A single monolithic monster system is only one way to go. You can build large systems out of lots of little systems too. (Okay, I learned engineering from legos.)
There are lots of problems with isolated local systems. Again the two most obvious being local drought and local water table pollution.
It's like the electrical grid. Having a single massive power plant in the middle of no where pumping out power to the entire nation through a massive grid is a bad idea. Having a nation-wide grid that connects together local power plants, dams, personal power sources (solar, wind, etc), and maybe even a few massive plants in the middle of no where is a good idea or would be if it were implemented well. (The current grid pretty much sucks.) A massive shared grid allows problems to be worked around and resources to be moved from where they are created to where they are needed. Why is water any different?
If IE can't handle the stylesheets or Javascript I use for Firefox, Safari, and Opera with minimal changes then I'll just throw it a version that is grossly simplified. I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to make things work for crappy browsers.
Maybe IE7 will fix some of these bugs and make it work? Haha yeh right.
Exactly why I dislike both KDE and Gnome. They are the wrong direction to go for a solid Linux GUI enviroment. Rather than staying with decades old and well proven Unix sensibilities they have tried to go the way of Windows and Mac OS where constant flux and geewhiz features are more important than usability. As if it really matters if UI chrome can have transparency or if the toolbar icons magnify when you hover over them. We are copying these stupid features instead of working on stability, flexibility, and ease of use?
Yes, yes. The money is much better spent making or protesting war, providing roads for our 10mpg ($4gal) gas hogs, providing cops to arrest drug users, whores, and various other harmless criminals, and whatever other useless things our tax dollar is going towards. Why plan ahead for extreme weather conditions? Why create thousands of jobs ranging from untrained workers to skilled engineers?
TRILLIONS of dollars really doesn't matter because we're paying the money to ourselves and all reaping the benifits. A nation-wide water system would be more useful to me than the stupid interstate system, a military, etc. All these things are expensive and somewhat stupid but they come in handy when you need them.
Of course you're probably the type of person that since you have a well thinks it's stupid to spend MILLIONS on a city-wide water system. As long as your well doesn't dry up or get to polluted you're all set. No reason to spend money on a more reliable system. The same with sewage huh? You have your own system (doubtlessly leaking into your water system) so why bother with a shared system?
Of course it's a big project that might take years and trillions of dollars to implement. Is that really a reason not to do it? You can't be a very advanced engineer if you decide a project is impossible just because it's big. Most areas have water systems already. Just find a workable solution for connecting those systems together and you're set. Nobody said to just throw away the existing infrastructure.
I'm sure if somebody proposed to build the Internet, as we know it today, 30 years ago they would have been ridiculed and told it was foolish, impossible, expensive, and that nobody would ever use it. Yet it has become one of the most important developments in our species' history.
I've begun to stop supporting IE or if I support it at all it's some stripped down lame version compared to what Firefox, Safari, and even Opera users see. IE gets damn near the same look as Lynx.. maybe with background colors and a few similar limited touches. At the bottom of pages is a 'Get Firefox' link.
Some of my recent websites are all but impossible to implement in IE so I just decided I wouldn't. I'm tired of holding back on my designs just to keep things equal across all browsers.
When last did you try Linux? 1996? Or maybe you're just a dork that doesn't know how to use the available tools.
As compared to something like Windows where a fscked config means you need to call in expert outside help or just reinstall the whole OS and dependencies are damn near impossible to fix because the OS has NO system in place to work out such problems at all. Oh.. and just try to custom compile most Windows apps to your needs. Good luck. Either what you want is just impossible to get or you're required to run a huge bloated buggy program to get the couple small features you want. Good plan.
True. We could use some of the wide-open desert regions to build massive water purification plants. Pump extra water back out into the ocean and pump in ocean water as needed, purify it, and pump it where it's needed.
Obviously, you missed my entire point that ALL areas experience periods of flood and drought and that by spreading the burden across the whole country you could dramaticly reduce both these effects.
You could put thousands of people to work creating such a system so most of the money would be recycled right back into our economy. That combined with not having to pay billions of dollars in flood and drought recovery all the time would quickly make the system pay for itself.
Nature is just some crappy system that was here before we were. That doesn't mean that it's designed to do what we need it to do. Expecting to use rivers to control flooding and pump water over massive distances (uphill) is just not going to work very well.
Funny, I didn't realize any of those were nation-wide systems. Such a system would really work better when spread out across a wider area as of course weather patterns differ much more across wider areas.:)
Don't be silly. If you divert potential flood waters and redirect them or even store them for use where they're needed then it doesn't really matter where the water comes from. There is certainly enough to go around. A frequent problem I've seen is that during part of the year an area will flood and during other parts of the year the same area will be in drought. If we captured and stored the flood waters we could solve both problems.
As a nation-wide system it could spread the load across everyone. I've lived in the midwest. Both floods and droughts are an ongoing problem. I currently live in Las Vegas and funny enough it's a problem here too. When it rains it floods and when it doesn't there is a shortage of water. To some degree Lake Mead is the local storage system but it doesn't do much good for people upstream that aren't connected to the local water supply system.
Really I wonder how hard it'd be to enclose important historical areas (any not distroyed?) inside of some sort of futuristic protective dome. Building to be under water sounds silly but it'd be a good experimental area as it isn't always under water but the techniques learned would allow us to build real under water cities thus gaining more real estate and having easier access to undersea natural resources. Overall, I think building undersea would be better done with lots of small modules connected together but doing a big area could be useful for when we need to know how to do it.
Death Valley might be big enough and low enough and they certainly could use the water. Actually I've long thought this country needed a national water pipeline connecting all parts of the country, storing extra water, and providing water to areas that need it. It's silly to have some areas flooding while others have drought. If we can pipe oil around we can sure pipe water around too.
Investors are, for the most part, idiots who don't understand technology or business and in most cases they have no business involved in these things. Short sighted, STUPID, investors are one of the worst things about our screwed up capitalist system and will no doubt be one of the major factors in the collapse of this system. Stock market investing is gambling. You observe the way something is going and place your bet on it. There is no promise you will be lucky and there is no reason any investor should feel they have the right to control that which they've invested in. Allowing stock holders to have a voice in how a company does business is like letting players all change the rules in the middle of a game of poker.
Damn investors. They ruin everything. The media doesn't know what they're talking about and usually they don't care. They just want to suck in readers.
Why not get rid of unneeded effects, stars, hotshot producers, etc and just make our own movies? How many actors, writers, etc would be interested in making a movie even if they weren't going to pay them directly?
There is no reason an opensource process won't work for movies. They might start out rough but they'd get better as we got more experience, the process caught on with non-geeks, and we got better equipment.
Probably because the vast majority of parents aren't great parents and a sadly high percentage are bad parents. Poor parenting is one of the worst illnesses of our culture and is directly related to most other ills of our society.
Way to many kids are rude, stupid, spoiled, and unloved which means many are little beasts until real life, after mommy and daddy, beats them into submission and some still manage to never grow up. THAT is why so many people complain abour parents and rotten kids.
I expect you're probably a better than average parent and most parents in Canada are probably better than here in the US. Still, that leaves a lot of bad parents and kids to be annoyed by.
I used to go to the discount theature for $1 almost every day but they shut it down. I'd rather spend $1 to go see a slightly older movie than $10 to see a brand spanking new movie. A shame that it doesn't seem to earn enough revenue to keep the places alive.
Besides lowering the price per ticket to something reasonable I'd go to more movies if they sold a DVD of the movie I'd just watched right there. If ticket holders (and only ticket holders) could buy a plain-jane copy of the movie right away it'd encourage people to see the movie and stop a lot of piracy.
Yes, but we were talking about something that could easily be generated and would still be usable by blind users. I think that CAPTCHAS are usually a little harder to write programs to bypass though as some image recognition is required. It's not to hard to parse a string holding a simple mathematical formula and compute an answer.
That's a good point. It makes me wonder about an anti-phishing method I use where the stored username and birthday are used to produce a custom background (with the name used as a slightly visible watermark and their birthstone color and the site logo). Not sure how that should work for blind users.
You can do something like generate simple math problems. Of course that has the weakness that the stupid may not pass and custom computer programs will be able to handle it but it would screen out the majority of wanker bots.
The secret sauce seems to be to look for good employees, pay them well, give them the freedom to innovate, and don't abuse your customers. Damn that is evil. We should put them out of business for knowing how to treat their employees and customers. EVIL EVIL EVIL!
Increased salaries is only bad for business if they have a weak business model or poor management that can't support those salaries.
It'd be cool if we had broadband here in the US instead of wimpy crap. My DSL is SLOW. 1.5M/down and something like 256K/up. Not going to be moving TB's over that very soon. It'd be nice if I could backup over the Net but I don't see that happening. The best I could do is keep a spare backup drive (TB's?) and manually take it to a second location. Not very reliable.
That'd be good but I can't afford that kind of Internet connection or a server with TB's of space on the other end. My hosting company already thinks I'm nuts for having asked if they could hook a TeraStation up to my server.
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A single monolithic monster system is only one way to go. You can build large systems out of lots of little systems too. (Okay, I learned engineering from legos.)
There are lots of problems with isolated local systems. Again the two most obvious being local drought and local water table pollution.
It's like the electrical grid. Having a single massive power plant in the middle of no where pumping out power to the entire nation through a massive grid is a bad idea. Having a nation-wide grid that connects together local power plants, dams, personal power sources (solar, wind, etc), and maybe even a few massive plants in the middle of no where is a good idea or would be if it were implemented well. (The current grid pretty much sucks.) A massive shared grid allows problems to be worked around and resources to be moved from where they are created to where they are needed. Why is water any different?
If IE can't handle the stylesheets or Javascript I use for Firefox, Safari, and Opera with minimal changes then I'll just throw it a version that is grossly simplified. I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to make things work for crappy browsers.
Maybe IE7 will fix some of these bugs and make it work? Haha yeh right.
Exactly why I dislike both KDE and Gnome. They are the wrong direction to go for a solid Linux GUI enviroment. Rather than staying with decades old and well proven Unix sensibilities they have tried to go the way of Windows and Mac OS where constant flux and geewhiz features are more important than usability. As if it really matters if UI chrome can have transparency or if the toolbar icons magnify when you hover over them. We are copying these stupid features instead of working on stability, flexibility, and ease of use?
Yes, yes. The money is much better spent making or protesting war, providing roads for our 10mpg ($4gal) gas hogs, providing cops to arrest drug users, whores, and various other harmless criminals, and whatever other useless things our tax dollar is going towards. Why plan ahead for extreme weather conditions? Why create thousands of jobs ranging from untrained workers to skilled engineers?
TRILLIONS of dollars really doesn't matter because we're paying the money to ourselves and all reaping the benifits. A nation-wide water system would be more useful to me than the stupid interstate system, a military, etc. All these things are expensive and somewhat stupid but they come in handy when you need them.
Of course you're probably the type of person that since you have a well thinks it's stupid to spend MILLIONS on a city-wide water system. As long as your well doesn't dry up or get to polluted you're all set. No reason to spend money on a more reliable system. The same with sewage huh? You have your own system (doubtlessly leaking into your water system) so why bother with a shared system?
Of course it's a big project that might take years and trillions of dollars to implement. Is that really a reason not to do it? You can't be a very advanced engineer if you decide a project is impossible just because it's big. Most areas have water systems already. Just find a workable solution for connecting those systems together and you're set. Nobody said to just throw away the existing infrastructure.
I'm sure if somebody proposed to build the Internet, as we know it today, 30 years ago they would have been ridiculed and told it was foolish, impossible, expensive, and that nobody would ever use it. Yet it has become one of the most important developments in our species' history.
I've begun to stop supporting IE or if I support it at all it's some stripped down lame version compared to what Firefox, Safari, and even Opera users see. IE gets damn near the same look as Lynx.. maybe with background colors and a few similar limited touches. At the bottom of pages is a 'Get Firefox' link.
Some of my recent websites are all but impossible to implement in IE so I just decided I wouldn't. I'm tired of holding back on my designs just to keep things equal across all browsers.
When last did you try Linux? 1996? Or maybe you're just a dork that doesn't know how to use the available tools.
As compared to something like Windows where a fscked config means you need to call in expert outside help or just reinstall the whole OS and dependencies are damn near impossible to fix because the OS has NO system in place to work out such problems at all. Oh.. and just try to custom compile most Windows apps to your needs. Good luck. Either what you want is just impossible to get or you're required to run a huge bloated buggy program to get the couple small features you want. Good plan.
Why? Why would you want to do that?!
We could do it secretly and see if they noticed. And just buy up all the beach-front land before flooding and hope they didn't notice.
True. We could use some of the wide-open desert regions to build massive water purification plants. Pump extra water back out into the ocean and pump in ocean water as needed, purify it, and pump it where it's needed.
Obviously, you missed my entire point that ALL areas experience periods of flood and drought and that by spreading the burden across the whole country you could dramaticly reduce both these effects.
You could put thousands of people to work creating such a system so most of the money would be recycled right back into our economy. That combined with not having to pay billions of dollars in flood and drought recovery all the time would quickly make the system pay for itself.
Nature is just some crappy system that was here before we were. That doesn't mean that it's designed to do what we need it to do. Expecting to use rivers to control flooding and pump water over massive distances (uphill) is just not going to work very well.
Funny, I didn't realize any of those were nation-wide systems. Such a system would really work better when spread out across a wider area as of course weather patterns differ much more across wider areas. :)
Don't be silly. If you divert potential flood waters and redirect them or even store them for use where they're needed then it doesn't really matter where the water comes from. There is certainly enough to go around. A frequent problem I've seen is that during part of the year an area will flood and during other parts of the year the same area will be in drought. If we captured and stored the flood waters we could solve both problems.
As a nation-wide system it could spread the load across everyone. I've lived in the midwest. Both floods and droughts are an ongoing problem. I currently live in Las Vegas and funny enough it's a problem here too. When it rains it floods and when it doesn't there is a shortage of water. To some degree Lake Mead is the local storage system but it doesn't do much good for people upstream that aren't connected to the local water supply system.
Really I wonder how hard it'd be to enclose important historical areas (any not distroyed?) inside of some sort of futuristic protective dome. Building to be under water sounds silly but it'd be a good experimental area as it isn't always under water but the techniques learned would allow us to build real under water cities thus gaining more real estate and having easier access to undersea natural resources. Overall, I think building undersea would be better done with lots of small modules connected together but doing a big area could be useful for when we need to know how to do it.
Death Valley might be big enough and low enough and they certainly could use the water. Actually I've long thought this country needed a national water pipeline connecting all parts of the country, storing extra water, and providing water to areas that need it. It's silly to have some areas flooding while others have drought. If we can pipe oil around we can sure pipe water around too.
Sounds cool. Why bother getting Libya's okay? They think we're crazy power mongers anyway. Just do it and see what happens.
Investors are, for the most part, idiots who don't understand technology or business and in most cases they have no business involved in these things. Short sighted, STUPID, investors are one of the worst things about our screwed up capitalist system and will no doubt be one of the major factors in the collapse of this system. Stock market investing is gambling. You observe the way something is going and place your bet on it. There is no promise you will be lucky and there is no reason any investor should feel they have the right to control that which they've invested in. Allowing stock holders to have a voice in how a company does business is like letting players all change the rules in the middle of a game of poker.
Damn investors. They ruin everything. The media doesn't know what they're talking about and usually they don't care. They just want to suck in readers.
Why not get rid of unneeded effects, stars, hotshot producers, etc and just make our own movies? How many actors, writers, etc would be interested in making a movie even if they weren't going to pay them directly?
There is no reason an opensource process won't work for movies. They might start out rough but they'd get better as we got more experience, the process caught on with non-geeks, and we got better equipment.
Probably because the vast majority of parents aren't great parents and a sadly high percentage are bad parents. Poor parenting is one of the worst illnesses of our culture and is directly related to most other ills of our society.
Way to many kids are rude, stupid, spoiled, and unloved which means many are little beasts until real life, after mommy and daddy, beats them into submission and some still manage to never grow up. THAT is why so many people complain abour parents and rotten kids.
I expect you're probably a better than average parent and most parents in Canada are probably better than here in the US. Still, that leaves a lot of bad parents and kids to be annoyed by.
I used to go to the discount theature for $1 almost every day but they shut it down. I'd rather spend $1 to go see a slightly older movie than $10 to see a brand spanking new movie. A shame that it doesn't seem to earn enough revenue to keep the places alive.
Besides lowering the price per ticket to something reasonable I'd go to more movies if they sold a DVD of the movie I'd just watched right there. If ticket holders (and only ticket holders) could buy a plain-jane copy of the movie right away it'd encourage people to see the movie and stop a lot of piracy.
Yes, but we were talking about something that could easily be generated and would still be usable by blind users. I think that CAPTCHAS are usually a little harder to write programs to bypass though as some image recognition is required. It's not to hard to parse a string holding a simple mathematical formula and compute an answer.
That's a good point. It makes me wonder about an anti-phishing method I use where the stored username and birthday are used to produce a custom background (with the name used as a slightly visible watermark and their birthstone color and the site logo). Not sure how that should work for blind users.
You can do something like generate simple math problems. Of course that has the weakness that the stupid may not pass and custom computer programs will be able to handle it but it would screen out the majority of wanker bots.
The secret sauce seems to be to look for good employees, pay them well, give them the freedom to innovate, and don't abuse your customers. Damn that is evil. We should put them out of business for knowing how to treat their employees and customers. EVIL EVIL EVIL!
Increased salaries is only bad for business if they have a weak business model or poor management that can't support those salaries.
It'd be cool if we had broadband here in the US instead of wimpy crap. My DSL is SLOW. 1.5M/down and something like 256K/up. Not going to be moving TB's over that very soon. It'd be nice if I could backup over the Net but I don't see that happening. The best I could do is keep a spare backup drive (TB's?) and manually take it to a second location. Not very reliable.
That'd be good but I can't afford that kind of Internet connection or a server with TB's of space on the other end. My hosting company already thinks I'm nuts for having asked if they could hook a TeraStation up to my server.