You will (if you read my post) note that I said that I swing my vote on this criteria ONLY if it's an issue or candidate that I do not already hold a definite position on.
Bugging me too much might make me reconsider voting for a candidate.
I keep track of these calls. If they're about issues I have a position on, I ignore them. But if they're on issues I'm undecided on, I generally vote against the people who are annoying me with recorded announcements.
Last election I had a tough time because on a few proposals, both sides were bugging me about equally. So I voted against the side whose recording pissed me off the most.
I used to do this for elected positions as well, but this year my strategy is simpler; I wouldn't vote for a republican to be a damn dog-catcher. I'll vote Martian Invaders party if I have to in order to vote against a republican.
They'll have tens of thousands of users demanding that they "unlock" their drive. If there's no back door, not even data recovery services will be able to help, at any price. If there is a back door, it'll be disclosed eventually
Anyone who really wants encryption won't trust it regardless. I sure won't.
With any luck, the hardware won't matter if I can still run Linux on it, and it will still run viable software.
If not, well, maybe I don't need to upgrade. Honestly, at this point, if the choice were to buy a DRM box or use older stuff, I would reluctantly go to the basement and pull out a 386sx-16 running Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock and a modem, if that's what it took.
Plus there is the added benefit of no taxes. The company that WOULD have made $1000 selling software licenses WOULD have had to pay taxes on that income. But with free software, there is no taxable transaction.
Horrible thought: If the RIAA were to be a group of software companies, every time someone release a free program that competed with a commercial product, either the author or everyone who downloaded it would be held liable for all those copies of the commercial program that isn't selling. The software companies could just stop making their product better, keep selling the same crap year after year, and if their sales dropped, it would all be because of those damn commies giving away their software, and they'd claim the right to sue everyone involved to make up the difference.
...which is why I won't buy one, until and unless I know I can get an override to that "feature."
I buy commercial games also, but not until I know I can get a nocd crack for it. I'm not going to put up with that crap. I've had to re-buy copies of games in the past because my kids scratched them up, when the CD is only needed for validation, and I'd rather have put the CD in the binder and had them play totally from HD anyway.
I have not been a huge Sony fan for a while (I don't like proprietary hardware), but I still buy things from them occasionally. That's over. This is the final straw. I was actually kind of thinking of getting a PS3 (we've never owned any gaming console at our house at all) but screw that. I've bought several things from Lik-Sang and I'm sorry to hear of this. The reason Sony is giving is obviously laughable; they've probably been after them for a while for selling mod chips or something and this was an excuse.
I have a 15.1" laptop now and my main complaint is it's too big. I don't take it with me much because IMHO it's too clumsy.
My next laptop will be as small and light as possible; probably a 12" screen, and I hope 4 pounds. I don't even care if it even HAS batteries; I never use a laptop anywhere that I don't have a 110v socket anyway, even in my car. For me a laptop can't be my only machine or replace a desktop anyway because I really need a ton of storage and the ability to plug in a wide range of peripherals, so the laptop might as well be as portable as possible.
This particular group has core members who originally formed the group and published the first newsletter (back in the 70s) at the university I went to. There are now people from all over the US and a couple of countries. We have about 500 people loosely affiliated. We're largely people who also go to science fiction conventions, though that's not universal. There is no structure or organization, just a bunch of people who converse via email, and get together a few times a year to hang out. Originally this was just in people's garages, now we generally meet at SF conventions or while camping at semi-organized times. There is no publicity, you just have to find out about us. I sometimes hear that there are other groups like ours around too.
As to how to find people like this? I dunno. If there are groups like this, I'd suggest looking for them at places where smart people tend to hang out. I got into this group by going to the science fiction group meetings on campus. If you're not on campus anymore, try SF conventions. NOT trekkie conventions, not gaming or media (primarily) conventions. I mean real conventions where people who actually read books and think about alternative futures and space flight and applied physics go. If you haven't been exposed to fandom before, you may not like what you find there, but IMHO it's worth a try because if you do like it, you'll find hundreds of people who are generally pretty smart and open minded and will be able to get in on as many intelligent conversations as you can deprive yourself of sleep for the weekend for.
I'm sure there are other ways to meet people like this. This is just the one that "happened" to me. Mensa in some areas might be a way. If you're lucky enough to live in places like SoCal, there are tons of groups out there. I like groups that actually do something. I'd love to go at least hang out at SRL, for instance. But I live in the midwest.
There is some talk of people opening up "fab lab" places that you can go to and rent time on lathes, electronics equipment, etc if you want to build stuff. If one of these opens around you I'd bet you can meet some really cool people there.
There's a much more efficient method of storing electricity than using it to electrolyze water. It's called batteries. They're still more efficient than hydrogen, last I checked. Many people believe that the only reason hydrogen is being pushed is that it allows the people who own infrastructure for transporting oil and gas to still have something to transport.
Actually I was invited to join Mensa, I took the test but was disappointed at how easy it was, I went to a meeting and it was really dull, so I decided I didn't really want to belong.
I hang out with a group of people who have more PhDs per square foot than I could believe at first. You can mill around between people who do cancer research, particle physicists, pharmaceutical chemists, a JPL spacecraft pilot, a deep-sea research tech, you-name-it, and they're just as likely to be talking about that, or knitting, steam engines, farming, mythology, or about anything else you can imagine. It's a LOT of fun, and they're higher level and more fun than the (admittedly only one) mensa meeting I went to.
I can see the attraction of being able to go to meetings and parties where the level of discussion and general knowledge is very high, hanging out with this group is the most fun times I've had, but AFAIK none of them are in Mensa, probably for the same reasons I walked away.
What it will do is to keep ordinary users from PLAYING the discs on their PCs/Laptops/etc. And at the same time, it probably won't slow down anyone who's seriously copying DVDs at all.
This will get broken just like every other measure, and the break will get incorporated into the same software people are already using to copy DVDs, and within a couple of months you won't even know there's any protection on the disc when you go to copy it.
Another thing it will do is to force people who otherwise would not copy their DVDs to do so, so that the copies will then be playable on their PCs. I already know people who have done this when they unknowingly bought out-of-region DVDs from eBay or while on vacation. They're not pirates, they just want to watch what they bought.
It is not legal to have a police-band receiver in a car. No problem in a house. I'm not sure if this is a federal or state reg, but if state it's in a lot of states.
IMHO the geekiest wallet is what I carry; no wallet at all. I ride my bike to work, so I don't need ID. I carry my lunch and do all my shopping online so I don't need money or a credit card. Every couple of weeks I go to a store for one thing or another, and then I have to remember to take an ATM card with me but that's it.
...who'da thunk it. They keep trying to sell me TV service and won't stop talking about how their picture quality is better than satellite. No, it's not. In fact it's not even close. I've tried it and it stinks, even the digital service. Heck, on local channels we get a better signal off our rooftop antenna. But they won't shut up about it.
Is it possible to build a test script into your software to show bandwidth and latency of something like port 80 traffic versus VoIP traffic? Then your support people could have the customer run that and see for themselves. You'd have to run it by legal and be very careful what you said; saying "Both of those sets of data are travelling between the same machines, but as you can see from that test, your ISP is selectively degrading the VoIP traffic" may be true but it may get you in legal trouble.
You should be able to get away with saying most of that but concluding with "Those numbers show how much bandwidth you're getting for web site versus VoIP traffic. If the VoIP number is much lower, that's the problem, and you should call your ISP to have them deal with it."
Disinfecting the hell out of everything isn't a good thing. It's pretty much accepted that having a certain low level of exposure to germs will keep your defenses up. There have been studies that indicate that people (especially children) who live in antiseptic conditions tend to get sick more often.
I'm pretty much a slob, and I get sick less than almost anyone else at the company.
I agree that if someone who has pinkeye or strep or something like that uses your keyboard/mouse/etc, yeah, clean it. But I'm the only one that ever touches my computer, except maybe 10 times a year, so there's not much point in me cleaning something that only contains either benign bacteria or stuff I'm already immune to.
and blame the manufacturer for building a system that can be set into production mode with the default password still active. We can enforce password strength restrictions for goofy web blog sites but somehow it's too hard to do for ATMs?
I've worked with banks before. They will implement exactly the amount of security that they're required to by law. Don't ever count on more than that, and I'd verify before I even trusted that much. They have a huge heirarchy of career programmers and IT people who have been around since COBOL was king of the hill, and a lot of them haven't bothered to keep up and they don't understand much about anything more modern than a modem and serial communications.
I've not seen $4 camera batteries, but my Canon Rebel uses BP511 batteries. The original from Canon costs $70 (list, $45 street). The aftermarket ones I've been buying cost $12.50 (I've seen them for $8 but not from a place I trust and buy from often). The aftermarket ones work fine and last noticably longer per charge, and have held up as well over several years of life (this isn't my first camera or camcorder that took BP511s).
I've had a Canon and an aftermarket die (after many many charges they got to where they wouldn't hold a charge anymore. I took them both apart and found pretty much exactly the same things inside. A charge controller chip, and a polyswitch (self-resetting solid state current+temp breaker). The cells were both from major manufacturers, Sanyo and Panasonic, though I can't remember which was which.
There are probably some really crap units out there which should be avoided, but I think this shows that the OEM batteries are complete ripoffs. Heck, at the price difference it'd be worth buying an aftermarket one, tear it apart and make sure it has proper protection inside, then throw it away and buy another from the same maker, and you'd STILL be less than half the cost of the OEM battery.
why not just cut a working rfid tag from a disc and stick it right in the case next to the reader? Then, no matter what disk you put in the player, if the player looks for a chip it will find one.
Watch out. You'll probably use a disc you don't care for as the chip donor, and when the player starts phoning home, you'll wind up on the demographic mailing lists of people who listen to this one Morrissey album 18 times a day.
I went to college to learn, and I believe that I learned a lot. Many of them were unrelated to my direct field of study and I wouldn't have picked up unless forced, and I'm glad I was forced. I now find history fairly fascinating, and wouldn't have unless I was put into the classroom of a very good professor. Even in the field of programming, I learned to approach problems in a structured manner instead of just slashing at things until I had slapped together something that worked.
At college it quickly became apparent that there were two classes of students. Those who were there because they loved the subject and learning, and those who were there because someone told them that they should go there and study this because then they'd earn a bunch of money. We in the former class got pretty irritated by those in the latter, because the latter were generally pretty clueless and not really serious. We really tried to NOT get paired up with them, but we did from time to time. And that's a good thing, because know what? When you get into a job situation, there are people there as well who don't actually like what they do, they're just there for the paycheck and aren't interested in doing more than the minimum. Luckily in the job I have now there are teams you can move to that are 100% filled with people who really love what they're doing.
BTW when I say that the two classes of student became apparent, I think that was only to the people who were there because they loved the subject. I don't think that those who were just there to fatten their eventual paycheck realized that some of us really loved the subject, or if they did, they probably just thought we were freaks. Eventually a few of them may have figured out that we were the freaks that bailed their asses out on group projects every time while they wrote the documentation.
Last I knew, it was illegal to use a fully automated calling system with a message that didn't contain real contact info which included a method to talk to a person to be added to the DNC list.
Also, it's been said already but I'll say it again. "Don't call me" or "Remove me from your list" are NOT the magic words. They will NOT trigger the response you want nor the legal ramifications of calling you again. You have to say "Please add me to your do-not-call list." THEN and only then are they liable for fines if they do call you again (once a grace period, usually 14 days or something like that, has passed).
I personally ask if the person works for the company they're calling for directly, or whether they work for a telemarketing firm. If the latter (usually the case), then asked to be added to the DNC list for EVERY COMPANY THAT THEIR FIRM REPRESENTS. This will usually get you on hundreds of DNC lists in one try.
Re:USB Powered != USB Gadget
on
Outré USB Gadgets
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Pick up any copy of Nuts and Volts. There are ads galore for USB development kits and inexpensive interface chips, and most issues have some damn thing or another that interfaces to USB.
Slashdot Mirror
You will (if you read my post) note that I said that I swing my vote on this criteria ONLY if it's an issue or candidate that I do not already hold a definite position on.
Bugging me too much might make me reconsider voting for a candidate.
I keep track of these calls. If they're about issues I have a position on, I ignore them. But if they're on issues I'm undecided on, I generally vote against the people who are annoying me with recorded announcements.
Last election I had a tough time because on a few proposals, both sides were bugging me about equally. So I voted against the side whose recording pissed me off the most.
I used to do this for elected positions as well, but this year my strategy is simpler; I wouldn't vote for a republican to be a damn dog-catcher. I'll vote Martian Invaders party if I have to in order to vote against a republican.
They'll have tens of thousands of users demanding that they "unlock" their drive. If there's no back door, not even data recovery services will be able to help, at any price. If there is a back door, it'll be disclosed eventually
Anyone who really wants encryption won't trust it regardless. I sure won't.
Same here, no problems. A few of those sites are blocked by our company's filters, some were 404, but the rest display fine.
XP Pro/IE7 final.
With any luck, the hardware won't matter if I can still run Linux on it, and it will still run viable software.
If not, well, maybe I don't need to upgrade. Honestly, at this point, if the choice were to buy a DRM box or use older stuff, I would reluctantly go to the basement and pull out a 386sx-16 running Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock and a modem, if that's what it took.
Plus there is the added benefit of no taxes. The company that WOULD have made $1000 selling software licenses WOULD have had to pay taxes on that income. But with free software, there is no taxable transaction.
Horrible thought:
If the RIAA were to be a group of software companies, every time someone release a free program that competed with a commercial product, either the author or everyone who downloaded it would be held liable for all those copies of the commercial program that isn't selling. The software companies could just stop making their product better, keep selling the same crap year after year, and if their sales dropped, it would all be because of those damn commies giving away their software, and they'd claim the right to sue everyone involved to make up the difference.
...which is why I won't buy one, until and unless I know I can get an override to that "feature."
I buy commercial games also, but not until I know I can get a nocd crack for it. I'm not going to put up with that crap. I've had to re-buy copies of games in the past because my kids scratched them up, when the CD is only needed for validation, and I'd rather have put the CD in the binder and had them play totally from HD anyway.
I have not been a huge Sony fan for a while (I don't like proprietary hardware), but I still buy things from them occasionally.
That's over. This is the final straw. I was actually kind of thinking of getting a PS3 (we've never owned any gaming console at our house at all) but screw that. I've bought several things from Lik-Sang and I'm sorry to hear of this. The reason Sony is giving is obviously laughable; they've probably been after them for a while for selling mod chips or something and this was an excuse.
I have a 15.1" laptop now and my main complaint is it's too big. I don't take it with me much because IMHO it's too clumsy.
My next laptop will be as small and light as possible; probably a 12" screen, and I hope 4 pounds. I don't even care if it even HAS batteries; I never use a laptop anywhere that I don't have a 110v socket anyway, even in my car. For me a laptop can't be my only machine or replace a desktop anyway because I really need a ton of storage and the ability to plug in a wide range of peripherals, so the laptop might as well be as portable as possible.
This particular group has core members who originally formed the group and published the first newsletter (back in the 70s) at the university I went to. There are now people from all over the US and a couple of countries. We have about 500 people loosely affiliated. We're largely people who also go to science fiction conventions, though that's not universal. There is no structure or organization, just a bunch of people who converse via email, and get together a few times a year to hang out. Originally this was just in people's garages, now we generally meet at SF conventions or while camping at semi-organized times. There is no publicity, you just have to find out about us. I sometimes hear that there are other groups like ours around too.
As to how to find people like this? I dunno. If there are groups like this, I'd suggest looking for them at places where smart people tend to hang out. I got into this group by going to the science fiction group meetings on campus. If you're not on campus anymore, try SF conventions. NOT trekkie conventions, not gaming or media (primarily) conventions. I mean real conventions where people who actually read books and think about alternative futures and space flight and applied physics go. If you haven't been exposed to fandom before, you may not like what you find there, but IMHO it's worth a try because if you do like it, you'll find hundreds of people who are generally pretty smart and open minded and will be able to get in on as many intelligent conversations as you can deprive yourself of sleep for the weekend for.
I'm sure there are other ways to meet people like this. This is just the one that "happened" to me. Mensa in some areas might be a way. If you're lucky enough to live in places like SoCal, there are tons of groups out there. I like groups that actually do something. I'd love to go at least hang out at SRL, for instance. But I live in the midwest.
There is some talk of people opening up "fab lab" places that you can go to and rent time on lathes, electronics equipment, etc if you want to build stuff. If one of these opens around you I'd bet you can meet some really cool people there.
There's a much more efficient method of storing electricity than using it to electrolyze water. It's called batteries. They're still more efficient than hydrogen, last I checked.
Many people believe that the only reason hydrogen is being pushed is that it allows the people who own infrastructure for transporting oil and gas to still have something to transport.
Actually I was invited to join Mensa, I took the test but was disappointed at how easy it was, I went to a meeting and it was really dull, so I decided I didn't really want to belong.
I hang out with a group of people who have more PhDs per square foot than I could believe at first. You can mill around between people who do cancer research, particle physicists, pharmaceutical chemists, a JPL spacecraft pilot, a deep-sea research tech, you-name-it, and they're just as likely to be talking about that, or knitting, steam engines, farming, mythology, or about anything else you can imagine. It's a LOT of fun, and they're higher level and more fun than the (admittedly only one) mensa meeting I went to.
I can see the attraction of being able to go to meetings and parties where the level of discussion and general knowledge is very high, hanging out with this group is the most fun times I've had, but AFAIK none of them are in Mensa, probably for the same reasons I walked away.
What it will do is to keep ordinary users from PLAYING the discs on their PCs/Laptops/etc. And at the same time, it probably won't slow down anyone who's seriously copying DVDs at all.
This will get broken just like every other measure, and the break will get incorporated into the same software people are already using to copy DVDs, and within a couple of months you won't even know there's any protection on the disc when you go to copy it.
Another thing it will do is to force people who otherwise would not copy their DVDs to do so, so that the copies will then be playable on their PCs. I already know people who have done this when they unknowingly bought out-of-region DVDs from eBay or while on vacation. They're not pirates, they just want to watch what they bought.
It is not legal to have a police-band receiver in a car. No problem in a house.
I'm not sure if this is a federal or state reg, but if state it's in a lot of states.
IMHO the geekiest wallet is what I carry; no wallet at all.
I ride my bike to work, so I don't need ID. I carry my lunch and do all my shopping online so I don't need money or a credit card. Every couple of weeks I go to a store for one thing or another, and then I have to remember to take an ATM card with me but that's it.
...who'da thunk it.
They keep trying to sell me TV service and won't stop talking about how their picture quality is better than satellite.
No, it's not. In fact it's not even close. I've tried it and it stinks, even the digital service. Heck, on local channels we get a better signal off our rooftop antenna. But they won't shut up about it.
Is it possible to build a test script into your software to show bandwidth and latency of something like port 80 traffic versus VoIP traffic? Then your support people could have the customer run that and see for themselves. You'd have to run it by legal and be very careful what you said; saying "Both of those sets of data are travelling between the same machines, but as you can see from that test, your ISP is selectively degrading the VoIP traffic" may be true but it may get you in legal trouble.
You should be able to get away with saying most of that but concluding with "Those numbers show how much bandwidth you're getting for web site versus VoIP traffic. If the VoIP number is much lower, that's the problem, and you should call your ISP to have them deal with it."
Disinfecting the hell out of everything isn't a good thing. It's pretty much accepted that having a certain low level of exposure to germs will keep your defenses up. There have been studies that indicate that people (especially children) who live in antiseptic conditions tend to get sick more often.
I'm pretty much a slob, and I get sick less than almost anyone else at the company.
I agree that if someone who has pinkeye or strep or something like that uses your keyboard/mouse/etc, yeah, clean it. But I'm the only one that ever touches my computer, except maybe 10 times a year, so there's not much point in me cleaning something that only contains either benign bacteria or stuff I'm already immune to.
and blame the manufacturer for building a system that can be set into production mode with the default password still active. We can enforce password strength restrictions for goofy web blog sites but somehow it's too hard to do for ATMs?
I've worked with banks before. They will implement exactly the amount of security that they're required to by law. Don't ever count on more than that, and I'd verify before I even trusted that much. They have a huge heirarchy of career programmers and IT people who have been around since COBOL was king of the hill, and a lot of them haven't bothered to keep up and they don't understand much about anything more modern than a modem and serial communications.
I've not seen $4 camera batteries, but my Canon Rebel uses BP511 batteries. The original from Canon costs $70 (list, $45 street). The aftermarket ones I've been buying cost $12.50 (I've seen them for $8 but not from a place I trust and buy from often). The aftermarket ones work fine and last noticably longer per charge, and have held up as well over several years of life (this isn't my first camera or camcorder that took BP511s).
I've had a Canon and an aftermarket die (after many many charges they got to where they wouldn't hold a charge anymore. I took them both apart and found pretty much exactly the same things inside. A charge controller chip, and a polyswitch (self-resetting solid state current+temp breaker). The cells were both from major manufacturers, Sanyo and Panasonic, though I can't remember which was which.
There are probably some really crap units out there which should be avoided, but I think this shows that the OEM batteries are complete ripoffs. Heck, at the price difference it'd be worth buying an aftermarket one, tear it apart and make sure it has proper protection inside, then throw it away and buy another from the same maker, and you'd STILL be less than half the cost of the OEM battery.
why not just cut a working rfid tag from a disc and stick it right in the case next to the reader? Then, no matter what disk you put in the player, if the player looks for a chip it will find one.
Watch out. You'll probably use a disc you don't care for as the chip donor, and when the player starts phoning home, you'll wind up on the demographic mailing lists of people who listen to this one Morrissey album 18 times a day.
I went to college to learn, and I believe that I learned a lot. Many of them were unrelated to my direct field of study and I wouldn't have picked up unless forced, and I'm glad I was forced. I now find history fairly fascinating, and wouldn't have unless I was put into the classroom of a very good professor. Even in the field of programming, I learned to approach problems in a structured manner instead of just slashing at things until I had slapped together something that worked.
At college it quickly became apparent that there were two classes of students. Those who were there because they loved the subject and learning, and those who were there because someone told them that they should go there and study this because then they'd earn a bunch of money. We in the former class got pretty irritated by those in the latter, because the latter were generally pretty clueless and not really serious. We really tried to NOT get paired up with them, but we did from time to time. And that's a good thing, because know what? When you get into a job situation, there are people there as well who don't actually like what they do, they're just there for the paycheck and aren't interested in doing more than the minimum. Luckily in the job I have now there are teams you can move to that are 100% filled with people who really love what they're doing.
BTW when I say that the two classes of student became apparent, I think that was only to the people who were there because they loved the subject. I don't think that those who were just there to fatten their eventual paycheck realized that some of us really loved the subject, or if they did, they probably just thought we were freaks. Eventually a few of them may have figured out that we were the freaks that bailed their asses out on group projects every time while they wrote the documentation.
Well, *yeah*. Look at the number of Lincoln Navigators on the road.
Last I knew, it was illegal to use a fully automated calling system with a message that didn't contain real contact info which included a method to talk to a person to be added to the DNC list.
Also, it's been said already but I'll say it again. "Don't call me" or "Remove me from your list" are NOT the magic words. They will NOT trigger the response you want nor the legal ramifications of calling you again. You have to say "Please add me to your do-not-call list." THEN and only then are they liable for fines if they do call you again (once a grace period, usually 14 days or something like that, has passed).
I personally ask if the person works for the company they're calling for directly, or whether they work for a telemarketing firm. If the latter (usually the case), then asked to be added to the DNC list for EVERY COMPANY THAT THEIR FIRM REPRESENTS. This will usually get you on hundreds of DNC lists in one try.
Pick up any copy of Nuts and Volts. There are ads galore for USB development kits and inexpensive interface chips, and most issues have some damn thing or another that interfaces to USB.