I like the idea, unfortunately it is a myth that there is a surplus that could cover the funds that people currently receiving benefits paid into the system, as I mention in another post, SS is a Ponzi scheme, not a savings scheme, which means that the money being paid out now comes directly from the people paying in now.
The whole thing depended on the idea, that the working population paying in would always grow larger than the non-working population receiving pay out, a nice thought, but not reality.
Even worse, as with most social welfare programs, it does an admirable job of encouraging the beneficiarys to milk the system at the expense the poor slobs supporting it, and also encouraging people to move from the supporting working group, to the beneficiary non-working group.
and voila! you have institutionalized poverty, and perpetuated a class system that supposedly social liberals want to eliminate.
Regardless of the whether you think the government should provide any kind guaranteed financial support to its citizens (I don't, but whatever), the fact is that the current Social Security system, is a Ponzi scheme, and in addition to being completely un-ethical, is doomed to the same eventual collapse that all ponzi, pyramid, and related financial schemes suffer from.
Anyone who thinks that social security has at any point in its history been even remotely successful at providing retirees, widows, disabled folks with financial security, has not actually looked at the numbers.
Well I will probably pay for admitting this but I have 7 computers that make up my webserver, nameservers, firewall, build server, and file server all living in my unheated, un-airconditioned, uninsulated garage sitting on bench between the clothes dryer and the part I use as a shop for building small boats. When ever I open up one these guys to upgrade a drive or memory, I usually have to use a shop vac to clean out all the dryer lint, sawdust, and spider webs (lots of these, apparently they like the heat).
I have never had a problem with any these boxes, and most of them are over 8 years old. Most are HP Vectras (200 and 233 mhz), Compaq Deskpros (SFF, 450 and 500 mhz), and a Dell Optiplex (the oldest, its 60 mhz pentium)
The only time I ever worry is in the summer, it gets a tad warm out there, and my build server is the only one that really gets close to having issues, it uses the BP6 dual socket 370 motherboard that supports dual celeron CPUs, and it doesn't like to get warm (but it cranks in the winter)
Of course if you want anything that runs faster than 500 mhz, you probably can't pull this off, all them new fangled whiz bang machines is so damn fragile!
Not really, I am not talking about streaming HDTV. Contrary to a lot of the posts I have seen, I don't high quality/resolution is necessary for internet broadcasting. Most people who are going to want to watch the internet streams, will be doing so as a matter of convience (e.g. keeping the news on in window while working on something else, or watching their local stations while traveling).
I think the standard quality we see in the aready available news clips will be fine. If want to watch a movie or favorite show in high quality then I will go into the living room and watch my tv set.
And for this level of quality, they probably wouldn't use that much additional bandwidth, and bandwidth is cheap these days, at least in the US, and major European countries, the situation would be more problematic is places where measured service is the rule.
Ok, so why aren't the local affiliates streaming their broadcasts, all we are talking about is taking the same content they broadcast freely over the airwaves, and making it available over the Internet.
I am probably being really dense, but can someone please explain to me why the major broadcast networks are not streaming their broadcasts on the Internet?
I can kind of understand why cable only networks might not (not really), but why in the world broadcast networks are not doing it is a mystery to me.
I would think it would only improve the competive position against the cable networks, and the increase their viewership, and thereby increasing their value to their advertisers.
Another benefit of older hardware, with slower cpus, I am pulling a total of about 300 watts, this varies depending on the current load of the systems, which equates to about $34/mth on my electric bill. Of course as soon as I get my solar collectors finished I will more than make up for that. Never mess with true geek, I've got a project for anything you come up with.
Do I "need" them? no not really, but I am a SysAdmin/Network Engineer by trade, who lately has been moving up to management roles, having these gives me a chance to keep up my technical skills, and while the hardware may be old they give me a chance to experiment with newer technologies and standards (e.g. IPv6, IPSEC, VoIP, etc) also I didn't mention the two Win2003 servers because they are running on dual Xeon 1ghz.
Also I host a family website and mail for my rather extended family scattered across the US, which helps keep everybody in touch. And also provides a learning zone for young family members like my daughter, and one of nephews get to learn about computers and networking.
webserver - P233 w/198MB RAM, 10GB HDD 2 external nameservers - P166s w/64MB RAM, 4GB HHD (one is also running NTP) mailserver - Dual PP200 w/128MB RAM, 2x2GB SCSI and 16GB IDE HDD
Firewall - P60 w/48MB RAM, 1.6GB HDD
Internal DHCP/nameserver - P133 w/128MB RAM, 4GB HDD Internal nameserver/NTP/management server - PII450 w/256MB RAM, 20GB HDD Build server - Dual Celeron 400, with 512MB RAM, 200GB HDD Test server - Celeron 300, with 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD
I also have two old Alpha servers (300mhz) one running Tru64 and the other OpenVMS. And of course an old SparcStation 20 with Solaris 8.
Now if I can just get the rest of the parts I need for the PDP I'm set.
My laptop - PIII700, with 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD
Toss in a couple of cisco routers and some 3Com switches and there you have it.
As Microsoft says "Do More with Less", of course if you want realize that dream, try FreeBSD.
The really nice thing about all this is that with the exception of my laptop, it was all free, throw aways from my or friend's clients or employers over the years.
In my experience this is how most large companies do it:
1. Post ad 2. HR filters out all the really capable and honest people using unrealistic requirements lists (e.g. 15 years experience with Win NT in 1999) and/or requiring certs that only people with no real work to do, have time to get. 3. Only people who lied on their resumes get through the screening process 4. Pick the best of the lot 5. New employee turns out to be a flaky incompetent, shuffle him to make work 6. Tech manager hires knowledgable worker on his own, with out going through HR to do the flakes job 7. Company goes through layoffs, and the knowledgeable guy is let go first because he is not on the official TO&E 8. Flaky guy takes over knowledgeable guys projects and hoses them up 9. Tech manager quits in disgust 10. Flaky guy is promoted to tech managers job
I have seen this exact sequence carried out at least four times.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Prior to 9/11, common sense, assuming anybody had to bothered to apply it, would have told us that of course terrorists will inevitably choose to use the pontential destructive power of a flying airliner against any manner of populated targets. Anyone who spent any time thinking about ways terrorists can attack us, has either envisioned it (witnes countless fictional works, and a number of non-fiction reports and studies, pre-dating 9/11, that included similar scenarios), or else was obscenely naive or shortsighted.
At this stage, we are not only shutting the door after the barn has burnt down, but we are also taking sledge hammers to the foundation.
I wish everyone posting here on slashdot, would just cut and paste your posts into a letter and mail them to your congressman. Maybe we can save whats left of our freedom yet.
I very much agree that the open source community should make a concerted effort to reward IBM, whether through recommending their products (those that are worthy of recommendation), or contributing code to IBM sponsored projects, or anything else you can think of.
While there is an element of truth to the statements they are doing what they are for "good business" (read profit motive) reasons, and that if it made greater business sense to line up against the open source community they probably would. There are a number of other ways they could have handled this, that would have cost them much less effort and probably a lot less money, and would not have been as beneficial to the open source community, and the future of Linux.
I honestly believe that most corporate execs, and possibly even the majority of lawyers get same warm pleasure as the rest of us, when the get to fight the good fight. They just don't get to do it very often, being answerable to greedy stockholders (you know: all of us with 401k and retirement plans, and online investment accounts).
It never hurts to reward companies that take the high road, if we make an effort to reward companies whose behavior we approve of, whatever their original motivations, we motivate them to exhibit behavior we approve of.
Actually I used to work for this company as well, and I have to say it is very depressing seeing them participating stupidity like this these days.
Way back when I first went into consulting, there were two companies that I specifically sought out employement with because of their reputations for doing right by the customer no matter what. DEC Multi-vendor services and Cap Gemini, unforturnately I got to watch one destroyed by absorption into an inferior organization, and the other destroyed by the weak moral fiber of its french management.
At one time Cap Gemini was one of the only consulting companies in the world that consistently delivered projects on-time, with-in budget, and actually met the original project goals. They also were well known for going to the customer and admitting when they fucked up, and doing what was necessary to fix it, at their own costs. There has been nothing more depressing, than watching them turn into body shopping Microsoft toadies.
Last time I checked items like anonymous travel, and the protection personal freedoms from goverment encroachment, was conservative republican stance, as differentiated from the neo-con powermongers and control freaks in office today.
Bear mind it was a member of one of the antecedents of today's republican party who said:
"Those that would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security."
I can guarentee you that no American passenger airliner will ever again be used as a missile, and it won't be, because of anything our goverment protectors do, it won't happen because the free citizens on that plane will refuse to be puppets and/or victims ever again.
The fact that there is even disagreement today in America over the basic premise in Franklin's quote tells me that America's status a free and open society is in serious jeopardy, I only hope we recover from this before we sacrifice all of our freedom in the name of comfort and stability.
I am still very much an rxvt fan, but I also wanted tabs. I recently switched from blackbox wm to fluxbox wm, which allows you to tab all your windows, to get tabbed terminal windows not to mention all the other improvements. I just can't bring myself to run gnome or kde given their enormous footprints. The only thing I miss is displaying icons on the desktop.
I can attest to this. I used to own a Fiat 128 (tiny 4 door sedan). The wireharness just inside the firewall would short and burn everytime after about 20-30 miles of continuous driving. I kept splicing in heavier guage wire each time, but it didn't do any good. The one Fiat mechanic in town never found anything wrong. Finally I settled for stopping and turning off the car momentarily every 15 miles, until I could sell. My friends and the guy I sold it to, thought I was nuts.
Maintenance guy/janitor in small town McDonald's - cleaing Micky D's bathrooms and grease traps, and "fun..fun" annual septic tank cleaning and service.
Laborer in Timber Services contracter, doing post logging cut clean up, slogging around torn up forest land spraying plant killer on anything not a tree, while a half drunk helicopter pilot tries to set everything but you on fire with jellied gasoline.
Infantryman in the Army, joy of joys, from helping to blow up river ice in sub-zero winters in Korea (can't have tanks driving across it after all) to training in Panamanian jungles with Air Force pilots who can't remember which side of the road to drop you on (the other side was a wild game preserve, and we weren't doing live fire training).
Crewman on an traditional rig sailing ship, yippee from hanging upside down in the engine room bilges trying to repair a faulty bilge pump under a foot and half of oily water to going 60' aloft to the topsail yard to furl topsail, both of these while the ship careens through 15 to 25 seas, in 30 to 40 knots of wind, at night. (problem for the mathematically inclined: your 60' up, the ship rolls ~40 degrees to either side for a total of 80 degress with a period of ~2 seconds, what kind of accelerations are you experiencing? ps: don't worry about the 30' to 50' of up and down caused by the waves)
All in all I would trade the job I have now (corp IT consultant) for any of the previous, at least I didn't risk jail from strangeling various C?Os.
Throwing away nuclear waste in space is very much the wrong answer. Quite aside from the safety issues of flinging radioactive material into the sky, these materials are in very limited supply and potentially very valuable. With very little additional refinement of current technologies, all most all current types of waste being generated could be reused and/or recycled.
If weren't for the strong political aversion to supporting nuclear research we would probably have a lot of that capability today.
We are far better off, storing the material safely where we can get at it later.
This argument also speaks against the plan to dump the wast into tectonic subduction zones.
IANAL, but it I don't believe it has been tested. Because the lawsuit suit ended in a settlement instead of a judgement, no legal precendent has been set, and therefore it can not be used as a reference case for establishing the legitimacy of GPL.
So unless there is another case out there somewhere involving the GPL which went all the way to decision, then you can't say that it has been vetted in court.
The point is that while IBM may not care about the GPL outside of this case, their notably able lawyers will be arguing for enforcement of it in this case. Assuming they win, this could provide a precedent for the legal force of the GPL.
For those of you who haven't read Jerry Pournelle's books, they talk about a future where the hypothetical world powers work to suppress Scientific research in order to preserve "Peace & Stability".
Of course amatuer historians can also point the Constantine Roman Empire and see similar trends.
Unfortunately unlike Pournelle's books, we haven't managed inter-stellar travel before the suppression began, there by haven't manage plant the seeds of future civilizations else where, and unlike the time's of Christian Rome, we don't have the seed's planted by a previous empire and barbarian hordes to force us out of stagnation.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the idea, unfortunately it is a myth that there is a surplus that could cover the funds that people currently receiving benefits paid into the system, as I mention in another post, SS is a Ponzi scheme, not a savings scheme, which means that the money being paid out now comes directly from the people paying in now.
The whole thing depended on the idea, that the working population paying in would always grow larger than the non-working population receiving pay out, a nice thought, but not reality.
Even worse, as with most social welfare programs, it does an admirable job of encouraging the beneficiarys to milk the system at the expense the poor slobs supporting it, and also encouraging people to move from the supporting working group, to the beneficiary non-working group.
and voila! you have institutionalized poverty, and perpetuated a class system that supposedly social liberals want to eliminate.
Regardless of the whether you think the government should provide any kind guaranteed financial support to its citizens (I don't, but whatever), the fact is that the current Social Security system, is a Ponzi scheme, and in addition to being completely un-ethical, is doomed to the same eventual collapse that all ponzi, pyramid, and related financial schemes suffer from.
Anyone who thinks that social security has at any point in its history been even remotely successful at providing retirees, widows, disabled folks with financial security, has not actually looked at the numbers.
Well I will probably pay for admitting this but I have 7 computers that make up my webserver, nameservers, firewall, build server, and file server all living in my unheated, un-airconditioned, uninsulated garage sitting on bench between the clothes dryer and the part I use as a shop for building small boats. When ever I open up one these guys to upgrade a drive or memory, I usually have to use a shop vac to clean out all the dryer lint, sawdust, and spider webs (lots of these, apparently they like the heat).
I have never had a problem with any these boxes, and most of them are over 8 years old. Most are HP Vectras (200 and 233 mhz), Compaq Deskpros (SFF, 450 and 500 mhz), and a Dell Optiplex (the oldest, its 60 mhz pentium)
The only time I ever worry is in the summer, it gets a tad warm out there, and my build server is the only one that really gets close to having issues, it uses the BP6 dual socket 370 motherboard that supports dual celeron CPUs, and it doesn't like to get warm (but it cranks in the winter)
Of course if you want anything that runs faster than 500 mhz, you probably can't pull this off, all them new fangled whiz bang machines is so damn fragile!
Somebody mod this parent up so people will see it, he may be anonymous, but he makes a good point.
Not really, I am not talking about streaming HDTV. Contrary to a lot of the posts I have seen, I don't high quality/resolution is necessary for internet broadcasting. Most people who are going to want to watch the internet streams, will be doing so as a matter of convience (e.g. keeping the news on in window while working on something else, or watching their local stations while traveling).
I think the standard quality we see in the aready available news clips will be fine. If want to watch a movie or favorite show in high quality then I will go into the living room and watch my tv set.
And for this level of quality, they probably wouldn't use that much additional bandwidth, and bandwidth is cheap these days, at least in the US, and major European countries, the situation would be more problematic is places where measured service is the rule.
Ok, so why aren't the local affiliates streaming their broadcasts, all we are talking about is taking the same content they broadcast freely over the airwaves, and making it available over the Internet.
This should be a no brainer.
I am probably being really dense, but can someone please explain to me why the major broadcast networks are not streaming their broadcasts on the Internet?
I can kind of understand why cable only networks might not (not really), but why in the world broadcast networks are not doing it is a mystery to me.
I would think it would only improve the competive position against the cable networks, and the increase their viewership, and thereby increasing their value to their advertisers.
Another benefit of older hardware, with slower cpus, I am pulling a total of about 300 watts, this varies depending on the current load of the systems, which equates to about $34/mth on my electric bill. Of course as soon as I get my solar collectors finished I will more than make up for that. Never mess with true geek, I've got a project for anything you come up with.
Do I "need" them? no not really, but I am a SysAdmin/Network Engineer by trade, who lately has been moving up to management roles, having these gives me a chance to keep up my technical skills, and while the hardware may be old they give me a chance to experiment with newer technologies and standards (e.g. IPv6, IPSEC, VoIP, etc) also I didn't mention the two Win2003 servers because they are running on dual Xeon 1ghz.
Also I host a family website and mail for my rather extended family scattered across the US, which helps keep everybody in touch. And also provides a learning zone for young family members like my daughter, and one of nephews get to learn about computers and networking.
So need? No, but it is fun.
Here's mine:
webserver - P233 w/198MB RAM, 10GB HDD
2 external nameservers - P166s w/64MB RAM, 4GB HHD (one is also running NTP)
mailserver - Dual PP200 w/128MB RAM, 2x2GB SCSI and 16GB IDE HDD
Firewall - P60 w/48MB RAM, 1.6GB HDD
Internal DHCP/nameserver - P133 w/128MB RAM, 4GB HDD
Internal nameserver/NTP/management server - PII450 w/256MB RAM, 20GB HDD
Build server - Dual Celeron 400, with 512MB RAM, 200GB HDD
Test server - Celeron 300, with 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD
I also have two old Alpha servers (300mhz) one running Tru64 and the other OpenVMS.
And of course an old SparcStation 20 with Solaris 8.
Now if I can just get the rest of the parts I need for the PDP I'm set.
My laptop - PIII700, with 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD
Toss in a couple of cisco routers and some 3Com switches and there you have it.
As Microsoft says "Do More with Less", of course if you want realize that dream, try FreeBSD.
The really nice thing about all this is that with the exception of my laptop, it was all free, throw aways from my or friend's clients or employers over the years.
Gee dude, try 15-18 hour days, with 90% travel and only 1 2-week vacation over the last 8 years, then you can whine to me about burn out.
In my experience this is how most large companies do it:
1. Post ad
2. HR filters out all the really capable and honest people using unrealistic requirements lists (e.g. 15 years experience with Win NT in 1999) and/or requiring certs that only people with no real work to do, have time to get.
3. Only people who lied on their resumes get through the screening process
4. Pick the best of the lot
5. New employee turns out to be a flaky incompetent, shuffle him to make work
6. Tech manager hires knowledgable worker on his own, with out going through HR to do the flakes job
7. Company goes through layoffs, and the knowledgeable guy is let go first because he is not on the official TO&E
8. Flaky guy takes over knowledgeable guys projects and hoses them up
9. Tech manager quits in disgust
10. Flaky guy is promoted to tech managers job
I have seen this exact sequence carried out at least four times.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Prior to 9/11, common sense, assuming anybody had to bothered to apply it, would have told us that of course terrorists will inevitably choose to use the pontential destructive power of a flying airliner against any manner of populated targets. Anyone who spent any time thinking about ways terrorists can attack us, has either envisioned it (witnes countless fictional works, and a number of non-fiction reports and studies, pre-dating 9/11, that included similar scenarios), or else was obscenely naive or shortsighted.
At this stage, we are not only shutting the door after the barn has burnt down, but we are also taking sledge hammers to the foundation.
I wish everyone posting here on slashdot, would just cut and paste your posts into a letter and mail them to your congressman. Maybe we can save whats left of our freedom yet.
I very much agree that the open source community should make a concerted effort to reward IBM, whether through recommending their products (those that are worthy of recommendation), or contributing code to IBM sponsored projects, or anything else you can think of.
While there is an element of truth to the statements they are doing what they are for "good business" (read profit motive) reasons, and that if it made greater business sense to line up against the open source community they probably would. There are a number of other ways they could have handled this, that would have cost them much less effort and probably a lot less money, and would not have been as beneficial to the open source community, and the future of Linux.
I honestly believe that most corporate execs, and possibly even the majority of lawyers get same warm pleasure as the rest of us, when the get to fight the good fight. They just don't get to do it very often, being answerable to greedy stockholders (you know: all of us with 401k and retirement plans, and online investment accounts).
It never hurts to reward companies that take the high road, if we make an effort to reward companies whose behavior we approve of, whatever their original motivations, we motivate them to exhibit behavior we approve of.
Actually I used to work for this company as well, and I have to say it is very depressing seeing them participating stupidity like this these days.
Way back when I first went into consulting, there were two companies that I specifically sought out employement with because of their reputations for doing right by the customer no matter what. DEC Multi-vendor services and Cap Gemini, unforturnately I got to watch one destroyed by absorption into an inferior organization, and the other destroyed by the weak moral fiber of its french management.
At one time Cap Gemini was one of the only consulting companies in the world that consistently delivered projects on-time, with-in budget, and actually met the original project goals. They also were well known for going to the customer and admitting when they fucked up, and doing what was necessary to fix it, at their own costs. There has been nothing more depressing, than watching them turn into body shopping Microsoft toadies.
Last time I checked items like anonymous travel, and the protection personal freedoms from goverment encroachment, was conservative republican stance, as differentiated from the neo-con powermongers and control freaks in office today.
Bear mind it was a member of one of the antecedents of today's republican party who said:
"Those that would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security."
I can guarentee you that no American passenger airliner will ever again be used as a missile, and it won't be, because of anything our goverment protectors do, it won't happen because the free citizens on that plane will refuse to be puppets and/or victims ever again.
The fact that there is even disagreement today in America over the basic premise in Franklin's quote tells me that America's status a free and open society is in serious jeopardy, I only hope we recover from this before we sacrifice all of our freedom in the name of comfort and stability.
I am still very much an rxvt fan, but I also wanted tabs. I recently switched from blackbox wm to fluxbox wm, which allows you to tab all your windows, to get tabbed terminal windows not to mention all the other improvements. I just can't bring myself to run gnome or kde given their enormous footprints. The only thing I miss is displaying icons on the desktop.
Somebody please mod parent up, this is one of the most astute observations I have seen on slashdot.
I can attest to this. I used to own a Fiat 128 (tiny 4 door sedan). The wireharness just inside the firewall would short and burn everytime after about 20-30 miles of continuous driving. I kept splicing in heavier guage wire each time, but it didn't do any good. The one Fiat mechanic in town never found anything wrong. Finally I settled for stopping and turning off the car momentarily every 15 miles, until I could sell. My friends and the guy I sold it to, thought I was nuts.
Past jobs in roughly chronological order:
Maintenance guy/janitor in small town McDonald's - cleaing Micky D's bathrooms and grease traps, and "fun..fun" annual septic tank cleaning and service.
Laborer in Timber Services contracter, doing post logging cut clean up, slogging around torn up forest land spraying plant killer on anything not a tree, while a half drunk helicopter pilot tries to set everything but you on fire with jellied gasoline.
Infantryman in the Army, joy of joys, from helping to blow up river ice in sub-zero winters in Korea (can't have tanks driving across it after all) to training in Panamanian jungles with Air Force pilots who can't remember which side of the road to drop you on (the other side was a wild game preserve, and we weren't doing live fire training).
Crewman on an traditional rig sailing ship, yippee from hanging upside down in the engine room bilges trying to repair a faulty bilge pump under a foot and half of oily water to going 60' aloft to the topsail yard to furl topsail, both of these while the ship careens through 15 to 25 seas, in 30 to 40 knots of wind, at night. (problem for the mathematically inclined: your 60' up, the ship rolls ~40 degrees to either side for a total of 80 degress with a period of ~2 seconds, what kind of accelerations are you experiencing? ps: don't worry about the 30' to 50' of up and down caused by the waves)
All in all I would trade the job I have now (corp IT consultant) for any of the previous, at least I didn't risk jail from strangeling various C?Os.
http://mitosyfraudes.8k.com/INGLES/MicroReactor.ht ml
Throwing away nuclear waste in space is very much the wrong answer. Quite aside from the safety issues of flinging radioactive material into the sky, these materials are in very limited supply and potentially very valuable. With very little additional refinement of current technologies, all most all current types of waste being generated could be reused and/or recycled.
If weren't for the strong political aversion to supporting nuclear research we would probably have a lot of that capability today.
We are far better off, storing the material safely where we can get at it later.
This argument also speaks against the plan to dump the wast into tectonic subduction zones.
IANAL, but it I don't believe it has been tested. Because the lawsuit suit ended in a settlement instead of a judgement, no legal precendent has been set, and therefore it can not be used as a reference case for establishing the legitimacy of GPL.
So unless there is another case out there somewhere involving the GPL which went all the way to decision, then you can't say that it has been vetted in court.
The point is that while IBM may not care about the GPL outside of this case, their notably able lawyers will be arguing for enforcement of it in this case. Assuming they win, this could provide a precedent for the legal force of the GPL.
This is a good thing.
For those of you who haven't read Jerry Pournelle's books, they talk about a future where the hypothetical world powers work to suppress Scientific research in order to preserve "Peace & Stability".
Of course amatuer historians can also point the Constantine Roman Empire and see similar trends.
Unfortunately unlike Pournelle's books, we haven't managed inter-stellar travel before the suppression began, there by haven't manage plant the seeds of future civilizations else where, and unlike the time's of Christian Rome, we don't have the seed's planted by a previous empire and barbarian hordes to force us out of stagnation.
It was last year that USNews reported that Video Games had surpassed movies in popularity.