The new machines lack LPT ports? WTF kind of machine did you buy without an LPT port? A laptop, sure, a desktop? You have to look hard, even today to find a machine that doesn't have a printer port.

Pretty much anything built in the last five or so years won't have serial or parallel ports. If you're lucky, you might have some headers on the motherboard that can be brought to the slot cage with connectors in brackets like what were common before ATX, but I've run across plenty of motherboards that don't even have those. Notebooks are even less likely to have them. This Dell Inspiron E1505 I'm typing on is a bit long in the tooth...main reason I'm keeping it going is its 15" 1680x1050 screen. No serial or parallel ports on it.

When I saw a sufficiently-old notebook come through my office a while back that had a serial port on it, I hung onto it for talking to our switches and routers. I forget what model of HP it is, but it's old enough that it runs on an Athlon XP. It's probably the better part of 10 years old at this point. The last emerge -uND world took a couple of days to run, but it's fast enough to run Minicom and Firefox, and to do traffic captures from the switch: serial connection to the management port to enable SPAN, Ethernet to the SPAN port for capture, and WiFi to talk to the whole thing from my office instead of the server room.

Receiving large amounts of money is actually fine. Receiving large amounts of money and not disclosing it is a problem.

Comcast is fighting against this tooth and nail and has promised to file lawsuits to stop it.

But don't let facts get in the way of your political bullshit.

At high levels, Jeopardy is all about who presses the button first. Watch a Tournament of Champions. All 3 people buzz in for pretty much every question.

The trick is who can parse what the "answer" is really asking, recall the fact required, and then buzz in before the other players can do all 3 things. If Watson can do those things faster than a person, it won fair and square. Just being able to parse the "answer" was an incredibly impressive achievement.

Net metering doesn't force the utility to provide a service without getting compensated for it. Here in Maryland, I'm billed for the transport costs to move the power BOTH to or FROM my residence. So I have to cover a cost of my generated solar power getting pushed back out over their lines.

As I also pointed out, if the utilities were more forward-thinking and less resistant to change, they'd embrace PV solar as a useful addition to their overall system. There are pretty large losses involved in transporting power long distances to customers from the central power generation plant. That's why you see those big structures surrounded by chain link fence. They contain transformers needed to step up the voltage to compensate for resistive losses going over miles of copper wire on the poles.

If they've got people scattered about with small solar power generation capabilities on their roofs, they can purchase and immediately resell excess power generated there and avoid the big transmission losses.

I completely agree that this stuff requires some coordination with the utility company, for best results. As it is, you can't even get a solar system up and running without filling out a lot of paperwork, undergoing an inspection, and waiting for an approval from the utility though. So the ball is in their court in this respect. (They DO have first-hand knowledge of exactly where the solar systems will go online and how much power they're capable of generating.)

Most likely, what will happen is when particular neighborhoods reach a certain saturation level of solar installation, the power company will have to say - "Sorry... We won't approve any more new systems here with more than X amount of generation capacity because we've got all we need for this geographic area."

You're correct, except in reality, those of us adopting PV solar right now aren't really so much expecting the utility company to act as a battery as we expect that they'll be able to immediately redirect/resell the excess electricity we generate to another customer nearby.

I believe a recent statistic said solar adoption would, in fact, work nicely this way in any given neighborhood until it exceeds at least a threshold of around 8%?

In my own town, for example ... we have a population of roughly 6,000. As far as I'm aware, there are only approximately 5 residences using PV solar. (I think the city makes some use of solar as well for the water treatment plant, but that's probably NOT a situation where they're generating more than they're using and expecting repayment for excess generation!) Even if you assume you've got 3 or 4 (or more) people living in one residence in some cases, and a number of people in apartment complexes? It's clear we haven't hit the saturation point yet where more people are making power than want to use it at that same time.

If the utility company can resell the power I generate and push back out over the wires connected to my house, that's power they don't have to generate themselves AND transmit a relatively long distance, running it through "step up" transformers and so on to offset losses from the electrical resistance of the long run of wire. In that sense, it should be valuable to them -- not something inherently "bad" or "problematic".

if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear
if you've something to hide, you shouldn't even be here

(techo beat)

=)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Ten years ago

When we inevitable lose the battle (the government does have a tendency to get their way in these things), do we get to reap the benefits of a total information society? I mean, will there be a searchable database where I can find out where I left my keys? That link to that awesome video i saw on sometube.com that i can't remember? If i remembered to feed the cat?

Yeah, like GTA. GTA V spent $150M on development and $150M on advertising. There's no way they could put out a high quality game every year.

Most games don't require $150M development budgets.

Crowdfunding albums has been done before. I'm pretty sure RadioHead tried this with a recent album, as did Nine Inch Nails. David Bowie may have done so too? (Just going by memory here ...)

In any case, I think the concern with going this route is that once the novelty of doing it wears off, you'll quickly have little more than a "race to the bottom", where artists everywhere are releasing works this way, and people won't contribute much money at all to any one project. (The early adopters of the model did well with it, primarily because people were paying them the "going rate" for albums, or more in some cases, as a show of support for trying the new business model and taking risks.)

Again, I'm not really sure what the answer is with all of this? Many, many years ago, musicians were "professionals for hire" -- LONG before it was even possible to record audio. The wealthy paid them to do live gigs at their parties and what-not, and that was pretty much the extent of how profit was made from it. Maybe we're headed back that way, where live concerts are the only practical way to profit from making music -- and anything else is simply done to market your music and get your "brand" out there?

Truthfully, I don't even know that I care? I love music and I used to even play guitar in a local band for a couple years (long time ago). Part of me thinks our society is poorer for eliminating the possibility (however faint) that some teens jamming together in a garage can aspire to become stars, making millions, if they just believe in themselves and doggedly keep practicing and playing, playing, playing. But another part of me knows that's exactly why I got out of the music scene too. The writing was on the wall that this wasn't going to be a good living for many people at all, as technology progressed and things changed. (First, we saw the decline of the radio DJ who was allowed to run his/her own show, playing whatever he/she liked. Then we saw the major labels implode (deservedly, basically). And just as the indie labels and individual entrepreneurs were picking up the pieces and going DYI -- things went to digital streaming for "all you want to listen to for $10 a month" services.

I see you posted anonymous. Nice.... so you can't even sign your name to your opinion on this topic?

The "flat earth" debate has long ceased to be a debate because it's essentially PROVEN at this point that the planet is, indeed, a sphere. (The only people still denying it are a very SMALL portion of the population who may well do so just to be contrary, vs. having a true belief in it.)

I'm not whining and fussing about a few dollars coming from my pocket, at all. I *am*, however, saying, there's a LOT of B.S. going around, especially in areas like "alternative energy solutions" right now.

I actually HAVE a PV solar system I purchased for our house, outright -- and that cost me more than "a few dollars". Even so, I'd happily tell anyone who asks how much total B.S. and nonsense is promised by the "Eco Green, pro solar" crowd and adjust their expectations before they commit to a solar loan or purchase.

It's *only* via artificially manufactured govt. subsidies that this stuff makes good financial sense for most customers. It's NOT cost effective on its own, especially when you consider the costs they don't like to talk about -- such as labor to disassemble a whole solar system from your roof, in order to replace roofing shingles that are at the end of their useful life, or the cost to replace a dying inverter outside of the warranty period (typically less than HALF the warranty length offered on your panels themselves).

A serious change would involve building new, safer nuclear power plants and using those to generate all of our energy needs where options like hydroelectric weren't viable options. Guess what though? That's not really profitable for the special interests getting big payouts from technologies like solar right now, so that's not up for so much real discussion.....

One of the current issues for music recording artists is that we've essentially removed the traditional method of getting paid for producing a new album. A painter hopes to initially make $'s on the first sale of a new painting. So he/she doesn't really concern him/herself with the concept of "pay per view" after the fact.

These days, most musicians either invest their own money into production and distribution of a new album, or they sign with a record label who may loan them some money as part of a contract, but it's subject to being repaid by selling enough albums to pay the loan off.

Unfortunately, music streaming services severely cut into the number of people interested in buying the album, yet the streaming is apparently barely paying the artists anything.

So how do we fix it? I'm not necessarily arguing that we need to pay more for streaming, or in turn those companies should pay the artists more of a "cut". But I'm saying there's a transition in progress away from people actually buying new music that's released, and towards an expectation of being able to listen to it, on demand, via the Internet.

If the current music situation was more equivalent to how a da Vinci type would get compensated, we'd have a system in place where anyone providing the music streaming (equivalent to "public viewing of the painting") would have to pay thousands of dollars, up front, first, to own each song. (Perhaps that would mean each service would have "exclusives" on individual songs or whole albums they purchased.)

Hey Bill. Kindly go fuck yourself. Seriously. If you believe (and apparently you do), that only Ivy League universities can provide any education of merit, then you really are more of a mindless tool than I suspected.

QFT. Consider how well the Ivy Leaguers mismanaging the executive branch of the government are doing as further proof of the uselessness of credentialism.