Where do you get the idea that the USAFS period was "brief"? It lasted from the early 60s to the late 70s.
I suppose the navy has a monopoly on fighting ships. But why should they have a monopoly on other kinds of ships?
I don't see any of this as counter-intuitive. It's only strange if you have a superficial understanding of what something is. Like people who think that all finned sea creatures are fish, all non-human animals with hands are monkeys, all warships are battleships, etc.
We all make mistake like that. It's no big deal. Unless you're really lame about it. Like when Siskel and Ebert assumed that this movie took place in Alaska, despite a ton of references to Canadian places and institutions. Or the particularly stupid TV critic who thought this show was about the Air Force, despite a zillion references to the Army.
Before it belonged to the Air Force, she belonged to the Army. During WW II, the Army actually had more tonnage afloat than the Navy.
I find it interesting that the submitter labeled this ship a "USNS", as does the picture caption in the Wikipedia article. That designates a non-commissioned naval vessel crewed to some extend by civilians. This ship only carried that designation for a few years in the late 50s. Before that she was either a "USS" or a "USAT" (US Army Transport). And then she was a "USAFS" for almost two decades.
Gotta watch your assumptions here. People see ships, they think "navy", ground forces "army", airplanes, "air force". But in fact each service has huge assets of the kind associated with the other two.
Really, the separation into services is thoroughly outdated. It's particularly weird that we have two ground forces, the Army and the Marine Corps. (The marines are a holdover from the days when naval battles invariably included boarding actions.) But of course, no members of these service are willing to give up their traditions.
Right you are. The most effective measure seems to be to create preserves where fishing is simply not allowed. This allows big healthy populations to build up, something you don't get if you just limit fishing.
The most disturbing result of overfishing is that fish who mature early are more likely to reproduce, since smaller fish slip through the nets. This plays bloody hell with their life cycle.
Ever been to Cannery Row in Monterey? Nowadays a tourist destination. Used to be a major port for landing and canning sardines. Then the sardines just disappeared, almost overnight. The ecological effects of overfishing can be very sudden and very devestating.
Sound economics, but it's still a non-starter. Two big problems.
First, taxing carbon would have huge economic impact. I think it would work out in the long term, since it would encourage the new technologies we need. But in the short term, it would cost ordinary people a lot. Worse, it would cost them more to drive. Any politician who proposes that is simply saying "I don't ever want to be elected to anything again, ever."
Hey, California booted a governor out of office just for trying to restore a pretty small car registration fee. And you think you can get people to support a measure that would raise gas to $10/gallon? Not gonna happen.
Another problem: reducing carbon emissions only works if everybody does it. If we rely on every nation to tax carbon, they'll say "sure!" and then corrupt officials will make a fortune from that-smokestack-is-invisible bribes. And when we complain about it, they'll accuse us of cultural arrogance or whatever.
The next best solution, economically, is the cap-and-trade approach trying to get through Congress right now. (I should hate the idea, since evil Republicans invented it, but what can I say, I'm a sucker for logic.) You decide how much carbon you can allow to be omitted this year, then your divvy up the permits among the emitters, who are allowed to sell them to each other. Everybody has an incentive to cut back as much as possible, because they can sell their leftover permits to somebody who's less creative. Then you play musical chairs with the permits, so that less and less carbon gets emitted every year.
It's just possible that rewarding inventiveness in this way could create new technologies that makes energy cheaper. That sort of thing does happen when people start rethinking their methods.
The only problem is that the same politics that makes carbon taxes undoable are causing the cap-and-trade bill to be shot through with loopholes. Oh well, guess we're doomed!
Great, so a bunch of NASA spinoff technology found medical application. Does that mean the people who invented these technologies know jack about medicine?
NASA also gave us Teflon. Does that suggest they should open a chain of restaurants?
I don't know the specifics, but since the official name change came shortly after the collapse of the Turkish Empire, I'd guess that it had a lot to do with the ethnic cleansing that occurred at the time, which resulted in most of Turkey's Greek-speaking minority being forced to leave the country. Under the circumstances, it's not surprising that the city's Greek name got dropped from official usage, and replaced by a Turkish colloquialism ("Istanbul" is a Turkish corruption of a Greek phrase that could be roughly translated as "The city's that way") that had been widely used for centuries but previously had been unofficial.
Now, if I could just get that stupid song out of my head...
Except of course that just about all disputes start with cops, not with lawmakers. Miranda, Terry Stops, FLIR cameras, take your pick.
So fucking what? What exactly does arguing with a cop accomplish? Does it change the law? Quite the opposite: people who pick unnecessary fights with cops is used to justify abridgment of our rights.
And not just by cops either. Try to remember that there are millions of Americans who think that abrogating the Bill of Rights is no big deal. As long as the bad guys get locked up, they don't care. And they define "bad guy" very broadly, which is why the U.S. has the largest percentage of its population behind bars of any country.
1. Abuse your authority and harass an individual until they become agitated 2. If they don't remain perfectly calm and "respectful" 3. Accuse them of "immaturity" and bringing it on themselves 4. Arrest them for disorderly conduct when you're the one who put them in a disorderly state 5. ??? 6. Profit.
I don't get your point here. Are you saying that it isn't fair that you be busted for behavior that somebody provoked you into? That's childish. If you can't control your own behavior, then you're the slave of anybody who knows how to push your buttons — and pushy cops are the least of your problems.
Let me tell you the biggest reason your attitude is stupid. This episode with a cop trying to tell a photography what he can point his camera at is not an isolated incident. And I don't find that acceptable. That's why I contributed to the legal defense fund of this guy. And if you really give a shit, you will too. Or is your involvement in the defense of the first amendment limited to undermining that defense by handing propaganda to the world's Dick Cheneys?
Better yet, look at those off-lease business computers, the kind with no PCI slots and an external power supply. Big companies lease them by the ton, and then ditch them after a few years. Brand new, they're maybe overpriced, but used, they cost a pittance. If you pay more than $150, you're getting ripped off. Lots of them on eBay; "external power supply" is a good way to find them.
Doesn't sound like a good gaming computer? Well, I'm not a serious gamer, but the Dell SX270 I have does quite well with 3D graphics. And the Intel 865 graphics chipset is on the CoH recommended list. If you're looking at a computer with a different graphic chipset, compare it against the recommendations on help.ncsoft.com.
Typical. First they stick with their legacy OS long, long after it's obsolete. Then when they finally get around to replacing it, they fail to support their developers. Jeez, a new platform has the deck stacked against it even if you do everything right. No developer/hacker ecosystem? The things dead before it's even released.
Palm's capacity for shooting itself in the foot is amazing. The first Palm I owned was a V. The V series made me fall in love with the platform, and is still my favorite. But even it had some boneheaded features. Like an Up button that stuck out too far, so you couldn't close the cover without triggering it; I think the StayOffIfUp hack was the most popular of all Palm OS hacks.
And every Palm I've owned since then has been worse. I had hopes for the Handspring version, but its screwups made me wonder if Jeff Hawkins really had anything to do with creating the basic Palm design. And when Palm absorbed them, Handspring ineptitude seemed to spread through the whole product line.
My final Palm was as a Centro: buggy, shoddy construction, and the integration of the phone with the PDA was klunky in the extreme. A web browser designed by somebody with very novel notions about what the "Back" button is supposed to do. JRE pulled just before I bought it. When the Centro finally stopped seeing is microSD card, I knew my long relationship with Palm was over.
If the Pre were from some random vendor I'd never heard of, I'd be very tempted to give it a try. But I'll never touch another Palm product, ever.
You're oversimplifying the issue. Yes, most of the problems that make Windows a nightmare don't exist in Linux. Linux is still follows the Woz architecture. Fine for us hackers and geeks, but a PITA for everybody else. Hence the trend towards "thin client" solutions.
I'm more impressed that we can still get signals from the thing. The radio only emits 20 watts. By the time the signal reaches earth, it's been attenuated to 0.00000000000000001 watts. Being able to grab that signal is equivalent to reading morse code transmitted by an ordinary light bulb 200 million miles away!
Isn't BIOS + Browser just a modern interpretation of the thin client?
So? Why is that a bad thing? Looking after a set of locally installed applications is a chore most users have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with.
The modern PC (and to a lesser extent, the Mac) uses what I call Woz Architecture. By that I mean it's a direct descendant of the Apple II, a system Wozniak designed to maximize hackability. He was thinking in terms of selling systems to his fellow hackers, but he created an technical and economic ecosystem that dominates desktop computing to this very day. Geeks like us wouldn't have it any other way, but for most users having to play hacker all the time (or paying an IT department to play hacker) is a major PITA. And for businesses, which actually buy most computers, it's a major cost center. Which is why the thin client model has never really gone away, despite its many failures.
I don't see how it can grab a huge share of the market.
It's already grabbed a big share. You may have noticed one or two popular web-hosted applications? (It seems likely most people will end up doing their taxes that way.) Many businesses rely on terminal servers for their desktops. (Not technically a thin client, but from the end user's POV there's not much difference.)
I personally prefer the original thin client model, namely the network computer. More elegant than kludgy web applications or resource-intensive terminal servers. Alas, proponents of the NC model destroyed any chance of its acceptance by pushing the idea long before the technology was in place to support it.
The traditional PC still dominates, but it's definitely losing ground. People are just fed up with the increasing complexity and brittleness of Windows. Desktop Linux, if it ever gets significant mind share, will just go down the same route. Open Source is good for squashing bugs, filling security holes, and encouraging creative application development. But it's actually worse at maintaining a consistent and simple user experience.
The Mac has mostly avoided these pitfalls, but only because a single company has tightly control the user-developer-hardware ecosystem. Users can count on a consistent and simple experience, because Nanny Apple has decreed that it must be so. Same goes for OS/X APIs. This makes life simpler for all involved, but so much control by one relatively small company has always limited acceptance. That's why I still don't own an iPhone — too many issues relating Nanny Apple's dictating what you can and cannot do with it. I don't want a shake-the-baby application, but what business of theirs is it if I do?
On the home front, such a business model turns your computer into a subscription service. It works as long as you pay your internet bill (and whatever other costs are needed to access the actual web applications). This wasn't very popular for music when the customer was presented with other options (iTunes).
Yeah, people have resisted any flat-fee subscription model for online content. On the other hand, they've not only accepted that model for network access, they've actually resisted any attempt to impose usage charges!
Here's the difference: nobody's going to pay $10 every month for access to a library that may or may not provide them with $10 worth of content every month. Such libraries typically don't have very complete collections, since they don't have enough revenue to make it worthwhile to content providers. And in any case, people don't usually buy music every month.
But note that Netflix has done quite well with their flat-fee access to streaming movies, despite their limited selection. Yes, they've piggy-backed on their DVD subscription business — but is that business fundamentally different? (Aside from being less convenient.) And in any case the streaming service has turned into a
Sarah Connor was a non-populist, meditative, complex piece of television on a smash-bang, show-me-the-ratings kind of network
Oh please. It was about as meditative as a football game. The few episodes I bothered to watch were as smash-bang as anything else on Fox.
There's been a depressing trend for some very shallow entertainments to position themselves as "serious drama". The BSG remake, all those pretentious cop shows on FX, and movies like Crash all come to mind. They throw in serious issues so they can take themselves seriously, but they never really address them. It's like sticking celery in a milkshake and saying it's a balanced meal.
But this TV show didn't even do that. It was just a serial action thriller with dark tones, not very interesting mysteries, and way too much soap opera. Don't fanboy it into War and Peace.
If there's an active platform that can't run Linux, it must be very arcane. And Macs are hardly arcane. Nowadays the hardware is not that different from a PC.
I have a Motion tablet that runs Vista. That OS is every bit as bad as its reputation, but I put up with it because it's the only tablet OS with decent handwriting recognition. If I could similar software for Linux, I'd switch tomorrow.
And yes, I know about PenReader. Despite its claims, it does not handle handwriting. You have to draw out the letters one at a time. Easier to use an on-screen keyboard.
I know Smallville sucks. It only took a single episode to convince me of that. You overlooked the sarcasm in my commnet, which relates to your knowing so much about a really, really bad TV show.
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Where do you get the idea that the USAFS period was "brief"? It lasted from the early 60s to the late 70s.
I suppose the navy has a monopoly on fighting ships. But why should they have a monopoly on other kinds of ships?
I don't see any of this as counter-intuitive. It's only strange if you have a superficial understanding of what something is. Like people who think that all finned sea creatures are fish, all non-human animals with hands are monkeys, all warships are battleships, etc.
We all make mistake like that. It's no big deal. Unless you're really lame about it. Like when Siskel and Ebert assumed that this movie took place in Alaska, despite a ton of references to Canadian places and institutions. Or the particularly stupid TV critic who thought this show was about the Air Force, despite a zillion references to the Army.
Before it belonged to the Air Force, she belonged to the Army. During WW II, the Army actually had more tonnage afloat than the Navy.
I find it interesting that the submitter labeled this ship a "USNS", as does the picture caption in the Wikipedia article. That designates a non-commissioned naval vessel crewed to some extend by civilians. This ship only carried that designation for a few years in the late 50s. Before that she was either a "USS" or a "USAT" (US Army Transport). And then she was a "USAFS" for almost two decades.
Gotta watch your assumptions here. People see ships, they think "navy", ground forces "army", airplanes, "air force". But in fact each service has huge assets of the kind associated with the other two.
Really, the separation into services is thoroughly outdated. It's particularly weird that we have two ground forces, the Army and the Marine Corps. (The marines are a holdover from the days when naval battles invariably included boarding actions.) But of course, no members of these service are willing to give up their traditions.
Right you are. The most effective measure seems to be to create preserves where fishing is simply not allowed. This allows big healthy populations to build up, something you don't get if you just limit fishing.
The most disturbing result of overfishing is that fish who mature early are more likely to reproduce, since smaller fish slip through the nets. This plays bloody hell with their life cycle.
Ever been to Cannery Row in Monterey? Nowadays a tourist destination. Used to be a major port for landing and canning sardines. Then the sardines just disappeared, almost overnight. The ecological effects of overfishing can be very sudden and very devestating.
"Informative"? Jeez, does somebody out there think that Skynet is real?
Sound economics, but it's still a non-starter. Two big problems.
First, taxing carbon would have huge economic impact. I think it would work out in the long term, since it would encourage the new technologies we need. But in the short term, it would cost ordinary people a lot. Worse, it would cost them more to drive. Any politician who proposes that is simply saying "I don't ever want to be elected to anything again, ever."
Hey, California booted a governor out of office just for trying to restore a pretty small car registration fee. And you think you can get people to support a measure that would raise gas to $10/gallon? Not gonna happen.
Another problem: reducing carbon emissions only works if everybody does it. If we rely on every nation to tax carbon, they'll say "sure!" and then corrupt officials will make a fortune from that-smokestack-is-invisible bribes. And when we complain about it, they'll accuse us of cultural arrogance or whatever.
The next best solution, economically, is the cap-and-trade approach trying to get through Congress right now. (I should hate the idea, since evil Republicans invented it, but what can I say, I'm a sucker for logic.) You decide how much carbon you can allow to be omitted this year, then your divvy up the permits among the emitters, who are allowed to sell them to each other. Everybody has an incentive to cut back as much as possible, because they can sell their leftover permits to somebody who's less creative. Then you play musical chairs with the permits, so that less and less carbon gets emitted every year.
It's just possible that rewarding inventiveness in this way could create new technologies that makes energy cheaper. That sort of thing does happen when people start rethinking their methods.
The only problem is that the same politics that makes carbon taxes undoable are causing the cap-and-trade bill to be shot through with loopholes. Oh well, guess we're doomed!
Next time, disconnect the Skynet interface.
I want Blue Nun WINE. Goes with any distro.
Great, so a bunch of NASA spinoff technology found medical application. Does that mean the people who invented these technologies know jack about medicine?
NASA also gave us Teflon. Does that suggest they should open a chain of restaurants?
I don't know the specifics, but since the official name change came shortly after the collapse of the Turkish Empire, I'd guess that it had a lot to do with the ethnic cleansing that occurred at the time, which resulted in most of Turkey's Greek-speaking minority being forced to leave the country. Under the circumstances, it's not surprising that the city's Greek name got dropped from official usage, and replaced by a Turkish colloquialism ("Istanbul" is a Turkish corruption of a Greek phrase that could be roughly translated as "The city's that way") that had been widely used for centuries but previously had been unofficial.
Now, if I could just get that stupid song out of my head...
They might be giants. But probably not.
You mean like, "People can't breath vacuum, we better make sure they have plenty of air"? Oh yeah, that's groundbreaking stuff.
So. You disagree with me, and you're "calling me on it" but I disagree with you and some kind of viscous, unfair attack.
Grow up.
Psychic powers not required. It is possible to detect sarcasm by ordinary means.
Except of course that just about all disputes start with cops, not with lawmakers. Miranda, Terry Stops, FLIR cameras, take your pick.
So fucking what? What exactly does arguing with a cop accomplish? Does it change the law? Quite the opposite: people who pick unnecessary fights with cops is used to justify abridgment of our rights.
And not just by cops either. Try to remember that there are millions of Americans who think that abrogating the Bill of Rights is no big deal. As long as the bad guys get locked up, they don't care. And they define "bad guy" very broadly, which is why the U.S. has the largest percentage of its population behind bars of any country.
1. Abuse your authority and harass an individual until they become agitated
2. If they don't remain perfectly calm and "respectful"
3. Accuse them of "immaturity" and bringing it on themselves
4. Arrest them for disorderly conduct when you're the one who put them in a disorderly state
5. ???
6. Profit.
I don't get your point here. Are you saying that it isn't fair that you be busted for behavior that somebody provoked you into? That's childish. If you can't control your own behavior, then you're the slave of anybody who knows how to push your buttons — and pushy cops are the least of your problems.
Let me tell you the biggest reason your attitude is stupid. This episode with a cop trying to tell a photography what he can point his camera at is not an isolated incident. And I don't find that acceptable. That's why I contributed to the legal defense fund of this guy. And if you really give a shit, you will too. Or is your involvement in the defense of the first amendment limited to undermining that defense by handing propaganda to the world's Dick Cheneys?
Better yet, look at those off-lease business computers, the kind with no PCI slots and an external power supply. Big companies lease them by the ton, and then ditch them after a few years. Brand new, they're maybe overpriced, but used, they cost a pittance. If you pay more than $150, you're getting ripped off. Lots of them on eBay; "external power supply" is a good way to find them.
Doesn't sound like a good gaming computer? Well, I'm not a serious gamer, but the Dell SX270 I have does quite well with 3D graphics. And the Intel 865 graphics chipset is on the CoH recommended list. If you're looking at a computer with a different graphic chipset, compare it against the recommendations on help.ncsoft.com.
Typical. First they stick with their legacy OS long, long after it's obsolete. Then when they finally get around to replacing it, they fail to support their developers. Jeez, a new platform has the deck stacked against it even if you do everything right. No developer/hacker ecosystem? The things dead before it's even released.
Palm's capacity for shooting itself in the foot is amazing. The first Palm I owned was a V. The V series made me fall in love with the platform, and is still my favorite. But even it had some boneheaded features. Like an Up button that stuck out too far, so you couldn't close the cover without triggering it; I think the StayOffIfUp hack was the most popular of all Palm OS hacks.
And every Palm I've owned since then has been worse. I had hopes for the Handspring version, but its screwups made me wonder if Jeff Hawkins really had anything to do with creating the basic Palm design. And when Palm absorbed them, Handspring ineptitude seemed to spread through the whole product line.
My final Palm was as a Centro: buggy, shoddy construction, and the integration of the phone with the PDA was klunky in the extreme. A web browser designed by somebody with very novel notions about what the "Back" button is supposed to do. JRE pulled just before I bought it. When the Centro finally stopped seeing is microSD card, I knew my long relationship with Palm was over.
If the Pre were from some random vendor I'd never heard of, I'd be very tempted to give it a try. But I'll never touch another Palm product, ever.
You're oversimplifying the issue. Yes, most of the problems that make Windows a nightmare don't exist in Linux. Linux is still follows the Woz architecture. Fine for us hackers and geeks, but a PITA for everybody else. Hence the trend towards "thin client" solutions.
What an uneuphonious comment. You must have a tine ear.
Yeah, it's forked up.
I'm more impressed that we can still get signals from the thing. The radio only emits 20 watts. By the time the signal reaches earth, it's been attenuated to 0.00000000000000001 watts. Being able to grab that signal is equivalent to reading morse code transmitted by an ordinary light bulb 200 million miles away!
Isn't BIOS + Browser just a modern interpretation of the thin client?
So? Why is that a bad thing? Looking after a set of locally installed applications is a chore most users have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with.
The modern PC (and to a lesser extent, the Mac) uses what I call Woz Architecture. By that I mean it's a direct descendant of the Apple II, a system Wozniak designed to maximize hackability. He was thinking in terms of selling systems to his fellow hackers, but he created an technical and economic ecosystem that dominates desktop computing to this very day. Geeks like us wouldn't have it any other way, but for most users having to play hacker all the time (or paying an IT department to play hacker) is a major PITA. And for businesses, which actually buy most computers, it's a major cost center. Which is why the thin client model has never really gone away, despite its many failures.
I don't see how it can grab a huge share of the market.
It's already grabbed a big share. You may have noticed one or two popular web-hosted applications? (It seems likely most people will end up doing their taxes that way.) Many businesses rely on terminal servers for their desktops. (Not technically a thin client, but from the end user's POV there's not much difference.)
I personally prefer the original thin client model, namely the network computer. More elegant than kludgy web applications or resource-intensive terminal servers. Alas, proponents of the NC model destroyed any chance of its acceptance by pushing the idea long before the technology was in place to support it.
The traditional PC still dominates, but it's definitely losing ground. People are just fed up with the increasing complexity and brittleness of Windows. Desktop Linux, if it ever gets significant mind share, will just go down the same route. Open Source is good for squashing bugs, filling security holes, and encouraging creative application development. But it's actually worse at maintaining a consistent and simple user experience.
The Mac has mostly avoided these pitfalls, but only because a single company has tightly control the user-developer-hardware ecosystem. Users can count on a consistent and simple experience, because Nanny Apple has decreed that it must be so. Same goes for OS/X APIs. This makes life simpler for all involved, but so much control by one relatively small company has always limited acceptance. That's why I still don't own an iPhone — too many issues relating Nanny Apple's dictating what you can and cannot do with it. I don't want a shake-the-baby application, but what business of theirs is it if I do?
On the home front, such a business model turns your computer into a subscription service. It works as long as you pay your internet bill (and whatever other costs are needed to access the actual web applications). This wasn't very popular for music when the customer was presented with other options (iTunes).
Yeah, people have resisted any flat-fee subscription model for online content. On the other hand, they've not only accepted that model for network access, they've actually resisted any attempt to impose usage charges!
Here's the difference: nobody's going to pay $10 every month for access to a library that may or may not provide them with $10 worth of content every month. Such libraries typically don't have very complete collections, since they don't have enough revenue to make it worthwhile to content providers. And in any case, people don't usually buy music every month.
But note that Netflix has done quite well with their flat-fee access to streaming movies, despite their limited selection. Yes, they've piggy-backed on their DVD subscription business — but is that business fundamentally different? (Aside from being less convenient.) And in any case the streaming service has turned into a
Sarah Connor was a non-populist, meditative, complex piece of television on a smash-bang, show-me-the-ratings kind of network
Oh please. It was about as meditative as a football game. The few episodes I bothered to watch were as smash-bang as anything else on Fox.
There's been a depressing trend for some very shallow entertainments to position themselves as "serious drama". The BSG remake, all those pretentious cop shows on FX, and movies like Crash all come to mind. They throw in serious issues so they can take themselves seriously, but they never really address them. It's like sticking celery in a milkshake and saying it's a balanced meal.
But this TV show didn't even do that. It was just a serial action thriller with dark tones, not very interesting mysteries, and way too much soap opera. Don't fanboy it into War and Peace.
If there's an active platform that can't run Linux, it must be very arcane. And Macs are hardly arcane. Nowadays the hardware is not that different from a PC.
I have a Motion tablet that runs Vista. That OS is every bit as bad as its reputation, but I put up with it because it's the only tablet OS with decent handwriting recognition. If I could similar software for Linux, I'd switch tomorrow.
And yes, I know about PenReader. Despite its claims, it does not handle handwriting. You have to draw out the letters one at a time. Easier to use an on-screen keyboard.
I know Smallville sucks. It only took a single episode to convince me of that. You overlooked the sarcasm in my commnet, which relates to your knowing so much about a really, really bad TV show.
Somehow, I can never find the time to watch TV shows that suck. Thus I rely on people like you to keep me informed about their details.