Nigel Bridgman-Elliot

From the story: > Shetland has recently been targeted by scrap metal thieves Down here in London the other week someone stole my metal framed double bed from right outside where I live! I had popped inside after pushing it the 3 miles home on a couple of sack trollies, when I came back out, it was disappearing on the back of a truck up the road. A neighbour had their front gate stolen, and down by the local canal, first the brass plaque's disappeared, and then the steel holders vanished! The next bed I pushed home (15 miles from east to west london..) I was more paranoid about!

http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/interleaving.htm > BT state that interleaving can increase latency by an additional 20-40ms. > Interleaving is set to "auto" by default and interleaving is then controlled > by the DLM process, turning it on if needed. It is possible to arrange to > have interleaving set to permanently "on" or "off" via your ISP. Some ISPs > may make a charge for doing this. Turning it off might help, but might make things worse And then getting them to turn it back on again might take a while.. (Just took my ISP a month and a day or two to fix my problems.) Moving closer to the server can help, is one of the reasons I moved to London! Though now there are far more reasons to move away..

> However access to things like email and facebook are much more likely > to be gained through password/security question guessing. Agreed. It is suprising how many people use the same password for many services as well. (And people who stick them on postit notes next to the monitor..) > to guess most security questions One trick there is not to give the real answers but to make them up! Of course, you have to remember a million and one things that way.. Sadly I have noticed that there is no 100% or even 99% single antivirus software product out there that can catch all, and that things are going back a little to the old days of being very careful and suspicious of PC activitiy which might indicate you have a virus. That and regular checks with different software to catch things another misses. Though I find the overwelming reason why people get infected is simply because they fail to update their virus database or software itself. (Many programs say they automatically do this, but quite a few do not, eg. manually do it!) Then peoples subscriptions run out and they don't bother to renew them.. One rather good, but very time consuming to run free antivirus I can personally recommend to get some of those stubbon items out is: http://www.freedrweb.com/download+cureit Do be aware though it can take days to fully scan your PC! And you will need to babysit it the entire time.. Also, it can help to flush out your java cache from time to time, as some of the latest nasties like to hide there I notice. settings/control panel/java/general/tempoary internet files/settings/delete files

It has been a while, as I'm also in some 2,000+ other forums, it can take me a while to get around to checking them all, especially as of late being pressed for time in my hunt for a job/income to keep the wolf from the door. And even if I don't post, I may well be reading, waiting for the moment to say something to contribute. (It's a pity the forum software doesn't log easily whose reading what.) For backups I still use a rather old fashioned approach of HD caddies, simple and uncomplicated (For the most part.. except with old hardware that struggles to deal with anything above 250Gb in size.), which enables me to easily plug the HD into any PC to get the data off. (Though more complicated these days as the HD's I use are PATA ones and not SATA, and not every new motherboard has a very reliable PATA interface anymore.. (This newish Abit MB here for example, the PATA doesn't work with CD/DVD drives at all well, nor does it function with PCI RS232 cards..)) A friend of mine did try burning his backups to CD, but then found when he wanted the backups back, the discs had got corrupted! I would worry that DVD's might easily suffer the same kind of issues for long term storage. As such, I go for RAID 1 (Mirrored twin HD's, those special edition WD ones are rather nice I find.) on a seperate fileserver, then to HD caddies, then to offsite HD caddies. You can never have too many backups I reckon Incidently, finding a reliable RAID 1 that is cheap is somewhat of a challange, I've only found one that actually works as advertised so far, and that is the Promise FastTrack TX2000, it is getting rather old now and I think is limited to nothing bigger than 250Gb HD's. One might hope their newer cards work too.. But as I have tested some of their previous cards in anger so to speak and found they didn't work, just because one card works, doesn't mean the others will unless you test them! Most, or all that I have tested so far MB built in RAID 1 mirrored, do not actually work in practice, as they fail to copy the early tracks from one HD to another and should your primary fail, they won't boot from the secondary flawlessly. (Not without a lot of techincal doohookery.) It all works fine if you yank the primary out whilst its running, but as soon as you reboot, your find it doesn't work Plus, if one of the drives degrades slowly, so far testing wise all that happens is the errors get mirrored too.. (I've yet to have a drive fail under the latest Promise controller, so cannot report whether it is just as bad as every other one I tried.) Reliable backups seem rather fraught with difficulties in practice it seems.

Perhaps the box has a cooling fan in it that is failing/failed and it is overheating. Another fix which might work is to put a powered USB hub between them both. Also, is the new motherboard running overclocked at all ? And, the USB lead you are using, is it the correct one ? (eg. I seem to recal that there are differences between USB 1, 2 and 3 leads, such you may accidently be using a lead that cannot cope with the speed because it looks just the same as the one that worked!) Do you have any other USB devices plugged in ? (It may help to reduce the number of items, as such a powered hub may well help here.) Tried all the USB sockets in case the one you are using is duff in some way ? You could also perhaps try creating a dual boot system with XP and seeing if it works any better than, that way if it works the same, it would tend to indicate more of a hardware/firmware issue than an OS/Driver issue.

It is a pity one cannot vote for an area one does not live in, as I wish my vote here in London could be transferred up to your area.

Is there local stone suitable for drystone walling ? (Incidently, whats the usual cost per yard/metre for your average drystone wall?) Can you keep sheep out with ditches/ramparts ? Could always get someone to pick up some seeds the next time they are on the mainland

Thanks for the links. I would have thought it could be done pretty cheaply if people collected suitable seeds and grew a few in their own greenhouses. Seeds after all, litterly grow on trees How big do trees need to be to plant before sheep and rabbits aren't an issue ?

Would tree planting be welcomed here ? Especially say new woodlands ?

Out of interest, when did it become illegal to be naked in public in the UK ? Obviously way back in the past we was all naked in the trees, so at some point someone decided it wasn't ok.. (Perhaps clothing manufactors.. conspiracy theory 101..)

Because I'm pretty sure if its made public, we benefit more than if its kept secret. Hackers already have their own well oiled network to talk about such things in and are ahead of us in the game, we are playing catch up all the time. Hiding from the public just which bits broken does us no good in trying to avoid using that bit, and is the very thing the hackers want, eg. to keep us in the dark! Its like, if there is a food scare, do you want to know which brand of food to avoid, or just a vague description and have to throw out your entire cupboard of supplies..

I'm sure all the dangerious hackers already know what the exploit is, but for us little people, we need a little more of a helping hand. Looks like the patch/update is now available: KB960714 Available via windows update as a priority, lets hope it doesn't break anything eh Now, is it a fix for this; http://securitywatch.eweek.com/microsoft_windows/attackers_hammering_new_ie_flaw_via_sql_injection.html Or a fix for something else... Without information we the poor little people are just in the dark and have to spend our lives googling to find out.. Time passes . . . Well, installed the update, things seem ok..

I wish they would say which flaw they are talking about! Apparently there is a patch due in a few hours, to fix some issue, maybe the same one.. I hope everyone is running with at least some version of anti-virus software (Up to date..), I came across two the other day, one on an Ebay page and one on The Mirror website, where as previously I rarely saw one myself.

What if eventually every service the local authority/government was supposed to pay for ended up being paid for by private means, would that mean we wouldn't need to pay for local authorities/governments at all.. Its all very nice to expect the services we pay for, but over the last few decades all I see is services getting worse and our bills/taxes going up. If there was only a better lot to vote in, but it seems every time the new lot are just as bad as the last lot. (Though if you had my local lot who voted theselves a 113% payrise you might imagine they are the worst of the bunch!)

I'm not sure I'd use the terms intellectual elite and world bankers in the same sentance.. Like there are many forms of conservatism, or capitalistic approaches, there is also different forms of technocratic rule, from slavery where those at the top decide what is best for them, and other approaches where whats best for everyone is put first instead. I do agree its been 1984 for a while now, but I still hold out hope some of us can make enough difference to ultimately drive the world to a new home without the tyranny of today.

We don't have to manufactor to export do we, can't we just sell to our own folk ?

Won't this mean that we'll see an increase in manufactoring in the UK due to it being cheaper to make stuff here rather than imports ? (And thus more jobs..)

There isn't anything necessarly wrong with a globally governed state.. Unless its one where the poor end up as slaves..

I'm old enough to remember the last time we had a scare like this, all them peer reviewed research showing a new ice age was coming. Now its the oppersite.. The trouble with calling someone a climate scientist, is like calling someone a psychiatrist, not quite the same thing as a physicist or psychologist, whose disaplines are based on more mature science. Also, with the nature of science, your always going to have people who disagree, once you stop having disagreement, then how are you ever going to progress... My concern is more to help even the playing field and show errors on both sides, and that todays news of doom will be forgotten tomorrow when the next latest theory says something else, quite possibly oppersite thing.. We know far less about the world than we think we do.. (I'm reminded of a time not so many years ago when I got a friend to use a weather computer to tell me the chance of fog in 2 weeks time on moving day, the best technology of the day said a 5% chance.. yet it was like peasoup, well, there you go on good old reliable prediction eh..) Unless its a falling apple and you can see the theory in practice, anything else is just a maybe, so you plan for your maybe. Eg. Maybe all the ice will melt, maybe it won't. Lets move inland and higher up just in case, and look towards ways that are less polluting to the planet. In time, we'll figure out climate, I just don't think we have a good of a model as we think we do, and I do wish both sides would stop tinkering with the figures, its like listening to the government telling you the chocolate ration has been increased..

Testing it, looks like its: (Which appears different to what the help that goes along with the URL button seems to be saying.. have I made a mistake, or is it wrong ?) {url=http://www.webaddress.com} description{/url} Replace {} with [] Nanos But I usually don't bother myself, as at some point when your message ends up being copied in some systems, all people will see is the description and possibly have no idea on the real URL. (Which is a real pain when your searching for old stuff/links and all you find is a description in some google cache!)

I would be happier if the data used to make such graphs was made publically available so we could all add our own little interpertation, being that so much of what we see today is facts after they have been 'adjusted'. Then there is the actual measurements themselves, perhaps not being ideally done.. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/19/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-74/ http://www.surfacestations.org

Perhaps I might have chosen a better word than issue, but on the whole, anything thats disagreed about becomes an issue. Throughout the ages there have been things, from building wacking great big cathedrals which I'm sure gave plenty of work to stonemasons, to one of my favourite pet theories, that bonfire night was actually dreampt up by firewood salesmen so as to make sure there was plenty of demand just before it got really cold by getting everyone to burn all their spare wood.. Issues/things also keep us all busy arguing and not getting on with the real issues, next week I'm sure it will be alien abductions causing damage to the ozone layer by the influx of out of solar system holiday-makers intent on safari hunting whose spaceships are polluting our atmosphere and we need just a little bit of funding for an EU committe..

It wouldn't suprise me if like many issues, that it gets hijacked in the self interests of those at the top of the food chain.

What you see voiced is disagreement, people rarely say they agree Its like in customer support forums, people are there to complain, rarely do they say your doing a good job and keep it up. It might appear that nothing at all comes from all of this, but I find if you speak to people in person after they have had a good session listening to others views on something like a forum like this, that your find it has coloured their views just a little. Some high level people do listen to debates like this (Though I agree more should do so and not stay in their ivory tower blinkered to what everyone else thinks..), as its quite common that all you see being spoken is by about 2% of the people who are here, the other 98% just sit and listen, but it does sometimes sink in whats being said and makes a little difference here or there.

I tend to find that from debate comes cooperation, both sides learn a little, the gap between people is less, and common ground is found to work on. Its not perfect, but the old fashioned way of each doing their own thing leads to duplicated effort and wastefulness, as well as doing at times oppersite solutions. The less we fight each other and fight the problem at hand the better in my view. Language is one of our greatest gifts, it helps us achieve as a species, let us continue to use it!