Shibboleths

[Eric]

Ok, the first thing I saw in the pic below was an AT-AT Walker, from Star Wars. It is formed by the bush, the don’t walk sign, a light pole and some building features in the pic, above the rear roof of the car, back in the background a bit. I’ve always had a knack for seeing visual patterns in things. It has been a source of amusement all my life.

And that guy needs to be slapped around a little for those tiny wheels, fake side pipes and spats on the rear wheel wells. Leave the old Impalas alone, you butchers!

[tous]

Give 'em a break.

They're Canadian, eh?

That is where research indicates that the Oshawa House is: Oshawa, Ontario.

 

[Eric]

14 minutes ago, tous said:

Give 'em a break.

They're Canadian, eh?

That is where research indicates that the Oshawa House is: Oshawa, Ontario.

 

Yeah, I figured it must be Canada, if a white guy was driving an old Impala that looked like that. 

[tous]

Did Chevrolet even offer fender skirts for the 1964 Impala?

 

[Eric]

3 minutes ago, tous said:

Did Chevrolet even offer fender skirts for the 1964 Impala?

 

That’s a 1962 and no. Or, maybe there was an accessory set that could be bought through a dealer or something, but it wasn’t standard or optional equipment. 

[Eric]

17 minutes ago, tous said:

Did Chevrolet even offer fender skirts for the 1964 Impala?

 

I may be wrong about the fender skirts. I know they were available aftermarket then, I just don’t know if they were offered by the factory, for the Biscayne/Belair/Impala. I see people offering ‘original’ skirts, as opposed to modern aftermarket skirts, but I don’t know if they are referring to aftermarket pieces available back then, or if GM actually made them.

I just checked and as a point of interest, GM phased out fender skirts in 1977 and then brought them back in 1980, for the Olds 98. It was available with them until 1985, when they went away for good.

I’ve cut the piss out of myself more than once on a sharp inner edge or jagged bit of a fender skirt. I don’t like the way they look and they make a tire change even more fun. When a car is sitting on a flat, that damned spat is down very close to the ground. They can be a PITA to remove that way. Plus the latches and linkage can be damaged by the flat, making it even harder to remove. AND, near the end of their run, some of them were equipped with keys, or other anti-theft devices. People were really good about losing the damned keys, turning a flat change into a freaking ordeal.

[Eric]

AND, those damned fender skirts were one more part on a car that was likely to not go back on the car and stay there like it was new. They got abused, received indifferent service and the locks, latches and mount points weren’t that strong. Of course, you could count on the freaking customer to SWEAR that the damned thing had been in absolutely PERFECT condition, when they brought their car in for you to work on. People suck. People who drive cars with spats suck a little more than the rest.

[Eric]

Do you get the idea that is an automotive accessory I do not care for?

[tous]

A quick internet search and I saw a bunch of ads for spats for 60s Impalas,   As you stated, anyone that would do that to such a wonderful, blue-collar classic should be forced to drive a Mustang II forever.

Like you, I have had my battles with fender skirts and flat tires. 

After I got the tire changed, I tossed the demonic things into the trunk and refused to re-install them.

 

[Eric]

10 minutes ago, tous said:

A quick internet search and I saw a bunch of ads for spats for 60s Impalas,   As you stated, anyone that would do that to such a wonderful, blue-collar classic should be forced to drive a Mustang II forever.

Like you, I have had my battles with fender skirts and flat tires. 

After I got the tire changed, I tossed the demonic things into the trunk and refused to re-install them.

 

Foxcraft was and still is a large maker of fender skirts. I think that Foxcraft was making the spats that ended up on cars like the Impalas and they were then being sold in GM dealerships by agreement. I’m not sure if GM actually offered an OEM set of skirts themselves.

Interestingly enough, Foxcraft is still in business and making fender skirts today. Bastards. 

[tous]

18 minutes ago, Eric said:

Do you get the idea that is an automotive accessory I do not care for?

I am with you.

I never really liked fender skirts even on the automobiles of the 1930s and 1940s where they seemed to at least fit the styling better.

I also really hate continental kits on post-war coupes and sedans.

They just never added anything to the attractiveness of the car and did much to ugly them up.

I especially hated it on a 1957-59 Thunderbird.

Ruined the lines.

[Eric]

4 minutes ago, tous said:

I am with you.

I never really liked fender skirts even on the automobiles of the 1930s and 1940s where they seemed to at least fir the styling better.

I also really hate continental kits on post-war coupes and sedans.

They just never added anything to the attractiveness of the car and did much to ugly them up.

An old accessory that I always scratched my head at was the external eyebrow windshield visor. Most stoplights back then were suspended in the center of the intersection. You already had to crane your neck to see them. Why would you then add an accessory that made it even harder to see the damned thing. THEN, another clever auto accessory maker came out with a product to cure that problem. Well, it was actually to help with the original visibility issue, but if you mounted it lower, it might still help with a visor.

You remember the windshield-mounted prisms that would allow you to see the color of the light, if not the light itself?

[tous]

Big chrome spotlights on automobiles that were not police cars.

Pretentious, perhaps occasionally useful, but ugly.

[Eric]

Another accessory I disliked were those little steering wheel-mounted rotating balls. You go from no power steering to power assisted steering, and suddenly it is too much effort to turn the wheel normally?

[Eric]

2 minutes ago, tous said:

Big chrome spotlights on automobiles that were not police cars.

Pretentious, perhaps occasionally useful, but ugly.

I did love the large driving lights though on it higher-end prewar cars, that steered with the wheels. It’s funny how things come back around. Steerable beam headlights have made a comeback. 

[tous]

That's why the steering wheels were 20" in diameter back then. 

Remember when the heater core was under the dashboard near the floor on the passenger side?

You got heat by opening the little door.

And in the 1950s, the heater was an option.

 

[Eric]

6 minutes ago, tous said:

That's why the steering wheels were 20" in diameter back then. 

Remember when the heater core was under the dashboard near the floor on the passenger side?

You got heat by opening the little door.

And in the 1950s, the heater was an option.

 

Steering wheels had gotten much smaller in cars by the sixties and seventies, but people still bought and used those stupid steering knobs.

Yeay, a heater core R&R was a lot simpler job back then.

[Eric]

I just spent the last twenty minutes tracking down an asshat on the AT&T network in Houston, who has been portscanning my server all night. I zapped him and wrote an abuse report to the AT&T Abuse Team, which they are probably busy ignoring as we speak. People suck.

[tous]

I thought that the era of the script kiddie was over 20 years ago.

You sure that it isn't the FBI?

If so, they will just create a few open ports out of whole cloth and get a hippie Marxist judge to sign a search warrant.

Thirty agents could be at your door tomorrow. 

I always wanted a firewall appliance with strike-back capabilities.

Probe my ports and the firewall melts your network.

[Eric]

44 minutes ago, tous said:

I thought that the era of the script kiddie was over 20 years ago.

You sure that it isn't the FBI?

If so, they will just create a few open ports out of whole cloth and get a hippie Marxist judge to sign a search warrant.

Thirty agents could be at your door tomorrow. 

I always wanted a firewall appliance with strike-back capabilities.

Probe my ports and the firewall melts your network.

My server gets hit a lot. It costs me a lot of time and aggravation to keep the heathens at bay.

If you get yourself a firewall and spend any time watching the log files, you will not sleep nearly as well at night. Around 42% of Internet traffic is from bots and almost all of those are doing something nefarious. This doesn't include the traffic from actual, live scumbags sitting in front of a computer, trying to screw other people over, for whatever reason. I block traffic from most of the world on my server, by default, and I still spend as much as an hour a day dealing with this crap.

[Eric]

38 minutes ago, Eric said:

Around 42% of Internet traffic is from bots and almost all of those are doing something nefarious.

I was just reading an article on CNet about this topic and they estimate that 61% of all Internet traffic is from bots. They are a better source than the one that I cited earlier.

Think about that for a second. 61% of all network traffic is bot traffic, almost all of which is trying to do something illicit to others. That is mind boggling. 3/5 of the Internet resources are being consumed by these ******* things and the bastards that run them. How much money does every one of us pay in higher Internet access costs, software security costs and products & services costs that have been inflated by companies trying to absorb the monumental expense of this parasitic use of a vital world resource? How much electricity is consumed each year by this criminal traffic? The Internet runs on electricity, one hell of a lot of it, and 61% of it is being used by people trying to screw over the rest of us, at our own expense.

People say time is money. Money is also time. How much of our lives are being stolen by the scumbags? The expenses are real and the time we spend to earn the money to pay those expenses is precious and irreplaceable. I don't want to waste one second of my life wishing ill on others, or dwelling on what I would like to do to some groups of people, but there are a lot of groups of people on this Earth that will only ever make the world better by leaving it. A lot of these groups are obvious choices. This isn't a segment of our population that ever ends up on the radar of most people, but few groups have had a greater, more negative impact on most people's day-to-day lives than the hackers, phishers, spammers, scammers and other Internet vermin.

I don't know why I am ranting about this tonight. It does no good. The aftermath of the hernia operation is especially painful tonight and I can't get to sleep. That and this has been a worse day than usual dealing with Internet scumbags. The incident I mentioned above was a simple one. I've also wasted several hours today dealing with a couple of really determined attacks on my mail server, from China and Bulgaria as well. They are trying to exploit my system in order to deliver their spam/scam email through what will look like a legitimate source. It is frustrating and aggravating and it discourages the hell out of me sometimes. Anyway, I'll stop sniveling now. Mama said there would be days like this. Eric

[Eric]

According to a study undertaken by Barath Raghavan and Justin Ma of ICSI and University of California, Berkeley, the Internet consumes an estimated 84 to 143 gigawatts of electricity. That is 3.6% to 6.2% of all electricity produced wordwide. Let's call it 5%. That's a nice round number. So, a little over 3% of all the electricity produced wordwide each year is being used by criminals and criminal organizations great and small, to prey on the rest of us. This study was undertaken in 2011. The amounts consumed and their cost will only have gone up.

I don't know a hell of a lot about what such large units of electricity cost, but I found an answered question on Quora that said 1 year's worth of 1GW of electricity had a value of 1.86 billion dollars. If that number is accurate, that puts the dollar value of the criminally consumed electricity each year at between 156 billion and 266 billion dollars yearly.  That's just the cost of one of the many resources needed to run the Internet. I am not qualified to properly quantify and estimate the costs involved for this illicit use. I just did the best I could to come up with a number for part of the issue that I didn't pull out of thin air. Even if it is wildly innacurate, I think it still serves to illustrate the sheer scope of this problem.

Why aren't we hunting these ******* down?

[minervadoe]

13 hours ago, Eric said:

Why aren't we hunting these ******* down?

If I had my druthers, we'd do something about it.

[Huaco Kid]

On 8/28/2022 at 3:10 AM, Eric said:

 the Internet consumes an estimated 84 to 143 gigawatts of electricity.

75% of that is probably porn.

[gwalchmai]

1 hour ago, Huaco Kid said:

75% of that is probably porn.

You may have hit upon the answer to the world's energy problem...