I just connect my dialup laptop to the local AOL or Netscape BBS, which is a free call. I guess if I was truly in the middle of noplace, like some indian reservation, then I wouldn't have that option but in the last seven years I've never encountered that problem.
>>>Doesn't AOL require you to install their bloatware to connect as well?
AOL does, but their subsidiary Netscape ISP does not. It just uses a plain-jane dialing program which will work with any browser you desire. As for the DSL I do have that at home, but cannot carry it with me on my various business-related hotel trips. Hence the need for dialup.
Oh and dialup really isn't that bad. While I'm at work I typically bittorrent 5 or 6 TV episodes, and then watch them when I get back to the hotel, or over the weekend.
The Rockports I'm wearing only cost me $12 and are still holding-up seven years later. I think you're making a lot of unfounded assumptions about cost and quality - there's not always a direct correlation.
>>>Name brand products sold at Walmart are often manufactured to a lower standard of quality
Disagree. The PS2 and Gamecubes I bought at Walmart still work eight years later. Ditto the 21" CRT TV. My JVC VCR is still going strong, my microwave works perfectly, and these Levis laying in the corner still are in good shape (too bad they don't fit me anymore). Plus the food I buy is identical to the food I find in a grocery store, but about 50 cents less each carton.
I've not noticed that Walmart sells inferior quality.
>>>Walmart is busy demanding lower prices from its suppliers, lowering quality and causing jobs to be shipped overseas which is destroying the American employment base.
So what do you want Walmart to do? Layoff millions of Chinese/Maxican/Indian workers and ship the jobs back to the US or EU? Do you not care about those workers left to starve?
Well maybe I'm an oddball, but the study doesn't apply to me. My personality changed a lot when I it puberty.
The study also doesn't make sense when you consider that 1/4 of brain growth happens during the teens years. That alone could cause some major personality shifts.
I don't know if you've noticed but we have the same "bury brigrade" here on slashdot - People who use -1 overrated or -1 troll or -1 flamebait or -1 offtopic to bury opinions they don't like. When a post drops to (0) or (-1) it become invisible at the default settings.
From what I've observed this brigade is mostly anti-republican or anti-libertarian ("right wing kooks" is the label typically used).
Big Government is probably better since there's no profit involved, but BG has its own evils. Like the earlier idea I heard about "internet licenses" (you need to ask permission to publish a blog). Oh and eliminating porn from the net.
If you don't have one control freak (Verizon) then you have another control freak (Congress).
At least with Verizon I can say "fuck you" and cancel my service. I don't know how to do that with Congress.
I don't know anything about MagicJack, but it looks easy enough to use, and $20 a year is certainly a good price. That's cheaper than my current 5 c/minute rate. C-NBC called it a "Skype and Vonage killer"?
Most of those rules were invented AFTER the language was invented, by people with anal tendencies. Such as outlawing the double negative. Prior to ~1700 the double negative was not only an accepted part of language, but often ran into triple or quadruple negatives. The purpose was to add additional emphasis.
The blue book claim "Who refers to people. That and which refer to groups or things," sounds like an invented rule, not a reflection of the actual speakers of the language. i.e Prescriptive rather than descriptive. Real wordsmiths like ee cummins, Shakespeare, and Chaucer didn't give a fuck about rules. They wrote whatever they felt like writing.
- "Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous" (i.e., "There was not no man nowhere so virtuous")
- "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In all his lyf unto no maner wight." (i.e., "He never yet no vileness not said / In all his life to no sort of man.")
Yeah 5 billion years into the future. During the previous 1 billion we evolved from amino acids to cells to amphibians, lizards, and intelligent mammals. So by the time the earth expires, we'll likely have moved into Q-like beings. Even if we stayed on this planet, its eventual scalding by the nearby star wouldn't affect us.
As for asteroids that caused massive extinctions, the previous one was 70 million years ago. And 250 million years ago. During that timespan we evolved from small rodent-like lizards into modern mammals. Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
>>>I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
In Robert's Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon" it was greed that propelled humans to the Moon and Mars and outer planets. In fact that's pretty much true in every science fiction universe, even the utopian Star Trek. People don't do things for rational reasons like "we might go extinct" - they do them for personal gain, or a desire for a better life than the crappy one they have now.
My TV costs nothing, my phone is about $10/month, and my internet is $15. If I absolutely "had" to have cable channels, then I'd get Dish for $20 but there's nothing on cable that entices me enough to pay that bill. Anyway the total would be $45. 1/6th as much .
>>>$70 a month for a cell phone with small data plan
I didn't realize cable companies sold cellphones.. Hmmmm. Well I spend $5/month for mine, without a data plan.
They look at the internet as just another appliance.
Still it does seem their lives revolve around the net, with webcam chatting, youtube creations, live chats, and texting. Just like I always have my TV or Radio turned on, even it's just for noise. It's ever-present.
>>>If a user doesn't know about that option, it appears to them as if the updates are being made in spite of their desires.
Precisely. That's why it's called "silent updates" because Firefox 4 will be automatically defaulting to doing upgrades without the user's knowledge. If programmers were perfect, it would be okay to do that, but programmers are human and make mistakes just like any other human. That means sometimes the update will kill a browser (or plugin) and make it unusable.
I prefer to hold-off on updates until a suitable time has elapsed (say one month). Let the early adopters be the one who get screwed if the update has a bug in it.
>>>there had been a half dozen times where I had to ask my classmates a question AND they actually knew the answer
Your sentence triggered a memory. In the engineering major professors assigned ridiculous amounts of homework (like 5 hours per class) that was literally impossible for one person to finish (especially with ~40 hours a week already tied-up with classes and labs). So we split the work - one person did one class, another did another class, and so on. Then we traded homeworks.
So I guess I did come to rely upon my classmates, although not in the way the school intended.
>>>Overpriced is your opinion, and you're welcome to it. If you're not familiar with the Apple platform
I've been using them off-and-on since 1991. I forget which model was my first, but it was a one piece so probably the Mac SE (68000 based). Then a Quadra (68040), then the first PowerMac, followed by a Power G4 model running 10.5
The reason I used Commodores, Amigas, and Macs was because Windows 3.x was a piece of shit. I'm not exaggerating. Worst desktop I've ever used.
>>>the republicans are spiteful, self-centered assholes who sell out the country
Thank you. I've been waiting for a hate-filled troll to come along and spout a bunch of nonsense (and get modded +5 insightful by other trolls), JUST so I could post the following.
The most racist Party in the whole history of America:
1790s - the Founders abolished importation of slaves, abolished slavery in the north and northwest territories, and banned selling of slaves across state lines. They intended to abolish slavery in the south too but.....
1820s - the South, aka the Democrats, reversed a lot of the laws the Founders had put in place, and adopted a pro-slavery stance, thereby blocking any more progress toward complete abolition.
1860s - the Democrats seceded from the Union because a Republican won the presidency (and because they wanted protect slavery)
1880s - the Democrats invented the idea of Segregation
1910s - Democrat Wilson segregates blacks from the formerly unified army. He also invites the KKK to the White House for the first time.
1950s/60s/70s - the Democrats opposed/ voted against Civil Rights Laws. To quote Senator Byrd: "Rather I should die a thousand times, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels."
.
Republicans are racist? Perhaps so but the R Party's record looks golden compared to the D Party's record. And yes people claim the Democrats "changed" but when exactly? Name a year when Democrats suddenly stopped voting-down civil rights law, and turned pro-black? Because as far as I can tell, they never did. Democrats are still wholly against School Choice even though the majority of blacks are in favor of it (to escape falling-down innercity schools).
Actually in the case of 10.5, Opera did force me to upgrade from 10.0.
It was impossible to make the "update to 10.5" popup go away. Even when I clicked "no" it just kept coming back again and again. Probably a programming error, but nevertheless it left me with no choice.
No they really don't. It's why you can't run Mac OS on an IBM PC-compatible, without some major hacking. Macs don't have a BIOS like PCs have. Also Macs don't use the same ISA-based system that the original PC used.
>>>It's not patent infringement, it's willful theft of DNA that is the property of Monsanto.
For those who think this is a joke, go watch the video "Food Inc" especially the second half. They interview a number of farmers who did nothing wrong, but were sued by Monsanto because their DNA-modified lants had cross-pollinated with the natural wheat (or corn or soy plants). These farmers were driven into bankruptcy trying to defend themselves (according to the video).
It's equivalent to if RIAA started mailing-out copies of songs to random people's computers, and then sued that person for "possession of intellectual property", even though said person did nothing wrong.
Interesting. How much coverage is WWAN? (i.e. Can I get it in Wendover Utah?)
In the last hotel I stayed, I did search for a wireless connection, but found nothing. I asked the clerk and she said if I move one room to the left I can use their service for ~$90 a month. I said "no thanks". So instead I simply used the 7 dollar a month AOL/ Netscape account. Even if you are in the middle of nowhere there's always a phone line inside the hotel room. .
>>>per gigabit it's a lot cheaper than dialup
Is it? Let's see. Dialup lets me download 5 KB/s which is 12 gigabytes per month, and only costs $7. i.e. 58 cents per gigabyte. Verizon Wireless or Cricket Broadband charge $40 and are capped at 5 gigabytes. i.e. 800 cents per gigabyte.
58 versus 800 cents/gigabyte. I think your statement may be in error. Dialup is cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh.
No!
I just connect my dialup laptop to the local AOL or Netscape BBS, which is a free call. I guess if I was truly in the middle of noplace, like some indian reservation, then I wouldn't have that option but in the last seven years I've never encountered that problem.
>>>Doesn't AOL require you to install their bloatware to connect as well?
AOL does, but their subsidiary Netscape ISP does not. It just uses a plain-jane dialing program which will work with any browser you desire. As for the DSL I do have that at home, but cannot carry it with me on my various business-related hotel trips. Hence the need for dialup.
Oh and dialup really isn't that bad. While I'm at work I typically bittorrent 5 or 6 TV episodes, and then watch them when I get back to the hotel, or over the weekend.
>>>someone's $20 cheap shoes are falling apart
The Rockports I'm wearing only cost me $12 and are still holding-up seven years later. I think you're making a lot of unfounded assumptions about cost and quality - there's not always a direct correlation.
>>>Name brand products sold at Walmart are often manufactured to a lower standard of quality
Disagree. The PS2 and Gamecubes I bought at Walmart still work eight years later. Ditto the 21" CRT TV. My JVC VCR is still going strong, my microwave works perfectly, and these Levis laying in the corner still are in good shape (too bad they don't fit me anymore). Plus the food I buy is identical to the food I find in a grocery store, but about 50 cents less each carton.
I've not noticed that Walmart sells inferior quality.
And that's why I stop there almost every week.
>>>Walmart is busy demanding lower prices from its suppliers, lowering quality and causing jobs to be shipped overseas which is destroying the American employment base.
So what do you want Walmart to do? Layoff millions of Chinese/Maxican/Indian workers and ship the jobs back to the US or EU? Do you not care about those workers left to starve?
Well maybe I'm an oddball, but the study doesn't apply to me. My personality changed a lot when I it puberty.
The study also doesn't make sense when you consider that 1/4 of brain growth happens during the teens years. That alone could cause some major personality shifts.
I don't know if you've noticed but we have the same "bury brigrade" here on slashdot - People who use -1 overrated or -1 troll or -1 flamebait or -1 offtopic to bury opinions they don't like. When a post drops to (0) or (-1) it become invisible at the default settings.
From what I've observed this brigade is mostly anti-republican or anti-libertarian ("right wing kooks" is the label typically used).
Big Government is probably better since there's no profit involved, but BG has its own evils. Like the earlier idea I heard about "internet licenses" (you need to ask permission to publish a blog). Oh and eliminating porn from the net.
If you don't have one control freak (Verizon) then you have another control freak (Congress).
At least with Verizon I can say "fuck you" and cancel my service.
I don't know how to do that with Congress.
So how does SKype compare to this new competition I discovered? http://www.magicjack.com/5/index.asp
I don't know anything about MagicJack, but it looks easy enough to use, and $20 a year is certainly a good price. That's cheaper than my current 5 c/minute rate. C-NBC called it a "Skype and Vonage killer"?
>>>I earned less than $2 USD.
Yeah it's pretty sad when stealing pays better than legitimate work.
(I kid)
They pay $8 in a nice, clean, air conditioned environment.
Around $20 if you're a manager. That certainly beats 0.6 per hour for this data mining stuff.
Most of those rules were invented AFTER the language was invented, by people with anal tendencies. Such as outlawing the double negative. Prior to ~1700 the double negative was not only an accepted part of language, but often ran into triple or quadruple negatives. The purpose was to add additional emphasis.
The blue book claim "Who refers to people. That and which refer to groups or things," sounds like an invented rule, not a reflection of the actual speakers of the language. i.e Prescriptive rather than descriptive. Real wordsmiths like ee cummins, Shakespeare, and Chaucer didn't give a fuck about rules. They wrote whatever they felt like writing.
- "Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous" (i.e., "There was not no man nowhere so virtuous")
- "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In all his lyf unto no maner wight." (i.e., "He never yet no vileness not said / In all his life to no sort of man.")
>>>This planet has an expiration date.
Yeah 5 billion years into the future. During the previous 1 billion we evolved from amino acids to cells to amphibians, lizards, and intelligent mammals. So by the time the earth expires, we'll likely have moved into Q-like beings. Even if we stayed on this planet, its eventual scalding by the nearby star wouldn't affect us.
As for asteroids that caused massive extinctions, the previous one was 70 million years ago. And 250 million years ago. During that timespan we evolved from small rodent-like lizards into modern mammals. Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
>>>I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
In Robert's Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon" it was greed that propelled humans to the Moon and Mars and outer planets. In fact that's pretty much true in every science fiction universe, even the utopian Star Trek. People don't do things for rational reasons like "we might go extinct" - they do them for personal gain, or a desire for a better life than the crappy one they have now.
$300??? That's just nuts.
My TV costs nothing, my phone is about $10/month, and my internet is $15. If I absolutely "had" to have cable channels, then I'd get Dish for $20 but there's nothing on cable that entices me enough to pay that bill. Anyway the total would be $45. 1/6th as much
.
>>>$70 a month for a cell phone with small data plan
I didn't realize cable companies sold cellphones.. Hmmmm. Well I spend $5/month for mine, without a data plan.
They look at the internet as just another appliance.
Still it does seem their lives revolve around the net, with webcam chatting, youtube creations, live chats, and texting. Just like I always have my TV or Radio turned on, even it's just for noise. It's ever-present.
>>>If a user doesn't know about that option, it appears to them as if the updates are being made in spite of their desires.
Precisely. That's why it's called "silent updates" because Firefox 4 will be automatically defaulting to doing upgrades without the user's knowledge. If programmers were perfect, it would be okay to do that, but programmers are human and make mistakes just like any other human. That means sometimes the update will kill a browser (or plugin) and make it unusable.
I prefer to hold-off on updates until a suitable time has elapsed (say one month). Let the early adopters be the one who get screwed if the update has a bug in it.
>>>there had been a half dozen times where I had to ask my classmates a question AND they actually knew the answer
Your sentence triggered a memory. In the engineering major professors assigned ridiculous amounts of homework (like 5 hours per class) that was literally impossible for one person to finish (especially with ~40 hours a week already tied-up with classes and labs). So we split the work - one person did one class, another did another class, and so on. Then we traded homeworks.
So I guess I did come to rely upon my classmates, although not in the way the school intended.
I wish! I may be the only person to ever survive four years of college and still be a virgin.
(Fortunately year 5 and an easily-impressed sophomore girl cured that malady.)
>>>Overpriced is your opinion, and you're welcome to it. If you're not familiar with the Apple platform
I've been using them off-and-on since 1991. I forget which model was my first, but it was a one piece so probably the Mac SE (68000 based). Then a Quadra (68040), then the first PowerMac, followed by a Power G4 model running 10.5
The reason I used Commodores, Amigas, and Macs was because Windows 3.x was a piece of shit. I'm not exaggerating. Worst desktop I've ever used.
>>>the republicans are spiteful, self-centered assholes who sell out the country
Thank you. I've been waiting for a hate-filled troll to come along and spout a bunch of nonsense (and get modded +5 insightful by other trolls), JUST so I could post the following.
The most racist Party in the whole history of America:
1790s - the Founders abolished importation of slaves, abolished slavery in the north and northwest territories, and banned selling of slaves across state lines. They intended to abolish slavery in the south too but.....
1820s - the South, aka the Democrats, reversed a lot of the laws the Founders had put in place, and adopted a pro-slavery stance, thereby blocking any more progress toward complete abolition.
1860s - the Democrats seceded from the Union because a Republican won the presidency (and because they wanted protect slavery)
1880s - the Democrats invented the idea of Segregation
1910s - Democrat Wilson segregates blacks from the formerly unified army. He also invites the KKK to the White House for the first time.
1950s/60s/70s - the Democrats opposed/ voted against Civil Rights Laws. To quote Senator Byrd: "Rather I should die a thousand times, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels."
.
Republicans are racist? Perhaps so but the R Party's record looks golden compared to the D Party's record. And yes people claim the Democrats "changed" but when exactly? Name a year when Democrats suddenly stopped voting-down civil rights law, and turned pro-black? Because as far as I can tell, they never did. Democrats are still wholly against School Choice even though the majority of blacks are in favor of it (to escape falling-down innercity schools).
Actually in the case of 10.5, Opera did force me to upgrade from 10.0.
It was impossible to make the "update to 10.5" popup go away. Even when I clicked "no" it just kept coming back again and again. Probably a programming error, but nevertheless it left me with no choice.
>>>Mans and PCs use the SAME INSTRUCTION SET.
No they really don't. It's why you can't run Mac OS on an IBM PC-compatible, without some major hacking. Macs don't have a BIOS like PCs have. Also Macs don't use the same ISA-based system that the original PC used.
>>>It's not patent infringement, it's willful theft of DNA that is the property of Monsanto.
For those who think this is a joke, go watch the video "Food Inc" especially the second half. They interview a number of farmers who did nothing wrong, but were sued by Monsanto because their DNA-modified lants had cross-pollinated with the natural wheat (or corn or soy plants). These farmers were driven into bankruptcy trying to defend themselves (according to the video).
It's equivalent to if RIAA started mailing-out copies of songs to random people's computers, and then sued that person for "possession of intellectual property", even though said person did nothing wrong.
Interesting. How much coverage is WWAN? (i.e. Can I get it in Wendover Utah?)
In the last hotel I stayed, I did search for a wireless connection, but found nothing. I asked the clerk and she said if I move one room to the left I can use their service for ~$90 a month. I said "no thanks". So instead I simply used the 7 dollar a month AOL/ Netscape account. Even if you are in the middle of nowhere there's always a phone line inside the hotel room.
.
>>>per gigabit it's a lot cheaper than dialup
Is it? Let's see. Dialup lets me download 5 KB/s which is 12 gigabytes per month, and only costs $7. i.e. 58 cents per gigabyte. Verizon Wireless or Cricket Broadband charge $40 and are capped at 5 gigabytes. i.e. 800 cents per gigabyte.
58 versus 800 cents/gigabyte. I think your statement may be in error. Dialup is cheaper.