I seriously doubt that. GDP was probably exaggerated by a factor of 10x or 100x during the Soviet era. Read some Solzhenitsyn... the whole Soviet system was built atop a mountain of lies and bones.
Nuts & Volts is pretty decent nowadays, going by the last couple of copies I've bought from the newsstand. I'm thinking it might almost be worth subscribing to.
The level of complacency after the 2000 fiasco, which no doubt some very sharp minds took note of, underscored that people just really as a whole don't give that much of a damn about democracy in the US anymore.
One way to interpret hairsplitting fiascos like the Y2K election is that perhaps it doesn't really matter who wins.
That could explain the lack of revolutionary outrage after the (s)election of Bush. The reason the 2000 election was so close was that the outcome, in the collective hive-mind that is the American electorate, just wasn't that important.
Landslides tend to happen when things suck, the candidates offer genuinely-different positions, and the need for change is acute (e.g., Carter's loss to Reagan in 1980). We're heading into another epsilon-fest in 2004, it seems, because the public is being given a choice between two rich white guys from Skull & Bones whose policies appear all but indistinguishable.
If everyone who felt like you rose up and voted for Badnarik, we'd all win.
Although I'm voting for Bush, actually, and want him to win out of the four. I'll reevaluate again in four years. Unless the parties fundamentally realign, I can't see myself seriously considering anyone other than Republican or Libertarian.
I'd like to understand your rationale a little better. Since Reagan left office, Republicans have positioned themselves at the very opposite end of the political spectrum from Libertarianism. What, in the Democratic platform, is more horrifying to a libertarian-leaning voter than a virulent, out-of-control theocracy whose agenda is basically governmental expansion, deficit spending, and packing the Supreme Court with evangelical freakshows?
I don't like paying excessive taxes any more than the next guy, but until Bush II, I don't think I realized how many other ways existed for the Federal government to hose the citizenry.
It's hilarious that the collectors are so up in arms about someone modding out a Predicta TV, when you consider that one less on the market raises the value of their collection ever so slightly.
No, actually, it's not "hilarious" once you realize that the more hardcore collectors aren't in it to make money, but to see rare and important examples of old-school tech preserved for posterity. Believe me, old TV sets aren't much better as investments than they are as PC cases.
There is a certain aesthetic quailty to an old chassis full of hot, glowing vacuum tubes, capacitors that smell like beeswax, resistors that actually look big enough to block an electron or two, and wiring that might kill you with a touch. Some folks are into that. If you have to ask, you're probably not one of them. Which is fine.
So, why not leave the genuine article to those who will appreciate it? Buy a reproduction Predicta, duct-tape your IDE disk-access light to the side, and pretend it's the real thing. If you're right, it doesn't really matter, does it?
The perpetrators of this project have been mildly vilified by classic TV collectors (fearing imitators) ... there are only so many Predictas left, and Philco isn't making any more of them.
Here's an idea: modern Predicta reproductions are available, so why not buy a repro and case-mod it instead of trashing a really neat, really valuable technological artifact from another age?
This is no better than gutting a classic Zenith console radio to make a fishtank. It's lame as hell.
s/Reagan/Clinton/ or s/Khobar Towers/Beruit/ right? I think I get you drift though.
Not sure what you mean? Those examples were as stated -- Reagan pulled US troops out of Beirut after the Khobar bombing, and Clinton pulled out of Somalia after things started to look bad on CNN.
Didn't the first world trade center bombing happen before Somalia? As an attack on civillians? By a terrorist group?
I'm not sure of the timing, but I believe our forces were already in country at the time of the first WTC attack. Somalia was G. H. W. Bush's Christmas present to the incoming Clinton administration, IIRC.
Either way, it was another good example of us taking it on the chin and not doing much of anything about it.
As for "key gating factors", Didn't they see us bomb Bosnia? Is that a key factor, too?
The irony there is that in Bosnia, the Muslim population was the beneficiary of our military action. I'm not sure what OBL's take on the Bosnian action was.
And isn't there a big enough difference between losing serveral lives in a limited combat action and several thousand lives in New York City (I know they didn't expect that many). A factor, sure, but then maybe the WTO riots were as well. Or Vietnam. Or Korea. Or the Civil War. I don't know. Got any links to change my mind?
I think you're right in that the 9/11 planners didn't expect to do quite as much damage as they did. There is footage of OBL admitting as much. I just remember reading this interview with OBL in a tattered copy of Time not long after 9/11, in which he makes it very clear how inspirational he finds the demoralization of US armed forces.
In fact, the funny thing is, the interview I read was much longer; more like this ABC edition which contains a longer version of the same comment:
By the Grace of God, Praise and Glory be to him, Muslims were able to defeat and force them out of Somalia, as they expelled them before, from Aden. This blockade and this tightening doesn't hurt us much. We expect to be rewarded by God, Praise and Glory to him.
It's strange that these two interviews read so similarly.
What did the events Somalia have to do with any terrorist group?
A hell of a lot, actually. The US retreat from Somalia was one of the key factors that convinced bin Laden that the US would be both vulnerable and non-responsive to an attack on its own soil.
Just as Reagan's retreat from Beirut in the aftermath of the Khobar Towers bombing inspired terrorists to step up attacks on our interests, it is safe to say that Clinton's retreat from Somalia after the Black Hawk incident was one of the key gating factors in 9/11.
When we dabble in affairs we should't get involved in, get our noses bloodied, and run away yelping, people like bin Laden watch, learn, and draw incorrect but painful conclusions about our nature as Americans.
Whoever modded this offtopic needs to be banninated from further moderation.
Unfortunately, I think the guy's got a point. I don't like what he's saying, but he's got the Bush administration's modus operandi down to a 'T'. We are trading off a lot of valuable science for a Mars mission that will probably not take place. The likely result will be that neither the pure scientists, nor those of us who are Mars-mission advocates, will get what we're after.
Household microwave ovens spew a lot of 2.4 GHz energy all over the band (enough that after looking at it on a spectrum analyzer, I no longer feel like pressing my face up to the window to see if the cheese on my pizza has melted yet).
However, they radiate only on alterating half-cycles of the 60 Hz line frequency. There may be a config option in your WLAN hardware's client utility to make it more resistant to microwave-oven leakage by forcing transmission of smaller packets. You'll lose some performance if you enable it, but it should keep your WLAN from going down altogether.
A Google search on "EG008W jumbo frames" suggests that it does not. What effect that has on ultimate throughput, I don't know.
I do know that I get roughly the same throughput accessing drives on a remote machine (via netbeui) as I do on my local box, so it hasn't been an issue for me. If my NICs were sitting on PCI Express ports, I'd probably be more concerned about it. Given the price of the EG008W, I really don't have any room to complain.
As a lot of people have pointed out, off-the-shelf PCs aren't a good choice for gigabit Ethernet switching and routing regardless of the OS, and you can't really take advantage of true full-duplex Gigabit Ethernet on a standard consumer PCI bus. Still, you can do better than 145 Mbit/sec.
I've been using a LinkSys EG008W switch on my home network, and it's a real bargain. It is a true switch (not a hub), costs less than $200, and all eight ports are capable of autosensing gigabit-capable hardware. Not all so-called "Gigabit" hubs are created equal; some of them only work in half-duplex mode, some of them only have gigabit capability on their uplink ports; some of them slow down to 100 megabit/sec if any of their ports are connected to 100-megabit devices.
The Linksys's big drawback is its fan noise. It is insanely annoying. I owned mine for about 24 hours before I opened it up and dropped the voltage to the fan with a three-terminal regulator IC. I cut a hole in the top to improve the airflow at the lower fan speed, and it's perfectly unobtrusive now. (No, I don't remember what voltage I ended up running the fan at, unfortunately.) If you're either (a) deaf; (b) located at least a couple of rooms away from your network closet; or (c) handy with a soldering iron and indifferent to manufacturer warranties, the EG008W would be an ideal piece of hardware for your situation.
Frequency-wise, WiFi on the 2.4 GHz band is nowhere near anything important that would be used in a hospital. (This, despite the fact that the 2.4 GHz band is designated "ISM" by the FCC -- industrial, scientific, and medical.)
There's an amazing amount of RF crap floating around on 2.4 GHz, from telephones to microwave ovens. No sane engineer would try to use that part of the spectrum for anything related to health or safety.
In terms of power levels, a WiFi link emits much less RF power than a cellphone; around 100 times less, in fact. If there is a microwave oven anywhere in the hospital building, it's leaking much more 2.4 GHz radiation than Steve's Airport card is putting out.
Where is the NPR leading story on the propaganda piece Moore just put out with a list of all the factual errors Moore made?
Fahrenheit 911 was indeed full of lies, half-truths, distortions, and factual errors. Every time someone from the Bush Administration appeared onscreen, I could count on hearing at least one.
Were there any others I missed?
Re:Quote from the article
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 1
They have a strong overriding conservative, and a timid, meek, vacuous "liberal" who doesnm't challenge any of the outrageous bullshit Hannity says
A conservative wag once defined a "liberal" as "a man who won't even take his own side in a fight."
If nobody seems to be rebutting the Bush Brigade effectively, it doesn't necessarily mean the right-wingers are right on every issue. It could just mean that nobody with a clue has the rhetorical cojones to stand up and say as much.
Slashdot Mirror
GDP is down 40% since communism tanked.
I seriously doubt that. GDP was probably exaggerated by a factor of 10x or 100x during the Soviet era. Read some Solzhenitsyn... the whole Soviet system was built atop a mountain of lies and bones.
THE TRIVIAL PATENTS ARE IRRELEVANT AND ARE NOT THE REAL ISSUE HERE!
OK, we have one AC's opinion. Now, let's find someone from Barnes & Noble and ask them if they agree.
http://www.earthlcd.com
eBay
(see Home > All Categories > Business & Industrial > Electronic Components > Semiconductors, Actives > LCDs, Displays)
You know, you're allowed to send in more money than your 1040 form calls for, right?
How much additional tax did you contribute last year?
Nuts & Volts is pretty decent nowadays, going by the last couple of copies I've bought from the newsstand. I'm thinking it might almost be worth subscribing to.
... does the printer support proportional rendering of chocolate superscripts in Times New Roman?
I do it a dozen times on the weekend
After spending three years in space being repetitively frozen, superheated, and irradiated?
The level of complacency after the 2000 fiasco, which no doubt some very sharp minds took note of, underscored that people just really as a whole don't give that much of a damn about democracy in the US anymore.
One way to interpret hairsplitting fiascos like the Y2K election is that perhaps it doesn't really matter who wins.
That could explain the lack of revolutionary outrage after the (s)election of Bush. The reason the 2000 election was so close was that the outcome, in the collective hive-mind that is the American electorate, just wasn't that important.
Landslides tend to happen when things suck, the candidates offer genuinely-different positions, and the need for change is acute (e.g., Carter's loss to Reagan in 1980). We're heading into another epsilon-fest in 2004, it seems, because the public is being given a choice between two rich white guys from Skull & Bones whose policies appear all but indistinguishable.
If everyone who felt like you rose up and voted for Badnarik, we'd all win.
Although I'm voting for Bush, actually, and want him to win out of the four. I'll reevaluate again in four years. Unless the parties fundamentally realign, I can't see myself seriously considering anyone other than Republican or Libertarian.
I'd like to understand your rationale a little better. Since Reagan left office, Republicans have positioned themselves at the very opposite end of the political spectrum from Libertarianism. What, in the Democratic platform, is more horrifying to a libertarian-leaning voter than a virulent, out-of-control theocracy whose agenda is basically governmental expansion, deficit spending, and packing the Supreme Court with evangelical freakshows?
I don't like paying excessive taxes any more than the next guy, but until Bush II, I don't think I realized how many other ways existed for the Federal government to hose the citizenry.
Interestingly, there's no dynamic action in Doom 3 that couldn't be handled easily by ODE. They didn't really need to roll their own physics package.
It's hilarious that the collectors are so up in arms about someone modding out a Predicta TV, when you consider that one less on the market raises the value of their collection ever so slightly.
No, actually, it's not "hilarious" once you realize that the more hardcore collectors aren't in it to make money, but to see rare and important examples of old-school tech preserved for posterity. Believe me, old TV sets aren't much better as investments than they are as PC cases.
There is a certain aesthetic quailty to an old chassis full of hot, glowing vacuum tubes, capacitors that smell like beeswax, resistors that actually look big enough to block an electron or two, and wiring that might kill you with a touch. Some folks are into that. If you have to ask, you're probably not one of them. Which is fine.
So, why not leave the genuine article to those who will appreciate it? Buy a reproduction Predicta, duct-tape your IDE disk-access light to the side, and pretend it's the real thing. If you're right, it doesn't really matter, does it?
The perpetrators of this project have been mildly vilified by classic TV collectors (fearing imitators) ... there are only so many Predictas left, and Philco isn't making any more of them.
Here's an idea: modern Predicta reproductions are available, so why not buy a repro and case-mod it instead of trashing a really neat, really valuable technological artifact from another age?
This is no better than gutting a classic Zenith console radio to make a fishtank. It's lame as hell.
Sorry; you're right, I don't know why I associated Khobar with Beirut.
Not sure what you mean? Those examples were as stated -- Reagan pulled US troops out of Beirut after the Khobar bombing, and Clinton pulled out of Somalia after things started to look bad on CNN.
Didn't the first world trade center bombing happen before Somalia? As an attack on civillians? By a terrorist group?
I'm not sure of the timing, but I believe our forces were already in country at the time of the first WTC attack. Somalia was G. H. W. Bush's Christmas present to the incoming Clinton administration, IIRC.
Either way, it was another good example of us taking it on the chin and not doing much of anything about it.
As for "key gating factors", Didn't they see us bomb Bosnia? Is that a key factor, too?
The irony there is that in Bosnia, the Muslim population was the beneficiary of our military action. I'm not sure what OBL's take on the Bosnian action was.
And isn't there a big enough difference between losing serveral lives in a limited combat action and several thousand lives in New York City (I know they didn't expect that many). A factor, sure, but then maybe the WTO riots were as well. Or Vietnam. Or Korea. Or the Civil War. I don't know. Got any links to change my mind?
I think you're right in that the 9/11 planners didn't expect to do quite as much damage as they did. There is footage of OBL admitting as much. I just remember reading this interview with OBL in a tattered copy of Time not long after 9/11, in which he makes it very clear how inspirational he finds the demoralization of US armed forces.
In fact, the funny thing is, the interview I read was much longer; more like this ABC edition which contains a longer version of the same comment:It's strange that these two interviews read so similarly.
What did the events Somalia have to do with any terrorist group?
A hell of a lot, actually. The US retreat from Somalia was one of the key factors that convinced bin Laden that the US would be both vulnerable and non-responsive to an attack on its own soil.
Just as Reagan's retreat from Beirut in the aftermath of the Khobar Towers bombing inspired terrorists to step up attacks on our interests, it is safe to say that Clinton's retreat from Somalia after the Black Hawk incident was one of the key gating factors in 9/11.
When we dabble in affairs we should't get involved in, get our noses bloodied, and run away yelping, people like bin Laden watch, learn, and draw incorrect but painful conclusions about our nature as Americans.
Whoever modded this offtopic needs to be banninated from further moderation.
Unfortunately, I think the guy's got a point. I don't like what he's saying, but he's got the Bush administration's modus operandi down to a 'T'. We are trading off a lot of valuable science for a Mars mission that will probably not take place. The likely result will be that neither the pure scientists, nor those of us who are Mars-mission advocates, will get what we're after.
Household microwave ovens spew a lot of 2.4 GHz energy all over the band (enough that after looking at it on a spectrum analyzer, I no longer feel like pressing my face up to the window to see if the cheese on my pizza has melted yet).
However, they radiate only on alterating half-cycles of the 60 Hz line frequency. There may be a config option in your WLAN hardware's client utility to make it more resistant to microwave-oven leakage by forcing transmission of smaller packets. You'll lose some performance if you enable it, but it should keep your WLAN from going down altogether.
A Google search on "EG008W jumbo frames" suggests that it does not. What effect that has on ultimate throughput, I don't know.
I do know that I get roughly the same throughput accessing drives on a remote machine (via netbeui) as I do on my local box, so it hasn't been an issue for me. If my NICs were sitting on PCI Express ports, I'd probably be more concerned about it. Given the price of the EG008W, I really don't have any room to complain.
As a lot of people have pointed out, off-the-shelf PCs aren't a good choice for gigabit Ethernet switching and routing regardless of the OS, and you can't really take advantage of true full-duplex Gigabit Ethernet on a standard consumer PCI bus. Still, you can do better than 145 Mbit/sec.
I've been using a LinkSys EG008W switch on my home network, and it's a real bargain. It is a true switch (not a hub), costs less than $200, and all eight ports are capable of autosensing gigabit-capable hardware. Not all so-called "Gigabit" hubs are created equal; some of them only work in half-duplex mode, some of them only have gigabit capability on their uplink ports; some of them slow down to 100 megabit/sec if any of their ports are connected to 100-megabit devices.
The Linksys's big drawback is its fan noise. It is insanely annoying. I owned mine for about 24 hours before I opened it up and dropped the voltage to the fan with a three-terminal regulator IC. I cut a hole in the top to improve the airflow at the lower fan speed, and it's perfectly unobtrusive now. (No, I don't remember what voltage I ended up running the fan at, unfortunately.) If you're either (a) deaf; (b) located at least a couple of rooms away from your network closet; or (c) handy with a soldering iron and indifferent to manufacturer warranties, the EG008W would be an ideal piece of hardware for your situation.
Frequency-wise, WiFi on the 2.4 GHz band is nowhere near anything important that would be used in a hospital. (This, despite the fact that the 2.4 GHz band is designated "ISM" by the FCC -- industrial, scientific, and medical.)
There's an amazing amount of RF crap floating around on 2.4 GHz, from telephones to microwave ovens. No sane engineer would try to use that part of the spectrum for anything related to health or safety.
In terms of power levels, a WiFi link emits much less RF power than a cellphone; around 100 times less, in fact. If there is a microwave oven anywhere in the hospital building, it's leaking much more 2.4 GHz radiation than Steve's Airport card is putting out.
I wouldn't hold my breath. It was hard enough to convince manufacturers that floating-point frame buffers and textures were needed in the first place.
Even now, only the NV40 offers what you could honestly call single-precision floats. The ATI cards give you 24 bits for the whole value.
I'm not talking about the scientific discovery or interest, I'm talking about the *obessesion*
Without the obsession part, the discovery part doesn't tend to happen.
No kidding. I don't think I would test something that had the potential to cause HF interference in Cedar Rapids!
Where is the NPR leading story on the propaganda piece Moore just put out with a list of all the factual errors Moore made?
Fahrenheit 911 was indeed full of lies, half-truths, distortions, and factual errors. Every time someone from the Bush Administration appeared onscreen, I could count on hearing at least one.
Were there any others I missed?
They have a strong overriding conservative, and a timid, meek, vacuous "liberal" who doesnm't challenge any of the outrageous bullshit Hannity says
A conservative wag once defined a "liberal" as "a man who won't even take his own side in a fight."
If nobody seems to be rebutting the Bush Brigade effectively, it doesn't necessarily mean the right-wingers are right on every issue. It could just mean that nobody with a clue has the rhetorical cojones to stand up and say as much.