I forgot, geologists (vulcanologists) are also a dime-a-dozen on Hawaii. I'm sure they'd also want to be close to where the "action" is in exogeology research.
The only PROBLEM with this, is that Hawaii has such a small population, they can't lobby congress effectively for big-budget-science projects like this. So we'll probably end up locating this thing in Texas instead.
Mona Kea, Hawaii would be MY choice. I'll scout it out for the rest of y'all, 'k?
As a bonus, there's already a big space/scientific community there for Keck. Rocket components can be delivered from west-coast aerospace industries like Boeing and Lockheed via ocean vessel, and it's closer to the equator than any other US territory, PLUS it's halfway to Russia, so Cosmonauts and RSA personnel on joint ventures can easily access it. PLUS, having a big electromagnetic "anything" launcher pointed westward in the middle of the pacific would REALLY piss China off.
There is no way we'll not have to worry about overpopulation. Overpopulation is now - it's last year, it's 50 years ago.
Colonization of other worlds, that's hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of years from now. Overpopulation will be a problem that will have to be dealt with in a much much sooner time-frame. Either through mass-extinction, or somehow learning to cope with 50 billion humans.
(by the way, latex allergies are rising in our population. If you think about it, it's evolution in action. Those who are allergic to latex (like myself) are a bit more likely to breed successfully (got 3 rug rats myself! I know there are other options, but reduce the options - and you have an increased probability of fertility) therefore, . . . well, you do the math).
Now - about population control, even the most draconian least free governments on the planet (Communist Maoist China) has TRIED this, and failed miserably. They've managed to put a dent in their growth curve, but it's still increasing. In the long run, it's not going to work in China, and if it can't work in China, how in hell do you think it's going to work in a democracy. Nobody's going to vote for that until we're up to our armpits in starving corpses and feces. By that time, nature will have taken care of it.
Well, one thing's for sure, the opinions here on slashdot seem pretty much the same as my opinion when I read and took the survey a couple of days ago.
I felt it was so limited, I sent an email to them. I highly recommend you all do the same.
I'm guessing that this survey data was going to be used to present to the government as "justification" for projects and future budgeting. I hope they get much more out of this than that.
Affordable launch technology really needs to be the #1 priority. Until we can get into orbit without breaking the budget and getting the republicans all in a huff, we need to really focus and focus HARD on making launches much, much cheaper.
I see that there are many many problems that humanity is facing in the next 100-1000-10000 years, and pretty much all of them hinge on getting a cheap, renewable energy source. And the only good, safe bet we have is orbital solar power. And that's NOT going to happen until we develop a cheap way to launch and assemble it. That's got to be our #1 priority. With cheap launches, we have a much more economical outlook on having a stronger presence in space, and with a stronger presence in space, we have a much better chance of surviving a catastrophe like global climate change, epidemic, or asteroid impact. Further down the road - 5000+ years, if we can find and colonize some other planets, even if we never acheive faster than light travel, we can at least broaden our chances at surviving longer, even after the sun explodes. (er- okay, "expands"), and maybe in the 10,000-year range, we can have spread far enough that a local supernova wouldn't eradicate us either.
there's nothing out there for them but advertising and crap
I notice you're still here.
. . . .
My you're observant, so why didn't you notice I said "them"?
I have my own reasons for being on the net, and spending the money for a DSL account, which have little or nothing to do with the reasons why I believe 99% of the rest of the world came online.
I wasn't talking about myself, I was talking about the "internet public at large" - the REASON why there was a boom in the first place, the reason why millions of people felt like it was worth the money, time and effort to sign up for the internet.
All of those reasons are gone or marginalized, and I was not critiquing the reasons why things have changed - merely stating the observation that those things HAVE changed.
I have a DSL connection, and I'm happy with it, and I never did the napster thing, or the online trading thing, or most of the others (except email). But I'm not 99% of people out there that I know. The non-technical people that I know that were on the internet 2 years ago, all are either seriously reconsidering it, or have switched their computers off and put them into the garage. Most of them are not planning on upgrading machines 3 or 4 years old.
I wasn't complaining about the evolution of the internet. Just stating that it HAS happened, and it has happened for certain reasons: businesses on the internet have steered it in certain directions, mainly in order to protect their rights, and maximize profit potential - because when zillions of people were signing up, they started to get nervous over the lawlessness of the net, and how these new subscibers were taking advantage of them. Now that they levelled the playing field - it's no longer an attractive one for most people - so ironically, the corps that wanted to have this huge subsciber base, and force them all to "play nice" have found that the huge subscriber base would rather go outside for a walk than sit on the internet and watch banner ads and delete spam.
Now, I'm not saying that people are fleeing the net - the stats don't agree with that. But I'm betting that the rates of new subscribers, and new PC purchases are way down. Numbers may be increasing, but rate of increase is definately down, and that is why the internet economy has imploded.
I'm not sure I trust ATI anymore - they keep fucking around with their drivers. Their hardware is pretty good, but on the Mac side, their drivers have always been a day late and a dollar short.
I guess the other way you *could* do it would be through some remote-control method (like rhosting or pc anywhere, terminal services, or my favorite, VNC) - pop up a browser on a machine behind the firewall and manage it thru that - but then again, if you shut down the firewall, you're sawing off the limb you're sitting on. . .
I guess "screw" was rather inflammatory - I should have enclosed it in quotes - since this is the implied attitude of the ISP. I don't believe that it's in any way screwing the ISP - in fact, I NAT myself. I think they should charge a scale for bandwidth myself (within reason) that way, on a normal month, I probably wouldn't pay as much.
The only way this is "screwing" the ISP - is that it's more "screwing with" because the service agreement specifically states (in most cases) "a single machine".
What's next. a limit on dual CPU machines?
Your linksys config "webserver" IS accessible to the outside world. At least mine is - if you enable remote administration - you can punch in the IP address, and the password, and there you are.
Of course, if your provider dhcp's you, knowing the IP address if you're not there is half the battle.
The question we should be asking ourselves here is:
Why WAS there an internet boom in the first place?
It's because a whole lot of people saw a GREAT value in the amount of money it cost to buy a computer, hook up to the internet. What you got for that money was virtually FREE, convenient communication, (IM, email) with anyone anywhere in the world, free music, free software, etc.
Now, many of those formerly compelling reasons have evaporated:
IM - is a world of divided standards, so you can only talk to AOL users if you're an AOL user, MSN if your an MSN user, etc.
email - is a world where you need to sift through 20 spam messages to find your one message. Also the monoculture of email clients created a nightmare reality of viruses.
nntp - spam is certainly a problem, as is the bulk of news services no longer carrying binaries.
Search - pay per search, or commercially-supported search (ie - paid-for results placement).
Stock Trading - find me a stock worth investing in today. It was half a function of cheap trading, but also half a function of stocks where you could actually make money.
WEB - commercial consolidation funnels most people to portals. Nobody can afford to host anymore, so people's websites are either overrun with popups or they're very small, and hosted on very slow hardware, and anyone posting material of any worth has been shut down due to copyright concerns. Anything interesting or non-mainstream is either impossible to find now, or shut down. I recently went through my bookmarks.html list, of 500k, accumulated over the past 8 years or so - and a good 70% of the URLs were dead. Making me regret not saving the content to my local hard drive. (and I have saved a great deal anyway).
A Voice - running your own server used to be a great democratic equalizer. It's no longer affordable to the vast majority of people. For all but the most basic uses, you can't address the web at large anymore, because 56k is not enough, cable and DSL providers are "gunning" for any attempt at using the service for servers, and T1 is still prohibitively expensive.
Free Music - the age of napster is finished.
Free Software - I'm not talking about Free Software, I'm talking about that which the BSA is making extinct. Warez. Right or wrong, it was one major compelling reason people got onto the internet.
The only compelling things left I can see are:
email/im - despite the fact that they're not what they used to be, they're still very useful, but there's no need for broadband here.
Corporate Software websites - where you can usually get up to date drivers and updates. Most of the time, broadband isn't required.
Free Software - If you're a Linux-head - you still need broadband for downloading those isos.
Marketing - ah yes. If you're an advertiser, the internet is your friend, and a very compelling reason to get broadband, or even a T1. That is, until everyone who has signed up for the internet in the past 3 years finally realizes that there's nothing out there for them but advertising and crap, and drop the service.
I'm curious as to what the effect is of that new "Speed Download" software you can get on the Mac, that supposedly opens multiple connections with a server to speed up downloads. Won't THAT look like NATted devices?
I'm guessing that our friends at LinkSys, sensing the threat to their revenue from the sale of devices that allow people to screw ISPs, are going to simply add some features to their routers that prevent detection, and we have another round of escalation in the network arms race.
However, I think that eventually, flat-rate ISP pricing is going to go away, no matter how much people protest. We're addicted like crack-whores now.
One thing I'd like to know, since my Dish contract is over, and I'm pretty much free to switch over to DirecTV any time I want to go outside, and unbolt my old dish and put in a new one.
But I personally prefer the less "sports-oriented" channel packages with Dish. (I'm already getting like 20 fucking sports channels I never watch - in the basic package, but people say that DirecTV gives you even MORE sports) -
That said - if I stick with Dish, and go get a 721, is it going to be any better than the 501? Or is it based off of the same technology?
If the person's fraudulent activities cause a very large company to collapse, putting thousands of people out of work, and depressing the stock market, and generally turning a national recession into a depression, and people end up starving to death over it, then they're a fucking danger to society, indirectly guilty of murder, and should be strung up by their genitals.
In fact, there's really no good example of a commodity or security that's really a bullet-proof shelter.
for example, US farmers got raped back in the 80's as food prices failed to keep up with inflation, and the income they were counting on to pay off 10-year loans on $100,000 tractors - wasn't reliable, and they lost their farms. Granted, it was a stupid decision to take risks like that, but when you look at the pattern of the large numbers of farmers who were getting foreclosed on, it looks like something fishy was going on with the loan underwriting. That's really beside the point.
Food prices fall when there's an oversupply, which can be caused by poor planning, good weather, or unintended side effects of tax laws or changing political climates (with regard to economic sanctions, etc).
What are more reliable commodities? Precious metals are generally good. Oil used to be good, but that's because the prices were propped up by a monopolistic cartel. The Russians are fucking their asses right now. Yay Russia!
Land is almost ALWAYS a good deal - but there are factors that can sneak up on you and screw you. The value will drop out of land if there's a recession and people suddenly can't afford to pay $1 million for an 800 sq ft house anymore (San Jose, CA).
The thing that absolutely SHITS me, is - I'm relatively on the side of "free markets" and such. But when you deregulate some crucial infrastructure commodity like energy, and for whatever reason, the value of a commodity like natural gas spikes, then it's a happy good time for the commodity traders who can take advantage of it. It's a SHITTY BAD time for the poor consumers, who one month, were paying $30 to run their lights and TV, and the next month, are being billed $100, and they're suffering rolling blackouts. For some reason, I don't think it's a good idea to let the invisible hand jerk us off ALL the time. For me, it was a simple matter of realigning some of my bills for the extra cash I needed for my electric bill. For a low-income family, it meant choosing between electricity or food. What really sucks is the thousands of office buildings that were running air conditioning full blast, leaving computers and lights on at night, and the poor low-income families couldn't afford to power their refrigerator to keep their food from spoiling. These arguments seem to miss the ears of the "free market" champions.
"Yes, we sent him a strongly-worded email reminding him that it was against company policy, and that further transgressions may impact his next quarterly bonus."
I have a dishplayer, and I *sometimes* think it would be nice to be able to record two shows at once, but then again, it's VERY rare that we need to. If there was enough compelling content available, then I guess that would be a great feature, but the sad fact is, I like so few shows, that rarely are they scheduled against eachother on channels that aren't also time-shifted (for instance, I can record Buffy the Vampire Slayer at like 5pm PST by tuning it in to the New York channel - then I can be recording something else at 7pm on a different channel, when BVS is on on the west coast).
Anyone who's had the DishNetwork DishPlayer system (with WebTV) is acutely aware of how crappy Microsoft settop box software is.
The thing is buggy as hell, and with each software update, it gets worse. I've returned three units on RMA, and every replacement has the same fucking problems.
When it works, it works fairly well, and is very simple to use. My only complaint really is the WebTV marketing garbage that's on every frickin screen.
When it doesn't work - it's frustrating as hell. It'll do things like, fail to record scheduled shows without warning, or lose all of it's saved data, without warning. Or you'll tune into a channel to watch live, and you'll get signal for about 5 seconds, then blank screen for 5 seconds, then signal again (these are called blink-outs).
And in TRUE Microsoft-fashion, the ONLY way to work around these problems is to reset the box (with a special option code you can enter via the remote - it's secret, and undocumented, and every other DishPlayer owner I know on the net knows this code because it's what the Support Reps tell us to do).
And, in true Microsoft-fashion, the reboot time of this machine is attrocious. It just sits there blinking for like 20 minutes while it reboots, you have no fucking idea what it's doing (just like Windows95).
I'm going to be VERY happy when the non-Microsoft 721 DishPlayer becomes available, and I'll buy that one, and I'll take my old DishPlayer out into the back yard and reenact the fax-machine scene from Office Space.
The alternative is cutting the CEO and senior staff's (basically his golfing buddies) pay in half, they can STILL buy their lexus, they can still produce printers for $125, and they can still pay their workers $20/hr.
I see the waste at the higher levels in my company. I see the huge amounts of money wasted by the sales staff, who feel it's their right to expense hookers on business trips, I see the sales manager take the whole staff on "offsite" meetings to expensive vacation resorts, where they don't do anything that you or I would define as "work", and on top of it, they're given expensive gifts like rolex watches, just to commemorate their wonderful strategic planning meeting. Basically the what goes on at these meetings is the sales people either bitch that they can't sell the product because it's priced too high, or they bitch that selling a product isn't worth their time and effort because it's priced too low (and they don't get a high enough commission).
Don't even get me started on marketing dweebs and trade shows.
Money at a tech company should be spent on engineers and infrastructure.
Of course, this isn't just MY company. I bitch and moan to my father, who was a salesman, and he says this is commonplace everywhere.
They waste this kind of money, and then they cry about their poor long-lost bottom line when the unions come to ask for a raise for the production staff.
Slashdot Mirror
oops - I meant "Eastward!" Westward was the wrong direction.
On the other hand, Southern California wouldn't be a bad choice either. Good weather, close to JPL in Pasadena, close to Vandenburg.
I forgot, geologists (vulcanologists) are also a dime-a-dozen on Hawaii. I'm sure they'd also want to be close to where the "action" is in exogeology research.
The only PROBLEM with this, is that Hawaii has such a small population, they can't lobby congress effectively for big-budget-science projects like this. So we'll probably end up locating this thing in Texas instead.
Mona Kea, Hawaii would be MY choice. I'll scout it out for the rest of y'all, 'k?
As a bonus, there's already a big space/scientific community there for Keck. Rocket components can be delivered from west-coast aerospace industries like Boeing and Lockheed via ocean vessel, and it's closer to the equator than any other US territory, PLUS it's halfway to Russia, so Cosmonauts and RSA personnel on joint ventures can easily access it. PLUS, having a big electromagnetic "anything" launcher pointed westward in the middle of the pacific would REALLY piss China off.
200 trillion if we learn to eat poo and love it!
There is no way we'll not have to worry about overpopulation. Overpopulation is now - it's last year, it's 50 years ago.
Colonization of other worlds, that's hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of years from now. Overpopulation will be a problem that will have to be dealt with in a much much sooner time-frame. Either through mass-extinction, or somehow learning to cope with 50 billion humans.
(by the way, latex allergies are rising in our population. If you think about it, it's evolution in action. Those who are allergic to latex (like myself) are a bit more likely to breed successfully (got 3 rug rats myself! I know there are other options, but reduce the options - and you have an increased probability of fertility) therefore, . . . well, you do the math).
Now - about population control, even the most draconian least free governments on the planet (Communist Maoist China) has TRIED this, and failed miserably. They've managed to put a dent in their growth curve, but it's still increasing. In the long run, it's not going to work in China, and if it can't work in China, how in hell do you think it's going to work in a democracy. Nobody's going to vote for that until we're up to our armpits in starving corpses and feces. By that time, nature will have taken care of it.
Well, one thing's for sure, the opinions here on slashdot seem pretty much the same as my opinion when I read and took the survey a couple of days ago.
I felt it was so limited, I sent an email to them. I highly recommend you all do the same.
I'm guessing that this survey data was going to be used to present to the government as "justification" for projects and future budgeting. I hope they get much more out of this than that.
Affordable launch technology really needs to be the #1 priority. Until we can get into orbit without breaking the budget and getting the republicans all in a huff, we need to really focus and focus HARD on making launches much, much cheaper.
I see that there are many many problems that humanity is facing in the next 100-1000-10000 years, and pretty much all of them hinge on getting a cheap, renewable energy source. And the only good, safe bet we have is orbital solar power. And that's NOT going to happen until we develop a cheap way to launch and assemble it. That's got to be our #1 priority. With cheap launches, we have a much more economical outlook on having a stronger presence in space, and with a stronger presence in space, we have a much better chance of surviving a catastrophe like global climate change, epidemic, or asteroid impact. Further down the road - 5000+ years, if we can find and colonize some other planets, even if we never acheive faster than light travel, we can at least broaden our chances at surviving longer, even after the sun explodes. (er- okay, "expands"), and maybe in the 10,000-year range, we can have spread far enough that a local supernova wouldn't eradicate us either.
there's nothing out there for them but advertising and crap
I notice you're still here.
. . . .
My you're observant, so why didn't you notice I said "them"?
I have my own reasons for being on the net, and spending the money for a DSL account, which have little or nothing to do with the reasons why I believe 99% of the rest of the world came online.
I wasn't talking about myself, I was talking about the "internet public at large" - the REASON why there was a boom in the first place, the reason why millions of people felt like it was worth the money, time and effort to sign up for the internet.
All of those reasons are gone or marginalized, and I was not critiquing the reasons why things have changed - merely stating the observation that those things HAVE changed.
I have a DSL connection, and I'm happy with it, and I never did the napster thing, or the online trading thing, or most of the others (except email). But I'm not 99% of people out there that I know. The non-technical people that I know that were on the internet 2 years ago, all are either seriously reconsidering it, or have switched their computers off and put them into the garage. Most of them are not planning on upgrading machines 3 or 4 years old.
I wasn't complaining about the evolution of the internet. Just stating that it HAS happened, and it has happened for certain reasons: businesses on the internet have steered it in certain directions, mainly in order to protect their rights, and maximize profit potential - because when zillions of people were signing up, they started to get nervous over the lawlessness of the net, and how these new subscibers were taking advantage of them. Now that they levelled the playing field - it's no longer an attractive one for most people - so ironically, the corps that wanted to have this huge subsciber base, and force them all to "play nice" have found that the huge subscriber base would rather go outside for a walk than sit on the internet and watch banner ads and delete spam.
Now, I'm not saying that people are fleeing the net - the stats don't agree with that. But I'm betting that the rates of new subscribers, and new PC purchases are way down. Numbers may be increasing, but rate of increase is definately down, and that is why the internet economy has imploded.
I'm not sure I trust ATI anymore - they keep fucking around with their drivers. Their hardware is pretty good, but on the Mac side, their drivers have always been a day late and a dollar short.
some people can afford the best, but they choose otherwise. A fool and his money are soon parted.
I guess the other way you *could* do it would be through some remote-control method (like rhosting or pc anywhere, terminal services, or my favorite, VNC) - pop up a browser on a machine behind the firewall and manage it thru that - but then again, if you shut down the firewall, you're sawing off the limb you're sitting on. . .
I guess "screw" was rather inflammatory - I should have enclosed it in quotes - since this is the implied attitude of the ISP. I don't believe that it's in any way screwing the ISP - in fact, I NAT myself. I think they should charge a scale for bandwidth myself (within reason) that way, on a normal month, I probably wouldn't pay as much.
The only way this is "screwing" the ISP - is that it's more "screwing with" because the service agreement specifically states (in most cases) "a single machine".
What's next. a limit on dual CPU machines?
Your linksys config "webserver" IS accessible to the outside world. At least mine is - if you enable remote administration - you can punch in the IP address, and the password, and there you are.
Of course, if your provider dhcp's you, knowing the IP address if you're not there is half the battle.
The question we should be asking ourselves here is:
Why WAS there an internet boom in the first place?
It's because a whole lot of people saw a GREAT value in the amount of money it cost to buy a computer, hook up to the internet. What you got for that money was virtually FREE, convenient communication, (IM, email) with anyone anywhere in the world, free music, free software, etc.
Now, many of those formerly compelling reasons have evaporated:
IM - is a world of divided standards, so you can only talk to AOL users if you're an AOL user, MSN if your an MSN user, etc.
email - is a world where you need to sift through 20 spam messages to find your one message. Also the monoculture of email clients created a nightmare reality of viruses.
nntp - spam is certainly a problem, as is the bulk of news services no longer carrying binaries.
Search - pay per search, or commercially-supported search (ie - paid-for results placement).
Stock Trading - find me a stock worth investing in today. It was half a function of cheap trading, but also half a function of stocks where you could actually make money.
WEB - commercial consolidation funnels most people to portals. Nobody can afford to host anymore, so people's websites are either overrun with popups or they're very small, and hosted on very slow hardware, and anyone posting material of any worth has been shut down due to copyright concerns. Anything interesting or non-mainstream is either impossible to find now, or shut down. I recently went through my bookmarks.html list, of 500k, accumulated over the past 8 years or so - and a good 70% of the URLs were dead. Making me regret not saving the content to my local hard drive. (and I have saved a great deal anyway).
A Voice - running your own server used to be a great democratic equalizer. It's no longer affordable to the vast majority of people. For all but the most basic uses, you can't address the web at large anymore, because 56k is not enough, cable and DSL providers are "gunning" for any attempt at using the service for servers, and T1 is still prohibitively expensive.
Free Music - the age of napster is finished.
Free Software - I'm not talking about Free Software, I'm talking about that which the BSA is making extinct. Warez. Right or wrong, it was one major compelling reason people got onto the internet.
The only compelling things left I can see are:
email/im - despite the fact that they're not what they used to be, they're still very useful, but there's no need for broadband here.
Corporate Software websites - where you can usually get up to date drivers and updates. Most of the time, broadband isn't required.
Free Software - If you're a Linux-head - you still need broadband for downloading those isos.
Marketing - ah yes. If you're an advertiser, the internet is your friend, and a very compelling reason to get broadband, or even a T1. That is, until everyone who has signed up for the internet in the past 3 years finally realizes that there's nothing out there for them but advertising and crap, and drop the service.
I'm curious as to what the effect is of that new "Speed Download" software you can get on the Mac, that supposedly opens multiple connections with a server to speed up downloads. Won't THAT look like NATted devices?
meanwhile . . . my formerly $35/mo DSL service is now $50/mo. . .
I'm guessing that our friends at LinkSys, sensing the threat to their revenue from the sale of devices that allow people to screw ISPs, are going to simply add some features to their routers that prevent detection, and we have another round of escalation in the network arms race.
However, I think that eventually, flat-rate ISP pricing is going to go away, no matter how much people protest. We're addicted like crack-whores now.
One thing I'd like to know, since my Dish contract is over, and I'm pretty much free to switch over to DirecTV any time I want to go outside, and unbolt my old dish and put in a new one.
But I personally prefer the less "sports-oriented" channel packages with Dish. (I'm already getting like 20 fucking sports channels I never watch - in the basic package, but people say that DirecTV gives you even MORE sports) -
That said - if I stick with Dish, and go get a 721, is it going to be any better than the 501? Or is it based off of the same technology?
If the person's fraudulent activities cause a very large company to collapse, putting thousands of people out of work, and depressing the stock market, and generally turning a national recession into a depression, and people end up starving to death over it, then they're a fucking danger to society, indirectly guilty of murder, and should be strung up by their genitals.
Food is a bad example.
In fact, there's really no good example of a commodity or security that's really a bullet-proof shelter.
for example, US farmers got raped back in the 80's as food prices failed to keep up with inflation, and the income they were counting on to pay off 10-year loans on $100,000 tractors - wasn't reliable, and they lost their farms. Granted, it was a stupid decision to take risks like that, but when you look at the pattern of the large numbers of farmers who were getting foreclosed on, it looks like something fishy was going on with the loan underwriting. That's really beside the point.
Food prices fall when there's an oversupply, which can be caused by poor planning, good weather, or unintended side effects of tax laws or changing political climates (with regard to economic sanctions, etc).
What are more reliable commodities? Precious metals are generally good. Oil used to be good, but that's because the prices were propped up by a monopolistic cartel. The Russians are fucking their asses right now. Yay Russia!
Land is almost ALWAYS a good deal - but there are factors that can sneak up on you and screw you. The value will drop out of land if there's a recession and people suddenly can't afford to pay $1 million for an 800 sq ft house anymore (San Jose, CA).
The thing that absolutely SHITS me, is - I'm relatively on the side of "free markets" and such. But when you deregulate some crucial infrastructure commodity like energy, and for whatever reason, the value of a commodity like natural gas spikes, then it's a happy good time for the commodity traders who can take advantage of it. It's a SHITTY BAD time for the poor consumers, who one month, were paying $30 to run their lights and TV, and the next month, are being billed $100, and they're suffering rolling blackouts. For some reason, I don't think it's a good idea to let the invisible hand jerk us off ALL the time. For me, it was a simple matter of realigning some of my bills for the extra cash I needed for my electric bill. For a low-income family, it meant choosing between electricity or food. What really sucks is the thousands of office buildings that were running air conditioning full blast, leaving computers and lights on at night, and the poor low-income families couldn't afford to power their refrigerator to keep their food from spoiling. These arguments seem to miss the ears of the "free market" champions.
"Yes, we sent him a strongly-worded email reminding him that it was against company policy, and that further transgressions may impact his next quarterly bonus."
I have a dishplayer, and I *sometimes* think it would be nice to be able to record two shows at once, but then again, it's VERY rare that we need to. If there was enough compelling content available, then I guess that would be a great feature, but the sad fact is, I like so few shows, that rarely are they scheduled against eachother on channels that aren't also time-shifted (for instance, I can record Buffy the Vampire Slayer at like 5pm PST by tuning it in to the New York channel - then I can be recording something else at 7pm on a different channel, when BVS is on on the west coast).
Anyone who's had the DishNetwork DishPlayer system (with WebTV) is acutely aware of how crappy Microsoft settop box software is.
The thing is buggy as hell, and with each software update, it gets worse. I've returned three units on RMA, and every replacement has the same fucking problems.
When it works, it works fairly well, and is very simple to use. My only complaint really is the WebTV marketing garbage that's on every frickin screen.
When it doesn't work - it's frustrating as hell. It'll do things like, fail to record scheduled shows without warning, or lose all of it's saved data, without warning. Or you'll tune into a channel to watch live, and you'll get signal for about 5 seconds, then blank screen for 5 seconds, then signal again (these are called blink-outs).
And in TRUE Microsoft-fashion, the ONLY way to work around these problems is to reset the box (with a special option code you can enter via the remote - it's secret, and undocumented, and every other DishPlayer owner I know on the net knows this code because it's what the Support Reps tell us to do).
And, in true Microsoft-fashion, the reboot time of this machine is attrocious. It just sits there blinking for like 20 minutes while it reboots, you have no fucking idea what it's doing (just like Windows95).
I'm going to be VERY happy when the non-Microsoft 721 DishPlayer becomes available, and I'll buy that one, and I'll take my old DishPlayer out into the back yard and reenact the fax-machine scene from Office Space.
The alternative is cutting the CEO and senior staff's (basically his golfing buddies) pay in half, they can STILL buy their lexus, they can still produce printers for $125, and they can still pay their workers $20/hr.
I see the waste at the higher levels in my company. I see the huge amounts of money wasted by the sales staff, who feel it's their right to expense hookers on business trips, I see the sales manager take the whole staff on "offsite" meetings to expensive vacation resorts, where they don't do anything that you or I would define as "work", and on top of it, they're given expensive gifts like rolex watches, just to commemorate their wonderful strategic planning meeting. Basically the what goes on at these meetings is the sales people either bitch that they can't sell the product because it's priced too high, or they bitch that selling a product isn't worth their time and effort because it's priced too low (and they don't get a high enough commission).
Don't even get me started on marketing dweebs and trade shows.
Money at a tech company should be spent on engineers and infrastructure.
Of course, this isn't just MY company. I bitch and moan to my father, who was a salesman, and he says this is commonplace everywhere.
They waste this kind of money, and then they cry about their poor long-lost bottom line when the unions come to ask for a raise for the production staff.