This will lead to the Great Debate, and Scientists the world over will be faced with a challenging decision: whether to reclassify these particles as a "Dwarf Proton". Or, possibly, simply "Kuiper-belt Protons".
The prior glory days of the positively-charged Proton's full status as a subatomic particle are over. The Proton will soon be relegated to the back-room annex containing exhibits for miscellaneous classes of odds and ends, fragments and freaks of the Standard Model, like the protino, the strange-quark, and the hapnion, in the Museum of Subatomic Physics, instead of the Main Hall of subatomic particles, where crowds of spectators will see the great favorites like the Neutron, and the Electron, and even the Positron.
But we should not feel so sad for the poor Proton. At least they haven't turned it into some form of "string". Yet.
Firefox has way more add-ons and plugins. Adblock+flashblock+noscript+webdeveloper_toolbar+firebug+TorButton+betterprivacy+bugmenot+taco+passiverecon+sessionmanager+skipscreen+colorzilla+greasemonkey+httpseverywhere+measureit+showip+tabmix+viewsourcechart+tamperdata+mozillasniffer+trackmenot+xmarks...
I can't imagine browsing without these add-ons. Chrome doesn't have them. Opera doesn't have them. IE. . . bwahahahaha!
Nobody's saying you didn't work hard for your money.
If you think you've earned every penny of it; compared to others, it is you who are delusional.
And no, nobody really expects you to do anything about it; give your money to others, tell your boss: "hey pay me half of what you pay me, because it's not fair" - or, anything like that.
Just understand that there are a lot of people in this world who really DO work their asses off with a huge degree of high competence, who earn jack squat, and part of that is due to choice - part of it is due to circumstance of birth, part if it is due to lack of awareness that they even have the option to do anything to earn more, part of it is simple fear to take a risk, (many people aren't as well positioned to recover from a loss if a taken risk doesn't work out, as are others).
I, personally think that some concert tickets are probably way underpriced, for what the market will bear - for certain "acts" that are exposed and promoted and occupy a huge mindshare (blown way out of proportion to actual talent). The mindshare of a big-name band creates an artificial demand, which drives prices way up. The monopoly that the ticket brokers have, also drives prices up, and that needs to end; and ideally, there shouldn't be a resale market that jacks prices up like it does - if the original sale price was correct, the scalpers/brokers wouldn't exist. (so yeah, maybe $500-$1000 for U2 tickets; as hyped/exposed as they are, is probably right - I saw them for $12 in 1984, lol). There's only so many seats, and so many nights they can perform in a tour. There's only one U2. Each "big name" band is a limited commodity. It's a tight supply, that's created by hype.
If you look at smaller acts out there, local bands, you realize that the talent of these big-name acts is not at all extraordinary. Not even close. Yeah, there is a glut of really crappy talentless cover-bands playing bars. But there is also a huge number of unsigned bands out there struggling to make any kind of living at all, in a hyper-consolidated recording industry that builds value by concentrating hype like this.
So - the parent poster's point that, a small-club experience - may be a better value for the dollar, class-warfare issues aside, is an extremely valid one. It's true, that a band that is sitting in a major venue on an international tour, in front of 50,000 people, is going to be of a certain quality; guaranteed. Your small-venue band is going to be hit-or-miss. Your $12 may be well-spent or crap. But then you get to avoid buying-into a monopolized ticket-buying system, and a hype-funneled price-gouging scheme designed to make sure that 300 million Americans have all heard of the same 40 bands, while being smug about the fact that they can afford $100-a-seat tickets. And have *never* heard of literally thousands of other very talented performers.
I was at a classic car show recently. There were cars from the 1920's, 30's, etc. Very, very, very few from the 1980's or later. There was a 19 year old kid with a Deuce Coupe; no paint, he was still in the process of restoring it, learning the very difficult art of "metal bumping". Something they don't even teach in modern body shops any more.
There was one modern car there, a jacked-up chromed-out tarted H2. You could see people walking past it sneering in disdain.
There will come a time when all the guys who are 80 years old now, are dead. Not too long from now. These are the guys who grew up with the 1930's and 1940's cars. A few decades more, guys like me who think 1970's cars are cool, will be dead.
But there's NOT going to be rows and rows of kids born in the 1980's with tricked-out Honda Civvics. Those cars are crushed already! Even the VW Jetta freaks, when they get older, are shopping around for old 1950's and 1960's bugs.
I don't really know what it is, because there are certain brands where "cool" is still being mass-produced and maintained. Certainly Mustang, Charger, Camaro, Corvette - are still "cool" in those circles, and the modern look has come back home. The styling is accepted. Though I don't think Thunderbird was. I think the 1980's versions indellibly poisoned that brand.
You can poison coolness out of a brand, and you can do it permanently.
The Mini Cooper had a following of sorts; before BMW bought them and tarted them up, and now they've got a totally different set of drooling fanbois. The guys who like the classic cooper don't like the BMW version; though the BMW version is superior in every way, from an automotive perspective - except cost-effectiveness (it's completely lost its appeal as an economy car - it's now a "BMW" vanity-brand).
So bringing this analogy back to the Internet: Is it "over"?
I think it's extremely arrogant to say such a thing. What we think of as the internet, today, does seem to be overwhelmingly focusing down and consolidating to a very few media brands. But there's NOTHING enforcing that, but human mindshare. If anything, the technology is even MORE widely compatible than it was a decade ago. It's just that nobody's come up with a better solution yet. Federated social networks? pfft? Let's see one. We're either navel gazing, or we're showing eachother our own belly-button lint, and we're bored of it. And maybe this shows us how completely self-absorbed and boring we've become as individuals, as a culture, and as a species. And Prince, is the one telling us this? That's rich.
I think the internet being "over" from his point of view, has more to do with him being afraid of infinite digital copies of his work, and his inability to control their distribution. He's happy with the convenience that technology gives him when he's producing. But doesn't like it when his consumers misbehave. Poor baby.
Maybe he should first invent his own musical scales, chord progressions, and time signatures. Because he's kind of "stealing" that from other musicians who wrote music before him. Then he should invent his own instruments and devices for recording, and notation for writing down the music. Then, in the format his music is recorded, he will not have to worry about unauthorized distribution across the Internet - which is so "over" anyway.
And he can then invent and build his own playback devices, and go door-to-door selling them to fans. This way, only fans he gets money from will be able to enjoy his inventive and unique and special and completely non-derivative music!
And then when he says some crap like "the Internet is over", I might think he's serious, instead of just another worthless washed up never-was over-promoted talentless hack.
Yeah, because usually, you just blast away at the asteroids until that flying saucer shows up, then it's 5000 bonus points! Every time I try to land on an asteroid though, BOOM!
The other problem with this whole debate, is the critics of global climate change all pretty much have an agenda, and that is to fight any policy changes driven by the science. (ie. limiting carbon emission - either via energy policy, or cap n trade schemes, or basically any type of government intervention.)
Nobody on the global climate change "side" of the argument seems to have taken the strategy of attacking this rationale. Because the basis of THOSE arguments, ("free market" dogmatism) are much easier to refute. When you compare the scientific basis, the rigor of the data collection, the ethical situation of the practitioners, hell, the ETHICAL RECORD, with that of "Economic Science" - as the supposed rationale for why we should not be trying to stop global climate change, it's a freaking 2nd-grade-level logical slam dunk. Or at least I see it that way.
On the one hand, we have the great geniuses who brought us: The Great Depression of the 1930's, The 2001 Stock Market Crash, Derivatives (WTF?), Enron, Bernie Madoff, Goldman Sachs, AIG, the Housing Bubble, the whatever the fuck is going on since 2007, and now the HFT Flash-Crash of May 6 2010, and the whole time, they pretty much stand around with their thumbs up their asses telling us that the Invisible Hand is taking good care of us, and that they're awesome math PhD gods who deserve 7-figure salaries. And climate scientists are untrustworthy wierdos in a worldwide secret conspiracy to scam government grants so they can continue getting their $50k/yr salaries. riiiiiight.
If they did this, they should go to jail. Bush did it too. Also should have gone to jail. (also: White House email backup system has been non-functional since the Clinton era. Bullshit they can't afford to get that working. So fucking illegal. Their communications in doing business on MY behalf, while I'm paying them - is MY lawful property. Do the job right, or go the fuck home.)
Usually arguments against porn (and/or legal prostitution) are shortcuts for the problem of equal pay/opportunity for women. The arguments against porn and prostitution always claim that adult women can not effectively consent to participate in porn, or prostitution. They claim they are forced into it, and are subject to abuses. But nobody's arguing that beating women or other forms of intimidation or coersion be legalized also.
But these arguments really have at their root, the problem of equal pay in our society. Whatever the cause of that, and problems around solving this issue, I'm not getting into here, but you go after porn and prostitution, there's always these red herrings lurking.
Then there's also the argument that males who consume porn are somehow also not able to make choices about their behavior as well. Well, that's a handy excuse for someone who doesn't want to be responsible for the choices they make. That's for sure.
Well, the sick thing about all this. . . is the whole POINT of terrorism, is to TERRORIZE the target population, and cause them to react in this way (limit freedoms, increase fear, racial xenophobia, escalate conflict, provoke war, draw attention, etc.). And the US played right into it.
These arguments were made in the wake of 9/11 - of course. But were immediately drowned-out among the "OMG! brown people blowing up stuff on our soil!" (because there was nowhere near the national concern, of course, over the threat posed by Tim McVeigh or various domestic militia movements - who hate our liberal democracy just as much as Osama bin Laden. And for the same ideological reasons).
I *do* have a problem with allowing terrorists to succeed, in their goal, of shutting down 4th amendment and 1st amendment protections. (and 6th and 8th). Out of fear. Via the tried and true mechanism that gives this method of warfare it's name. They (the terrorists) spent far less money than the RIAA did lobbying to violate our 1st and 4th amendment rights. (Probably, both the terrorist groups, and the RIAA/MPAA spent less money on provoking the fear that gets our rights violated, than WE spend, as taxpayers, on the national infrastructure of lawyers and police to violate our own rights.)
That's the sick thing.
We pay tax money, to FORCE our citizens to become educated - we learn in history, and civics classes, about our rights, our constitution, and what terrorism is (at least we did in the 1980s and 1970s when I went to school) - but then, apparently, we get into the voting booth, and we've forgotten all about that, and we're wetting our pants in fear over what our President's business-partner's rogue son is doing in 'stan, "Oh Please, big brother! please take our rights away! We're so terrified of what we're seeing on FoxNews! OMG! SCARY! We'll pay ANY PRICE to feel safe! Please save us!!!"
My God Man! Haven't you ever heard of the Prime Directive?!
(That means we must send Navy Warships to their harbors, on Diplomatic Missions of Peace - the officers go ashore, and mate with their women, but under NO conditions, are we to interfere with their culture or scientific progress!)
We've observed sunspots for hundreds of years. We have data on the cyclical effects of solar radiation on isotope balance in polar ice-core samples for hundreds of thousands of years.
2-3 decades of space-radiation storms is about right, but, I think we can be reasonably certain that the theory that they're closely associated with sunspots and isotopes, is pretty sound.
Another very difficult (but very seldom talked-about) problem of spaceflight, is re-ignition of rocket engines. At-altitude, in space, on another heavenly body. . . one has to count on the propellant being in good condition (not frozen, not aerosolized, not leaked out through a ruptured tank, line, seal or stuck-valve, not gravitationally globbed in the center of the tank). It's not a trivial problem - and launch of a sample-return vehicle from Mars faces a pretty big challenge that we have not yet addressed.
Some folks have speculated about manufacture of propellant on the martian surface - that's a big huge "if". Solids have their own problems, given the very cold temperatures, the engine could easily be damaged in landing. Hypergolics could freeze, and binary liquid propellants could also freeze. (ie. the tanks would have to have heaters to maintain operating temperature prior to ignition - which isn't unusual, of course). But these are the options, I think, used in landing retros on previous Mars landers, which re-ignite under some of the same conditions.
The notion of a binary solid/hybrid (like the one used on SpaceShip One) is interesting. (Nitrous Oxide as an oxidant, and rubberized solid fuel). Mechanically, I think, simple and reliable, and lightweight, and probably, enough impulse to get off Mars. (I don't know.)
Something based on perchlorate chemistry to produce hydrogen peroxide from the martian soil might also be interesting (but I don't know if it would be possible to produce enough quantity in high enough concentration - and that failing; would mean mission-failure). The fact that hydrogen peroxide is relatively simple to fire: you pressurize it, and shoot it out through a platinum catalyst, and it decomposes, burning itself - makes it, in my mind, a more reliable bet, at least mechanically-speaking. The waste product is water and oxygen, so less pollution of the pristine martian environment.
The main thing going for such a mission, is the very thin martian atmosphere; drag can probably be disregarded in the design of the ascent vehicle. Escape velocity is probably what, like 8500 mph?
It should bring back two rocks.
One - to sell to some very rich "sucker". The profit from that sale, will fund the mission. The other rock will go to Science.
No - the problem is; the valuation of assets, how you're saying. . . the way we "secure" debt, is and absurd shell-game. Depending on who's selling, how much is available on the market for sale, and the conditions of what's being traded for those assets - for example, housing prices, were skewed way out of proportion with reality, thanks to fantastical speculation on CDO's which were bets on how bundles of loans were going to perform, long-term, the odds of which, were based on statistics on previous performance, which bore zero resemblance to the realities of whether the debtors were going to be able to pay those loans off: (bond market prices, interest rates, inflation, income, taxation, unemployment, trade activity, overall levels of fraud, and detection or enforcement of said fraud, and a host of other factors that nobody could even make a wild guess at, let alone point to some calculus on a whiteboard, and say with a straight-face that this was how it was going to be).
So to say that someone has a certain amount of debt that's only secured by an asset of value "X" is actually, an absurd statement. Really. Because what are the terms of that debt? What will be the value of that asset, when that debt comes to term? For that matter, what will be the value of the currency in which the debt is denominated, when it comes to term?
It is all fortune-telling and voodoo.
And to REALLY make it all fun-and-games: The Government Prints Money. As much as it wants, whenever it wants. The fact that the rate at which it prints money, is alarming to you, is probably AMUSING to others. Because you are ONE person, and you probably think that a trillion dollars is a lot of money. It is not. It is all imaginary. It's a few bits flipped on a chip, in a computer, at the FED. The banks of the world, of course, need to buy-in to the notion that this "value" exists somewhere. Maybe - what - some future date? Some mathematical formulae can "prove" it, sufficiently? It will either exist, or if it does not, it won't matter, because we'll all be fucked?
At the end of the day - we'd like all of our transactional chits to be backed up by concrete assets like a block of gold sitting in a vault somewhere. But when you've got 6 billion + people making transactions all day long (and making more people), and inventing new ways to even represent stored money (securities), some of which expand geometrically - you have to eventually accept that we can't limit money to mapping over to assets in the physical world any more. Money is "stored value" - either labor, or a physical asset, or a stake in a creative work, or even a stake in an enterprise. There isn't enough gold in the universe; we've conceptually gone past that.
So, the PROBLEM is - in a Democracy, regular folks, like you and I, are taught how to manage a finite household budget, in finite mathematical terms. And we know that we have to keep our debt and income in line. And most of us have no concept of how to deal with finance on this scale, when we have the power to "imagine" capital, create it out of thin air. We either say; "shit, I want some of that, because I'm working my ass off, and I need to pay off my corvette." or we say; "holy mother of fuck, I can't believe you're spending that much of my money on feeding lazy, immoral drug addicts who don't work!"
I'm not saying that "regular folks" should keep their noses out of macroeconomic problems. I'm just saying that - trying to fix macroeconomic problems with microeconomic logic, is like trying to solder a live 20,000 volt high-tension wire connection with a 25-watt soldering iron.
Well - when a country's mineral wealth is concentrated into the hands of a few; whether it's a monarchy, or robber-barons, the masses still end up suffering.
And what better example than Saudi Arabia.
If Afghanistan becomes the "Saudi Arabia of Lithium" as has been suggested. . . well, the Saudi Sheiks and Royals themselves sure are progressive in their values (in private). They attend western universities, party down at western casinos, screw western whores, invest in western business and markets. Of course, THEY must maintain these relationships with westerners, in order to continue to profit in the plunder of their nations' natural resources.
But they realize that if they put too much into their domestic economy, they threaten their own dominance. They spend just enough domestically, to keep themselves in power. When their own people get upset that the Royals are "too cozy" with the west, or "too friendly" with Israel, well, you get guys like Osama bin Laden, and followers. They kicked his ass out of Saudi Arabia.
And what did they try to do with their followers?
Well - they have an effective public campaign they play on their tightly controlled national newsmedia called "it's all Israel's fault". Then they throw money at the religious institutions, who fund chains of schools, we all have heard of them, called "madrassas" which teach poor muslim kids all over the world how to read. By having them memorize the koran. I'm sure that not all madrassas are hotbeds of radical hatred of the west, but they DO tend to deflect hatred from the people who are actually causing oppression and suffering among the world's muslim poor. Because you can teach a billion muslims to read. But unless you give them an economic stake in their own future - a career, a job, a way to start a business without a royal lineage being a prerequisite, they're still going to end up poor, starving, and angry.
The question is - who are they going to be angry at. The monarchial oppressors? Or who their clerics and xenophobic state-controlled newsmedia tells them is their enemy? (the West, Israel)?
So what exactly do you think is going to happen if mineral wealth in Afghanistan triggers a flow of wealth into the centers of power there? Will Karzai continue to be a "good little puppet"? Or will he necessarily shake hands with the Taliban, in order to win enough practical peace to allow mining to actually happen?
Western corporations have been bedding down with the Taliban since the 1990's, when it was necessary to do so, in order to exploit Afghanistan's resources. Unocal sure as hell did it. And will Karzai, his Western mining partners, and Taliban mobsters share their wealth with the Afghan people? Maybe with Pashtun tribes, but certainly not the rest. And what you're going to see, is simply a money-backed return to the status quo. . . circa 1998.
In fact: Pashtun cooperation is going to necessarily figure in, because that is the route through Southern Pakistan to any Sea Port where Afghanistan might ship-out its products. (once again, thank you Great Britain, for your absolutely brain-dead assignment of national boundaries, completely ignorant of the presence of local cultures and tribes).
I figured this out in 1983. I was sitting on my couch, eating potato chips, watching MTV. I realized: my parents were paying a monthly cable bill - so I could watch music videos, which were advertisements for record albums. In between the music videos, were MORE ADS. WTF?
(fantasy follows:) I said to myself right then, someday, since music is now coming out on these CD's and we have personal computers, and there are digital networks connecting these computers. . . it follows that SOME DAY, people will just copy the digital data from the CD's, and send them to each other over the digital network - (just like we used to send copied software to each other via BBS's using a modem). AND THERE WOULD BE NOTHING THEY COULD DO TO STOP US!!! I decided right then and there - fuck this MTV shit. Paying? To watch advertisement for music I don't like, that is anyway, ad-supported? Fuck this MTV shit.
What really pisses me off is when I hear former "popular kids" saying crap like; "oh, those years are horrible for everybody. Everyone felt lonely, and awkward and left out, and picked-on."
Do you realize how many times you have to reload to kill 26 people with a standard 12ga shotgun?
Is that before, or after, large-capacity magazines were banned?
Because, I dunno, there are single-shot breech loaders, double-barrel breech loaders, 3 round magazine loaders, 5 round magazine loaders, I think as many as 7 in that remington auto; but before the ban, I think there were 15-round box magazine style shotguns out there, that you just can't get anymore. Because of the ban. Now, with the cylinder-style magazine, you've got to reload each shot individually. But box-style magazines can be pre-loaded and swapped with a new full one, like an assault rifle.
Considering the great pleasure I take from powdering clay pidgeons. . . I'm really glad shotguns are available. Considering the great pleasure I take from breathing, I'm really glad shotguns with 15-round box magazines are NOT available.
. . . just for fun. . .
on
Time To Dump XP?
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· Score: 1, Informative
Last month, I took on the task of "cleaning off" a pair of computers, used by a friends' teenage kids. One running XP Home, the other Win 7 Home.
OF COURSE I lectured them about security basics, not running as Admin, not installing "candy from strangers", and I burned them an Ubuntu CD too. (if they aren't going to install it, at least they can boot to it to rescue what's left of their data when the next infection hits).
Each computer took about a week of evenings to clear off. Using scan tools, alternately booting back and forth between Ubuntu, safe mode, standard mode, etc.
In the end, both machines were pretty much subject to the same abusive practices, (autologin, run as admin, kids going to porn sites, both of them chat/camwhores, etc.; yeah, these kids were horrified when I told their mom what they had been up to.) - both machines were trojaned and rootkitted to the hilt. I honestly have no idea if I got everything. I deleted a bunch of software that was probably legit, in the process, (hardware vendor (HP) crapware) Probably not.
But I was able to get things functioning to the point where the systems were at least reasonably stable again. Getting the DNS to be able to find Windows Updates was one of the toughest chores - because something had totally ripped out the entire tcpip stack, and replaced it. I had to uninstall networking, and reinstall it, including all the web browsers, and network device drivers (wired and wireless).
At the end of those two weeks - I had learned a lot. What I already knew. . . you're better off blowing everything away, and reinstalling. Every time.
There was a keylogger. There was something that was turning the webcam on. There was something that had replaced the standard windows file-system driver, in the encrypted CAB file that Windows File Protection should *not* allow to be replaced. (atapi.sys). There was something that had left Symantec AntiVirus in an "installed" but, non-functional state. I had luckily, armed myself with seven USB thumbdrives, loaded with my "standard" set of tools. Those kept getting infected. There were at least three different programs trying to infect those. One of them became non-functional during this job. I don't know why. It just won't mount in any system (Mac, Linux, Windows) now. I'm hoping it was just a hardware failure, and not something nasty trying to change the onboard driver. I did not see any such activity, but I'm wondering if I need a hardware USB bus-protocol analyzer to even see something like that.
There were drivers that would mysteriously reinstall themselves after I deleted them. (typical malware behavior though). Tracking those down with Sysinternals tools was fun. The first few iterations.
The other thing I learned, in this little trip down the rabbit hole, is that, all other things reasonably equal. . . the Windows XP machine was WAY more fubared than the Windows 7 machine. The things that kept on re-appearing in the Run keys and Startup folders on the XP machines, were present on the Windows 7 machine, but for some reason, were unable to re-assert themselves after deletion. I'm guessing it was probably due to the Virtual Storage architecture, that prevents userland stuff from writing to system keys and filesystem areas.
After this experience - I am convinced that Windows XP is simply no longer safe. Period. Not in the hands of a non-paranoid, non-technical user, that's not behind a separate, NAT device. (meet those conditions, then maybe you're okay).
Keep it updated. Run with Antivirus+anticrapware. Don't install candy from strangers. Surf with NoScript+FlashBlock+Adblock. Don't open PDFs with a reader that supports Javascript. Don't run as Admin. If you have teenagers, physically de-solder the webcam. I would also recommend - use a product like nLite to build a preconfigured OS + automated app-install disk. Keep your persistent documents and static data on a separate physical partition. Update the install dis
Well; I *do* have a nuclear reactor in my back yard. Probably the most modern and advanced one in the US. And if they *fuck* that up, like BP fucked up Deepwater Horizon. . . we'll need a lot more than a CEO's apology. Maybe we could deal with a TMI-type event. But not a Chernobyl-type event. This region is already pretty difficult to make a living in, since the clam and fish population has been decimated. Though it's still got fairly rich farming, wine grapes (as long as that remains a fad) and cattle grazing going on. A Chernobyl would kill all that.
We banned offshore drilling here in 1969, after a spill down south. The oil companies have been cleaning up other spills up and down the California coast for the past 30 years. I can think of 4 ongoing cleanup projects off the top of my head, and two completed ones. The local Union Carbide refinery had a minor explosion and fire just last year. No deaths, no headlines.
The thing is: the crazy folks are talking about removing the drilling ban. Deepwater Horizon, of course, THANK GOD, has put the kibosh on that. For what? Maybe another 30 years, until people forget again.
No matter what we do with nuclear - people will forget, and we will end up with both nuclear and oil drilling. NIMBY is nothing. NIMBY is Not In My Back Yard (Today. . . maybe tomorrow). NIMBY is Not In My. . . wait, $5 a gallon, are you fucking kidding me? Drill baby drill!
One thing that The Great American Dream has been based on; (and probably not a great idea), is the idea of home ownership, and stable/growing property values. You spew oil on my beach, rain down Sr-90 on my dairy farm, or wrap all my neighbor's mortgages in a CDO, none of that has anything to do with whether I put in a good day's work at my job. All of them can destroy decades of saved-labor I have in the form of home equity. Even if oil does not actually kill any wildlife, even if Sr-90 doesn't bind in place of calcium in your bones and cause bone cancer. Even if 3 mortgage defaults in your neighborhood don't cause appraisers to write-down values - it's still actions and choices that other people make, that have absofuckinglutely NOTHING to do with me, yet fuck me over completely.
Why not YOUR backyard, instead? Get off of my lawn. Thanks.
Yes; this is why I did not donate any money to the Haiti relief effort. As cold-hearted as that sounds (and *feels*) - these people were suffering long before the earthquake, and will be suffering long after, and donating our pocket change is not going to alter the fact that they're bent under the yoke of oppression in a self-sustaining kleptocracy. Well, maybe not self-sustaining. . . certainly propped up by their neighbors in the Dominican Republic, the US, and other regional influences.
The earthquake was a great opportunity for the American newsmedia to blink its eye open and shut quickly to show a view of the tremendous suffering these people have borne for generations. When a viable solution to this suffering is found, I'll happily contribute. Until then, I refuse to make token "feel-good" attempts that do little more than roll statistics on paper so some self-serving social scientist can smoke them, or pass the joint to a politician.
'k - Haiti's 15 minutes are up. Next disaster please. Next group of desperately starving and suffering masses of third world children who will never understand how they barely even qualify as pawns in someone else's chess game - played largely for idle amusement. Pfft! Guatamala doesn't even get their own 15 minutes. They must share with the US Gulf Coast as it suffers through another disaster - roughly man-made - as all of these, frankly, are.
How are you going to convince the existing 6 billion people to do that? Violence?
Your current math is wrong. The hell is here now. Every person who has to "sacrifice" is going to ask, "why me, and not this other person?" Most will resist violently. Which is fine, because only a few of them have access to small-arms. Fewer to heavy-arms. And fewer, to WMD; figuring, the more of "those people over there, (different nationality, tribe, race, religion), I can kill now, the less I'll have to sacrifice."
PS. This kind of thinking has pretty much been behind the drive for most conflicts for the past 1000 years.
PPS. Once the immediate "threat" of resource-scarcity is taken out of our face - (and I mean, like, starvation), we'll resume our previous rate of reproduction and resource consumption, or increase it.
That's not to say that Communism or Socialism is the answer either. But look around you. People are *not* coin-operated. If they were, the Capitalist Paradise that the Republicans tried to create in the past 10 years - look, they had complete freedom to do so - complete 100% pure freedom; nobody tried to stop them, and nobody could have - and it did not work.
When there's a boot-heel on your throat, it doesn't matter if it's a Right boot-heel, or a Left boot-heel.
The world seems to work that way when you walk out of your Psychology 101 class. But when you take Psych 102 (and ++), you realize that real human behavior and motivation is more complicated than the "reward-punishment" model suggests. On an individual scale, and on a mass-scale.
Slashdot Mirror
This will lead to the Great Debate, and Scientists the world over will be faced with a challenging decision: whether to reclassify these particles as a "Dwarf Proton". Or, possibly, simply "Kuiper-belt Protons".
The prior glory days of the positively-charged Proton's full status as a subatomic particle are over. The Proton will soon be relegated to the back-room annex containing exhibits for miscellaneous classes of odds and ends, fragments and freaks of the Standard Model, like the protino, the strange-quark, and the hapnion, in the Museum of Subatomic Physics, instead of the Main Hall of subatomic particles, where crowds of spectators will see the great favorites like the Neutron, and the Electron, and even the Positron.
But we should not feel so sad for the poor Proton. At least they haven't turned it into some form of "string". Yet.
Firefox has way more add-ons and plugins. ..
Adblock+flashblock+noscript+webdeveloper_toolbar+firebug+TorButton+betterprivacy+bugmenot+taco+passiverecon+sessionmanager+skipscreen+colorzilla+greasemonkey+httpseverywhere+measureit+showip+tabmix+viewsourcechart+tamperdata+mozillasniffer+trackmenot+xmarks.
I can't imagine browsing without these add-ons. Chrome doesn't have them. Opera doesn't have them. IE. . . bwahahahaha!
Nobody's saying you didn't work hard for your money.
If you think you've earned every penny of it; compared to others, it is you who are delusional.
And no, nobody really expects you to do anything about it; give your money to others, tell your boss: "hey pay me half of what you pay me, because it's not fair" - or, anything like that.
Just understand that there are a lot of people in this world who really DO work their asses off with a huge degree of high competence, who earn jack squat, and part of that is due to choice - part of it is due to circumstance of birth, part if it is due to lack of awareness that they even have the option to do anything to earn more, part of it is simple fear to take a risk, (many people aren't as well positioned to recover from a loss if a taken risk doesn't work out, as are others).
I, personally think that some concert tickets are probably way underpriced, for what the market will bear - for certain "acts" that are exposed and promoted and occupy a huge mindshare (blown way out of proportion to actual talent). The mindshare of a big-name band creates an artificial demand, which drives prices way up. The monopoly that the ticket brokers have, also drives prices up, and that needs to end; and ideally, there shouldn't be a resale market that jacks prices up like it does - if the original sale price was correct, the scalpers/brokers wouldn't exist. (so yeah, maybe $500-$1000 for U2 tickets; as hyped/exposed as they are, is probably right - I saw them for $12 in 1984, lol). There's only so many seats, and so many nights they can perform in a tour. There's only one U2. Each "big name" band is a limited commodity. It's a tight supply, that's created by hype.
If you look at smaller acts out there, local bands, you realize that the talent of these big-name acts is not at all extraordinary. Not even close. Yeah, there is a glut of really crappy talentless cover-bands playing bars. But there is also a huge number of unsigned bands out there struggling to make any kind of living at all, in a hyper-consolidated recording industry that builds value by concentrating hype like this.
So - the parent poster's point that, a small-club experience - may be a better value for the dollar, class-warfare issues aside, is an extremely valid one. It's true, that a band that is sitting in a major venue on an international tour, in front of 50,000 people, is going to be of a certain quality; guaranteed. Your small-venue band is going to be hit-or-miss. Your $12 may be well-spent or crap. But then you get to avoid buying-into a monopolized ticket-buying system, and a hype-funneled price-gouging scheme designed to make sure that 300 million Americans have all heard of the same 40 bands, while being smug about the fact that they can afford $100-a-seat tickets. And have *never* heard of literally thousands of other very talented performers.
I was at a classic car show recently. There were cars from the 1920's, 30's, etc. Very, very, very few from the 1980's or later. There was a 19 year old kid with a Deuce Coupe; no paint, he was still in the process of restoring it, learning the very difficult art of "metal bumping". Something they don't even teach in modern body shops any more.
There was one modern car there, a jacked-up chromed-out tarted H2. You could see people walking past it sneering in disdain.
There will come a time when all the guys who are 80 years old now, are dead. Not too long from now. These are the guys who grew up with the 1930's and 1940's cars. A few decades more, guys like me who think 1970's cars are cool, will be dead.
But there's NOT going to be rows and rows of kids born in the 1980's with tricked-out Honda Civvics. Those cars are crushed already! Even the VW Jetta freaks, when they get older, are shopping around for old 1950's and 1960's bugs.
I don't really know what it is, because there are certain brands where "cool" is still being mass-produced and maintained. Certainly Mustang, Charger, Camaro, Corvette - are still "cool" in those circles, and the modern look has come back home. The styling is accepted. Though I don't think Thunderbird was. I think the 1980's versions indellibly poisoned that brand.
You can poison coolness out of a brand, and you can do it permanently.
The Mini Cooper had a following of sorts; before BMW bought them and tarted them up, and now they've got a totally different set of drooling fanbois. The guys who like the classic cooper don't like the BMW version; though the BMW version is superior in every way, from an automotive perspective - except cost-effectiveness (it's completely lost its appeal as an economy car - it's now a "BMW" vanity-brand).
So bringing this analogy back to the Internet:
Is it "over"?
I think it's extremely arrogant to say such a thing. What we think of as the internet, today, does seem to be overwhelmingly focusing down and consolidating to a very few media brands. But there's NOTHING enforcing that, but human mindshare. If anything, the technology is even MORE widely compatible than it was a decade ago. It's just that nobody's come up with a better solution yet. Federated social networks? pfft? Let's see one. We're either navel gazing, or we're showing eachother our own belly-button lint, and we're bored of it. And maybe this shows us how completely self-absorbed and boring we've become as individuals, as a culture, and as a species. And Prince, is the one telling us this? That's rich.
I think the internet being "over" from his point of view, has more to do with him being afraid of infinite digital copies of his work, and his inability to control their distribution. He's happy with the convenience that technology gives him when he's producing. But doesn't like it when his consumers misbehave. Poor baby.
Maybe he should first invent his own musical scales, chord progressions, and time signatures. Because he's kind of "stealing" that from other musicians who wrote music before him. Then he should invent his own instruments and devices for recording, and notation for writing down the music.
Then, in the format his music is recorded, he will not have to worry about unauthorized distribution across the Internet - which is so "over" anyway.
And he can then invent and build his own playback devices, and go door-to-door selling them to fans. This way, only fans he gets money from will be able to enjoy his inventive and unique and special and completely non-derivative music!
And then when he says some crap like "the Internet is over", I might think he's serious, instead of just another worthless washed up never-was over-promoted talentless hack.
Yeah, because usually, you just blast away at the asteroids until that flying saucer shows up, then it's 5000 bonus points! Every time I try to land on an asteroid though, BOOM!
The other problem with this whole debate, is the critics of global climate change all pretty much have an agenda, and that is to fight any policy changes driven by the science. (ie. limiting carbon emission - either via energy policy, or cap n trade schemes, or basically any type of government intervention.)
Nobody on the global climate change "side" of the argument seems to have taken the strategy of attacking this rationale. Because the basis of THOSE arguments, ("free market" dogmatism) are much easier to refute. When you compare the scientific basis, the rigor of the data collection, the ethical situation of the practitioners, hell, the ETHICAL RECORD, with that of "Economic Science" - as the supposed rationale for why we should not be trying to stop global climate change, it's a freaking 2nd-grade-level logical slam dunk. Or at least I see it that way.
On the one hand, we have the great geniuses who brought us: The Great Depression of the 1930's, The 2001 Stock Market Crash, Derivatives (WTF?), Enron, Bernie Madoff, Goldman Sachs, AIG, the Housing Bubble, the whatever the fuck is going on since 2007, and now the HFT Flash-Crash of May 6 2010, and the whole time, they pretty much stand around with their thumbs up their asses telling us that the Invisible Hand is taking good care of us, and that they're awesome math PhD gods who deserve 7-figure salaries. And climate scientists are untrustworthy wierdos in a worldwide secret conspiracy to scam government grants so they can continue getting their $50k/yr salaries. riiiiiight.
If they did this, they should go to jail.
Bush did it too. Also should have gone to jail.
(also: White House email backup system has been non-functional since the Clinton era. Bullshit they can't afford to get that working. So fucking illegal. Their communications in doing business on MY behalf, while I'm paying them - is MY lawful property. Do the job right, or go the fuck home.)
Usually arguments against porn (and/or legal prostitution) are shortcuts for the problem of equal pay/opportunity for women. The arguments against porn and prostitution always claim that adult women can not effectively consent to participate in porn, or prostitution. They claim they are forced into it, and are subject to abuses. But nobody's arguing that beating women or other forms of intimidation or coersion be legalized also.
But these arguments really have at their root, the problem of equal pay in our society. Whatever the cause of that, and problems around solving this issue, I'm not getting into here, but you go after porn and prostitution, there's always these red herrings lurking.
Then there's also the argument that males who consume porn are somehow also not able to make choices about their behavior as well. Well, that's a handy excuse for someone who doesn't want to be responsible for the choices they make. That's for sure.
Well, the sick thing about all this. . . is the whole POINT of terrorism, is to TERRORIZE the target population, and cause them to react in this way (limit freedoms, increase fear, racial xenophobia, escalate conflict, provoke war, draw attention, etc.). And the US played right into it.
These arguments were made in the wake of 9/11 - of course. But were immediately drowned-out among the "OMG! brown people blowing up stuff on our soil!" (because there was nowhere near the national concern, of course, over the threat posed by Tim McVeigh or various domestic militia movements - who hate our liberal democracy just as much as Osama bin Laden. And for the same ideological reasons).
I *do* have a problem with allowing terrorists to succeed, in their goal, of shutting down 4th amendment and 1st amendment protections. (and 6th and 8th). Out of fear. Via the tried and true mechanism that gives this method of warfare it's name. They (the terrorists) spent far less money than the RIAA did lobbying to violate our 1st and 4th amendment rights. (Probably, both the terrorist groups, and the RIAA/MPAA spent less money on provoking the fear that gets our rights violated, than WE spend, as taxpayers, on the national infrastructure of lawyers and police to violate our own rights.)
That's the sick thing.
We pay tax money, to FORCE our citizens to become educated - we learn in history, and civics classes, about our rights, our constitution, and what terrorism is (at least we did in the 1980s and 1970s when I went to school) - but then, apparently, we get into the voting booth, and we've forgotten all about that, and we're wetting our pants in fear over what our President's business-partner's rogue son is doing in 'stan, "Oh Please, big brother! please take our rights away! We're so terrified of what we're seeing on FoxNews! OMG! SCARY! We'll pay ANY PRICE to feel safe! Please save us!!!"
8====D O|
he seems to enjoy the bigger one more. His eyes are closed.
My God Man! Haven't you ever heard of the Prime Directive?!
(That means we must send Navy Warships to their harbors, on Diplomatic Missions of Peace - the officers go ashore, and mate with their women, but under NO conditions, are we to interfere with their culture or scientific progress!)
We've observed sunspots for hundreds of years.
We have data on the cyclical effects of solar radiation on isotope balance in polar ice-core samples for hundreds of thousands of years.
2-3 decades of space-radiation storms is about right, but, I think we can be reasonably certain that the theory that they're closely associated with sunspots and isotopes, is pretty sound.
Another very difficult (but very seldom talked-about) problem of spaceflight, is re-ignition of rocket engines. At-altitude, in space, on another heavenly body. . . one has to count on the propellant being in good condition (not frozen, not aerosolized, not leaked out through a ruptured tank, line, seal or stuck-valve, not gravitationally globbed in the center of the tank). It's not a trivial problem - and launch of a sample-return vehicle from Mars faces a pretty big challenge that we have not yet addressed.
Some folks have speculated about manufacture of propellant on the martian surface - that's a big huge "if". Solids have their own problems, given the very cold temperatures, the engine could easily be damaged in landing. Hypergolics could freeze, and binary liquid propellants could also freeze. (ie. the tanks would have to have heaters to maintain operating temperature prior to ignition - which isn't unusual, of course). But these are the options, I think, used in landing retros on previous Mars landers, which re-ignite under some of the same conditions.
The notion of a binary solid/hybrid (like the one used on SpaceShip One) is interesting. (Nitrous Oxide as an oxidant, and rubberized solid fuel). Mechanically, I think, simple and reliable, and lightweight, and probably, enough impulse to get off Mars. (I don't know.)
Something based on perchlorate chemistry to produce hydrogen peroxide from the martian soil might also be interesting (but I don't know if it would be possible to produce enough quantity in high enough concentration - and that failing; would mean mission-failure). The fact that hydrogen peroxide is relatively simple to fire: you pressurize it, and shoot it out through a platinum catalyst, and it decomposes, burning itself - makes it, in my mind, a more reliable bet, at least mechanically-speaking. The waste product is water and oxygen, so less pollution of the pristine martian environment.
The main thing going for such a mission, is the very thin martian atmosphere; drag can probably be disregarded in the design of the ascent vehicle. Escape velocity is probably what, like 8500 mph?
It should bring back two rocks.
One - to sell to some very rich "sucker". The profit from that sale, will fund the mission. The other rock will go to Science.
No - the problem is; the valuation of assets, how you're saying. . . the way we "secure" debt, is and absurd shell-game. Depending on who's selling, how much is available on the market for sale, and the conditions of what's being traded for those assets - for example, housing prices, were skewed way out of proportion with reality, thanks to fantastical speculation on CDO's which were bets on how bundles of loans were going to perform, long-term, the odds of which, were based on statistics on previous performance, which bore zero resemblance to the realities of whether the debtors were going to be able to pay those loans off: (bond market prices, interest rates, inflation, income, taxation, unemployment, trade activity, overall levels of fraud, and detection or enforcement of said fraud, and a host of other factors that nobody could even make a wild guess at, let alone point to some calculus on a whiteboard, and say with a straight-face that this was how it was going to be).
So to say that someone has a certain amount of debt that's only secured by an asset of value "X" is actually, an absurd statement. Really. Because what are the terms of that debt? What will be the value of that asset, when that debt comes to term? For that matter, what will be the value of the currency in which the debt is denominated, when it comes to term?
It is all fortune-telling and voodoo.
And to REALLY make it all fun-and-games: The Government Prints Money. As much as it wants, whenever it wants. The fact that the rate at which it prints money, is alarming to you, is probably AMUSING to others. Because you are ONE person, and you probably think that a trillion dollars is a lot of money. It is not. It is all imaginary. It's a few bits flipped on a chip, in a computer, at the FED. The banks of the world, of course, need to buy-in to the notion that this "value" exists somewhere. Maybe - what - some future date? Some mathematical formulae can "prove" it, sufficiently? It will either exist, or if it does not, it won't matter, because we'll all be fucked?
At the end of the day - we'd like all of our transactional chits to be backed up by concrete assets like a block of gold sitting in a vault somewhere. But when you've got 6 billion + people making transactions all day long (and making more people), and inventing new ways to even represent stored money (securities), some of which expand geometrically - you have to eventually accept that we can't limit money to mapping over to assets in the physical world any more. Money is "stored value" - either labor, or a physical asset, or a stake in a creative work, or even a stake in an enterprise. There isn't enough gold in the universe; we've conceptually gone past that.
So, the PROBLEM is - in a Democracy, regular folks, like you and I, are taught how to manage a finite household budget, in finite mathematical terms. And we know that we have to keep our debt and income in line. And most of us have no concept of how to deal with finance on this scale, when we have the power to "imagine" capital, create it out of thin air. We either say; "shit, I want some of that, because I'm working my ass off, and I need to pay off my corvette." or we say; "holy mother of fuck, I can't believe you're spending that much of my money on feeding lazy, immoral drug addicts who don't work!"
I'm not saying that "regular folks" should keep their noses out of macroeconomic problems. I'm just saying that - trying to fix macroeconomic problems with microeconomic logic, is like trying to solder a live 20,000 volt high-tension wire connection with a 25-watt soldering iron.
Well - when a country's mineral wealth is concentrated into the hands of a few; whether it's a monarchy, or robber-barons, the masses still end up suffering.
And what better example than Saudi Arabia.
If Afghanistan becomes the "Saudi Arabia of Lithium" as has been suggested. . . well, the Saudi Sheiks and Royals themselves sure are progressive in their values (in private). They attend western universities, party down at western casinos, screw western whores, invest in western business and markets. Of course, THEY must maintain these relationships with westerners, in order to continue to profit in the plunder of their nations' natural resources.
But they realize that if they put too much into their domestic economy, they threaten their own dominance. They spend just enough domestically, to keep themselves in power. When their own people get upset that the Royals are "too cozy" with the west, or "too friendly" with Israel, well, you get guys like Osama bin Laden, and followers. They kicked his ass out of Saudi Arabia.
And what did they try to do with their followers?
Well - they have an effective public campaign they play on their tightly controlled national newsmedia called "it's all Israel's fault". Then they throw money at the religious institutions, who fund chains of schools, we all have heard of them, called "madrassas" which teach poor muslim kids all over the world how to read. By having them memorize the koran. I'm sure that not all madrassas are hotbeds of radical hatred of the west, but they DO tend to deflect hatred from the people who are actually causing oppression and suffering among the world's muslim poor. Because you can teach a billion muslims to read. But unless you give them an economic stake in their own future - a career, a job, a way to start a business without a royal lineage being a prerequisite, they're still going to end up poor, starving, and angry.
The question is - who are they going to be angry at. The monarchial oppressors? Or who their clerics and xenophobic state-controlled newsmedia tells them is their enemy? (the West, Israel)?
So what exactly do you think is going to happen if mineral wealth in Afghanistan triggers a flow of wealth into the centers of power there? Will Karzai continue to be a "good little puppet"? Or will he necessarily shake hands with the Taliban, in order to win enough practical peace to allow mining to actually happen?
Western corporations have been bedding down with the Taliban since the 1990's, when it was necessary to do so, in order to exploit Afghanistan's resources. Unocal sure as hell did it. And will Karzai, his Western mining partners, and Taliban mobsters share their wealth with the Afghan people? Maybe with Pashtun tribes, but certainly not the rest. And what you're going to see, is simply a money-backed return to the status quo. . . circa 1998.
In fact: Pashtun cooperation is going to necessarily figure in, because that is the route through Southern Pakistan to any Sea Port where Afghanistan might ship-out its products. (once again, thank you Great Britain, for your absolutely brain-dead assignment of national boundaries, completely ignorant of the presence of local cultures and tribes).
ha - you learned the secret!
I figured this out in 1983. I was sitting on my couch, eating potato chips, watching MTV. I realized: my parents were paying a monthly cable bill - so I could watch music videos, which were advertisements for record albums. In between the music videos, were MORE ADS. WTF?
(fantasy follows:)
I said to myself right then, someday, since music is now coming out on these CD's and we have personal computers, and there are digital networks connecting these computers. . . it follows that SOME DAY, people will just copy the digital data from the CD's, and send them to each other over the digital network - (just like we used to send copied software to each other via BBS's using a modem). AND THERE WOULD BE NOTHING THEY COULD DO TO STOP US!!! I decided right then and there - fuck this MTV shit. Paying? To watch advertisement for music I don't like, that is anyway, ad-supported? Fuck this MTV shit.
And fantasy became reality.
What really pisses me off is when I hear former "popular kids" saying crap like; "oh, those years are horrible for everybody. Everyone felt lonely, and awkward and left out, and picked-on."
They have absolutely NO fucking clue.
Do you realize how many times you have to reload to kill 26 people with a standard 12ga shotgun?
Is that before, or after, large-capacity magazines were banned?
Because, I dunno, there are single-shot breech loaders, double-barrel breech loaders, 3 round magazine loaders, 5 round magazine loaders, I think as many as 7 in that remington auto; but before the ban, I think there were 15-round box magazine style shotguns out there, that you just can't get anymore. Because of the ban. Now, with the cylinder-style magazine, you've got to reload each shot individually. But box-style magazines can be pre-loaded and swapped with a new full one, like an assault rifle.
Considering the great pleasure I take from powdering clay pidgeons. . . I'm really glad shotguns are available. Considering the great pleasure I take from breathing, I'm really glad shotguns with 15-round box magazines are NOT available.
Last month, I took on the task of "cleaning off" a pair of computers, used by a friends' teenage kids. One running XP Home, the other Win 7 Home.
OF COURSE I lectured them about security basics, not running as Admin, not installing "candy from strangers", and I burned them an Ubuntu CD too. (if they aren't going to install it, at least they can boot to it to rescue what's left of their data when the next infection hits).
Each computer took about a week of evenings to clear off. Using scan tools, alternately booting back and forth between Ubuntu, safe mode, standard mode, etc.
In the end, both machines were pretty much subject to the same abusive practices, (autologin, run as admin, kids going to porn sites, both of them chat/camwhores, etc.; yeah, these kids were horrified when I told their mom what they had been up to.) - both machines were trojaned and rootkitted to the hilt. I honestly have no idea if I got everything. I deleted a bunch of software that was probably legit, in the process, (hardware vendor (HP) crapware) Probably not.
But I was able to get things functioning to the point where the systems were at least reasonably stable again. Getting the DNS to be able to find Windows Updates was one of the toughest chores - because something had totally ripped out the entire tcpip stack, and replaced it. I had to uninstall networking, and reinstall it, including all the web browsers, and network device drivers (wired and wireless).
At the end of those two weeks - I had learned a lot.
What I already knew. . . you're better off blowing everything away, and reinstalling. Every time.
There was a keylogger.
There was something that was turning the webcam on.
There was something that had replaced the standard windows file-system driver, in the encrypted CAB file that Windows File Protection should *not* allow to be replaced. (atapi.sys).
There was something that had left Symantec AntiVirus in an "installed" but, non-functional state.
I had luckily, armed myself with seven USB thumbdrives, loaded with my "standard" set of tools. Those kept getting infected. There were at least three different programs trying to infect those. One of them became non-functional during this job. I don't know why. It just won't mount in any system (Mac, Linux, Windows) now. I'm hoping it was just a hardware failure, and not something nasty trying to change the onboard driver. I did not see any such activity, but I'm wondering if I need a hardware USB bus-protocol analyzer to even see something like that.
There were drivers that would mysteriously reinstall themselves after I deleted them. (typical malware behavior though). Tracking those down with Sysinternals tools was fun. The first few iterations.
The other thing I learned, in this little trip down the rabbit hole, is that, all other things reasonably equal. . . the Windows XP machine was WAY more fubared than the Windows 7 machine. The things that kept on re-appearing in the Run keys and Startup folders on the XP machines, were present on the Windows 7 machine, but for some reason, were unable to re-assert themselves after deletion. I'm guessing it was probably due to the Virtual Storage architecture, that prevents userland stuff from writing to system keys and filesystem areas.
After this experience - I am convinced that Windows XP is simply no longer safe. Period.
Not in the hands of a non-paranoid, non-technical user, that's not behind a separate, NAT device.
(meet those conditions, then maybe you're okay).
Keep it updated.
Run with Antivirus+anticrapware.
Don't install candy from strangers.
Surf with NoScript+FlashBlock+Adblock.
Don't open PDFs with a reader that supports Javascript.
Don't run as Admin.
If you have teenagers, physically de-solder the webcam.
I would also recommend - use a product like nLite to build a preconfigured OS + automated app-install disk. Keep your persistent documents and static data on a separate physical partition. Update the install dis
Well; I *do* have a nuclear reactor in my back yard. Probably the most modern and advanced one in the US. And if they *fuck* that up, like BP fucked up Deepwater Horizon. . . we'll need a lot more than a CEO's apology. Maybe we could deal with a TMI-type event. But not a Chernobyl-type event. This region is already pretty difficult to make a living in, since the clam and fish population has been decimated. Though it's still got fairly rich farming, wine grapes (as long as that remains a fad) and cattle grazing going on. A Chernobyl would kill all that.
We banned offshore drilling here in 1969, after a spill down south.
The oil companies have been cleaning up other spills up and down the California coast for the past 30 years. I can think of 4 ongoing cleanup projects off the top of my head, and two completed ones. The local Union Carbide refinery had a minor explosion and fire just last year. No deaths, no headlines.
The thing is: the crazy folks are talking about removing the drilling ban. Deepwater Horizon, of course, THANK GOD, has put the kibosh on that. For what? Maybe another 30 years, until people forget again.
No matter what we do with nuclear - people will forget, and we will end up with both nuclear and oil drilling. NIMBY is nothing. NIMBY is Not In My Back Yard (Today. . . maybe tomorrow). NIMBY is Not In My. . . wait, $5 a gallon, are you fucking kidding me? Drill baby drill!
One thing that The Great American Dream has been based on; (and probably not a great idea), is the idea of home ownership, and stable/growing property values. You spew oil on my beach, rain down Sr-90 on my dairy farm, or wrap all my neighbor's mortgages in a CDO, none of that has anything to do with whether I put in a good day's work at my job. All of them can destroy decades of saved-labor I have in the form of home equity. Even if oil does not actually kill any wildlife, even if Sr-90 doesn't bind in place of calcium in your bones and cause bone cancer. Even if 3 mortgage defaults in your neighborhood don't cause appraisers to write-down values - it's still actions and choices that other people make, that have absofuckinglutely NOTHING to do with me, yet fuck me over completely.
Why not YOUR backyard, instead? Get off of my lawn. Thanks.
Where can I download the MP3 of the lawyer making that claim? sounds like it would make a hilarious sample for a techno mix song I'm doing.
Yes; this is why I did not donate any money to the Haiti relief effort. As cold-hearted as that sounds (and *feels*) - these people were suffering long before the earthquake, and will be suffering long after, and donating our pocket change is not going to alter the fact that they're bent under the yoke of oppression in a self-sustaining kleptocracy. Well, maybe not self-sustaining. . . certainly propped up by their neighbors in the Dominican Republic, the US, and other regional influences.
The earthquake was a great opportunity for the American newsmedia to blink its eye open and shut quickly to show a view of the tremendous suffering these people have borne for generations. When a viable solution to this suffering is found, I'll happily contribute. Until then, I refuse to make token "feel-good" attempts that do little more than roll statistics on paper so some self-serving social scientist can smoke them, or pass the joint to a politician.
'k - Haiti's 15 minutes are up. Next disaster please. Next group of desperately starving and suffering masses of third world children who will never understand how they barely even qualify as pawns in someone else's chess game - played largely for idle amusement. Pfft! Guatamala doesn't even get their own 15 minutes. They must share with the US Gulf Coast as it suffers through another disaster - roughly man-made - as all of these, frankly, are.
How are you going to convince the existing 6 billion people to do that?
Violence?
Your current math is wrong. The hell is here now. Every person who has to "sacrifice" is going to ask, "why me, and not this other person?" Most will resist violently. Which is fine, because only a few of them have access to small-arms. Fewer to heavy-arms. And fewer, to WMD; figuring, the more of "those people over there, (different nationality, tribe, race, religion), I can kill now, the less I'll have to sacrifice."
PS. This kind of thinking has pretty much been behind the drive for most conflicts for the past 1000 years.
PPS. Once the immediate "threat" of resource-scarcity is taken out of our face - (and I mean, like, starvation), we'll resume our previous rate of reproduction and resource consumption, or increase it.
Actually, the vacuum's not THAT hard. Kind of soft, really. You should come up and try it.
I think it's also a gross fallacy to say that ALL PEOPLE ARE LAZY AND GREEDY.
That's bullshit.
And has been proven largely false: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=autofb
That's not to say that Communism or Socialism is the answer either.
But look around you. People are *not* coin-operated. If they were, the Capitalist Paradise that the Republicans tried to create in the past 10 years - look, they had complete freedom to do so - complete 100% pure freedom; nobody tried to stop them, and nobody could have - and it did not work.
When there's a boot-heel on your throat, it doesn't matter if it's a Right boot-heel, or a Left boot-heel.
The world seems to work that way when you walk out of your Psychology 101 class. But when you take Psych 102 (and ++), you realize that real human behavior and motivation is more complicated than the "reward-punishment" model suggests. On an individual scale, and on a mass-scale.