Re:Imagine the impact...Lower Taxes
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Thin, Flat LEDs
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Houston and Austin, TX (maybe more, houston and austin are all I ever go to) are replacing all their traffic lights with LEDs. Ditto for city bus brake lights/turn signals. The savings are bigger than you might think. Used to be they'd replace the bulbs in traffic lights every year or two, now they can wait ten. That means that they don't have to hire as many people to change the bulbs, they use less power AND they're totally compatible witht the old systems. Any city not seriously considering LED traffic lights is wasting your tax dollars.
And because of all this money we spend on fighting drug trafficking, the drug cartels make even more. Why are we losing the war on drugs? We're being outspent. The Feds spend about $17 billion a year on this war.. the cartels spend somewhere around $30 billion. Also, people seem to think that as Americans, we're smarter than everyone else out there. The cartels have some fucking SMART guys working for them; American trained chemists, guys churning out counterfeit bills so good the Secret Service can barely tell the difference, even rumors of drugs being smuggled by submarine. Not to mention the rumors of CIA involvement in drug traffcking, which I really wouldn't doubt, given the backass nature of the CIA in the past.
The US govt needs to learn the war on drugs is NOT one it can win unless it is prepared to enter into another Vietnam type conflict (albeit against a much better funded enemy.) All to enforce some racist laws enacted at the turn of the century (example: opium was outlawed because of anti-Chinese sentiments. White people didn't use the stuff.)
But all this is regardless of my objections to these type of raids. It is irrelevant that these pipes/bongs/whatever are often used to smoke marijuana. They CAN (and, at least in name, are intended to) be used to smoke tobacco and other legal substances. That in itself should be reason enough for the average American to start to fear. Because books that do not agree with this regime bring rise to terrorism, they should be banned. Because terrorists are muslim, the religion of islam should be banned.
I'll say this now, and probably have black helicopters landing on my roof in an hour: John Ashcroft needs to go away. I don't care how, but he's leading this country down a path towards certain self-destruction. Unless things head in a different direction soon, I'll find myself holding up my end of the bargain on the Socratian social contract and heading somewhere else. A ray of hope: In the year 2030 Hispanics are estimated to be 50% of the US' population. Perhaps then the religious right (aka the religious white) will be wrenched from power. Unless we revoke the Hispanics' voting rights.
At that point you're probably going to buy a Quadro/FireGL or maybe not even use a graphics card at all. Super-high end stuff just uses multiple CPUs to do all the work.
Yeah, except we probably won't see DX9 games for another 3 years. The first real DX8 games are just now entering the market. It doesn't really matter though, benchmarks are just a dicksizing tool anyway. They often have very little to do with the real world except letting 16 year olds whose parents have too much money try and pretend they have a bigger penis, which sadly, will never get used. Computers don't impress the ladies. Buy a corvette instead.
Ugh! I totally know what you mean. I ran an ISP off a bank of O2s we bought from a flopping graphics house, and I eventually ended up just compiling everything myself. You really learn to appreciate Linux and the ilk (which is why I eventually talked the owner into selling the SGIs to buy cheap x86 boxen) when the vendor support for your OS blows.
Geeks don't want everyone to learn Linux. Geeks want everyone to be as computer literate as they are and share their passion for computers so they won't be outcasts. Unfortunately, that's never gonna happen (for the same reason most geeks aren't jocks) so they just ridicule any half-assed attempt to do so.
I think his point was that music made for the purpose of making money sucks. Good music comes from the soul, the artists are gonna make it whether or not they make a dime off it. Personal passion vs. personal greed, one of those produces more interesting music. Three guesses as to which one, and the first two don't count.
OpenFirmware is nice from the perspective of a developer, but it's almost unusable from a user perspective. It's really nice to have access to all the info OF provides without having to use any sort of debugger, but the CLI format is very intimidating to people who just want to "mess around." I know I only started dealing with OF when I had an Apple Network Server (the only modern machine Apple ever made that would not boot any form of Mac OS) and I wanted to run Linux on it. I had to learn OF, device names, commands, etc and it was not too fun. Eventually I got SCSI and the MACE controller working after some kernel hacking, but it was a pain in the arse; I had to compare the OF offsets to my G3 and compare and compesnate in the drivers. I'm glad Apple provided that info, but I don't think OF is the best way to do that.
The biggest problem with OF is it's so easy to totally fubar your machine if you don't know what you're doing. Touch any of the boot-* directives and your machine WILL NOT BOOT. You have to do a set-defaults to get things working again (which most newbie OF users don't realize.) OF, while very powerful, is also very unforgiving. I had a totally fucked OF config on a beige G3 (defaults had been overwritten somehow) and the thing eventually became unusable. I couldn't boot into OF, (not to mention an OS) and I had to junk the machine after searching for and not finding any solutions. OF is good, but the learning curve is so steep that its power is hard to harness.
Uh, pardon? This is either a troll or a 12 year old idiot. 99.9% of linux stuff will work on a mac actually, just download gcc and it'll compile natively. There's even a port of apt to OS X to handle all that crap for you. Anyway, wasted enough of my time on this post...
Entertainment is a funny issue. First of all, sports players are entertainers. Essentially they're no different than actors. The only reason they get paid that much money is because people are willing to pay that much money to watch sports (or advertisers are willing to pay that much because people watch sports, etc.) Is it really fair if the team pulls in $500 million a year and the players get paid $100,000 a year? No. While I agree most sports players are grossly overpaid (mostly because they bitch about wanting more money when they're already making $5 mil a year) what they make is fair in comparison to the amount of money they make for the team.
In the end, the pay disparity comes down to simple economics. Athletes get paid more because the expense to revenue ratio in sports is VERY good. Salaries of the players are around 60% of the revenue of the team. If we paid athletes less, it would just put more money in the pockets of already rich owners. Most scientific research is absurdly expensive to begin with, and is often government funded. It's government funded because it's beneficial to society, but not extremely profitable. Scientists, while producing a product of great societal value, really don't work on projects of great IMMEDIATE monetary value.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that athletes make a lot of money because there's a lot of money in sports in general-- so it's only fair they get a cut. Conversely, while there's a lot of money in scientific research, there are also a lot more expenses, and thus less money left over for the scientists themselves. It really is a shame, but that's generally how capitalism works.
Really. You REALLY want to make Americans fear? Grab a gun (this is America, they're NOT hard to find at all) and go to ye local shopping mall and randomly kill people. No real planning or conspiracy needed, just one fanatical wacko willing to die for whatever cause. I think we'd see a lot more of these kind of attacks if the threat of terrorism were as high as they say it is. If we had a few of these random murders then people would be afraid to leave their houses, afraid to go anywhere. But the "threat of terrorism" is just a means to an end: the police state that Ashcroft and Bush have wanted all along.
Yeah, and it's not really this mythical substance everyone makes it out to be. Really, napalm is just sticky gasoline. It worked so well in vietnam because they could spray the shit everywhere and it would stick to the jungle and burn it down. It's really not any more volatile or dangerous than regular gasoline. There are actually more ways to make napalm than you can count, but they all involve, you guessed it, gasoline and a thickening agent. Styrofoam, soap, and supposedly even orange juice concentrate (though that was from the Anarchist's cookbook so I dunno if it's true) will all work.
Scenario C: This is way too complicated to really entice anyone to use it, and proceeds to do an impression of every other dot-com in the past 4 years and implode upon itself without much fanfare. I see this as the most likely scenario.
Take the mach microkernel, then take FreeBSD and put it on top of that and add what amounts to a central registry (NetInfo) and essentially you've got darwin. Apple essentially took UNIX, made it more like modern graphical OSes by adding functionality (not removing) and out came darwin. OS X is one hell of a sleek OS; insanely modular, everything is XML and embedded PDFs yet you can still run most (read: 99.9%) *nix programs with minor makefile modifications. It's BSD for the 21st century;)
Kiddies wouldn't learn them because most kiddies nowdays don't even fuck with *nix. Most skript kiddies don't bother hacking servers anymore anyway. Why hack a single well defended server when you can have backdoors on a hundred Windows PCs sitting on cable modems? Home boxes are easier to get access to (user error, trojans etc) and there's almost ZERO chance of getting caught. Sysadmins tend to be able to track people a lot better than grandma on RoadRunner.
Go out into the world and you'll see that real people (i.e. people who will be running the world in 20 years) don't really have the slightest idea what linux is. I know everyone on Slashdot and their friends know what Linux is and use it daily, but Joe Public MAYBE has heard about Linux from a friend of his who is a CS major. If I were Microsoft, I'd be a lot more worried about Apple right now. Apple is making REAL inroads-- especially with the "NetGen." I can't tell you how many iBooks I see on campus. And people are happy with them.
Actually XP is pretty good on the stabilty front. I've had a few crashes but they're almost exclusively related to my soundcard driver, which is a shit piece of code and totally unrelated to microsoft. I dunno tho, this thing seems kinda stupid. And I'm part of their target demographic...
Interesting little fact.. 2.2 million cards is.33% of outstanding cards in the US. Yes, you read that right.. one third of one percent. In the grand scheme of things, that's really not THAT many cards. I would assume that the credit card industry is a multi-trillion dollar a year business. They can afford it.
No, they very much like it when people don't pay everything on time. 20% is much better than that 2%, which they get anyway. If you charge $2k then don't pay it back for a year, they get ~$400 (depending on your APR, most are around 15-20%.) Plus they still get the $40, and they get their money back (most people EVENTUALLY pay off their credit cards.) Most people ride a balance on their credit cards, which is where they make the REAL money. The credit card companies (among other financial institutions) have been lobbying really hard to make bankrupcy a LOT harder to get, so that they get all their money back.
Amen to that. PCs never really quite work right (especially laptops.) After owning several wintel laptops, I can honestly say my iBook is far and away the best laptop I've ever owned. And I've owned Vaios, Thinkpads, etc. I'll gladly pay the premium just to have a laptop that works predictably.
So... Filing your taxes gets you a refund. You can go the easy way and just claim income with no deductions, and you don't have to do anything. Every paycheck the fed takes out federal income tax, you file a tax return to get some of that money back (or to pay a bit more if you made more money than you expected or filled out a form incorrectly.) In general, it's in your best interest to file taxes. It's just a pain in the ass.:)
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Houston and Austin, TX (maybe more, houston and austin are all I ever go to) are replacing all their traffic lights with LEDs. Ditto for city bus brake lights/turn signals. The savings are bigger than you might think. Used to be they'd replace the bulbs in traffic lights every year or two, now they can wait ten. That means that they don't have to hire as many people to change the bulbs, they use less power AND they're totally compatible witht the old systems. Any city not seriously considering LED traffic lights is wasting your tax dollars.
And because of all this money we spend on fighting drug trafficking, the drug cartels make even more. Why are we losing the war on drugs? We're being outspent. The Feds spend about $17 billion a year on this war.. the cartels spend somewhere around $30 billion. Also, people seem to think that as Americans, we're smarter than everyone else out there. The cartels have some fucking SMART guys working for them; American trained chemists, guys churning out counterfeit bills so good the Secret Service can barely tell the difference, even rumors of drugs being smuggled by submarine. Not to mention the rumors of CIA involvement in drug traffcking, which I really wouldn't doubt, given the backass nature of the CIA in the past.
The US govt needs to learn the war on drugs is NOT one it can win unless it is prepared to enter into another Vietnam type conflict (albeit against a much better funded enemy.) All to enforce some racist laws enacted at the turn of the century (example: opium was outlawed because of anti-Chinese sentiments. White people didn't use the stuff.)
But all this is regardless of my objections to these type of raids. It is irrelevant that these pipes/bongs/whatever are often used to smoke marijuana. They CAN (and, at least in name, are intended to) be used to smoke tobacco and other legal substances. That in itself should be reason enough for the average American to start to fear. Because books that do not agree with this regime bring rise to terrorism, they should be banned. Because terrorists are muslim, the religion of islam should be banned.
I'll say this now, and probably have black helicopters landing on my roof in an hour: John Ashcroft needs to go away. I don't care how, but he's leading this country down a path towards certain self-destruction. Unless things head in a different direction soon, I'll find myself holding up my end of the bargain on the Socratian social contract and heading somewhere else. A ray of hope: In the year 2030 Hispanics are estimated to be 50% of the US' population. Perhaps then the religious right (aka the religious white) will be wrenched from power. Unless we revoke the Hispanics' voting rights.
At that point you're probably going to buy a Quadro/FireGL or maybe not even use a graphics card at all. Super-high end stuff just uses multiple CPUs to do all the work.
Yeah, except we probably won't see DX9 games for another 3 years. The first real DX8 games are just now entering the market. It doesn't really matter though, benchmarks are just a dicksizing tool anyway. They often have very little to do with the real world except letting 16 year olds whose parents have too much money try and pretend they have a bigger penis, which sadly, will never get used. Computers don't impress the ladies. Buy a corvette instead.
Ugh! I totally know what you mean. I ran an ISP off a bank of O2s we bought from a flopping graphics house, and I eventually ended up just compiling everything myself. You really learn to appreciate Linux and the ilk (which is why I eventually talked the owner into selling the SGIs to buy cheap x86 boxen) when the vendor support for your OS blows.
Do you work for Microsoft? :)
Geeks don't want everyone to learn Linux. Geeks want everyone to be as computer literate as they are and share their passion for computers so they won't be outcasts. Unfortunately, that's never gonna happen (for the same reason most geeks aren't jocks) so they just ridicule any half-assed attempt to do so.
You're not gonna get X in less than 20 megs. At least not with any usable functionality. CD boot disks on the other hand..
I think his point was that music made for the purpose of making money sucks. Good music comes from the soul, the artists are gonna make it whether or not they make a dime off it. Personal passion vs. personal greed, one of those produces more interesting music. Three guesses as to which one, and the first two don't count.
OpenFirmware is nice from the perspective of a developer, but it's almost unusable from a user perspective. It's really nice to have access to all the info OF provides without having to use any sort of debugger, but the CLI format is very intimidating to people who just want to "mess around." I know I only started dealing with OF when I had an Apple Network Server (the only modern machine Apple ever made that would not boot any form of Mac OS) and I wanted to run Linux on it. I had to learn OF, device names, commands, etc and it was not too fun. Eventually I got SCSI and the MACE controller working after some kernel hacking, but it was a pain in the arse; I had to compare the OF offsets to my G3 and compare and compesnate in the drivers. I'm glad Apple provided that info, but I don't think OF is the best way to do that.
The biggest problem with OF is it's so easy to totally fubar your machine if you don't know what you're doing. Touch any of the boot-* directives and your machine WILL NOT BOOT. You have to do a set-defaults to get things working again (which most newbie OF users don't realize.) OF, while very powerful, is also very unforgiving. I had a totally fucked OF config on a beige G3 (defaults had been overwritten somehow) and the thing eventually became unusable. I couldn't boot into OF, (not to mention an OS) and I had to junk the machine after searching for and not finding any solutions. OF is good, but the learning curve is so steep that its power is hard to harness.
Uh, pardon? This is either a troll or a 12 year old idiot. 99.9% of linux stuff will work on a mac actually, just download gcc and it'll compile natively. There's even a port of apt to OS X to handle all that crap for you. Anyway, wasted enough of my time on this post...
Entertainment is a funny issue. First of all, sports players are entertainers. Essentially they're no different than actors. The only reason they get paid that much money is because people are willing to pay that much money to watch sports (or advertisers are willing to pay that much because people watch sports, etc.) Is it really fair if the team pulls in $500 million a year and the players get paid $100,000 a year? No. While I agree most sports players are grossly overpaid (mostly because they bitch about wanting more money when they're already making $5 mil a year) what they make is fair in comparison to the amount of money they make for the team.
In the end, the pay disparity comes down to simple economics. Athletes get paid more because the expense to revenue ratio in sports is VERY good. Salaries of the players are around 60% of the revenue of the team. If we paid athletes less, it would just put more money in the pockets of already rich owners. Most scientific research is absurdly expensive to begin with, and is often government funded. It's government funded because it's beneficial to society, but not extremely profitable. Scientists, while producing a product of great societal value, really don't work on projects of great IMMEDIATE monetary value.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that athletes make a lot of money because there's a lot of money in sports in general-- so it's only fair they get a cut. Conversely, while there's a lot of money in scientific research, there are also a lot more expenses, and thus less money left over for the scientists themselves. It really is a shame, but that's generally how capitalism works.
Really. You REALLY want to make Americans fear? Grab a gun (this is America, they're NOT hard to find at all) and go to ye local shopping mall and randomly kill people. No real planning or conspiracy needed, just one fanatical wacko willing to die for whatever cause. I think we'd see a lot more of these kind of attacks if the threat of terrorism were as high as they say it is. If we had a few of these random murders then people would be afraid to leave their houses, afraid to go anywhere. But the "threat of terrorism" is just a means to an end: the police state that Ashcroft and Bush have wanted all along.
My elite crew of super-ninja spies picked up some notes from Ari Fleischer's office. Here's how they read:
1. Lift oil embargo
2. ???
3. Profit!
Yeah, and it's not really this mythical substance everyone makes it out to be. Really, napalm is just sticky gasoline. It worked so well in vietnam because they could spray the shit everywhere and it would stick to the jungle and burn it down. It's really not any more volatile or dangerous than regular gasoline. There are actually more ways to make napalm than you can count, but they all involve, you guessed it, gasoline and a thickening agent. Styrofoam, soap, and supposedly even orange juice concentrate (though that was from the Anarchist's cookbook so I dunno if it's true) will all work.
Scenario C: This is way too complicated to really entice anyone to use it, and proceeds to do an impression of every other dot-com in the past 4 years and implode upon itself without much fanfare. I see this as the most likely scenario.
Yeah which would be all fine and dandy if anyone ever bothered to get drivers signed. As it is nothing out there is signed.
Take the mach microkernel, then take FreeBSD and put it on top of that and add what amounts to a central registry (NetInfo) and essentially you've got darwin. Apple essentially took UNIX, made it more like modern graphical OSes by adding functionality (not removing) and out came darwin. OS X is one hell of a sleek OS; insanely modular, everything is XML and embedded PDFs yet you can still run most (read: 99.9%) *nix programs with minor makefile modifications. It's BSD for the 21st century ;)
Kiddies wouldn't learn them because most kiddies nowdays don't even fuck with *nix. Most skript kiddies don't bother hacking servers anymore anyway. Why hack a single well defended server when you can have backdoors on a hundred Windows PCs sitting on cable modems? Home boxes are easier to get access to (user error, trojans etc) and there's almost ZERO chance of getting caught. Sysadmins tend to be able to track people a lot better than grandma on RoadRunner.
Go out into the world and you'll see that real people (i.e. people who will be running the world in 20 years) don't really have the slightest idea what linux is. I know everyone on Slashdot and their friends know what Linux is and use it daily, but Joe Public MAYBE has heard about Linux from a friend of his who is a CS major. If I were Microsoft, I'd be a lot more worried about Apple right now. Apple is making REAL inroads-- especially with the "NetGen." I can't tell you how many iBooks I see on campus. And people are happy with them.
Actually XP is pretty good on the stabilty front. I've had a few crashes but they're almost exclusively related to my soundcard driver, which is a shit piece of code and totally unrelated to microsoft. I dunno tho, this thing seems kinda stupid. And I'm part of their target demographic...
Interesting little fact.. 2.2 million cards is .33% of outstanding cards in the US. Yes, you read that right.. one third of one percent. In the grand scheme of things, that's really not THAT many cards. I would assume that the credit card industry is a multi-trillion dollar a year business. They can afford it.
No, they very much like it when people don't pay everything on time. 20% is much better than that 2%, which they get anyway. If you charge $2k then don't pay it back for a year, they get ~$400 (depending on your APR, most are around 15-20%.) Plus they still get the $40, and they get their money back (most people EVENTUALLY pay off their credit cards.) Most people ride a balance on their credit cards, which is where they make the REAL money. The credit card companies (among other financial institutions) have been lobbying really hard to make bankrupcy a LOT harder to get, so that they get all their money back.
Amen to that. PCs never really quite work right (especially laptops.) After owning several wintel laptops, I can honestly say my iBook is far and away the best laptop I've ever owned. And I've owned Vaios, Thinkpads, etc. I'll gladly pay the premium just to have a laptop that works predictably.
So... Filing your taxes gets you a refund. You can go the easy way and just claim income with no deductions, and you don't have to do anything. Every paycheck the fed takes out federal income tax, you file a tax return to get some of that money back (or to pay a bit more if you made more money than you expected or filled out a form incorrectly.) In general, it's in your best interest to file taxes. It's just a pain in the ass. :)