Someone actually pointed this out when this topic was discussed on Free Republic, which is a conservative news forum site that does not generally attract particularly tech-savvy people.
Please don't think that because we are knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing hard right wingers that there are no tech-savvy people among us. We are chockablock with engineers and other left-brain types.
I was talking to a half dozen of my partners yesterday. Four of us already had a MacBook, and the other three were planning to buy one.
Every one of us was a former Windows user, and had a copy of Windows 2000 or XP which they planned to run under Parallels for connectivity to our company system, but not one of them cared a fig for Vista, and nobody intended to run any kind of Windows natively with BootCamp.
I predict this will be Microsoft's biggest flop ever. You heard it here first.
All our IT technicians knew how to do was follow pre-preprinted instruction cards and call the supplier's helpdesk.
Meanwhile the little shits are opening up SSH tunnels on port 443 outbound with port forwarding through their home router to a proxy server on their own computer. Nobody keeps today's kids away from their pr0n and MySpace.
Don't worry about him. He's impervious to prosecution by virtue of his newfound Internet fame, and he stands to make a great deal of money out of the inevitable qui tam lawsuit.
I am sick of these stories. Nobody trusts any of this electronic stuff. Everyone on the left thinks the Republicans are ripping off elections, but I assure you the right wing was saying the same things when Clinton was beating them like a rented mule. This crazy talk is tearing society up. Let's go back to paper ballots. We can wait a day or two for the results.
Why bother with an actual crime that will use resources when they can target basically good people for cash?
Pretty comical to think that there are people all over the country, mostly Democrats, who think these lazy pencil pushing jobsworths are the only ones who ought to be trusted with firearms.
But it seems some morans (especially the guy sitting behind me on my third to last flight) thinks that doesn't apply the literal moment the wheels touch ground.
The "moran" is correct; the ban applies only in flight.
Ah. No... The money/capital isn't generated. It's simply moved from one place to another, from low performing areas to higher performing areas. Only the governments can print money. Are you trying to tell me that money invested in the telecoms industry inherently has more merit than money invested in the entertainment industry?
You are confusing "capital" with "currency." It is trivially true that governments print currency, but that doesn't mean they are creating productive capital, not by a long shot. In fact, if they print currency unwisely, they can destroy capital.
Maybe it would help you to think of intellectual capital as a source of "wealth" rather than a source of "money". Money is just a convenient symbol for wealth and purchasing power and one's standard of living. It depends for its value on the productive capacity and fiscal and monetary prudence of the nation that issues it. And the productive capacity of all nations is increased dramatically by scientific knowledge, especially those who are best able to "capitalize" on it (i.e. free-market liberal democracies.)
It is no exaggeration to say that without the intellectual capital bequeathed to us by generations of mathematicians and other innovators, life would end for many of us and be made far more miserable for the rest. Food arrives on your table speedily and cheaply, because of innovations in agriculture, transportation and communications that depend on advanced mathematical and scientific knowledge.
A trillion liters is 10^12 liters. It is the volume of water contained in a cubic kilometer. It weighs a trillion kilograms, by definition.
2.5 trillion liters is a vanishingly small amount compared to all the fresh water (not to mention sea water) on Earth. There are 1.4 trillion cubic kilometers of sea water and about 6 billion cubic kilometers of fresh water.
How much nuclear waste is there? Less than 250,000 tons, or 250 million kilograms, of high level waste in the whole world. If even as much as one one-hundredth of this waste were actually contaminating the groundwater in question, it would be at a concentration by weight of approximately (2.5 million kg) / (2.5 trillion kg) = 1:1,000,000.
You could drink a liter of this mixture, with no more ionizing radiation than you get from spending a day in a granite building breathing radon-contaminated air, or living for a few days at the altitude of Denver.
Small quantities of radiation are harmless. The linear no-threshold model of radiation dosimetry is a crock. Life evolved in a constant bath of terrestrial and cosmic radiation, and has very efficient mechanisms for repairing DNA damage from it.
As far as the Israeli question: discontinue support for Israel, but give any and all Israelis that wish to immigrate to the US unconditional permission to do so.
You know, I am certain to get a -1 for this, but once in a while it has to be said:
Go to hell, you despicable coward. Go to hell and roast with Neville Chamberlain and every other appeasing cowardly worm.
Nukes are the culmination of that trend, and they're the reason the free world runs the rest of the world. That's allright by me.
Hear, hear. I'm on board with Pax Americana too.
My old man was a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force. He spent the summer of 1945 training for the Battle of Japan. They knew that there would be casualties of 80% or more. He's alive today because of Fat Man and Little Boy. Multiply that by millions and millions of soldiers and civilians on both sides, and it's clear that blasting Hiroshima and Nagazaki to green glass and ashes was the most humane thing Truman could have done at that juncture.
A lesson in there for modern Western civilization, as it slowly comes to grips with the greatest threat it has ever faced.
Surely any rational person would see the ideals portrayed in the Communist Manifesto as at least trying to be 'good' for society.
Surely any rational person would see an economy based on gifts from Santa Claus as being 'good' for society, right? In theory, yes. In practice, of course not.
Only children and simpletons believe in Santa Claus or collectivist economic theory. It takes far more intellectual sophistication to realize the inherent superiority and inevitable supremacy of free-market capitalism than it does to hold on to the phantasmic dream of socialism.
Also, subduction zones aren't particularly stable and predictable, so the waste would likely spew about rather than being neatly sucked away.
Big deal. If you took all the waste ever produced by every reactor on Earth and diluted it in even one cubic mile of water, I'd happily drink a glass every day for the rest of my life. It would be totally harmless and might even be beneficial.
There are trillions of tons of naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in the world, not to mention the millions of cosmic rays passing through us every second. Life evolved repair mechanisms to deal easily with low-level radiation, and it's a joke that people are so scared of it.
You won't get a chance, you dingaling, he's in his second term and will retire in two and a half years.
but part of me fears there will be a day when he will just decide not to leave office, and turn the military on those who oppose and then force us to finance him.
Spare me the drama. This isn't a banana republic. I'm still quite pleased with George Bush, even though he's too liberal for my taste, but if he were so foolish as to try to stay in office after January 2009 I'd be right beside you on the barricades. And I'd bring enough guns to go around, too.
During World War II, the entire nation made sacrifices for the war. Yet, during the Iraq War, we Americans are not even paying extra taxes to finance the war.
Yes, and during World War II, we had 10% of the nation in uniform. Now it's about 0.1%. As a percentage of our GNP, the cost of this war is a trivial fraction of what we spent on WWII.
This seems to be a new liberal meme: if you don't support higher taxes for the war you're not a real patriot.
Of course, the intent is for this to be a one-way ratchet, with vast new rivers of tribute paid into Washington's coffers, ready to be blown on harebrained make-work schemes for otherwise unemployable social science graduates as soon as the war is over.
The telephone tax from the Spanish American War lasted for a hundred years. Any such "sacrifice" the Left manages to guilt-trip out of us will last for a hundred more, I am sure.
For the consumer products, this math falls apart if you are willing to attribute any reasonably conservative (but none-zero) value to the nice form factor. For the the pro line, the math fails if you match all the hardware features.
The math really falls apart if you take support costs and productivity into account. I wonder how much money corporate America spends on weeding their $450 Dells of viruses and spyware?
Sure interesting to see how close the houses are. Looks like a normal suburban neighborhood, I don't think it's even base housing for the officers. You could throw a rock from the checkpoint gate at the bottom of the hill to the nearest house.
You can still make scrip based on whatever backing you think is appropriate and do your best to get it circulated, as long as you don't commit fraud or counterfeiting. Local Rotary clubs do stuff like this as a fund-raiser. Most of it never gets spent.
Ultimately, what you talk about may require acceptance of alternative (non-centralised, community-run) monetary systems
Before the US Government issued greenbacks, every little piss-ant country bank had its own bank notes. If there was a run on the bank and you got caught holding their notes, too bad for you, your money was gone. If you think some kind of non-profit hippie currency collective could do better, you've gone soft in the head.
It's true that there is nothing backing our currency but the full faith and credit of the US Federal Government, but consider what that means: This is the reason why the money bears the inscription about it being "legal tender for all debts, public and private." If you owe someone money, the court system will make you pay him in greenbacks, and only in greenbacks, or a greenback-denominated check. Most importantly, this applies to the government itself. In days gone by, armed tax collectors would come by your farm and gather in a percentage of your crops or carry off some of your possessions. If you didn't have enough, it was off to the dungeon with you. Now, however, you can give them a piece of paper that society has invested with the magical power to make gun-toting tax collectors go away. That is an advance in the evolution of civilization.
MS put such as piss poor job into their office products for the mac, they might as well not have made them.
I do not agree. This hasn't been true since Word 6.0 for the Mac, which indeed was a steaming pile of crap. In fact, Office 98 for Mac was generally acclaimed as better than Windows Office 97. The current offerings are quite comparable, and exceedingly capable.
I hate Microsoft's OS, and many of they ways they do business, but MS Office is a damn fine piece of work whether on Mac or Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
-ccm
me and 6 partners = 7 people.
I remember that thread, and posted on it.
Please don't think that because we are knuckle-dragging mouth-breathing hard right wingers that there are no tech-savvy people among us. We are chockablock with engineers and other left-brain types.
-ccm
Every one of us was a former Windows user, and had a copy of Windows 2000 or XP which they planned to run under Parallels for connectivity to our company system, but not one of them cared a fig for Vista, and nobody intended to run any kind of Windows natively with BootCamp.
I predict this will be Microsoft's biggest flop ever. You heard it here first.
-ccm
Meanwhile the little shits are opening up SSH tunnels on port 443 outbound with port forwarding through their home router to a proxy server on their own computer. Nobody keeps today's kids away from their pr0n and MySpace.
-ccm
-ccm
Pretty comical to think that there are people all over the country, mostly Democrats, who think these lazy pencil pushing jobsworths are the only ones who ought to be trusted with firearms.
-ccm
The "moran" is correct; the ban applies only in flight.
-ccm
You are confusing "capital" with "currency." It is trivially true that governments print currency, but that doesn't mean they are creating productive capital, not by a long shot. In fact, if they print currency unwisely, they can destroy capital.
Maybe it would help you to think of intellectual capital as a source of "wealth" rather than a source of "money". Money is just a convenient symbol for wealth and purchasing power and one's standard of living. It depends for its value on the productive capacity and fiscal and monetary prudence of the nation that issues it. And the productive capacity of all nations is increased dramatically by scientific knowledge, especially those who are best able to "capitalize" on it (i.e. free-market liberal democracies.)
It is no exaggeration to say that without the intellectual capital bequeathed to us by generations of mathematicians and other innovators, life would end for many of us and be made far more miserable for the rest. Food arrives on your table speedily and cheaply, because of innovations in agriculture, transportation and communications that depend on advanced mathematical and scientific knowledge.
-ccm
2.5 trillion liters is a vanishingly small amount compared to all the fresh water (not to mention sea water) on Earth. There are 1.4 trillion cubic kilometers of sea water and about 6 billion cubic kilometers of fresh water.
How much nuclear waste is there? Less than 250,000 tons, or 250 million kilograms, of high level waste in the whole world. If even as much as one one-hundredth of this waste were actually contaminating the groundwater in question, it would be at a concentration by weight of approximately (2.5 million kg) / (2.5 trillion kg) = 1:1,000,000.
You could drink a liter of this mixture, with no more ionizing radiation than you get from spending a day in a granite building breathing radon-contaminated air, or living for a few days at the altitude of Denver.
Small quantities of radiation are harmless. The linear no-threshold model of radiation dosimetry is a crock. Life evolved in a constant bath of terrestrial and cosmic radiation, and has very efficient mechanisms for repairing DNA damage from it.
(All quantities gleaned from Wikipedia)
You know, I am certain to get a -1 for this, but once in a while it has to be said:
Go to hell, you despicable coward. Go to hell and roast with Neville Chamberlain and every other appeasing cowardly worm.
-ccm
Rubbish, it's going to come out right after Copland.
-ccm
Windows/Norton/AdAware/McAffee etc. have been a risible joke for years. Everything out of Redmond (except MS Office) is insecure, feeble crapware.
-ccm
Hear, hear. I'm on board with Pax Americana too.
My old man was a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force. He spent the summer of 1945 training for the Battle of Japan. They knew that there would be casualties of 80% or more. He's alive today because of Fat Man and Little Boy. Multiply that by millions and millions of soldiers and civilians on both sides, and it's clear that blasting Hiroshima and Nagazaki to green glass and ashes was the most humane thing Truman could have done at that juncture.
A lesson in there for modern Western civilization, as it slowly comes to grips with the greatest threat it has ever faced.
-ccm
Surely any rational person would see an economy based on gifts from Santa Claus as being 'good' for society, right? In theory, yes. In practice, of course not.
Only children and simpletons believe in Santa Claus or collectivist economic theory. It takes far more intellectual sophistication to realize the inherent superiority and inevitable supremacy of free-market capitalism than it does to hold on to the phantasmic dream of socialism.
-ccm
Big deal. If you took all the waste ever produced by every reactor on Earth and diluted it in even one cubic mile of water, I'd happily drink a glass every day for the rest of my life. It would be totally harmless and might even be beneficial.
There are trillions of tons of naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in the world, not to mention the millions of cosmic rays passing through us every second. Life evolved repair mechanisms to deal easily with low-level radiation, and it's a joke that people are so scared of it.
-ccm
There, there. ::pats Quintios on head::
If it upsets you that much, you can buy a fully functional MicroVAX for a few hundred on eBay.
-ccm
You won't get a chance, you dingaling, he's in his second term and will retire in two and a half years.
but part of me fears there will be a day when he will just decide not to leave office, and turn the military on those who oppose and then force us to finance him.
Spare me the drama. This isn't a banana republic. I'm still quite pleased with George Bush, even though he's too liberal for my taste, but if he were so foolish as to try to stay in office after January 2009 I'd be right beside you on the barricades. And I'd bring enough guns to go around, too.
-ccm
Yes, and during World War II, we had 10% of the nation in uniform. Now it's about 0.1%. As a percentage of our GNP, the cost of this war is a trivial fraction of what we spent on WWII.
This seems to be a new liberal meme: if you don't support higher taxes for the war you're not a real patriot.
Of course, the intent is for this to be a one-way ratchet, with vast new rivers of tribute paid into Washington's coffers, ready to be blown on harebrained make-work schemes for otherwise unemployable social science graduates as soon as the war is over.
The telephone tax from the Spanish American War lasted for a hundred years. Any such "sacrifice" the Left manages to guilt-trip out of us will last for a hundred more, I am sure.
-ccm
The math really falls apart if you take support costs and productivity into account. I wonder how much money corporate America spends on weeding their $450 Dells of viruses and spyware?
-ccm
-ccm
You can still make scrip based on whatever backing you think is appropriate and do your best to get it circulated, as long as you don't commit fraud or counterfeiting. Local Rotary clubs do stuff like this as a fund-raiser. Most of it never gets spent.
Ultimately, what you talk about may require acceptance of alternative (non-centralised, community-run) monetary systems
Before the US Government issued greenbacks, every little piss-ant country bank had its own bank notes. If there was a run on the bank and you got caught holding their notes, too bad for you, your money was gone. If you think some kind of non-profit hippie currency collective could do better, you've gone soft in the head.
It's true that there is nothing backing our currency but the full faith and credit of the US Federal Government, but consider what that means: This is the reason why the money bears the inscription about it being "legal tender for all debts, public and private." If you owe someone money, the court system will make you pay him in greenbacks, and only in greenbacks, or a greenback-denominated check. Most importantly, this applies to the government itself. In days gone by, armed tax collectors would come by your farm and gather in a percentage of your crops or carry off some of your possessions. If you didn't have enough, it was off to the dungeon with you. Now, however, you can give them a piece of paper that society has invested with the magical power to make gun-toting tax collectors go away. That is an advance in the evolution of civilization.
-ccm
-ccm
I do not agree. This hasn't been true since Word 6.0 for the Mac, which indeed was a steaming pile of crap. In fact, Office 98 for Mac was generally acclaimed as better than Windows Office 97. The current offerings are quite comparable, and exceedingly capable.
I hate Microsoft's OS, and many of they ways they do business, but MS Office is a damn fine piece of work whether on Mac or Windows.
-ccm