The U of Mn has 50k students, and a 1.2 billion dollar budget. $10k * 50k is *less than half* the budget and it doesn't include a lot of research-grant funding that most of the technology departments use for purchasing high-tech equipment and seriously supplementing researchers salaries. And I'm pretty sure the 1.2 billion doesn't include any bonding dollars used for capital improvement.
Of course spending money better is always smarter, regardless of where the money comes from. I won't argue that.
So whay again does the US kiss Saudi tush, and ignores it friends to the north?
Geopolitics.
If we don't buy it from them, someone else might and we want to make it expensive for "someone else" to get oil.
Money buys influence. What do you think the Saudis buy with the US dollars we pay them for their oil? Shitloads of US products -- it's like getting the oil for free *and* they buy our products.
Nonsense. No state institution that I'm aware of runs off of tuition. They almost all run off of massive taxpayer subsidies (state, federal). Tuition barely makes the vig at those places.
If you're in college and you feel oppressed by your university because they're holding back on what they "owe" you for your tuition, you're pretty sadly mistaken.
So many posters seem to have ignored the
fact that the question is about a female. A FEMALE. They tend to have much more pleasant dealings with the cops.
Most professional cops don't care whether you're a woman or a man. They've seen that I'm-a-girl routine too many times, and none of them buy it.
Your sleazier cops? Well, instead of just getting treated like a con, being a girl might earn you a vigorous body search at best or a rather persuasive opportunity to exchange sex for getting let off.
The cop that pulls you over doesn't have to prove shit to take your lockpicks, put you in handcuffs and set you in the back of his squad car for an hour or two -- and that's if you did something minor, like cross against the lights or speed or something. You'll get let go, but you won't get the lockpicks back.
If you're doing something *illegal* it's a license to be a USDA Grade A asshole and maybe get you to take a trip to the county lockup on a gross misdemeanor or a felony beef where otherwise you might just get a talking to or a misdemeanor citation.
You can quote chapter and verse to the cops all you want, but when it comes down to it the guys in blue hold *all* the cards and you hold none, until you're in front of the judge explaining your lockpicks and 609.59.
There was a scifi book and part of the backstory was that the Chinese had crushed the US economy by basically pirating EVERYTHING and making it available on some global satellite net.
Granted, Dad's "UPS" is a Trace inverter with a battery array mounted in a 45' Gilig bus, but it will easily run the 'fridge, the microwave, TV, satellite and the furnace (which has a pump for pumping glycol).
The A/C is not possible, but its a 40K BTU unit and will only run off the generator or 50A shore power.
I think its just a question of the size of your UPS (dad's is an array of 8 6V storage batteries) and the capabilities of your inverter to handle the load. Dad says he gets about 3-5 days in mild weather of "normal" living -- lighting, fridge, TV/Sat, and water pump without shore power, the generator or running the engine (which also charges the battery array).
If you bought a $100 UPS, I wouldn't plug my cell phone into it to charge. If you bought a $2k UPS that came with decent batteries and inverter, then you might be able to get away with the 10-12A that a big laser printer will demand.
There's nothing magical about compressors and other electric motors other than the current draw; most computer rooms are actually full of electric motors (fans, disk drives, tape drives). It's just that the UPS are sized to meet those loads.
Exchange is actually a pretty decent mail server, although only using it for mail is pretty dumb - its groupware features are the killer app.
Icky. Exchange does well enough for email and scheduling, but anything else requires you to dump your life into the black hole of the exchange database.
We've been fortunate with our Exchange installation -- lots of AV software, excessive hardware and limited use of the groupware functionality have kept it stable and functional.
Maybe this is some kind of strategy on the part of the game makers to "lock in" people to their games or gaming genres. If you buy a SuperWidget controller to play StarGenre, aren't you more inclined to buy StarGenre II vs. PlanetChase I, which also has a custom controller?
I also wonder if its not a way to get more profit out of a given game. I know that you pay money to develop software for gaming platforms, but does hardware have the same royalty setup? Can I sell a PS2 controller without kicking back to Sony the way I would if I wanted to develop games for it? I can't believe the lawyers wouldn't have been on top of this one, but hey, even they miss.
Balanced people are a *liability*, not a strength. They make too many safe decisions and aren't willing to take the kinds of risks necessary for a "one-way" trip to Mars to work.
Admittedly you don't want psychotic people, and a military-type discipline would probably be essential to maintain supplies, but at the same time a bunch of conservative, highly rational people aren't going to experiement and try edgy things that might be really successful.
Look at the profile of successful people in business, sports, etc -- how many of them are sane, stable, follow-the-rules kinds of people? They're mostly not unstable, but they're also the kinds of people willing to take huge risks for huge rewards. Guys like you and I take tiny risks for tiny rewards, which is why we couldn't do the one-way to mars.
What's to stop someone from jacking into your phone box and making long distance calls? It can and does happen, but you're not concerned about it are you?
Never thought about that. It's probably pretty simple to take a DSS phone (900Mhz or 2.4Ghz), ditch the plastic shell and mount it into a phone-company looking box with a line-powered charging system. Wire into an apartment building phone system, get free/untracable calls.
Better yet would be tagging onto a business analog trunk, local calls would never be found and most LD calls would be overlooked.
I'll bet loads of people run pirated versions of XP that aren't well-known stolen activation keys or other cracks that attempt to override it.
I'll bet lots of them are grey-area pirates -- people with Select agreements that have a copy that doesn't require online authorization and can be used on lots of computers. I'm sure there are other similar distributions that are in the wild that don't require this and won't get caught by XP SP1.
Unless (when?) Microsoft starts limiting how these versions can be used, there will still be large numbers of illicit copies of XP and other software on the market. I wouldn't be suprised to see a MS licensing service in.net server that would manage (contain?) the spread of select CDs.
these are the idiots we have working for us. on the one side, we have warhawk who support big Industry, on the other, we have psudo-wanabe-whatever-is-popular-at-the-time-and-n ot-republican idiots who are in the pockets of Big media.
Big Money, Inc. has bought and paid for the legislature and the presidency long ago.
Support any and all campaign finance reform that regulates the contributions -- limits their size, limits their frequency and mandates reporting. It's the only chance to elect candidates whose mission in life isn't serving corporate interests.
Amen. Security geeks who don't appreciate the risk/cost/benefit analysis are all trying to build Fort Knox, often on shifting sand.
Security doesn't have to be perfect. If you're protecting X, you just need to protect it slightly better than most other people with X. People interested in X will take it where it's easiest to get.
And I agree that IPSEC is a PITA. It's OK as a dedicated tunnel between endpoints with shared secrets, but cert management gets to be a big nightmare, really fast for client applications.
No kidding. Management are so busy shorting the company's stock or faking business to pump it up in an effort to get more money, coke and whores that they don't even understand that just because the server's don't crash 10 times a day they're not shorting their technology infrastructure.
Yes, difficult to maintain packages are at a higher risk of becoming orphaned. But the same is true for commercial packages as well: either the company gives up and starts from scratch, or they go out of business.
Packages mostly get orphaned by commercial companies because they're not profitable, not because they're hard to maintain. Besides, sawfish was abandoned by its primary developer because of work commitments not because it was hard to develop. The real orphaning comes when nobody picks it up and it won't build right in six months because its dependencies have changed.
I'm always amused by open source zealots who, when confronted with a weakness of open source development *always* try to paint commercial development with the same brush. I guess the assumption is that a shared weakness isn't a weakness for open source or something.
I'm not anti-open source, but I think its important to remember that this development model has its own set of problems that don't always overlap with commercial software. Commercial software also has problems that OSS doesn't, but that neither makes OSS perfect nor commercial software fatally flawed.
The fact that a single person has moved on to doing something else makes little difference for open source software.
This can be a problem for niche open source software. Some packages are never developed/driven by more than one person. When that person moves on, it's real easy for the package to drift apart. Sure "anyone" can use the source and built it, fix it, maintain it, and further develop it but usually the further you go from just using it towards further development, the greater the skill required which increases the chances that the package will just get orphaned.
Of course you're actually using MP3 basically for what it was designed for -- same music in less bits.
Everyone else here is using some other lossless encoding that results in files larger than the PCM originals on the CD because when they're listening on their 802.11 wireless iPaqs while mowing the lawn they can hear the difference between the original and some crappy MP3.
IKEA furtniture is attractive, in a simple-meets-modern kind of way, but from what I've seen and bought, it's totally retrograde in quality.
I had a table that I used as a computer table until the top became so warped (it looked wavy) the mouse wouldn't track anymore. I cut the top open when I trashed it and it was two pieces of particleboard supported by *cardboard* between the pine trim surrounding the table.
The last time I was in an Ikea (Tustin/Irvine) I checked all the furniture and it was for shit; almost exlusively bad composite materials that would disintegrate if they ever got even damp.
If Ikea is the only acceptable place to buy furniture in the UK, the UK really is a fallen empire...
Rollerball should definitely have been on the list, especially if plausability is a major factor -- blood sports, corporate-run government? Other than the fact that killing is just slightly against the rules in football, how far away are we from *that* reality?
I also think that the original Mad Max was a much more plausable reality than the Road Warrior. A bunch of S&M types with pneumatic arrow guns that could get a supply of nitrous and not gas is far less plausable than a government that can't govern sinking into biker chaos.
I'd vote for the Omega Man, too, as well as They Live.
No, this Super 8 was somewhere east of Grand Island, NE. Real small town, I think it might have had a mainstreet with the usual BS -- bars, implement dealers, gas station and a bad pancake joint by the interstate exit.
I will give Super 8s a lot of credit, especially in small towns. They're almost universally very clean and the people who work at them are usually pretty friendly. This particular one was actually "luxurious" and had won like the Super 8 of the year award or something.
We always bring our own towels when stay at them, though, as the towels provided are small and scratchy. Other than that, we stay at Super 8 almost exclusively when we travel on the road. We have one of their lodging directories and plan our driving around the Super 8 locations.
I'm sure small motels have really minimalist phone systems that lack the accounting capability to charge for local calls. Minimalist may mean no phone system at all, relying on telco centrex capability with some crude reporting to charge you for long distance calls.
There's also the argument to be made that most people who stay in cheap motels don't make many phone calls, either because they're just sleeping or fucking there or because small motels are in the middle of nowhere and there's just no reason to call anybody.
Besides, Motel 6 and Super 8 have to advertise *something*..
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The U of Mn has 50k students, and a 1.2 billion dollar budget. $10k * 50k is *less than half* the budget and it doesn't include a lot of research-grant funding that most of the technology departments use for purchasing high-tech equipment and seriously supplementing researchers salaries. And I'm pretty sure the 1.2 billion doesn't include any bonding dollars used for capital improvement.
Of course spending money better is always smarter, regardless of where the money comes from. I won't argue that.
So whay again does the US kiss Saudi tush, and ignores it friends to the north?
Geopolitics. If we don't buy it from them, someone else might and we want to make it expensive for "someone else" to get oil. Money buys influence. What do you think the Saudis buy with the US dollars we pay them for their oil? Shitloads of US products -- it's like getting the oil for free *and* they buy our products.
But that money comes from your tuition anyways
Nonsense. No state institution that I'm aware of runs off of tuition. They almost all run off of massive taxpayer subsidies (state, federal). Tuition barely makes the vig at those places.
If you're in college and you feel oppressed by your university because they're holding back on what they "owe" you for your tuition, you're pretty sadly mistaken.
So many posters seem to have ignored the fact that the question is about a female. A FEMALE. They tend to have much more pleasant dealings with the cops.
Most professional cops don't care whether you're a woman or a man. They've seen that I'm-a-girl routine too many times, and none of them buy it.
Your sleazier cops? Well, instead of just getting treated like a con, being a girl might earn you a vigorous body search at best or a rather persuasive opportunity to exchange sex for getting let off.
Clearly you've never dealt with the cops.
The cop that pulls you over doesn't have to prove shit to take your lockpicks, put you in handcuffs and set you in the back of his squad car for an hour or two -- and that's if you did something minor, like cross against the lights or speed or something. You'll get let go, but you won't get the lockpicks back.
If you're doing something *illegal* it's a license to be a USDA Grade A asshole and maybe get you to take a trip to the county lockup on a gross misdemeanor or a felony beef where otherwise you might just get a talking to or a misdemeanor citation.
You can quote chapter and verse to the cops all you want, but when it comes down to it the guys in blue hold *all* the cards and you hold none, until you're in front of the judge explaining your lockpicks and 609.59.
There was a scifi book and part of the backstory was that the Chinese had crushed the US economy by basically pirating EVERYTHING and making it available on some global satellite net.
Maybe this is the beginning?
Granted, Dad's "UPS" is a Trace inverter with a battery array mounted in a 45' Gilig bus, but it will easily run the 'fridge, the microwave, TV, satellite and the furnace (which has a pump for pumping glycol).
The A/C is not possible, but its a 40K BTU unit and will only run off the generator or 50A shore power.
I think its just a question of the size of your UPS (dad's is an array of 8 6V storage batteries) and the capabilities of your inverter to handle the load. Dad says he gets about 3-5 days in mild weather of "normal" living -- lighting, fridge, TV/Sat, and water pump without shore power, the generator or running the engine (which also charges the battery array).
If you bought a $100 UPS, I wouldn't plug my cell phone into it to charge. If you bought a $2k UPS that came with decent batteries and inverter, then you might be able to get away with the 10-12A that a big laser printer will demand.
There's nothing magical about compressors and other electric motors other than the current draw; most computer rooms are actually full of electric motors (fans, disk drives, tape drives). It's just that the UPS are sized to meet those loads.
Exchange is actually a pretty decent mail server, although only using it for mail is pretty dumb - its groupware features are the killer app.
Icky. Exchange does well enough for email and scheduling, but anything else requires you to dump your life into the black hole of the exchange database.
We've been fortunate with our Exchange installation -- lots of AV software, excessive hardware and limited use of the groupware functionality have kept it stable and functional.
Maybe this is some kind of strategy on the part of the game makers to "lock in" people to their games or gaming genres. If you buy a SuperWidget controller to play StarGenre, aren't you more inclined to buy StarGenre II vs. PlanetChase I, which also has a custom controller?
I also wonder if its not a way to get more profit out of a given game. I know that you pay money to develop software for gaming platforms, but does hardware have the same royalty setup? Can I sell a PS2 controller without kicking back to Sony the way I would if I wanted to develop games for it? I can't believe the lawyers wouldn't have been on top of this one, but hey, even they miss.
Balanced people are a *liability*, not a strength. They make too many safe decisions and aren't willing to take the kinds of risks necessary for a "one-way" trip to Mars to work.
Admittedly you don't want psychotic people, and a military-type discipline would probably be essential to maintain supplies, but at the same time a bunch of conservative, highly rational people aren't going to experiement and try edgy things that might be really successful.
Look at the profile of successful people in business, sports, etc -- how many of them are sane, stable, follow-the-rules kinds of people? They're mostly not unstable, but they're also the kinds of people willing to take huge risks for huge rewards. Guys like you and I take tiny risks for tiny rewards, which is why we couldn't do the one-way to mars.
What's to stop someone from jacking into your phone box and making long distance calls? It can and does happen, but you're not concerned about it are you?
Never thought about that. It's probably pretty simple to take a DSS phone (900Mhz or 2.4Ghz), ditch the plastic shell and mount it into a phone-company looking box with a line-powered charging system. Wire into an apartment building phone system, get free/untracable calls.
Better yet would be tagging onto a business analog trunk, local calls would never be found and most LD calls would be overlooked.
I'll bet loads of people run pirated versions of XP that aren't well-known stolen activation keys or other cracks that attempt to override it.
.net server that would manage (contain?) the spread of select CDs.
I'll bet lots of them are grey-area pirates -- people with Select agreements that have a copy that doesn't require online authorization and can be used on lots of computers. I'm sure there are other similar distributions that are in the wild that don't require this and won't get caught by XP SP1.
Unless (when?) Microsoft starts limiting how these versions can be used, there will still be large numbers of illicit copies of XP and other software on the market. I wouldn't be suprised to see a MS licensing service in
these are the idiots we have working for us. on the one side, we have warhawk who support big Industry, on the other, we have psudo-wanabe-whatever-is-popular-at-the-time-and-n ot-republican idiots who are in the pockets of Big media.
Big Money, Inc. has bought and paid for the legislature and the presidency long ago.
Support any and all campaign finance reform that regulates the contributions -- limits their size, limits their frequency and mandates reporting. It's the only chance to elect candidates whose mission in life isn't serving corporate interests.
Amen. Security geeks who don't appreciate the risk/cost/benefit analysis are all trying to build Fort Knox, often on shifting sand.
Security doesn't have to be perfect. If you're protecting X, you just need to protect it slightly better than most other people with X. People interested in X will take it where it's easiest to get.
And I agree that IPSEC is a PITA. It's OK as a dedicated tunnel between endpoints with shared secrets, but cert management gets to be a big nightmare, really fast for client applications.
Unless you're willing to live with 23 channels, in which case you can have your 8 bits clean and get voice.
No kidding. Management are so busy shorting the company's stock or faking business to pump it up in an effort to get more money, coke and whores that they don't even understand that just because the server's don't crash 10 times a day they're not shorting their technology infrastructure.
I've gotten over 80k probes in two days at work and several hundred on my single IP address at home.
I kind of gave up and just ACL'd it on the border router since the volume makes it almost a DoS of my intrusion detection.
Yes, difficult to maintain packages are at a higher risk of becoming orphaned. But the same is true for commercial packages as well: either the company gives up and starts from scratch, or they go out of business.
Packages mostly get orphaned by commercial companies because they're not profitable, not because they're hard to maintain. Besides, sawfish was abandoned by its primary developer because of work commitments not because it was hard to develop. The real orphaning comes when nobody picks it up and it won't build right in six months because its dependencies have changed.
I'm always amused by open source zealots who, when confronted with a weakness of open source development *always* try to paint commercial development with the same brush. I guess the assumption is that a shared weakness isn't a weakness for open source or something.
I'm not anti-open source, but I think its important to remember that this development model has its own set of problems that don't always overlap with commercial software. Commercial software also has problems that OSS doesn't, but that neither makes OSS perfect nor commercial software fatally flawed.
The fact that a single person has moved on to doing something else makes little difference for open source software.
This can be a problem for niche open source software. Some packages are never developed/driven by more than one person. When that person moves on, it's real easy for the package to drift apart. Sure "anyone" can use the source and built it, fix it, maintain it, and further develop it but usually the further you go from just using it towards further development, the greater the skill required which increases the chances that the package will just get orphaned.
Because the loss introduced into a 128Kbit MP3 isn't drowned out by either the subpar sound chip in the iPaq... or the lawnmower!
...despite the fact that its a bootleg originally recorded through some guy's shirt onto a cassette tape.
(that was sarcasm, right?)
Yes, yes. Or just a/be-musement at the techno-extremism some people....
that's 1500 CDs worth of MP3s.
Of course you're actually using MP3 basically for what it was designed for -- same music in less bits.
Everyone else here is using some other lossless encoding that results in files larger than the PCM originals on the CD because when they're listening on their 802.11 wireless iPaqs while mowing the lawn they can hear the difference between the original and some crappy MP3.
IKEA furtniture is attractive, in a simple-meets-modern kind of way, but from what I've seen and bought, it's totally retrograde in quality.
I had a table that I used as a computer table until the top became so warped (it looked wavy) the mouse wouldn't track anymore. I cut the top open when I trashed it and it was two pieces of particleboard supported by *cardboard* between the pine trim surrounding the table.
The last time I was in an Ikea (Tustin/Irvine) I checked all the furniture and it was for shit; almost exlusively bad composite materials that would disintegrate if they ever got even damp.
If Ikea is the only acceptable place to buy furniture in the UK, the UK really is a fallen empire...
Rollerball should definitely have been on the list, especially if plausability is a major factor -- blood sports, corporate-run government? Other than the fact that killing is just slightly against the rules in football, how far away are we from *that* reality?
I also think that the original Mad Max was a much more plausable reality than the Road Warrior. A bunch of S&M types with pneumatic arrow guns that could get a supply of nitrous and not gas is far less plausable than a government that can't govern sinking into biker chaos.
I'd vote for the Omega Man, too, as well as They Live.
No, this Super 8 was somewhere east of Grand Island, NE. Real small town, I think it might have had a mainstreet with the usual BS -- bars, implement dealers, gas station and a bad pancake joint by the interstate exit.
I will give Super 8s a lot of credit, especially in small towns. They're almost universally very clean and the people who work at them are usually pretty friendly. This particular one was actually "luxurious" and had won like the Super 8 of the year award or something.
We always bring our own towels when stay at them, though, as the towels provided are small and scratchy. Other than that, we stay at Super 8 almost exclusively when we travel on the road. We have one of their lodging directories and plan our driving around the Super 8 locations.
I'm sure small motels have really minimalist phone systems that lack the accounting capability to charge for local calls. Minimalist may mean no phone system at all, relying on telco centrex capability with some crude reporting to charge you for long distance calls.
There's also the argument to be made that most people who stay in cheap motels don't make many phone calls, either because they're just sleeping or fucking there or because small motels are in the middle of nowhere and there's just no reason to call anybody.
Besides, Motel 6 and Super 8 have to advertise *something*..