Bob Morris @ Apr 7th 2007 16:16 - Category: Unfiled ;
The prosecutor wants to recuse the entire 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals because the current governor was the D.A. during Mumia’s trial and “would have been responsible for the supposed ‘routine’ racially discriminatory practices of Philadelphia prosecutors” and besides his wife is one of the judges so rather than just recuse her, they want all the judges gone.
Confused? Me too.
Bob Morris @ Apr 7th 2007 12:08 - Category: Unfiled ;
Microsoft has a password checker that’ll tell you how secure your password is. Test your passwords there, then check this chart which tells how long it takes to crack a password using easily available software.
A solid password will be at least eight characters long and mixed case. If passwords are lowercase only, then there are 26 possibilities for each character. If it’s mixed case, then there are 56 possibilities, which makes it orders of magnitude harder to crack. Toss in numbers and special characters, and the password then becomes very secure.
Don’t use your standard passwords for important sites like online banking. Make those important passwords different from any other password you use.
I store my passwords in Password Safe (Windows only, unfortunately) which is open source and easy to use.
Firefox handles passwords better than IE because it allows you to view which ones you’ve saved, and thus to delete them if you don’t want them stored at all. IE, to me knowledge, doesn’t have this feature, so you never quite know which ones are stored.
And if goes without saying to not use pet names, birthdates, or anything obvious like that for important passwords.
Bob Morris @ Apr 7th 2007 08:06 - Category: Unfiled ;
Immigrants are moving into the cities as native-borns move out. Without such immigration, many large cities would have a net population loss during the past several years.
“A lot of cities rely on immigration to prop up their housing market and prop up their economies,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
Reader DJ who sent the link comments “It’ll be interesting to see whether global warming/peak oil changes this trend as suburbs shrink and cities grow again– and whites compete with immigrants for space and resources…”
Jim Kunstler at Clusterfuck Nation writes about this eloquently and nonstop, if a bit messianically. Peak Oil will destroy the suburbs and exurbs because suddenly everything will cost much because of the cost of trucking it there. Add long, increasingly expensive commutes on top of that, and he thinks things will get apocalyptic.
Bob Morris @ Apr 7th 2007 00:23 - Category: Renewable energy ;
Our new home has a fireplace, and we just had a cord of wood delivered. They brought it in a small dumptruck, emptied it in the driveway, and while stacking it (hey, a cord is a LOT of wood to stack, 4×4x8, to be exact) was thinking about carbon footprints.
Firewood is a renewable resource, yet it leaves a carbon footprint when burned for heat. Hundreds of millions if not billions of people probably do this every day too.
However, a carbon footprint also has to take into considerable how the fuel source was prepared, and in that, firewood has a tiny footprint compared to natural gas, electric, or heating oil. The carbon produced by log cutting machines and chainsaws is miniscule compared to that of processing crude oil into fuelstocks. And of course, in many parts of the world, most if not all of the wood cutting is done manually, so there’s no footprint at all.
I wonder what the carbon footprint of burning wood in a fireplace is compared to, say, a heating oil furnace, as is common here in New England?
Bob Morris @ Apr 7th 2007 00:08 - Category: Wind turbines ;
They fit anywhere and can generate power in very low wind speeds. This could be a next-generation wind turbine that anyone can use.
Available from Motorwind Turbines. Inhabitat has more.
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