Putting it in the desert is fine - there's less humidity so maintenance will not be as bad as putting it near the sea or in a humid city. It's just that hiding it far up some inaccessible gulch defeats the point of the machine. For 99.99999999% of the population, it may as well not exist. Unless of course, it's only being built for the.000000001% then hell and gone is a dandy location.
There's another drawback you're missing. If civilisation collapses, there isn't going to be a caretaker for projects that only 1 in a 100 million people have seen. Whereas if it's a place where you take your kids so they can see a place that their great^200-grandfolks left them a big hello in the guest book, society as a whole might ensures it survives whatever comes down the pike. My sons' mother descends from the family that built the oldest standing house in the United States. The boys' names are in a guest book waiting for them to come see the house some day and sign the spot in the book that's waiting for them. Chances are they'll do it when they have kids of their own and can put their kid's names into the book. This has been going on since the house was built some 400 years ago. Granted, that's only 4% of 10,000 years, but I suspect that as long as the house endures, so will the tradition. The house endures, not because of the descendants, but because lots of people are interested in old houses and are willing to see to their upkeep.
How will we know it is keeping accurate time if nothing else is as accurate to check it against?
Local noon is an easy time to measure. When the sun is due south, it's local noon. Due south is halfway between local sunrise and local sunset. If the clock were to drift, it would be saying something like "it's two oclock" whereas the sun would be telling you it was local noon so you'd know the clock was wrong. The clock is designed to reset itself based on the position of the sun using a bimetallic strip so unless it breaks completely, it should keep time.
The bigger problem to my eyes is they're planning on tucking it hell and gone inside a mountain so no one will steal or vandalize it. For a monument that is intended as a statement of hope for the future, that strikes me as counter productive. "Umm, we built this thing for you kids whom we've never met but we figure you're not trustworthy enough to let you know where it is."
The architects in the middle ages trusted their offspring to finish and maintain the cathedrals that the architects laid the foundations for. Seems that turned out ok - most of the cathedrals are still here and don't show signs of being stolen or vandalized. Even the Germans had the good sense to leave Paris alone during both wars and they're the original Vandals.
Put it in the desert to keep it free from humidity but don't go and hide the damn thing. Kind of defeats the idea.
I had never heard John Carmack until he started giving away the first few rounds of Doom. EA's vaunted marketing can't compete with a very good game getting good word of mouth.
Subverting democracy is an old tradition. When Congress was voting on funding the trans-continental railroad, Collis Huntington (one of the founders of the Central Pacific) used a small telescope to get a closeup look at each congress man while Congress was in session. He was deciding which ones would be likely candidates to give bribes to so they'd support the railway. He must have been good at it because lots of congressmen got huge bribes in the form of Credit-Mobilier stock and Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins and Crocker ended up owning California for 40 years.
Democracy has been subverted for ages and will continue to be. The only thing that keeps it rolling along is the electorate eventually gets pissed off enough and kicks the scoundrels out and installs new scoundrels. Rotating the bastards out is something akin to hitting the reset button - things work well for awhile until it's time to reset again.
These 20 congress folk who signed the letter need to be reminded who voted them into office. The bribes the MPAA and RIAA are paying had better be enough for them to live on once they're kicked out.
I'm curious if AJAX sites work well over dial-up or dsl connections at the margins of the service area. Lots of developers have broadband connections and may not take into account what the experience is like for people who are still stuck on slow connections. Google Maps obviously won't fly and nobody would expect it to. But what's gmail like over broadband?
Is there some utility that can clamp your broadband connection so you can test your work as if you were using it from a slow connection?
I use Excel quite a bit and was startled at how upgrading to a Raptor drive from a regular ide drive made such a huge difference when saving my work. Saves that took as long as 14 seconds on the old drive went through in 1-2 seconds. It made me wonder if the Excel developers were all decked out with the latest and greatest hardware and didn't have a clue as to how their code behaved on machines most of their customers would use.
Will it matter who controls the roots or if the roots go peer-to-peer? Both models have their weak points and if someone, U.S., or some other sufficiently large player, decides to shut down DNS, it's going to go down.
Personally, I don't think that a body that can be controlled by China is an organization I want to rely on to run the net. If cute, cuddly, don't-be-evil Google can't withstand China, who the hell thinks the U.N. can?
You obviously don't have kids. When your kid lets out a yell that says "I'm being murdered and if you're not here in 10 seconds flat I'm going to be dead," the last thing you're going to be doing is rummaging around for the remote.
Generally the scream is almost accurate. When you find out said kid yelled because he couldn't find his favorite toy, his 10 second demise forecast turns out to have been only off by 30 seconds.
Joseph Mangan's blog starts off being pretty inflamatory. However, down towards the bottom of his main page, he posts the minutes of a meeting that discusses how the employees should act if anyone asks about problems with the chip. The items he cites can be read two ways:
say as little as needed to avoid getting entangled in details or...
say as little as possible so Airbus is deceived into thinking the part is "simple."
Without more documents, it's not clear to me which interpretation is closer to the truth.
In this document he asserts that the OS that runs on the chip was hacked together and that the software being delivered to Airbus was not put together according to the software engineering standards Airbus requires of its sub-contractors. He also says:
In numerous official review findings by Honeywell International employees performing the role of external reviewers, led by Honeywell Engines and Systems Tucson, Software Quality Assurance Manager Jeff Young, TTTech consistently failed to deliver documentation, tests, and process compliance evidence at an acceptable level of quality.
Perhaps someone here knows Jeff Young and can ask him if Mangan's charge is true vis-a-vis the product delivered to Honeywell.
The problem is that the material is copyrighted at all. The map is public information created by a public agency for public dissemination. This case is an example of public agencies wasting public resources.
The only beneficiary of copyright in this instance is some petty bureaucrat who can claim his/her job is important to the public weal. The public "servant's" next step will be to ask for an increase in funding so he can hire his/her wife/husband/son/daughter/nephew/... to reformat the maps to meet this new "public demand" for public information.
I feh on your feh and whomever ordered the cease and desist to be written in the first place.
If you have a scratched screen, Apple won't replace it.
If you have a cracked screen, Apple will replace it.
Ergo, If you have a scratched screen, crack the screen and exchange it.
I suspect part of the problem with so many scratched screens is the way Jobs introduced the Nano. He pulled it out of his Levis. Denim is pretty harsh material but there was Jobs saying that the watch pocket on a pair of Levis was a perfectly appropriate place to store the ultra-thin Nano.
I have yet to find a scientist (I mean a real one with a science degree, not a PR person or a journalist) who would disagree that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is increasing the greenhouse effect. If the sun is getting hotter, that does not give us a license to ignore the problem.
First it has to be established that Earth's heating is anthropogenic. That hasn't happened and there's a piss-pot full of data that shows the earth has been hotter in the past than it is now. In fact, for the past million years, every 100,000 years or so the earth has heated up just like it is now. And yes, the last time it happenned was 100,000 years ago. Before you go chasing CO2 as the culprit, you'd better be sure it's the guilty party otherwise you're wasting resources that could be better used elsewhere.
The second issue is that the developed world represents about 1.5 billion people whereas there are another 5 billion people out there who have yet to get out of crushing poverty. As they climb out of that hole in the next century, their contribution to CO2 is going to drawf whatever cutbacks we would make. Even if we cut back 100%, it's still going to rise. IF CO2 turns out to be the hazard some would have you believe it is it makes more sense to figure out how to get it out of the atmosphere because there isn't much prospect of preventing those 5 billion from adding to what's already there. You can't very well say to them, "No, you're stuck in grinding poverty because if you crawl out, you'll make the world warmer."
Firefox is nice but I'm using Opera because I think having a diversity of browsers is a good idea for a couple of reasons.
If we're using different browsers, we're not all vulnerable to the same attacks.
Having different browsers encourages alternate solutions to browsing. If I recall correctly, Opera was the first browser to use tabbed browsing, something that Firefox picked up on and IE will have in its next iteration.
Yeah. It's like how often will I have to run down a deer for dinner? I mean really! Why should I run around a track in gym if all I have to do to eat is go into a hamburger joint.
You're right that most people won't need trig or geometry on a day to day basis but they will need to know how to think. If you can't solve the trivial puzzles that trig and geometry present, good luck figuring out harder puzzles like whether global warming is anthropogenic or not.
I had cancer in my right thigh muscle that was beginning to invade the bone. The oncologist tried radiation but it didn't help. The oncologist refered me to a surgeon to remove my right leg. Only problem was the surgeon's right was my left and the surgeon took the wrong leg. He had to go back and take the diseased leg. Hell of a thing to wake up to.
I sued and lost. Judge ruled I didn't have a leg to stand on.
We sold a security product that wiped the drives 3 times if requested. The write sequence we used came from a NSA document that specified that we write certain patterns in a specific order. We had a beta tester who worked at Mitre who was feeding us the specs. Mitre needed to comply with those specs to conform to some contractural requirements they had with the NSA. Had they not given us the spec, we never would have known about the triple write requirement.
My understanding back then was that the on-track data was wiped on the first write but there was recoverable data on the sides of the tracks. No one whom I asked knew if the sidetrack data was there due to field leakage or to variations in the head's motion as it moved over the track. In the end, it didn't matter much as all we had to do was to make Mitre happy so they'd buy our software. This was back in the late 80's.
Your position may have been set when YOU were born. If you were unlucky enough to be born to parents who were pessimistic, it may have rubbed off on you.
My neighbor, on the other hand, came here from Mexico 15 years ago on a green card. Didn't have anything except the willingness to bust his butt and a good head on his shoulders. Worked scut work for 5 years in a bakery saving every cent he earned all the while learning how to be a baker. After 5 years, he started out on his own and opened a bakery. He's got seven of them now, and he works one day at each one each day of the week. Public schools around here aren't worth much so he's sent his two kids to a Catholic private high school. Each of them has their own car.
About once a month, I eat at a Chinese hole in the wall. Food is outstanding and there's always a line for takeout as there are barely any seats in the restaurant as most of the floorspace is kitchen. There are 6 people working in a space the size of two cubicles exchanging instructions in Chinese. Haute cuisine it ain't but the food is damn good. They open at 10 am and are there until 10 pm. They're making a go of what you would take to be slim prospects.
My gardener wasn't quite as successful. He still rents, but he's provided for his family which he said there was no way he could of done in Guatamala.
My best friend is a plumber. No college but is a partner in a plumbing business. He's smart, worked his tail off, and got to the point that he is billing quarter million dollar jobs in Pebble Beach. He plumbed Clint Eastwood's house and used a tie down he invented to keep floor heating pipes in place. The tie-down saved him 7 cents/tiedown over a commercial product, and is faster to install to boot. It may not sound like much of a savings but it's enabled him to shave his cost on each floor heating job he's bid. He never knew his dad and is mother was an alcholic who didn't provide much for him and yet he's thrived. All that on a high school education.
One of my top student's father was pulled out of middle school during the cultural revolution. Wasted years of his life on a farm just staying alive. When he got the chance, he left China and came here. His wife works in a local hospital and he's holding down a day job while taking care of some pre-reqs before going to med school. He gets about 5 hours of sleep each night even though he's in his mid 40's. Even still, he's happy to be here.
I don't think any of these folk would agree with your assessment of economic prospects in this country.
It's $59+$7 s/h to have Apple replace the battery. At that price, you may as well buy the Applecare contract at $59 and just figure the battery will need replacing within 2 years. They'll swap it out under warranty when it can only hold a 50% charge.
Sounds like your school had a different line printer. The highest speed line printers laid an entire line per strike, others laid a subset of the line at a time. Burroughs, may they rest in peace, had a line printer that had the character set strung together on a chain. The chain would run in a horizontal loop that was a printer page wide and as the desired letter moved in front of the specified column, a solenoid would fire. WHen the entire line was imaged, the printer would step forward for the next line.
Back in the mid 60's my brother-in-law was in Naval Intelligence and got a plum posting at Pearl Harbor. They had an IBM line printer that churned out paper by printing entire lines at a time. The printer had a row of 132 wheels and each wheel had each character the printer could strike. To print an "A" in column 5, the 5th wheel would spin until an "A" was opposite the paper. When all 132 wheels were ready, the whole row of wheels would strike the paper. As you might imagine, it made quite a racket.
Some naval geeks realized you could get it to play tunes by adjusting what it print to hit various notes and slewing various amounts of paper for tempo. Intelligence people tend to be musically inclined and these geeks were no exception. Lord knows how many hours they invested in tuning their instrument but word came down that an admiral was going to tour the computer room. When he walked in, they started up their synth and the printer started belting out Anchors Away. The admiral was suitably impressed. My brother-in-law was relieved the admiral didn't inspect the back of the printer where the output stack was because the paper didn't fold properly and as a result, paper was strewn all over.
The easily accessible oil in the U.S. appears to have been found. WHile looking for that oil, however, geologists found huge reserves of oil that aren't exploitable when compared to the cheap oil. If oil stays above $30/barrel, Green River in Colorado comes into play. We won't see $12/barrel anymore, but we could easily see $35/barrel if prices aren't temporarily inflated. Green River reserves are estimated to be 1 to 4 times as large as Saudi Arabia's fields. That's just Colorado. Wyoming has similar structures as well. There's a lot of oil out there waiting for market prices to rise to make it worthwhile to extract it.
When I was in college in the 70's I fell hook line and sinker for the Club of Rome's forecast the world would run out of oil in 1985. Their methods were obviously flawed because they were wrong. Thirty years later, Hubert is trotted out as "this is what we really meant...." In the interim, I've seen markets adjust to constraints, both artificial and structural. I've also seen people be a hell of a lot more adaptable than oil future models can account for. Hell, in the 60's had you said the Secretary of State would be a black woman whose predecessor was a black man, you would have been considered a nut. People adapt. If we ever truly run out of oil somewhere down the line, we'll figure something out - we've demonstrated in the past that figuring it out seems to be something we're capable of.
This gas price chart shows how the price of gas has slowly dropped between 1950 and 2002. The recent spike in prices is due to short term supply problems. The south-east suffered the worst because a major gasoline pipeline went offline due to the storm.
Out here in California, prices surged as people bet the price would sky rocket and bought gas no matter what the price. The local 7/11 had people topping off their tanks because their price, usually the highest around, was 10 cents lower than in town. Most of the people buying gas didn't need it but figured the price was going higher so they bought while it was "low" at $2.90.
If the price stays high for the next few years, people will get out of their SUVs and move into more efficient vehicles. The oil markets will respond, just as it did in the 80's, and prices will drop in real terms. Eventually, people will forget and they'll buy gas hogs again. People do that - they forget.
Those of you who are certain that we're running out of oil forget as well. In 1970, it was common knowledge that we'd be out of oil by 1985. Paul Erlich at Stanford made a fortune pitching his dystopian view of the future and we bought it. The futurists who got it right were the economist who argued that the real price of commodities fall over time as producers and consumers become more efficient.
It's worth noting that the shift to SUVs wasn't due to just the cheap price of gas. Congress played a major role as well. Business used to be able to depreciate the price of cars it purchased at an accelerated rate. Small business owners used that to their advantage by buying nicer cars which angered folks who didn't own businesses and hence, couldn't get the same tax write off. Congress responded by eliminating the write off for business-owned cars. The accelerated depreciation schedule remained for trucks which GM and Ford exploited by gussing up what used to be utility trucks for hauling workers around into SUVs. I saw a lot of new SUVs in my neighborhood after my accountant sent out a flyer advising his clients of the tax advantage which was considerable. A very smart friend of mine grumbled that the "I want my children to be safe and so I have to have the biggest car available" crowd just got a tax boost and the only way to retaliate was to drive a Peterbilt to work.
I live in a farm town in Central California that's served by Comcast. I work at home and access the web from about 5 am until 7 pm. When Comcast first installed fiber and offered Internet access, my downloads were running at around 4 mbits/sec which was considerably better than DSL's 1.5 mbit/sec. That was about 15 months ago. Recently, service has been oscillating. During the day, it's gotten up to 7 mbits/sec but at night, it has dropped to as low as 100 kbits/sec.
At first I thought it was p2p traffic but that didn't make much sense since school is still out so the kids around here are home during the day. Turns out Comcast has offered a new service - you can download movies on demand via a Tivo like interface. Fast forward-pause-skip etc. My hunch is that when parents come home at night, they decide to watch a movie and it sucks up the available bandwidth. Since I use the net during the day, I'm not affected by the slowdown. However, if I came home at night and expected to relax with a good game of Counter Strike, I'd go back to DSL as night service on cable here truly sucks.
If the cable companies can iron out the logistics and offer consistently decent service to all users, legitimate movie downloading will take off and 1 Terabit/sec will end up looking like a 1 mhz 6502.
Good article. I especially appreciated the explanation of how the keys are handled. My sense is that's the biggest single weakness in the encryption scheme.
If any/. reader knows a Walmart eletronics buyer, explain the following problem to him/her.
Once someone hacks a player Walmart sold, that model will lose its ability to play future HD-DVD/Blu Rays that Walmart sells. It's not just the individual player that the hacker owns but the entire model line will lose its ability to decode the HD-DVD/Blu Ray. Problem is, Walmart sells millions of players which means millions of honest customers who had nothing to do with the hack will not be able to play any movie pressed after the license was revoked.
Walmart might be able to avoid returns on the compromised players but they're not going to be able to avoid the DVD returns. If the Walmart buyers understand the problem in advance, they'll either refuse to stock the players and Hi Def DVDs or force the industry to forget about the license revocation scheme altogether.
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There's another drawback you're missing. If civilisation collapses, there isn't going to be a caretaker for projects that only 1 in a 100 million people have seen. Whereas if it's a place where you take your kids so they can see a place that their great^200-grandfolks left them a big hello in the guest book, society as a whole might ensures it survives whatever comes down the pike. My sons' mother descends from the family that built the oldest standing house in the United States. The boys' names are in a guest book waiting for them to come see the house some day and sign the spot in the book that's waiting for them. Chances are they'll do it when they have kids of their own and can put their kid's names into the book. This has been going on since the house was built some 400 years ago. Granted, that's only 4% of 10,000 years, but I suspect that as long as the house endures, so will the tradition. The house endures, not because of the descendants, but because lots of people are interested in old houses and are willing to see to their upkeep.
Local noon is an easy time to measure. When the sun is due south, it's local noon. Due south is halfway between local sunrise and local sunset. If the clock were to drift, it would be saying something like "it's two oclock" whereas the sun would be telling you it was local noon so you'd know the clock was wrong. The clock is designed to reset itself based on the position of the sun using a bimetallic strip so unless it breaks completely, it should keep time.
The bigger problem to my eyes is they're planning on tucking it hell and gone inside a mountain so no one will steal or vandalize it. For a monument that is intended as a statement of hope for the future, that strikes me as counter productive. "Umm, we built this thing for you kids whom we've never met but we figure you're not trustworthy enough to let you know where it is."
The architects in the middle ages trusted their offspring to finish and maintain the cathedrals that the architects laid the foundations for. Seems that turned out ok - most of the cathedrals are still here and don't show signs of being stolen or vandalized. Even the Germans had the good sense to leave Paris alone during both wars and they're the original Vandals.
Put it in the desert to keep it free from humidity but don't go and hide the damn thing. Kind of defeats the idea.
I had never heard John Carmack until he started giving away the first few rounds of Doom. EA's vaunted marketing can't compete with a very good game getting good word of mouth.
Given Tivo's past mis-steps, it shouldn't be too long before we see Tivo's funeral.
Democracy has been subverted for ages and will continue to be. The only thing that keeps it rolling along is the electorate eventually gets pissed off enough and kicks the scoundrels out and installs new scoundrels. Rotating the bastards out is something akin to hitting the reset button - things work well for awhile until it's time to reset again.
These 20 congress folk who signed the letter need to be reminded who voted them into office. The bribes the MPAA and RIAA are paying had better be enough for them to live on once they're kicked out.
I'm curious if AJAX sites work well over dial-up or dsl connections at the margins of the service area. Lots of developers have broadband connections and may not take into account what the experience is like for people who are still stuck on slow connections. Google Maps obviously won't fly and nobody would expect it to. But what's gmail like over broadband?
Is there some utility that can clamp your broadband connection so you can test your work as if you were using it from a slow connection?
I use Excel quite a bit and was startled at how upgrading to a Raptor drive from a regular ide drive made such a huge difference when saving my work. Saves that took as long as 14 seconds on the old drive went through in 1-2 seconds. It made me wonder if the Excel developers were all decked out with the latest and greatest hardware and didn't have a clue as to how their code behaved on machines most of their customers would use.
Personally, I don't think that a body that can be controlled by China is an organization I want to rely on to run the net. If cute, cuddly, don't-be-evil Google can't withstand China, who the hell thinks the U.N. can?
Generally the scream is almost accurate. When you find out said kid yelled because he couldn't find his favorite toy, his 10 second demise forecast turns out to have been only off by 30 seconds.
- say as little as needed to avoid getting entangled in details or...
- say as little as possible so Airbus is deceived into thinking the part is "simple."
Without more documents, it's not clear to me which interpretation is closer to the truth.In this document he asserts that the OS that runs on the chip was hacked together and that the software being delivered to Airbus was not put together according to the software engineering standards Airbus requires of its sub-contractors. He also says:
Perhaps someone here knows Jeff Young and can ask him if Mangan's charge is true vis-a-vis the product delivered to Honeywell.The problem is that the material is copyrighted at all. The map is public information created by a public agency for public dissemination. This case is an example of public agencies wasting public resources.
The only beneficiary of copyright in this instance is some petty bureaucrat who can claim his/her job is important to the public weal. The public "servant's" next step will be to ask for an increase in funding so he can hire his/her wife/husband/son/daughter/nephew/... to reformat the maps to meet this new "public demand" for public information.
I feh on your feh and whomever ordered the cease and desist to be written in the first place.
If you have a cracked screen, Apple will replace it.
Ergo, If you have a scratched screen, crack the screen and exchange it.
I suspect part of the problem with so many scratched screens is the way Jobs introduced the Nano. He pulled it out of his Levis. Denim is pretty harsh material but there was Jobs saying that the watch pocket on a pair of Levis was a perfectly appropriate place to store the ultra-thin Nano.
First it has to be established that Earth's heating is anthropogenic. That hasn't happened and there's a piss-pot full of data that shows the earth has been hotter in the past than it is now. In fact, for the past million years, every 100,000 years or so the earth has heated up just like it is now. And yes, the last time it happenned was 100,000 years ago. Before you go chasing CO2 as the culprit, you'd better be sure it's the guilty party otherwise you're wasting resources that could be better used elsewhere.
The second issue is that the developed world represents about 1.5 billion people whereas there are another 5 billion people out there who have yet to get out of crushing poverty. As they climb out of that hole in the next century, their contribution to CO2 is going to drawf whatever cutbacks we would make. Even if we cut back 100%, it's still going to rise. IF CO2 turns out to be the hazard some would have you believe it is it makes more sense to figure out how to get it out of the atmosphere because there isn't much prospect of preventing those 5 billion from adding to what's already there. You can't very well say to them, "No, you're stuck in grinding poverty because if you crawl out, you'll make the world warmer."
If we're using different browsers, we're not all vulnerable to the same attacks.
Having different browsers encourages alternate solutions to browsing. If I recall correctly, Opera was the first browser to use tabbed browsing, something that Firefox picked up on and IE will have in its next iteration.
You're right that most people won't need trig or geometry on a day to day basis but they will need to know how to think. If you can't solve the trivial puzzles that trig and geometry present, good luck figuring out harder puzzles like whether global warming is anthropogenic or not.
I sued and lost. Judge ruled I didn't have a leg to stand on.
My understanding back then was that the on-track data was wiped on the first write but there was recoverable data on the sides of the tracks. No one whom I asked knew if the sidetrack data was there due to field leakage or to variations in the head's motion as it moved over the track. In the end, it didn't matter much as all we had to do was to make Mitre happy so they'd buy our software. This was back in the late 80's.
So what changed in 1997?
My neighbor, on the other hand, came here from Mexico 15 years ago on a green card. Didn't have anything except the willingness to bust his butt and a good head on his shoulders. Worked scut work for 5 years in a bakery saving every cent he earned all the while learning how to be a baker. After 5 years, he started out on his own and opened a bakery. He's got seven of them now, and he works one day at each one each day of the week. Public schools around here aren't worth much so he's sent his two kids to a Catholic private high school. Each of them has their own car.
About once a month, I eat at a Chinese hole in the wall. Food is outstanding and there's always a line for takeout as there are barely any seats in the restaurant as most of the floorspace is kitchen. There are 6 people working in a space the size of two cubicles exchanging instructions in Chinese. Haute cuisine it ain't but the food is damn good. They open at 10 am and are there until 10 pm. They're making a go of what you would take to be slim prospects.
My gardener wasn't quite as successful. He still rents, but he's provided for his family which he said there was no way he could of done in Guatamala.
My best friend is a plumber. No college but is a partner in a plumbing business. He's smart, worked his tail off, and got to the point that he is billing quarter million dollar jobs in Pebble Beach. He plumbed Clint Eastwood's house and used a tie down he invented to keep floor heating pipes in place. The tie-down saved him 7 cents/tiedown over a commercial product, and is faster to install to boot. It may not sound like much of a savings but it's enabled him to shave his cost on each floor heating job he's bid. He never knew his dad and is mother was an alcholic who didn't provide much for him and yet he's thrived. All that on a high school education.
One of my top student's father was pulled out of middle school during the cultural revolution. Wasted years of his life on a farm just staying alive. When he got the chance, he left China and came here. His wife works in a local hospital and he's holding down a day job while taking care of some pre-reqs before going to med school. He gets about 5 hours of sleep each night even though he's in his mid 40's. Even still, he's happy to be here.
I don't think any of these folk would agree with your assessment of economic prospects in this country.
It's $59+$7 s/h to have Apple replace the battery. At that price, you may as well buy the Applecare contract at $59 and just figure the battery will need replacing within 2 years. They'll swap it out under warranty when it can only hold a 50% charge.
Sounds like your school had a different line printer. The highest speed line printers laid an entire line per strike, others laid a subset of the line at a time. Burroughs, may they rest in peace, had a line printer that had the character set strung together on a chain. The chain would run in a horizontal loop that was a printer page wide and as the desired letter moved in front of the specified column, a solenoid would fire. WHen the entire line was imaged, the printer would step forward for the next line.
Some naval geeks realized you could get it to play tunes by adjusting what it print to hit various notes and slewing various amounts of paper for tempo. Intelligence people tend to be musically inclined and these geeks were no exception. Lord knows how many hours they invested in tuning their instrument but word came down that an admiral was going to tour the computer room. When he walked in, they started up their synth and the printer started belting out Anchors Away. The admiral was suitably impressed. My brother-in-law was relieved the admiral didn't inspect the back of the printer where the output stack was because the paper didn't fold properly and as a result, paper was strewn all over.
When I was in college in the 70's I fell hook line and sinker for the Club of Rome's forecast the world would run out of oil in 1985. Their methods were obviously flawed because they were wrong. Thirty years later, Hubert is trotted out as "this is what we really meant...." In the interim, I've seen markets adjust to constraints, both artificial and structural. I've also seen people be a hell of a lot more adaptable than oil future models can account for. Hell, in the 60's had you said the Secretary of State would be a black woman whose predecessor was a black man, you would have been considered a nut. People adapt. If we ever truly run out of oil somewhere down the line, we'll figure something out - we've demonstrated in the past that figuring it out seems to be something we're capable of.
Out here in California, prices surged as people bet the price would sky rocket and bought gas no matter what the price. The local 7/11 had people topping off their tanks because their price, usually the highest around, was 10 cents lower than in town. Most of the people buying gas didn't need it but figured the price was going higher so they bought while it was "low" at $2.90.
If the price stays high for the next few years, people will get out of their SUVs and move into more efficient vehicles. The oil markets will respond, just as it did in the 80's, and prices will drop in real terms. Eventually, people will forget and they'll buy gas hogs again. People do that - they forget.
Those of you who are certain that we're running out of oil forget as well. In 1970, it was common knowledge that we'd be out of oil by 1985. Paul Erlich at Stanford made a fortune pitching his dystopian view of the future and we bought it. The futurists who got it right were the economist who argued that the real price of commodities fall over time as producers and consumers become more efficient.
It's worth noting that the shift to SUVs wasn't due to just the cheap price of gas. Congress played a major role as well. Business used to be able to depreciate the price of cars it purchased at an accelerated rate. Small business owners used that to their advantage by buying nicer cars which angered folks who didn't own businesses and hence, couldn't get the same tax write off. Congress responded by eliminating the write off for business-owned cars. The accelerated depreciation schedule remained for trucks which GM and Ford exploited by gussing up what used to be utility trucks for hauling workers around into SUVs. I saw a lot of new SUVs in my neighborhood after my accountant sent out a flyer advising his clients of the tax advantage which was considerable. A very smart friend of mine grumbled that the "I want my children to be safe and so I have to have the biggest car available" crowd just got a tax boost and the only way to retaliate was to drive a Peterbilt to work.
At first I thought it was p2p traffic but that didn't make much sense since school is still out so the kids around here are home during the day. Turns out Comcast has offered a new service - you can download movies on demand via a Tivo like interface. Fast forward-pause-skip etc. My hunch is that when parents come home at night, they decide to watch a movie and it sucks up the available bandwidth. Since I use the net during the day, I'm not affected by the slowdown. However, if I came home at night and expected to relax with a good game of Counter Strike, I'd go back to DSL as night service on cable here truly sucks.
If the cable companies can iron out the logistics and offer consistently decent service to all users, legitimate movie downloading will take off and 1 Terabit/sec will end up looking like a 1 mhz 6502.
If any /. reader knows a Walmart eletronics buyer, explain the following problem to him/her.
Once someone hacks a player Walmart sold, that model will lose its ability to play future HD-DVD/Blu Rays that Walmart sells. It's not just the individual player that the hacker owns but the entire model line will lose its ability to decode the HD-DVD/Blu Ray. Problem is, Walmart sells millions of players which means millions of honest customers who had nothing to do with the hack will not be able to play any movie pressed after the license was revoked.
Walmart might be able to avoid returns on the compromised players but they're not going to be able to avoid the DVD returns. If the Walmart buyers understand the problem in advance, they'll either refuse to stock the players and Hi Def DVDs or force the industry to forget about the license revocation scheme altogether.