It just so happens, that when the the government is particularly bad, and if the US was anywhere nearby, the US gets blamed wholesale for the outcome. Hm. The US, in a sense, installed the French Government after the German Occupation. So - um, wow, that French government is BAD. They're evil. Let's go bomb the Americans for putting them back in power, because the world would have been SOOO much better if we'd just left Hitler in charge.
Or rather a "conservative" idea. Democrats can be champions of conservative causes.
It's a user-fee. user-fee is conservative code for - "make someone else pay for it". Brought to you by the same brilliant people who thought up toll-roads and sin-taxes.
The whole point of a tax is to pool everyone's resources for an expensive item that benefits everybody. A road, for example, benefits EVERYBODY, even someone who doesn't drive. Even someone who never drove. Even someone who doesn't even live in the same state. The system of roads enables commerce, and commerce IS the economy, and without that commerce, Joe "I don't drive, why should I pay for the roads?" doesn't enjoy the benefits of living in a society with a vibrant robust economy.
Sure, there seems to be something unfair about having to pay for schools when you don't have any children. But then again, I sure feel better if that truck driver has at least a high school diploma, and understands the basics of physics when he tries to steer or brake his 18-wheeler laden with liquid nitrogen.
So how does space research benefit all of society? One example: The GPS satellite system. Funded by the military, but made possible by civillian space research. Without GPS, we might not have beaten Saddam Hussein. If we had not beaten Saddam Hussein, first off, there'd likely be a whole buttload of dead Jews, but that's beside the point. Hussein would then likely have moved on to Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Lybia, and anyone else who would rather be a part of the Great Arab Third Reich than be squashed by anthrax-tipped scuds. Osama Bin Laden would have been irrelevant. England, Russia, Mexico and Venezuela would also become irrlelvant, as more than 1/2 the world's Oil reserves would be controlled by a single source. The measely few million we "wasted" on space research back in the 70's and 80's would have been nice, but now with oil at $200 a barrel, our economy is fucked, our ability to wage war to defend our way of life is fucked. Better grow a beard, learn Arabic, and grab a copy of the Quaran, buddy, because you didn't want to look into the future, we're going back to the 12th century.
In my opinion (which is not so humble today) - the MORE ex-programmers move into marketing and managerial positions, the better place the world will be.
We've seen what happens when you put MBA's into marketing and managerial positions in tech companies. Hell on Earth.
The world needs MORE engineering-driven tech companies, and less lawyer-driven tech companies.
This isn't going to reduce the amount of traffic congestion or pollution on the strip. It will simply increase the capacity. The same amount of idiots will still drive, the sidewalks will still be flooded with pedestrians, and the monorail will bear an increase in the total amount of traffic on the strip. Said increase will be funnelled through the lobbies of all the casinos at which it stops. Of course.
The other thing is, you board at the BACK of the casinos. In other words, strip/street traffic has to go through the casino to get onto the monorail, then when you get to your destination, you need to exit through the casino. I imagine there's a reason for that, and that reason is probably to get people to spend more $$$ at the casinos.
nothing gets done in Las Vegas unless it somehow funnels more money into the casinos.
Actually, what would be better would be a very long conveyor-style system to keep the traffic constantly flowing. Like the ones in airports. (in fact, they already have a couple of systems like this at Ceasars, and one other hotel there). I think that a monorail, carrying 400 passengers per train, would not even make an insignificant pinprick in the gross amount of people who are moving up and down the strip.
A 3-meter wide conveyer moving in both directions, covered to protect from the rain, would be best.
Las Vegas already HAS a monorail system. It goes between the MGM Grand up and down the strip. It connects about 3 or 4 hotels, and is being expanded.
It's been running for years, and is really the best way to get around, at least for the few hotels it connects. Sometimes, even the sidewalks are so crowded, it's difficult just to walk the strip.
I dunno. Watching current American events - I've been getting kind of turned-off on democracy lately.
I mean, forget the electoral college. Face it, our choices were Gore or Bush. I think we were doomed - Florida or not.
Look at the whole DMCA/SSSCA/UTICA thread from yesterday. We have to vote for a fascist neo-nazi theocracy in order to protect our fair use rights. What kind of crap is that? This country sucks, democracy sucks. The American people can't be trusted to run their own fucking country, without running it into the ground.
What we need is a benevolent dictator. I volunteer.
This is actually one of the reasons WHY LEO was chosen as the place for the ISS. It's "cleaner" space.
The biggest threat (imo) is from polar-launched satellites (typically military surveillance), which produce debris which typically crosses the other orbits more frequently. Launch a satellite in a normal orbit, and all the space debris created will be generally moving in a similar orbit at a similar velocity. 17-20,000 mph. No space object is going to encounter another space object at 20,000mph because it's all going pretty much the same speed in the same direction at that altitude. Anything moving faster is going to gain altitude, and anything moving slower is going to lose altitude. It's the polar orbits that produce the danger.
However, the effectiveness of a given solar panel is going to depend on the angle at which sunlight hits it, so you can't just take the area of the disk, because that assumes it's all pointing directly at the sun. Only a small fraction is pointing directly at the sun. The stuff towards the EDGE of the visible disk of a full moon is pointing 90-degrees from the sun, and probably not collecting much in the way of light, unless you use a servo-mounted mirror, or panels mounted on servos which track the sun. This significantly adds to the cost and maintenence burden.
Don Phillipo: "Gee Mister **AA, that's some nice content you got there. It would be a real shame if something were to, you know, HAPPEN to it. Like if someone were to violate the licensing terms. Listen, I think we can make a deal here. We can offer you protection from these thieving pirates. For a small fee. . . "
Most of these Politicians just suck up to the Christian Right. They realize, even BUSH realizes, that they're psycho fanatics. Remember the Nixon tape, recently released, where he was conversing with Billy Graham, and Billy Graham was telling Nixon about how terrible it was that the country was being run by the Jews in the media, and Nixon just humored him and said, "yeah, that's right, I believe that" in a perceptibly sarcastic tone. They want the Christian Right's money, but I don't think they seriously want those ideals. Abortion, maybe, but not a lot of the other stuff that's talked about as scare tactics. Your John Aschcrofts' you gotta worry about though. Bush uses the idealistic and simplistic Good Vs. Evil religious rhetoric, because it's convenient to manipulate the emotions of the masses. I don't believe for one second that he has a drop of actual faith in him.
And look at the last several major Democratic front-runners. Carter, Gore, Clinton - all HARD-CORE Southern Baptists. Clinton may not have outlawed abortion, and he may have tried to suck-up to the women vote, but Reno didn't do much to improve reproductive freedom in this country - by way of standing by and doing nothing while the abortion clinic bombers ran wild. This domestic terrorism was allowed to happen, and as a result, the availability of abortions in the US declined by a sharper amount than it did under the three consecutive republican terms of Reagan AND Bush the Elder.
Face it, the religion issue is a red-herring to distract us from the REAL issues. And it's simply a way to get money. Look at the reform party, taken over by the REAL Christian Fanatics, because they were disgusted by the republican party's non-committal stance on some of the religious issues. The main thing I'm worried about with the republicans, is the suck-uppage to the oil industry.
I agree. I wrote Feinstein prior to the last election regarding UTICA and DMCA, and I got the "shaft" letter back - illustrating her complete support for sucking up to the entertainment industry. It's probably not the amount of money she gets, it's the perks. How can an aging woman refuse lunch with Robert Redford, or an elegant dinner party with Michael Douglas and several of the Baldwin brothers?
I wrote her back telling her that because of her position, I could no longer in clear conscience support a candidate with such grossly unamerican ideals. So I voted republican. And I took a shower afterwards. I still feel dirty. And she won anyways. By a HUGE margin. Welcome to California.
(btw - voting Republican in California means that you want the entire coastline to be lined with offshore oil rigs, and the air constantly filled with the stench of refineries. One thing Californians love is nature, our natural resources, the beauty of the outdoors, because the weather is quite often nice enough to actually do things outside year-round - I guess you don't care much about pollution when you're spending all your time indoors because it's 15 degrees out and 3 feet of snow - frankly, I'd MUCH rather have rolling blackouts than to hand it all over to the oil industry's exploitation).
Unfortunately, here is the UGLY choice we Americans have.
Republicans or Democrats. Corporate Welfare for the Energy and Defense industries, or Corporate Welfare for the Entertainment industry. Or in GE's case, they have BOTH parties fighting to suck their cock. It's good to make jet engines for tanks and fighter planes, power plants, and also own a major segment of the media.
Every old machine I've ever gotten rid of, I've done so at a garage sale or swap meet. I don't think I've ever thrown a piece of hardware away into the garbage. Working or non-working.
Although I have some old ISA SCSI cards and 48-pin 4-meg simms I'm thinking of tossing. ..
(Ironically, I've got about 250 megs worth of RAM in the form of 48-pin simms that are probably all perfectly working, but obsolete to the point of useless. I think they'd make good secondary storage if there was some sort of PCI card to plug em all into - they'd make a great RAM drive - they'd outperform disk).
better than angering your genuine customers by making them wait for support, because you're busy supporting some yahoo who downloaded your software from hotline and entered a hack serial number from Surfer's Serials.
The whole Han Solo/Greedo thing gets really creepy on a deep level here:
My 8 year old son and I had a huge argument about this, and he actually didn't believe me when I told him that in the ORIGINAL movie, Han Solo shot first. He said that's not true, because Han Solo was a good guy, a hero, and would never had shot first.
I borrowed an original tape from a friend (um- er- after paying a license fee to LucasFilm and 20th Century Fox), and showed my son (paid for him too), and he was completely dumbfounded.
"Why would they DO a thing like that? It totally changes EVERYTHING!" he complained.
I explained, gently, that Han Solo wasn't always a hero. That he started out as a criminal. A smuggler. A law breaker. And he changed, he became a good man. A hero. My son liked that angle on the story much better, and thinks George Lucas was an idiot for changing it.
Most video cameras nowadays record to little itty-bitty proprietary format tapes, players for which cost a lot of money.
For me, it's a no-brainer to want to take footage from my Sony MiniDV, and get it onto a DVD to sent to the grandparents or whatever. You can't stream video over the internet, not even from DSL, so the next best thing is to snail-mail a DVD. Much smaller and more durable than VHS.
Granted, not everyone out there wants to invest in this kind of equipment. Granted, my Sony Mini DV camera was like $1k, and upgrades to my computer to do DVD production, another $1k, and software, another $1k. That's a lot of money to spend just for the convenience and cost savings of not having to dump raw footage down to VHS via the VCR, but there are other intangibles, like, DVD media lasts longer, takes less physical storage space, etc.
Microsoft, of course, has demonstrated that they totally don't "get it" when it comes to DVD, by adopting DVD+R as their "standard" instead of DVD-R. Apparently just to spite Apple. Possibly to suck-up to the content industry (MPAA).
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"good government" is an oxymoron.
It just so happens, that when the the government is particularly bad, and if the US was anywhere nearby, the US gets blamed wholesale for the outcome.
Hm. The US, in a sense, installed the French Government after the German Occupation. So - um, wow, that French government is BAD. They're evil. Let's go bomb the Americans for putting them back in power, because the world would have been SOOO much better if we'd just left Hitler in charge.
Or rather a "conservative" idea. Democrats can be champions of conservative causes.
It's a user-fee.
user-fee is conservative code for - "make someone else pay for it". Brought to you by the same brilliant people who thought up toll-roads and sin-taxes.
The whole point of a tax is to pool everyone's resources for an expensive item that benefits everybody. A road, for example, benefits EVERYBODY, even someone who doesn't drive. Even someone who never drove. Even someone who doesn't even live in the same state. The system of roads enables commerce, and commerce IS the economy, and without that commerce, Joe "I don't drive, why should I pay for the roads?" doesn't enjoy the benefits of living in a society with a vibrant robust economy.
Sure, there seems to be something unfair about having to pay for schools when you don't have any children. But then again, I sure feel better if that truck driver has at least a high school diploma, and understands the basics of physics when he tries to steer or brake his 18-wheeler laden with liquid nitrogen.
So how does space research benefit all of society?
One example:
The GPS satellite system. Funded by the military, but made possible by civillian space research.
Without GPS, we might not have beaten Saddam Hussein. If we had not beaten Saddam Hussein, first off, there'd likely be a whole buttload of dead Jews, but that's beside the point. Hussein would then likely have moved on to Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Lybia, and anyone else who would rather be a part of the Great Arab Third Reich than be squashed by anthrax-tipped scuds. Osama Bin Laden would have been irrelevant. England, Russia, Mexico and Venezuela would also become irrlelvant, as more than 1/2 the world's Oil reserves would be controlled by a single source. The measely few million we "wasted" on space research back in the 70's and 80's would have been nice, but now with oil at $200 a barrel, our economy is fucked, our ability to wage war to defend our way of life is fucked. Better grow a beard, learn Arabic, and grab a copy of the Quaran, buddy, because you didn't want to look into the future, we're going back to the 12th century.
Sounds like propaganda to me.
Name one thing (THING) that Bill Gates coded himself, that wasn't stolen or bought from somewhere else.
In my opinion (which is not so humble today) - the MORE ex-programmers move into marketing and managerial positions, the better place the world will be.
We've seen what happens when you put MBA's into marketing and managerial positions in tech companies. Hell on Earth.
The world needs MORE engineering-driven tech companies, and less lawyer-driven tech companies.
This isn't going to reduce the amount of traffic congestion or pollution on the strip. It will simply increase the capacity. The same amount of idiots will still drive, the sidewalks will still be flooded with pedestrians, and the monorail will bear an increase in the total amount of traffic on the strip. Said increase will be funnelled through the lobbies of all the casinos at which it stops. Of course.
The other thing is, you board at the BACK of the casinos. In other words, strip/street traffic has to go through the casino to get onto the monorail, then when you get to your destination, you need to exit through the casino. I imagine there's a reason for that, and that reason is probably to get people to spend more $$$ at the casinos.
nothing gets done in Las Vegas unless it somehow funnels more money into the casinos.
Actually, what would be better would be a very long conveyor-style system to keep the traffic constantly flowing. Like the ones in airports. (in fact, they already have a couple of systems like this at Ceasars, and one other hotel there). I think that a monorail, carrying 400 passengers per train, would not even make an insignificant pinprick in the gross amount of people who are moving up and down the strip.
A 3-meter wide conveyer moving in both directions, covered to protect from the rain, would be best.
Las Vegas already HAS a monorail system. It goes between the MGM Grand up and down the strip. It connects about 3 or 4 hotels, and is being expanded.
It's been running for years, and is really the best way to get around, at least for the few hotels it connects. Sometimes, even the sidewalks are so crowded, it's difficult just to walk the strip.
The statement that they're going to be making far less merchandising for this movie accomplishes the main goal of sales:
Convince your prospective buyer that the product is going to be in limited supply. Therefore, in their mind, it will be "worth" more.
That's all. The fact that this statement is being broadcast in all the news sources is basically free advertising for Lucasfilm.
I dunno.
Watching current American events - I've been getting kind of turned-off on democracy lately.
I mean, forget the electoral college. Face it, our choices were Gore or Bush. I think we were doomed - Florida or not.
Look at the whole DMCA/SSSCA/UTICA thread from yesterday. We have to vote for a fascist neo-nazi theocracy in order to protect our fair use rights. What kind of crap is that? This country sucks, democracy sucks. The American people can't be trusted to run their own fucking country, without running it into the ground.
What we need is a benevolent dictator. I volunteer.
This is actually one of the reasons WHY LEO was chosen as the place for the ISS. It's "cleaner" space.
The biggest threat (imo) is from polar-launched satellites (typically military surveillance), which produce debris which typically crosses the other orbits more frequently. Launch a satellite in a normal orbit, and all the space debris created will be generally moving in a similar orbit at a similar velocity. 17-20,000 mph. No space object is going to encounter another space object at 20,000mph because it's all going pretty much the same speed in the same direction at that altitude. Anything moving faster is going to gain altitude, and anything moving slower is going to lose altitude. It's the polar orbits that produce the danger.
However, the effectiveness of a given solar panel is going to depend on the angle at which sunlight hits it, so you can't just take the area of the disk, because that assumes it's all pointing directly at the sun. Only a small fraction is pointing directly at the sun. The stuff towards the EDGE of the visible disk of a full moon is pointing 90-degrees from the sun, and probably not collecting much in the way of light, unless you use a servo-mounted mirror, or panels mounted on servos which track the sun. This significantly adds to the cost and maintenence burden.
"roughly" circular? (hexagonal) .)
"roughly" 30 cubits? (31.415926535898. .
what would have been REALLY satisfying is if HE was your waiter.
I'll be satisfied when Diane Feinstein is my crack-whore.
Don Phillipo: "Gee Mister **AA, that's some nice content you got there. It would be a real shame if something were to, you know, HAPPEN to it. Like if someone were to violate the licensing terms. Listen, I think we can make a deal here. We can offer you protection from these thieving pirates. For a small fee. . . "
It probably wouldn't be so bad as that.
Most of these Politicians just suck up to the Christian Right. They realize, even BUSH realizes, that they're psycho fanatics. Remember the Nixon tape, recently released, where he was conversing with Billy Graham, and Billy Graham was telling Nixon about how terrible it was that the country was being run by the Jews in the media, and Nixon just humored him and said, "yeah, that's right, I believe that" in a perceptibly sarcastic tone. They want the Christian Right's money, but I don't think they seriously want those ideals. Abortion, maybe, but not a lot of the other stuff that's talked about as scare tactics. Your John Aschcrofts' you gotta worry about though. Bush uses the idealistic and simplistic Good Vs. Evil religious rhetoric, because it's convenient to manipulate the emotions of the masses. I don't believe for one second that he has a drop of actual faith in him.
And look at the last several major Democratic front-runners. Carter, Gore, Clinton - all HARD-CORE Southern Baptists. Clinton may not have outlawed abortion, and he may have tried to suck-up to the women vote, but Reno didn't do much to improve reproductive freedom in this country - by way of standing by and doing nothing while the abortion clinic bombers ran wild. This domestic terrorism was allowed to happen, and as a result, the availability of abortions in the US declined by a sharper amount than it did under the three consecutive republican terms of Reagan AND Bush the Elder.
Face it, the religion issue is a red-herring to distract us from the REAL issues. And it's simply a way to get money. Look at the reform party, taken over by the REAL Christian Fanatics, because they were disgusted by the republican party's non-committal stance on some of the religious issues.
The main thing I'm worried about with the republicans, is the suck-uppage to the oil industry.
Campbell was an oil-industry stooge.
But I did vote for him. Argh, I think I'm gonna be sick.
I agree. I wrote Feinstein prior to the last election regarding UTICA and DMCA, and I got the "shaft" letter back - illustrating her complete support for sucking up to the entertainment industry. It's probably not the amount of money she gets, it's the perks. How can an aging woman refuse lunch with Robert Redford, or an elegant dinner party with Michael Douglas and several of the Baldwin brothers?
I wrote her back telling her that because of her position, I could no longer in clear conscience support a candidate with such grossly unamerican ideals.
So I voted republican.
And I took a shower afterwards. I still feel dirty. And she won anyways. By a HUGE margin. Welcome to California.
(btw - voting Republican in California means that you want the entire coastline to be lined with offshore oil rigs, and the air constantly filled with the stench of refineries. One thing Californians love is nature, our natural resources, the beauty of the outdoors, because the weather is quite often nice enough to actually do things outside year-round - I guess you don't care much about pollution when you're spending all your time indoors because it's 15 degrees out and 3 feet of snow - frankly, I'd MUCH rather have rolling blackouts than to hand it all over to the oil industry's exploitation).
. .. yeah, get out there and vote! And whine. And give blood too!
Unfortunately, here is the UGLY choice we Americans have.
Republicans or Democrats.
Corporate Welfare for the Energy and Defense industries, or Corporate Welfare for the Entertainment industry. Or in GE's case, they have BOTH parties fighting to suck their cock. It's good to make jet engines for tanks and fighter planes, power plants, and also own a major segment of the media.
Every old machine I've ever gotten rid of, I've done so at a garage sale or swap meet. I don't think I've ever thrown a piece of hardware away into the garbage. Working or non-working.
.
Although I have some old ISA SCSI cards and 48-pin 4-meg simms I'm thinking of tossing. .
(Ironically, I've got about 250 megs worth of RAM in the form of 48-pin simms that are probably all perfectly working, but obsolete to the point of useless. I think they'd make good secondary storage if there was some sort of PCI card to plug em all into - they'd make a great RAM drive - they'd outperform disk).
better than angering your genuine customers by making them wait for support, because you're busy supporting some yahoo who downloaded your software from hotline and entered a hack serial number from Surfer's Serials.
The whole Han Solo/Greedo thing gets really creepy on a deep level here:
My 8 year old son and I had a huge argument about this, and he actually didn't believe me when I told him that in the ORIGINAL movie, Han Solo shot first. He said that's not true, because Han Solo was a good guy, a hero, and would never had shot first.
I borrowed an original tape from a friend (um- er- after paying a license fee to LucasFilm and 20th Century Fox), and showed my son (paid for him too), and he was completely dumbfounded.
"Why would they DO a thing like that? It totally changes EVERYTHING!" he complained.
I explained, gently, that Han Solo wasn't always a hero. That he started out as a criminal. A smuggler. A law breaker. And he changed, he became a good man. A hero.
My son liked that angle on the story much better, and thinks George Lucas was an idiot for changing it.
Then you *should* vigorously enforce serial number registration on support.
Give NO support to people who can't cough up a valid serial number - whether it's a 90-day eval serial, or a full license key.
There. That ought to solve your whiney-ass problem.
Au contraire.
Most video cameras nowadays record to little itty-bitty proprietary format tapes, players for which cost a lot of money.
For me, it's a no-brainer to want to take footage from my Sony MiniDV, and get it onto a DVD to sent to the grandparents or whatever. You can't stream video over the internet, not even from DSL, so the next best thing is to snail-mail a DVD. Much smaller and more durable than VHS.
Granted, not everyone out there wants to invest in this kind of equipment. Granted, my Sony Mini DV camera was like $1k, and upgrades to my computer to do DVD production, another $1k, and software, another $1k. That's a lot of money to spend just for the convenience and cost savings of not having to dump raw footage down to VHS via the VCR, but there are other intangibles, like, DVD media lasts longer, takes less physical storage space, etc.
Microsoft, of course, has demonstrated that they totally don't "get it" when it comes to DVD, by adopting DVD+R as their "standard" instead of DVD-R. Apparently just to spite Apple. Possibly to suck-up to the content industry (MPAA).