All this may not have much to do with Dialectizer, but it is very interesting to hear from somebody with a first-hand perspective on the Austrian election. Thanks for filling us in.
I think most Americans can relate to the concept of choosing between two parties that are broadly disliked.
The X-Files is a good show, on and off... but for those of you who like conspiracy-driven suspense, I have two words:
Nowhere Man
When it first came on, I thought it was going to be a lame rip-off of The Prisoner, but once I followed the story arc for a few episodes I found that I had discovered the coolest show since Twin Peaks... and nobody saw it.
A big part of what killed it was that it follows the horrid season one of "The Dreadful Star Trek Spin-off Whose Name I Shall Not Speak", so most true sci-fi fans were doing something else that night. It's realy too bad. The final episode (a cliffhanger which will forever be unresolved) was as good of a series finale as I have ever seen.
DVD's and videos of this show are available nowhere... so get your hands on bootlegs if you can. I assure you it is worth hunting for.
Before gravitating towards *nix, I was once a Mac geek, so I'm all too familiar with how it feels to be ignored by leading game developers, and waiting 6-12 months for ports. You need to understand the economics of game development a little to see how this happens.
1. The LINUX desktop market is still fairly small. It may have overtaken SCO, FreeBSD, and maybe even MacOS (I haven't seen the numbers lately), but we are still talking about a platform with no more than about a tenth of the number of Micros~1 machines out there.
2. It is well known that many LINUX users (not all) dual boot their systems, or have a separate Micros~1 box set up for games. I have to count myself among this number... In addition to my various LINUX and MacOS systems, I a tricked-out Micron in the den, with Win95 on it, strictly for use as a game console.
3. Porting games after the development phase is over is usually cheaper than multi-platform development. This may be counter-intuitive, but when you consider that over the time-span of a game's development from concept to release, there are going to be several OS patches and new drivers released. Keeping up with the changes on more than one platform means juggling more balls than most game companies want to do.
4. Most game companies (not all) are small mom-and-pop organizations. They often extend themselves to the limit just to get a release out the door for one platform. The only way they can afford to do the ports is to wait for the profits from the initial release to roll in.
A good example of this is Starship Titanic. You will never meet a bigger Mac zealot than Douglas Adams, but when developing the game it became obvious that a MacOS-first or simultanious release was beyond the resources available to him. Titanic was released as a windows-only game (even though D.A. did not even own a PC to run his own game on!), and was ported to the Mac using money from the sales of the Windows product.
Bottom line: Game developers will care about LINUX if and when they must write for LINUX to be profitable.
For now, the best hope for Tux fans is the development of open-source projects like WorldForge.
Who knows? Maybe some GPL game, designed by some free-beer advocate, might come along and prove to be the killer app that gets all hard-core gamers to put a permanent LINUX partition on their PC's. Until then, get used to sounding like Rodney Dangerfield when the subject of games comes up.
IMHO, there has never been a better time to buy MSFT.
Laugh if you want, but everybody was laughing at me in late '98 when I was insisting that AAPL was a good long-term bet.
My theory is this... any tech stock {with money in the bank) that gets spanked will either bounce back (AOL), or be bought by a more valuable company at a high price (Netscape). Either way, you usually win if you buy on bad news, buy a lot on disasterous news, and sell when everybody loves them again.
Now that my secret is out, I will need to start working on a new strategy that reacts to everybody taking my advice.:)
All of which is, of course, total drivel because said government was democratically elected and has so far shown not the slightest intention of altering the political system for the worse.
Given that a democratically elected Austrian with strong nationalist sentiments made life miserable for all of Europe about 50 years ago, you must at least be willing to acknowledge that international fears of fascism in Austria are not completely unfounded.
For everybody's sake, I sincerely hope that we are wrong, and you are right... but don't pretend to be alarmed at the cautious attitudes towards your current government; you had to have known that this would happen.
The smart people will eventually tire of this and leave. Also, new smart people will not join.
Smart people know that Micro$ has created more millionaires than any other company. They will stick arround and get vested.
Also, Micros~1 tends to hire their techies strait out of college, so most of their people are blissfully unaware of what it is like to work for a company that is not run by the marketing department.
I gotta admit, it would be kind of cute to see the little guy furrow his brow and say, "damn you! That is the last time you will EVER turn my eyeballs into printer spools and feed my body through them! The 'My Documents' folder is being deleted. Let that be a lesson to you!"
It has nothing to do with "hate", it's idiotic and FUNNY!
So if the Anonymous Coward had said "I get a kick out of these posts making fun of idiot Jews," you would not find it shockingly offensive? Really? Most reasonable people would, given the bloody history of hostility towards people based on religious beliefs.
Sorry, but not everybody can take bigotry as lightly as you do.
I get a kick out of these posts making fun of idiot...
Follow this with any other religious or ethnic group, and the moral vacancy of your statement should become obvious, even to you. Shades of Germany in the 1930's, if you ask me.
I'm no southern fundamentalist, but it sickens me that they are the one group that everybody thinks it is okay to hate.
Your comments are very well put. Just a few nit-picks:
There was no such thing as Christianity at the time... it developed as a religion about 60 - 70 years AD. Christ had a rather large group of followers during his ministry (26-29 AD or so, depending on who you ask). Most of his followers (not all) were Jewish, so Christianity was thought of as a sect of Judaism for the most of the first Century, but it was around.
the new Testament and the synoptic gospels were written around 100 - 200 AD
This is a point of hot debate. Many scholars place them at about 60-90 AD.
There are a number of other gospels...
The gnostic gospels were considered and rejected by mainstream Christians long before the Catholic Church assembled the Bible. To give them too much consideration would be like a historian 2000 years from now reading crackpot books of today (like "New World Order" by whats-his-name from the 700 Club) and accepting them as historical documents. Far from keeping "quiet", the Church has always actively rejected books like the "St. Thomas" for the deliberately corrupt work that it is. The gnostic gospels are to Christianity as Microsoft Java is to Sun... designed to embrace, extend, and engulf.
The history of religoion is facinating... to bad the "religious" have never learned any of it.
Don't paint all religious people with such a broad brush. It makes you sound like you are just as closed-minded as the troll you were arguing with.
Okay, I am a Christian, but I can't let this slide... The oldest manuscripts we have match perfectly the most recent editions.
This was a false statement. It's not open to debate, anyone can check for themselves. A simple side-by-side comparison of, say, the Dead Sea scrolls, to other old manuscripts will show slight differences in some passages.
While it is remarkable that the scriptures remained as intact as they have, it is more a credit to the rabbinical practices of rote memorization than evidence of a miracle.
Got a bad feeling I'm being trolled here... but what the heck.
Let's look at his track record. Yes, lets. He became a multi-millionaire by teaming up with Woz to introduce the first complete consumer PC to the world (the Apple II). Then he ran with an idea from PARC that Xerox didn't know how to use and created the first consumer GUI (Macintosh), and gave us personal computers that could do easy peer-to-peer networking long before Ethernet became a standard (AppleTalk).
After getting booted from Apple as a result of losing a power struggle, he went on to create a company that broke new ground in object-oriented programming (NeXT), and run one of Hollywood's most successful digital animation shops (Pixar).
While he was off making even more millions, the wise executives that fired him ran Apple into the ground. Apple went from being the Number 1 desktop computer maker in the world to a pathetic sub-5% market share.
When he came back, he took a design concept that was going nowhere (the CHIRP-based "thin client"), and had it rebuilt into the best-selling consumer system in the world (the iMac), and returned the "doomed" and "beleagured" Apple Computer company to profitability, against all expectations.
Not a bad track record, if you ask me.
Apple leads the pack? With what? Pretty colors?
USB implementation. Firewire. Cheap wireless networking. Desktop publishing. Streaming video. Next question, please.
...doesn't excluding a floppy just remove an option for the consumer?
No. It gives an option to the consumer. If you want a floppy, you can connect one via USB or internally. If you don't want to spend money on legacy hardware, you don't need to buy it. Even on my PC's and LINUX boxes, I only use floppies for emergency system restoration. Macs (and new PC's) can boot from CD, so a 1.4 MB disk is pretty much worthless.
I submit that Apple's comeback is due largely to a good economy
Bzzt. Thanks for playing. Apple may have recovered during the "Clinton" boom, but they went into the dumper during the "Reagan" boom. Obviously there are other factors at work here, like quality, marketing, and yes, even pretty colors.
Macs may not be the way to go for most of us on this forum. Most geeks are better off using LINUX PC's for most tasks... but stop flaming over religious issues.
extraordinarily crappy mouse, good only as a conversation piece
I think I've said this before, but it is worth repeating:
I agree that the Apple "hocky puck" mouse sucks. Nevertheless, it's a remarkably cheap USB mouse that works.
Since it is a given that I am going to use my personal favorite mouse anyway, I would really hate it if they included a very expensive mouse that I didn't want.
This way, lightweight users get the "free" mouse that they insist when they buy the computer, and I am not forced to pay an extra $50 for a mouse I don't like. Everybody wins.
I agree that your question is valid, and not "flamebait", as one moderator has branded it.
One reason why you might be interested in MacOS X is if you were one of the handful of fans of the old NeXT cube. The NeXT environment was very popular with a lot of geeks, particularilly developers. The new Apple GUI borrows a lot of concepts from that design.
It is difficult to give you a solid reason for chosing it over, say, Gnome-on-RedHat, because we end up getting into a lot of religious debate if we go down that road.
Bottom line is, some people will dig it and use it, some will hate it and flame it, some will tinker with it, and some will ignore it. Same as anything else.
For frustrated system admins, this is what my college instructors used to call a "teachable moment." Now is probably the ideal time to bring up strategic software issues with your CIO to avoid this kind of trouble in the future. Here are a few lessons that we may have the opportunity to pass along:
For starters, just because you run NT or 9x, and your staff likes using Word, don't always assume that the Micros~1 solution is the best one, or even the best-integrated. Nearly all third-party apps are designed specifically to be happy in the M$ biosphere. For your environment, you might be better off tracking your software inventory with Tangram Asset Insight instead of SMS. Maybe your HR database should be running on Peoplesoft or Oracle instead of MS-SQL. Maybe not... but each technology decision should be considered on the merits of the tech, rather than just saying "we are a Microsoft shop."
When you use MS products (or any software), don't always take the "biggest d*ck" approach. Outlook Express might serve your needs better than Outlook. The hot new service pack might not be ready for prime time. Keep in mind that you probably have a lot of 2 year-old systems in your office that you are trying to squeeze a little more life out of. What works on your brand new test-lab box might break in the real world.
MCSE grunts might be easy to find and recruit, but even the most die-hard M$ fan would rather learn how to use the right tool for the job, and one person with the right tech is better than three people trying to fix junk. Don't give up on superior solutions out of fear that you can't find "qualified" staff. I bet your SQL guru would love to be sent to Oracle DBA classes... in fact, you might actually retain him/her for a couple more years if you show that your are committed to expanding the skills of your employees.
Most of your staff is probably made up of geeks and hackers who know a lot about security. Don't take their recommendations lightly.
There are four things that you can always count on the French for: Interesting political thought, fine wine, oboe reeds, and surrendering to the Germans.:)
For those of us unhappy about the fact that we dwell in a Corporate Republic, where conglomerates increasingly dominate culture, politics and society, the issue isn't primarily economic. It's intensely personal: Can we live individualistic lives, express our own beliefs freely, develop our own value systems?
Yes.
Look, just because every 14-year-old in America wants to buy a copy of "Oops, I Did It Again" by the Disney-backed bubblegum queen of the hour, there is no reason to think that my life is somehow affected by this. I can still download my copy of "Long Tall Weekend" by They Might Be Giants off their MP3 distribution site.
It seems to me like you are the one trying to control people, not the corporations. If somebody wants to wear a Nike hat to look like like Tiger Woods, that's his own business. I'm sure he knows, when he's buying the hat, that Woods was paid to wear it. You can choose not to buy one yourself, but you should mind your own damn business if somebody thinks having one is cool.
I can't help but detect a little insecurity. Were you the only kid in your class that didn't have a checkered pair of "Vans"? Did you feel like an outcast for not having a Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox? I think you should deal with these feelings, instead of whining about how everybody on your block but you is driving a Lexus. "They need to wake up because they are not being Individuals," you cry. "Everybody is the same except me. It's not fair!"
If anything, we live in a time with more individuality, not less. In the 60's, society was pretty much divided between those who thought "Easy Rider" presented the ideal lifestyle and those who thought it had a happy ending.
Walk into First Avenue in Minneapolis on any given night these days, and you will see punk rockers drinking right next to guys in suits right next to club kids in baggy jeans & gold chains.
If all you do with your time is follow Media Trends (i.e., watch TV commercials, tune in to broadcast news, and read Wired), I can see where you might get the impression that we live in a world shaped by corporate images... but the real America looks absolutely nothing like what you see on a typical episode of "Friends".
Solar power is swell stuff, but consider this: To generate enough power for New York City with solar cells alone, we would need to cover the entire New England area with solar collectors. We would also need some type of battery-like storage facility, because sunlight is not always available, and demand for lighting goes way up after dark.
Extending solar power to be our main energy source would mean completely blanketing the land with big mirrors, leaving very little room for agriculture.
Solar and wind power both have the problem of demanding far too much real estate to provide not enough power, and not all of the time.
If we really want to get away from fossil fuels, then we need to learn to get over some of our irrational fears about nuclear power.
If there are, I haven't found 1 of the 64,000 yet. The original comment was referencing the fact that there were 64000 published bugs in DOS2000. That's right... that is how many bugs Micros~1 themselves openly admit to having. The fact that you have not used your computer enough to run into them does not detract from the point.
In fairness to M$, they were mostly very minor problems, and this is basically an 1.0 software release (or 6.0, depending on how you look at it). Once they get their first service pack out, I'm sure many of these problems will be addressed.
Heh. Well, The Observer is written by hippies, but at least they are hippies that I have heard of before.:)
Thanks for providing another source.
So far both the paper and the web site seem to be written around the account of one physicist and a Carl Segan biographer. I think I will retain a little skepticism until I find out that somebody got a little more confirmation tha that.
I'm not saying that the story is definately untrue, but many of the elements of a classic hoax are here: 1) It is weird enough to get our attention. 2) It is very easy to believe something like this could happen. 3) A name we all recognize is involved. 4) You can count on the government being no help whatsoever. (The Pentagon released their usual "neither confirm nor deny" statements.)
uswest.net is my ISP right now (I get my DSL through them), and they recently spammed^H^H^H^H^H^Hent me an "newsleter" about their on-line store. The spam included directions to their web page that allowed me to opt out, but it warned me that it would take 3 weeks for the database to be updated.
My solution: I forwarded the message to abuse@uswest.net!:)
Slashdot Mirror
I think most Americans can relate to the concept of choosing between two parties that are broadly disliked.
Nowhere Man
When it first came on, I thought it was going to be a lame rip-off of The Prisoner, but once I followed the story arc for a few episodes I found that I had discovered the coolest show since Twin Peaks... and nobody saw it.
A big part of what killed it was that it follows the horrid season one of "The Dreadful Star Trek Spin-off Whose Name I Shall Not Speak", so most true sci-fi fans were doing something else that night. It's realy too bad. The final episode (a cliffhanger which will forever be unresolved) was as good of a series finale as I have ever seen.
DVD's and videos of this show are available nowhere... so get your hands on bootlegs if you can. I assure you it is worth hunting for.
1. The LINUX desktop market is still fairly small. It may have overtaken SCO, FreeBSD, and maybe even MacOS (I haven't seen the numbers lately), but we are still talking about a platform with no more than about a tenth of the number of Micros~1 machines out there.
2. It is well known that many LINUX users (not all) dual boot their systems, or have a separate Micros~1 box set up for games. I have to count myself among this number... In addition to my various LINUX and MacOS systems, I a tricked-out Micron in the den, with Win95 on it, strictly for use as a game console.
3. Porting games after the development phase is over is usually cheaper than multi-platform development. This may be counter-intuitive, but when you consider that over the time-span of a game's development from concept to release, there are going to be several OS patches and new drivers released. Keeping up with the changes on more than one platform means juggling more balls than most game companies want to do.
4. Most game companies (not all) are small mom-and-pop organizations. They often extend themselves to the limit just to get a release out the door for one platform. The only way they can afford to do the ports is to wait for the profits from the initial release to roll in.
A good example of this is Starship Titanic. You will never meet a bigger Mac zealot than Douglas Adams, but when developing the game it became obvious that a MacOS-first or simultanious release was beyond the resources available to him. Titanic was released as a windows-only game (even though D.A. did not even own a PC to run his own game on!), and was ported to the Mac using money from the sales of the Windows product.
Bottom line: Game developers will care about LINUX if and when they must write for LINUX to be profitable.
For now, the best hope for Tux fans is the development of open-source projects like WorldForge.
Who knows? Maybe some GPL game, designed by some free-beer advocate, might come along and prove to be the killer app that gets all hard-core gamers to put a permanent LINUX partition on their PC's. Until then, get used to sounding like Rodney Dangerfield when the subject of games comes up.
Laugh if you want, but everybody was laughing at me in late '98 when I was insisting that AAPL was a good long-term bet.
My theory is this... any tech stock {with money in the bank) that gets spanked will either bounce back (AOL), or be bought by a more valuable company at a high price (Netscape). Either way, you usually win if you buy on bad news, buy a lot on disasterous news, and sell when everybody loves them again.
Now that my secret is out, I will need to start working on a new strategy that reacts to everybody taking my advice. :)
Given that a democratically elected Austrian with strong nationalist sentiments made life miserable for all of Europe about 50 years ago, you must at least be willing to acknowledge that international fears of fascism in Austria are not completely unfounded.
For everybody's sake, I sincerely hope that we are wrong, and you are right... but don't pretend to be alarmed at the cautious attitudes towards your current government; you had to have known that this would happen.
Smart people know that Micro$ has created more millionaires than any other company. They will stick arround and get vested.
Also, Micros~1 tends to hire their techies strait out of college, so most of their people are blissfully unaware of what it is like to work for a company that is not run by the marketing department.
I gotta admit, it would be kind of cute to see the little guy furrow his brow and say, "damn you! That is the last time you will EVER turn my eyeballs into printer spools and feed my body through them! The 'My Documents' folder is being deleted. Let that be a lesson to you!"
You even got somebody to moderate you up as "Insightful."
I normally don't care for this kind of stuff, but your tolling post about how everybody falls for trolls was a brilliant work of post-modernist art.
Kudos, Anonymous Coward.
So if the Anonymous Coward had said "I get a kick out of these posts making fun of idiot Jews," you would not find it shockingly offensive? Really? Most reasonable people would, given the bloody history of hostility towards people based on religious beliefs.
Sorry, but not everybody can take bigotry as lightly as you do.
Follow this with any other religious or ethnic group, and the moral vacancy of your statement should become obvious, even to you. Shades of Germany in the 1930's, if you ask me.
I'm no southern fundamentalist, but it sickens me that they are the one group that everybody thinks it is okay to hate.
There was no such thing as Christianity at the time... it developed as a religion about 60 - 70 years AD. Christ had a rather large group of followers during his ministry (26-29 AD or so, depending on who you ask). Most of his followers (not all) were Jewish, so Christianity was thought of as a sect of Judaism for the most of the first Century, but it was around.
the new Testament and the synoptic gospels were written around 100 - 200 AD
This is a point of hot debate. Many scholars place them at about 60-90 AD.
There are a number of other gospels...
The gnostic gospels were considered and rejected by mainstream Christians long before the Catholic Church assembled the Bible. To give them too much consideration would be like a historian 2000 years from now reading crackpot books of today (like "New World Order" by whats-his-name from the 700 Club) and accepting them as historical documents. Far from keeping "quiet", the Church has always actively rejected books like the "St. Thomas" for the deliberately corrupt work that it is. The gnostic gospels are to Christianity as Microsoft Java is to Sun... designed to embrace, extend, and engulf.
The history of religoion is facinating... to bad the "religious" have never learned any of it.
Don't paint all religious people with such a broad brush. It makes you sound like you are just as closed-minded as the troll you were arguing with.
This was a false statement. It's not open to debate, anyone can check for themselves. A simple side-by-side comparison of, say, the Dead Sea scrolls, to other old manuscripts will show slight differences in some passages.
While it is remarkable that the scriptures remained as intact as they have, it is more a credit to the rabbinical practices of rote memorization than evidence of a miracle.
It's a roman numeral for their version number, not a reference to X11.
You were not mislead, just confused. I can't say I blame you, though.
Let's look at his track record. Yes, lets. He became a multi-millionaire by teaming up with Woz to introduce the first complete consumer PC to the world (the Apple II). Then he ran with an idea from PARC that Xerox didn't know how to use and created the first consumer GUI (Macintosh), and gave us personal computers that could do easy peer-to-peer networking long before Ethernet became a standard (AppleTalk).
After getting booted from Apple as a result of losing a power struggle, he went on to create a company that broke new ground in object-oriented programming (NeXT), and run one of Hollywood's most successful digital animation shops (Pixar).
While he was off making even more millions, the wise executives that fired him ran Apple into the ground. Apple went from being the Number 1 desktop computer maker in the world to a pathetic sub-5% market share.
When he came back, he took a design concept that was going nowhere (the CHIRP-based "thin client"), and had it rebuilt into the best-selling consumer system in the world (the iMac), and returned the "doomed" and "beleagured" Apple Computer company to profitability, against all expectations.
Not a bad track record, if you ask me.
Apple leads the pack? With what? Pretty colors?
USB implementation. Firewire. Cheap wireless networking. Desktop publishing. Streaming video. Next question, please.
No. It gives an option to the consumer. If you want a floppy, you can connect one via USB or internally. If you don't want to spend money on legacy hardware, you don't need to buy it. Even on my PC's and LINUX boxes, I only use floppies for emergency system restoration. Macs (and new PC's) can boot from CD, so a 1.4 MB disk is pretty much worthless.
I submit that Apple's comeback is due largely to a good economy
Bzzt. Thanks for playing. Apple may have recovered during the "Clinton" boom, but they went into the dumper during the "Reagan" boom. Obviously there are other factors at work here, like quality, marketing, and yes, even pretty colors.
Macs may not be the way to go for most of us on this forum. Most geeks are better off using LINUX PC's for most tasks... but stop flaming over religious issues.
I think I've said this before, but it is worth repeating:
I agree that the Apple "hocky puck" mouse sucks. Nevertheless, it's a remarkably cheap USB mouse that works.
Since it is a given that I am going to use my personal favorite mouse anyway, I would really hate it if they included a very expensive mouse that I didn't want.
This way, lightweight users get the "free" mouse that they insist when they buy the computer, and I am not forced to pay an extra $50 for a mouse I don't like. Everybody wins.
One reason why you might be interested in MacOS X is if you were one of the handful of fans of the old NeXT cube. The NeXT environment was very popular with a lot of geeks, particularilly developers. The new Apple GUI borrows a lot of concepts from that design.
It is difficult to give you a solid reason for chosing it over, say, Gnome-on-RedHat, because we end up getting into a lot of religious debate if we go down that road.
Bottom line is, some people will dig it and use it, some will hate it and flame it, some will tinker with it, and some will ignore it. Same as anything else.
For starters, just because you run NT or 9x, and your staff likes using Word, don't always assume that the Micros~1 solution is the best one, or even the best-integrated. Nearly all third-party apps are designed specifically to be happy in the M$ biosphere. For your environment, you might be better off tracking your software inventory with Tangram Asset Insight instead of SMS. Maybe your HR database should be running on Peoplesoft or Oracle instead of MS-SQL. Maybe not... but each technology decision should be considered on the merits of the tech, rather than just saying "we are a Microsoft shop."
When you use MS products (or any software), don't always take the "biggest d*ck" approach. Outlook Express might serve your needs better than Outlook. The hot new service pack might not be ready for prime time. Keep in mind that you probably have a lot of 2 year-old systems in your office that you are trying to squeeze a little more life out of. What works on your brand new test-lab box might break in the real world.
MCSE grunts might be easy to find and recruit, but even the most die-hard M$ fan would rather learn how to use the right tool for the job, and one person with the right tech is better than three people trying to fix junk. Don't give up on superior solutions out of fear that you can't find "qualified" staff. I bet your SQL guru would love to be sent to Oracle DBA classes... in fact, you might actually retain him/her for a couple more years if you show that your are committed to expanding the skills of your employees.
Most of your staff is probably made up of geeks and hackers who know a lot about security. Don't take their recommendations lightly.
There are four things that you can always count on the French for: Interesting political thought, fine wine, oboe reeds, and surrendering to the Germans. :)
Anyone who reads Tocqueville can't be all bad. (Might as well lump in Voltaire while you are at it, though.)
Yes.
Look, just because every 14-year-old in America wants to buy a copy of "Oops, I Did It Again" by the Disney-backed bubblegum queen of the hour, there is no reason to think that my life is somehow affected by this. I can still download my copy of "Long Tall Weekend" by They Might Be Giants off their MP3 distribution site.
It seems to me like you are the one trying to control people, not the corporations. If somebody wants to wear a Nike hat to look like like Tiger Woods, that's his own business. I'm sure he knows, when he's buying the hat, that Woods was paid to wear it. You can choose not to buy one yourself, but you should mind your own damn business if somebody thinks having one is cool.
I can't help but detect a little insecurity. Were you the only kid in your class that didn't have a checkered pair of "Vans"? Did you feel like an outcast for not having a Dukes of Hazzard lunchbox? I think you should deal with these feelings, instead of whining about how everybody on your block but you is driving a Lexus. "They need to wake up because they are not being Individuals," you cry. "Everybody is the same except me. It's not fair!"
If anything, we live in a time with more individuality, not less. In the 60's, society was pretty much divided between those who thought "Easy Rider" presented the ideal lifestyle and those who thought it had a happy ending.
Walk into First Avenue in Minneapolis on any given night these days, and you will see punk rockers drinking right next to guys in suits right next to club kids in baggy jeans & gold chains.
If all you do with your time is follow Media Trends (i.e., watch TV commercials, tune in to broadcast news, and read Wired), I can see where you might get the impression that we live in a world shaped by corporate images... but the real America looks absolutely nothing like what you see on a typical episode of "Friends".
Extending solar power to be our main energy source would mean completely blanketing the land with big mirrors, leaving very little room for agriculture.
Solar and wind power both have the problem of demanding far too much real estate to provide not enough power, and not all of the time.
If we really want to get away from fossil fuels, then we need to learn to get over some of our irrational fears about nuclear power.
If there are, I haven't found 1 of the 64,000 yet. The original comment was referencing the fact that there were 64000 published bugs in DOS2000. That's right... that is how many bugs Micros~1 themselves openly admit to having. The fact that you have not used your computer enough to run into them does not detract from the point.
In fairness to M$, they were mostly very minor problems, and this is basically an 1.0 software release (or 6.0, depending on how you look at it). Once they get their first service pack out, I'm sure many of these problems will be addressed.
Thanks for providing another source.
So far both the paper and the web site seem to be written around the account of one physicist and a Carl Segan biographer. I think I will retain a little skepticism until I find out that somebody got a little more confirmation tha that.
I'm not saying that the story is definately untrue, but many of the elements of a classic hoax are here: 1) It is weird enough to get our attention. 2) It is very easy to believe something like this could happen. 3) A name we all recognize is involved. 4) You can count on the government being no help whatsoever. (The Pentagon released their usual "neither confirm nor deny" statements.)
uswest.net is my ISP right now (I get my DSL through them), and they recently spammed^H^H^H^H^H^Hent me an "newsleter" about their on-line store. The spam included directions to their web page that allowed me to opt out, but it warned me that it would take 3 weeks for the database to be updated.
My solution: I forwarded the message to abuse@uswest.net! :)
Oh well. If you read it on the Internet it must be true, right?