I keep my email in maildir format (the default for Claws-Mail), and rotate every six months. The whole process is entirely manual, but since any given step only takes a few seconds, it works fine for me.
Emails are sorted on receipt according to source or content via ordinarily filters. Every email I receive that's worth keeping goes into a catch-all folder after reading. I probably should be preserving the sorting when I move something into that catch-all, but I don't receive enough email to bother with it yet.
The start of the current six-month range is always part of that folder's name, e.g. "2011-07-01 to Current". Every six months, I rename the folder to add the end date (e.g. "2011-01-01 to 2011-06-30") and move it into a separate storage folder (still within Claws-Mail's folder tree). Then, I simply create a new Archive folder for the new 6-month period. Fill, rinse, repeat every six months.
When the mood strikes me (roughly every couple of years), I'll compress the latest six-month block(s) and move the results into a long-term storage directory. I generally keep only the most recent few years' worth of emails at hand, so the oldest stuff gets deleted from time to time, leaving only the compressed files. If I need to search the older stuff, it's a small matter of extracting to a temp/work directory, doing whatever needs done, and deleting.
On top of that, I run an incremental backup of my home directory and storage areas to a USB-connected disk every so often (the time between backups varies - usually once a fortnight or more often). So eventually, every email I decide to save ends up with one online and at least two offline backups. Since I use Gmail, technically they serve as an off-site backup of the most recent stuff (until I delete it anyway).
I figure with this setup, it's easy to find whatever I need, and it would take a pretty big screwup to actually lose an email.
Um, 8 bytes does not yield only 256 discrete levels, however 8 BITS does, which is the base format the grandparent refers to (and which I use quite frequently, minus the translucency). You may hand in your geek card on the way out.
The same medium whose primary controllers those same government folks depend on for the aforementioned campaign financing? No, the media companies need the Internet (to serve ads on, if nothing else!) and those politicians need the media companies' money too badly.
Besides, which, the government can no more "shut down" the Internet than they could shut down every road, highway, street, etc. in the country. There are simply too many paths to get online via, and too many people who would rather not see it shut down. About the worst that our government could do to cause wide-scale damage is to fuck with DNS, and as we all know, there are ways around that, too.
Don't forget also: Those ISPs, from the smallest to the largest, have one asset that we all know is the least likely to put up with that kind of shit: a squad of geeks to keep everything running. I doubt there are enough geeks in this country willing to assist in keeping the Internet shut down, if such a thing were even possible.
After all of that, if worst did come to worst, we could still go back to the equivalent of the days of BBS's, long-distance dial-up access, and FidoNet until a new network is built, provided those aforementioned ISPs and media companies don't find a solution first.
If you've been around Slashdot long enough, you should have noticed that a fair portion of the people here, especially the ones who complain about things like this, believe rather strongly in Martin Niemöller's poem, which states in part, "When they came for [members of group] A, I remained silent. I'm not [part of] A." After a few more iterations, the poem ends, "When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out".
In this context, it means standing up for your neighbor's rights relative to an excessively powerful corporation, whoever they are, even if you yourself are completely unaffected by that breach of rights. To fail to do so just invites other organizations to try comparable actions in their respective areas. Sooner or later, you're left with no respectable organizations because everyone's trying to fuck everyone else over.
No, we ALL need to speak out for each other in this kind of stuff, lest we end up at the last line of that poem.
"Voters" didn't put the TSA and their ilk into power. Voted-in politicians who promise exactly the opposite sort of behavior are the ones who did. Besides, at least if it's a truly private agency you can sue them when they get out of line and maybe actually get somewhere. Try doing that with the government.
So put the card in question at the end of a short extension cable and mount it behind a little panel on the back of the machine - something the user can just flip open as easily as replacing a battery on a clock.
It's like teaching students to understand the operation of, and to build any random engine (and ultimately the whole car around it) from the base parts, and teaching them how to tune and modify it for maximum performance (for whatever your favorite metric is), versus showing them how to assemble a stock vehicle from pre-built engine+transmission+frame+[...]+instructions.
Same reason that, every once in a while, one might see one or two people working from several PADDs scattered across a table in an episode of Star Trek.
It's easier and perhaps more "natural" to be able to just pick up a reader/tablet and start reading whatever's already showing on it, put it down, pick up another, repeat ad nauseum, than to switch between multiple documents on a single device. This is especially true with reference materials.
[...] and if you can change permissions, you can grant yourself "take ownership".
Incorrect. You have to own the file to change its permissions, but if you don't already own the file, you can't give yourself ownership of it or modify it without first becoming root.
If root or some other user besides yourself owns a file and has it set for world-executable, the user can only read its contents or execute it, but not change its permissions or modify its contents. This is the case with most program files in Unix-like systems, while most system admin tools are only executable by root, period. Some stuff requires you to be part of a specific group to read or execute.
The ability to read a file is explicitly separated from the ability to execute the file's contents, as is the ability to write/modify a file, regardless of who owns the file or who is allowed to work with it. The ability to change to a particular directory can be similarly restricted.
[...] extended attributes are not a filesystem feature, but metadata.
All filesystem flags, including ownership and permissions, and even the filename itself, are metadata - it's up to other parts of the OS kernel to decide what to do with that metadata, regardless of the structure of the underlying filesystem. A virtual machine or emulator can execute files in a guest disk image as long as those files are marked appropriately, regardless of the state of the disk image's flags in the host filesystem (provided the emulator doesn't care about such things, of course).
So a parody of [King's] speech, to the extent it is transformative, could be protected and thought to be a misuse of the material.
[citation needed]
Existing laws would disagree with you; making a parody of something is legal and explicitly protected. That's how Weird Al and Mel Brooks do what they do (did), not to mention every other artist out there, whatever their media, who creates parodies and satire.
Also, not the same - Ralphie outright complained right there at the end of the video that, after all that tension, the secret message was nothing more than a commercial - a "crummy" one at that - effectively destroying any product placement.
In Transformers, that SD card shot wasn't so bad - one could take that shot to mean "hey audience, the analyst used an SD card", and not necessarily "attention consumers, the girl used an SD card made by Panasonic (TM)". Rather, the most blatant and awkward product placement to my mind was the roughly 30-second sequence where Mikaela and friends are shown sitting outside of a Burger King, with branding clearly visible, if out of focus. I don't care if such gatherings happen in real life or not; to give that much screen time to that company's branding is like inserting a commercial right into the movie, and that borders on offensive.
For electrics and hybrids, put a flat tax on the *batteries*, using the weight of the car and its most frequent occupants as one of the factors, or if you give tax breaks for electrics and hybrids, stop doing so. After all, the car will wear those batteries out every 3-5 years, and the amount and style of driving a person does will surely also affect their lifespan. They already cost a few thousand to replace, so a fair tax on them won't amount to much by comparison. An extra $1000 (or the equivalent) in taxes every five years doesn't sound too bad.
Or, use the odometer and something that merely estimates the proximity to any nearby cell towers, and another device which estimates how much weight is added by the passengers and whatever freight they are carrying. No triangulation, just have the device use that proximity to decide when the car is out of the country, and phone-in the odometer reading, an "x% in-country" figure, and the total weight every month or whatever.
That way, the central tax servers would only be given *just* enough information to estimate your overall wear on the roads.
You're on the right track, but still somewhat wrong.
A 44 kHz carrier will indeed allow for a 22 kHz wave, but the problem is not whether you can reproduce the amplitude of the waveform, nor its overall envelope, as those are both a function of the total amount of amplification between the audio source and the speakers, and to a lesser extent the sampling resolution (which I assume is at least 16 bits per channel). Those don't vary with the carrier/sampling frequency.
The problem is that you can't reproduce the actual shape or phase of the tone in question with any consistency. Regardless of your exact carrier/sampling rate, you need 3 samples per audio cycle to capture something other than a square wave, but it takes at least 5 samples per audio cycle to capture something that vaguely resembles a simple sine wave. It takes at least 7 to 9 samples per cycle to capture that sine wave with good consistency and phase. Far more if your sample rate is already somewhat low or your sounds are reasonably complex.
Now all of that said, the most complex sounds in music tend to be far lower in pitch than the 22 kHz example you gave. Hell, most instruments don't produce a fundamental frequency greater than 4 or 5 kHz, so at a 44 kHz sample rate, that's 8 to 11 samples per audio cycle for the fundamental, and still a reasonable amount for the first few harmonics above that.
The Voyager probes only had to go about half way around the solar system before reaching Jupiter, and they basically traveled directly to each of the planets they visited. Voyager 1 went off into the void after its Jupiter flyby, while Voyager 2 used Jupiter and Saturn to slingshot itself toward Uranus and Neptune before leaving the solar system. In both cases, they were programmed to achieve solar escape velocity by the time their flybys were done, using however much fuel was necessary for the job.
In contrast, Juno is going to make one complete circuit around the Sun in an elliptical orbit that takes it out past Mars, it will fire its main rocket a couple of times out there to keep it on the right trajectory, then it'll fly past Earth again in about two years. It makes more than 1 and 1/2 laps around the solar system in total before reaching Jupiter, and it will be slowing down during most of the journey after the Earth flyby. Juno is far more massive than Voyager, and it is solar powered rather than using an RTG (as in Voyager and Pioneer), so they probably chose such a route partly to save on fuel and power.
Juno will go into a highly elliptical polar orbit around Jupiter (to avoid most of the radiation belts), which also requires a totally different route than one would take for any other "normal" type of orbit.
Ponzi scheme or not, Social Security is most definitely NOT part of the General Fund.
Look at your paycheck stub sometime. In addition to state and local taxes, there'll be at least two entries on there for federal taxes: one for regular federal income tax, which goes into the General Fund to pay for tanks, bombs, and bailouts, and one listed as FICA, which is for Social Security, and which goes into a separate fund for that purpose.
The General Fund can, as far as I know, be used to underwrite SSA payouts when it becomes necessary, but the SSA Fund cannot legally be used to underwrite General Fund outlays (not that the government necessarily cares).
Look, it's simple math. If the total SSA outlays are more than the taxes taken in to pay for them (which some believe is the case), either FICA taxes need to go up, or the General Fund needs to be tapped to supplement it, or the cost of those payouts has to go down. Considering the sheer number of people who absolutely need those outlays, the hard fact that every last person in this country is going to reach a point where they can't work, and the fact that "retirement plans" are basically the same idea handled by private corporations (and thus subject to the same potential faults), which do you think makes more sense?
As for T-Bills and the SSA "trust fund", those are separate issues from the above, which have to be solved independently of the actual income/outlay ratio.
*shrug* And this is a problem....why? The same could be said for any comparable stretch of Interstate highway, except to hit one of those at the right time of day would cause far more damage.
1) How to manipulate gravity so reactionless air-cars and spaceships are possible. As well as gravity on the spaceships as they travel.
Someone over in Russia claimed years ago to have discovered something not unlike that. It required intensely low temperatures, exotic materials, and a significant amount of energy input, but the article I read never made it clear if this was a superconductor he was effectively playing with, or maybe a diamagnetic material of some kind. The guy claimed a measured ~2% reduction in the force of gravity in a column extending directly above the apparatus, but he wouldn't let others attempt to reproduce it because it was "too complex" or some such.
Don't buy it myself, but I can't help but wonder if he wasn't at least onto something.
2) Enviromentally clean, cheap, abundant and easily mass-produced energy...
Stirling engines attached to generators, with solar collectors for the heat source (with some kind of reservoir for overnight of course). Let the Earth itself be the heat sink for the cold side, since it would have received that heat anyway. I don't have the reference, but there's at least one full-scale power facility in existence that uses this idea.
3) FTL velocity for spacecraft (we need a way around the speed of light barrier).... we can't live in the cradle of humanity much longer
Slashdot Mirror
My husband is from Brooklyn, you insensitive clod!
I keep my email in maildir format (the default for Claws-Mail), and rotate every six months. The whole process is entirely manual, but since any given step only takes a few seconds, it works fine for me.
Emails are sorted on receipt according to source or content via ordinarily filters. Every email I receive that's worth keeping goes into a catch-all folder after reading. I probably should be preserving the sorting when I move something into that catch-all, but I don't receive enough email to bother with it yet.
The start of the current six-month range is always part of that folder's name, e.g. "2011-07-01 to Current". Every six months, I rename the folder to add the end date (e.g. "2011-01-01 to 2011-06-30") and move it into a separate storage folder (still within Claws-Mail's folder tree). Then, I simply create a new Archive folder for the new 6-month period. Fill, rinse, repeat every six months.
When the mood strikes me (roughly every couple of years), I'll compress the latest six-month block(s) and move the results into a long-term storage directory. I generally keep only the most recent few years' worth of emails at hand, so the oldest stuff gets deleted from time to time, leaving only the compressed files. If I need to search the older stuff, it's a small matter of extracting to a temp/work directory, doing whatever needs done, and deleting.
On top of that, I run an incremental backup of my home directory and storage areas to a USB-connected disk every so often (the time between backups varies - usually once a fortnight or more often). So eventually, every email I decide to save ends up with one online and at least two offline backups. Since I use Gmail, technically they serve as an off-site backup of the most recent stuff (until I delete it anyway).
I figure with this setup, it's easy to find whatever I need, and it would take a pretty big screwup to actually lose an email.
Generally I agree with the content of your post, save for this:
The residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima would probably disagree with you rather strongly.
Um, 8 bytes does not yield only 256 discrete levels, however 8 BITS does, which is the base format the grandparent refers to (and which I use quite frequently, minus the translucency). You may hand in your geek card on the way out.
The same medium whose primary controllers those same government folks depend on for the aforementioned campaign financing? No, the media companies need the Internet (to serve ads on, if nothing else!) and those politicians need the media companies' money too badly.
Besides, which, the government can no more "shut down" the Internet than they could shut down every road, highway, street, etc. in the country. There are simply too many paths to get online via, and too many people who would rather not see it shut down. About the worst that our government could do to cause wide-scale damage is to fuck with DNS, and as we all know, there are ways around that, too.
Don't forget also: Those ISPs, from the smallest to the largest, have one asset that we all know is the least likely to put up with that kind of shit: a squad of geeks to keep everything running. I doubt there are enough geeks in this country willing to assist in keeping the Internet shut down, if such a thing were even possible.
After all of that, if worst did come to worst, we could still go back to the equivalent of the days of BBS's, long-distance dial-up access, and FidoNet until a new network is built, provided those aforementioned ISPs and media companies don't find a solution first.
Well, it might be if we could just perfect Alchemy.
If you've been around Slashdot long enough, you should have noticed that a fair portion of the people here, especially the ones who complain about things like this, believe rather strongly in Martin Niemöller's poem, which states in part, "When they came for [members of group] A, I remained silent. I'm not [part of] A." After a few more iterations, the poem ends, "When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out".
In this context, it means standing up for your neighbor's rights relative to an excessively powerful corporation, whoever they are, even if you yourself are completely unaffected by that breach of rights. To fail to do so just invites other organizations to try comparable actions in their respective areas. Sooner or later, you're left with no respectable organizations because everyone's trying to fuck everyone else over.
No, we ALL need to speak out for each other in this kind of stuff, lest we end up at the last line of that poem.
"Voters" didn't put the TSA and their ilk into power. Voted-in politicians who promise exactly the opposite sort of behavior are the ones who did. Besides, at least if it's a truly private agency you can sue them when they get out of line and maybe actually get somewhere. Try doing that with the government.
Oh, that's just evil.
So put the card in question at the end of a short extension cable and mount it behind a little panel on the back of the machine - something the user can just flip open as easily as replacing a battery on a clock.
Ok, how about:
It's like teaching students to understand the operation of, and to build any random engine (and ultimately the whole car around it) from the base parts, and teaching them how to tune and modify it for maximum performance (for whatever your favorite metric is), versus showing them how to assemble a stock vehicle from pre-built engine+transmission+frame+[...]+instructions.
Namely, the C64 Programmer's Reference Guide, and more importantly, Machine Language for the C64 [...] by Jim Butterfield.
Same reason that, every once in a while, one might see one or two people working from several PADDs scattered across a table in an episode of Star Trek.
It's easier and perhaps more "natural" to be able to just pick up a reader/tablet and start reading whatever's already showing on it, put it down, pick up another, repeat ad nauseum, than to switch between multiple documents on a single device. This is especially true with reference materials.
Incorrect. You have to own the file to change its permissions, but if you don't already own the file, you can't give yourself ownership of it or modify it without first becoming root.
If root or some other user besides yourself owns a file and has it set for world-executable, the user can only read its contents or execute it, but not change its permissions or modify its contents. This is the case with most program files in Unix-like systems, while most system admin tools are only executable by root, period. Some stuff requires you to be part of a specific group to read or execute.
The ability to read a file is explicitly separated from the ability to execute the file's contents, as is the ability to write/modify a file, regardless of who owns the file or who is allowed to work with it. The ability to change to a particular directory can be similarly restricted.
All filesystem flags, including ownership and permissions, and even the filename itself, are metadata - it's up to other parts of the OS kernel to decide what to do with that metadata, regardless of the structure of the underlying filesystem. A virtual machine or emulator can execute files in a guest disk image as long as those files are marked appropriately, regardless of the state of the disk image's flags in the host filesystem (provided the emulator doesn't care about such things, of course).
[citation needed]
Existing laws would disagree with you; making a parody of something is legal and explicitly protected. That's how Weird Al and Mel Brooks do what they do (did), not to mention every other artist out there, whatever their media, who creates parodies and satire.
Mostly, but it's also "stuff that matters". I'd have to argue that an oil leak in the Gulf, however thin, falls under that category.
Also, not the same - Ralphie outright complained right there at the end of the video that, after all that tension, the secret message was nothing more than a commercial - a "crummy" one at that - effectively destroying any product placement.
In Transformers, that SD card shot wasn't so bad - one could take that shot to mean "hey audience, the analyst used an SD card", and not necessarily "attention consumers, the girl used an SD card made by Panasonic (TM)". Rather, the most blatant and awkward product placement to my mind was the roughly 30-second sequence where Mikaela and friends are shown sitting outside of a Burger King, with branding clearly visible, if out of focus. I don't care if such gatherings happen in real life or not; to give that much screen time to that company's branding is like inserting a commercial right into the movie, and that borders on offensive.
"Hush Harriet, that's a sure way to get him killed!"
I'm surprised no one mentioned this already:
For electrics and hybrids, put a flat tax on the *batteries*, using the weight of the car and its most frequent occupants as one of the factors, or if you give tax breaks for electrics and hybrids, stop doing so. After all, the car will wear those batteries out every 3-5 years, and the amount and style of driving a person does will surely also affect their lifespan. They already cost a few thousand to replace, so a fair tax on them won't amount to much by comparison. An extra $1000 (or the equivalent) in taxes every five years doesn't sound too bad.
Or, use the odometer and something that merely estimates the proximity to any nearby cell towers, and another device which estimates how much weight is added by the passengers and whatever freight they are carrying. No triangulation, just have the device use that proximity to decide when the car is out of the country, and phone-in the odometer reading, an "x% in-country" figure, and the total weight every month or whatever.
That way, the central tax servers would only be given *just* enough information to estimate your overall wear on the roads.
You're on the right track, but still somewhat wrong.
A 44 kHz carrier will indeed allow for a 22 kHz wave, but the problem is not whether you can reproduce the amplitude of the waveform, nor its overall envelope, as those are both a function of the total amount of amplification between the audio source and the speakers, and to a lesser extent the sampling resolution (which I assume is at least 16 bits per channel). Those don't vary with the carrier/sampling frequency.
The problem is that you can't reproduce the actual shape or phase of the tone in question with any consistency. Regardless of your exact carrier/sampling rate, you need 3 samples per audio cycle to capture something other than a square wave, but it takes at least 5 samples per audio cycle to capture something that vaguely resembles a simple sine wave. It takes at least 7 to 9 samples per cycle to capture that sine wave with good consistency and phase. Far more if your sample rate is already somewhat low or your sounds are reasonably complex.
Now all of that said, the most complex sounds in music tend to be far lower in pitch than the 22 kHz example you gave. Hell, most instruments don't produce a fundamental frequency greater than 4 or 5 kHz, so at a 44 kHz sample rate, that's 8 to 11 samples per audio cycle for the fundamental, and still a reasonable amount for the first few harmonics above that.
The Voyager probes only had to go about half way around the solar system before reaching Jupiter, and they basically traveled directly to each of the planets they visited. Voyager 1 went off into the void after its Jupiter flyby, while Voyager 2 used Jupiter and Saturn to slingshot itself toward Uranus and Neptune before leaving the solar system. In both cases, they were programmed to achieve solar escape velocity by the time their flybys were done, using however much fuel was necessary for the job.
In contrast, Juno is going to make one complete circuit around the Sun in an elliptical orbit that takes it out past Mars, it will fire its main rocket a couple of times out there to keep it on the right trajectory, then it'll fly past Earth again in about two years. It makes more than 1 and 1/2 laps around the solar system in total before reaching Jupiter, and it will be slowing down during most of the journey after the Earth flyby. Juno is far more massive than Voyager, and it is solar powered rather than using an RTG (as in Voyager and Pioneer), so they probably chose such a route partly to save on fuel and power.
Juno will go into a highly elliptical polar orbit around Jupiter (to avoid most of the radiation belts), which also requires a totally different route than one would take for any other "normal" type of orbit.
Ponzi scheme or not, Social Security is most definitely NOT part of the General Fund.
Look at your paycheck stub sometime. In addition to state and local taxes, there'll be at least two entries on there for federal taxes: one for regular federal income tax, which goes into the General Fund to pay for tanks, bombs, and bailouts, and one listed as FICA, which is for Social Security, and which goes into a separate fund for that purpose.
The General Fund can, as far as I know, be used to underwrite SSA payouts when it becomes necessary, but the SSA Fund cannot legally be used to underwrite General Fund outlays (not that the government necessarily cares).
Look, it's simple math. If the total SSA outlays are more than the taxes taken in to pay for them (which some believe is the case), either FICA taxes need to go up, or the General Fund needs to be tapped to supplement it, or the cost of those payouts has to go down. Considering the sheer number of people who absolutely need those outlays, the hard fact that every last person in this country is going to reach a point where they can't work, and the fact that "retirement plans" are basically the same idea handled by private corporations (and thus subject to the same potential faults), which do you think makes more sense?
As for T-Bills and the SSA "trust fund", those are separate issues from the above, which have to be solved independently of the actual income/outlay ratio.
It's also easy to target and hard to guard.
*shrug* And this is a problem....why? The same could be said for any comparable stretch of Interstate highway, except to hit one of those at the right time of day would cause far more damage.
No. The whole terrorism claim is old and tired.
1) How to manipulate gravity so reactionless air-cars and spaceships are possible. As well as gravity on the spaceships as they travel.
Someone over in Russia claimed years ago to have discovered something not unlike that. It required intensely low temperatures, exotic materials, and a significant amount of energy input, but the article I read never made it clear if this was a superconductor he was effectively playing with, or maybe a diamagnetic material of some kind. The guy claimed a measured ~2% reduction in the force of gravity in a column extending directly above the apparatus, but he wouldn't let others attempt to reproduce it because it was "too complex" or some such.
Don't buy it myself, but I can't help but wonder if he wasn't at least onto something.
2) Enviromentally clean, cheap, abundant and easily mass-produced energy ...
Stirling engines attached to generators, with solar collectors for the heat source (with some kind of reservoir for overnight of course). Let the Earth itself be the heat sink for the cold side, since it would have received that heat anyway. I don't have the reference, but there's at least one full-scale power facility in existence that uses this idea.
3) FTL velocity for spacecraft (we need a way around the speed of light barrier).... we can't live in the cradle of humanity much longer
That one, I have no answer for. :-)