Sorry, the Mac XL *was* a Macintosh computer, not a Lisa. The OS of the two was quite different, and had different hardware requirements.
This doesn't mean the tech guy didn't give you the wrong answers, that's hard to say since you didn't say what the questions or the answers were, but the two were vastly different machines, and the form factor was the smallest part of it.
FWIW, I used most of the models of Mac up through the Mac II, none of them were like the Lisa, which I only used at demonstrations. E.g., the tracking of the mouse was quite different between the Mac and the Lisa.
P.S.: The Mac XL was not inherently flaky. That you got a lemon isn't reason to criticize the entire model. Some modified versions had heat issues, but I never had a problem with that. Those who did commonly solved the problem with a chimney...and I think that didn't usually happen unless the machine had already been modified. It did, however, have limited air circulation, and this was a mistake of the design, but rarely caused problems...it just pushed things closer to the edge than they should have been. A more common problem, however, was people putting things on top of the computer and blocking the air flow.
P.P.S.: Some people who modified the machine would also add in a fan to increase the air flow, but this was only needed if you had already modified the machine. And, of course, if you were in the habit of obstructing the air flow, even a fan wouldn't reliably help.
There's no particular reason both claims couldn't be true. Jobs could have made a "retronym" of his daughter's name and used that to sell the name to marketing. A lot of nominal acronyms appear to actually be retronyms.
Given the way devices tend to get redesigned, I'm not convinced that you can expect thermostats that offer remote access to offer local access.
OTOH, since I wouldn't have one in the house, I haven't looked at the current designs. But even if local control exists for all the current designs, I expect them to be "made more efficient" in the future.
Sorry, that doesn't say anything about restricting certain packets. That's a possible reading, but one that seems more likely to me is something like "You can't watch a video at 2 frames per second, because your video app will time out."
OTOH, I can't imagine why that would impact your ability to remotely adjust your thermostat. Not unless the controlling app has a really fat data stream, and is sensitive to lag. Possibly the notification was issued by tech services, but then re-written by marketing to be more attention getting.
Fascism doesn't require violence, though I can't think of any examples of governments that don't rely on it. Even so, that means that violence isn't a distinguishing characteristic of fascism. Fascism is mainly about the integration of privately owned corporation power with government power in such a way that they reinforce each other. Mussolini designed it to "Make Italy great again!", and he was better at it than many imitators...though not as good as the US. China looks to be doing this even more effectively.
Note that in principle fascism is orthogonal to liberty. It never seems to work out that way in practice, however. Probably because people have a need to control things, so whoever is put in charge will find a way to expand their power. I suppose that if you could guarantee that the guys in charge would be ever benevolent that fascism would be a nearly ideal form of government, but this is never the case. Perhaps an AI will prove that it can work well sometime in the next few decades. Just as likely though we'll all end up dead.
The only ThunderBird extension I use is also Lightning. But I'm one of those who wouldn't touch any software from MS.
So.... has kmail gotten any better? Last time I tried it, it crashed after a couple of months, apparently from an overloaded mail box. That *was* a few years ago, however.
IIUC, there's still a lot of uncertainty as to just how much water exists on Mars, and where it is. Some people talk about a subsurface ocean, though they probably mean ice pack. It's possible, I guess, but I'd give it less than 50% chance of being real.
OTOH, recycling water will go a long way. When you need to maintain vacuum tight facilities anyway, water leakage should be minimal.
I basically agree with you, but solar panels designed to withstand hurricanes would require a substantial redesign. Of course, you could just plan to replace them after every really high wind, but I think a redesign might be better.
It may not be literally true, and even if so probably varies a lot from time to time, but California *does* import a lot of both electricity and water. This is a problem that needs to be addressed, as the Hoover Dam, e.g., doesn't have an infinite lifetime, and these days California couldn't negotiate a deal that was anywhere near a favorable as it could back then. Back then the deal for the other states provided them more than they could use...that wouldn't be true now.
I don't know about current panels, but it's not just the panels. Our solar panels were purchased over a decade ago (I'd need to look it up) but the regulations for how they are mounted have been changed, so now that the roof need to be replaced there's a whole new expense, because the solar panels can't just be dismounted and then replaced, they need an entirely new set of mounts. And, AFAIKT, this is purely because the regulations have changed.
Now the panels still work, but the remounting costs are sufficient that it makes more sense to replace them with an entirely new system. So make that lifetime 15-20 years.
You underestimate the time delays. I've gotten a bill for something that happened two years ago, and what it was was only identified by a code number. How the fuck am I supposed to know whether that's valid or not, much less whether the price is reasonable.
O, a government clearly *could* come up with a worse system, it just didn't. (You don't think the current system wasn't crafted by government, do you?)
That said, the accounting games played in the US system add substantially to the cost. And the rake-off that the "insurers" get is substantial. They're playing the part of "the house" in a casino, with the advantage that they can often find ways to avoid paying off the bet. But the entire system is not only facilitated, but ensured by various pieces of legislation, some of it well intentioned.
The middle east is a lot closer to the equator, which improves solar efficiency remarkably. A more reasonably comparison would be Denmark or Germany, which also do a lot of solar, though I don't know the cost figures.
OTOH, if you're comparing the LA area, Texas, or Florida, that swath, then the middle east is a much more reasonable comparison. I believe that LA is about the same latitude as Israel.
He did say "when this was available". The available amount varies from year to year, and using it for hydro doesn't prevent using it also for drinking and irrigation...though storage can be a problem.
But the real problem is it varies from year to year. Some years it would be a reasonable approach.
Well, the first step is to get the government's permission to sue it. It's perfectly alright to sue the federal government, but you need their permission.
While there's a lot of " Everybody has time to do it fast, but nobody has the time to do it right the first time." out there, it's also true that it's quite difficult to find a lot of bugs, particularly your own bugs. And this is true even if you're excruciatingly careful. If you doubt that, consider the Mars lander that failed because of a units conversion. That wasn't a matter of "doing it fast and sloppy".
The reaction to a bug being revealed, however, is significant. I wouldn't trust Keeper, or a company closely associated with it, for anything at this point.
The thing is, bitcoins are without intrinsic value. Government issued money is, indeed, untrustworthy, but it has intrinsic value: the government promises to accept payoffs in its own currency for taxes so it won't confiscate your property, etc.
Now the government is untrustworthy, but it does have to power to enforce it's threats. Bitcoins are more trustworthy (not totally), but they have no intrinsic value. Their only value is whatever people are currently willing to exchange for them. I wan to call them bitcons rather than bitcoins.
Money is not just about trust and not just about intrinsic value. Things which only have intrinsic value make lousy currencies, and so do things without trust. This is why so many people are into gold, but most of them don't realize that folding paper promises of gold don't directly count. You need the actual metal. And it needs to be of a specific purity. And this is likely to get lost or stolen. But banks have also had their vaults pilfered.
There is noting in the world that has perfect trust. Looking for such is futile. But things that have value can be exchanged for other things with value, where things without intrinsic value can become totally worthless.
OTOH, how much was a Confederate dollar worth after the South lost? Value can be transitory. My old disk drive is worth more as a paperweight than as a disk drive. But it wasn't a bad investment, because I got use out of it for years.
And value is very personal. What is valuable to one person is valueless to another, and invaluable to a third. So it's difficult to use value as a currency. A currency needs to have an agreed value, which means it's own intrinsic value is only a floor to it's effective value. Bitcoin sure proves this, as it's current effective value is immense, but its intrinsic value is closer to nothing than to that of a piece of paper the size of a piece of government currency.
The closest stab I have to a reasonable "thing of constant value" is a bottle of whiskey. That would become more valuable if the government collapsed. Small amounts are easily packaged for portability. etc. Of course, some people would only value it for trade, except in cases of medical emergency and not medications. Wheat doesn't work because it doesn't store well and is too bulky. Also the value fluctuates too much during the course of a year.
Bitcoins, though.... their only value is that they are more trustworthy than governmental currency. But that's all, and it's not sufficient. At some point they will collapse, unless some major vendor of values turns them into a fiat currency. (Also they are vulnerable to centralized control if most of them are bought up by a small enough number of parties to from an oligarchy.)
While I was describing the current situation, it wasn't *only* the current situation. It is clearly the situation back as far as the early 1900's, and I have no reason to believe that things changed at that point. When people lived in smaller groups, they had more direct knowledge of what was going on, and the government was often (not always!) more in line with their desires, so the role of the police was less adversarial, but it's always been to support the government...and those the government supported. (See, e.g., "copper bosses") There have even been times when the army was called out, and the police were operating under the control of the army.
No. The National Guard is normally under the control of the State government, and can be put under the control of the federal government. This is clearly not what is meant by a "well regulated militia". When I said local, I meant city, town, village, or possibly country (or equivalent). And I expect that they didn't want any official government organizing it.
As I said, I expect a bunch of attitudes changed after 1812, but nobody altered the constitution to update it for those changes.
It seemed to me that if people objected to a plan of theirs they ignored the objections. They only paid attention if it was already something they wanted to do. So it was never really useful, but with Trump in office it had absolutely zero utility.
Actually, I believe you are wrong. I don't believe that protecting the citizenry is the official job of the police. I believe that their major job is to protect the government. That in order to do that they are supposed to enforce the laws, whenever that benefits the protection of the government. And that when it endangers the government they are explicitly supposed to ignore the laws. And that it is intended that the protection of the citizenry be a consequence of the foregoing behavior. It's been awhile since I looked that up, so I've probably fuzzed a few of the details, but that was the essence.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. The thing I was calling a Mac XL was something completely different.
Sorry, the Mac XL *was* a Macintosh computer, not a Lisa. The OS of the two was quite different, and had different hardware requirements.
This doesn't mean the tech guy didn't give you the wrong answers, that's hard to say since you didn't say what the questions or the answers were, but the two were vastly different machines, and the form factor was the smallest part of it.
FWIW, I used most of the models of Mac up through the Mac II, none of them were like the Lisa, which I only used at demonstrations. E.g., the tracking of the mouse was quite different between the Mac and the Lisa.
P.S.: The Mac XL was not inherently flaky. That you got a lemon isn't reason to criticize the entire model. Some modified versions had heat issues, but I never had a problem with that. Those who did commonly solved the problem with a chimney...and I think that didn't usually happen unless the machine had already been modified. It did, however, have limited air circulation, and this was a mistake of the design, but rarely caused problems...it just pushed things closer to the edge than they should have been. A more common problem, however, was people putting things on top of the computer and blocking the air flow.
P.P.S.: Some people who modified the machine would also add in a fan to increase the air flow, but this was only needed if you had already modified the machine. And, of course, if you were in the habit of obstructing the air flow, even a fan wouldn't reliably help.
All that said, there were occasional lemons.
There's no particular reason both claims couldn't be true. Jobs could have made a "retronym" of his daughter's name and used that to sell the name to marketing. A lot of nominal acronyms appear to actually be retronyms.
Given the way devices tend to get redesigned, I'm not convinced that you can expect thermostats that offer remote access to offer local access.
OTOH, since I wouldn't have one in the house, I haven't looked at the current designs. But even if local control exists for all the current designs, I expect them to be "made more efficient" in the future.
Sorry, that doesn't say anything about restricting certain packets. That's a possible reading, but one that seems more likely to me is something like "You can't watch a video at 2 frames per second, because your video app will time out."
OTOH, I can't imagine why that would impact your ability to remotely adjust your thermostat. Not unless the controlling app has a really fat data stream, and is sensitive to lag. Possibly the notification was issued by tech services, but then re-written by marketing to be more attention getting.
Fascism doesn't require violence, though I can't think of any examples of governments that don't rely on it. Even so, that means that violence isn't a distinguishing characteristic of fascism. Fascism is mainly about the integration of privately owned corporation power with government power in such a way that they reinforce each other. Mussolini designed it to "Make Italy great again!", and he was better at it than many imitators...though not as good as the US. China looks to be doing this even more effectively.
Note that in principle fascism is orthogonal to liberty. It never seems to work out that way in practice, however. Probably because people have a need to control things, so whoever is put in charge will find a way to expand their power. I suppose that if you could guarantee that the guys in charge would be ever benevolent that fascism would be a nearly ideal form of government, but this is never the case. Perhaps an AI will prove that it can work well sometime in the next few decades. Just as likely though we'll all end up dead.
The only ThunderBird extension I use is also Lightning. But I'm one of those who wouldn't touch any software from MS.
So.... has kmail gotten any better? Last time I tried it, it crashed after a couple of months, apparently from an overloaded mail box. That *was* a few years ago, however.
Yes, but I wonder, is he still giving odds of 50% that it will explode on lift-off?
IIUC, there's still a lot of uncertainty as to just how much water exists on Mars, and where it is. Some people talk about a subsurface ocean, though they probably mean ice pack. It's possible, I guess, but I'd give it less than 50% chance of being real.
OTOH, recycling water will go a long way. When you need to maintain vacuum tight facilities anyway, water leakage should be minimal.
I basically agree with you, but solar panels designed to withstand hurricanes would require a substantial redesign. Of course, you could just plan to replace them after every really high wind, but I think a redesign might be better.
It may not be literally true, and even if so probably varies a lot from time to time, but California *does* import a lot of both electricity and water. This is a problem that needs to be addressed, as the Hoover Dam, e.g., doesn't have an infinite lifetime, and these days California couldn't negotiate a deal that was anywhere near a favorable as it could back then. Back then the deal for the other states provided them more than they could use...that wouldn't be true now.
As you appear knowledgeable in the field, what do you think of PG&E's molten salt solar plant in the Mojave?
I don't know about current panels, but it's not just the panels. Our solar panels were purchased over a decade ago (I'd need to look it up) but the regulations for how they are mounted have been changed, so now that the roof need to be replaced there's a whole new expense, because the solar panels can't just be dismounted and then replaced, they need an entirely new set of mounts. And, AFAIKT, this is purely because the regulations have changed.
Now the panels still work, but the remounting costs are sufficient that it makes more sense to replace them with an entirely new system. So make that lifetime 15-20 years.
You underestimate the time delays. I've gotten a bill for something that happened two years ago, and what it was was only identified by a code number. How the fuck am I supposed to know whether that's valid or not, much less whether the price is reasonable.
O, a government clearly *could* come up with a worse system, it just didn't. (You don't think the current system wasn't crafted by government, do you?)
That said, the accounting games played in the US system add substantially to the cost. And the rake-off that the "insurers" get is substantial. They're playing the part of "the house" in a casino, with the advantage that they can often find ways to avoid paying off the bet. But the entire system is not only facilitated, but ensured by various pieces of legislation, some of it well intentioned.
The middle east is a lot closer to the equator, which improves solar efficiency remarkably. A more reasonably comparison would be Denmark or Germany, which also do a lot of solar, though I don't know the cost figures.
OTOH, if you're comparing the LA area, Texas, or Florida, that swath, then the middle east is a much more reasonable comparison. I believe that LA is about the same latitude as Israel.
He did say "when this was available". The available amount varies from year to year, and using it for hydro doesn't prevent using it also for drinking and irrigation...though storage can be a problem.
But the real problem is it varies from year to year. Some years it would be a reasonable approach.
Well, the first step is to get the government's permission to sue it. It's perfectly alright to sue the federal government, but you need their permission.
While there's a lot of " Everybody has time to do it fast, but nobody has the time to do it right the first time." out there, it's also true that it's quite difficult to find a lot of bugs, particularly your own bugs. And this is true even if you're excruciatingly careful. If you doubt that, consider the Mars lander that failed because of a units conversion. That wasn't a matter of "doing it fast and sloppy".
The reaction to a bug being revealed, however, is significant. I wouldn't trust Keeper, or a company closely associated with it, for anything at this point.
The thing is, bitcoins are without intrinsic value. Government issued money is, indeed, untrustworthy, but it has intrinsic value: the government promises to accept payoffs in its own currency for taxes so it won't confiscate your property, etc.
Now the government is untrustworthy, but it does have to power to enforce it's threats. Bitcoins are more trustworthy (not totally), but they have no intrinsic value. Their only value is whatever people are currently willing to exchange for them. I wan to call them bitcons rather than bitcoins.
Money is not just about trust and not just about intrinsic value. Things which only have intrinsic value make lousy currencies, and so do things without trust. This is why so many people are into gold, but most of them don't realize that folding paper promises of gold don't directly count. You need the actual metal. And it needs to be of a specific purity. And this is likely to get lost or stolen. But banks have also had their vaults pilfered.
There is noting in the world that has perfect trust. Looking for such is futile. But things that have value can be exchanged for other things with value, where things without intrinsic value can become totally worthless.
OTOH, how much was a Confederate dollar worth after the South lost? Value can be transitory. My old disk drive is worth more as a paperweight than as a disk drive. But it wasn't a bad investment, because I got use out of it for years.
And value is very personal. What is valuable to one person is valueless to another, and invaluable to a third. So it's difficult to use value as a currency. A currency needs to have an agreed value, which means it's own intrinsic value is only a floor to it's effective value. Bitcoin sure proves this, as it's current effective value is immense, but its intrinsic value is closer to nothing than to that of a piece of paper the size of a piece of government currency.
The closest stab I have to a reasonable "thing of constant value" is a bottle of whiskey. That would become more valuable if the government collapsed. Small amounts are easily packaged for portability. etc. Of course, some people would only value it for trade, except in cases of medical emergency and not medications. Wheat doesn't work because it doesn't store well and is too bulky. Also the value fluctuates too much during the course of a year.
Bitcoins, though.... their only value is that they are more trustworthy than governmental currency. But that's all, and it's not sufficient. At some point they will collapse, unless some major vendor of values turns them into a fiat currency. (Also they are vulnerable to centralized control if most of them are bought up by a small enough number of parties to from an oligarchy.)
While I was describing the current situation, it wasn't *only* the current situation. It is clearly the situation back as far as the early 1900's, and I have no reason to believe that things changed at that point. When people lived in smaller groups, they had more direct knowledge of what was going on, and the government was often (not always!) more in line with their desires, so the role of the police was less adversarial, but it's always been to support the government...and those the government supported. (See, e.g., "copper bosses") There have even been times when the army was called out, and the police were operating under the control of the army.
No. The National Guard is normally under the control of the State government, and can be put under the control of the federal government. This is clearly not what is meant by a "well regulated militia". When I said local, I meant city, town, village, or possibly country (or equivalent). And I expect that they didn't want any official government organizing it.
As I said, I expect a bunch of attitudes changed after 1812, but nobody altered the constitution to update it for those changes.
It seemed to me that if people objected to a plan of theirs they ignored the objections. They only paid attention if it was already something they wanted to do. So it was never really useful, but with Trump in office it had absolutely zero utility.
Actually, I believe you are wrong. I don't believe that protecting the citizenry is the official job of the police. I believe that their major job is to protect the government. That in order to do that they are supposed to enforce the laws, whenever that benefits the protection of the government. And that when it endangers the government they are explicitly supposed to ignore the laws. And that it is intended that the protection of the citizenry be a consequence of the foregoing behavior. It's been awhile since I looked that up, so I've probably fuzzed a few of the details, but that was the essence.
And you're assuming that they want to assist the officer. In a lot of areas that's not a safe assumption.