Entries by Erick

Decent Quality (for faster systems)


Extra Low Quality (for everyone else)

How exactly is the war on terror supposed to stop terrorism? Terrorizing people with "shock and awe" destruction clearly rallies the soldiers -- those willing to inflict injury and death on others under orders for a 'greater good', as was seen after 9/11 and the flashy invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. War is incapable of stopping people desperate enough to give up their own lives from doing so in an effort to fight against an occupation, we already knew this because of the occupation of Palestine by western supplied and backed Israel. In order to prevent terrorism it is absolutely necessary to address what lies at the root of the problem, whatever it is that motivates people to fight and die, beyond the rhetoric about the religions used to justify it. There's a reason people do desperate things, call it insane all you want but it doesn't change the reality for those carrying out the acts. Most people understand this reality in their day to day lives, such as it makes much more sense to have a dialogue with some party you are having a dispute with rather than immediately taking them to court or trying to kill them. Of course as you can see, the larger an entity you are, courts and war seem less costly an option, the reason corporations are to happy to sue media fans and empires are eager to wage endless wars and create global corporate friendly "free trade" agreements without input from ordinary people.

What's the war on drugs supposed to be all about? Drug abuse, right? Well, as it turns out they seem to think it's just about drugs, the abuse is just a consequence of using drugs in their uneducated minds. The consequence of the policies put in place to enforce prohibition of certain drugs has been to create a booming underground economy that supplies much of the funding for gangs to buy guns, as well as a huge economic deficit with the enforcement and punishment of users and dealers. What they don't realize is that people abuse drugs because of social, spiritual and emotional issues. Getting people off illegal drugs and on to legal drugs, such as alcohol, tobacco or prescriptions of synthetic chemicals doesn't change the situation, and quite often makes things much worse by trading a less harmful illegal drug for a more harmful legal one. If anyone actually wants to get serious about cracking down on drugs, start by addressing the issues in people's lives that lead them to abuse drugs, such as poverty, war in general but especially the war on drugs and freedom in all it's disguises. There's no other way to end the cycles of violence.

We aren't actually learning though... A new war is being launched in an effort to control what we think and how we share information. Copyright laws are being warped into draconian war-on-drugs style criminal offenses that will be punishable with 3 year or more prison sentences and fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, on top of the civil cases the copyright owners currently launch against media users. It's a systematic process of mass manipulation using the corporate media and well greased political will to absorb a huge swath of population into the prison industrial complex and legally eliminate many of their rights permanently. It also gives the government and corporations a valid reason to fully regulate internet traffic, ultimately completely eliminating access to uncensored information.

Keeping in mind that when a large enough percent of the population find a law to be unworthy of upholding it is our duty to stand up against it before it's too late, before everything changes and we go through it all again and then have to start hearing things like this applied to those evil media pirates:

He argues that taking the crime out of drug use could be a simple solution to a complex question, but says: "I welcome debate because the lack of robust, balanced, public debate has bedevilled this whole issue. It shows a tremendous courage by the police federation to bring someone with such radical thoughts, because that is what you need to stimulate debate." His caveat is that Cole and his colleagues "muse about Utopia, but I have to live in the world as it is".

Recently I gave Google AdSense a try on my site and to my supprise there were quite a few clicks. One of their many rules is that you can't click on your own ads, for obvious reasons. After a while I decided to add the search feature to my "start" page that shows up as the bookmark homepage on the computers in my network. I already had the Google search box, so it was just a matter of adding my client ID and then when people search and click on an ad that comes up in the results page, I would get a credit.

An EV with a range of about 240km is more than enough for most people's commuting needs, and with batteries that last 1500 full cycles that means it should last at least 360,000km, and more if the battery isn't deep cycled constantly, which is probably the case if you charge at home and your commute isn't using the full battery capacity. The battery recharge time from empty is 5–6 hours using conventional 110 volt power, so a nightly topping off would probably only take a couple hours.

It's that time of year again, when all the junk you collected over the year gets kicked to the curb and someone, either a lucky passer by or the garbage truck comes along and picks it up. This year I managed to get rid of a lot of old computer stuff, not even 5 minutes after I drag it to the curb, it's gone. I think we need a better facility for junk exchange, most of what wealthy people throw away is still perfectly useable, or in need of repairs that some would be willing to perform, and it makes sense ecologically to extend the useful life of stuff before it ends up in a landfill. I suppose large economic interests that rely on the low-medium income bracket purchases would be affected, so they would probably be opposed to any such facilitation.

It's been a long time since we flew the airplane, but finally we got a fresh beaver and built it up with pre-enforcements. The new version comes with a 350 motor instead of a 300 and recommends adding additional struts to the wing for added stability. The old 100 speed controller was also unsuitable, so a new one had to be bought. Last night we installed 9 bright LEDs so that we can fly it at night, and it worked pretty good, except for one "hard landing" that broke a propeller. Tomorrow we'll install some different colour LEDs so it's a bit easier to see it's position. This thing can really tear it up, the power to weight ratio is pretty crazy with the 8 NiHM AAA pack it can climb straight up and loops are effortless.

It all started back in the year 2000. The new Prius Hybrid was on the back cover of the white pages phone book and I showed my parents because I knew they were interested in electric vehicles, and if they could have bought an EV they would have, but this was the closest thing in production that was available in Canada at the time.  They ordered a white 2001 Prius to replace their white 1991 Plymouth Colt (Mitsubishi) and they love it. They took it on a camping trip across Canada, including mountain bikes, equivalent to an average year of normal driving. There haven't been any problems with it so far, a recall for the original tires and a service bulletin for the hybrid battery to have it's positive terminals re-sealed have been the only signs of trouble with this vehicle.

In 2005 my best friend totalled his 2003 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec-V in a bad accident that had him in the hospital for quite a while. I helped convice him to get a generation two Prius as a replacement, primarily on the grounds of fuel economy (and gas was only $0.64/l at the time), but also because of the advanced technology. It offers just enough performance to be a fun car to drive, similar to a v6 off the line, but with the fuel economy in your face it's actually more fun and more of a challenge to play the fuel consumption game and see how low you can get it. The great thing about a Prius is that even if you completely ignore the extra info and drive like a moron, you'll still be using way less gas than any ordinary vehicle driven that way. It didn't take long though, as usual, to get tired of the stock stereo, even this one, the premium JBL 9-speaker package with a 6 disc in-dash CD changer, really didn't sound all that great compared to previous installs we had done. Time for upgrades!

What parts of nature are beautiful? What are horrific? Why are some things frightening even though they are small?

My best friend bought me a Compaq V2405CA, a nearly new AMD based laptop that's quite speedy, burns dual layer DVDs, has TV-out and it plays a 1920x1080 MPEG4 video file that I haven't seen any other computer able to play... Awesome! The only problem with it is the wireless network only works for a few minutes, then stops, still seemingly connected but refuses to work, no matter what until a full reboot. Tried updating drivers, adjusting settings but still, no luck. I've determined that it's not my wireless access point because the old laptop has no problems staying connected, so time to try Linux and solve what seems to be the root of the problem, Microsoft Windows XP.

Half the problem recently was an extended blackout (normally power here is very reliable, usually if it goes out it comes back on within a few seconds) that caused the UPS battery to drain rather quickly (running the G3 webserver and an old P200 router machine) before I could get my car hooked up, so the server went down hard. That wouldn't be too big of a deal except that it had been running for well over a year and I had forgotten what the procedure was to boot it! Now... normally a Mac just boots into Mac OS by searching the drives and devices for something bootable, but you can set them to boot into Open Firmware where you have to issue a command that tells it what to boot from (handy for Linux since you can specify the file you want to boot) but since it had been soooo long (and rare before the last time I booted it) since I've issued a boot command to this machine I had to start looking stuff up...