Posts by GrimJack

Try this gadget - you need to be running Vista but take a look here

Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT)

Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) is an electronic system that allows a recipient to authorize transfer of their government benefits from a Federal account to a retailer account to pay for products received. EBT is currently being used in many States to issue food stamp and other benefits. EBT has been implemented in all States since June of 2004.

Some of the following documents are available as Adobe Acrobat PDFs. Download Acrobat Reader.
EBT Status Highlights
EBT Status Report
A Report to Congress: Food Stamp EBT Systems. The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 required the Secretary of Agriculture to submit a report on the status of Food Stamp Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) systems to Congress.
EBT Alternatives Analysis (PDF 4MB, 241 pages) - This report analyzes possible changes FNS and States could make to existing EBT implementation and system models to increase competition among EBT vendors, facilitate system implementation nationwide, and lower the cost of EBT in general. The report is broken out by chapters and appendices which can be downloaded individually. Appendices A & B are not available in electronic format. Appendix H is not available because of sensitive data.
EBT Rules & Regulations - Current rules governing EBT system implementation and operation.
EBT Disaster Guidelines - The purpose of this Guide is to assist EBT States in developing their disaster plans. Responses to recent disasters have demonstrated EBT can effectively deliver food stamp benefits …

Have you disassembled the keyboard and blown out keyboard. Once you have the board open and the large chunks blownout, then check the membrane for spilled drinks and stuff, trying cleaning that. Reassemble and try again

Do you know what triggers the event? What is your computer? What is your operating system? What is going on around your set up? Did this just start happening (trigger)? A little more information could help.

Are you trying to set up a dual boot system w/both XP and/or Vista? Or are you trying to upgrade from XP to Vista? 2 gigs of ram is bare minimum for Vista - try adding another gig to the mix.

Do you have problems downloading other files? What is your browser? At what point in the process does it fail to start? Does help to shift-click or right-click?

Hmmm, no cables, hunh? Well, You need a power cable to plug it into the wall, but those are a dime a dozen, then you need keyboard, mouse, and monitor cables to go into the far left set of plugs. Then you will need a set of mouse/keyboard to USB converter cables and a video cable for each of the computers you want to control from the switch. I am not sure that you would need a any software but dang - no cables, that might hamper you a bit. and I don't see any way to get sound from the computers. If you are paying money for this - find out how much you will need to pay to get the cables.

If you have the correct drivers, yes.

Almost any office supply store will sell you a UPS - do you need more than that? The more money you spend on it, the longer it will last (within reason). You might be able to find recommendations in the hardware section here on DaniWeb.

Depending on the HD, there should be no problem. Once you have the HD in your hand, you can remove the adapter revealing the standard connector which you can attach to any of your computers via the standard ribbon cable. When you fire up the computer, it should show up. If you want to get fancy, you can buy a 'laptop-to-USB' connector kit that includes a hard-case.

I don't think I left anything out. I used to work for legal 'discovery' firm getting data off of hard drives. There were probably 100 computers in the various rooms that were left open and had all sorts of HDs hanging off them.

Once your computer fires up, the HD should be added to the list of drives and you should be able to click on it. Heck, you could just keep the disk as more storage.

It looks pretty nice but there is no way in h**l I will let Google put something else on my pc. Just like I hate having M$ know too much about me and my machine. I think that having a 3 or 4 way race for browser control can only help us, the users, get better products.

I've worked in energy research, kiddo.
And you're the one getting your references from the ecoweenies...

Nuclear is far cleaner than is either wind or solar.
Best would be to build massive solar collectors in high orbit, beam the energy to earth.
Of course that would have to be done without launching everything from earth, we'd first need to build permanent living quarters in space, engineer ways to mine the asteroid belt for the raw materials, etc. etc.
That's all technically feasible, construction could start within a decade, 2 at most, IF we had the political will to do it. Sadly we don't as no politician thinks of anything that doesn't bring him votes in the next elections in 4 years or less, and these programs would not provide a financial return in more than that.

Wow, a measured response with barely a lapse into name calling.

The other investment that has to be made is in the 'infrastructure'. Here in the US, it is not only the bridges, roads, and dams that are in need of upgrading - the power grid needs a serious upgrade. A deep rethinking of the grid needs to happen as there is no storage capacity; if more power is being produced than can be carried or used, production has to stop. Currently, carrying capacity is the major blockage but one can envision a time when more power is produced than can be used.

One form of storage is …

Or as one smoker put it as she lay dying of cancer "I knew that smoking would take years off my life - I just didn't know it would take them from the middle"

I was going to put this in my geek thread but since it is really about dark matter, well - here is a geek rap about looking for dark matter.

Let's see...
Don't carry a double standard. You have plenty of other examples.

Hoist on my own petard - dang.

ps When you drill down, that quote translates as blown up by my own fart.

Why are they wearing wooden shoes in the Netherlands?

Flotation devices in the event the dykes fail.

Usually, but they prefer to date other scientists

Have you ever said anything useful?

Er, Dave! Have you said anything useful? Mote...log eye - that whole thing.

Spoken like a true unthinking yellow dog democrat.

If you want to ban BS - start with yourself.

So with McSame and McDame due to be down in LA, they are ready for their show down with Gustav. Naturally, there are some serious mapping groups following along.
Here is a time slice of Gustav heading NW.
Gustav is bearing right down onto LA

yes. They made their own fortune unlike young idiot kids who inherited it all and spend it like water because they never learned to handle money.
Kids like Osama bin Laden bin Barak ibn Hosseini...

<<note emotionally loaded wording>>
You are implying that old rich folks did not inherit their money but earned it themselves?
Then you are implying rich young kids inherit their money.
Both are logical fallacies or at the very least incomplete because it leaves numerous other possible combinations.

Then you somehow bring in Osama bin Laden who both inherited his fortune and also make a fortune on his own before er, entering politics.

Then you bring in Barak Obama who is not wealthy, did not inherit wealth but earned a good living and married someone who is not wealthy nor did she inherit her wealth but earns a good income.

And you did not mention McCain who married his wealth; his wife did not earn her wealth, she inherited it.

I would also suggest that you join Second Life as a student who is doing research and see if you can also get 'in character' responses from people who are participating; come to think of it, there might be some literature on SL in SL that you could research.

Is this getting to recursive?

The second is easy, it's weapons of mass destruction. Employ those on a large enough scale and you can depopulate large areas.

That would also reduce pollution (though of course most of those weapons will cause quite a bit of it when deployed, but I'm thinking longterm solutions here).

We could always opt for the neutron bomb - kill the people but save the property. <<cackles quietly to himself as he envisions the simplicity and beauty of the solution>>

Whatever programs you have written in life , you can not add additional code in the program which can verify the program is 100% correct .

That has actually been proven mathematically in 1931 under the guise of Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

What was John McSame thinking when he was looking at McDame? Or was he thinking?

Are you doing primary research?
At what level granularity?
Are you doing a survey of current literature?
Have you defined 'virtual reality'?
What is the baseline you are using to compare values?

When i worked at NOAA, there was a brief 16mm film of an almost empty Hawaiin beach stretching off to the horizon where you could barely see a very dark, very tall wall of water. Mid-frame you see one person bending over picking up something and another person looking at something in his hand, then glancing out to the horizon, then disappearing into the wall - then the POV goes flying. You can't outrun a 500 mph wall w/o a headstart.

We got to see a lot of movies of tsunamis that were just not available to the general public. Most of it was from Japan; by 1987 more than 50% of the adult population had home video cameras and Japan gets a lot of tsunamis (hence the name).

Especially since she is under investigation for firing the guy who would not fire her brother-in-law from the state police. Apparently, her sister's divorce is getting nasty.

I read my first one of these in the mid-nineties and all my greed senses pegged at 11 but I was burned at a carnival as a youth so I recognized that they were trying to overwhelm my intellect.

I am waiting for Max Headroom to show up as Google's head priest/spokeshead

May I diverge for a moment?<diverge> - I just spent an hour on that site. Set a time before you enter

Please don't blame 'chaos':

However, it should be noted that despite its "random" appearance, chaos is a deterministic evolution. In addition, there are chaotic systems that do not have periodic orbits (periodic orbits only survive in the boundaries of KAM tori, and for sufficiently strong perturbations from the integrable case, islands do not necessarily survive). Furthermore, in so-called quantum chaos, trajectories do not diverge exponentially because they are constrained by the fact that the entire evolution must be unitary.

The boundary between regular and chaotic behavior is often characterized by period doubling, followed by quadrupling, etc., although other routes to chaos are also possible (Abarbanel et al. 1993; Hilborn 1994; Strogatz 1994, pp. 363-365).

Chaos accepts no responsibility for your inability to understand the world.

I live near several of them, kiddo. And I've SEEN the carnage.
It's the eco-idiots who spread disinformation.

Well, I see you still deal in emotional content rather than intelligent discourse

I thought agnostic implied that one doesn't follow a religion, but that individual believes there is room (or chance) for something beyond us to exist?

Gnostic/Gnosticism is a syncretistic religious movement that tries to merge Abrahamic beliefs with <yadda,yadda,yadda> 'a' is a prefix meaning 'not' as in atheist means not a theist; agnostic means not a gnostic. Meanings of the negatives have drifted.

Sometimes, i worry about google - their motto is 'do no evil' but they bought doubleclick. I have Google-Analytics and GoogleSyndication completely forbidden on my system using NoScript.

Geeks explore the deep, blue sea here

Steven, JW is a pretty extreme reactionary (in the old sense of the word) - he does not like change and he does not like anyone who disagrees with him.

Wind energy is a complete farce.
Not only is it utterly unreliable, but it's also not at all "good for the environment".
Wind turbines are meat grinders, each one of them when built in a migration route for birds (which most places where there's good wind are) can kill thousands of birds a day.
They've actually had to remove several windfarms here because of that, others had to be relocated to less favourable spots or turned off during certain times of day and year.
Then there's the noise, which is quite loud when you're near them.
And of course the massive environmental cost to build the things in the first place.

They're bad, bad enough that the regional government here has banned any more from being built and dictated that replacement units for ones that are removed from service must be both smaller in size and have higher power than the ones they're replacing.

JW - many of those objections can be used against most sources of power. Does that make them a complete farce?

Tsunamis aren't weather.

Do you think I don't know that? What is your point? Have you read anything in this thread? Did you even read the thread title?

What would you do, try to see it or head for high ground?

One of the problems with the Hawaii tsunamis is that suddenly the beach drains of water and all kinds of undersea life is suddenly right there for the picking - locals run for high ground, tourists ran for baubles. This was the most warning available at the time.

Remember you can only use 3.6 (seems to vary from system to system but almost always less than 4 gig) gigs of memory unless you run the 64 bit version

Thankyou for "TweakUAC.exe" - I have been looking for a tweaker for VISTA

Corrected birthday link

Warning! this is a pointer to dethmetal and not for the weak of heart.

Happy Birthday to me (heh,heh - "I can't drink because I am the F&^$E&^%ing spokesman for a rehab center") - er, after the first bit, you can quit any time. But oh, man it's really addictive

Here is a cleaned up YouTube version

Taste the Magic!

I have only heard horror stories about upgrading from XP to VISTA. It is almost impossible to buy a new machine with XP (especially laptops) in stead of VISTA. I got a really good deal on my toshiba with 2 gigs of memory installed But I don't like VISTA but it hasn't bit me yet (well, I have found some programs that won't work on it but...); I still have an XP machine for gaming. (I use FoxMarks to keep my bookmarks sync.ed).

Your crazy - she is turning clockwise
er
I'm crazy - she is turning counterclockwise
er
now she is turning CCW but her support foot is turning CW.

Fun optical illusion

This just in:

A study of small galaxies circling around the Milky Way founnd that while they range dramatically in brightness, they all surprisingly pack about the same mass. The work suggests there is a minimum size for galaxies, and it could shed light on mysterious dark matter.

Spinning around the Milky Way are at least 23 pint-sized galaxies, each shining with the light of anywhere from a thousand to a billion suns. Though each of these galaxies is very dim compared to large galaxies like our own, they span a large range in brightness.

Astronomers led by Louis Strigari of the University of California-Irvine studied the movements of individual stars in these satellite galaxies to determine the mass of each galaxy.

"What we found was astonishing, which was that they all had the same mass," said researcher James Bullock, a UC-Irvine astrophysicist. "It's not what we were expecting — we were really taken off guard."

Loaded with dark matter

The finding could help explain the mysterious stuff called dark matter and how it affects the formation of galaxies. Nobody knows what dark matter is, but its presence is revealed by gravity that is not produced by the regular matter that can be seen.

Despite their wide-ranging brightnesses, all of the 23 satellite galaxies around the Milky Way seem to have a central mass of 10 million times that of the sun. And what's more, almost all of that mass seems to be made up of dark matter, with just …

Why does McClain hate the American worker?
<<rhetorical eye-catcher>>
With oil at an all-time high,

"Once the mills of US Steel and Bethlehem Steel employed thousands, producing the metal that was cast into the building materials and cars that were the engine of the American economy. Then they were silent, as new technology could produce new steel from scrap at a lower cost than virgin steel from ore. Soon it became cheaper to ship that scrap to China and ship it back to the US, and the North American steel industry almost shut down, and with it, many of the towns and cities that supplied the workers for it. The most productive cities in America became known as the "Rust Belt" as the economic engine of the country moved to Arizona, building houses and big box stores to sell the stuff that filled the houses.
Shipping a standard 40-foot container from Shanghai to the US Eastern seaboard now costs $ 8,000. In 2000, when oil prices were $20 per barrel, it only cost $3,000 to ship the container. But at $ 200 per barrel, it will soon cost $ 15,000 in transport costs to ship from China to the US Eastern seaboard. In a world of triple-digit oil prices, distance costs money. And while trade liberalization and technology have flattened the world, rising transport prices will once again make it rounder."

Now if you are from Arizona, your business experience, if any, is probably in real estate, …

Not easy being green! The New York Times has an article about 'grid congestion' -

The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.
When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing. - The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.

“We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The link will probably expire in 24 hours and become a 'pay per view' link as it ages.

Thanks Vegs - why didn't you just point to the scambusters website rather than post the garbage?

America was founded so we could oppress people with our religion - the oppressors in Europe would not let us practice there.