I was 18500 feet from the CO in Broomfield, CO and was running a CAP connection with 18dB of signal quite nicely for about 2.5 years. Suddenly it quit working and I checked and found 12dB of signal. Qworst put me on a DMT connection (it took two weeks for them to do this) and now all is wonderful again. I'm only about 2000 feet from the DMT (CO?) connection point and am routinely getting 55KB/s downloads. You can try slashdotting my server on the URL above (Solaris 8 on dual 180 processor Sparcstation 10) on the 256K upline.
The whole deal with Freon had nothing to do with global warming. Both Slashdot and the BBC got this completely wrong. Supposedly Freon depleted the Ozone Layer, but even that's wrong, as pointed out here.
It would really be nice if reporters would bone up on this stuff and give us the science and the facts, not hearsay.
For lots more debunking of just about every "science" fad, check this out.
Last month I was in D.C. and got to use their excellent rail system. Trains run often, on time, aren't overcrowded, and are cheaper than owning a car... and the whole thing is run by the government.
Consider the fact that the Washington, DC government is actually the Congress of these formerly free United States and things begin to make more sense. For example, have you investigated how much operating subsidy, coerced from taxpayers, is built into your "cheaper than owning a car" ticket on the DC Metro? My wild guess would be at least a 100% subsidy, but that's probably too low. And my other wild guess is that the subsidy is most likely a Federal subsidy, considering the Federal clientele that normally rides the DC Metro.
And I never said that government transportation systems were uniformly horrible to ride. They're often pleasant (although also often very slow). The burden to the taxpayer is the horrible part.
If a transportation project makes sense, and will provide benefits to people, everybody will pay the price in the cost of tickets, not the cost of taxes.
We're on the verge of subsidizing the formerly profitable airline business in this country, mostly because political meddlers have determined that the only way to make airline travel safe is to strip-search 70-year-old grandmas on the way to visiting their grandchildren.
Why not strip-search every person who enters a New York City subway entrance? After all, many subway stations are adjacent to (if not directly under) many of the city's remaining skyscrapers. Ludicrous, you say? Well, so is strip-searching grandmas with one-way tickets on the airlines.
What we need is to have the courage to invest in our future.
Let's take this disastrous sentence apart:
The second word is we, one of the great weasel words of the politician. "We" don't need courage, because "we" can't have courage. Only individuals can be courageous and have courage. A government collective can spend a lot of money, not spend a lot of money, create useless transportation "projects" or let the free market provide transportation. But a government collective cannot have, or exhibit "courage."
Lots of people have "need" of many things. I, for example, "need" a Gulfstream G550, because it's fast, fun, and I'd enjoy flying it. But unless a very large meteorite full of platinum lands in my patio, I'm not going to get one, because I haven't (yet) given enough service to my fellow humans to warrant getting together enough money to pay for a G550. Spending 1.4 Billion for a monorail from nowhere to nowhere is a similar "need". Why not think a litte more out of the box and spend the $1.4 billion on a fleet of helicopters that fly over everything? (oh, I forgot, that d*** Seattle weather, sigh) It'd almost certainly be cheaper in the long run.
There is no such thing as courageously spending someone else's money. Courage is taking money you've worked hard for, and investing it in some risky project that might or might not prove profitable. If profit (somehow a "dirty" word to most people who think collectively) were allowed by the PUCs of the world, transport solutions would spring up overnight. And taxpayers, exhausted and nearly bankrupted as it is, wouldn't have to pay a cent.
Governments do not "invest", they spend, usually into a black hole like "public" transportation or the infamously disastrous "drug war." True investment (see above, re: courage) is individuals risking their money and their lives in projects directed by the free market (not politicians) that may or may not produce a profit. But if there is no possibility of a profit (because a PUC has decreed a monopoly, for example), no such investment will occur. To repeat: governments do not, should not, and cannot "invest." That was the "American System" that Henry Clay devised, and Abraham Lincoln imposed, with a lot of help from another disastrously damaging war.
Governments are not prescient, and they almost always choose a possible "future" that turns out to have been wrong, or at least useless. The business of government should be only the protection of life, liberty, and property. All the rest should be left up to the free market choices of individuals. Even the much vaunted New York City subway system was built as a private, profit-making instution that leased the property from the city, but was expected to make its own profit, not be a continuing burden on the taxpayers.
Let's have the courage to get rid of "public" (read: government) solutions to problems cause by government overregulation.
Well then, you've done the right thing: you moved to Japan to slake your thirst for government transportation systems. The socialist Japanese government is on the verge of bankruptcy and needs your taxes to prop it up. Good luck! (especially since the U.S. Government still taxes you and we who still live in a nominally "free" country get the benefit of your taxes).
Well yes. That's because the word "public" has been a misnomer for "government" for most of the disastrous 20th century, and now remains a misnomer in the 21st. Government transportation systems will always be a mistake, and here are the reasons why:
1. Government is always about 10 years behind the curve. If governments decide to build highways, they build them with little or no buffer for traffic growth. If the decide to use a 19th century technology like rail (and monorail), they forget to tell people that the system-wide average speed is 14mph. People ride them once or twice for the novelty, but then decide that the waste of time isn't worth it and the trains run riderless.
2. Government transportation systems are coercively funded, meaning that politicians and bureaucrats, not the needs of the transported "public", decide where projects are built, how much coerced money is used to build them, and who gets the money for construction. Because government systems always require competitive bidding, awarding the "lowest price" bidder with the business, construction starts about a year lather than it otherwise would, and takes forever because the lowest price bidder is also usually the lowest quality. The resulting low quality system breaks down frequently (potholes, anybody?) and requires huge amounts of coerced funding to make it merely usable. A free market owner of a transportation system would take into account the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the system. Government bureaucrats have never even heard of TCO.
3. Public Utility Commisions consistently reject free market solutions to transportation problems like jitneys, toll roads (it's illegal to toll a federal Interstate highway), profit-making vanpools, and the billions of other ways to profit from transportation that would spring up if the monopoly-protecting fascism of the PUCs was removed.
It's about time we got government out of the transportation business. Look at how the Internet took off when the ARPA and DARPA controls were removed and the free market took over. The same would happen if government transportation controls were removed.
Re:Why is there still a probelm with the Osprey.
on
Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 2
The Osprey may not be unsafe, but it sure is expensive.
FreeBSD is for computer geeks and IT professionals, not the ordinary fool that would fall for BillG's latest marketing troll.
Reminds me of what a Sun marketdroid once told me when I asked him why Sun didn't make some sort of system administration helper like smitty or sam. He said, "Well, Sun SA's can ask for more money, so you should be happy."
Might Sun's current stock price reflect this attitude??
Well, it might be that easy for you, but many don't have any kind of broadband.
The FreeBSD CDROM installation screens are unreliable, confusing, ugly, and lots of other adjectives that would just piss off religious *BSDers. I use FreeBSD for one of my webservers (currently down because of a Qwest DSL line problem), but scratched my head a great deal during installation.
Can't anybody come up with something like the Red Hat or YAST2 installer? Is there no BSD licensed installer with an API that *BSDers could use??? If not, why not?
Re:Best you'll see in a while for a couple of reas
on
Meet The Leonids
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· Score: 2
Blueshifting is an application of the Doppler effect with light rather than sound -- the speed of the objects stack up the light 'waves' in front of them and in effect make the objects look bluer because of the shift upwards in the visible spectrum.
What? My old Physics classes taught me that this happens only when objects are moving at a relative speed that is a significant percentage of the speed of light. I doubt these meteors will be moving that fast.
And besides, what will be visible will be the trails of the meteors, which will be pretty much stationary, thus precluding any such shift in color.
Well, I own two 75GXP 30GB IBM drives. One came built into my Mac G4/450MP, and the other I bought from my hole-in-the-wall PCclone supplier. I needed more space for video, so replaced the Apple-supplied drive with a WD 80GB drive, but during the copy from the IBM to the WD, a few files had too many errors to copy (fortunately, not files I needed).
Smart mode wasn't of much use back in MacOS 9, so it didn't tell me anything about the impending doom of my data.
I took the drive out of the Mac and put in a PCclone and ran IBM's Drive
Fitness Test which showed a boatload of errors. Since I didn't care about the data on the drive anymore (it had all been copied to the WD), I ran the low level format utility from the DFT and erased everything down to the bare glass. It came back perfect. I have since had the drive running for about six months in the PCclone on FreeBSD without problems. I'm about to upgrade this machine to 4.7 (or maybe 5.0, if it comes out on November 20 as promised by the FreeBSD webpage), so before I do that, I'll check it again with DFT. I suspect it'll come back fine.
The other 75GXP (the one I purchased from my PCclone store) hasn't given any problems.
They're both made in Hungary. I do use one of those drive cooling fan panels underneath the drive in the PCclone, since I've heard the rumor that the 75GXP failures are often heat-related.
Bottom line: turning off smart mode is NOT a solution. Reformatting to the bare glass IS a solution.
Most people running a small operation don't need the speed of Fibre Channel. 50MB/s is enough. But FireWire2 is rumored to be 100MB/s and up (perhaps even 200MB/s). Note the MB (megaBytes).
Not to mention the fact that FireWire is mostly self-configuring. I've not seen a self-configuring Fibre Channel anything.
My office-mate just spent a week attempting to configure a Brocade-switched Fibre Channel setup for HACMP. In his defense, it was his first attempt at such.
Everything I've ever heard about Fibre Channel reminds me of something Rube Goldberg threw together.
Airplanes are considered "private property", hence the 2nd amendment does not apply.
Well yes, but when the rule preventing one from bringing the tools of self defense onto an airplane are enforced by the Federal Aviation Administration, disallowing any private airline from allowing its passengers to carry same, then we've got a different situation. I, for one, would much rather travel on an airline where I knew that at least some of the passengers could defend themselves against an agressive hijacker, than one where I know nobody can (the current situation). I don't have that choice, currently. Neither do you. And it's not because all the airlines have made such a rule. After all, those folks rummaging through your briefcase are no longer in private employ, so there's no "It's what the airlines want," excuse.
If I tell you to leave your gun at home when you come to visit me, don't respond with shock and offense when I send you away because you came packin' heat.
You're absolutely right and I couldn't agree more fully.
Guns are not a useful means of self defense in planes with pressurised cabins.
False. A bullet hole in an airplane cabin (or even several hundred of same) would not cause cabin depressurization. I speak as a pilot of (admittedly small) airplanes. The pressurization system is set up to handle the loss of the square foot or so of an entire window. No bullet hole is that big. And depressurization is easily handled by the automatic dropping of oxygen masks. As someone who has been on an MD-80 where the cabin pressure exceeded 14,000 feet, I have personal experience of this.
That they didn't do so probably reflects that at the time they couldn't know that the risks of not tackling the aggressors were greater than the risks of tackling them.
What it reflects is an attitude of passive submission that has been drilled into Americans by their government indoctrination centers (read: government schools). The whole rejection of the 2nd Amendment as a vital part of the American ethos is more evidence of this.
Knowledge is the essential weapon needed to preserve liberty, guns are an irrelevance.
Tell that to the very intelligent and resourceful Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.
those assumptions (symmetry of information, fungibility, minimal barriers to entry, etc) don't really stack up well in real-world markets.
Libertarians aren't looking for utopia. They don't expect free markets to be perfect, just like they don't expect you to be perfect.
But they do expect that free markets, like free humans, will do a whopping lot better than government-controlled markets. For a real-world example, compare North and South Korea. This is a country with the same language, culture, and history that is divided into a (more-or-less) free market South, and a government-controlled market North. People are still starving in the North.
Oh really? And where did you find this "Libertarian" definition of liberty? I've never seen one. I've never advocated such. No Libertarian I've ever heard of has defended slavery of any kind, especially to a taxaholic government.
Yes, there are Libertarians who believe that the Confederacy was better organized for individual liberties (of white people) than was the Union at the time. But they also make it quite clear that slavery was an abhorrent practice that would have died out of its own abhorrence had it been abolished the same way every other society of the time accomplished its abolishment: peacefully. And if you believe that Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, you'd best think again, since the Emancipation Proclamation didn't cover any Northern-controlled states (where there were still plenty of slaves). The EP was a PR boost for Lincoln to get the British and French to stay away from siding with the Confederacy. It worked, but your government indoctrination center school teacher never told it to you this way. See The Real Lincoln for the true story you haven't been told.
Slashdot Mirror
I was 18500 feet from the CO in Broomfield, CO and was running a CAP connection with 18dB of signal quite nicely for about 2.5 years. Suddenly it quit working and I checked and found 12dB of signal. Qworst put me on a DMT connection (it took two weeks for them to do this) and now all is wonderful again. I'm only about 2000 feet from the DMT (CO?) connection point and am routinely getting 55KB/s downloads. You can try slashdotting my server on the URL above (Solaris 8 on dual 180 processor Sparcstation 10) on the 256K upline.
I'm not aware that the warming of Alaska would ever be bad, but of course, some people might think so. The problem is that local warming in Alaska isn't part of a global trend, and that carbon dioxide isn't the cause of global warming.
Even more evidence that the whole controversy over global warming is junk science.
It would really be nice if reporters would bone up on this stuff and give us the science and the facts, not hearsay.
For lots more debunking of just about every "science" fad, check this out.
Consider the fact that the Washington, DC government is actually the Congress of these formerly free United States and things begin to make more sense. For example, have you investigated how much operating subsidy, coerced from taxpayers, is built into your "cheaper than owning a car" ticket on the DC Metro? My wild guess would be at least a 100% subsidy, but that's probably too low. And my other wild guess is that the subsidy is most likely a Federal subsidy, considering the Federal clientele that normally rides the DC Metro.
And I never said that government transportation systems were uniformly horrible to ride. They're often pleasant (although also often very slow). The burden to the taxpayer is the horrible part.
If a transportation project makes sense, and will provide benefits to people, everybody will pay the price in the cost of tickets, not the cost of taxes.
We're on the verge of subsidizing the formerly profitable airline business in this country, mostly because political meddlers have determined that the only way to make airline travel safe is to strip-search 70-year-old grandmas on the way to visiting their grandchildren.
Why not strip-search every person who enters a New York City subway entrance? After all, many subway stations are adjacent to (if not directly under) many of the city's remaining skyscrapers. Ludicrous, you say? Well, so is strip-searching grandmas with one-way tickets on the airlines.
Let's take this disastrous sentence apart:
Let's have the courage to get rid of "public" (read: government) solutions to problems cause by government overregulation.Well then, you've done the right thing: you moved to Japan to slake your thirst for government transportation systems. The socialist Japanese government is on the verge of bankruptcy and needs your taxes to prop it up. Good luck! (especially since the U.S. Government still taxes you and we who still live in a nominally "free" country get the benefit of your taxes).
Well yes. That's because the word "public" has been a misnomer for "government" for most of the disastrous 20th century, and now remains a misnomer in the 21st. Government transportation systems will always be a mistake, and here are the reasons why:
It's about time we got government out of the transportation business. Look at how the Internet took off when the ARPA and DARPA controls were removed and the free market took over. The same would happen if government transportation controls were removed.
And noisy.
Reminds me of what a Sun marketdroid once told me when I asked him why Sun didn't make some sort of system administration helper like smitty or sam. He said, "Well, Sun SA's can ask for more money, so you should be happy."
Might Sun's current stock price reflect this attitude??
Well, it might be that easy for you, but many don't have any kind of broadband.
The FreeBSD CDROM installation screens are unreliable, confusing, ugly, and lots of other adjectives that would just piss off religious *BSDers. I use FreeBSD for one of my webservers (currently down because of a Qwest DSL line problem), but scratched my head a great deal during installation.
Can't anybody come up with something like the Red Hat or YAST2 installer? Is there no BSD licensed installer with an API that *BSDers could use??? If not, why not?
What? My old Physics classes taught me that this happens only when objects are moving at a relative speed that is a significant percentage of the speed of light. I doubt these meteors will be moving that fast.
And besides, what will be visible will be the trails of the meteors, which will be pretty much stationary, thus precluding any such shift in color.
Their IDE drives are *quiet*.
Their SCSI drives are *reliable*.
Is this a real workaround?
Well, I own two 75GXP 30GB IBM drives. One came built into my Mac G4/450MP, and the other I bought from my hole-in-the-wall PCclone supplier. I needed more space for video, so replaced the Apple-supplied drive with a WD 80GB drive, but during the copy from the IBM to the WD, a few files had too many errors to copy (fortunately, not files I needed).
Smart mode wasn't of much use back in MacOS 9, so it didn't tell me anything about the impending doom of my data.
I took the drive out of the Mac and put in a PCclone and ran IBM's Drive Fitness Test which showed a boatload of errors. Since I didn't care about the data on the drive anymore (it had all been copied to the WD), I ran the low level format utility from the DFT and erased everything down to the bare glass. It came back perfect. I have since had the drive running for about six months in the PCclone on FreeBSD without problems. I'm about to upgrade this machine to 4.7 (or maybe 5.0, if it comes out on November 20 as promised by the FreeBSD webpage), so before I do that, I'll check it again with DFT. I suspect it'll come back fine.
The other 75GXP (the one I purchased from my PCclone store) hasn't given any problems.
They're both made in Hungary. I do use one of those drive cooling fan panels underneath the drive in the PCclone, since I've heard the rumor that the 75GXP failures are often heat-related.
Bottom line: turning off smart mode is NOT a solution. Reformatting to the bare glass IS a solution.
Neighborhood Nuclear Superiority
My suspicion is that, in both cases, the answer is: they're not in as much demand as, say, Cat 5 Ethernet cables.
My office-mate just spent a week attempting to configure a Brocade-switched Fibre Channel setup for HACMP. In his defense, it was his first attempt at such.
Everything I've ever heard about Fibre Channel reminds me of something Rube Goldberg threw together.
Think about it, if you can.
"My god, it's full of crap!"
Photography, video, and the Internet have changed, and will change, the power of the tank.
But don't forget the deterrence power of an armed and liberty-loving populace when the government gets out of its Constitutional bounds.
But they do expect that free markets, like free humans, will do a whopping lot better than government-controlled markets. For a real-world example, compare North and South Korea. This is a country with the same language, culture, and history that is divided into a (more-or-less) free market South, and a government-controlled market North. People are still starving in the North.
Yes, there are Libertarians who believe that the Confederacy was better organized for individual liberties (of white people) than was the Union at the time. But they also make it quite clear that slavery was an abhorrent practice that would have died out of its own abhorrence had it been abolished the same way every other society of the time accomplished its abolishment: peacefully. And if you believe that Lincoln was the Great Emancipator, you'd best think again, since the Emancipation Proclamation didn't cover any Northern-controlled states (where there were still plenty of slaves). The EP was a PR boost for Lincoln to get the British and French to stay away from siding with the Confederacy. It worked, but your government indoctrination center school teacher never told it to you this way. See The Real Lincoln for the true story you haven't been told.