Don't most lawyers give up on doing something worthwhile during their junior years? How many times have you heard a junior, toward the end say "senior year is coming up, I'm going to graduate, I'm not sure what I can do with my degree... I think I'll go to law school". Not only has he graduated, but he's thrown in the towel and realized that there isn't much else to do other than leach off society. Well done!
Too bad he probably never found the time to attend a free play, get alcohol poisoning, lose his virginity, visit the haunted tunnels during Halloween, streak the lawn, or any of the other UVa traditions... OK, not so much the alcohol poisoning. Point is, how is he going to relate to other people? What's he going to do? Download road trip stories and football statistics off Google so he can have something to talk about when the subject of college comes up? Read the minutes of various student organizations? Cram four years of back-issues of the Cavalier Daily during an all-night reading session? Get to live in off-campus housing. See bands that will probably never sign, but are actually not bad. All the little snippets that make up life--gone.
If all I had was e-mail, how would I get people's e-mail addresses? For my current friends and family, I either already have them, or I ask them. All the other e-mail addresses I have come off the Web. Without web, new contacts would be established as they were in pre-internet days. I'd have to find out about clubs, social groups, etc. by reading printed newspapers, attending their meetings, and striking up conversations with people who gave me their business cards. Very ineficient!
With just Web and no e-mail, they could put snail-mail addresses or FAX numbers on their pages and I could send them letters and faxes. Very 1985, but considerably more liveable than the former scenario.
I'm just happy we don't have to make such a silly choice. The two tools have grown together; they feed off eachother.
Historicly, if you get conned, that's your problem.
If the bank sold phishing insurance, it would invite people to get in cahoots with the phishers.
The simple rule for ALL online banking is this:
All online banking transactions should be initiated by YOU. If someone who looks like the bank contacts you with something, even if it looks perfectly innocent, never trust them. Instead, hit the bank's web site as you ordinarily would, not by clicking on a link in an e-mail, but by going to their main site and logging in as usual. This constitutes a transaction intiated by YOU. Once logged in, you will, under many online banking systems, find something in your "message center". If it matches up with what you received via e-mail, then it really was from the bank.
It really is that simple.
Sadly, some legitimate financial institutions do put links in e-mails. Forbidding this practice would make phishing virtually impossible, so I would advocate forbidding banks to send anything containing a link in an e-mail, not even as a copy-paste. If the bank sends you a message telling you it's time to update your password, and there are no links, then you MUST initiate the transaction by their legitimate URL, and you cannot be phished unless the bank has been hacked.
If the bank is hacked, then yes, the bank is liable. This is more likely to be insurable; especially under a well-regulated banking system.
Convenient? No. But then neither is having a lock on your door.
They said it would cost $425 million to build. With oil at $66/barrel, that works out to roughly 6.4 million barrels of oil just to build the thing. Now, how much energy is in the landfill, and is it much more than what's in 6.4 million barrels? I'm not sure about the price of natural gas, much less the energy content of the thing; but if I were living in that jurisdiction, I'd really want to know more. You've gotta figure that cost overruns could easily push this to half a billion dollars.
I live in Washington, DC. If I had a dime for everytime I heard someone say "I never visit the museums, the monuments, etc..." I'd be a billionaire. And the museums here are free. Not free as in "we're going to make you feel guilty at the door". No. Really Free. Nobody bothers you at all, except that now there are metal detectors.
Anyway, I think that when something is right in your own backyard, (sort of), there is a tendancy to not appreciate it. Here in the US, there are a lot of people that pay attention to the Brittish Royal Family. Personally, I could care less. I sometimes wonder if the British themselves pay as much attention as some Americans do.
...purchasers get something called "title insurance". This is a policy that you pay for all at once, that insures you hold legal title to the property. It's one of the many fees you pay at closing. From a certain point of view, title insurance is a rip-off perpetrated by the legal-industrial complex that runs the system here. I mean, think about it. The government is supposed to record all these transactions, and record them properly. If they screw up, they ought to be the ones who are liable. However, from another PoV it makes sense. What if the hall of recores burns down? Modern tech, with distributed backups and the like, are supposed to prevent that from being a problem; but what if the local recorder of deeds was an idiot and didn't backup the files, or they forgot to pay the offsite backup company before the fire, or there were two simultaneous fires, or... all the things that insurance is supposed to cover. Then, you have to prove you hold legal title, and it ain't so easy.
I have never known anyone who collected on title insurance; but lenders require it. No insurable title, no loan.
You have to wonder though, how often these title insurance companies stay in business for more than 30 years. How long do these policies run? probably just for the life of the loan. I'd go dig into the "envelope of fear and loathing" I got at closing, but even on a rainy Saturday afternoon there are much better things to do, and I think I have a better chance of becoming president than ever being involved in a title dispute.
OK, in this story the kid does not sell the house, but it's still quite funny. It was related to me first hand by the now grown-up kid who did it, and he was wild so I have no reason to disbelieve him. It seems that the kid's family was being pestered by an aggressive real estate agent who wanted to help them sell the housse. They had been living there for years, and had no desire to move. The agent wouldn't stop calling. Well, the kid was able to pull off a reasonable impression of his father, and finally relented on his behalf. The agent came by at the appointed hour to fill out the paperwork, so she could represent them. Of course the father knew nothing of this; but knew his son well enough to walk into his room later and say something along the lines of "stop doing that", although probably in less polite terms.
There were, however, no further telemarketing calls from the agent after that.
Pull your heads out of your asses and sell OS-X for generic PCs. You could clean up at $300/copy. Virtually no marginal cost. It'll replace the iPod revenues you're losing because everyone who wants one, has one. But nooOOOooo. You're so hell bent on emulating the losing business model followed by Sun. Oh, please... what do we have to do? Fly out there, slap you in the face and put smelling salts under your noses? The gorilla has eaten a bad bannanna. He's down. He won't stay down forever. You'll look back on this, and you'll never forgive yourselves for not having kicked him while he's down, cuz you know he's gonna get back up.
Wow. Rheems of data, and I really don't have the time or inclination to analyze it. Far easier to... resign. heheh.
I skimmed some of it, and sure enough there is a lot of correlation. Indeed this squares well with the fact that I've known a lot of smart people who also play chess. If I had time, I'd dig in and see whether or not these studies actually proved causation which is a bit more difficult. In other words, maybe the students who were likely to develop critical thinking skills were simply more likely to remain in the "chess group". A fair test would be one where students were exposed to the chess program, and not allowed to drop out.
In other words, if your goal is to raise test scores, a mere correlation isn't enough to justify starting a chess program. The data may simply be telling us that smart kids are more likely to join, and remain, in chess clubs.
Aha! You say, but at least some of the studies do seem to account for this--citing things like "how much chess was in the curriculum". This reminds me of another study (and I know I can find this one if I look) where they increased the lighting in a factory and output went up. They they decreased the lighting and output went up even more. Turns out, employees were motivated by the fact that management was concerned for their comfort, not by the actual light level. It's possible that the students were motivated by the fact that teachers were introducing a game into the curriculum, and that other games or methods of "paying attention" to the students would have accomplished the same thing. Note, I'm not really arguing against you here. Chess is a well-known "standard game", and if it works, then great.
It would be nice to find studies that weren't published on a chess club website. Can you say "conflict of interest"?
But anyway, I really don't care that much. Teaching kids chess certainly won't hurt them... unless they tell the bullies they're in the chess club.
Customize startup sound to be a file full of silence. Now, if you can't customize the startup sound... that's just nuts. What are these guys smoking in Redmond?
The problem is that i'll bet good money these computers dont come with a single development tool, and i'm sure that kids "hacking" them will be frowned upon.
This is a big difference between the 80s and now. Back then, the computers at least came with BASIC. This didn't open up the whole machine, but it was enough to learn. Some systems were more friendly than others. The TI-994/A: What a miserable piece of crap that was. Why? Not because the hardware was inherently bad, but because TI locked out the guts of the system. You couldn't POKE memory like on Ataris and Commodores. Alegedly, functionality like that was available if you purchased an "expansion module", but the thing was so bloody expensive it made more sense for me to beg, beg, beg my parents for another machine, which I eventually got--the beloved C-64. The TI had been a surprise Christmas present, and I think my parents, like many adults at the time, had to come to the realization that kids knew more than they did. In some ways this was a good turn of events--had I been able to pick my first machine it might have been a VIC-20 or an Atari. When Commodore made its first big price cut, I got one. I think they dropped from $595 to $399, if memory serves correctly. The TI expansion box was $1000. TI mercifully stopped making home computers, well before 1990 AFAIK.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that many of those early systems were hackable out of the box. Nowadays, on your typical Windows box, you have to go looking for tools. The big difference is the internet. All we had was what we could get via mail order, swap meet, friends, etc. On more than one occasion I packed up the 1541 in the original styrofoam and lugged it over to sombody's house for a copying session. Only a few people had modems. I didn't see a BBS until my senior year--in an office. The bandwidth was so low, it was really just a curiosity and I was actually not interested.
So, the poor "hackability out of the box" in modern PCs is mitigated by the internet. However, because it's not part of the standard package, you're right that teachers may actually discourage such behavior. When the computer booted from ROM it didn't matter if you "messed up the system". All you had to do was reset it. Now the teacher would have to reinstall the system or re-image it, which is a hassle.
Parents who think learning PowerPoint is important? It's too late. Nevermind this kid's education. Just make sure we have an extra cell in the prison system for him.
I program computers for a living. I didn't get a computer until I was in 8th grade. What does that tell you?
This reminds me of the study that was done regarding chess. A lot of people got the idea that chess taught students "critical thinking". The conclusion of the study was that students who were taught chess learned... chess. That's it.
I'm also reminded of the first incarnation of "computers to help disadvantaged students" that I witnessed first-hand in the 80s. There, at the computer, was one of the "slow kids" interacting with a computer. What was it doing? A computerized version of... flash cards. Yes. The Atari 800 was being used as a virtual stack of 3 by 5 cards with simple multiplication problems on them.
Now, for those of us who were learning algebra, the computer was a fantastic tool. In fact, when I was just being introduced to the idea that variables could be involved in math problems, the computer illustrated the point most vividly. So, I don't think that computers are useless in schools. I think it probably makes sense to introduce them right around the time students are learning algebra, but it's hard to tell if I'm being prejudiced because of my own personal experience. At any rate, having a computer certainly made me better at... computing! Whether or not it would have made me good at anything else I can't say.
As a general rule though, I don't see why we should be spending several hundred dollars for a stack of 3 by 5 cards with multiplication tables on them. I certainly don't thinnk we should be giving kids eyestrain by having them read books of computers. Get paper books, OK? I definitely don't think we should be giving vocational training to kids in gradeschool. A kid with an average eduction should be able to learn PowerPoint quickly after graduating highschool, via a brief seminar. A kid with a superior education should be able to attend the same seminar, and recognize PowerPoint for the mind numbing crap that it is.
A lot of the money made off this stuff is bait-n-switch. People think they're getting the original, and in fine print it says "remastered" or something like that. Or maybe the print isn't that fine, but you simply can't get the original, so a "reasonable facsimile" will have to do. Or, they're showing "Star Wars" at the Student Union theatre, and a lot of people go. How many of them will know the difference? None, because they weren't born yet when the original came out. Wow. I must really be getting old, because that doesn't make me feel old anymore, and I know it should.
Somebody needs to do a parody, where they replace the vacuum tubes in Spock's "stone knives and bearskins" with PC motherboards and stuff. Or better yet, make the effects more low-tech than the original. I've seen some things like that, and they're a scream. The major studios would never do that though, and it probably doesn't have mass market appeal.
Re:I don't care for these commercials
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The stuff the OEM vendor bundles on the desktop is really not a problem with Windows, it's a problem with OEMs who don't actually have the best interests of their consumers in mind.
Truer words were never spoken. Every OEM machine I've ever worked with, I have to spend a few days tweaking it (while working) to get the setup I want. Inevitably, I put a folder called "crap" on my desktop. Into this folder I throw all the shortcuts to the bundled crapware that came with the machine. I don't uninstall it, just in case of the very, very, remote chance that somebody else with the same box might have a solution that involves "use the preinstalled...". In all my years, nobody has ever had such a solution. Then I usually weed through and make sure that unnecessary apps aren't being started. That takes some digging in the registry. Then I have to kill lame keyboard and mouse setups. That can be the hardest thing, especially for laptops. With the Lenovo I got, somebody seemed to assume that by default users would want every obscure mouse gesture and click combo enabled. I couldn't surf the web or do anything without having windows close, move, or resize for no apparent reason. The settings for these things were scattered a bit, and divided between Windows and IBM's proprietary setups.
While it's a cool material, it's not "transparent aluminum". It's a compound with two other elements. Calling this transparent aluminum is like calling quartz transparent silicon. Many elements with opaque crystal structures form compounds that have transparent crystal structures. A true transparent aluminum would be like carbon, which can be opaque (graphite) or transparent (diamond) depending on the arrangement of atoms, with no other elements involved. Until someone finds a way to arrange aluminum at the molecular level so that it's transparent, there can be no real claim that this little bit of Star Trek has become real. It may not even be possible, or if it is possible the resulting structure might not have such desireable properties as the fictional panels, or the real compound you mentioned.
you just got yourself a nice device to pressure the pilot to give you his seat.
No. The rules changed starting with flight 93 and the will probably stay changed. If they tell the pilot to fly someplace, the passengers *might* cooperate, but if they try to take the cockpit the passengers and crew will assume that they are a missile and are dead anyway. If you're dead anyway, you're not going to let them pick their target; at least I wouldn't.
Would this rise in the cost of oil help to drive innovations in alternative fuels and energy?
Yes, I think it would. It takes a while to "tool up" to a different economy though. It's this short-term pain that keeps us from doing it. The OPEC nations realize this too. As a general rule, they don't want to see sustained high prices because they know that it will cause structural changes in consumer economies, and they know that once those changes are in place there won't be an immediate reversion. This has already happened to some extent in the US economy due to the first oil shock. Remember how cheap gas was in the 90s? On an inflation adjusted basis it might have even been less than pre-OPEC. That's because many US drivers switched from gas guzzlers to Japanese econo-boxes. The SUV eventually turned the tide on that; but heavy industry and power production facilities had diversified their energy inputs, and that hasn't changed. The $3/gal price we are seeing today is comparable to what happened during the first oil shock, but it's less likely to impact the economy as much as it did in the 70s because fixed power plants in heavy industry didn't get suckered back to oil. We have less of an industrial based economy anyway. As SUV sales decline, this will lock "structural conservation" into the transportation economy, at least for the life of the replacement vehicles that are now being purchased. Where I live, the power company is required to periodicly state where the energy comes from. Oil is only a small fraction of it. Coal and nuclear are #1 and #2 here. Anyway, I'm sort of mish-mashing the industrial and transportation effects here--it's really two separate economies.
Oil sustained at $100/bbl would have some interesting effects. Shale oil becomes economicly viable (but it's an environmental nightmare). Maybe long haul freight railroads will convert to electricity instead of diesel (how much would oil have to cost for that to happen?). People will be less inclined to choose overnight shipping just because they want it now when air frieght costs $100 vs. $30 for rail+truck (and the truck will be powered by natural gas, which we have more of).
Anyway, long story short, we don't really need their black gunk in the long run. The US created an autocentric lifestyle for itself; we can uncreate it too.
Well, we could dust off the MAD strategy; but maybe $100/bbl oil is a better outcome, frankly. It might certainly be good for me, since I now own property in the city, within walking distance of public transit. Sucks to be a suburbanite with $5/gal gas.
Actually, I rather like the $100/bbl outcome. Remember that line, "the cold war is over and the Japanese won?". How about, "the oil war is over, and those who bought property in the cities won".
Ummm... the same reason we talk people down off bridges and high buildings? Compassion, maybe? Not to mention the fact that these people end up with others who are more responsable, and simply don't know their partners are infected. Really though, even though you're being modded Troll, you've got a point; but just leaving people to twist in the wind isn't moral from my point of view. We really need to eliminate the attitude of fatalism that some people have, especially young people. You see a lot of articles where people have the attitude of "it's only a matter of time before I get it". Before we can use any of the methods you describe to stop HIV, we need to figure out how to stop fatalism. We also need to stamp out arrogance. You hear a lot of people who think that HIV is a manageable illness like diabetes or herpes. It isn't. Like all successful vices, it buries those who would testify otherwise.
...who reads something like this, and hearkens back to the days when people thought stuff like this would lead to some sort of golden age, and then to hear that it will simply make "better phones and cameras" is kind of disappointing. I know the prior attitude was a lot of idealistic pie-in-the-sky, flying-car, jet-pack, white building, monorail nonsense. Still though. I miss it. Oh... bring back Donald Duck with his doors to the future, and the nuclear powered airplane. Please? For just a moment?
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So, you're saying there wont be a USB charging adaptor...?
They tried.
What about the third alternative: Congress does nothing.
I know, I know. It'll never happen; but I can dream.
Don't most lawyers give up on doing something worthwhile during their junior years? How many times have you heard a junior, toward the end say "senior year is coming up, I'm going to graduate, I'm not sure what I can do with my degree... I think I'll go to law school". Not only has he graduated, but he's thrown in the towel and realized that there isn't much else to do other than leach off society. Well done!
Too bad he probably never found the time to attend a free play, get alcohol poisoning, lose his virginity, visit the haunted tunnels during Halloween, streak the lawn, or any of the other UVa traditions... OK, not so much the alcohol poisoning. Point is, how is he going to relate to other people? What's he going to do? Download road trip stories and football statistics off Google so he can have something to talk about when the subject of college comes up? Read the minutes of various student organizations? Cram four years of back-issues of the Cavalier Daily during an all-night reading session? Get to live in off-campus housing. See bands that will probably never sign, but are actually not bad. All the little snippets that make up life--gone.
I have no envy for this kid. Not one bit.
If all I had was e-mail, how would I get people's e-mail addresses? For my current friends and family, I either already have them, or I ask them. All the other e-mail addresses I have come off the Web. Without web, new contacts would be established as they were in pre-internet days. I'd have to find out about clubs, social groups, etc. by reading printed newspapers, attending their meetings, and striking up conversations with people who gave me their business cards. Very ineficient!
With just Web and no e-mail, they could put snail-mail addresses or FAX numbers on their pages and I could send them letters and faxes. Very 1985, but considerably more liveable than the former scenario.
I'm just happy we don't have to make such a silly choice. The two tools have grown together; they feed off eachother.
Historicly, if you get conned, that's your problem.
If the bank sold phishing insurance, it would invite people to get in cahoots with the phishers.
The simple rule for ALL online banking is this:
All online banking transactions should be initiated by YOU. If someone who looks like the bank contacts you with something, even if it looks perfectly innocent, never trust them. Instead, hit the bank's web site as you ordinarily would, not by clicking on a link in an e-mail, but by going to their main site and logging in as usual. This constitutes a transaction intiated by YOU. Once logged in, you will, under many online banking systems, find something in your "message center". If it matches up with what you received via e-mail, then it really was from the bank.
It really is that simple.
Sadly, some legitimate financial institutions do put links in e-mails. Forbidding this practice would make phishing virtually impossible, so I would advocate forbidding banks to send anything containing a link in an e-mail, not even as a copy-paste. If the bank sends you a message telling you it's time to update your password, and there are no links, then you MUST initiate the transaction by their legitimate URL, and you cannot be phished unless the bank has been hacked.
If the bank is hacked, then yes, the bank is liable. This is more likely to be insurable; especially under a well-regulated banking system.
Convenient? No. But then neither is having a lock on your door.
Communists? In China? Where?
Fascists, on the other hand...
They said it would cost $425 million to build. With oil at $66/barrel, that works out to roughly 6.4 million barrels of oil just to build the thing. Now, how much energy is in the landfill, and is it much more than what's in 6.4 million barrels? I'm not sure about the price of natural gas, much less the energy content of the thing; but if I were living in that jurisdiction, I'd really want to know more. You've gotta figure that cost overruns could easily push this to half a billion dollars.
I live in Washington, DC. If I had a dime for everytime I heard someone say "I never visit the museums, the monuments, etc..." I'd be a billionaire. And the museums here are free. Not free as in "we're going to make you feel guilty at the door". No. Really Free. Nobody bothers you at all, except that now there are metal detectors.
Anyway, I think that when something is right in your own backyard, (sort of), there is a tendancy to not appreciate it. Here in the US, there are a lot of people that pay attention to the Brittish Royal Family. Personally, I could care less. I sometimes wonder if the British themselves pay as much attention as some Americans do.
Does this mean that net neutrality really is bunk?
This post is close-captioned for the rhetorical question impaired. The question was rhetorical.
...purchasers get something called "title insurance". This is a policy that you pay for all at once, that insures you hold legal title to the property. It's one of the many fees you pay at closing. From a certain point of view, title insurance is a rip-off perpetrated by the legal-industrial complex that runs the system here. I mean, think about it. The government is supposed to record all these transactions, and record them properly. If they screw up, they ought to be the ones who are liable. However, from another PoV it makes sense. What if the hall of recores burns down? Modern tech, with distributed backups and the like, are supposed to prevent that from being a problem; but what if the local recorder of deeds was an idiot and didn't backup the files, or they forgot to pay the offsite backup company before the fire, or there were two simultaneous fires, or... all the things that insurance is supposed to cover. Then, you have to prove you hold legal title, and it ain't so easy.
I have never known anyone who collected on title insurance; but lenders require it. No insurable title, no loan.
You have to wonder though, how often these title insurance companies stay in business for more than 30 years. How long do these policies run? probably just for the life of the loan. I'd go dig into the "envelope of fear and loathing" I got at closing, but even on a rainy Saturday afternoon there are much better things to do, and I think I have a better chance of becoming president than ever being involved in a title dispute.
OK, in this story the kid does not sell the house, but it's still quite funny. It was related to me first hand by the now grown-up kid who did it, and he was wild so I have no reason to disbelieve him. It seems that the kid's family was being pestered by an aggressive real estate agent who wanted to help them sell the housse. They had been living there for years, and had no desire to move. The agent wouldn't stop calling. Well, the kid was able to pull off a reasonable impression of his father, and finally relented on his behalf. The agent came by at the appointed hour to fill out the paperwork, so she could represent them. Of course the father knew nothing of this; but knew his son well enough to walk into his room later and say something along the lines of "stop doing that", although probably in less polite terms.
There were, however, no further telemarketing calls from the agent after that.
Pull your heads out of your asses and sell OS-X for generic PCs. You could clean up at $300/copy. Virtually no marginal cost. It'll replace the iPod revenues you're losing because everyone who wants one, has one. But nooOOOooo. You're so hell bent on emulating the losing business model followed by Sun. Oh, please... what do we have to do? Fly out there, slap you in the face and put smelling salts under your noses? The gorilla has eaten a bad bannanna. He's down. He won't stay down forever. You'll look back on this, and you'll never forgive yourselves for not having kicked him while he's down, cuz you know he's gonna get back up.
Wow. Rheems of data, and I really don't have the time or inclination to analyze it. Far easier to... resign. heheh.
I skimmed some of it, and sure enough there is a lot of correlation. Indeed this squares well with the fact that I've known a lot of smart people who also play chess. If I had time, I'd dig in and see whether or not these studies actually proved causation which is a bit more difficult. In other words, maybe the students who were likely to develop critical thinking skills were simply more likely to remain in the "chess group". A fair test would be one where students were exposed to the chess program, and not allowed to drop out.
In other words, if your goal is to raise test scores, a mere correlation isn't enough to justify starting a chess program. The data may simply be telling us that smart kids are more likely to join, and remain, in chess clubs.
Aha! You say, but at least some of the studies do seem to account for this--citing things like "how much chess was in the curriculum". This reminds me of another study (and I know I can find this one if I look) where they increased the lighting in a factory and output went up. They they decreased the lighting and output went up even more. Turns out, employees were motivated by the fact that management was concerned for their comfort, not by the actual light level. It's possible that the students were motivated by the fact that teachers were introducing a game into the curriculum, and that other games or methods of "paying attention" to the students would have accomplished the same thing. Note, I'm not really arguing against you here. Chess is a well-known "standard game", and if it works, then great.
It would be nice to find studies that weren't published on a chess club website. Can you say "conflict of interest"?
But anyway, I really don't care that much. Teaching kids chess certainly won't hurt them... unless they tell the bullies they're in the chess club.
So, if you want to holler "Checkmate!", fine.
Customize startup sound to be a file full of silence. Now, if you can't customize the startup sound... that's just nuts. What are these guys smoking in Redmond?
The problem is that i'll bet good money these computers dont come with a single development tool, and i'm sure that kids "hacking" them will be frowned upon.
This is a big difference between the 80s and now. Back then, the computers at least came with BASIC. This didn't open up the whole machine, but it was enough to learn. Some systems were more friendly than others. The TI-994/A: What a miserable piece of crap that was. Why? Not because the hardware was inherently bad, but because TI locked out the guts of the system. You couldn't POKE memory like on Ataris and Commodores. Alegedly, functionality like that was available if you purchased an "expansion module", but the thing was so bloody expensive it made more sense for me to beg, beg, beg my parents for another machine, which I eventually got--the beloved C-64. The TI had been a surprise Christmas present, and I think my parents, like many adults at the time, had to come to the realization that kids knew more than they did. In some ways this was a good turn of events--had I been able to pick my first machine it might have been a VIC-20 or an Atari. When Commodore made its first big price cut, I got one. I think they dropped from $595 to $399, if memory serves correctly. The TI expansion box was $1000. TI mercifully stopped making home computers, well before 1990 AFAIK.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that many of those early systems were hackable out of the box. Nowadays, on your typical Windows box, you have to go looking for tools. The big difference is the internet. All we had was what we could get via mail order, swap meet, friends, etc. On more than one occasion I packed up the 1541 in the original styrofoam and lugged it over to sombody's house for a copying session. Only a few people had modems. I didn't see a BBS until my senior year--in an office. The bandwidth was so low, it was really just a curiosity and I was actually not interested.
So, the poor "hackability out of the box" in modern PCs is mitigated by the internet. However, because it's not part of the standard package, you're right that teachers may actually discourage such behavior. When the computer booted from ROM it didn't matter if you "messed up the system". All you had to do was reset it. Now the teacher would have to reinstall the system or re-image it, which is a hassle.
Parents who think learning PowerPoint is important? It's too late. Nevermind this kid's education. Just make sure we have an extra cell in the prison system for him.
I program computers for a living. I didn't get a computer until I was in 8th grade. What does that tell you?
This reminds me of the study that was done regarding chess. A lot of people got the idea that chess taught students "critical thinking". The conclusion of the study was that students who were taught chess learned... chess. That's it.
I'm also reminded of the first incarnation of "computers to help disadvantaged students" that I witnessed first-hand in the 80s. There, at the computer, was one of the "slow kids" interacting with a computer. What was it doing? A computerized version of... flash cards. Yes. The Atari 800 was being used as a virtual stack of 3 by 5 cards with simple multiplication problems on them.
Now, for those of us who were learning algebra, the computer was a fantastic tool. In fact, when I was just being introduced to the idea that variables could be involved in math problems, the computer illustrated the point most vividly. So, I don't think that computers are useless in schools. I think it probably makes sense to introduce them right around the time students are learning algebra, but it's hard to tell if I'm being prejudiced because of my own personal experience. At any rate, having a computer certainly made me better at... computing! Whether or not it would have made me good at anything else I can't say.
As a general rule though, I don't see why we should be spending several hundred dollars for a stack of 3 by 5 cards with multiplication tables on them. I certainly don't thinnk we should be giving kids eyestrain by having them read books of computers. Get paper books, OK? I definitely don't think we should be giving vocational training to kids in gradeschool. A kid with an average eduction should be able to learn PowerPoint quickly after graduating highschool, via a brief seminar. A kid with a superior education should be able to attend the same seminar, and recognize PowerPoint for the mind numbing crap that it is.
A lot of the money made off this stuff is bait-n-switch. People think they're getting the original, and in fine print it says "remastered" or something like that. Or maybe the print isn't that fine, but you simply can't get the original, so a "reasonable facsimile" will have to do. Or, they're showing "Star Wars" at the Student Union theatre, and a lot of people go. How many of them will know the difference? None, because they weren't born yet when the original came out. Wow. I must really be getting old, because that doesn't make me feel old anymore, and I know it should.
Somebody needs to do a parody, where they replace the vacuum tubes in Spock's "stone knives and bearskins" with PC motherboards and stuff. Or better yet, make the effects more low-tech than the original. I've seen some things like that, and they're a scream. The major studios would never do that though, and it probably doesn't have mass market appeal.
The stuff the OEM vendor bundles on the desktop is really not a problem with Windows, it's a problem with OEMs who don't actually have the best interests of their consumers in mind.
Truer words were never spoken. Every OEM machine I've ever worked with, I have to spend a few days tweaking it (while working) to get the setup I want. Inevitably, I put a folder called "crap" on my desktop. Into this folder I throw all the shortcuts to the bundled crapware that came with the machine. I don't uninstall it, just in case of the very, very, remote chance that somebody else with the same box might have a solution that involves "use the preinstalled...". In all my years, nobody has ever had such a solution. Then I usually weed through and make sure that unnecessary apps aren't being started. That takes some digging in the registry. Then I have to kill lame keyboard and mouse setups. That can be the hardest thing, especially for laptops. With the Lenovo I got, somebody seemed to assume that by default users would want every obscure mouse gesture and click combo enabled. I couldn't surf the web or do anything without having windows close, move, or resize for no apparent reason. The settings for these things were scattered a bit, and divided between Windows and IBM's proprietary setups.
While it's a cool material, it's not "transparent aluminum". It's a compound with two other elements. Calling this transparent aluminum is like calling quartz transparent silicon. Many elements with opaque crystal structures form compounds that have transparent crystal structures. A true transparent aluminum would be like carbon, which can be opaque (graphite) or transparent (diamond) depending on the arrangement of atoms, with no other elements involved. Until someone finds a way to arrange aluminum at the molecular level so that it's transparent, there can be no real claim that this little bit of Star Trek has become real. It may not even be possible, or if it is possible the resulting structure might not have such desireable properties as the fictional panels, or the real compound you mentioned.
you just got yourself a nice device to pressure the pilot to give you his seat.
No. The rules changed starting with flight 93 and the will probably stay changed. If they tell the pilot to fly someplace, the passengers *might* cooperate, but if they try to take the cockpit the passengers and crew will assume that they are a missile and are dead anyway. If you're dead anyway, you're not going to let them pick their target; at least I wouldn't.
Would this rise in the cost of oil help to drive innovations in alternative fuels and energy?
Yes, I think it would. It takes a while to "tool up" to a different economy though. It's this short-term pain that keeps us from doing it. The OPEC nations realize this too. As a general rule, they don't want to see sustained high prices because they know that it will cause structural changes in consumer economies, and they know that once those changes are in place there won't be an immediate reversion. This has already happened to some extent in the US economy due to the first oil shock. Remember how cheap gas was in the 90s? On an inflation adjusted basis it might have even been less than pre-OPEC. That's because many US drivers switched from gas guzzlers to Japanese econo-boxes. The SUV eventually turned the tide on that; but heavy industry and power production facilities had diversified their energy inputs, and that hasn't changed. The $3/gal price we are seeing today is comparable to what happened during the first oil shock, but it's less likely to impact the economy as much as it did in the 70s because fixed power plants in heavy industry didn't get suckered back to oil. We have less of an industrial based economy anyway. As SUV sales decline, this will lock "structural conservation" into the transportation economy, at least for the life of the replacement vehicles that are now being purchased. Where I live, the power company is required to periodicly state where the energy comes from. Oil is only a small fraction of it. Coal and nuclear are #1 and #2 here. Anyway, I'm sort of mish-mashing the industrial and transportation effects here--it's really two separate economies.
Oil sustained at $100/bbl would have some interesting effects. Shale oil becomes economicly viable (but it's an environmental nightmare). Maybe long haul freight railroads will convert to electricity instead of diesel (how much would oil have to cost for that to happen?). People will be less inclined to choose overnight shipping just because they want it now when air frieght costs $100 vs. $30 for rail+truck (and the truck will be powered by natural gas, which we have more of).
Anyway, long story short, we don't really need their black gunk in the long run. The US created an autocentric lifestyle for itself; we can uncreate it too.
Well, we could dust off the MAD strategy; but maybe $100/bbl oil is a better outcome, frankly. It might certainly be good for me, since I now own property in the city, within walking distance of public transit. Sucks to be a suburbanite with $5/gal gas.
Actually, I rather like the $100/bbl outcome. Remember that line, "the cold war is over and the Japanese won?". How about, "the oil war is over, and those who bought property in the cities won".
Ummm... the same reason we talk people down off bridges and high buildings? Compassion, maybe? Not to mention the fact that these people end up with others who are more responsable, and simply don't know their partners are infected. Really though, even though you're being modded Troll, you've got a point; but just leaving people to twist in the wind isn't moral from my point of view. We really need to eliminate the attitude of fatalism that some people have, especially young people. You see a lot of articles where people have the attitude of "it's only a matter of time before I get it". Before we can use any of the methods you describe to stop HIV, we need to figure out how to stop fatalism. We also need to stamp out arrogance. You hear a lot of people who think that HIV is a manageable illness like diabetes or herpes. It isn't. Like all successful vices, it buries those who would testify otherwise.
No, it's nothing like thaWHOOSH! NO CARRIER
...who reads something like this, and hearkens back to the days when people thought stuff like this would lead to some sort of golden age, and then to hear that it will simply make "better phones and cameras" is kind of disappointing. I know the prior attitude was a lot of idealistic pie-in-the-sky, flying-car, jet-pack, white building, monorail nonsense. Still though. I miss it. Oh... bring back Donald Duck with his doors to the future, and the nuclear powered airplane. Please? For just a moment?