addressed you can try to stop all you want, for what little good it will do.
You do realise that a lot of countries in the EU have been implicated in the torture and the ferrying of suspects to other countries with more lax rules on "interrogation methods"?
If there is one thing that the western European nations have not done, it is learn from the past, the same stuff is still going on today, including ignoring/violating international law when it suits them. The difference is that now they have the media to gloss over and sugercoat it so the citizens honestly feel they are the good guys.
No it cannot escape, my understanding is that the water molecules are too heavy to "float away" from the earths gravity. In fact chances are we have more water than back when the dinosaurs roamed, for the simple reason that all those frozen balls of ice that occasionally smash into the earth from the heavens have an ungodly amount of water in them.
Over the time span of the earths existance, I would suspect that the amount of water has been steadily increasing, overall.
To be fair, some of us still have a lot of VGA equipment. For example, all my monitors, and my TV, have VGA ports (and I still use them). The quality is good enough for me.
My RasPi has the issue that I don't actually have anything with HDMI to plug it into, so have had to use the composite output to my TV (no ideal by any measure). I wish it had a VGA header at least.
I would file civil war under 2). Like Rome, empires usually collapse into bickering sides, which can result in a civil war destroying what is left of said empire.
However I don't have my ear close to the US ground, so I really don't know how likely a civil war is to break out before a collapse.
From what I see, there is a lot of noise on one side, yet very little action. While the other side is doing everything it can to restrict the ability to stage an armed revolt (be it via weapon controls, security checkpoints, spying or other means).
How likely is it for a civil war to break out in the US soon (by soon, I mean in the next 10 years)?
That doesn't make sense though. So you are selling the electricity for below market value? I would have thought you'd at least sell it for the same rate as you buy it from. How much do you pay per KW/h? (both buying ans selling). Just out of curiosity as to the economics behind this.
Unfortunately, the only way the world will reign the US in is:
1) World war 3, which would be a massive clusterfuck that probably annihilates the human race. 2) We wait until, like Rome before it, the empire collapses under its own weight.
So far, it looks like we are going with 2, and the financial collapse of the last few years might be the beginning. Unfortunately the US will take the rest of the world with it, so we'll end up in a clusterfuck anyway, but at least it will be slower and less violent (at least initially)
That is because it is being subsidised, no? If I remember correctly, you are paid more than the going rate for electricity thanks to the subsidy, precisely for the reason that it would be uneconomic to put up solar panels otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Glad you like it! As for scanners, I bought my first one secondhand on amazon for $45. It served me throughout Uni for the next 5 years, until I got a new one (it came as a 2-for-1 deal with a new printer). If that is beyond your budget I have seen them be thrown/given away (especially old parallel port ones), and a lot of them work well with Linux.
If Linux support is a must, have a look at: http://www.sane-project.org/sane-supported-devices.html
Yeah.. My site, like the rest of my non work life, is out of date and broken (the counter no longer increments, and it doesn't load properly, breaking the site). I am in the process of rewriting the backend, but time is short.
Thanks a lot, hopefully times will get better soon, and then I can devote some proper time to personal projects again :)
Good luck with your attempts to find a scanner as well!
As requested, I have put it on github now:
https://github.com/ZivaVatra/SDAT
Hope it is useful to you, or at least interesting :)
I don't think it is worth selling the script, it isn't that fancy, not to mention that then I would be on the hook for supporting it. :(
Since the recession hit I've had to work 2 jobs, and I really don't have much time to devote to personal nerdy pursuits. Barely have time to sleep as it is
All I can do is publish and hope it helps others. That little script has made my life a lot easier and less cluttered. With any luck others with more time will improve on it and we all benefit :)
And it isn't your settings. I also get an invalid certificate on Firefox and Chromium. Something is up with the link, so I just went ahead and used the actual github.com site to host it.
And done :)
https://github.com/ZivaVatra/SDAT
Figured I would take the opportunity to try out GIT (have not bothered so far).
Also, seems that I have recently made it actually save to tagged PNG's rather than TIFFs. Forgot about that :)
Hope it turns out to be useful to you. Let me know if you want commit privs for any fixes you do. Happy Hacking!
My situation is the same, except that I move often, and have to keep legal documents for a few years (typically 5). I also have paper copies of invoinces and Bills (loads). I didn't want to have to lug boxes and boxes of paper, so I developed a script to do the following:
1) Scan the document page by page, and save as tiff (300dpi)
2) Run open source OCR on it, and save the resulting text to the tiff "comment" field on the metadata
3) Save it in my file server.
4) Index it with a desktop search program (here is a list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_search). This has the nice facility of scanning the metadata and allowing you to search it. This way I can search documents by text, ignoring the fact OCR is not 100% correct (it is usually correct enough for me to find the document I want), while having the pure text in photocopy quality as a TIFF (this is very important for legal documents, as OCR'd versions are not acceptable replacments).
I have been wondering whether it would be worth open sourcing the script (for the moment it is a bit hacky, but it has been serving me well for years now). If the TIFFs take up to much space for you liking, subsitute with PNG/JPEG/etc...
So far it has served me well, I've been collecting hundreds of documents this way. The only manual step is the script requesting a filename (not a big deal for me, as I have to manually put each page into the scanner anyway).
If you are interested let me know, and I can post the script.
Meh, I cashed out my 300 bitcoins a few months ago, having mined them back when CPU's could unlock 50 within a couple of weeks. Somewhat kicking myself, as I sold them at $14 a bitcoin, and now they are something like $100.
Considered getting back into mining with FPGA's, but it is really hard to get much nowadays, so not sure if worth it. I had a good run, and made some decent coin, even though it is paltry compared to this.
Oh well, good thing I don't do investment as a business, I sure suck at it :o)
- I live round the London area, the M1 has speed cameras that don't seem to work, and I have seen people exceed 100mph there.
- The M20 has no cameras as far as I saw, but they do have unmarked and marked police cars. My only interaction with the coppers was with my mate in his car for doing 155mph, but only after we pulled over ourselves (i.e. no blue lights or anything, they just followed us), and we didn't get booked for speeding. They just asked us why we were in such a hurry.
- The M40 is more of the same. Once when I was in the far lane temporarily in order to overtake and I could not keep up with traffic while going at 100mph (my car can't safely go any faster). However on entry to London, especially where the M40 meets the A40, there are loads of speed cameras. Especially in the built up residential areas (40mph limit, and with good reason). On the way out of London I saw only average speed cameras here, but have no idea if they work. I certainly got no tickets from it so far.
- The A40 into Oxfordshire has no speed cameras, or police. So the locals seem to love hitting the gas down that strip.
- I got pulled over in Richmond, but they didn't seem to care about the speeding. They just checked my licence and asked me questions about the car.
- Don't speed in Essex, they really come down hard on you from what I have heard. Every time I have been there you can see their police helicopter following someone on the road.
That is just my experience/information, and I admit it is anecdotal. And yes, if there is traffic, you can't go fast. I am not saying the above happens 100% of the time, but there are opportunities and people seem to take them. It also depends on how you drive. If you are speeding in residential areas, weaving in and out of traffic, undertaking at speed or generally driving recklessly, expect a booking.
I feel that the changes might be due to a large influx of continental Europeans, who bring their cars and driving styles with them. Since the EU crisis started I am seeing more and more Germans/French and others about. Or the crisis has heavily cut the police traffic enforcement budget, I have no idea.
It is different in Europe, where speed limits are seen as recommendations. While driving across for a road trip we averaged 110mph throughout, including slow city driving. We only got stopped 3 times, and not once for speeding (in Belgium we were stopped only so the cops could look under the hood). Europe is without a doubt more car friendly, but the UK is not exactly the total pile of misery some people portray it as (except for speed bumps, god I hate those things, and London is getting more and more of them).
You would think so, but I have passed those average speed cameras many times, never actually going at the speed limit and just keeping in time with the traffic, and never got a ticket.
I honestly don't know if they even work, or if they just turn them on at set hours of the day or something (someone told me that they can't track lane switches, but I find that hard to believe).
I can only assume that budget cuts mean most of them no longer work. Since the coalition took over the number of camera's that actually work have reduced (I believe the Tories talked about reducing the cameras as part of their platform, along with other generic "easing the burden on the motorist" promises) .
Additionally, most speed cameras are not on motorways, but on A roads and smaller. Some motorways do have them, so as long as you know where they are and take care, you should be ok (just pay attention to the cars ahead, and leave a good amount of space. Every once in a while someone doesn't know there is a camera there and slams on their brakes. You don't want to end up in their rear).
It also depends on which county you are in. Some are car unfriendly, and will do everything they can to dissuade you from owning or using a car, including punitive chargers and speed cameras everywhere.
Others are really lax about it, and have things like free parking, little/no ticket wardens and few speed cameras (usually on actual dangerous roads, where they should be).
Clarkson lives in Oxfordshire, which from what the locals tell me. is a pretty car unfriendly place (only place I have seen 15/20mph speed limits on public roads).
Don't know where you live in the UK, but I have easily seen people hit 130mph on motorways (about 200km/h, which is the maximum recommended speed on autobahns).
In fact it is getting so that even the "slow lane" has people doing 70mph, the middle has 90mph, and 100mph+ is in the far lane.
Not sure about the death rate between the two countries, but I would have thought the UK's would be higher, primarily because people in the UK don't seem to know that you should slow down in adverse conditions. People seem to do 90mph no matter what. In clear weather, rain, fog, etc...
It seems the police will only stop you if you are driving dangerously, and they have the sense to know that isn't the same as driving fast.
I use lavabit.com, who say they store their emails encrypted in such a way that if you lose your password, they can't get it back.
No saying if this is true or not (from my experience), but they do seem to give it a good try. Make good use of GPG encryption (don't send email in plaintext) and it should be good enough for normal use (if you really are worried about the NSA spying on you, you will need to at least think of running your own infra).
Well, I remember when I looked into applying to do an undergraduate course in Belgrade, I was discouraged to find that most employers in the EU would not recognise it.
Essentially I would need to do an undergraduate course there, and then use that to get into a EU University (possible, but not guaranteed), from which I would have the credentials to get a job. Essentially adding 3 years (and quite a bit of cost) to my education.
So for now I stuck with being in a EU country, as that is recognised everywhere, even there.
Interesting, if I may ask, How difficult was it to buy a house in Montenegro and Belgrade? How much did it cost?
I remember when my parents bought a flat in Belgrade, when it came to sell it there was a problem, as some original documentation were missing. Essentially the paper saying we owned the flat was worthless, and we were close to losing the whole thing with no compensation. After a few thousand euro's and much arguing with lawyers and the government we got new documents affirming us as owners, and allowing us to sell.
However the whole thing put me off. The idea I could buy a property, then find out that I don't actually own it because a document went missing 10 years ago due to the wars/upheaval wasn't really tempting. Especially as you could be looking at tens of thousands of euro's lost.
What is wrong with the recent resurgence of Nationalism? Having spent so much time there, I found the level of nationalism to always have been there. It never really subsided. It doesn't seem to have altered much really. It may be more visible, but it isn't new nor unexpected.
Oh, and the bureaucracy, I remember getting my passport renewed. Unless you bribe someone, or know someone high up personally, it is so painful and slow, that getting my teeth pulled out without anesthetic would be preferable.
For me the main issue is finding a job that would allow me to work from abroad, yet pay me a western salary. My current employer is unwilling to let me do that as of yet, but I keep asking.
Still, I am very glad you are enjoying it, and may I welcome you to the completely crazy world that is the Balkans and its peoples :o) (I think we are an awesome lot once you get to know us, but then again I am biased :) )
It may have calmed, but until a lasting solution is found, it will be able to flair up at any moment. It just isn't tenable to have a province partly recognised as an independent country, and still held as part of another country.
At best it will end up like Nagorno-Karabakh, a small semi-recognized state with little future. Neither side could enter the EU (as since admitting in Cyprus, they have little appetite for taking in more countries where nobody agrees where the border is).
In the middle situation, you could have localised clashes , with EU/NATO having to have a long term presence to keep the two sides separate. Costly, and still not fixing the underlying issue. Essentially not so much "at peace" as much as "lack of war" situation.
At worst you could see a return to full scale hostilities, which, depending no whether the big powers decide to play geopolitics with the issue, could end up looking like a bunch of minor skirmishes, or like Syria now.
Still, the two sides are negotiating, which while I feel hasn't got a snowball's chance in hell of actually changing anything, it is better than blowing each others brains out.
Glad you had a nice time though. If you love history then you'll love the Balkans, pretty much everything is history. Even the current fight over Kosovo goes back some 800 years. There is so much history, there are entire university departments dedicated to it. Must be heaven to a history buff ;)
Well, yeah it is nice, but if you want to have a family there, education is a big problem.
Especially as many of the local universities in the Balkans, despite being pretty good, are not recognised in the west, which makes it hard for your kids to get a western job that pays you to live so well in the Balkans.
Also, the security situation next door (Serbia/Kosovo) is ... untenable to say the least. So in future that may cause problems.
Also, the legal structures... there is not so much protection of your investments. Lots of corruption, and ambiguity (especially amongst property ownership and rights).
Apart from that, the Balkans are a lovely place, and if I ever manage to find a job that allows me to work remotely for good money, I will go back there (At least until I decide to have kids).
(The points above are gathered from my friends and family, who still live down there. As well as my research into the possibility of returning).
I do wonder then if you can use other fuels as a propellant, anything from propane onwards can be compressed and ignited to force a projectile, not unlike in an IC engine.
What is the government going to do? Ban everything from Gasoline onwards? No flammable fuels anymore?
That does not even touch on the fact that gunpowder is trivial to make yourself. If people could make it hundreds of years ago with their technology level, I'm sure a suitably driven individual could do it now in his backyard.
Yeah, except back in the 2000's people would be thinking it is a cool idea, and would be at least 4 other people who have recently done it and can give tips.
Now it is just people saying "Meh, throw it away and buy newer more powerful boxes". True, and the rational choice, but still rather bland...
I remember when nerds here were willing to do all kinds of crazy things, even if they were not a good long term solution. Maybe we all just grew old and crotchety or something :P
(Spoken as someone who had a lot of fun building an openmosix cluster from old AMD 1.2GHz machines my uni threw out.)
No, you are not trying to stop. Ok, let me rephrase, the people might be trying to stop, but your governments are not, in fact they are doing it more and more.
The fact that governments in the west have become a law unto themselves and don't listen to the people is a problem that I don't see any good (non-violent) way of solving. Until that problem is addressed you can try to stop all you want, for what little good it will do.
You do realise that a lot of countries in the EU have been implicated in the torture and the ferrying of suspects to other countries with more lax rules on "interrogation methods"?
If there is one thing that the western European nations have not done, it is learn from the past, the same stuff is still going on today, including ignoring/violating international law when it suits them. The difference is that now they have the media to gloss over and sugercoat it so the citizens honestly feel they are the good guys.
The result was pretty much the same, though. No?
No it cannot escape, my understanding is that the water molecules are too heavy to "float away" from the earths gravity. In fact chances are we have more water than back when the dinosaurs roamed, for the simple reason that all those frozen balls of ice that occasionally smash into the earth from the heavens have an ungodly amount of water in them.
Over the time span of the earths existance, I would suspect that the amount of water has been steadily increasing, overall.
To be fair, some of us still have a lot of VGA equipment. For example, all my monitors, and my TV, have VGA ports (and I still use them). The quality is good enough for me.
My RasPi has the issue that I don't actually have anything with HDMI to plug it into, so have had to use the composite output to my TV (no ideal by any measure). I wish it had a VGA header at least.
I would file civil war under 2). Like Rome, empires usually collapse into bickering sides, which can result in a civil war destroying what is left of said empire.
However I don't have my ear close to the US ground, so I really don't know how likely a civil war is to break out before a collapse.
From what I see, there is a lot of noise on one side, yet very little action. While the other side is doing everything it can to restrict the ability to stage an armed revolt (be it via weapon controls, security checkpoints, spying or other means).
How likely is it for a civil war to break out in the US soon (by soon, I mean in the next 10 years)?
That doesn't make sense though. So you are selling the electricity for below market value? I would have thought you'd at least sell it for the same rate as you buy it from. How much do you pay per KW/h? (both buying ans selling). Just out of curiosity as to the economics behind this.
and for those of you that are still having trouble with the reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy:_The_Spirits_Within
Unfortunately, the only way the world will reign the US in is:
1) World war 3, which would be a massive clusterfuck that probably annihilates the human race.
2) We wait until, like Rome before it, the empire collapses under its own weight.
So far, it looks like we are going with 2, and the financial collapse of the last few years might be the beginning. Unfortunately the US will take the rest of the world with it, so we'll end up in a clusterfuck anyway, but at least it will be slower and less violent (at least initially)
That is because it is being subsidised, no? If I remember correctly, you are paid more than the going rate for electricity thanks to the subsidy, precisely for the reason that it would be uneconomic to put up solar panels otherwise.