Bunch o' stuff!

[giza]

• Tiger spotted on Louisiana Army base - Of all the places to prowl around, I would think that this would NOT be one of them. :-)
  
  
• Usb Floppy Disk Striped Raid Under OS X - Yeah, let's hear it for RAID-5 floppy disks! And only on a Macintosh, too!
  
  
• PC PhoneHome - This might be worth getting if you have a laptop. It's software that sits on your machine, and every time you boot up with a network connection, sends a message to the company's central server. If your machine is ever stolen, you contact them, they will tell you where the machine is being used from and forward the information on to the police. From there, it's pretty easy for them to bust the perp and recover your laptop.
  
  
• Stuff Bak - This is a pretty cool site that you can buy stickers from to place on your cellphone, PDA, laptop, keys, etc. that result in someone finding them being paid a cash reward when the item is returned. It also helps deter theft of the items by making an item less unique. (Kinda hard to pawn/sell a stolen laptop that has an aluminum sticker on it!) Here's a sample label:
  
  
  
  
• Philadelphia Mulls Wireless Society - Aww, Philadelphia wants to have wireless access for the entire city. That's nice... but how about spending that money on something more important like... not charging me a 4.5% tax to work in the city! Oh wait, that's why I stopped working in the city!
  
  Or maybe fix the Sure Kill Distressway so that it's more than 2 lanes in each direction and doesn't get backed up for miles every single day?
  
  
• FBI busts alleged DDoS Mafia - Oh, here's a great one. I'll just quote the first paragraph:
  

  A Massachusetts businessman allegedly paid members of the computer underground to launch organized, crippling distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against three of his competitors, in what federal officials are calling the first criminal case to arise from a DDoS-for-hire scheme.

  How nice. Looks like they caught a few of the jerks who hijack computers and use them in DDoS attacks against innocent parties. These people should be locked up for a good long time.
  

That's all for now.

Comments

[slyphox.livejournal.com]

some cool stuff =)..thanks for posting that

[furahi.livejournal.com]

I've seen loads of those aluminium stickers and I always wonder, are they really that hard to peel off?
My Sun computer has one of those, says AT&T and some number. I don't want to try to remove it because it looks rad tho ;D

[vesuvius.livejournal.com]

Those stickers might also encourage people to steal them in order to get the reward.

[feren.livejournal.com]

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

[giza.livejournal.com]

And double-damned if you're the guy who steals my stuff. ;-)

[vesuvius.livejournal.com]

Knit one, Purl two, Darn it all!

RAID and taxes.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

A couple of points:

• I note with amewsment that the RAID is superficially similar to a little program I ran across in my 286 (or maybe even XT) days that spanned a single logical volume across a set of 5 1/4" floppy disks. This probably counts as RAID 0 :). Started hacking up that code to make my own version that spanned 3.5" 1.44 meg disks (and more of them), but never finished it. It worked by replacing the hard drive access interrupts in BIOS.
  
  Under *nix, it should be fairly easy to RAID floppy drives like any other drive using mdtools or successors, but I haven't tried it.
  
  
• Re. taxes, why is a municipal income tax a bad thing? As long as it's in theory balanced by reduced property taxes, it's as good a way as any other to get money for the city.
  
  On a similar note, municipal and higher levels of government are still fighting over who gets gasoline tax money, up here. It's in theory supposed to pay for road maintenance and other infrastructure projects.
  

Re: RAID and taxes.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

With income tax, the devil is in the details. If you move from property tax to a flat income tax, then the poor (renters) end up subsidizing the rich (owners). A progressive income tax *could* work, but the rich have access to far more deductions. So such a move would be likely to widen the gap between rich and poor.

Re: RAID and taxes.

[giza.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm concerned, people have a civic and moral duty to support those who are less fortunate than them.

Case in point, I'm good at what I do, and ended up much better off than my parents. I will GLADLY pay higher taxes to ease the financial burden on them. And at the end of the day I'll still have more money left over.

Re: RAID and taxes.

[cjthomas.livejournal.com]

With income tax, the devil is in the details. If you move from property tax to a flat income tax, then the poor (renters) end up subsidizing the rich (owners).

As long as the taxes remain fair, the owners end up paying their share of tax - the rent is, after all, gross income. As far as property owners go, this system ends up matching a property-tax type scheme if we assume that people will buy property with value commesurate to their income.

I agree that renters end up being taxed where they otherwise wouldn't be. This suggests making rent tax-deductible (as it's already getting taxed as income to the property-owner; so don't tax it twice).

A progressive income tax *could* work, but the rich have access to far more deductions. So such a move would be likely to widen the gap between rich and poor.

As long as the floor below which you don't pay significant tax is the threshold at which people tend to buy their own homes, it works out decently. We have a scheme like this up here (Canada). The problem of tax systems being prone to abuse is endemic across the board, not just to income tax - the rich have more influence, and don't want to be taxed :). So I don't see this as a persuasive argument against income tax; just as a constraint on how it would have to be implemented in order to be fair.

Re: RAID and taxes.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

Ah, to be in Canada. I suspect income tax is considerably fairer there than here.

You're right that any tax can be structured for abuse. What's pernicious about income tax is that it *pretends* to be progressive, but has been gamed into regressiveness. In the U.S., anyway. My cynicism is based on U.S. tax history, and our current situation.

[nius.livejournal.com]

Dude, you've driven the distressway.. Where the fuck are they gonna add more lanes at?! The thing is mostly elevated, and there's nothing else that can be done about it, except plow down the PJs and pave them.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Two words: Double-decker expressway.

There was a proposal floating around about that a few months ago, and Mayor Snarly Mayor Street promptly killed it.

Heck, they could carve more of the mountainside if they need to. All I know is that EVERY DAY the Schulkyll gets backed up, and I'm sick and tired of it. It's a second class highway that's turning Philly into a second class city. We deserve better.