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Although now that I think of it, you likely could have played from the speaker jack on a radio to the mic jack on a PC and recorded that way.

Maybe you're joking but I actually happened to be doing exactly that 20 years ago. I also used that setting to record the output of an old LP turntable to save impossible-to-find (or so I thought at the time) old records. Hours of hand-cleaning of crackles for each track ensued.

That's a good point, but what if you live somewhere prone to flooding and tornadoes?

Seems like a house on permanent stilts would be more likely to blow down, not to mention not having a basement to hide in.

I'd just say move.

You could record or download music to a laptop or a phone or even an MP3 player to take with you. MP3 players are dirt cheap now and can last a pretty long time. You could also get an expanded battery pack to take with you to have music for days. Maybe find an MP3 player with an SD slot on it, I know they exist. Then get a 32 GB SD, which are also cheap and will hold a ton of music, or splurge on a 256 GB SD for a shit ton of music. I'd just buy a bunch of smaller SDs though, two or three of them would probably hold more music than you could listen to in a week.

I find it very difficult to listen to streaming music in the middle of a desert. Perhaps I should drag an ethernet cable behind me or something

Maintenance is not free, land is not free, having parallel tracks requiring weed control, etc.

Maintenance on a rarely-used train would just be a few hours once per year. Land is extremely cheap a couple hours outside of most any city, and the grid has no problem moving power that distance with minimal loss. Train tracks sprawling across the planet seem to be just fine without active weed control...

Would be slightly impressive if the train cars actually went somewhere and transported something useful, like water.

I they were hauling water up-hill, then unloading it, you'd completely defeat the purpose of this system. A water pump would surely be more efficient, anyhow.

Smarter electricity use and a better grid, capable of transferring power from where it is produced to where is it needed, would do the same more robustly, and probably cheeper too.

Energy storage like this is very much a critical feature of any smart grid. Wind and solar power aren't necessarily producing the most power when demand is highest, and peaking plants have always been very expensive.

Businesses and the public have been largely resistant to changing their energy use patterns. Perhaps the notification and metering technology isn't there yet, or perhaps the incentives aren't significant enough, but either way, controlling "electricity use" doesn't seem to be a viable alternative.

There were numerous stand-alone CD recorders which would allow you to record to disc linearly just like an old cassette tape recorder. They weren't popular because being able to mix, edit, etc., on your PC before recording, as well as record bit-exact (audio or data), make copies, and record faster than real-time were such huge benefits.

Plus CD-Recorders were expensive, just like cassette recorders were when they first appeared. Now you can get dirt-cheap CD burners, but nobody wants them... Everybody has moved on to solid-state audio recording with microSD cards or similar if they still have a need to record at all (most don't, and just "download" audio already digitized).

It was actually a lot easier to make mixed tapes than it was to make mixed CDs. Almost every tape player I think I've ever had had an input jack and a record button, or you could just record off the radio. I don't think you could easily record music from the radio with a CD player and you needed specialized hardware to get the radio to play on a PC... Although now that I think of it, you likely could have played from the speaker jack on a radio to the mic jack on a PC and recorded that way. Still would be easier to just hit record on the tape player though, and it's not like the radio doesn't play "popular" songs TO DEATH!!! If you missed it just wait ten minutes...

In fact screw recording the songs, by the time the radio stations got through with them you didn't want to ever hear them again anyway. So much better now with the internet, you get a huge variety (for free) and practically never have to listen to the same thing twice ever, unless you want too.

Like many of us, I grew up with tapes during the early days of CDs. I don't understand why people would want to go back to that.

This seems like a very large investment for a very small gain.
Maintenance is not free, land is not free, having parallel tracks requiring weed control, etc.
Most areas don't have large areas of land available for free, especially those areas where people actually live.
Would be slightly impressive if the train cars actually went somewhere and transported something useful, like water.
Smarter electricity use and a better grid, capable of transferring power from where it is produced to where is it needed, would do the same more robustly, and probably cheeper too.

In some countries tape players are king. Even today.

This type of scam is all over the place now. Especially by smaller stores.

Here's one: https://support.nastydress.com/faq/faq/view?id=1162
And another: https://support.everbuying.net/faq/faq/view?id=1459
And another: http://www.gearbest.com/about/verify-payment.html

You are correct. They are not allowed to do this. Obtaining this information does not help to 'verify' an order. Which is why it looks like a scam, smells like a scam..

...that already deals well with the problem.

It's called a "houseboat".

As someone envisioned FEMA's new housing specs:
http://www.doomgold.com/images/fema.jpg

..away

Hence why many houses in Brisbane are raised above ground level by half a storey. The water runs or pools underneath during the 1 in 100 year floors

One thing that comes to mind is maximum height... The homes in question will be 2-stories plus a basement. If built permanently on 13ft tall piles, that would make it stand taller than a 4-story building.

I don't want to be too negative but there's definitely a case for simplicity.

The articulation to allow it to climb and descend the stilts constitutes a vulnerability. What if one or more points binds, and it cocks and jams because it's trying to rise crookedly?

There's an episode of Grand Designs (S14E7) "The Floating House" [1][2], it looks like the same design. They had ballast under the basement floor to help it rise smoothly. You'd have to check it often or have it automated (more points of failure).

Another thought I had was silt washed under the house. Then it may not sit flat or sink to the original level.

[1] http://www.constructionmanagermagazine.com/news/amphibious-grand-design-ready-take-water/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Grand_Designs_episodes#Series_14_.282014.29

If you're afraid your house might be flooded out, and you're bound and determined nevertheless to build it in such an unsuitable place for whatever reason, why not just build it on stilts in the first place, rather than go to all the trouble to put in stilts AND a mechanism to allow it to ride up on those stilts?

The articulation to allow it to climb and descend the stilts constitutes a vulnerability. What if one or more points binds, and it cocks and jams because it's trying to rise crookedly?

Battery life was good for most phones when they had monochrome displays. The power consumption for a monochrome LCD is about 1/5th of a TFT at the same size. Here is an article comparing some displays. Here is some more discussion. I've read that the difference can even go up to 10x. This is for the same size. The Galaxy Nexus S has a screen 4 times bigger (4'' vs. 2'').

The display isn't all. A smartphone has a much bigger CPU with higher power consumption. I imagine an older phone would do fine with some 8-bit microprocessor, given the same GSM modules. Or even with no extra processor since the GSM module was probably the entirety of the phone. Typically has some extra radio like Bluetooth or WiFi etc.

Also, older phones were used for one purpose only: phone calls (ok, SMS also. Older phones were used for two purposes. phone calls and SMS and alarms). This meant that you spent very little time with the phone and it was able to sleep for long periods without consuming much power. With the new phones you surf the internet, play games or check your email etc. This causes the phone to come out of sleep many more times than before.

With all these things added, it's a wonder that a smartphone even can go thru a whole day with one charge.

Any idiot can do a random password generator, which is why you can find thousands of them. It's practically the next step after writing a "Hello World".

Here's a quick random password generator for *nix:

head -c 56 /dev/urandom | base64

Over-hyping some trivial and mundane program is just what GRC always does.

What do you think of https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm ?

I had a Nokia 1100. It was one of the best phones I've ever had - I dropped it probably a dozen times, yet every time I reassembled it, it'd work like a charm. Even dropped it in a puddle, once.

If turned off when I went to bed, the battery lasted about three weeks. This of course decreased as the battery aged, but after several years it was still almost a fortnight when I upgraded to a Galaxy Nexus S. That would last about a day, in comparison.

I had to recycle my Nokia 1100 in the end, but it was a damned good phone for what it was.

Or terrorists, San Bernadino has a pretty sketchy record for that kind of thing.

"Branding has become a critical differentiator in mobile phones, which is why our business model is centered on the unique asset of the Nokia brand, and our extensive experience in sales and marketing. We will work with world class manufacturing and distribution providers to move quickly and deliver what customers want," said Nummela, in a statement.

So in other words "we're going to buy cheap android hardware, write nokia on it, fill it with undeletable Nokia apps and services and lose 500M in the process".

I never had a Nokia phone, but their bulletproofness is legendary. If the new devices aren't amazingly resilient, they are doomed. Considering they're going for a an Android-based device, I'm guessing they are indeed doomed.

Relax, he was only conjecturing. No need to nerdrage so badly.

I do agree with your underlying sentiment, though.

GRC has no "security researchers". It's practically a one-man operation, and Gibson is just a loud-mouthed twit with no security experience. He's been widely denounced by actual security experts. Just see the controversy around his Windows XP SOCK_RAW and WMF bug/Windows backdoor claims. And his most popular work, the "SpinRite" app, is just a load of snake-oil he's managed to con a decent number of people into paying for...

The old grcsucks.com is gone, but there are still several sites dedicated to exposing his fraud, mistakes and lies over the years:

http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/steve_gibson/

http://radsoft.net/news/roundups/grc/

Will not work for the older versions.

It would just take 3,200,407,146,487 nonagintillion years

No. Evidence or shut the fuck up.

The probability of component failure increases with time. Fix it. Learn from it. Don't be an alarmist douchebag.

I wonder if it was sabotage by competing interests.

They would have lasers painting the intended targets from the mirrors and regular checks for misalignment.. right?

Retailers aren't allowed (by credit card companies) to bill your card until the item has shipped. If you find a store is doing that, for ANY reason, you should contact your issuing bank, and challenge the charge. After multiple people do that, the credit card company will see the misbehavior isn't just a one-off billing mistake, and will revoke their license. The company will no long be able to accept credit card payments.

Personally, I don't buy from random websites I know nothing about... I usually find retailers via Froogle, Pricewatch, or similar trusted aggregator, which means I have someone to complain to and can at the very least get them delisted if they are dishonest.

Since this story is just one person's anecdote, with no link to a source, don't expect it to ever get published the front-page.

This is the store admitting that it never sees the customer's credit card information

Welcome back janjes. Still trying to make a buck by ripping off other people's content and posting it on your youtube channel?

Fuel cells have conversion efficiency double that of a turbine, so your 6x volume figure is immediately down to 3x...

My next thought is of methanol... A popular fuel for fuel cell forklifts. More dense and decidedly renewable.

well at least they admit that using fuel cells in planes is a pipe dream. I much more reasonable option is to use H2 from carbon free sources (i.e. solar, wind, nuclear, etc.) combined with renewable carbon (atmospheric, biomass, algae, etc.) to make liquid fuels. typical jet fuel has an energy density (engergy/vol) 6x times of heavily compressed H2. It's hard enough to find space for my carry-on's on airplanes as it is, I don't need more space being taken up by huge fuel cell stacks and H2 tanks

The issue is not so much blocking VPN but interrupting it, effectively knocking you offline. they don't even need DPI. Just look at the traffic.. If you see someone sending all their data with SSH (or OpenVPN) headers out of a specific port, just kill the connection. Luckily they don't seem to focus on all types of packets and all ports at the same time. So one day SSH tunneled OpenVPN packets over port 465 seem to work while the same thing on 443 doesn't work, the next day it might be the opposite..
Source: http://www.bestvpnprovider.com/china-vpn

Yes, indeed, I saw it this morning. Some other experts argue that the human-made structure could as well be abandoned corn fields.

Oh well. Guess we will have to wait until someone actually gets there before publishing the (non-)story.

I have a source of interesting very technical articles, many with an exploration/military twist. Perhaps I should start submitting them, to fan the flames, and help Pipedot become that third party that we all claim to want but never have time to nurture.

Please do :)

Another problem is that there are stories in the pipe, but they don't get upvoted enough to make it to front page (and yes, I'm as guilty as anyone not upvoting stories there).

I respect Pipedot's refusal to copy Slashdot or SoylentNews articles and their determination to find their own articles.

I thank Pipedot's admin for posting this story. Cool!

I have a source of interesting very technical articles, many with an exploration/military twist. Perhaps I should start submitting them, to fan the flames, and help Pipedot become that third party that we all claim to want but never have time to nurture.

~ childo

the HY4 will take off to its maiden flight during the upcoming summer.

I guess they're a bit further than CGI renderings ;-)

But, indeed, it will be interesting to have an update on this by summer's end.

It's great that people are working on this, and by all means they should get funding one way or another. Wake me up when it's more than a cg rendering.

Kinda late noticing this comment, but your username is probably just "kurt" and not your external email address.

The reservoirs used for hydro power are very enviro-friendly indeed; they hugely benefit wildlife,

That's really not true. There's a huge amount of information out there on the environmental damage dams cause, like driving salmon and other species to near-extinction. It's been a cause ci©li¨bre in recent years to destroy old and unnecessary dams everywhere that is remotely practical.

"Sierra Club California does not support any proposal that provides funding for the construction of new dams or surface storage in California."

"2014 was a monumental year for dam removal projects. A record-setting 72 dams were removed across 19 states, restoring hundreds of miles of river, and last year's Patagonia-produced film DamNation raised even more awareness about the environmental impact of defunct dams that block salmon and other fish from their upriver breeding grounds." http://sierraclub.org/sierra/2015-2-march-april/green-life/3-dam-detonation-videos-prove-going-green-blowing

Providing big watering-holes for wild life in the Nevada desert is not necessarily an environmental benefit at all. Instead it can bring in more large wild life, which should not naturally be there, which then displaces and kills the native desert species. And destroying dozens or hundreds of square miles of land and habitat by flooding it is never going to be looked on as environmentally friendly. Those kinds of projects tend to be supported by hunters, rather than environmentalists.

Plus you don't have to worry about the rail cars evaporating.

The reservoirs used for hydro power are very enviro-friendly indeed; they hugely benefit wildlife, and probably do a lot to recharge aquifers since the water sits there long enough to soak in rather than just running past.

Regardless... seems to me this could be adapted to small-scale and local, to use any hill in parallel with existing roadways.

Interesting. It's essentially a dry version of an old technology. Quite likely cheaper and more environmentally friendly to boot.

...hears more than half of the conversation.*

Sounds like candles and olive oil lamps might be your best bet.

You still haven't explained to anybody how you can turn your switch off yet still have power running to your LED bulbs. That would happen regardless of what kind of bulb you have in there, unless your LED bulbs are powered by some kind of magic.