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The End of the Oil Age
geekstreak quotes "'The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.' Ways to break the tyranny of oil are coming into view. Governments need to promote them."
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Is there any other use for the smart cards that have recently been used to steal digital satellite TV? With all the lawsuits flying around about them there has to be some kind of "oh I was using it for something else" loop hole.
Some advice for the newly outsourced, downsized, and generally unemployed
First of all, welcome to the nouveaux pauvre (that's "new poor" to you. Your french phrase days will gently fade into happy memories, like some other things.)
The purpose of this thread is to help you understand some of the changes that accompany this new chapter in your life.
For those of you who still have savings, early withdrawn IRAs, homes or automobiles to sell, or other assets that you have not yet liquidated and spent, you may wish to print this page out and save it. Depending on how hotshit a coder you were, it may be months, for a few of you, either a couple of years, before you need it.
For those of you who have already passed through that "well honey thank goodness we have enough to keep going for a little while" to the "hm, I think we've got enough equity that if we sell the house, we can get enough to tide us over" to the "holy shit! We have a total of $700 to our name, no income coming in, and this $1200 apartment I thought we'd be in for a month or 2 is now asking for month 6 of the rent" phase, some of you will now transition to the "I guess we can go back to Peoria to stay with the folks for a while" benchmark.
Print this and save it. You are very fortunate.
Now those of you are left are the ones who have already sold and spent everything you had, you don't have folks to go stay with for a while, and you have just made a new and important discovery: Your new "survival jobs until.." are not enough to enable you to afford housing. In other words, you are now priced out of the housing market.
If you are lucky, you may find something with a roof that with one more shift you can afford, where you will learn many new things, and so will your kids.
You always knew that there were neighborhoods like this, but you never thought YOU'D be living in one, especially not with kids, who you have had to take out of the progressive alternative school and place into the one with the metal detectors and the very reasonably priced nearly new Glock swap meets in the parking lot, from which they will return every afternoon to discover their new neighborhood while both of you work your second shifts.
There is no one way to explain to them that everything you taught them about calling 911 is no longer applicable, because the only way the police will come here at all is if you yell "officer down!" into the phone, and frankly, nobody at the precinct is buying that any more because they know that no officer goes there. It's an opportunity to grow in your parenting skills.
There will be some dietary changes. As soon as your car is repossessed or stolen, you will be reliant on your feet and public transportation, and in combination with your new 5 AM to midnight 7 day schedule, you will notice some differences in your food choices. Instead of riding out to the big supermarket with the produce section, grocery shopping will now mean picking up some loaf bread and stale peanut butter at a convenience store for about twice what you paid for it at the supermarket. The plus side is that it is open 24 hours, and you can walk to it!
Hot meals will now be available at McDonald's. You will soon find that this is both more economical and practical than trying to make a hot meal out of a dusty can of peas and a small $4 pack of beef jerky from the convenience store.
Another big change will be health care. You have probably been accustomed to take the kids to the doctor, even go yourself, in the case of illness, and made a point of making sure that the whole family gets in for regular wellness checks and preventive care, like an annual physical for those of you who are over 35 or so.
While that will no longer be possible, what you can do is discover that while some illnesses and injuries are painful and uncomfortable, they eventually get better and/or heal on their own.
You can also know that you are participating in the free market system, and your education w
Karma: Bad (mostly affected by being such an asshole)
Hee hee. You might like our project.
Wow? How is it surprising that it took 1 post. The guy has the largest deficit ever for a single year, has spent more than any other president since FDR, started a needless war, made pathetic policy choices that made the coming recession worse, and is a complete moron.
I'd be surprised if he's re-elected. However, never overlook the ability of Americans to vote for the best commercial/best known name.
I wish people could accept when they are wrong about something instead of sticking their proud heads in the sand. I guess when you've been doing it for years, why not continue.
Amen.
I say again, Amen.
The problem is finding quality 5yo cars at a quality dealership. Yeah, you can always do person-to-person sales, but....
Sony to ship blue laser storage rig next month
By Tony Smith
Posted: 24/10/2003 at 10:15 GMT
Sony's 23.3GB blue laser optical storage system will finally come to market next month, when the company ships products based on the technology. Those products were to have shipped in the summer.
Aimed at the kind of high-end storage applications traditionally delivered by 5.25in, 9.1GB Magneto Optical (MO) discs, the Professional Disc for Data (PDD) - as Sony is now calling it - was launched last April.
The multi-layer 4.7in discs are fixed inside cartridges. Instead of the red lasers used to read not only MO discs, but CDs and DVDs, PDD uses blue laser light which can be focused on a smaller area of the disc's surface, thus increasing the medium's data density and thus its overall capacity.
Sony said it will offer an internal PDD drive, the BW-F101, capable of using both recordable and re-writeable PDD media. As per Sony's April launch, the drive will cost around $3300, with discs coming in at $45 for 'PDD-R' and $50 for 'PDD-RW'.
Sony is already planning a second-generation machine that ups the capacity to 50GB. Alas we'll have to wait to 2005 for it. A third-generation unit, due some years down the line, will double capacity and throughput again, to 100GB and 36MBps, respectively, Sony said.
Toshiba and NEC, meanwhile, are working on blue laser devices based on existing DVD media - which, they claim, will make the technology not only much cheaper to implement but will be backward compatible with today's DVDs. Nor does it require the disc to be fitted inside a cartridge.
The Toshiba/NEC read/write disc will offer a capacity of at least 36GB and builds on work carried out by the two companies on a next-generation blue laser-based DVD format. Their efforts are currently being considered by the DVD Forum, the body overseeing the format. The Toshiba-NEC technology is designed to boost today's DVD capacities of 8.52GB for a dual-layer, single-sided read-only disc to 30GB, and a 4.7GB single-layer, single-sided read-and-write disc to 20GB. (R)
What part of do you not understand?
The stoned age did not end because of a lack of mary jane, but because of an increase in secret goverment funding pushed through the "just say no" programs (you remember nancy's one brested phone sex?).... O you said stone age... no Im sure they had plenty of mary jane back then...