I'll disagree strenuously with #5. You might need a new keyboard. I entered a phase at work, about a decade ago, when I was really pounding out the code. My wrists started to get really sore. I bought a no-name (literally; there is nothing recognizable as a brand name on the box or the device) split keyboard (I had bought the $200 Apple Adjustable Keyboard years ago, and was most comfortable with the widest split. Then the X key gave out... so I got another, I forget the brand name, that was split but not adjustable, but that's another story...)
Problem solved. Wrists stopped hurting. Code pounding continued. I really can't use a "normal" keyboard for very long.
There's an easy fix for the burden of a carbon tax: rebates. Take all the carbon tax revenues collected, divide by the number of people in the country. Everyone gets a share. Shares for children go to their parents.
This preserves the tax as a disincentive to put CO2 into the atmosphere, so it encourages conservation. And those who use "less than their share" will see a net gain from the tax.
The Apple II had plenty of interchangable parts. Bog-standard DIP RAM chip sockets on the motherboard. I/O specs for the expansion ports published. Even schematics of the motherboard.
Plenty of great software for the Apple II as well. Since you "lacked the budget for IBM", you were talking about things that happened after the summer of 1981, so you were really pretty close to the introduction of the//e (February, 1982).
Consumer Reports regularly has Apple topping the list of most reliable PC vendors. They have more data than you do.
I have digital cable at home; the digital converter box feeds a signal to my analog TV (and my wife's analog TiVo). The cable company already bought the converter box, and it works with my TV. Assuming that nothing gets zapped by lightning, I'm all set. Right? 2012 doesn't change anything for me?
But if I were to put a splitter on the cable, and run another length to my other (analog) TV, and live with the 40 or so analog channels, the Cable co could cut that off at their whim, and make me rent another digital cable box.
I think we're getting to those limits. Five or Ten years ago, a $600 computer system was a joke. Very limited. Now, not nearly so much. You get everything an office-type person needs, and you don't have to upgrade very much to keep a developer happy. It's not the latest gaming rig, true, and it doesn't have the bandwidth for working on big images or video. But that's a far cry from the $6,000 that a solid desktop set one back 15 years ago.
Those $6,000 systems exist; there are just not that many people who can use that "extra".
Re:Good binoculars, star charts, and a red flashli
on
Entry-Level Astronomy?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
One of my earliest astronomical memories (aside from the shows at the local planetarium) was standing on a friend's driveway just after dusk. He says to me, pointing at a bright point of light against the rapidly darkening sky, "hey, I bet that's Saturn". He ducks into the garage, and drags out a 8-ish inch reflector telescope his dad had made. He lines it up, adjusts the focus, looks, and then invites me to have a look. Boom, there it is. Just like in all the picture books, only live, in front of my eyes.
So look at the planets through your scope. It should be bright enough to resolve any of the naked-eye visible planets as discs. You should be able to see the phases of Venus.
On my desk I have a picture of Comet Hale-Bopp. I took it with a 35mm film camera, with a 100-200 mm zoom lens set all the way out. Tripod, Kodacolor Gold color film (although there isn't any color in the print.) I thought I would want to take more astro-photographs, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
The Film Society back when I went to college did the non-profit thing right. They turned enough profit on their popular Friday and Saturday night films that they would run foreign and independent movies on Tuesday evenings. Then they ploughed the remaining surplus into better projection and sound equipment. When they were done with that, they started running a free series on Sunday afternoons. Then I graduated, and no more film society movies for me.
Iraq has been pretty exhaustively searched for WMDs. They're not there.
Concepts of God, to the extent that they describe a scientifically testable entities, can be disproven. Most people ascribe properties to God that are not scientifically testable. "God of the Gaps". See also any psychic who has failed to win money from James Randi, for additional techniques to rationalize failed results.
The historical evidence for Muhammed is significantly better than the historical evidence for Jesus. Muhammad's teachings were written down by those in his presence; the Gospels were written 40 to 80 years after the "fact".
What historical record of Jesus? The oldest Christian writings, the epistles of Paul, make no reference to direct references to the events of Jesus' birth or death, which is surprising. No Roman records of his trial before Pilate or his punishment. No separate, contemporaneous records of the dramatic events ascribed to the crucifiction.
Apple//e, nearly 1 MHz, 64K plus 64K, and a pair of 140K floppies. Upgraded to have a 64K hardware buffer on the printer card, and 288 K of Ram dedicated to emulating two more disk drives. That got bumped up to a 768K bank-switched RAM card and an 800K 3.5" floppy drive. And the processor got bumped up to 8 MHz.... Those were the days.
Will AppleWorks 6, the OS X native version, run on an intel mac?
I still use AppleWorks 5 on my MacOS 9 iMac. After adding in the cost of AppleWorks and a couple other programs, the upgrade to Mac OS X was half the cost of a (G4) Mini, so I never upgraded. Now that AppleWorks is gone and Pages is extra and there is no MacDraw replacement, my incentives to buy a new Mac (rather than put the money into my Linux box) is dwindling.
PS: AppleWorks for the Apple// rocked! I got my hands on a pirated copy, and went right out and bought the package. Piracy as demo distribution.
The USA is the top emitter of Greenhouse gasses. We will soon be surpassed by China, but China has 4x the population of the USA, so the USA is still 4x China on a per-capita basis.
"Billions of tons of CO2" is n x 10 ^9 tons, where n is a small real number greater than 1.5. One (metric) ton is 10^3 KG. So "Billions of tons of CO2" is n x 10^12. Which is somewhere above 0.3 x 10^-6. Which would show up as 0.0000003, well within the limits of an 8-digit display that has been the rule for calculators for about 35 years now.
This should be within the abilities of a bright high school science student.
My recollection is that you needed the mail to get the babelfish. You put the mail on something so that when the cleaning robot rolled out, the mail went flying with the fish, and the flying robot scooped up the mail instead of the fish, and you got the fish and got to keep on going.
Of course, getting onto the vogon ship was pretty early on in the adventure. It's not like buying the stale sandwich at the bar, which is crucial much later on in the game (and I only learned that was the solution by reading the hint book...)
The perception of money certainly can go away. And perception is almost as good as the real thing.
If I have a hundred shares of BunkCo that are trading at $500 a share, I feel like I have an asset that is worth $50,000. I can spend real cash, keeping my BunkCo shares as the rainy day fund, and sell the BunkCo shares when it actually rains.
After the bubble bursts, and my BunkCo shares are down to $1, my net worth has gone down by $49,500. My rainy day fund is gone, and I need to scale back my lifestyle.
Yeah. I bought a computer in early 1994. 2x CD-ROM (or maybe it was 4x...) for access to 650 Megs of information. 250 MB SCSI drive to cache the stuff I needed...
Slashdot Mirror
Remember; those who invoke vi three times have The Mark of The Beast!
I'll disagree strenuously with #5. You might need a new keyboard. I entered a phase at work, about a decade ago, when I was really pounding out the code. My wrists started to get really sore. I bought a no-name (literally; there is nothing recognizable as a brand name on the box or the device) split keyboard (I had bought the $200 Apple Adjustable Keyboard years ago, and was most comfortable with the widest split. Then the X key gave out... so I got another, I forget the brand name, that was split but not adjustable, but that's another story...)
Problem solved. Wrists stopped hurting. Code pounding continued. I really can't use a "normal" keyboard for very long.
And I use emacs when I'm in unix-land.
There's an easy fix for the burden of a carbon tax: rebates. Take all the carbon tax revenues collected, divide by the number of people in the country. Everyone gets a share. Shares for children go to their parents.
This preserves the tax as a disincentive to put CO2 into the atmosphere, so it encourages conservation. And those who use "less than their share" will see a net gain from the tax.
The Apple II had plenty of interchangable parts. Bog-standard DIP RAM chip sockets on the motherboard. I/O specs for the expansion ports published. Even schematics of the motherboard.
//e (February, 1982).
Plenty of great software for the Apple II as well. Since you "lacked the budget for IBM", you were talking about things that happened after the summer of 1981, so you were really pretty close to the introduction of the
Consumer Reports regularly has Apple topping the list of most reliable PC vendors. They have more data than you do.
Ahhh, reprising Intergraph's strategy, only with the added cost of maintaining Open Solaris. It worked so well for them.
No, the 2012 mandate is only for Cable companies providing analog signals to their customers.
The broadcast cutoff is still 2009. We'll see if that changes.
I have digital cable at home; the digital converter box feeds a signal to my analog TV (and my wife's analog TiVo). The cable company already bought the converter box, and it works with my TV. Assuming that nothing gets zapped by lightning, I'm all set. Right? 2012 doesn't change anything for me?
But if I were to put a splitter on the cable, and run another length to my other (analog) TV, and live with the 40 or so analog channels, the Cable co could cut that off at their whim, and make me rent another digital cable box.
I think we're getting to those limits. Five or Ten years ago, a $600 computer system was a joke. Very limited. Now, not nearly so much. You get everything an office-type person needs, and you don't have to upgrade very much to keep a developer happy. It's not the latest gaming rig, true, and it doesn't have the bandwidth for working on big images or video. But that's a far cry from the $6,000 that a solid desktop set one back 15 years ago.
Those $6,000 systems exist; there are just not that many people who can use that "extra".
One of my earliest astronomical memories (aside from the shows at the local planetarium) was standing on a friend's driveway just after dusk. He says to me, pointing at a bright point of light against the rapidly darkening sky, "hey, I bet that's Saturn". He ducks into the garage, and drags out a 8-ish inch reflector telescope his dad had made. He lines it up, adjusts the focus, looks, and then invites me to have a look. Boom, there it is. Just like in all the picture books, only live, in front of my eyes.
So look at the planets through your scope. It should be bright enough to resolve any of the naked-eye visible planets as discs. You should be able to see the phases of Venus.
On my desk I have a picture of Comet Hale-Bopp. I took it with a 35mm film camera, with a 100-200 mm zoom lens set all the way out. Tripod, Kodacolor Gold color film (although there isn't any color in the print.) I thought I would want to take more astro-photographs, but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Conservatives shoot their friends and supporters in the face.
The Film Society back when I went to college did the non-profit thing right. They turned enough profit on their popular Friday and Saturday night films that they would run foreign and independent movies on Tuesday evenings. Then they ploughed the remaining surplus into better projection and sound equipment. When they were done with that, they started running a free series on Sunday afternoons. Then I graduated, and no more film society movies for me.
Iraq has been pretty exhaustively searched for WMDs. They're not there.
Concepts of God, to the extent that they describe a scientifically testable entities, can be disproven. Most people ascribe properties to God that are not scientifically testable. "God of the Gaps". See also any psychic who has failed to win money from James Randi, for additional techniques to rationalize failed results.
The historical evidence for Muhammed is significantly better than the historical evidence for Jesus. Muhammad's teachings were written down by those in his presence; the Gospels were written 40 to 80 years after the "fact".
What historical record of Jesus? The oldest Christian writings, the epistles of Paul, make no reference to direct references to the events of Jesus' birth or death, which is surprising. No Roman records of his trial before Pilate or his punishment. No separate, contemporaneous records of the dramatic events ascribed to the crucifiction.
Apple //e, nearly 1 MHz, 64K plus 64K, and a pair of 140K floppies. Upgraded to have a 64K hardware buffer on the printer card, and 288 K of Ram dedicated to emulating two more disk drives. That got bumped up to a 768K bank-switched RAM card and an 800K 3.5" floppy drive. And the processor got bumped up to 8 MHz.... Those were the days.
Will AppleWorks 6, the OS X native version, run on an intel mac?
// rocked! I got my hands on a pirated copy, and went right out and bought the package. Piracy as demo distribution.
I still use AppleWorks 5 on my MacOS 9 iMac. After adding in the cost of AppleWorks and a couple other programs, the upgrade to Mac OS X was half the cost of a (G4) Mini, so I never upgraded. Now that AppleWorks is gone and Pages is extra and there is no MacDraw replacement, my incentives to buy a new Mac (rather than put the money into my Linux box) is dwindling.
PS: AppleWorks for the Apple
The USA is the top emitter of Greenhouse gasses. We will soon be surpassed by China, but China has 4x the population of the USA, so the USA is still 4x China on a per-capita basis.
You need a better calculator, then.
"Billions of tons of CO2" is n x 10 ^9 tons, where n is a small real number greater than 1.5. One (metric) ton is 10^3 KG. So "Billions of tons of CO2" is n x 10^12. Which is somewhere above 0.3 x 10^-6. Which would show up as 0.0000003, well within the limits of an 8-digit display that has been the rule for calculators for about 35 years now.
This should be within the abilities of a bright high school science student.
Different media, different projects. Remember, the radio show came first, then the first book, then the others.
I like them all.
My recollection is that you needed the mail to get the babelfish. You put the mail on something so that when the cleaning robot rolled out, the mail went flying with the fish, and the flying robot scooped up the mail instead of the fish, and you got the fish and got to keep on going.
Of course, getting onto the vogon ship was pretty early on in the adventure. It's not like buying the stale sandwich at the bar, which is crucial much later on in the game (and I only learned that was the solution by reading the hint book...)
When the Dems were in the White House, budget deficits went down. When the Reps were in the White House, budget deficits went up.
Why do you say this is a problem for both parties?
The bible does not mention dragons.
The bible does mention leviathan and behemoth, which are taken to be alligator and hippo (or maybe vice versa).
The perception of money certainly can go away. And perception is almost as good as the real thing.
If I have a hundred shares of BunkCo that are trading at $500 a share, I feel like I have an asset that is worth $50,000. I can spend real cash, keeping my BunkCo shares as the rainy day fund, and sell the BunkCo shares when it actually rains.
After the bubble bursts, and my BunkCo shares are down to $1, my net worth has gone down by $49,500. My rainy day fund is gone, and I need to scale back my lifestyle.
Yeah. I bought a computer in early 1994. 2x CD-ROM (or maybe it was 4x...) for access to 650 Megs of information. 250 MB SCSI drive to cache the stuff I needed...