The Iowa Historic Preservation Alliance is presenting a two-day conference at the Spencer school admin offices (23 E 7th St) Oct. 3 & 4, where several speakers will be on hand for presentations, including a cartoonist/author and a university professor. A tour of museum schools in Clay, Dickinson and Buena Vista counties will be held Saturday.
For details, email Bill Sherman or call (800) 434-2039.
Mediacom, Des Moines' cable Internet provider, has to date, received 6 subpoenas on behalf of the RIAA for identity information on its users' downloading of copyright protected music on peer-to-peer networks, such as Kazaa.
Whether Mediacom succumbs to the requests is really irrelevant.
In many cases, if you buy it, you own it lock, stock and barrel. You have the right to screw with it, tinker with it, destroy it, or improve it however you see fit -- provided you don't hurt anyone or cause damage to anyone else's property in the process. At least that's what we hope is the case.
If you buy a CD, you own the CD. It's a bona fide contract between you and the seller. It's the same with any product. But if you reproduce it and sell it and make money on the venture, you are stealing someone else's hard work for profit. I doubt any reasonable person diagrees with that.
But that's not what this is about, and I think most people grasp that.
If this was really about stealing something, then we would be given an opportunity to pay for it, right? well, they don't give us that opportunity. Companies hold out a perfect product (free entertainment) and the RIAA stands there sneering, waiting for you take the bait. If they really had the artists' best interest at heart, then they would recommend that the companies that provide this entertainment ensure that the artists get paid. But they don't. Instead, they seek control. Control of polititians, hence, control of the very customers who have paid the money for CDs in the first place -- the only people that care about the artists.
Process that and tell me what you think.
Update, August 21, 2004: Mediacom has released the personal information, so RIAA has won and technology has lost -- for now.
Experts in the industry are predicting double and triple utility bills this
winter. This is cause for great concern for all of us, but the expected
high energy prices will devastate people in the lowest income ranges. As a
public service to our community, The Wise Guys would like to invite a panel of
experts to do a special show on improving the efficiency of homes, both for
existing structures and new construction.
The panel
We have invited Brian Leech of Alger-Leechman Heating & Cooling to be on
the panel, as well as the a PR spokesman for MidAmerican Energy. We'll
also invite a builder to come on and join us. We'll address several issues
in our forum:
We'll let you know when we will hold our forum. Please href="mailto:danny@radiowiseguys.com">send us your questions in advance so
we can answer them on the air.
Straw bail homes
What's the building cost of a straw bale home vs. a stick or brick home
Cement homes
How much do they cost? Are they cheaper to build than stick
homes? Is there an abundant supply of straw?
Berm or underground homes
How much do they cost? Are they cheaper to build than stick homes?
Existing homes
What can be done to modify an existing stick or brick home to have a
dramatically higher energy efficiency? How much would it cost? Wind
breaks? Trees? Solar panels? Solar reflectors?
"R" values
What are "R" values? Are they an accurate means by which to
measure the level of insulation? Can an "R" value change with
the outside temperature? What materials are most/least affected by extreme
hot or cold temperatures? How to fiberglass and recycled cellulose
materials hold up under extreme temperatures?
Assessing your home
Assess your current situation. Ask your utility company or a heating
and cooling professional to give you a free energy audit of your home. You
can also follow most of the audit steps yourself. Most energy companies
provide steps for assessing your home's energy efficiency. Check windows
and doors for leaks. Inspect the entire outside of your home for holes and
cracks where air leaks might occur. Check insulation for adequate
"R" values. Check heating and cooling equipment for best
efficiency.
Assessing costs of improving efficiency
Will it be cost-effective or even viable to replace appliances, insulate
your home and repair cracks and holes? Can
you spread costs our over a period of time? These are important
questions. Compare projected costs of not doing repairs with replacing or
repairing Estimate whether you can save money. Are there financing options
available to home owners/
What can renters do to keep their utilities down?
Alternative energy
Is it possible to get cost benefits from solar, water and wind energy?
Is it feasibly to buy your own solar panels and windmills to produce
electricity? Is it feasible to buy solar water heaters and air
conditioners? Will the utilities buy back unused energy? Are there
any DIY (do-it-yourself) alternative energy solutions?
Tips for reducing your energy usage
Near-field lighting using low voltage DC lamps.
You usually don't actually need to light an entire room, and using light only where you need it is far more efficient than lighting whole rooms. Either use smaller florescent lights or miniature DC lamps to really cut down on usage. You can even use motion detectors to automatically turn on lights when you are in the area. The real benefit of using this technology is that the lights can be set to turn off after a period of no motion, thereby cutting
energy usage.
Weatherizing kits
You can buy a wide variety of weatherizing kits from discount stores.
They include weather stripping for doors and windows, plastic coverings for
windows, wall plate insulators, foam tape and calk.
Close off outside doors
Do you really need to use the sliding door during cold months? Even
hot months? Particularly sliding doors let a lot of air pass through the
channels. Perhaps you can seal the door to prevent it from being used.
Seal up pet doors
Pet doors might seem like a better alternative to opening the doors to let
them pass. But many of these doors are very porous and allow a lot of air
leakage -- 24 hours a day.
Power use scheduling
Most homes are empty during the day and quiet during sleeping hours and you usually only use energy during the waking hours that you're home. so if it prudent to do so, you can use timers or simply unplug appliances and such that draw current even when not being used.
Here are some things you might unplug while you're not using them:
Alabama's Chief Justice Roy Moore has been suspended as a result of disobeying an order from a higher court. The order was to remove the Ten Commandments
monument he had placed his court house.
According to court documents, Moore was twice offered opportunities to stay the removal order and take the issue to the US Supreme Court, but the judge refused to follow established court
rules and failed in any hopes to do so. When Judge Moore finally made the appropriate request, it was
simply too late, and the higher court subsequently rejected such filings.
We hear heated discussions on the church-state separation issue, but this point comes down to following established guidelines. In two conference calls, members of the US District Court asked Moore if he wanted to have the order stayed; to take it to the US Supreme Court,
but Moore declined.
In arguing for keeping the monument in the court house, a few are suggesting that we look to the strongly held religious beliefs of the framers of our Constitution,
a concept that seems absurd to me. I understand that most of our founding fathers were
deeply religious men and I'm glad for that. But I believe they felt the first amendment protected us from religious persecution,
one of the very unpleasantries people fled other lands to escape.
I accept
that our laws are based on biblical laws such as the Ten Commandments. I
also accept that all rights come first from God. But I refuse to draw the
conclusion that, because the framers were religious, that they meant for our
government to exhibit any religious color. On the contrary. In order
to ensure freedom of religion, we need to keep the government out of our
churches, and the churches out of our government, or a bias can creep in that
will establish a certain religion.
The brick and mortar of our society was
laid by religious men and women. Reading their writings, it becomes
obvious that the virtue of their labors was indeed borne out of religion.
I thank God for their virtue, but I commend their restraint for the good of all
men and women.
I hope that all individuals would consider consulting religious clerics in
order for guidance, including congressmen, presidents and judges. I hope
they recognize the importance of the virtues of religion -- in fact that the
very foundation of our society was established because of it. I reject,
however, the notion that these people of government should sanction religion in
the name of the government in any way, including the adorning of court houses
and public schools of America with symbols which have the clear effect of
promoting religion.
So you're back online after another vicious attack on your computer.
You're sick of all the troubles you've been having. How are you going to
prevent this kind of this from happening again? Consider using an email
program that is nearly virus proof, like Pine, a text-based program that
composes and displays text email, which is, after all, what email was intended
to be.
Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express are huge targets for attackers because
they're hugely popular (Outlook express comes with every new Windows computer)
and because there are so many features to exploit. Don't get me
wrong. The features Microsoft build into their software help make using it
easy and pleasant -- for the most part. But remember that the more bells
and whistles you build into a program, there more places there are for breakage
(and expoits) to occur.
Old-school computer users sit back and chuckle at all the troubles people
have with their fancy-schmancy, graphics laden, gadget-heavy computers.
The old-schoolers not only remember the good old days of text-only email, but
many still use it exclusively. Let's look at an email program called Pine.
It was designed for use on Unix computers and is ported to many other operating
systems, like Linux and even Windows. Later versions of Pine strip HTML
coding from messages and display them as plain text. Attachments can be
easily detached and stored without executing them.
How can I do text-only email? There are several possibilities.
You might, for instance, have shell access to your email account. If this
is the case, perhaps you can use pine in a telnet window on your computer.
If you don't have shell access available to you from your ISP, then build your
own server machine out of an old computer you have laying around the house.
If you have or can come up with an old 486 or early Pentium-class machine
that has 32 or more megs of RAM, you can install a network card and a free
distribution of Linux; set it up to fetch mail from all your outside POP3 and
IMAP accounts (it won't work with free web-based mail like Hotmail and Yahoo!
without some external programming); then logon and type 'pine' at the command
prompt and start corresponding. Chances are, you'll never have a virus
problem again. You'll not only have a full-fledged email server, but the
added features of a file and print server too, and at no more cost than the old
computer you already own!
Some time ago, I had an occasion to set up a wireless network for some
friends. They had a broadband connection to the Internet through a cable
modem provided by Mediacom and two desktop computers. I suggested they buy
an 802.11b gateway and 802.11b cards for each computer they wanted connected.
After installing and connecting all the hardware they bought, each computer
seemed to be able to connect to the Internet fine, and we were able to do some
file and print sharing between them. But it all wasn't fine. I
quickly discovered that the computers could surf the net, but not at the same
time. It is then that I discovered that they'd purchased an access point
and not a gateway.
A wireless access point does one thing. It broadcasts a single RJ-45
jack to multiple wireless network cards. It merely provides direct
connectivity to the public. In this case, the public network sees all the
computers connected. This is a problem because Mediacom (and many other
cable companies) will only assign you one IP address. Not one for each
computer you have plugged into their network, just one period. So when we
connected the AP and fired up the first computer, we were fine. Mediacom
asked us to verify our new mac address, as expected. Then we fired up the
second computer. And again, we were asked to verify the mac address.
Doing this, we got on the net with that machine too. So all's well, right?
Wrong! Being asked to verify a new mac address the second time was a
bad sign. It meant Mediacom could see the mac addresses on each machine,
which told us that the wireless base was not fronting for us, but was exposing
each machine attached to it to the network, requiring each machine to obtain its
own IP address, which Mediacom will not do for more than one machine
simultaneously.
Ah hah! It's an access point, not a router.
If my friends had purchased a wireless gateway instead of the simple wireless
access point, the gateway would have appeared to Mediacom as a single computer,
and only asking to update the mac address once, and that mac address would have
been for the gateway and not one for each of the computers. With a
gateway, we not only insulate each of the internal computers from the Internet,
but we sort of fool Mediacom into thinking we only have one machine connected to
their network. A gateway acts as the go-between for all Internet requests
coming from inside the network -- so instead of each computer requesting its own
IP address from Mediacom directly, each computer would ask the gateway (and not
Mediacom) for their IP address, which would in turn assign each machine a local
IP address from a bank of local subnet addresses.
Lesson learned. Access points are fine if you're already behind a
firewall and are not limited to the number of IP addresses you can
request. But if you're using a cable or DSL modem, make sure you use a
gateway to connect several computers to the network or you may have the same
problem we had.
Lots of people assume that you need
broadband (cable or DSL modem) to have wireless networking. Not
so. You can still use your single dialup connection and share it
with all users on your home or office network. But there are a few
complications, including slower surfing and downloading.
In order to share dial up internet, you
need to have a modem doing the dialing. There are a number of ways
to get dialup internet into your network, but none are all that common,
or even very easy:
Here's what I suggest for most home/small
office users on a shoestring budget:
The base station is a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=ZoomAir+Wireless+IG-4150+Wireless+Gateway"
target="_blank">ZoomAir Wireless IG-4150 Wireless Gateway for under
$70, connected to either your phone line (56K dialup) or your Cable/DSL
modem (usually 256Kbps to 1,500 Kbps). What makes this unit unique
is that it has a built-in 56K modem where most all Gateways/Routers do
not. Those gateways and routers that do facilitate 56K dialup
connections to the Internet only do so through a serial port which you
must connect an additional external modem. The ZoomAir Gateway is
configured to dial and logon to your ISP using a web browser. I
assume this is a dial on demand situation, so that whenever a computer
needs an Internet connection, the modem will make that connection, and
hang up after a period of in-activity.
The downside of using this
particular gateway is that computers and the software running think
they're always connected to the net, so may make frequent connections
to update software such as weather bugs, chat clients, anti-virus
software definition updates and automatic Windows updates, and
therefore may never be inactive. This can increase your ISP
service charges if you are billed on an hourly basis. It would
be beneficial if you could configure the modem to ONLY dial up during
specific hours of the day, so that you could 'throttle' usage to stay
below a certain number of hours a month. I have no idea if this
feature is built into this gateway.
802.11b Wireless network adaptors
for all computers on your network.
How it works:
The base station connects to the internet
through either the phone line or your cable or DSL modem. It then
sets up a private local area network, isolated from the outside.
It assigns local IP addresses to each computer that connects to it in
ranges that are not accessible from outside your LAN and Internet
connection.
The premiere season of "The West Wing" is expected to be realeased late this year on four discs and will retail for $60. Gag reels to commentaries may also appear on the set. More...
In a bold move, Yahoo!, one of Google's best customers, has acquired some contender Internet search engines to go head-to-head with the biggest dog on the block. Microsoft isn't fdar nehind, chomping at Yahoo!'s heels. More...
F-Secure says Sobig.F is among four major virus threats discovered in a week. It's an email worm that sends a .pif or .scr file to recipients in users' address books. It also prepares the computer to receive orders and tries to download files from the Internet, according to one news report. If the infected computer is on a shared network, the worm tries to copy itself to the other computers on that network. The worm is programmed to stop spreading on Sept. 10. More...
Got your attention, didn't I? What's this about? In June, 1967, during the Six Day War, Israeli war planes attacked and nearly sunk a US spy ship staffed with NSA intelligence gathering personnel.
Israel calls the attack a horrible accident; a case of mistaken identity. Survivors and conspiracy theorists say that's a load of crap.
You decide. I'll deliberately leave out my viewpoint in all this, and instead suggest you read what's being
written about the incident. Do your own Google searches and read the words on the web sites on the two
sides and make up your own mind. Here are some links in no particular
order:
href="http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/01/04/USSLiberty0401.html" target="_blank">A
UK Book Review of James Bamford's "Body of Evidence"
Here's one scenario of what might have happened:
A zealous LBJ wanted to do right by Israel, since just 19 years prior, the US had sponsored Israel's very statehood, and he knew in advance of their plans to spank surrounding enemies who'd sworn to push the Jews into the ocean. LBJ nods in blind approval and vows he will know nothing of it. LBJ figured it would be ugly, but he didn't have to know unpleasant details of the gore. But he would later be shocked, for his own people would pay with their lives and dignity for LBJ's wink of an eye.
During this spanking, Israeli leadership learn there's a US intelligence ship lying quietly just 19 miles off the coast, watching the whole bloody mess unfold (like the execution of
Egyptians in an Israeli firing squad). Israel is slightly dismayed (a sentiment LBJ will soon share) at the NSA intrusion, and so tries to sink the snoopy ship to silence it.
It was a knee-jerk response and not well planned, but it had to be done. They'd do damage control and spin a tail of mistaken identity later, but right now, stopping Liberty is priority or there could be a very large audience and a paper trail of evidence against them.
So, despite that Israeli Air Force war plane pilots could plainly see what they were doing, orders to destroy Liberty are delivered and carried out, as dutiful warriors must, without question.
And what could LBJ say? He's all but fighting the Egyptians alongside the Israelis. How could he defend Liberty and not take action against Israel's air force? He had no choice. He had to turn a blind eye to the slaying of his own countrymen or burn in hell for not protecting the chosen ones. It would take generations to repair the damage on Israel's world status if the world knew the truth -- at least the official truth.
So, while commanders of the sixth fleet were sending warplanes to defend Liberty, LBJ turns them back.
