'm not sure how that makes your point. If you replace an hour of TV with an hour of the Internet, you haven't exactly gained time for social activities...
If I want to find out what is happening in the world, it takes half an hour of CNN headline news to find out. The remaining half hour might be spent looking for something else to watch. It takes less than five minutes to catch up on Slashdot, CNN.com, Plastic, Kuro5hin, Metafilter, and Fark. Give 10-15 more minutes to read some articles and I still have half an hour to send email and instant messages to my friends.
The key here is the email and instant messages. With TV, there is no bidirectional communication. On the internet, I'm often messaging people who live across the street and across the world while I'm browsing CNN.com or slashdot.
I'm sorry, but there is absolutely no news on CNN headline news anymore unless you count Britney's new album and Michale Jackson's Prince Albert as news. Almost 100% of their time is now taken up by advertisements for Time Warner AOL products including their "news." Also, whereas BEFORE AOL took over CNN's format was to put an entire line of news from headlines to sports in 30 minutes, that is no longer the case. Now they will typically give you 2 hours of teasers that they might actually tell you something useful and important and if they actually ever get to that story it will be a restatement of the teaser blurb and no more.
Their ticker is the height of annoyance. It usually has more interesting news than the ads the newscasters spout, but there is no more data. Check cnn.com and there is still no more data. I find CNN is too frustrating to watch though cnn.com is okay for news.
Incredibly, FOX is now the only channel that actually gives realtime news anymore and usually reports NEWS, not new products. Granted they are biased as hell on purpose, but at least the freaking DATA are there. They will report stories that CNN will never pick up that are relevant and important, while CNN tries to grok that new videogame from some Time Warner subsidiary.
CNN is now officially slower than SLASHDOT and less informative! This is pretty bad. For instance they just finally picked up TODAY on the story that pirated movies on the net are frequently leaked screeners. There is no excuse for that given their primary line of business.
I try to read the bbc and cnn websites as often as I can, and slashdot. But I think eventually I am going to get together a list of alternative news sources and put them in some sort of rotation. Maybe I could script it or something so the news just displays automatically on the screen one story after another.. oh wait.:)
That's the best description of television that I've ever read =D
Going on about 3 years myself since I stopped watching TV.
For those who still watch TV regularly: you don't realize how bad it really is until you step away for a while and then come back. Give it a try and you'll probably be quite disgusted...
But seriously, TV is mostly crap. Lately it has gotten so bad that you can't get news anymore and everything is a commercial. I watch some of the documentary-type channels, but otherwise mainly do the net. TV is ok for mindless entertainment once in awhile, but even then there is slashdot instead, so why bother?
Microsoft dropped msconfig with win98. It was never installed by default anyway. Even with msconfig you still could not kill everything and you still cannot choose whether or not to install every piece of software there is on the machine. Ordinary applications still replace system libraries with NO WARNING and service packs are misleading because system libraries get replaced with older bugged and/or vulnerable versions with no way to tell beyond manually cataloguing every file's checksum (version, size, and date are not guaranteed to be correct and usually wildly innacurate as methods of determining a file's origin on a microsoft OS).
With the exception of the Microsoft innovation of creating programs you cannot kill or uninstall ON PURPOSE, these are all old problems, predating MSDOS which everyone else has figured a way to correct EXCEPT Microsoft precisely because they do not really care. This is still the case all the way to Windows 2003 and I predict that it will be the case with Longhorn.
Damn damn damn. I should have recognised that. Too drunk by half, I guess.
Thanks for the reproduction. I hope some others see it for the first time, even if I don't necessarily agree with it all.:-)
Oh I don't necessarily agree with it, but after all I am "Whitey" and have always been enamoured with tech and space. THough I am far from being "The Man," who is clearly not giving me any peace either.
There was in the time period referenced a popular sentiment among revolutionaries of all colours that nuclear power, space travel, etc were only in the hands of "the man" or "whitey." It was seen as either an indication or a source of imbalance of power. Likewise there are those who, like our aforementioned poet, pointed to the disparity between money spent getting white people on the moon and getting blacks out of ghettos and into decent schools.
Personally, I think there is room for both, and the space stuff helps life on earth. But it is too bad there was not a bigger emphasis on the war on poverty. Actually Johnson lamented that the war on Vietnam was taking focus away frm his attempts at a war on poverty. But that is another tale altogether...
1. Sold out Central Europeans at Yalta, condemning them to 45 years of murder and slavery.
2. Rounded up Japanese-Americans and put them in concentration camps.
Absolutely nothing Reagan ever did even approached either of those crimes.
Yet because FDR was good at keeping people calm with empty rhetoric and feel-good programs that did nothing to end the Depression, somehow we're supposed to ignore the fact that he's the greatest betrayer of the innocent to totalitarianism and violator of civil rights to ever hold Presidential office. We even honor him by putting his damned face on the dime and giving him a big memorial in DC.
Any other former president would be a good choice as a replacement for FDR on the dime. Hell, even Nixon is an honorable choice compared to FDR. I'd rather have TR, Eisenhower, or Jackson, but I'd settle for Reagan or Truman.
FDR did nothing to end the Depression? What a master economist YOU must be! It was Hoover (and Bush, BTW, his only compatriot in this view) who claimed the president could not affect the economy. But somehow both FDR and Clinton disagreed and somehow the economy got better under each of their terms. As for FDR doing NOTHING, I would not call closing the banks, moving off the gold standard, and creating thousands of government jobs fixing infrastructure and building hydroelectric dams doing NOTHING. I would say it has to have had some impact on the economy, would you not think?
> Firstly, it is plainly understood that human society requires conformity to rules. This conformity is willingly undertaken because if we do not live according to agreed upon rules humans cannot occupy the same space peaceably.
A cynical view, that I question. Still I see no point to value "living peaceably with rules" higher then "living maybe not so peaceably without rules".
The first option implies you to impose rules on your neighboor. Rules that govern how they should live, a way of life that you may think of as peaceful. Right?
If you do this to your neighboor, it means, by its very nature, that you are restricting what he may do. You can not argue that this isn't restricting his freedom. It does.
Peaceful, perhaps. Freedom, no.
Actually they are always free to reject the rules. Anyone can do anything at any time. Other people may make consequences in addiotion to the natural consequences of these actions, but still the choice is there. In theory these rules are agreed upon by neighbours. Yes in practice democracy makes this law to a certain degree but stil has limitations. Despite this, I am still free to decide my own rules as are my neighbours. If we agree, and do not involve the authorities in any way, then in essence we have created a mini-anarchic state. This is more common in the US that you might think.
It might be so minor as not calling the cops when yur neighbours have a loud party as you too have loud parties or do not care. Or not telling that they are drunk outside of the normal confines of law or god forbid using illegal intoxicants. It goes so far as to have entire communities which exist in the wilderness living according to their own definition of what is right, even if it involves such taboos as nudism or polygamy. This is the natural state of human beings which is normally invisible because there are so many enforcers for social mores and laws. Still it exists. Humans are free and are meant to be so by their creator. Our founding fathers understood this and when they created this nation they codified this idea into law. It is with this attitude that governments shoudl govern, if at all, that their power is derived from the people, and that the people agree to the laws they will obey. All else is folly.
Some people are suggesting ide converters, but I have another suggestion as well. There exist laptop external drive enclosures which use USB and FireWire which can be had for all of $40. I had a girlfriend with a broken Thinkpad (who incidentally switched to an iBook) for whom this solution worked well. You just take out the drive, slap it in the enclosure and you have an external USB drive now. Oddly enough, linux worked best for actually getting at the data with the enclosure we chose, but there are probably others which come with decent drivers (besides, part of the problem was incompatable ntfs versions and the iBook itself, problems you will likely not have).
100% completely serious question: Do you or your girlfriend find the Aztec attractive? As in "Hey, that's a really great looking vehicle!" ? I'm genuinely curious if my taste in mainstream on this one.
Slashdotters seem to miss the correllation here. This girl
a) finds the Pontiac Aztec attractive
b) finds the aforementioned slashdotter attractive (though probably less so after he broke her car...)
Also ironic: the FTC posts their own email address online (uce@ftc.gov) at the bottom of their webpage!
uce@ftc.gov? That's a spamtrap address if I ever saw one!
Yes, it is. In fact, I use that address to sign up for crap somethines when they swear they will not send me spam therefore. Also, the FTC set up that address for people to forward their spam to it for their analysis.
First of all, nice rhyme. Don't know if it's original or not, but well done.
The same argument was made in 67, when they started to pour tons of money into the first moon landing, and continued for ages. There was a comic in Mad Magazine, from roughly 1972.
Q "How come the guvmint can put people on the moon, but they can't feed us poor people?"
For the lazy slashdotters who need not click links for fear of evil pictures (and now popups! damnit goatse.cx trolls, quit with the popups! goatse was enough already!) I have reproduced it here:
Whitey on the Moon
A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey's on the moon) I can't pay no doctor bill. (but Whitey's on the moon) Ten years from now I'll be payin' still. (while Whitey's on the moon) The man jus' upped my rent las' night. ('cause Whitey's on the moon) No hot water, no toilets, no lights. (but Whitey's on the moon) I wonder why he's uppi' me? ('cause Whitey's on the moon?) I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week. (with Whitey on the moon) Taxes takin' my whole damn check, Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck, The price of food is goin' up, An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough: A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face an' arm began to swell. (but Whitey's on the moon) Was all that money I made las' year (for Whitey on the moon?) How come there ain't no money here? (Hmm! Whitey's on the moon) Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill (of Whitey on the moon) I think I'll sen' these doctor bills, Airmail special (to Whitey on the moon)
So did we find oil on the moon and on Mars or something?
NO the Chinese are going there. By the way, the Chinese will declare that the Moon is part of China, and always has been, and prevent anyone going there with threat of war. They *are* the Celestial Kingdom, you know...
Oddly enough, the imperialists round the white house have been talking about putting weapons in space to prevent anyone launching anything into space without US permission, on threat of being shot down. Now, the Chinese may be crazy enough to claim the moon, but only Dubya would be crazy enough to claim the entire goddamn universe!
the same president who wants to cut funding to NASA? So we'll be sending people to Mars on a shoestring budget? Yay for making it there alive!
Interestingly enough, we are behind our timetable for Mars. Reagan, the president Republicans seem to worship as a god-king and want to place upon the dime instead of the loathsome FDR, had set a goal of reaching mars within ten years. Obviously we did not get there. Then there was some talk of a joint Russian-US mission to Mars by I think 2005 with a Mars base by 2013. That seems to be out if Bush is setting the time to 10 years again. Likewise if he and the Republicans continue to both force NASA to work on a shoestring budget and prevent private companies from building spacecraft on their own.
I love fvwm. Used it for years (i use sawfish now just because I'm a huge lisp fan). I love fvwm's stability, flexibility, etc etc. everything you cited.
But easy to configure? Hardly. Spending hours hand coding a fvwm2rc can be immensely satisfying, but it sure isn't easy especially to the new user.
Well, it depends on what you want. Most of the fvwm2rc is pretty straightforward, though I would kill to find some decent documentation beyond the man page. The best route is not to start from scratch, but rather to take one that is close to what you want and then modify it. Mine is mostly based on the default one that came with Slackware with some modifications snagged from other fvwm2rcs I found online. There are a lot of webpages where people say "This is what fvwm looks like on my system and here is my fvwm2rc file." In addition some of them are very well commented and/or explain why they used things the way they did.
The main things I have changed myself are menu items and icons, which are dead simple to change, and I removed some crap I don't use. Of course, YMMV.
Grub and Rifter have posted alternatives above, and I can also add blackbox to the list of suggestions regarding real usability and minimalism....
I know, I know... I have been trolled
Who cares if it was a troll? At least some informative comments were made of it, and it is indeed something a lot of new Linux users will want to know about. I know I have a few windowmanagers to play with now...:)
The same was said of manufacturing jobs. "It's more than just jobs! That's the real products of America! Steel and automobiles and textiles and and and... If you export that, what will be left for us?" The problem is, for the most part, tech jobs these days are the same thing. There's not much "innovation." Tell me, when you're designing a database system for a company, how much are you really "innovating?"
Yes, and they were. Direct consequences of outsourced manufacturing jobs include increased child labour, inferior products, and more US citizens on the unemployment line. Cars from the 50s-70s last far longer than those from the 80s-90s. Likewise textiles are less durable than they once were.
"Well, I came up with the schema!" -- sure, but the "innovation" was the relational database model, innovated some twenty years ago. "Well, I coded it!" -- sure, but did you write mySQL? Did you "innovate" that? No, you're just using it.
Well, maybe they wrote parts of MySQL, you don't know. There are certainly US Citizens working on that as well as on Oracle and other database products. They do come up with features and improve the products. Is there a single database product originally designed in any other country besides the US that is more popular than the US databases?
You have some points about grunt IT workers, but even they come up with innovative ways to solve problems. It's not all just grunt work. If it was, the PHBs could just hire janitors to paint by numbers. There is clearly something going on here besides that.
Fact of the matter is, your high-tech "skill" of database design is not much different that the skill of an autoworker installing the drivetrain on a Buick. These days, it's easy to learn, and repetative. That's not innovation.
Thankfully, most of the real innovation is still right here. New standards, protocols, specifications, fabrication techniques, etc, are still being developed right here in the U.S. We still make the tools. You just can't get paid near so much for merely using the tools anymore.
For now, the innovation is in the US. BUt how long before we have to copy foreign database makers instead of innovating just as we now copy foreign automakers (and still make inferior products, using inferior materials, manufactured by the cheapest labour possible from overseas).
Actually, it was insightful. Dollarization (which is what would happen if the Indian government made 1 Rupee = 1 dollar) has been helpful in countries keen on fighting inflation.
Then again, it is not a panacaea, and is difficult to implement. I also am not so sure that India has an inflation problem, and their currency has been pretty stable (floating round 40RS/1$ for a damn long time now).
"whereas the USSR enslaved as much of the world as it could as had their friends the Nazis." - Like the man on/. used to say: if I ever meet you, I will kick your ass. Don't even reply to me, freaking fascist.
Yes, it is obvious that my words were misunderstood. It is wrong to attribute the actions of a country, particularly a dictatorship like the USSR under Stalin, to the people in that country. That is not really what I meant by my statement, however. The USSR was essentially a Russian empire, and the Soviets did enslave the people both within the USSR and within the Soviet Bloc. Stalin was a power-hungry dictator who entered his pact with Hitler precisely in order to better extend his empire. He exploited the non-aggression pact for this purpose.
When the USSR fought the Nazis, the end result was that even more of Europe was enslaved by Stalin than would have been had Hitler left the USSR alone. My point was taht whereas the USSR brought slavery and misery wherever it went, the US made people more free than before and gave them strong economies. It was a major philosophical difference.
For the record, I am not a fascist. In fact I am vehemently antifascist. I am also not necessarily against communism as an idea. I do disagree with most implementations to date because they have all revolved around the removal of all freedom from the individual. For any nation, choking freedom is killing yourself.
I think that for now Capitalism has the best chance of working, mainly because it uses both the best and worst aspects of human nature to survive. It works best when everyone has equal opportunity however, and gets damned ugly when they do not.
Americans are not free. To be free you'd at least have to be able to support your self without the permission of others.
Look at your basic needs: A house. May you cut down some trees and build one, where you see fit? No, you need permission(s). How about food? Well unless your a native (not including eskimos) you may only hunt/eat whatever your community tells you to.
That's two major causes that makes me say that you are not free. America is not a free land, you must conform.
Firstly, it is plainly understood that human society requires conformity to rules. This conformity is willingly undertaken because if we do not live according to agreed upon rules humans cannot occupy the same space peaceably.
Secondly you can certainly support yourself in the USA without the permission of others. This is a basic tenet of our philosophy. You can also cut down trees on land you own. In some areas, like Alaska, you can still obtain a homestead and build your cabin there and live on it. Subsistence hunting is allowed (with a permit of course). But the rules that restrict this are there to protect the rights of the citizenry. I cannot come and chop down YOUR trees. I cannot take all the animals for myself and slaughter them wholesale. I have to share and that sharing occurrs according to previously agreed-upon rules. That does not mean we are not free.
According the the US patent office, invented in Cuba by an Italian who later registered his invention on a time limited patent in the USA, which he couldn't afford to keep up the payments for. Later patented by Bell.
Lots of countries didn't invent the things for which they are popularly attributed the inventions. E.g. UK - TV (actually invented by the French), Radar (Germans), jet engines (Romanians)
As I pointed out earlier in this thread, Meucci immigrated to the US and in fact filed his patent there, not in Cuba. TV I had thought was invented in the US but we will give that one a pass for now. Radar and Jet Engines you have no excuse for. The fact the British had Radar before the Germans was a deciding factor in the Battle of Britain. The US also developed Radar, but I am reasonably certain that of the three it was the Brits who first deployed it correctly and who continued throughout the war to have the best radar equipment. (IIRC they came up with onboard radar for aircraft first as well).
I never read anything about Romanians having anything to do with jet engines. The Germans had the most advanced jet engines and created the first functional jet aircraft, but the US and I think the British were working toward it. It was not until after the war that they got on this in earnest, however, using data from Germany.
Speaking of not invented here.. I think it is exceedingly odd that France does not pasteurize their dairy products. I know that they are not alone in this and have even been told unpasteurized dairy is better. But still....
Yes, but bell didn't invent the telephone. It was Meucci (according to the US Patent Office, given that Meucci sought to patent it first). See http://www.popular-science.net/history/meucci_bell.html
Yes, yes. Antonio Meucci, a fine, upstanding, Italian-American. Don't you get it? This is the whole point. Einstein was born in Germany, but persecuted for his Jewish background, so he comes to the US. The best minds from all over the world come to the US. US superiority is not racist ethnic superiority. It is superiority granted by the fact that people like living here and come here from all over.
The dues were based on a GDP formula and paid more than other individual countries. The US was most definitly not paying a lion's share compared to collections of countries (such as the EU, even just adding Germany's, the UK's and France's contributions together) - and in any case, they welched for party-political reasons.
Well, it looks like I was slightly wrong about this. The US pays 25% of the UN budget, which is certainly more than any other country, but certainly not what I woudl have thought given the Republican whining on this subject (I would have put the figure closer to 75%). However it is more than the UK France, and Germany put together. In fact if you throw in mighty Spain you are still short. You need Italy to get above the contribution of the US.
Now, that is just the "union dues," as it were. When the UN needs to do something militarily, 9 times out of ten it means the lion's share of the work has to be done by US troops. UN adventures which do not feature US troops are unsuccessful almost without exception. Which goes back to the 300-500 billion dollars the US spends annually to keep the world safe.
And again, the EU is not a country. To be a country, you need a common government and a common currency. The EU does not have either. A constitution was recently drafted, and there is the Euro, yes. And of course the UK, France, and Germany all use the.. oh that right, they DON'T use the euro and probably NEVER will.
And by the way if you do live in Europe you had better pray that the EU never does become a country. Especially now that the originally democratic provisions of the EU were replaced so that it will in fact be a dictatorship. This is beside the fact that adoption of the Euro is likely to cause economic collapse. Estonians were recently quoted as saying that the EU is becoming the new Soviet Union. I hope that they are not right, or it does not work out, because living in Europe will be very bad otherwise.
Now don't get me wrong. I am all for cooperation between countries. In fact I think that removing economic and immigration barriers between European countries will stimulate growth there and is therefore a healthy thing. I likewise think that the United States should work to improve the lot of all nations in the Western Hemisphere. NAFTA was supposed to do that, but apparently it did not work out that way. And there is the rub. Just as greedy corporate elitists took advantage of and subverted NAFTA, so greedy banking elitists will take over and subvert the EU systems.
You're confusing your units. What they're advertizing is actually 3Mbps - that's 3 megabits per second. (I live in TWC territory, too, and I happen to know one of the RR head-end techs. It's 3Mbps for residential service) Translated into megabytes, that's about 384 kilobits per second. Most programs that show you download speeds (like IE's download window) will give you a reading in bytes, whether that's kilo- mega- or giga-. It's a simple formula, really:
1 byte = 8 bits Therefore: 1 megabyte = 8 megabits See the pattern?
A 1 Mbps connection (note, the small "b" indicates bits, not bytes) is a transfer of 1/8th megabyte per second, or 128 kilobytes per second (1024 / 8 = 128)
Extrapolation for additional speeds will be left as an exercise to the reader/previous poster.
You sound a little confused yourself. 3Mbps (Megabits) would be 384KBps (kilobytes) not 384kbps (kilobits). Now your explanation seems plausible nonetheless if one were reading things in kilobytes per second transfered. To be fair, I think I will look again. But I could swear (and indeed I posted) that the transfer speeds I was reading were in kilobits per second, not kilobytes. Then again, I was clealry wrong about TWC stated speed. It must be in megabits, not megabytes.
Yeah, I don't think that ever happened. That would require landing on mars which we have all seen is difficult in itself but would also require taking back off from Mars. That would probably be more difficult then landing. It would require making it land with enough fuel to take off and get back to earth making it much more dangerous. It would also require more then twice the amount of fuel then a one way mission would. And if it costs near 100 million to take off from earth just think what it would cost to take off from mars.
I seem to remember reports of fossilized bacteria found in meteorites or something like that. I really doubt that it was from mars.
No, actually the scientists did think the meteorite was from Mars. Here is one story.
And here is NASA's take on it. As I said, I was confused and after thinking about it a bit realized that this had to be the only instance of Mars rocks, for the reasons described. By the way, it would not take twice as much fuel to bring rocks back from Mars because Mars gravity is 0.11G. It's quite a bt tougher than bringing back moon rocks, but it could be done in theory. I had thought that perhaps we could send a probe to mars that was capable of taking off later, but we have not done that yet.
Perhaps you should read this article about "The darker side of Muhammad Ali". I'm an Ali fan and have been since the age of eight but he never was as angelic as his face would suggest.
Well, I havent read the book but just judging from the Salon article it seems to me that its a lot of sensationalism and not a little sour grapes. Apparently the author did not like Ali or the people he portrays as buffoons, and he makes it sound like Ali was an ignorant puppet.
Now I was not alive at the time, but I have to say I had always thought that Joe Frazier and Muhammed Ali were friends outside of the ring. Wasn't their relationship the model for that between Apollo and Rocky? As for not being able to write, I had never before heard the accusation that anyone wrote for Muhammed Ali. In fact he has been consistently credited with his sharp wit in being able to come up with funny remarks for the cameras.
I would not be surprised if Muhammed Ali did not know where Vietnam was. But that was his point. He said he had no reason to fight the Viet Cong and every reason to fight the white establishment. He said that the Viet Cong never called him racial slurs and denied him a seat on a bus or a hot meal in a restaurant. It is a simple argument and requires no complex knowlege of geography to understand.
No one is a perfect angel, of course. But I don't think that Muhammed Ali deserves to be painted as an evil man just to sell a book.
is not violent! Ohh, now I get it you mean the sport that North Americans call football, that you play with your hands....:-)
Actually both can be pretty violent. How many people get killed at an "American Football" match? But they get killed all the time at Euro football. And there is that bit about kicking each other. I mean yes, it is easy to do it by accident trying for the ball, but still. I had understood that fights break out between the football teams quite often as well.
Slashdot Mirror
'm not sure how that makes your point. If you replace an hour of TV with an hour of the Internet, you haven't exactly gained time for social activities...
If I want to find out what is happening in the world, it takes half an hour of CNN headline news to find out. The remaining half hour might be spent looking for something else to watch. It takes less than five minutes to catch up on Slashdot, CNN.com, Plastic, Kuro5hin, Metafilter, and Fark. Give 10-15 more minutes to read some articles and I still have half an hour to send email and instant messages to my friends.
The key here is the email and instant messages. With TV, there is no bidirectional communication. On the internet, I'm often messaging people who live across the street and across the world while I'm browsing CNN.com or slashdot.
I'm sorry, but there is absolutely no news on CNN headline news anymore unless you count Britney's new album and Michale Jackson's Prince Albert as news. Almost 100% of their time is now taken up by advertisements for Time Warner AOL products including their "news." Also, whereas BEFORE AOL took over CNN's format was to put an entire line of news from headlines to sports in 30 minutes, that is no longer the case. Now they will typically give you 2 hours of teasers that they might actually tell you something useful and important and if they actually ever get to that story it will be a restatement of the teaser blurb and no more.
Their ticker is the height of annoyance. It usually has more interesting news than the ads the newscasters spout, but there is no more data. Check cnn.com and there is still no more data. I find CNN is too frustrating to watch though cnn.com is okay for news.
Incredibly, FOX is now the only channel that actually gives realtime news anymore and usually reports NEWS, not new products. Granted they are biased as hell on purpose, but at least the freaking DATA are there. They will report stories that CNN will never pick up that are relevant and important, while CNN tries to grok that new videogame from some Time Warner subsidiary.
CNN is now officially slower than SLASHDOT and less informative! This is pretty bad. For instance they just finally picked up TODAY on the story that pirated movies on the net are frequently leaked screeners. There is no excuse for that given their primary line of business.
I try to read the bbc and cnn websites as often as I can, and slashdot. But I think eventually I am going to get together a list of alternative news sources and put them in some sort of rotation. Maybe I could script it or something so the news just displays automatically on the screen one story after another.. oh wait. :)
That's the best description of television that I've ever read =D
Going on about 3 years myself since I stopped watching TV.
For those who still watch TV regularly: you don't realize how bad it really is until you step away for a while and then come back. Give it a try and you'll probably be quite disgusted...
You aren't this guy, are you? :)
But seriously, TV is mostly crap. Lately it has gotten so bad that you can't get news anymore and everything is a commercial. I watch some of the documentary-type channels, but otherwise mainly do the net. TV is ok for mindless entertainment once in awhile, but even then there is slashdot instead, so why bother?
msconfig and mozilla are your friends.
Microsoft dropped msconfig with win98. It was never installed by default anyway. Even with msconfig you still could not kill everything and you still cannot choose whether or not to install every piece of software there is on the machine. Ordinary applications still replace system libraries with NO WARNING and service packs are misleading because system libraries get replaced with older bugged and/or vulnerable versions with no way to tell beyond manually cataloguing every file's checksum (version, size, and date are not guaranteed to be correct and usually wildly innacurate as methods of determining a file's origin on a microsoft OS).
With the exception of the Microsoft innovation of creating programs you cannot kill or uninstall ON PURPOSE, these are all old problems, predating MSDOS which everyone else has figured a way to correct EXCEPT Microsoft precisely because they do not really care. This is still the case all the way to Windows 2003 and I predict that it will be the case with Longhorn.
Damn damn damn. I should have recognised that. Too drunk by half, I guess.
:-)
Thanks for the reproduction. I hope some others see it for the first time, even if I don't necessarily agree with it all.
Oh I don't necessarily agree with it, but after all I am "Whitey" and have always been enamoured with tech and space. THough I am far from being "The Man," who is clearly not giving me any peace either.
There was in the time period referenced a popular sentiment among revolutionaries of all colours that nuclear power, space travel, etc were only in the hands of "the man" or "whitey." It was seen as either an indication or a source of imbalance of power. Likewise there are those who, like our aforementioned poet, pointed to the disparity between money spent getting white people on the moon and getting blacks out of ghettos and into decent schools.
Personally, I think there is room for both, and the space stuff helps life on earth. But it is too bad there was not a bigger emphasis on the war on poverty. Actually Johnson lamented that the war on Vietnam was taking focus away frm his attempts at a war on poverty. But that is another tale altogether...
"instead of the loathsome FDR"
Exactly right. Let's look at FDR's record. He:
1. Sold out Central Europeans at Yalta, condemning them to 45 years of murder and slavery.
2. Rounded up Japanese-Americans and put them in concentration camps.
Absolutely nothing Reagan ever did even approached either of those crimes.
Yet because FDR was good at keeping people calm with empty rhetoric and feel-good programs that did nothing to end the Depression, somehow we're supposed to ignore the fact that he's the greatest betrayer of the innocent to totalitarianism and violator of civil rights to ever hold Presidential office. We even honor him by putting his damned face on the dime and giving him a big memorial in DC.
Any other former president would be a good choice as a replacement for FDR on the dime. Hell, even Nixon is an honorable choice compared to FDR. I'd rather have TR, Eisenhower, or Jackson, but I'd settle for Reagan or Truman.
FDR did nothing to end the Depression? What a master economist YOU must be! It was Hoover (and Bush, BTW, his only compatriot in this view) who claimed the president could not affect the economy. But somehow both FDR and Clinton disagreed and somehow the economy got better under each of their terms. As for FDR doing NOTHING, I would not call closing the banks, moving off the gold standard, and creating thousands of government jobs fixing infrastructure and building hydroelectric dams doing NOTHING. I would say it has to have had some impact on the economy, would you not think?
> Firstly, it is plainly understood that human society requires conformity to rules. This conformity is willingly undertaken because if we do not live according to agreed upon rules humans cannot occupy the same space peaceably.
A cynical view, that I question. Still I see no point to value "living peaceably with rules" higher then "living maybe not so peaceably without rules".
The first option implies you to impose rules on your neighboor. Rules that govern how they should live, a way of life that you may think of as peaceful. Right?
If you do this to your neighboor, it means, by its very nature, that you are restricting what he may do. You can not argue that this isn't restricting his freedom. It does.
Peaceful, perhaps. Freedom, no.
Actually they are always free to reject the rules. Anyone can do anything at any time. Other people may make consequences in addiotion to the natural consequences of these actions, but still the choice is there. In theory these rules are agreed upon by neighbours. Yes in practice democracy makes this law to a certain degree but stil has limitations. Despite this, I am still free to decide my own rules as are my neighbours. If we agree, and do not involve the authorities in any way, then in essence we have created a mini-anarchic state. This is more common in the US that you might think.
It might be so minor as not calling the cops when yur neighbours have a loud party as you too have loud parties or do not care. Or not telling that they are drunk outside of the normal confines of law or god forbid using illegal intoxicants. It goes so far as to have entire communities which exist in the wilderness living according to their own definition of what is right, even if it involves such taboos as nudism or polygamy. This is the natural state of human beings which is normally invisible because there are so many enforcers for social mores and laws. Still it exists. Humans are free and are meant to be so by their creator. Our founding fathers understood this and when they created this nation they codified this idea into law. It is with this attitude that governments shoudl govern, if at all, that their power is derived from the people, and that the people agree to the laws they will obey. All else is folly.
Some people are suggesting ide converters, but I have another suggestion as well. There exist laptop external drive enclosures which use USB and FireWire which can be had for all of $40. I had a girlfriend with a broken Thinkpad (who incidentally switched to an iBook) for whom this solution worked well. You just take out the drive, slap it in the enclosure and you have an external USB drive now. Oddly enough, linux worked best for actually getting at the data with the enclosure we chose, but there are probably others which come with decent drivers (besides, part of the problem was incompatable ntfs versions and the iBook itself, problems you will likely not have).
100% completely serious question: Do you or your girlfriend find the Aztec attractive? As in "Hey, that's a really great looking vehicle!" ? I'm genuinely curious if my taste in mainstream on this one.
Slashdotters seem to miss the correllation here. This girl
a) finds the Pontiac Aztec attractive
b) finds the aforementioned slashdotter attractive (though probably less so after he broke her car...)
And you think he shoudl question her tatse? :)
Also ironic: the FTC posts their own email address online (uce@ftc.gov) at the bottom of their webpage!
uce@ftc.gov? That's a spamtrap address if I ever saw one!
Yes, it is. In fact, I use that address to sign up for crap somethines when they swear they will not send me spam therefore. Also, the FTC set up that address for people to forward their spam to it for their analysis.
Y'know...
First of all, nice rhyme. Don't know if it's original or not, but well done.
The same argument was made in 67, when they started to pour tons of money into the first moon landing, and continued for ages. There was a comic in Mad Magazine, from roughly 1972.
Q "How come the guvmint can put people on the moon, but they can't feed us poor people?"
A "Who wants poor people on the moon?"
No, it is not original. In fact, it is a rather famous poem, Whitey on the Moon by Gil Scott-Heron.
For the lazy slashdotters who need not click links for fear of evil pictures (and now popups! damnit goatse.cx trolls, quit with the popups! goatse was enough already!) I have reproduced it here:
Whitey on the Moon
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
So did we find oil on the moon and on Mars or something?
NO the Chinese are going there. By the way, the Chinese will declare that the Moon is part of China, and always has been, and prevent anyone going there with threat of war. They *are* the Celestial Kingdom, you know...
Oddly enough, the imperialists round the white house have been talking about putting weapons in space to prevent anyone launching anything into space without US permission, on threat of being shot down. Now, the Chinese may be crazy enough to claim the moon, but only Dubya would be crazy enough to claim the entire goddamn universe!
the same president who wants to cut funding to NASA? So we'll be sending people to Mars on a shoestring budget? Yay for making it there alive!
Interestingly enough, we are behind our timetable for Mars. Reagan, the president Republicans seem to worship as a god-king and want to place upon the dime instead of the loathsome FDR, had set a goal of reaching mars within ten years. Obviously we did not get there. Then there was some talk of a joint Russian-US mission to Mars by I think 2005 with a Mars base by 2013. That seems to be out if Bush is setting the time to 10 years again. Likewise if he and the Republicans continue to both force NASA to work on a shoestring budget and prevent private companies from building spacecraft on their own.
I love fvwm. Used it for years (i use sawfish now just because I'm a huge lisp fan). I love fvwm's stability, flexibility, etc etc. everything you cited.
But easy to configure? Hardly. Spending hours hand coding a fvwm2rc can be immensely satisfying, but it sure isn't easy especially to the new user.
Well, it depends on what you want. Most of the fvwm2rc is pretty straightforward, though I would kill to find some decent documentation beyond the man page. The best route is not to start from scratch, but rather to take one that is close to what you want and then modify it. Mine is mostly based on the default one that came with Slackware with some modifications snagged from other fvwm2rcs I found online. There are a lot of webpages where people say "This is what fvwm looks like on my system and here is my fvwm2rc file." In addition some of them are very well commented and/or explain why they used things the way they did.
The main things I have changed myself are menu items and icons, which are dead simple to change, and I removed some crap I don't use. Of course, YMMV.
Grub and Rifter have posted alternatives above, and I can also add blackbox to the list of suggestions regarding real usability and minimalism. ...
I know, I know... I have been trolled
Who cares if it was a troll? At least some informative comments were made of it, and it is indeed something a lot of new Linux users will want to know about. I know I have a few windowmanagers to play with now... :)
The same was said of manufacturing jobs. "It's more than just jobs! That's the real products of America! Steel and automobiles and textiles and and and... If you export that, what will be left for us?" The problem is, for the most part, tech jobs these days are the same thing. There's not much "innovation." Tell me, when you're designing a database system for a company, how much are you really "innovating?"
Yes, and they were. Direct consequences of outsourced manufacturing jobs include increased child labour, inferior products, and more US citizens on the unemployment line. Cars from the 50s-70s last far longer than those from the 80s-90s. Likewise textiles are less durable than they once were.
"Well, I came up with the schema!" -- sure, but the "innovation" was the relational database model, innovated some twenty years ago.
"Well, I coded it!" -- sure, but did you write mySQL? Did you "innovate" that? No, you're just using it.
Well, maybe they wrote parts of MySQL, you don't know. There are certainly US Citizens working on that as well as on Oracle and other database products. They do come up with features and improve the products. Is there a single database product originally designed in any other country besides the US that is more popular than the US databases?
You have some points about grunt IT workers, but even they come up with innovative ways to solve problems. It's not all just grunt work. If it was, the PHBs could just hire janitors to paint by numbers. There is clearly something going on here besides that.
Fact of the matter is, your high-tech "skill" of database design is not much different that the skill of an autoworker installing the drivetrain on a Buick. These days, it's easy to learn, and repetative. That's not innovation.
Thankfully, most of the real innovation is still right here. New standards, protocols, specifications, fabrication techniques, etc, are still being developed right here in the U.S. We still make the tools. You just can't get paid near so much for merely using the tools anymore.
For now, the innovation is in the US. BUt how long before we have to copy foreign database makers instead of innovating just as we now copy foreign automakers (and still make inferior products, using inferior materials, manufactured by the cheapest labour possible from overseas).
Troll?
No way... this was funny.
Actually, it was insightful. Dollarization (which is what would happen if the Indian government made 1 Rupee = 1 dollar) has been helpful in countries keen on fighting inflation.
Then again, it is not a panacaea, and is difficult to implement. I also am not so sure that India has an inflation problem, and their currency has been pretty stable (floating round 40RS/1$ for a damn long time now).
"whereas the USSR enslaved as much of the world as it could as had their friends the Nazis." - Like the man on /. used to say: if I ever meet you, I will kick your ass. Don't even reply to me, freaking fascist.
Yes, it is obvious that my words were misunderstood. It is wrong to attribute the actions of a country, particularly a dictatorship like the USSR under Stalin, to the people in that country. That is not really what I meant by my statement, however. The USSR was essentially a Russian empire, and the Soviets did enslave the people both within the USSR and within the Soviet Bloc. Stalin was a power-hungry dictator who entered his pact with Hitler precisely in order to better extend his empire. He exploited the non-aggression pact for this purpose.
When the USSR fought the Nazis, the end result was that even more of Europe was enslaved by Stalin than would have been had Hitler left the USSR alone. My point was taht whereas the USSR brought slavery and misery wherever it went, the US made people more free than before and gave them strong economies. It was a major philosophical difference.
For the record, I am not a fascist. In fact I am vehemently antifascist. I am also not necessarily against communism as an idea. I do disagree with most implementations to date because they have all revolved around the removal of all freedom from the individual. For any nation, choking freedom is killing yourself.
I think that for now Capitalism has the best chance of working, mainly because it uses both the best and worst aspects of human nature to survive. It works best when everyone has equal opportunity however, and gets damned ugly when they do not.
Americans are not free. To be free you'd at least have to be able to support your self without the permission of others.
Look at your basic needs: A house. May you cut down some trees and build one, where you see fit? No, you need permission(s).
How about food? Well unless your a native (not including eskimos) you may only hunt/eat whatever your community tells you to.
That's two major causes that makes me say that you are not free.
America is not a free land, you must conform.
Firstly, it is plainly understood that human society requires conformity to rules. This conformity is willingly undertaken because if we do not live according to agreed upon rules humans cannot occupy the same space peaceably.
Secondly you can certainly support yourself in the USA without the permission of others. This is a basic tenet of our philosophy. You can also cut down trees on land you own. In some areas, like Alaska, you can still obtain a homestead and build your cabin there and live on it. Subsistence hunting is allowed (with a permit of course). But the rules that restrict this are there to protect the rights of the citizenry. I cannot come and chop down YOUR trees. I cannot take all the animals for myself and slaughter them wholesale. I have to share and that sharing occurrs according to previously agreed-upon rules. That does not mean we are not free.
or the telephone (also invented here)
According the the US patent office, invented in Cuba by an Italian who later registered his invention on a time limited patent in the USA, which he couldn't afford to keep up the payments for. Later patented by Bell.
Lots of countries didn't invent the things for which they are popularly attributed the inventions. E.g. UK - TV (actually invented by the French), Radar (Germans), jet engines (Romanians)
As I pointed out earlier in this thread, Meucci immigrated to the US and in fact filed his patent there, not in Cuba. TV I had thought was invented in the US but we will give that one a pass for now. Radar and Jet Engines you have no excuse for. The fact the British had Radar before the Germans was a deciding factor in the Battle of Britain. The US also developed Radar, but I am reasonably certain that of the three it was the Brits who first deployed it correctly and who continued throughout the war to have the best radar equipment. (IIRC they came up with onboard radar for aircraft first as well).
I never read anything about Romanians having anything to do with jet engines. The Germans had the most advanced jet engines and created the first functional jet aircraft, but the US and I think the British were working toward it. It was not until after the war that they got on this in earnest, however, using data from Germany.
Speaking of not invented here.. I think it is exceedingly odd that France does not pasteurize their dairy products. I know that they are not alone in this and have even been told unpasteurized dairy is better. But still....
Yes, but bell didn't invent the telephone. It was Meucci (according to the US Patent Office, given that Meucci sought to patent it first). See http://www.popular-science.net/history/meucci_bell .html
Yes, yes. Antonio Meucci, a fine, upstanding, Italian-American. Don't you get it? This is the whole point. Einstein was born in Germany, but persecuted for his Jewish background, so he comes to the US. The best minds from all over the world come to the US. US superiority is not racist ethnic superiority. It is superiority granted by the fact that people like living here and come here from all over.
The dues were based on a GDP formula and paid more than other individual countries. The US was most definitly not paying a lion's share compared to collections of countries (such as the EU, even just adding Germany's, the UK's and France's contributions together) - and in any case, they welched for party-political reasons.
Well, it looks like I was slightly wrong about this. The US pays 25% of the UN budget, which is certainly more than any other country, but certainly not what I woudl have thought given the Republican whining on this subject (I would have put the figure closer to 75%). However it is more than the UK France, and Germany put together. In fact if you throw in mighty Spain you are still short. You need Italy to get above the contribution of the US.
Now, that is just the "union dues," as it were. When the UN needs to do something militarily, 9 times out of ten it means the lion's share of the work has to be done by US troops. UN adventures which do not feature US troops are unsuccessful almost without exception. Which goes back to the 300-500 billion dollars the US spends annually to keep the world safe.
And again, the EU is not a country. To be a country, you need a common government and a common currency. The EU does not have either. A constitution was recently drafted, and there is the Euro, yes. And of course the UK, France, and Germany all use the.. oh that right, they DON'T use the euro and probably NEVER will.
And by the way if you do live in Europe you had better pray that the EU never does become a country. Especially now that the originally democratic provisions of the EU were replaced so that it will in fact be a dictatorship. This is beside the fact that adoption of the Euro is likely to cause economic collapse. Estonians were recently quoted as saying that the EU is becoming the new Soviet Union. I hope that they are not right, or it does not work out, because living in Europe will be very bad otherwise.
Now don't get me wrong. I am all for cooperation between countries. In fact I think that removing economic and immigration barriers between European countries will stimulate growth there and is therefore a healthy thing. I likewise think that the United States should work to improve the lot of all nations in the Western Hemisphere. NAFTA was supposed to do that, but apparently it did not work out that way. And there is the rub. Just as greedy corporate elitists took advantage of and subverted NAFTA, so greedy banking elitists will take over and subvert the EU systems.
You're confusing your units. What they're advertizing is actually 3Mbps - that's 3 megabits per second. (I live in TWC territory, too, and I happen to know one of the RR head-end techs. It's 3Mbps for residential service) Translated into megabytes, that's about 384 kilobits per second. Most programs that show you download speeds (like IE's download window) will give you a reading in bytes, whether that's kilo- mega- or giga-. It's a simple formula, really:
1 byte = 8 bits
Therefore:
1 megabyte = 8 megabits
See the pattern?
A 1 Mbps connection (note, the small "b" indicates bits, not bytes) is a transfer of 1/8th megabyte per second, or 128 kilobytes per second (1024 / 8 = 128)
Extrapolation for additional speeds will be left as an exercise to the reader/previous poster.
You sound a little confused yourself. 3Mbps (Megabits) would be 384KBps (kilobytes) not 384kbps (kilobits). Now your explanation seems plausible nonetheless if one were reading things in kilobytes per second transfered. To be fair, I think I will look again. But I could swear (and indeed I posted) that the transfer speeds I was reading were in kilobits per second, not kilobytes. Then again, I was clealry wrong about TWC stated speed. It must be in megabits, not megabytes.
Yeah, I don't think that ever happened. That would require landing on mars which we have all seen is difficult in itself but would also require taking back off from Mars. That would probably be more difficult then landing. It would require making it land with enough fuel to take off and get back to earth making it much more dangerous. It would also require more then twice the amount of fuel then a one way mission would. And if it costs near 100 million to take off from earth just think what it would cost to take off from mars.
I seem to remember reports of fossilized bacteria found in meteorites or something like that. I really doubt that it was from mars.
No, actually the scientists did think the meteorite was from Mars. Here is one story.
And here is NASA's take on it. As I said, I was confused and after thinking about it a bit realized that this had to be the only instance of Mars rocks, for the reasons described. By the way, it would not take twice as much fuel to bring rocks back from Mars because Mars gravity is 0.11G. It's quite a bt tougher than bringing back moon rocks, but it could be done in theory. I had thought that perhaps we could send a probe to mars that was capable of taking off later, but we have not done that yet.
Perhaps you should read this article about "The darker side of Muhammad Ali". I'm an Ali fan and have been since the age of eight but he never was as angelic as his face would suggest.
0 6/ ali/index1.html
http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2001/06/
Well, I havent read the book but just judging from the Salon article it seems to me that its a lot of sensationalism and not a little sour grapes. Apparently the author did not like Ali or the people he portrays as buffoons, and he makes it sound like Ali was an ignorant puppet.
Now I was not alive at the time, but I have to say I had always thought that Joe Frazier and Muhammed Ali were friends outside of the ring. Wasn't their relationship the model for that between Apollo and Rocky? As for not being able to write, I had never before heard the accusation that anyone wrote for Muhammed Ali. In fact he has been consistently credited with his sharp wit in being able to come up with funny remarks for the cameras.
I would not be surprised if Muhammed Ali did not know where Vietnam was. But that was his point. He said he had no reason to fight the Viet Cong and every reason to fight the white establishment. He said that the Viet Cong never called him racial slurs and denied him a seat on a bus or a hot meal in a restaurant. It is a simple argument and requires no complex knowlege of geography to understand.
No one is a perfect angel, of course. But I don't think that Muhammed Ali deserves to be painted as an evil man just to sell a book.
is not violent! Ohh, now I get it you mean the sport that North Americans call football, that you play with your hands.... :-)
Actually both can be pretty violent. How many people get killed at an "American Football" match? But they get killed all the time at Euro football. And there is that bit about kicking each other. I mean yes, it is easy to do it by accident trying for the ball, but still. I had understood that fights break out between the football teams quite often as well.