Why do people in this country feel so obligated to work for companies that treat them like crap?
Oh, I see. You have a choice? Congratulations, you trust fund baby. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to cut this reply short because I have to get my ass to work or I won't be able to pay my mortgage this month.
Of course, that need would be greatly smaller if the next time you buy (or are you still renting?) a house, you found one that was much closer to the things you need.
Well, if you end up actually executing this plan (and I encourage it, I now live 4 blocks from work, and it's great!) then try this exercise sometime:
1) Carefully record all your costs for running your car for one month. 2) If you can, cancel your insurance for a month and park it. If you normally buy your insurance a year at a time, try this at the end of the term. 3) Try living without your car. It's only a month after all, if all else fails you can still go back. You'll probably learn a few things about how to use it less at the very least.
The mother of all innovation is necessity. You will find workarounds to your "need" for a car if only you try. Most Americans just look at the problem and get scared and never bother to try. For example, you'd be surprised at how many (especially urban) grocery stores will deliver, even or especially if you pick them up at the store and pay at the till. These days the service is generally for the elderly who can't manage it on their own, but usually delivery is free over a certain amount. Or you can take a cab.
It also helps a great deal if you shop around for a house (or townhouse, or whatever) specifically with this goal in mind. Proximity to stores, transit, school and work are central to this philosophy. In fact, someone built a web site to help you out.
I've personally lived almost all of my adult life without a car. Nearly none of my friends drive either. It's no longer because I can't afford a car - our gross household income is now over $75,000 - but in no small part because I don't consider it a necessity. My wife and I have engineered our lifestyle around not having a car, instead of the norm of doing it the other way around. Because of that, "giving up" a car isn't even a hardship for us.
Uh, website defacement would require one of two things: Either really poor filesystem security (leaving the directory for your virtual site writable by whatever user Apache runs as), or a weak FTP password. Of course, that password could just as likely be scooped by someone listening on a nearby router or some other program that broke in through a broken php program. But for the most part, I've noticed that hackers these days are more interested in making money by spamming or phishing than they are in website defacement.
First of all, I must be a pedantic astro geek on this one and inform you that both sakdoctor and the original article have the spelling of Bootes wrong. Bootes is a constellation named by the ancient Greeks. The designation Tau is to indicate the brightness of the star in the constellation. Alpha Bootes would be the brightest star in Bootes, Beta Bootes the second, et cetera. So there really is a proper naming convetion for these bright stars in well-known constellations. Its problem is simply that it's in Greek.
The more numerous background stars all have much less interesting catalog numbers. I'm sure however, that should we ever build (or find) a colony on a planet orbiting IC871621, that we'll happily rename it to something a little easier to say and remember. Until then, it's an utterly unremarkable star.
I seem to recall a particularly interesting technique for indoctrination done to prisoners of war in some communist country somewhere, whereby the prisoners would be rewarded (with a better meal, I recall - a big deal when most everyone is malnourished) by competing in a competition to come up with the best communist slogan or advertising campaign, or what have you. The contest would be held on a regular basis too, and so the inmates would compete with ever more ferocity.
This didn't just turn the winners into good communists (and coming from their enemies in war, that too is a big deal) but *everyone else too*! It was a particularly effective method of indoctrination.
Energy consumption is a non-issue. We don't pay much for electricity.
Even if that were true, if you have 4000 computers that don't shut down at night, that's enough money to pay several people's salaries. 4000 computers * 12 hours * $0.015 per hour = $720 per night = $262,000 per year.
Fix that problem, and your boss might even give you a raise.
Actually, leaving your hard drives on is the biggest source of idle-computer power drain. You can also set Windows to turn them off after a set period of time, say an hour of inactivity. It doesn't take long to spin them up anyway. Or you can set it to go into sleep mode, which does the same thing and more.
Also, for the love of god, get an LCD. Modern LCDs are leaps and bounds better than CRTs in every way, especially power consumption. And they're dirt cheap too.
In which case, the entire reason for powering down at night is to save electricity, which is far more valuable than you would think. Especially when you have 8000 computers! By the University of Alberta's estimation each desktop costs about 1.5 cents per hour to run. Multiply that by 4000 (the rough estimate of the original poster of the PCs that are on at night), and multiply that by 12 hours, and you get $720 per night! At that rate, you can pay someone to go around and turn off all the PCs manually and still save money.
Have you all gone crazy?!? where am I? My browser window says slashdot.org but I feel like I'm at a luddite convention!
Yes, this is Slashdot.org. And amazingly enough, a few of us *work* for ISPs instead of being generally clueless about how it works.
But let me give you some insider tips on how you can actually get free, unlimited bandwidth, without anyone bitching at you.
Step 1: Extract copper from the ground. Step 2: Smelt copper. Step 3: Spin copper into wires. Step 4: Run copper wires to all the sites on the internet that you want to access. Ask them nicely if they can put new network interfaces into the servers you want access to. Step 5: This is the tricky part. You need to build a Cisco 5505 from scratch. You *could* build a router of similar capacity using an old PC, but the important part is "build". If you don't care too much about security, you could probably just build a 100-odd port switch. Step 6: You can technically set up your own name server, web server, and mail server on a single machine. I would recommend that you use a newer PC than you would the router. Especially if you want spam filtering. Step 7: Bitch on Slashdot that if you could do it for free in only 3000 man-years of labour, the ISPs should be able to provide it for free.
A few weeks ago, I saw a 14 year old kid in the food court at the mall. He was wearing a T-shirt that said "I pwn n00bs". I told him I liked his shirt. He said thanks. I told him I was pwning n00bs when he was as big as my son (who was with us. He was 12 months then). He didn't like that so much.
Using Kilograms and meters to describe astronomical masses and distances is like using nanometers to describe the distance between London and New York. It's pretty silly, isn't it?
This is why a few new conventions were adopted. A "Solar mass" is indeed a valid measurement of stars, nebulae, galaxies, and black holes. The only difference is the language used to describe such things in press releases, since the public doesn't actually know what a solar mass *is*.
There are also astronomical units, which is the mean distance between the sun and the earth throughout the year. Less useful in actual calculations are light years, but they're way easier to explain to the public than a parsec, which is the parallax of one second of arc. If you even knew what that meant, then you are only a fraction of the way to understanding what that means in actual distance. So light years it is.
As someone else has noted, such a collision of a "gas cloud" (since you point out that it's a million times less dense than the vacuum in the solar system) with a galaxy has real and profound effects, and has been observed elsewhere in the universe.
However, you might also want to take note of something here. Notice how we have actually been able to detect this astoundingly sparse cloud of hydrogen? It doesn't even emit any light, but it does emit radio waves. This means that there are places in the universe - between galaxies and even galaxy clusters - where there is literally *nothing*. Zero H2 molecules per liter, or even cubic kilometer. So when someone comes up with some calculation of the mass of all the matter of say, the milky way or some nearby galaxy, you know that that accounting is correct. And just as importantly, when they say "There's not enough mass here for the galaxy to form cohesive structure under its own gravity - structure that is obviously there", you can believe that no matter how cold or hot that matter is, we know for certain that it's there, and how much it all weighs. Moreover, you can believe that when someone says "50% of the mass of the galaxies we've observed is missing".
There's a difference between saying "The terrorists don't scare me" and flying internationally anyways, and running naked through Tikrit with a bullseye painted on your ass with red lipstick. Publishing your banking information doesn't just invite the evildoers, it invites the average joe, who will just say "Hell, anyone can hit that target from here".
Not just the cheapest possible carbon offsets, but very likely the least likely to actually *do* anything. There's a difference between Ford commissioning El Verde Grande LLC to plant trees in the Nevada desert (questions like "Are the trees even being planted" and "did the seedlings survive long enough to offset any carbon" come to *my* mind immediately) and Wayerhauser actually hiring actual workers to actually plant trees that they actually expect to actually grow to maturity.
While I know that some companies out there (say, Xcel Energy are indeed willing to offset their own emissions by replacing them with green technology (so long as the public is willing), the benefits of say Pearl Jam's CD production offsets, are a wee bit more vague.
Personally, I would prefer to *invest* money (with the expectation of profits and return on investment and all that corporate greed stuff) in a company that directly helps the environment than to "buy carbon offsets". At the very least, I get a nice profit-and-loss sheet and a decent understanding of what they did with my money (even at the risk of, well, you know).
Even more importantly, this can be easily fooled by attacking with a botnet. Each bot tries only once before it gets blacklisted, which is fine, because the botnet master doesn't care much about how that one IP is no longer usable, and the end-user who owns it probably doesn't even want to access whatever it is that you're protecting.
Also, apparently this box can't be used for anything useful but the service you're trying to protect. I honestly don't see much use for this besides some cyperpunk's home firewall.
I'm an Atheist, but I know that belief in a watchmaker can coexist with evolution. It just requires an immortal watchmaker with infinite patience. Technically, this is what intelligent design says, but what if you were to create a universe with rules for chemistry, physics, and mathematics that would inevitably lead to the creation of life without further intervention? All you would have to do is set it up and watch it happen like an enormous Rube Goldberg device. And life would spring up everywhere throughout the universe too.
I guess instead of a watchmaker, this theory is more like a farmer.
You're right. Even the sun doesn't produce a continuous unbroken spectrum of light. All those absorption lines from the chemical makeup of the sun, as well as the earth's atmosphere. I mean really, what's the point of having the sun at all if it doesn't shine right?
Nevermind the fact that incandescents are depressing. I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and I swear that incandescent light makes me feel lethargic. They are a poor substitute for sunshine, let me tell you.
Turn it off. There is an appropriate time to be reading your e-mail, responding to instant messages, and texting your boss on your blackberry. And there is an appropriate time for work. Set those times in your schedule quite strictly. During that your work time, your e-mail is not open. Your blackberry is off. MSN is closed. You can probably expect to get three to four hours of this kind of time per day. Unless something is on fire, nothing is to interrupt you, and you can focus on what you're doing and be astoundingly effective and productive.
Once you're done, it's back to e-mail and MSN and constant interruptions. Or "team building" at the water cooler. Whatever.
A little perspective is all most intelligent young people need to see their crop of music is pretty lame compared to the old stuff.
Right up and until some band that's actually good comes around and makes some new music. Creativity is like that, you know?
Do you really think that boy bands (or girl bands like the spice girls) were a product of the 90's and 2000's? There were a hundred bands in the 60s that followed that formula. The difference is, noone remembers them because they sucked. A few of them might have come out with a couple one-hit wonders and then promptly went away. Just like what's happening now.
The fact of the matter is that the music industry is a lot like the stock market, except more stupid. Some band makes a kick-ass album in a genre noone has heard before, and every label under the sun rushes out to sign *any* band in that genre, who cares how good they are. Thus creating a bubble that eventually bursts. And they keep doing it over and over because it makes money.
And finally, thanks to the internet and independent bands who appeal to smaller markets, that model is breaking down. And honestly, I can't imagine anything better.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people in this country feel so obligated to work for companies that treat them like crap?
Oh, I see. You have a choice? Congratulations, you trust fund baby. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to cut this reply short because I have to get my ass to work or I won't be able to pay my mortgage this month.
Of course, that need would be greatly smaller if the next time you buy (or are you still renting?) a house, you found one that was much closer to the things you need.
Well, if you end up actually executing this plan (and I encourage it, I now live 4 blocks from work, and it's great!) then try this exercise sometime:
1) Carefully record all your costs for running your car for one month.
2) If you can, cancel your insurance for a month and park it. If you normally buy your insurance a year at a time, try this at the end of the term.
3) Try living without your car. It's only a month after all, if all else fails you can still go back. You'll probably learn a few things about how to use it less at the very least.
The mother of all innovation is necessity. You will find workarounds to your "need" for a car if only you try. Most Americans just look at the problem and get scared and never bother to try. For example, you'd be surprised at how many (especially urban) grocery stores will deliver, even or especially if you pick them up at the store and pay at the till. These days the service is generally for the elderly who can't manage it on their own, but usually delivery is free over a certain amount. Or you can take a cab.
It also helps a great deal if you shop around for a house (or townhouse, or whatever) specifically with this goal in mind. Proximity to stores, transit, school and work are central to this philosophy. In fact, someone built a web site to help you out.
I've personally lived almost all of my adult life without a car. Nearly none of my friends drive either. It's no longer because I can't afford a car - our gross household income is now over $75,000 - but in no small part because I don't consider it a necessity. My wife and I have engineered our lifestyle around not having a car, instead of the norm of doing it the other way around. Because of that, "giving up" a car isn't even a hardship for us.
Uh, website defacement would require one of two things: Either really poor filesystem security (leaving the directory for your virtual site writable by whatever user Apache runs as), or a weak FTP password. Of course, that password could just as likely be scooped by someone listening on a nearby router or some other program that broke in through a broken php program. But for the most part, I've noticed that hackers these days are more interested in making money by spamming or phishing than they are in website defacement.
First of all, I must be a pedantic astro geek on this one and inform you that both sakdoctor and the original article have the spelling of Bootes wrong. Bootes is a constellation named by the ancient Greeks. The designation Tau is to indicate the brightness of the star in the constellation. Alpha Bootes would be the brightest star in Bootes, Beta Bootes the second, et cetera. So there really is a proper naming convetion for these bright stars in well-known constellations. Its problem is simply that it's in Greek.
The more numerous background stars all have much less interesting catalog numbers. I'm sure however, that should we ever build (or find) a colony on a planet orbiting IC871621, that we'll happily rename it to something a little easier to say and remember. Until then, it's an utterly unremarkable star.
I seem to recall a particularly interesting technique for indoctrination done to prisoners of war in some communist country somewhere, whereby the prisoners would be rewarded (with a better meal, I recall - a big deal when most everyone is malnourished) by competing in a competition to come up with the best communist slogan or advertising campaign, or what have you. The contest would be held on a regular basis too, and so the inmates would compete with ever more ferocity.
This didn't just turn the winners into good communists (and coming from their enemies in war, that too is a big deal) but *everyone else too*! It was a particularly effective method of indoctrination.
Energy consumption is a non-issue. We don't pay much for electricity.
Even if that were true, if you have 4000 computers that don't shut down at night, that's enough money to pay several people's salaries. 4000 computers * 12 hours * $0.015 per hour = $720 per night = $262,000 per year.
Fix that problem, and your boss might even give you a raise.
You know, you can set the bios to turn your computer on at a specified time each morning, right? Like say, half an hour before you show up for work?
Problem solved.
Actually, leaving your hard drives on is the biggest source of idle-computer power drain. You can also set Windows to turn them off after a set period of time, say an hour of inactivity. It doesn't take long to spin them up anyway. Or you can set it to go into sleep mode, which does the same thing and more.
Also, for the love of god, get an LCD. Modern LCDs are leaps and bounds better than CRTs in every way, especially power consumption. And they're dirt cheap too.
In which case, the entire reason for powering down at night is to save electricity, which is far more valuable than you would think. Especially when you have 8000 computers! By the University of Alberta's estimation each desktop costs about 1.5 cents per hour to run. Multiply that by 4000 (the rough estimate of the original poster of the PCs that are on at night), and multiply that by 12 hours, and you get $720 per night! At that rate, you can pay someone to go around and turn off all the PCs manually and still save money.
Have you all gone crazy?!? where am I? My browser window says slashdot.org but I feel like I'm at a luddite convention!
Yes, this is Slashdot.org. And amazingly enough, a few of us *work* for ISPs instead of being generally clueless about how it works.
But let me give you some insider tips on how you can actually get free, unlimited bandwidth, without anyone bitching at you.
Step 1: Extract copper from the ground.
Step 2: Smelt copper.
Step 3: Spin copper into wires.
Step 4: Run copper wires to all the sites on the internet that you want to access. Ask them nicely if they can put new network interfaces into the servers you want access to.
Step 5: This is the tricky part. You need to build a Cisco 5505 from scratch. You *could* build a router of similar capacity using an old PC, but the important part is "build". If you don't care too much about security, you could probably just build a 100-odd port switch.
Step 6: You can technically set up your own name server, web server, and mail server on a single machine. I would recommend that you use a newer PC than you would the router. Especially if you want spam filtering.
Step 7: Bitch on Slashdot that if you could do it for free in only 3000 man-years of labour, the ISPs should be able to provide it for free.
A few weeks ago, I saw a 14 year old kid in the food court at the mall. He was wearing a T-shirt that said "I pwn n00bs". I told him I liked his shirt. He said thanks. I told him I was pwning n00bs when he was as big as my son (who was with us. He was 12 months then). He didn't like that so much.
Lunar Lander was better played with a throttle and a joystick on a video camera and a scale model.
Using Kilograms and meters to describe astronomical masses and distances is like using nanometers to describe the distance between London and New York. It's pretty silly, isn't it?
This is why a few new conventions were adopted. A "Solar mass" is indeed a valid measurement of stars, nebulae, galaxies, and black holes. The only difference is the language used to describe such things in press releases, since the public doesn't actually know what a solar mass *is*.
There are also astronomical units, which is the mean distance between the sun and the earth throughout the year. Less useful in actual calculations are light years, but they're way easier to explain to the public than a parsec, which is the parallax of one second of arc. If you even knew what that meant, then you are only a fraction of the way to understanding what that means in actual distance. So light years it is.
As someone else has noted, such a collision of a "gas cloud" (since you point out that it's a million times less dense than the vacuum in the solar system) with a galaxy has real and profound effects, and has been observed elsewhere in the universe.
However, you might also want to take note of something here. Notice how we have actually been able to detect this astoundingly sparse cloud of hydrogen? It doesn't even emit any light, but it does emit radio waves. This means that there are places in the universe - between galaxies and even galaxy clusters - where there is literally *nothing*. Zero H2 molecules per liter, or even cubic kilometer. So when someone comes up with some calculation of the mass of all the matter of say, the milky way or some nearby galaxy, you know that that accounting is correct. And just as importantly, when they say "There's not enough mass here for the galaxy to form cohesive structure under its own gravity - structure that is obviously there", you can believe that no matter how cold or hot that matter is, we know for certain that it's there, and how much it all weighs. Moreover, you can believe that when someone says "50% of the mass of the galaxies we've observed is missing".
Dude, you totally need to lighten up. It's allegory.
And besides, it used to be international flights that were getting hijacked, so get off my lawn!
There's a difference between saying "The terrorists don't scare me" and flying internationally anyways, and running naked through Tikrit with a bullseye painted on your ass with red lipstick. Publishing your banking information doesn't just invite the evildoers, it invites the average joe, who will just say "Hell, anyone can hit that target from here".
Not just the cheapest possible carbon offsets, but very likely the least likely to actually *do* anything. There's a difference between Ford commissioning El Verde Grande LLC to plant trees in the Nevada desert (questions like "Are the trees even being planted" and "did the seedlings survive long enough to offset any carbon" come to *my* mind immediately) and Wayerhauser actually hiring actual workers to actually plant trees that they actually expect to actually grow to maturity.
While I know that some companies out there (say, Xcel Energy are indeed willing to offset their own emissions by replacing them with green technology (so long as the public is willing), the benefits of say Pearl Jam's CD production offsets, are a wee bit more vague.
Personally, I would prefer to *invest* money (with the expectation of profits and return on investment and all that corporate greed stuff) in a company that directly helps the environment than to "buy carbon offsets". At the very least, I get a nice profit-and-loss sheet and a decent understanding of what they did with my money (even at the risk of, well, you know).
This is indeed the truth, laid out in ways the ./ public can understand.
Even more importantly, this can be easily fooled by attacking with a botnet. Each bot tries only once before it gets blacklisted, which is fine, because the botnet master doesn't care much about how that one IP is no longer usable, and the end-user who owns it probably doesn't even want to access whatever it is that you're protecting.
Also, apparently this box can't be used for anything useful but the service you're trying to protect. I honestly don't see much use for this besides some cyperpunk's home firewall.
I'm an Atheist, but I know that belief in a watchmaker can coexist with evolution. It just requires an immortal watchmaker with infinite patience. Technically, this is what intelligent design says, but what if you were to create a universe with rules for chemistry, physics, and mathematics that would inevitably lead to the creation of life without further intervention? All you would have to do is set it up and watch it happen like an enormous Rube Goldberg device. And life would spring up everywhere throughout the universe too.
I guess instead of a watchmaker, this theory is more like a farmer.
I think of setting up a nice little pirate factory [...] on one of the nicer Caribbean islands.
So basically you're going to pull a Captain Morgan?
Arr!
You're right. Even the sun doesn't produce a continuous unbroken spectrum of light. All those absorption lines from the chemical makeup of the sun, as well as the earth's atmosphere. I mean really, what's the point of having the sun at all if it doesn't shine right?
Nevermind the fact that incandescents are depressing. I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and I swear that incandescent light makes me feel lethargic. They are a poor substitute for sunshine, let me tell you.
Here's the short version:
Turn it off. There is an appropriate time to be reading your e-mail, responding to instant messages, and texting your boss on your blackberry. And there is an appropriate time for work. Set those times in your schedule quite strictly. During that your work time, your e-mail is not open. Your blackberry is off. MSN is closed. You can probably expect to get three to four hours of this kind of time per day. Unless something is on fire, nothing is to interrupt you, and you can focus on what you're doing and be astoundingly effective and productive.
Once you're done, it's back to e-mail and MSN and constant interruptions. Or "team building" at the water cooler. Whatever.
A little perspective is all most intelligent young people need to see their crop of music is pretty lame compared to the old stuff.
Right up and until some band that's actually good comes around and makes some new music. Creativity is like that, you know?
Do you really think that boy bands (or girl bands like the spice girls) were a product of the 90's and 2000's? There were a hundred bands in the 60s that followed that formula. The difference is, noone remembers them because they sucked. A few of them might have come out with a couple one-hit wonders and then promptly went away. Just like what's happening now.
The fact of the matter is that the music industry is a lot like the stock market, except more stupid. Some band makes a kick-ass album in a genre noone has heard before, and every label under the sun rushes out to sign *any* band in that genre, who cares how good they are. Thus creating a bubble that eventually bursts. And they keep doing it over and over because it makes money.
And finally, thanks to the internet and independent bands who appeal to smaller markets, that model is breaking down. And honestly, I can't imagine anything better.
News flash! News media goes to hell! News at 11! Film at 12!