"It costs them nothing, so if they send out millions of spams per day and only get a few bites, they're still making a profit."
Despite the ease at which fools are parted from their money... not only are more born every minute, somehow they keep getting access to more money. Which is why spam is never going away.
For further evidence of junk mail longevity, check your snail mailbox.
"linux is geeky in some areas, but if you are a power user, you must learn ITS quirks and tricks THE SAME WAY YOU LEARN WINDOWS' ONES."
It's not as if you even have to futz with text files much either - usually there is a GUI frontend app that will do the configuration for you. And if you use Ubuntu, it will be in the repos. I'm finding Synaptic on Ubuntu to be for applications like Google is for information. Just the other day I was having an issue getting a drive mounted at boot, searched "fstab", and came up with a solution that didn't involve reading man pages or searching forums.
I have no doubt that as time goes by, more and more of these things will be included by default in the distro.
Your first two problems are a result of diving in head first. If you had first made a list of what applications you use, and then found an open source program (in the repos, but virtually everything good is in the repos) that does the same thing and is installable in windows, you wouldn't have been beaten over the knuckles as hard your first time around. i.e., you should have installed openoffice in windows and evolution (or thunderbird) in windows first.
As far as flash, someone else here said synaptic. That should be your first port of call whenever you want to install something new. Type in the application type (e.g. email), and optionally google the names of things that come up in order to research. If you just want to suck it and see, the applications with the ubuntu symbol next to them tend to be more polished.
That you made it this far and still use it is a tribute to Ubuntu's ease of use and default app selection. It tends to be a recipe for frustration and failure to switch operating systems before you are comfortable with the FOSS alternatives to your mission critical applications.
"If it is true that Kasparov et al. have no influence or support, then why on earth would the powers-that-be arrest him and risk sympathetic attention--strike that--any attention whatsoever be paid to him?"
I'm sure he has plenty of support... like the kind Jacob Schiff et al provided to bankroll the October Revolution.
"They're overselling by magnitudes, and of course that doesn't work out in the long run when people actually (gasp!) use what they're being sold. How dare they!"
Fair point. I've got an idea though. It's not original though, just a patch on another fraudulent system.
How about every ISP is required to join a national ISP. This ISP doesn't sell bandwidth to the public, just to individual ISPs. Let's call it the Federal Reserve Bandwidth ISP. But that doesn't mean it is owned by the government, it should be owned by Comcast, AOL and a few other member ISPs.
If there is a flood of p2p users on one ISP, the Federal Reserve Bandwidth ISP steps in and lends enough bandwidth to sate the users. In this way, we would prevent runs on ISPs from happening, shore up Fractional Reserve Internet Service Providing System, and all the sheeple would contendedly bleat away content with their constant 10mbit connections that they can use any time they wish.
If after a few years they start forcing you to use 28.8k modems with a mysterious all seeing eye logo... just shut up and download your porn, citizen, only terr'rists ask those sort of questions. You wouldn't want people to think you were un-American, would you?
If games didn't have levels, you couldn't catch the first rays of the morning sun glinting through the window and tell yourself "Just one more level!".
3. Every time you eat something, calculate the total calories.
4. Do that for a week, eating as per normal, so that you can calculate your equilibrium daily calorie requirement.
5. Eat to lower your daily caloric by 10%, check scales/mirror after 1 week.
6. If that doesn't work, lower it again.
The most important thing is to MEASURE calories. Otherwise you will ASSUME, which as all good engineers know, makes an ASS out of U and ME.
In the short term, there is water and muscle weight (including water involved with glycogen storage, bowel contents etc) that will throw you out, which is why you should only pay attention to weight/mirror over longer intervals.
Note that the MOST caloric intensive activity is 850 calories per hour, which is more than most people do when they exercise, and is difficult to maintain. Jogging is 600, and that's enough of a PITA.
Contrast that with the calorie intake side of the equation. I could easily eat 3 snickers bars in 5 minutes when I'm hungry, and that's restraining myself. That's 900 calories, very enjoyable, and more than 12 times the rate at which the body can burn energy over a reasonable length of time. Which is why attention to exercise alone is never a sufficient requirement to lose weight but attention to diet is, since you need at least 60 calories per hour to "idle", i.e. sleep or rest. Maybe less in starvation mode, but it's still sure as heck greater than zero.
"I'm sorry to see this modded down as it really makes me question the actual average IQ of the/.er to which I assumed in the past to be well above the mean."
A high IQ does not imply a detailed study of history. As evidenced by the posts that get modded up, most people here get their knowledge of history from a combination of The History Channel, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and assorted games and movies produced by Steven Spielberg.
I'm addicted to the web. There are worse things I can addict myself to, and are more addictive than the web, primarily multiplayer FPS games. They tend to make me more aggressive and decrease my ability to concentrate, neither of which make my life "better" on average. Web surfing is better than that, but if I had better ability to control myself, I'd be more happy.
The curse of it is, I'm reasonably adept with computers, and I would say that I'd be more happier using them in work than not using them, being able to do more in less time in non-internet related tasks. And the internet when used correctly can be a massive force multiplier for research.
I've even toyed with making an operating system for people like me. A working title would be "Work-buntu". It would be a fork of Ubuntu, but all access to repositories containing games and other time wasters would be disabled. If there was a browser (which there may not be), it would come with access disabled for most forums including this one. Not sure how. It'd probably remove access to most online communications such as IRC.
As a side benefit, it would probably be very useful in a corporate setting, because it's essentially the same trade-off being made - which applications have the potential to be net-negatives to an organization?
It seems a bit ridiculous, kind of like asking God to create a rock so heavy he can't life, asking a programmer to create an OS he can't subvert somehow with games (and slashdot). But it might work. I've found in the past that if you can create a barricade that delays instant gratification long enough, getting past that barricade starts to look like work... and then you've got a more rational choice between various delayed gratification. e.g.
1) Spend a PITA day installing a new operating system or subverting the existing one, chasing drivers, etc. etc, only to waste the rest of the night and the next day doing things you should be doing already, and will only make you depressed in the long run.
2) Spend the day working, and earn some money so that you feel better about yourself, the resume looks better, you spend some time with your family, and hopefully you can build a life where you can do what you want to do (even just web surfing!) without the constant threat of obligations intruding.
I've found that for someone like myself that addictions are transferable, and I can be equally happy doing anything given enough lead time where I don't feel like I'm bashing my head against a wall. For example, I can be addicted to paid work - it just takes time. But there is a pecking order - and if I allow myself to spend a little time doing something more addictive I will start to do that in preference to the less addictive thing. For myself, the pecking order might be work, sport, reading, surfing the web, games (with FPS most addictive - I won't even let myself near MMORPGs).
Possibly the best solution might be to take up a career without computers altogether. I'm not sure I have that much courage.
It disturbs me that it's primarily native speakers of English who bear the brunt of PC. People who can speak another language can (and do) say whatever they want in their own languages and consume their own media (which is like their versions of our own pre-1970s media).
I'll start adopting PC values once they are equitable and the rest of the world adopts them.
A lot of people confuse empire with capitalism. Having an empire (in the case of Churchill and England, taking wealth from India) will usually give the mother country a higher standard of living irrespective of government policies. If you want to give your country blessings through capitalism without some form of empire you'll have as much chance of receiving cargo from your ancestors by constructing an airfield.
"...is that animals come evolutionary pre-programmed to join groups"
Depends on the animal. In social animals, yes. In others (e.g. tigers, bears, moose, spiders), communication will be restricted to mating rituals and that sort of thing. Those methods of communication can of course be mimicked and often are by other species (or sub-species) for their own gain. e.g. orchids and insect mating behavior, moths with "eyes" on their wings etc.
"saving $18 / yr electricity: more than a five year payoff."
The payoff may be less than that, depending on his assumptions of future energy costs. If he is switching to solar, reducing peak or average load will probably reduce his costs there.
It is official; Science now confirms: Physics is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Physics community when IDC confirmed that phyics enrollments have dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all undergraduates. Coming close on the heels of a recent Science survey which plainly states that physics has lost more enrollments, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Physics is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing to successfully form a Theory of Everything in at least half a century of trying.
You don't need to be an Einstein to predict Phyisics' future. The hand writing is on the wall: Physics faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Physics because Physics is dying. Things are looking very bad for Physics. As many of us are already aware, Physics continues to lose funding. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
"And if you really are a paranoid git... partition drive, install windows, only boot to that partition for gaming. Problem solved."
I think you'd actually want a separate machine for that. There is no reason why some sort of malware couldn't read/alter information on your linux partition/drive, especially as linux becomes more popular.
"unplug unused power bricks (for cell phones, cameras, chargers, etc...)."
Another thing you can do that makes this a lot easier is to buy power strips with individual switches. They're cheap. That way you can leave all your wall warts plugged in, you just switch stuff off when you are done.
"So why do people keep recommending this stuff. I actually measured my unused power bricks with my handy, dandy, kill-a-watt, and they use nothing when there's no device connected to them."
You want to make sure that the kill-a-watt can actually measure less than 5W. The 240V version doesn't.
To test this, you need to have a power strip plugged into your watt meter, then plug an incandescent lamp (or anything else that is basically just a resistor) into the power strip. Note the power used. Then plug in the power brick you want to measure, note the difference between the two power figures as being roughly the power used (suspect it might be different due to different power factors, too lazy to verify).
It was only by doing this that I learned that these cheap and useful power meters have some limitations.
Your ideas make a lot of sense, but not in a democracy. The average person will never contemplate or understand this phenomenon, at least, not without a eugenics program lasting several generations. They are, however, more than capable of following what a good advertising campaign will instruct them to do.
Unfortunately for everyone, only one model of health care will buy pliable politicians and convincing advertising, and that is not the one you propose.
Slashdot Mirror
"It costs them nothing, so if they send out millions of spams per day and only get a few bites, they're still making a profit."
Despite the ease at which fools are parted from their money... not only are more born every minute, somehow they keep getting access to more money. Which is why spam is never going away.
For further evidence of junk mail longevity, check your snail mailbox.
"linux is geeky in some areas, but if you are a power user, you must learn ITS quirks and tricks THE SAME WAY YOU LEARN WINDOWS' ONES."
It's not as if you even have to futz with text files much either - usually there is a GUI frontend app that will do the configuration for you. And if you use Ubuntu, it will be in the repos. I'm finding Synaptic on Ubuntu to be for applications like Google is for information. Just the other day I was having an issue getting a drive mounted at boot, searched "fstab", and came up with a solution that didn't involve reading man pages or searching forums.
I have no doubt that as time goes by, more and more of these things will be included by default in the distro.
Your first two problems are a result of diving in head first. If you had first made a list of what applications you use, and then found an open source program (in the repos, but virtually everything good is in the repos) that does the same thing and is installable in windows, you wouldn't have been beaten over the knuckles as hard your first time around. i.e., you should have installed openoffice in windows and evolution (or thunderbird) in windows first.
As far as flash, someone else here said synaptic. That should be your first port of call whenever you want to install something new. Type in the application type (e.g. email), and optionally google the names of things that come up in order to research. If you just want to suck it and see, the applications with the ubuntu symbol next to them tend to be more polished.
That you made it this far and still use it is a tribute to Ubuntu's ease of use and default app selection. It tends to be a recipe for frustration and failure to switch operating systems before you are comfortable with the FOSS alternatives to your mission critical applications.
"If it is true that Kasparov et al. have no influence or support, then why on earth would the powers-that-be arrest him and risk sympathetic attention--strike that--any attention whatsoever be paid to him?"
I'm sure he has plenty of support... like the kind Jacob Schiff et al provided to bankroll the October Revolution.
"They're overselling by magnitudes, and of course that doesn't work out in the long run when people actually (gasp!) use what they're being sold. How dare they!"
Fair point. I've got an idea though. It's not original though, just a patch on another fraudulent system.
How about every ISP is required to join a national ISP. This ISP doesn't sell bandwidth to the public, just to individual ISPs. Let's call it the Federal Reserve Bandwidth ISP. But that doesn't mean it is owned by the government, it should be owned by Comcast, AOL and a few other member ISPs.
If there is a flood of p2p users on one ISP, the Federal Reserve Bandwidth ISP steps in and lends enough bandwidth to sate the users. In this way, we would prevent runs on ISPs from happening, shore up Fractional Reserve Internet Service Providing System, and all the sheeple would contendedly bleat away content with their constant 10mbit connections that they can use any time they wish.
If after a few years they start forcing you to use 28.8k modems with a mysterious all seeing eye logo... just shut up and download your porn, citizen, only terr'rists ask those sort of questions. You wouldn't want people to think you were un-American, would you?
If games didn't have levels, you couldn't catch the first rays of the morning sun glinting through the window and tell yourself "Just one more level!".
Well, why did you think he could run so fast without pausing for breath?
"Sure, Hollywood loves to portray aliens as weird, mostly very ugly and very different"
That depends on the budget, and how cheap CGI was at the time. Mostly they'll just use masks, prosthetics, and makeup.
1. Buy a scale precise to at least the nearest 10 grams.
2. Download an energy density table for food. http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/alt_formats/hpfb-dgpsa/pdf/nutrition/nvscf-vnqau_e.pdf
3. Every time you eat something, calculate the total calories.
4. Do that for a week, eating as per normal, so that you can calculate your equilibrium daily calorie requirement.
5. Eat to lower your daily caloric by 10%, check scales/mirror after 1 week.
6. If that doesn't work, lower it again.
The most important thing is to MEASURE calories. Otherwise you will ASSUME, which as all good engineers know, makes an ASS out of U and ME.
In the short term, there is water and muscle weight (including water involved with glycogen storage, bowel contents etc) that will throw you out, which is why you should only pay attention to weight/mirror over longer intervals.
There are a few tricks. Protein has an appetite suppressing effect, so increasing protein makes dieting easier. Also take a look at a table of exercise calorie burn rates.
http://health.utah.gov/lhd/tooele/Community_Health/CVD/Calories_Burned.html
Note that the MOST caloric intensive activity is 850 calories per hour, which is more than most people do when they exercise, and is difficult to maintain. Jogging is 600, and that's enough of a PITA.
Contrast that with the calorie intake side of the equation. I could easily eat 3 snickers bars in 5 minutes when I'm hungry, and that's restraining myself. That's 900 calories, very enjoyable, and more than 12 times the rate at which the body can burn energy over a reasonable length of time. Which is why attention to exercise alone is never a sufficient requirement to lose weight but attention to diet is, since you need at least 60 calories per hour to "idle", i.e. sleep or rest. Maybe less in starvation mode, but it's still sure as heck greater than zero.
"I'm sorry to see this modded down as it really makes me question the actual average IQ of the /.er to which I assumed in the past to be well above the mean."
A high IQ does not imply a detailed study of history. As evidenced by the posts that get modded up, most people here get their knowledge of history from a combination of The History Channel, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and assorted games and movies produced by Steven Spielberg.
I'm addicted to the web. There are worse things I can addict myself to, and are more addictive than the web, primarily multiplayer FPS games. They tend to make me more aggressive and decrease my ability to concentrate, neither of which make my life "better" on average. Web surfing is better than that, but if I had better ability to control myself, I'd be more happy.
The curse of it is, I'm reasonably adept with computers, and I would say that I'd be more happier using them in work than not using them, being able to do more in less time in non-internet related tasks. And the internet when used correctly can be a massive force multiplier for research.
I've even toyed with making an operating system for people like me. A working title would be "Work-buntu". It would be a fork of Ubuntu, but all access to repositories containing games and other time wasters would be disabled. If there was a browser (which there may not be), it would come with access disabled for most forums including this one. Not sure how. It'd probably remove access to most online communications such as IRC.
As a side benefit, it would probably be very useful in a corporate setting, because it's essentially the same trade-off being made - which applications have the potential to be net-negatives to an organization?
It seems a bit ridiculous, kind of like asking God to create a rock so heavy he can't life, asking a programmer to create an OS he can't subvert somehow with games (and slashdot). But it might work. I've found in the past that if you can create a barricade that delays instant gratification long enough, getting past that barricade starts to look like work... and then you've got a more rational choice between various delayed gratification. e.g.
1) Spend a PITA day installing a new operating system or subverting the existing one, chasing drivers, etc. etc, only to waste the rest of the night and the next day doing things you should be doing already, and will only make you depressed in the long run.
2) Spend the day working, and earn some money so that you feel better about yourself, the resume looks better, you spend some time with your family, and hopefully you can build a life where you can do what you want to do (even just web surfing!) without the constant threat of obligations intruding.
I've found that for someone like myself that addictions are transferable, and I can be equally happy doing anything given enough lead time where I don't feel like I'm bashing my head against a wall. For example, I can be addicted to paid work - it just takes time. But there is a pecking order - and if I allow myself to spend a little time doing something more addictive I will start to do that in preference to the less addictive thing. For myself, the pecking order might be work, sport, reading, surfing the web, games (with FPS most addictive - I won't even let myself near MMORPGs).
Possibly the best solution might be to take up a career without computers altogether. I'm not sure I have that much courage.
It disturbs me that it's primarily native speakers of English who bear the brunt of PC. People who can speak another language can (and do) say whatever they want in their own languages and consume their own media (which is like their versions of our own pre-1970s media).
I'll start adopting PC values once they are equitable and the rest of the world adopts them.
A lot of people confuse empire with capitalism. Having an empire (in the case of Churchill and England, taking wealth from India) will usually give the mother country a higher standard of living irrespective of government policies. If you want to give your country blessings through capitalism without some form of empire you'll have as much chance of receiving cargo from your ancestors by constructing an airfield.
"...is that animals come evolutionary pre-programmed to join groups"
Depends on the animal. In social animals, yes. In others (e.g. tigers, bears, moose, spiders), communication will be restricted to mating rituals and that sort of thing. Those methods of communication can of course be mimicked and often are by other species (or sub-species) for their own gain. e.g. orchids and insect mating behavior, moths with "eyes" on their wings etc.
God gave rock 'n' roll to everyone... except for college students, who are crooks.
"my time is worth a hell of a lot more than my money."
And... you're posting on slashdot? On a subject you really couldn't care less about? Something's not adding up here.
"saving $18 / yr electricity: more than a five year payoff."
The payoff may be less than that, depending on his assumptions of future energy costs. If he is switching to solar, reducing peak or average load will probably reduce his costs there.
It is official; Science now confirms: Physics is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Physics community when IDC confirmed that phyics enrollments have dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all undergraduates. Coming close on the heels of a recent Science survey which plainly states that physics has lost more enrollments, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Physics is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing to successfully form a Theory of Everything in at least half a century of trying.
You don't need to be an Einstein to predict Phyisics' future. The hand writing is on the wall: Physics faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Physics because Physics is dying. Things are looking very bad for Physics. As many of us are already aware, Physics continues to lose funding. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
"How does it do on Beer?"
Depends. If you were running it on wine first, never fear.
"And if you really are a paranoid git ... partition drive, install windows, only boot to that partition for gaming. Problem solved."
I think you'd actually want a separate machine for that. There is no reason why some sort of malware couldn't read/alter information on your linux partition/drive, especially as linux becomes more popular.
"unplug unused power bricks (for cell phones, cameras, chargers, etc...)."
Another thing you can do that makes this a lot easier is to buy power strips with individual switches. They're cheap. That way you can leave all your wall warts plugged in, you just switch stuff off when you are done.
"So why do people keep recommending this stuff. I actually measured my unused power bricks with my handy, dandy, kill-a-watt, and they use nothing when there's no device connected to them."
You want to make sure that the kill-a-watt can actually measure less than 5W. The 240V version doesn't.
To test this, you need to have a power strip plugged into your watt meter, then plug an incandescent lamp (or anything else that is basically just a resistor) into the power strip. Note the power used. Then plug in the power brick you want to measure, note the difference between the two power figures as being roughly the power used (suspect it might be different due to different power factors, too lazy to verify).
It was only by doing this that I learned that these cheap and useful power meters have some limitations.
"Don't look for malice where incompetence will do.
-- Napoleon"
Maybe he was explaining what happened to the 600,000 troops he invaded Russia with.
Your ideas make a lot of sense, but not in a democracy. The average person will never contemplate or understand this phenomenon, at least, not without a eugenics program lasting several generations. They are, however, more than capable of following what a good advertising campaign will instruct them to do.
Unfortunately for everyone, only one model of health care will buy pliable politicians and convincing advertising, and that is not the one you propose.
"Like it or not there is One Government in the earths future."
I don't like it. We may already have it. How long it will last is another question.