Two logically-designed hex key sets. Click to enlarge.
Several times, on trips to Vancouver, BC, I’ve felt my bladder filling as I approach the border. I’ve solved the problem by waiting till I clear customs, pulling over to the immigrations office (the one where they send those selected for further questioning for processing), and availing myself of the restrooms there.
On the past weekend’s trip to Vancouver, me and my traveling partner were selected for further processing as we crossed back into the USA. The shiny new customs and immigrations office has (very prominently displayed) signs informing the public that washrooms are not provided. That, in a facility that might often be expected to have people — many of them its own citizens — waiting for a significant period of time.
This speaks volumes about which nation still harbors at least some notion of the concept that the government exists to serve the people, and which is now predicated upon the concept — as was the late USSR — that the people exist to serve the government.
Note to anyone who thinks this will be put to only good uses: Kindly —
Sigh, if only it was that easy to remove the naïve morons who have such child-like faith in the Establishment from the gene pool.
I mean, really now: the system that gives the dogs of the rich better health care than the children of the poor, the system that contaminates Iraq with depleted uranium, the system that invented and used atomic weapons not planning to use this development for evil purposes?!?
Of course they are. The only question is how and when it will be so used, and whether the use can be stopped at the simple invention of military applications for it, or if it will actually be used in the field as well.
Even our most special natural places aren’t immune. Because that wild nature is just sitting there and not making a dollar for anybody, ya know.
And pay no attention to the following:
But [Gifford Pinchot National Forest outdoor recreation planner Steve Nelson] said officials will not let private proposals push commercial development too far. “We’re very conscious of all that, and we share that concern,” he said.
It’s a lie, as evidenced by:
One of the possibilities would convert more than half the space devoted to explanatory displays and exhibits at Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center to commercial uses such as gift sales.and:
Among the private activities the Forest Service suggests may be reasonable:With the exception of the cabin/yurt proposal (such things are already a part of many parks, and have been so for over a century), everything listed is, in my humble opinion, grossly inappropriate for a national monument. And given the nature of what has been openly proposed by the Forest Service I have every reason to suspect that any yurts and cabins would not be erected in a tasteful and ecologically sensitive manner consistant with their surroundings.Helicopter tours taking off from a helipad near the Johnston Ridge Observatory, the visitor center closest to the volcano’s crater, or parking lots at Coldwater Ridge.
Overnight yurt camps or rustic cabins at places such as Coldwater Ridge, the Marble Mountain SnoPark or Bear Meadow north of the volcano.
Mobile snack and gift stands that could be set up at scenic overlooks, picnic areas, trailheads or other popular sites such as Windy Ridge, a major viewpoint.
Winter snowmobile rentals or snowcoach tours on existing roads. Private snowmobile use is currently allowed in parts of the monument.
If the plan is implemented, I sure hope the mountain (quietly extruding lava for over a year straight now) blows the encroaching capitalism to smithereens.
Two logically-designed hex key sets. Click to enlarge.
Sometimes, when a hex bolt is really tight, a hex key set like those pictured above isn’t enough to loosen it. The force required to loosen the bolt is greater than the force required to destroy the plastic handle that holds the hex keys together.
In such a case, the easiest recourse is to disassemble the hex key set so the key needed can be held in a locking pliers to furnish the required force. I had a need to do so today, and noticed with dread that my metric hex key set is itself assembled with hex bolts. Oh, no — chickens and eggs.
Or so I feared for a moment. In a desperate bid to avoid a trip to the hardware store, I tried my English set on one of the bolts holding the metric one together. Success! And a little bit of further experimentation revealed that the English set is held together with metric hex bolts.
Maybe someday computers will be as logically designed as hand tools.
This is creepy because it smacks of what was done in places like the late, unlamented USSR, which registered and tracked ownership of typewriters and photocopiers.
Remember, all ruling classes throughout history have always sought ever more power. Do something that facilitates the tracking and management of dissent, and eventually it will be used for such purposes. It’s only a matter of time, and it matters not if the technology was originally sold for the purpose of making it hard to counterfeit anonymously.
It’s revealing because it shows how limited working within the strict confines of the political system is. The technology in question has been in place for over ten years, Do the math. That means it was implemented during the Clinton administration. Can’t blame this one all on the GOP. Both parties are the party of creeping totalitarianism.
Not to mention how that purported watchdog of the government, the media, by and large let the whole thing slip by unnoticed.
This is a really neat piece of code. A few months ago, I was wishing for something just like it, though as luck would have it (of course) I can no longer remember what for.
It is a little disconcerting that the defense establishment appears to be directly involved in developing the software, as that raises doubts about backdoors in pre-compiled versions. It is, however, open source, which makes such backdoors very hard to hide if one obtains a set of known-good source files and builds the thing oneself.
There are, of course, two reasons the government might be interested in working on such a project. The first has already been alluded to. The second is much more straightforward: they have their own needs for the sorts of security and anonymity such a network protocol can provide.
And, as the package’s authors mention, it’s actually an advantage that the user community be as large and diverse as possible, as it becomes increasingly difficult to assume anything about a random server-to-server Tor packet.
The fact that it’s actually being aided and abetted by the State would appear to indicate a judgment on their part that doing so advances their interests more than it retards them. This makes sense when one realizes that the past decade has seen all sorts of requirements that communications providers make their networks easy for government agents to snoop upon (sorry, don’t have the time to drag up the appropriate references).
If most “interesting” client and server boxes already have virtual wiretaps on them, Tor’s security pretty much goes down the toilet. Simple time-based analysis will correlate a given set of encrypted packets going from a client to a Tor server with a given set of (almost always plaintext) packets going from another Tor server to, say, a given website.
It gets much more difficult to do this if either client or server are in a jurisdiction that’s not cooperating with US intelligence. But my suspicion is that, for the majority of traffic, this isn’t the case. It’s also the case that the information retrieved is of minimal use if the end server is speaking an encrypted protocol. Again, however, that’s usually not the case.
Which is not to say it doesn’t have its uses, just that sweeping claims about Tor’s security benefits need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Two questions to ponder: Are the servers which distribute Tor software already considered “interesting” (by the definition above)? Does downloading the software from them mark one’s own client system as “interesting?”
One reason why I’d really rather prefer to find employment here instead of points south is the extreme dysfunctionality of the political culture in California. Oh, sure, lots of provincial Californians (even some of them my friends) talk as if their state is somehow more “progressive” than it’s neighbors, but let’s get real for a moment: it’s mostly bourgeois liberal bullshit. I don’t subscribe to the notion that the perfection of a society is measured by how comprehensively its subjects have every little detail of their lives covered by some sort of regulation.
Nowhere is this fallacy more evident than in housing and land-use policy, a textbook example of which may be found here. All the debate in California is basically between two awful alternatives: frustrating the construction of new housing, or enabling the construction of new sprawl (complete with new roads and freeway lanes for people to drive alone for ever longer distances). Sorry, slapping the adjective “green” in front of a development doesn’t make it so.
Totally absent are any plans to create new housing that’s not sprawl, to plan growth on a region-wide scale, to seriously integrate new housing construction not only with new highways but with new transit service, or to promote more effective use of existing housing. Often such things can be accomplished as much by deregulation as (or more than) regulation: repealing off-street parking requirements, allowing smaller setbacks and smaller lot sizes, allowing homeowners to construct and rent out mother-in-law units, allowing more apartment construction, etc.
No, instead the whole political culture is based on political subunits attempting to stop new housing construction within their boundaries as the region as a whole continues to grow explosively in population. Everyone believes that the new housing should be supplied by everyone else, while they continue to live as if the growth of the past decades hasn’t even happened.
Anyhow, what do they care: they bought their house years ago when it was still affordable (or have rent control keeping their apartment cheap). Screw the folks who live six to a studio apartment and sleep in three eight-hour shifts, one on the bed and one on the floor. To hell with the newcomer families who live three to a house (one family per bedroom). I’ve got mine, I can keep mine, so problem solved.
And because we have more rules and regulations and bureaucrats than anyone else, it’s “progressive,” so don’t criticize us or you’re just an ignorant backwoods yokel.
Things are hardly perfect here in Portland, but at least it’s still part of the expected norm that, say, a single newly-hired schoolteacher can have a home of his or her own (in a neighborhood served by transit a sane commuting distance from work) if he or she wants it.
… And proof that institutionalized racism doesn’t stop at the 49th parallel. More stories here and here.
When I read what this site has to say. I mean, really now, Boyle’s Law is Boyle’s Law. PV = nRT isn’t exactly true, but it’s pretty damn close for any mix of common gases. And as for oxygen being bad for the insides of a tire, the real enemy of rubber is ultraviolet light, and you don’t see much of that on the inside of a tire.
A little research seems to bear out my skepticism.
Air Force One’s tires are filled with nitrogen, as are many aircraft tires. That’s because of fire risk — aircraft tires get hot really fast when the plane lands, and there’s a risk of a blowout. An explosive blowout does more damage and is harder to control than a more gradual release of pressure, so aircraft rims come with fusible links designed to melt and let the air out of they get too hot. If the tire is that hot, it’s at risk of catching fire. If that happens, the last thing you want is a bunch of compressed air fanning the flames — what you want is an inert gas like nitrogen smothering them.
NASCAR uses nitrogen, too. That’s because at the speeds they drive, it gets hot enough to boil any condensed water (from pumped-in air) inside the tires, which causes a larger-than-normal pressure fluctuation, which is bad news as racing car tires are pushing the limits of tire operation as it is. Well-dried compressed air would work equally well for such purposes, but it’s easier for NASCAR team mechanics to just buy dry nitrogen gas than it is to keep maintaining the necessary in-line desiccators to dry compressed air. Normal driving doesn’t get tires nearly that hot, and if it would, they’d suffer a blowout because (unlike racing tires), they’re not built for that sort of abuse.
And ya gotta love how all their propaganda as to the “advantages” of nitrogen talks about the advantages of tires “consistently inflated at proper pressure” with the gas. Well, duh. Guess what? That’s also an advantage of tires “consistently inflated at proper pressure” with plain old compressed air.
It all reminds me of the wonderfully expensive “oxygen free copper” the golden-ears crowd squanders so much money on for their speaker wires when a trip to the hardware store for some lamp cord would return an equally good product for such purposes.
This should be enough to make anyone’s blood boil.
But halfway through it, I thought to myself: “Self, what other evidence do you have (aside from this one post under a pseudonym) that all this really happened?” Answer: none at all.
Could it not therefore be someone seeking revenge against a neighbor who drives a car with the mentioned license plate? Or someone trolling for attention?
Note that the gist of the post (bicycle rider who gets screwed over by a car driver and the cops) dovetails about as perfectly as possible with the world-view of the (stereo)typical Indymedia user. It’s precisely the sort of thing I’d write myself if I wanted to cook up a story that would outrage people.
None of this is to definitively say it didn’t happen, just that there’s very poor evidence (none independent of the single claim being posted to Indymedia) that it did. Moreover the latter of my two speculations as to motive for the post is corroborated by the claim (from an anonymous claiming to be a DMV employee) that the license plate in question has never been issued.
TrineDay Press are precisely the sort of logic-impaired, science-oblivious New Agers that tend to rub me the wrong way. They are preoccupied with all sorts of far-fetched conspiracy theories which fly in the fact of common logic and serve to distract those who might otherwise be fighting genuine evils into fighting imaginary bogeymen.
However, I believe the appropriate response to such nonsense is to denounce it. If someone is making free speech you disagree with, well, make speech of your own in response.
So it really upsets me that a group is attempting to sue both TrineDay and the author of one of the books they publish in an attempt to silence both of them. New-age conspiracy theorists are indeed annoying, but at least they aren’t going around attempting to bankrupt those with whom they disagree via legal fees.
If I had disposable income to my name, I’d click on the “author being sued” button at the bottom of the page and make a donation to the legal defense fund myself.
Moreover, it also brings to mind the old saw about stopped clocks being right twice a day. Just because a publisher usually cranks out poorly-substantiated dreck doesn’t mean he therefore always does.
Another adage that comes up is “nothing squeals like a stuck pig.” The fact that a group of “the State can do no wrong” types are willing to attempt to sue the book into oblivion makes me strongly suspect that it hits uncomfortably close to home.
Finally, nutty conspiracist stuff usually cites unnamed or anonymous sources almost exclusively. Go to a “chemtrails conspiracy” site and you’ll search for hours in vain for anyone willing to put his name to definitive inside information. It’s all “an airline executive,” “a senior FAA official,” “a retired pilot,” etc. ad nauseum; a sea of noun phrases with nary a proper noun to be found. This book is authored by an ex-Green Beret who’s willing to sign his name to his own first-hand account.
The National Review crowd sure seems annoyed at the comparison. Several points immediately come to mind upon reading of their outrage:
I always knew it would be a monumental struggle to escape from the systems-administration rut I had fallen into (do one thing for a few years and against your desires it becomes your “career path,” the defining characteristic of your adult live). Sometimes I’d suspect success was as likely as a very hot place freezing over.
I think I got the analogy wrong; the correct one was for two of baseball’s most hopeless losers to win a championship. It’s the only thing I can figure out. No, I’m not employed quite yet, but since this week I’ve had an interview and been called for two more (one of those is an inside-information, who-you-know, unadvertised opportunity — i.e. the best of leads).
It’s as if a dam has burst, releasing the fruits of a years-long effort all at once. Maybe I’m being foolishly optimistic, but I actually expect to have a firm offer from someone in my hands in the next few weeks.
If you want a good example of why I take such a dim view of so many paranormal claims, click here.
When physicists come up with theoretical evidence for some sort of elusive new subatomic particle, they come up with ideas for how the particle can be detected and get busy building detectors. The legitimacy of their claims for the existence of the particle rests partially on their ability to describe its properties explicitly enough that this can be done.
Yet the ghost busters have no real idea of just what a so-called “ghost” really is, how one is created, how one ceases to exist, and what one’s properties are. They collect random techno-toys and drag them through allegedly “haunted” places with no explanation of why the alleged phenomenon they’re studying has anything to do with the physical properties measured by their instruments. Often they have no idea of how to properly use those instruments. Their main ideas of how a ghost might be detected were lifted from the script of a Hollywood movie fer chrissakes! I’m not making this up, go read the article.
They haven’t even gotten to Square Zero in the Scientific Method, an explicit description of their theories, and they expect to be taken seriously as scientists? Give me a break!
This is a cut above the normal cheap and sleazy person search sites that abound on the web. Instead of excerpting and reselling the same old set of public records, they actually crawl the web with an eye to collecting names. The end result works better than Google if you’re searching for a person.
I could imagine some folks getting upset at the dossiers it assembles, but it does use explicitly public information.
I’m mainly putting this here for my own future reference; I came across the site a couple weeks ago, forgot it, and had a heck of a time finding it again (thanks to all the cheap and sleazy sites that Google returns dozens of).
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