Holy cow! I have that book! Very informative (albeit more than 50 years out of date) and very, very gruesome. Not exactly the type of book for light reading on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
I haven't read it in years. Gave me the heebies and the jeebies.
1.) The right of taxation is reserved to governments only. Private organizations (like RIAA) do not have the right to tax. So, your "taxation analogy" is out the window.
2.) A large portion of the money you pay when buying a CD goes directly to RIAA. Now RIAA is proposing that ISPs force their users to pay a fee, however indirectly, to RIAA. So, you the user are being forced to pay twice for products you've already bought. To follow your "taxation analogy," this would be called "double-taxation," which is illegal. Again, your "taxation analogy" fails.
3.) RIAA is not accountable to the tax-paying public, because they are a private company. You and I have no voice in how RIAA performs its functions, yet they are demanding the right to "tax" us for merely using the Internet, which -- I might add -- they had no hand in creating or maintaining. Once more, following your "taxation analogy," this would be called "taxation without representation." Your analogy falls flat on its face, mortally wounded.
4.) You state in your argument that, for your taxes paid, you get a set of services in return provided by the government. True. This is the balance of taxation. However, you get nothing from RIAA in return for the fee they propose to force upon you. That is not taxation; that's theft. So, once more, your "taxation analogy" is bogus.
I've read the SlashDot EULA, and I couldn't agree with it. For the most part, it's okay, but that clause about "you will strip yourself naked, cover yourself in motor-oil, and run down the street screaming 'I voted for CowboyNeal!'" just wasn't acceptable.
I happen to prefer covering myself in chocolate.:-)
Well, Firefly was absolutely craptacular. Not since Joss Whedon's last masturbatory fantasy have so many flat, uninteresting, stereotypical characters been combined with piss-poor special effects and 'epileptic monkey at the keyboard' writing. Let's run down the list, shall we?
Premise: Lame
Acting: Lame
Plot: Lame
Music: Lame
Special Effects: Lame
Characters: Lame
Actors/Actresses: Lame
Dialogue: Lame
Dramatic Tension: Lame
Comedy/Humor: Lame
Overall assessment: If given a choice between watching further episodes of Firefly and letting 418 rabid ferrets gnaw out my eyes, I'd have to go with the rabid ferrets. At least they're entertaining.
That's a possibility, but as we've seen from the recent trial of Andrea Yates, being diagnosed as mentally ill does not mean that you will be found not guilty by reason of mental defect (aka: insanity.)
In fact, the term "insanity" is a legal term, not a medical term. It's used as a legal definition for a person who has a mental illness that prevents him/her from being able to distinguish right from wrong, or from being able to understand the consequences of the criminal actions he/she had performed. The exact definition varies from state to state, and from nation to nation.
So, Heckenkamp may well be schizophrenic. He may be -- to use a highly technical term -- nutty as a fruit cake. But that doesn't help him in the least. A jury would have to find that his mental illness was so severe that he was incapable of knowing that his criminal actions were wrong, and I highly doubt that's going to happen.
On top to that, if Mr. Heckenkamp is trying for an "insanity" defence, he then opens himself up to a whole slew of legal mess. The judge can order him to have a representing attorney, and the prosecution can have his mental health examined, and admitted as evidence in the trial. It's very difficult to fake mental illness; psychiatrists can generally spot the pretenders.
Add to that the fact that the insanity defence rarely succeeds, and Mr. Heckenkamp's options grow increasingly dim.
The most he can hope for, if he's attempting some form of "insanity" defence, is for the judge to rule him incompetent to stand trial, in which case he'd be remanded to a mental-health hospital until such time as he was found competent.
So far, it appears that the only incompetence Heckenkamp has is his gross misunderstanding of the American legal system.
One of the tricks I use to create Easy-To-Remember-Yet-Complicated (ETRYC) passwords is this: have the user select an electronic device in his/her office, or a particular part of his/her car (like the alternator) and use the first 8 to 10 alphanumeric characters of the serial number of that object as the password.
That way, if the user forgets their password, the can easily remember "Hey! It's the serial number for my monitor!" or whatever they chose. Then they can find the serial number, and voila! They remember their password!
So far, it's proven very effective both in creating complex passwords, and reducing helpdesk calls of "I've lost my password!"
The users also generally like the idea, because it gives them a nice, secure password that they can easily remember. Most of my users also think it's a clever idea, which doesn't hurt my ego in the slightest.:-)
Of course, like anything involving passwords, the security of this process is only maintained so long as the user never tells anyone "I use my monitor's serial number for a password."
It's not fool-proof, but it's proven very effective for me.
I know from experience that XP does not require ACPI to function properly (well, as properly as XP can function.) XP runs quite happy even if APM or ACPI are disabled in the BIOS.
How do I know? I'm currently running XP on an older ABIT BH6 motherboard with APM and ACPI disabled. XP runs just fine, and even co-exists peacefully with my install of Linux.
However, if you installed XP with ACPI enabled, you cannot turn ACPI off and expect XP to run. It won't. Bad things will happen. In the same vein, you cannot enabled ACPI on an XP machine that was installed with it disabled.
Is ACPI worth anything? Well, for me at least, the jury's still out. The idea behind ACPI is nice, but so far the implementation has always seemed very slipshod.
On a side-note, I recently installed FreeBSD 4.0 on a newer Dell that has ACPI permanently enabled, and I didn't have any problems. Does FreeBSD support ACPI, or did I just get lucky?
Michael, in your "editorializing" on this submission, you managed to sum up pretty much everything that bugs me about Slashdot. [...] In short, you're a dick. [...]
Do me a favor from now on. Post the damn story, and shut up.
Thank you, DaC. I couldn't have said it better.
Oddly enough, I set my SlashDot preferences to filter out stories by Michael, and yet they keep appearing....
Actually, whenever he was challenged to a lightsaber duel, he waved his head and neck back and forth like a cobra coming out of a basket, all while humming that famous "cobra hypnotism" song.
It wasn't a very effect combat strategy, but it was pretty damned amusing.
In fact, his greatest enemies weren't bad guys with lightsabers; they were clotheslines, and doorframes, and chandeliers, and low-flying Star Destroyers.
It was not uncommon for Star Destroyer commanders to lurk in orbit, just hoping to catch this guy out on the streets so they could "buzz" him. Great morale booster for the crew, although Long-Neck tended to get a bit irritated.
Sometimes, at those wild and wicked late-night Jedi parties, Mace Windu and Obi Wan would pull his neck really, really tight, and then Yoda would pluck it like a guitar string. Depending on how tight Mace and Obi pulled, Yoda could play a pretty awesome version of Neal Young's "Rockin' in the Free World."
Genetically modified food has existed for ages
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As long as agriculture has existed, plants have been genetically modified to produce harvests with particular attributes, including resistance to pests, resistance to harsh climate, or resistance to disease. The process of genetic modification was done by combining the seeds of two or more plants that had the desired traits.
The plants produced by this genetic manipulation weren't called "genetically modified," they were called "hybrids." Still, the end result is the same: the genetic structure of a plant was purposefully changed by humans to produce a new plant that had desired traits.
Ever eaten corn? It's a genetically modified plant. The corn you eat is not "natural." It was made, through trial and error.
How about potatoes? The potato itself is a natural plant (well, tuber.) However, farmers have modified potatoes for 1000s of years to produce different strains that have resistances, or have a higher nutritional value, or keep longer, or have a different taste.
Ever seen a white orchid? Not natural. Genetic modification. Orchids are not white by nature. (Granted, you're not supposed to eat orchids, but I think you get my point.)
So, what's the big to-do about genetically modified foods? It's not a new science, merely a new approach to an ancient art.
However, I will agree that Monsanto is a perfect example of a sleezy coorporation. But I also think that Micheal needs to lay off the scare-tactic propoganda. That, or he should go work for Microsoft as Chief FUD Officer.
1.) Did you bother to test this "flaw"?
2.) Did you bother to get independent verification the "flaw" exists, and can be exploited?
3.) Did you bother to search for any evidence that the "flaw" has been, or is being, exploited?
4.) Do you have even the slightest bit of journalist integrity?
I suspect that the answer to all the above questions is "No."
Michael, you're an idiot. You have an uncontrollable case of "diarrhea of the keyboard." Your ridiculous ranting drips with stinky, runny shit.
Tell me, monkeyboy, had you found out about this flaw in Konquerer or Galeon or Mozilla, would you have ranted on in the same manner? Of course not; those products aren't made by Microsoft, therefore they aren't "EVIL!!!!" If this flaw existed (or does exist) in any other non-MS browser, well, you'd just say that it was a minor bug that was going to be fixed "real soon now."
However, since the flaw reportedly exists in IE, it's obviously a horrible conspiracy by Bill Gates and his Microsoft cronies to destroy everything that is sacred! They pissed on Mom's apple pie! By God, they'll be killing puppies next! They must be stopped!
Looks like it's time to take advantage of Slashdot's filtering features again. I've already filtered out articles by Jon Katz, and anything to do with anime (I don't care for anime). Time to add monkeyboy Michael to the list.
Not surprising that Slashdot's filters work so much better than Slashdot's editors.
several hundred Open Source AI projects are bypassing the antiquated, fossilized, mercenary money-grubbing anti-freedom mobsterality of extortionary confiscation of the entire acquisitions budget of every good research library.
Wow. Say that three times really fast.
How about this for being chock full of all the buzzwords that the politically unsavvy Slashers so love:
Non-conformist patent-abusing monopolistic corporate anti-corporatist fascist communist liberal socialist conservatives practicing their evil corrupt overbearing not-very-nice fat-cat CEO-type marketing distruction of the greatest most bestest kernel-based window-managed desktop environment supressing my rights to free speech free guns and free babes through the oppression of the incompetent courts and bloated legal systems that actually work because I don't really know a damn thing about the law but I'll complain all the same as George Bush and Janet Reno seal our fates in a suggestive love-pact with the Illuminati to overthrow the freedoms of anarchistic snake-oil salesmen using high-level AI memes and some fat ugly lady named Mimi from the "Drew Carey" show that is played in syndication by the evil giant networks but is still a pretty danged funny show because Microsoft blows and Windows sucks.
But does anybody have an exact tally to the dozens of times that the prime directive has been violated??
Well, let's see, at least as many times as they've used some stupid time-travel/temporal anomoly plot-device, but less than the number of hot space-babes that Kirk "did the Prime Directive" with.
Also, the astronauts were never evacuated from Skylab. The last Skylab crew left in 1974 after spending 84 days in orbit. Skylab didn't re-enter until July 11, 1979. The station maintained its ability to support life until re-entry.
Landed on Australia? Yep, sure did. How about the Russian Cosmos satellite? Unplanned re-entry, landed in Canada, and its power supply was a couple of pounds of uranium. I'd say that's a bit more dangerous than landing 25 feet from a pub.
Simply put, the Americans can do it. You may also want to remember that America has sent four spacecraft to tour the outer planets (Pioneer 10 & 11, Voyager 1 & 2). As far as I know, Russia has not. And, of those four deep-space probes, three are still transmitting.
It strikes me as very interesting that people insist that the Skylab project was a failure because it came down two years earlier than originally intended. Skylab performed her mission completely, and was set in a low-power state when the last crew left. Skylab's job was done, and at the time, NASA did not intend on sending any more crews to the station.
You may also want to remember that Mir was supposed to last only 5 years. I'm very impressed that the Russians made her last 11 years, however, I wonder if they would have done that had the 1991 revolution never occurred. I suspect not; the Russians probably would have retired the Mir far earlier than they did, and would have put a newer station into orbit to take Mir's place.
Skylab was a success. Mir was an exceptional success. To say otherwise about either space station is foolish.
I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean when you say that Skylab wasn't successful.
Skylab was highly successful, especially considering the damage it sustained during launch. Skylab was intended to support three missions only, which it did very well. After the last crew left, the station continued to function as an automated scientific platform until re-entry in July of 1979.
Its re-entry was unplanned, and was caused by atmospheric drag caused by the exceptionally high sunspot activity at that time (the sun was at the peak of its 11 year cycle). The increased expansion of the atmosphere was not calculated correctly (ever tried to calculate the expansion of trillions of square meters of a gaseous mixture?) Because Skylab was in a Low-Earth Orbit, the greatly expanded atmosphere created drag which eventually brought the station down.
The Russians had the same problem with Mir concerning atmospheric expansion, but they could easily boost the station to a higher orbit. In 1979, the US didn't have an active spacecraft capable of docking with Skylab to boost its orbit. The Apollo/Saturn V had been retired, and the shuttle wasn't ready for launch until 1981.
In fact, one of Columbia's first missions was supposed to have been to boost the Skylab to a higher orbit. The station didn't have engines powerful enough to handle that task. Skylab was huge (I believe it was built from the third stage of a Saturn V rocket), and it wasn't originally intended to last more than 10 years, so a complex orbital-manuvering system wasn't installed, just smaller thrusters for attitude correction. If I recall correctly, Mir didn't have the ability to do a great deal of orbital manuvering either. Whenever the Russians need to boost Mir's orbit, they used the big engines on a Soyuz or Progress spacecraft that was docked to the station.
Besides, the purpose of a space station is to act as a living space for astronauts/cosmonauts. Why waste all that critically valuable space on an engine that won't get used very often, and the fuel needed to operate it? Wouldn't be pragmatic.
All in all, with the exception of the atmosperic expansion that cause the unplanner re-entry, Skylab's mission was a complete success.
Slashdot Mirror
What they failed to mention is that the 350-pound "hit man" is gasping for breath, and the Glock made of chocolate.
Holy cow! I have that book! Very informative (albeit more than 50 years out of date) and very, very gruesome. Not exactly the type of book for light reading on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I haven't read it in years. Gave me the heebies and the jeebies.
No One Lives Forever, Deus Ex, both the Thief games, and Hitman 2.
I prefer stealth and guile to run and gun.
Oh, yes! This game was great! Best way to play it was late at night, with the lights off, with headphones.
A little too linear in some points, but the "crap in your pants" scare factor more than made up for it.
1.) The right of taxation is reserved to governments only. Private organizations (like RIAA) do not have the right to tax. So, your "taxation analogy" is out the window.
2.) A large portion of the money you pay when buying a CD goes directly to RIAA. Now RIAA is proposing that ISPs force their users to pay a fee, however indirectly, to RIAA. So, you the user are being forced to pay twice for products you've already bought. To follow your "taxation analogy," this would be called "double-taxation," which is illegal. Again, your "taxation analogy" fails.
3.) RIAA is not accountable to the tax-paying public, because they are a private company. You and I have no voice in how RIAA performs its functions, yet they are demanding the right to "tax" us for merely using the Internet, which -- I might add -- they had no hand in creating or maintaining. Once more, following your "taxation analogy," this would be called "taxation without representation." Your analogy falls flat on its face, mortally wounded.
4.) You state in your argument that, for your taxes paid, you get a set of services in return provided by the government. True. This is the balance of taxation. However, you get nothing from RIAA in return for the fee they propose to force upon you. That is not taxation; that's theft. So, once more, your "taxation analogy" is bogus.
I happen to prefer covering myself in chocolate. :-)
Overall assessment: If given a choice between watching further episodes of Firefly and letting 418 rabid ferrets gnaw out my eyes, I'd have to go with the rabid ferrets. At least they're entertaining.
Oh no! They've been shanghai'd!
(incoming rotten tomatoes in 3... 2... 1...)
"Mandrake" /me runs for cover, skillfully dodging the incoming rotten tomatoes.
Proof:
- Alexander the Great was a great general.
- Great generals are forewarned.
- To be forewarned is to be fore-armed
- Four is an odd number of arms for a person to have
- Four is an even number
- The only number that can be both even and odd is infinity
Conclusion: Therefore, Alexander the Great had an infinite number of arms.Ack! Stop with the rotten fruit already!
In fact, the term "insanity" is a legal term, not a medical term. It's used as a legal definition for a person who has a mental illness that prevents him/her from being able to distinguish right from wrong, or from being able to understand the consequences of the criminal actions he/she had performed. The exact definition varies from state to state, and from nation to nation.
So, Heckenkamp may well be schizophrenic. He may be -- to use a highly technical term -- nutty as a fruit cake. But that doesn't help him in the least. A jury would have to find that his mental illness was so severe that he was incapable of knowing that his criminal actions were wrong, and I highly doubt that's going to happen.
On top to that, if Mr. Heckenkamp is trying for an "insanity" defence, he then opens himself up to a whole slew of legal mess. The judge can order him to have a representing attorney, and the prosecution can have his mental health examined, and admitted as evidence in the trial. It's very difficult to fake mental illness; psychiatrists can generally spot the pretenders.
Add to that the fact that the insanity defence rarely succeeds, and Mr. Heckenkamp's options grow increasingly dim.
The most he can hope for, if he's attempting some form of "insanity" defence, is for the judge to rule him incompetent to stand trial, in which case he'd be remanded to a mental-health hospital until such time as he was found competent.
So far, it appears that the only incompetence Heckenkamp has is his gross misunderstanding of the American legal system.
One of the tricks I use to create Easy-To-Remember-Yet-Complicated (ETRYC) passwords is this: have the user select an electronic device in his/her office, or a particular part of his/her car (like the alternator) and use the first 8 to 10 alphanumeric characters of the serial number of that object as the password.
:-)
That way, if the user forgets their password, the can easily remember "Hey! It's the serial number for my monitor!" or whatever they chose. Then they can find the serial number, and voila! They remember their password!
So far, it's proven very effective both in creating complex passwords, and reducing helpdesk calls of "I've lost my password!"
The users also generally like the idea, because it gives them a nice, secure password that they can easily remember. Most of my users also think it's a clever idea, which doesn't hurt my ego in the slightest.
Of course, like anything involving passwords, the security of this process is only maintained so long as the user never tells anyone "I use my monitor's serial number for a password."
It's not fool-proof, but it's proven very effective for me.
Maybe. But if he won, then he'd force everyone to say "GNU/America" or perhaps "GNUnited States".
How do I know? I'm currently running XP on an older ABIT BH6 motherboard with APM and ACPI disabled. XP runs just fine, and even co-exists peacefully with my install of Linux.
However, if you installed XP with ACPI enabled, you cannot turn ACPI off and expect XP to run. It won't. Bad things will happen. In the same vein, you cannot enabled ACPI on an XP machine that was installed with it disabled.
Is ACPI worth anything? Well, for me at least, the jury's still out. The idea behind ACPI is nice, but so far the implementation has always seemed very slipshod.
On a side-note, I recently installed FreeBSD 4.0 on a newer Dell that has ACPI permanently enabled, and I didn't have any problems. Does FreeBSD support ACPI, or did I just get lucky?
Thank you, DaC. I couldn't have said it better.
Oddly enough, I set my SlashDot preferences to filter out stories by Michael, and yet they keep appearing....
(raises eyebrow in Mr.Spock fashion)
How interesting. Wouldn't you agree, Michael?
In fact, his greatest enemies weren't bad guys with lightsabers; they were clotheslines, and doorframes, and chandeliers, and low-flying Star Destroyers.
It was not uncommon for Star Destroyer commanders to lurk in orbit, just hoping to catch this guy out on the streets so they could "buzz" him. Great morale booster for the crew, although Long-Neck tended to get a bit irritated.
Sometimes, at those wild and wicked late-night Jedi parties, Mace Windu and Obi Wan would pull his neck really, really tight, and then Yoda would pluck it like a guitar string. Depending on how tight Mace and Obi pulled, Yoda could play a pretty awesome version of Neal Young's "Rockin' in the Free World."
As long as agriculture has existed, plants have been genetically modified to produce harvests with particular attributes, including resistance to pests, resistance to harsh climate, or resistance to disease. The process of genetic modification was done by combining the seeds of two or more plants that had the desired traits.
The plants produced by this genetic manipulation weren't called "genetically modified," they were called "hybrids." Still, the end result is the same: the genetic structure of a plant was purposefully changed by humans to produce a new plant that had desired traits.
Ever eaten corn? It's a genetically modified plant. The corn you eat is not "natural." It was made, through trial and error.
How about potatoes? The potato itself is a natural plant (well, tuber.) However, farmers have modified potatoes for 1000s of years to produce different strains that have resistances, or have a higher nutritional value, or keep longer, or have a different taste.
Ever seen a white orchid? Not natural. Genetic modification. Orchids are not white by nature. (Granted, you're not supposed to eat orchids, but I think you get my point.)
So, what's the big to-do about genetically modified foods? It's not a new science, merely a new approach to an ancient art.
However, I will agree that Monsanto is a perfect example of a sleezy coorporation. But I also think that Micheal needs to lay off the scare-tactic propoganda. That, or he should go work for Microsoft as Chief FUD Officer.
Sorry, but the strangling of innovation by the overuse of patents is patented.
Oh, and recessions have been patented. By the New York Stock Exchange, I think.
Artificial constructs are patented.
There's a copyright on stifling.
Finger-pointing's patented.
Corrupt companies? Bought politicians? Yep, both patented. (Patent #666 by "Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Baal, LLC.")
And I think hurting is covered by the DMCA.
Face it, we're screwed.
Aww, dammit! Screwing's been patented!
Clue me in on a few things, monkeyboy Michael:
1.) Did you bother to test this "flaw"?
2.) Did you bother to get independent verification the "flaw" exists, and can be exploited?
3.) Did you bother to search for any evidence that the "flaw" has been, or is being, exploited?
4.) Do you have even the slightest bit of journalist integrity?
I suspect that the answer to all the above questions is "No."
Michael, you're an idiot. You have an uncontrollable case of "diarrhea of the keyboard." Your ridiculous ranting drips with stinky, runny shit.
Tell me, monkeyboy, had you found out about this flaw in Konquerer or Galeon or Mozilla, would you have ranted on in the same manner? Of course not; those products aren't made by Microsoft, therefore they aren't "EVIL!!!!" If this flaw existed (or does exist) in any other non-MS browser, well, you'd just say that it was a minor bug that was going to be fixed "real soon now."
However, since the flaw reportedly exists in IE, it's obviously a horrible conspiracy by Bill Gates and his Microsoft cronies to destroy everything that is sacred! They pissed on Mom's apple pie! By God, they'll be killing puppies next! They must be stopped!
Looks like it's time to take advantage of Slashdot's filtering features again. I've already filtered out articles by Jon Katz, and anything to do with anime (I don't care for anime). Time to add monkeyboy Michael to the list.
Not surprising that Slashdot's filters work so much better than Slashdot's editors.
Wow. Say that three times really fast.
How about this for being chock full of all the buzzwords that the politically unsavvy Slashers so love:
Non-conformist patent-abusing monopolistic corporate anti-corporatist fascist communist liberal socialist conservatives practicing their evil corrupt overbearing not-very-nice fat-cat CEO-type marketing distruction of the greatest most bestest kernel-based window-managed desktop environment supressing my rights to free speech free guns and free babes through the oppression of the incompetent courts and bloated legal systems that actually work because I don't really know a damn thing about the law but I'll complain all the same as George Bush and Janet Reno seal our fates in a suggestive love-pact with the Illuminati to overthrow the freedoms of anarchistic snake-oil salesmen using high-level AI memes and some fat ugly lady named Mimi from the "Drew Carey" show that is played in syndication by the evil giant networks but is still a pretty danged funny show because Microsoft blows and Windows sucks.
You're welcome!
Well, let's see, at least as many times as they've used some stupid time-travel/temporal anomoly plot-device, but less than the number of hot space-babes that Kirk "did the Prime Directive" with.
"He who has the gold makes the rules."
Also, the astronauts were never evacuated from Skylab. The last Skylab crew left in 1974 after spending 84 days in orbit. Skylab didn't re-enter until July 11, 1979. The station maintained its ability to support life until re-entry.
Landed on Australia? Yep, sure did. How about the Russian Cosmos satellite? Unplanned re-entry, landed in Canada, and its power supply was a couple of pounds of uranium. I'd say that's a bit more dangerous than landing 25 feet from a pub.
Simply put, the Americans can do it. You may also want to remember that America has sent four spacecraft to tour the outer planets (Pioneer 10 & 11, Voyager 1 & 2). As far as I know, Russia has not. And, of those four deep-space probes, three are still transmitting.
It strikes me as very interesting that people insist that the Skylab project was a failure because it came down two years earlier than originally intended. Skylab performed her mission completely, and was set in a low-power state when the last crew left. Skylab's job was done, and at the time, NASA did not intend on sending any more crews to the station.
You may also want to remember that Mir was supposed to last only 5 years. I'm very impressed that the Russians made her last 11 years, however, I wonder if they would have done that had the 1991 revolution never occurred. I suspect not; the Russians probably would have retired the Mir far earlier than they did, and would have put a newer station into orbit to take Mir's place.
Skylab was a success. Mir was an exceptional success. To say otherwise about either space station is foolish.
I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean when you say that Skylab wasn't successful.
Skylab was highly successful, especially considering the damage it sustained during launch. Skylab was intended to support three missions only, which it did very well. After the last crew left, the station continued to function as an automated scientific platform until re-entry in July of 1979.
Its re-entry was unplanned, and was caused by atmospheric drag caused by the exceptionally high sunspot activity at that time (the sun was at the peak of its 11 year cycle). The increased expansion of the atmosphere was not calculated correctly (ever tried to calculate the expansion of trillions of square meters of a gaseous mixture?) Because Skylab was in a Low-Earth Orbit, the greatly expanded atmosphere created drag which eventually brought the station down.
The Russians had the same problem with Mir concerning atmospheric expansion, but they could easily boost the station to a higher orbit. In 1979, the US didn't have an active spacecraft capable of docking with Skylab to boost its orbit. The Apollo/Saturn V had been retired, and the shuttle wasn't ready for launch until 1981.
In fact, one of Columbia's first missions was supposed to have been to boost the Skylab to a higher orbit. The station didn't have engines powerful enough to handle that task. Skylab was huge (I believe it was built from the third stage of a Saturn V rocket), and it wasn't originally intended to last more than 10 years, so a complex orbital-manuvering system wasn't installed, just smaller thrusters for attitude correction. If I recall correctly, Mir didn't have the ability to do a great deal of orbital manuvering either. Whenever the Russians need to boost Mir's orbit, they used the big engines on a Soyuz or Progress spacecraft that was docked to the station.
Besides, the purpose of a space station is to act as a living space for astronauts/cosmonauts. Why waste all that critically valuable space on an engine that won't get used very often, and the fuel needed to operate it? Wouldn't be pragmatic.
All in all, with the exception of the atmosperic expansion that cause the unplanner re-entry, Skylab's mission was a complete success.