Constitutional issues aside, every Christian organization in the U.S. should be OPPOSED to the recitation (voluntary or compulsory) of the pledge of allegiance, given that it amounts to a big, fat act of idolatry.
Beyond the vacuum tubes, helicopters, frozen dinners, disposable houses, and plastic furinture there's something else to note.
The utterly optimistic view of the future.
Everything's supposed to be better, cleaner, tastier, healthier, and more efficient. Nobody's sick, hungry, or homeless (presumably, due to cheap housing).
Nowadays, we look fifty years down the road with dread, anticipating polluted air, nighmarish crime, phenomenal urban and suburban congestion, overpopulation, famine, powerful and overbearing corporations, ubiquitous surveillance, and disastrous climatological changes.
After fifty years, maybe we're just let down. Sure, we can cook a TV dinner in sixty seconds, but is anybody's life really better because of it? We still spend a third of our lives at work, still struggle with mortgages and rents, still eat poorly despite fifty years of accumulated nutritional expertise, still wage war over land and resources, and still wring our hands over social injustice.
Further, it's remarkable how we've clinged to the "old ways" in the face of technological change. Most people probably prefer a cooked-from-scratch meal to a microwaved sawdust-derivative. Millions of Americans still commute to work in their personal autos instead of taking the train or bus. Growing your own vegetables, though often unnecessary, remains an engaging and rewarding pasttime. Often when buying a new home, many people (myself included) will actually look for older, built-to-last homes.
I think that fifty years ago, Americans needed less of this year-2000-fantasy tripe. They (or we or whomever) should have instead paid more attention to the Aldous Huxleys, Ray Bradburys, and George Orwells who cautioned that the future is not necessarily bright and shiny.
According to the DOE, in 1998 California had a maximum electricity production capacity of 44,492 MW. In 1999 it had dropped to 30,952 MW. Peak demand this summer was in the neighborhood of 45,000 MW.
As a condition of deregulation, the California legislature placed a price cap on electricity producers at about $250 per megawatt. If, due to the high price of natural gas for instance, it costs $300 per megawatt to produce electricity at a particular plant, that plant will be shut down.
I've been working with a company called Mainsoft (www.mainsoft.com) to port some of our Windows software to UNIX. They produce a product called MainWin which is a UNIX implementation of COM, MFC, and some other Win32-specific stuff. It's available for several different platforms, including Linux.
However, it's not really a cross-platform development environment. It's a Win32 development environment that works on UNIX. You use Visual Studio to create your project, then compile the project on a UNIX system. And it's NOT trivial to use. Dependencies on stuff like DAO and VBA can throw you off, as can coding styles that your UNIX compiler doesn't like.
Since Amazon's business model is still losing incredible amounts of other people's money, it seems that suing other companies is the only way they'll get themselves back into black ink.
So, if suing for patent violation becomes their new business model, maybe they'll patent *that*, too. Could be a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Constitutional issues aside, every Christian organization in the U.S. should be OPPOSED to the recitation (voluntary or compulsory) of the pledge of allegiance, given that it amounts to a big, fat act of idolatry.
Dave Riesz
Does SlashDot's Slashcode fall under this description?
Beyond the vacuum tubes, helicopters, frozen dinners, disposable houses, and plastic furinture there's something else to note.
The utterly optimistic view of the future.
Everything's supposed to be better, cleaner, tastier, healthier, and more efficient. Nobody's sick, hungry, or homeless (presumably, due to cheap housing).
Nowadays, we look fifty years down the road with dread, anticipating polluted air, nighmarish crime, phenomenal urban and suburban congestion, overpopulation, famine, powerful and overbearing corporations, ubiquitous surveillance, and disastrous climatological changes.
After fifty years, maybe we're just let down. Sure, we can cook a TV dinner in sixty seconds, but is anybody's life really better because of it? We still spend a third of our lives at work, still struggle with mortgages and rents, still eat poorly despite fifty years of accumulated nutritional expertise, still wage war over land and resources, and still wring our hands over social injustice.
Further, it's remarkable how we've clinged to the "old ways" in the face of technological change. Most people probably prefer a cooked-from-scratch meal to a microwaved sawdust-derivative. Millions of Americans still commute to work in their personal autos instead of taking the train or bus. Growing your own vegetables, though often unnecessary, remains an engaging and rewarding pasttime. Often when buying a new home, many people (myself included) will actually look for older, built-to-last homes.
I think that fifty years ago, Americans needed less of this year-2000-fantasy tripe. They (or we or whomever) should have instead paid more attention to the Aldous Huxleys, Ray Bradburys, and George Orwells who cautioned that the future is not necessarily bright and shiny.
According to the DOE, in 1998 California had a maximum electricity production capacity of 44,492 MW. In 1999 it had dropped to 30,952 MW. Peak demand this summer was in the neighborhood of 45,000 MW.
As a condition of deregulation, the California legislature placed a price cap on electricity producers at about $250 per megawatt. If, due to the high price of natural gas for instance, it costs $300 per megawatt to produce electricity at a particular plant, that plant will be shut down.
You can't use an encrypted connection. It's against FCC rules for amateur operation.
However, it's not really a cross-platform development environment. It's a Win32 development environment that works on UNIX. You use Visual Studio to create your project, then compile the project on a UNIX system. And it's NOT trivial to use. Dependencies on stuff like DAO and VBA can throw you off, as can coding styles that your UNIX compiler doesn't like.
It's worth looking at.
Since Amazon's business model is still losing incredible amounts of other people's money, it seems that suing other companies is the only way they'll get themselves back into black ink.
So, if suing for patent violation becomes their new business model, maybe they'll patent *that*, too. Could be a good thing.