That depends how much learning you want to do. I'm a hardcore Gentoo fan, not because the source is more easily accessible, but because its package manager makes sense to me, as a developer. - It asks me when it's about to do something important, like updating config files or replacing core system tools. - It lets me choose which features to build into each package, rather than shoving a preconfigured binary down my throat. - It offers timely updates if I want to install them. - It shows which patches are applied, and often adds Gentoo-specific functionality or comforts that aren't in the upstream package for whatever reason.
Even though Gentoo is entirely built from source, I hardly ever need to actually touch the source. Less so than with a binary distro like RHEL/CentOS or Ubuntu, where if I'm not happy with the prebuilt package or want to apply a custom patch, I have to jump through hoops to get their tweaked sources, edit them directly and then rebuild in a way that appeases the package manager.
Portage is not without its flaws, sometimes it can break your system, or confuse you with circular conflicts, but once you understand how to address these simple problems it is a godsend. I run Gentoo on my production servers, because it lets me install whatever the hell I want.
Oh, don't get me wrong... I can't defend Sony, not at all. I realized they were shit 15 years ago, when I started being an A/V consumer, and they've only gotten worse with time. Every now and then, I'll make a new acquaintance that starts singing the praises of Sony home theatre equipment ("it's better because it costs more"), and within a few weeks I'll stop returning their calls/emails/pokes - not as a snub against Sony, but because those people tend to demonstrate poor judgment in other aspects of their meandering existence.
All I was saying in my comment, is that this site is not a source of balanced news. Never was, never will be, and that's perfectly fine. We come here because the debates can get interesting and are usually infused with at least some expert insight. If we wanted to hear idiots defending Sony, we'd mosey on over to Reddit.
Can we really call these virtual goods ? It's just a row in the game operator's database. The user didn't buy that data, they bought a license to access what it represents: some imaginary doodad with stats that is then used to play against other similar doodads.
I suppose the 2-second fix to this would be: you want your "virtual goods" ? Here:
We had something very similar here in Ottawa, Ontario. It was called NABU and consisted of a Z80-based computer hooked into the cable TV network. I remember it had quite a few (crappy) games and what we would today call cloud apps, since the base unit had no local storage, everything happened server-side. I remember it being pretty friggin cool at the time, compared to the 2400 baud modem I had on my Atari, but limited availability and lack of updates prevented it from taking off. It lasted only a few years before the cableco killed it due to poor adoption, which itself was due to the cableco doing a half-assed job of implementing and maintaining the system.
It was ahead of its time, only because the company didn't know how to market and support it.
That's a pretty wafer thin opinion piece. Sure, Stratfor seems like a mess, but I think the most telling aspect of this whole fiasco is that we actually believe an intelligence company could be so moronic. That says a lot about the public's perception of government intelligence, or lack thereof, if imbeciles like Stratfor are actually being paid to provide services.
PS3 Clusters were already covered here many years ago, where Sony donated PS3 consoles specifically for use as cluster nodes using OtherOS. It was cheap promotion for them, which most assuredly led to a few sales of multiple consoles to curious geeks. I don't know how many "a few sales" actually turned out to be, but I'd safely guesstimate 10,000 units at the least. Enough to spark class-action lawsuits that were clumsily thrown out of court, after which Sony updated its EULA to remove users' right to sue the company.
So yes, people wanted to use Linux on the PS3, which Sony initially embraced with open arms. Then they turned around and legally told all these users to fuck off and die. Perhaps I'm a bit too zen for the average sucker, but if the only way you (Sony) can stop people from suing you is by forcing them to digitally sign a contact with a covenant not to sue, I'd say you fail at business. It's kind of like when little kids say "I can hit you, but the rule is you can't hit me back"... those little fuckers need to be curb stomped, and so does Sony.
There's nothing shameful about the/. masses agreeing that Sony abuses its customer base. Perhaps what is truly insightful is how quickly the comment leapt up to +5 and stayed there, implying that far more people agree than disagree.
If you look to/. for balanced, impartial fact-based discourse... keep looking! And if you ever find such an impossible thing, do let us know.
Kim Dotcom isn't a hero, he's a fraud artist. That said, if he has the resources and visibility to pry the lid off the copyright system and its hordes of legal goons, I'll at least give him partial credit. It's less about the actual money, and more about what you do with that money. Right now, copyright is largely used as a "rich get richer" weapon, in part because it is an expensive system to maintain and enforce. If someone halfway around the world decides to upload my app to RapidShare, I have to pay some suit-wearing prick a few thousand in legal consultations, just to get the ball rolling. So for the sake of a $20 piece of software, enforcing copyright makes my lawyer $2000 richer, and me $1980 poorer - assuming I even get my $20 back which is very unlikely.
Your Robin Hood comment is spot-on. Yes, I think Dotcom is a scumbag, but he's less of a scumbag than the thousands of executives behind Disney, Viacom, Sony, Time Warner. He'll also be much easier to take down, even after he takes a bite out of those media cartels. Or, as we radicalist nutbars say: "the end justifies the means".
Video seems like something best handled by the GPU, no ? And even if not, it's still a single-thread job due to the very nature of video compression. I don't see why 4 cores would be better for video, unless you're watching 4 videos at once.... okay, 3 videos and one soundtrack, assuming each video requires 100% CPU time.
And I don't think smartphones need zillions of gigabytes of Ram. My old 3GS gets by with 128mb, and while that number often plummets, it is largely due to the so-called "multitasking" that keeps old suspended tasks in memory. I am a developer by trade, and even I cannot find uses for that much memory on a mobile device. I'm not using it for number crunching or high-resolution graphics manupulation. For a tablet, 512mb is comfortable, with 1024mb being "luxurious". Just don't expect anything from the Mozilla project to run on it *ducks*
They should, but often times they don't. I think one of the reasons they don't is because IOS makes it too damned easy since Objective C effectively spams the kernel with threads for every little thing. Android does it a tad less but it's still easy to ignore threading, with the notable exception of progress indicators (spinners), and still end up with a perfectly snappy app. The only platform that actually requires you to perform explicit threading is the Blackberry (Java), where if you get it wrong, your entire app slows down to a crawl, network I/O times out, and eventually the whole damned system crashes.
I hate to admit it, but I'm rather fond of the Objective C model because it forces the developer to work in a thread-friendly way, letting the OS figure out parallelism at runtime (or so it would seem). Even after a year of writing mobile and desktop apps, the only times I've actually written thread management code are when I was doing two non-UI tasks in parallel, typically some sort of batch processing job. I really don't see myself doing that kind of number crunching in the great majority of tablet apps, except maybe the odd game or media editing tool, so the built-in UI threading is sufficient for most iPad and Android apps.
On a tablet, I don't see us needing more than 2 cores for the time being, because of how we use them as toys. It's kind of hard to use a desktop or even laptop while laying on the couch, at least without some type of foldable stand or unnaturally ergonomic beer belly. As a stupid little "I don't wanna get off the couch" internet machine, a tablet kicks ass. For that basic usage, 2 cores is more than enough.
If/when we start using them as true laptop replacements, with a keyboard and stand/dock, that's when we'll start finding uses for more cores. The day I whip out a tablet at the bar, unroll a keyboard and fire up Eclipse for some billable hours, is the day I'll sing praises for a quad or hex core tablet.
The average user doesn't have the slighest idea how threading works nor why having more cores might be overkill. To them, it's just yet another number that must be increased. They look to us geeks, with our multi-core and multi-socket systems, and figure that's where they want to be once the prices come down. They're like kids emulating adults, and just as stubborn when I try to explain that the average human does NOT need a 12-core workstation with 48 gigs of Ram. It's hard enough convincing them that a Gigabit router won't make their DSL go faster than a 10/100 one, and they go absolutely retarded when they find out I use 10G fibre NICs.
This is what I tried to explain to my not-so-technical friend, who would ask me if the 4-core tablet was better than the 2-core one, and then ignored anything I said. It's a tablet, you don't multitask much on it. You're not running 50 torrents in the background, while your virus scanner eats a whole core protecting you from yourself, and trying to play a Youtube 1080p walkthrough on your second display while you follow along in Starcraft II on the main screen. It's a fuckin' tablet. One app at a time. If that app is smart enough to offload background tasks to a 2nd core, I'm already impressed. It's a very different computing experience from a desktop PC, and even there, most people get by just fine with a dual-core desktop. The mere fact that almost every computing device today has a dedicated GPU, it's like an extra "core" right there, in that it frees up the main CPU to do something else.
The Athlon 64 was indeed awesome. I was a full-on raging AMD fan back then, eventually culminating in an 8-way Opteron workstation: the good old Tyan Thunder K8QW. Only problem was, AMD stagnated for way too long. When I upgraded from the A64 to the X2, it was a huge leap (obviously), stomping all over Intel's overpriced Pentium-D. But then, Intel came out with the Core 2 series, and AMD just kept releasing die-shrinks of the same old CPUs. I had nothing to upgrade to. I eventually tired of waiting for a new Athlon to seduce me, and the Phenom was plagued with terrible reviews, so I went with an Intel Q6600 rig when they finally dropped its price in late 2007. Oh, and I overclocked the tits off that thing:)
Even two years down the road, when I was shopping for yet another PC, there was nothing from AMD that could outpace my C2Q. I kind-of felt like AMD was trying to peddle 5-year old processors. Phenom II was OK for the mid-range, but with Intel now flogging very overclocker-friendly i7's under $300, with far more tricked-out boards to match, AMD just wasn't for me. I did build lots of office/surf machines around the Athlon X3 though, but even that has come to pass. Right now, for a true budget build, the Intel G850 is where it's at. It's a sad day when Intel beats AMD at the bottom end of the market.
That's only two consecutive weekends in the whole year. Pretty shitty IMO. Perhaps once a month would be better, after all, it looks like those two weekends sold out.
That is exactly what I was thinking though, they just need to dial it up a notch.
It's big, is all I'm saying. And for Canada, 150 years ago was a long-ass time, since the city itself was founded by this man's grandfather only 50 years prior. Both predate the official "birth" of Canada, at least according to the British Empire.
What can I say, the natives weren't all that big into mansions and slavery...
Yep. This is where AMD lives and dies: the budget segment. That's where they stomp Intel, which prefers to keep its high margins and the mindshare that comes along with having the fastest chip of them all.
For myself, AMD would have to push out very affordable 4-socket and 8-socket Opteron solutions, like they did in the K8 days. These days, it's a better value for me to spend the big bucks on Intel workstations and ride them out for an extra year.
And when i say workstation, I'm thinking "server board with GPUs", whereas you seem to be thinking in terms of a standard desktop PC with high quality components. I still think you'd be better served by an Intel i7-2500k, which is also quiet, cheap and powerful (for a single-CPU system).
As a kid, what is now called "urban exploration" was a treasured hobby. Living in a big, boring government city, we'd ride our bikes far and wide in search of interesting areas and abandoned buildings. And by "we", I mean about half the kids my age. We'd venture out in groups, anywhere from two to ten of us, exploring all sorts of out-of-view places like unmanned water supply hubs, underground walkways, decommissioned train stations and the abandoned warehouses. The worst thing we ever encountered were a pair of crackheads who threatened to steal our bikes. So they got their asses beat by a pack of little kids with rocks and sticks:)
At no point in any of this did we feel like we were harming persons or property. We didn't even tag stuff, we just wanted to admire cool spots and all the kitschy 60's and 70's crap that has been left behind. To criminalize such acts of natural curiosity seems patently ridiculous to me. That said, it's not kosher to sneak around an active subway system past security lines, but I'd like to suggest an alternative solution: official tours of the abandoned subway stations! People like to see those out-of-the-way areas, so why not charge them a couple bucks and have guide safely lead would-be explorers in a perfectly legal manner. Sure, for some it takes away the thrill of sneaking around, but at least for myself, the goal was never to break laws, it was merely satisfying my curiosity.
As an aside, my high school was situated in a 150 year old castle, erected by one of the region's pioneers and eventually donated to the church, who repurposed it as an agricultural college in the early 20th century. Like many buildings of the era, it had vast underground catacombs and passageways connecting the various buildings, as well as upper levels that formerly housed residents, staff, and clergymen. They even had their own barber shop up there! We had an underground tunnel lined with lockers, something many of us considered a privilege as it conferred some peace and privacy. Most of these areas were not used during my time, but we were invited to explore, with guided tours arranged at least a few times a year. If you knew the routes, you could get to any building without stepping outside, a welcome luxury on rainy days or in -40'C winter storms. And if the indoors weren't your thing, there was a 30 acre forest island with beaches, rapids, a large rock formation, abandoned booths and small cabins from sporting events dating back 50-60 years, and all sorts of places to climb. Snooping around is what we did for fun, and it was encouraged!
It sure beats what today's kids do: sit around, baked out of their minds as they escape the mindlessness of our scared society.
That Wikipedia page only lists the gross price of electricity. Where I live (Ontario, Canada), there are several extra fees tacked on to the hydro bill, notably the "debt retirement charge", which is the result of our idiot ministers privatizing the government-owned power grid so cheaply that after the sale, we were left with 20 billion in debt. The net cost of electricity here is noticeably higher, and I suspect similar nickel-and-diming occurs elsewhere in the world.
Privatized hydro... did I mention this province is run by cousin-fucking neo-con swine ?
I don't want cheaper insurance by being monitored. That's how any invasion of privacy begins: voluntarily. A few years later, it will become mandatory. Eventually, the government gets involved and makes it into law.
Privacy isn't about having something to hide. It's about not letting your civil rights be stripped away in the name of profit and control.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends how much learning you want to do. I'm a hardcore Gentoo fan, not because the source is more easily accessible, but because its package manager makes sense to me, as a developer.
- It asks me when it's about to do something important, like updating config files or replacing core system tools.
- It lets me choose which features to build into each package, rather than shoving a preconfigured binary down my throat.
- It offers timely updates if I want to install them.
- It shows which patches are applied, and often adds Gentoo-specific functionality or comforts that aren't in the upstream package for whatever reason.
Even though Gentoo is entirely built from source, I hardly ever need to actually touch the source. Less so than with a binary distro like RHEL/CentOS or Ubuntu, where if I'm not happy with the prebuilt package or want to apply a custom patch, I have to jump through hoops to get their tweaked sources, edit them directly and then rebuild in a way that appeases the package manager.
Portage is not without its flaws, sometimes it can break your system, or confuse you with circular conflicts, but once you understand how to address these simple problems it is a godsend. I run Gentoo on my production servers, because it lets me install whatever the hell I want.
Oh, don't get me wrong... I can't defend Sony, not at all. I realized they were shit 15 years ago, when I started being an A/V consumer, and they've only gotten worse with time. Every now and then, I'll make a new acquaintance that starts singing the praises of Sony home theatre equipment ("it's better because it costs more"), and within a few weeks I'll stop returning their calls/emails/pokes - not as a snub against Sony, but because those people tend to demonstrate poor judgment in other aspects of their meandering existence.
All I was saying in my comment, is that this site is not a source of balanced news. Never was, never will be, and that's perfectly fine. We come here because the debates can get interesting and are usually infused with at least some expert insight. If we wanted to hear idiots defending Sony, we'd mosey on over to Reddit.
Can we really call these virtual goods ? It's just a row in the game operator's database. The user didn't buy that data, they bought a license to access what it represents: some imaginary doodad with stats that is then used to play against other similar doodads.
I suppose the 2-second fix to this would be: you want your "virtual goods" ? Here:
SELECT * FROM CARDS WHERE USER='poindexter'
And yes, fuck both parties.
We had something very similar here in Ottawa, Ontario. It was called NABU and consisted of a Z80-based computer hooked into the cable TV network. I remember it had quite a few (crappy) games and what we would today call cloud apps, since the base unit had no local storage, everything happened server-side. I remember it being pretty friggin cool at the time, compared to the 2400 baud modem I had on my Atari, but limited availability and lack of updates prevented it from taking off. It lasted only a few years before the cableco killed it due to poor adoption, which itself was due to the cableco doing a half-assed job of implementing and maintaining the system.
It was ahead of its time, only because the company didn't know how to market and support it.
That's a pretty wafer thin opinion piece. Sure, Stratfor seems like a mess, but I think the most telling aspect of this whole fiasco is that we actually believe an intelligence company could be so moronic. That says a lot about the public's perception of government intelligence, or lack thereof, if imbeciles like Stratfor are actually being paid to provide services.
PS3 Clusters were already covered here many years ago, where Sony donated PS3 consoles specifically for use as cluster nodes using OtherOS. It was cheap promotion for them, which most assuredly led to a few sales of multiple consoles to curious geeks. I don't know how many "a few sales" actually turned out to be, but I'd safely guesstimate 10,000 units at the least. Enough to spark class-action lawsuits that were clumsily thrown out of court, after which Sony updated its EULA to remove users' right to sue the company.
So yes, people wanted to use Linux on the PS3, which Sony initially embraced with open arms. Then they turned around and legally told all these users to fuck off and die. Perhaps I'm a bit too zen for the average sucker, but if the only way you (Sony) can stop people from suing you is by forcing them to digitally sign a contact with a covenant not to sue, I'd say you fail at business. It's kind of like when little kids say "I can hit you, but the rule is you can't hit me back"... those little fuckers need to be curb stomped, and so does Sony.
There's nothing shameful about the /. masses agreeing that Sony abuses its customer base. Perhaps what is truly insightful is how quickly the comment leapt up to +5 and stayed there, implying that far more people agree than disagree.
If you look to /. for balanced, impartial fact-based discourse... keep looking! And if you ever find such an impossible thing, do let us know.
Kim Dotcom isn't a hero, he's a fraud artist. That said, if he has the resources and visibility to pry the lid off the copyright system and its hordes of legal goons, I'll at least give him partial credit. It's less about the actual money, and more about what you do with that money. Right now, copyright is largely used as a "rich get richer" weapon, in part because it is an expensive system to maintain and enforce. If someone halfway around the world decides to upload my app to RapidShare, I have to pay some suit-wearing prick a few thousand in legal consultations, just to get the ball rolling. So for the sake of a $20 piece of software, enforcing copyright makes my lawyer $2000 richer, and me $1980 poorer - assuming I even get my $20 back which is very unlikely.
Your Robin Hood comment is spot-on. Yes, I think Dotcom is a scumbag, but he's less of a scumbag than the thousands of executives behind Disney, Viacom, Sony, Time Warner. He'll also be much easier to take down, even after he takes a bite out of those media cartels. Or, as we radicalist nutbars say: "the end justifies the means".
Video seems like something best handled by the GPU, no ? And even if not, it's still a single-thread job due to the very nature of video compression. I don't see why 4 cores would be better for video, unless you're watching 4 videos at once.... okay, 3 videos and one soundtrack, assuming each video requires 100% CPU time.
And I don't think smartphones need zillions of gigabytes of Ram. My old 3GS gets by with 128mb, and while that number often plummets, it is largely due to the so-called "multitasking" that keeps old suspended tasks in memory. I am a developer by trade, and even I cannot find uses for that much memory on a mobile device. I'm not using it for number crunching or high-resolution graphics manupulation. For a tablet, 512mb is comfortable, with 1024mb being "luxurious". Just don't expect anything from the Mozilla project to run on it *ducks*
They should, but often times they don't. I think one of the reasons they don't is because IOS makes it too damned easy since Objective C effectively spams the kernel with threads for every little thing. Android does it a tad less but it's still easy to ignore threading, with the notable exception of progress indicators (spinners), and still end up with a perfectly snappy app. The only platform that actually requires you to perform explicit threading is the Blackberry (Java), where if you get it wrong, your entire app slows down to a crawl, network I/O times out, and eventually the whole damned system crashes.
I hate to admit it, but I'm rather fond of the Objective C model because it forces the developer to work in a thread-friendly way, letting the OS figure out parallelism at runtime (or so it would seem). Even after a year of writing mobile and desktop apps, the only times I've actually written thread management code are when I was doing two non-UI tasks in parallel, typically some sort of batch processing job. I really don't see myself doing that kind of number crunching in the great majority of tablet apps, except maybe the odd game or media editing tool, so the built-in UI threading is sufficient for most iPad and Android apps.
On a tablet, I don't see us needing more than 2 cores for the time being, because of how we use them as toys. It's kind of hard to use a desktop or even laptop while laying on the couch, at least without some type of foldable stand or unnaturally ergonomic beer belly. As a stupid little "I don't wanna get off the couch" internet machine, a tablet kicks ass. For that basic usage, 2 cores is more than enough.
If/when we start using them as true laptop replacements, with a keyboard and stand/dock, that's when we'll start finding uses for more cores. The day I whip out a tablet at the bar, unroll a keyboard and fire up Eclipse for some billable hours, is the day I'll sing praises for a quad or hex core tablet.
The average user doesn't have the slighest idea how threading works nor why having more cores might be overkill. To them, it's just yet another number that must be increased. They look to us geeks, with our multi-core and multi-socket systems, and figure that's where they want to be once the prices come down. They're like kids emulating adults, and just as stubborn when I try to explain that the average human does NOT need a 12-core workstation with 48 gigs of Ram. It's hard enough convincing them that a Gigabit router won't make their DSL go faster than a 10/100 one, and they go absolutely retarded when they find out I use 10G fibre NICs.
This is what I tried to explain to my not-so-technical friend, who would ask me if the 4-core tablet was better than the 2-core one, and then ignored anything I said. It's a tablet, you don't multitask much on it. You're not running 50 torrents in the background, while your virus scanner eats a whole core protecting you from yourself, and trying to play a Youtube 1080p walkthrough on your second display while you follow along in Starcraft II on the main screen. It's a fuckin' tablet. One app at a time. If that app is smart enough to offload background tasks to a 2nd core, I'm already impressed. It's a very different computing experience from a desktop PC, and even there, most people get by just fine with a dual-core desktop. The mere fact that almost every computing device today has a dedicated GPU, it's like an extra "core" right there, in that it frees up the main CPU to do something else.
The Athlon 64 was indeed awesome. I was a full-on raging AMD fan back then, eventually culminating in an 8-way Opteron workstation: the good old Tyan Thunder K8QW. Only problem was, AMD stagnated for way too long. When I upgraded from the A64 to the X2, it was a huge leap (obviously), stomping all over Intel's overpriced Pentium-D. But then, Intel came out with the Core 2 series, and AMD just kept releasing die-shrinks of the same old CPUs. I had nothing to upgrade to. I eventually tired of waiting for a new Athlon to seduce me, and the Phenom was plagued with terrible reviews, so I went with an Intel Q6600 rig when they finally dropped its price in late 2007. Oh, and I overclocked the tits off that thing :)
Even two years down the road, when I was shopping for yet another PC, there was nothing from AMD that could outpace my C2Q. I kind-of felt like AMD was trying to peddle 5-year old processors. Phenom II was OK for the mid-range, but with Intel now flogging very overclocker-friendly i7's under $300, with far more tricked-out boards to match, AMD just wasn't for me. I did build lots of office/surf machines around the Athlon X3 though, but even that has come to pass. Right now, for a true budget build, the Intel G850 is where it's at. It's a sad day when Intel beats AMD at the bottom end of the market.
That's only two consecutive weekends in the whole year. Pretty shitty IMO. Perhaps once a month would be better, after all, it looks like those two weekends sold out.
That is exactly what I was thinking though, they just need to dial it up a notch.
s/Castle/Mansion/g
It's big, is all I'm saying. And for Canada, 150 years ago was a long-ass time, since the city itself was founded by this man's grandfather only 50 years prior. Both predate the official "birth" of Canada, at least according to the British Empire.
What can I say, the natives weren't all that big into mansions and slavery...
Actually, no I don't believe I have. If I did, it must have been 10+ years ago. These aren't the crackhead-beating kids you're looking for.
Yep. This is where AMD lives and dies: the budget segment. That's where they stomp Intel, which prefers to keep its high margins and the mindshare that comes along with having the fastest chip of them all.
For myself, AMD would have to push out very affordable 4-socket and 8-socket Opteron solutions, like they did in the K8 days. These days, it's a better value for me to spend the big bucks on Intel workstations and ride them out for an extra year.
And when i say workstation, I'm thinking "server board with GPUs", whereas you seem to be thinking in terms of a standard desktop PC with high quality components. I still think you'd be better served by an Intel i7-2500k, which is also quiet, cheap and powerful (for a single-CPU system).
As a kid, what is now called "urban exploration" was a treasured hobby. Living in a big, boring government city, we'd ride our bikes far and wide in search of interesting areas and abandoned buildings. And by "we", I mean about half the kids my age. We'd venture out in groups, anywhere from two to ten of us, exploring all sorts of out-of-view places like unmanned water supply hubs, underground walkways, decommissioned train stations and the abandoned warehouses. The worst thing we ever encountered were a pair of crackheads who threatened to steal our bikes. So they got their asses beat by a pack of little kids with rocks and sticks :)
At no point in any of this did we feel like we were harming persons or property. We didn't even tag stuff, we just wanted to admire cool spots and all the kitschy 60's and 70's crap that has been left behind. To criminalize such acts of natural curiosity seems patently ridiculous to me. That said, it's not kosher to sneak around an active subway system past security lines, but I'd like to suggest an alternative solution: official tours of the abandoned subway stations! People like to see those out-of-the-way areas, so why not charge them a couple bucks and have guide safely lead would-be explorers in a perfectly legal manner. Sure, for some it takes away the thrill of sneaking around, but at least for myself, the goal was never to break laws, it was merely satisfying my curiosity.
As an aside, my high school was situated in a 150 year old castle, erected by one of the region's pioneers and eventually donated to the church, who repurposed it as an agricultural college in the early 20th century. Like many buildings of the era, it had vast underground catacombs and passageways connecting the various buildings, as well as upper levels that formerly housed residents, staff, and clergymen. They even had their own barber shop up there! We had an underground tunnel lined with lockers, something many of us considered a privilege as it conferred some peace and privacy. Most of these areas were not used during my time, but we were invited to explore, with guided tours arranged at least a few times a year. If you knew the routes, you could get to any building without stepping outside, a welcome luxury on rainy days or in -40'C winter storms. And if the indoors weren't your thing, there was a 30 acre forest island with beaches, rapids, a large rock formation, abandoned booths and small cabins from sporting events dating back 50-60 years, and all sorts of places to climb. Snooping around is what we did for fun, and it was encouraged!
It sure beats what today's kids do: sit around, baked out of their minds as they escape the mindlessness of our scared society.
That Wikipedia page only lists the gross price of electricity. Where I live (Ontario, Canada), there are several extra fees tacked on to the hydro bill, notably the "debt retirement charge", which is the result of our idiot ministers privatizing the government-owned power grid so cheaply that after the sale, we were left with 20 billion in debt. The net cost of electricity here is noticeably higher, and I suspect similar nickel-and-diming occurs elsewhere in the world.
Privatized hydro... did I mention this province is run by cousin-fucking neo-con swine ?
Too late. Sweden sold out years ago, in exchange for quasi-NATO privileges. They are now just as crooked as the U.S. and U.K.
My house is fine as it is. It's my neighbor who's a total dick.
Doesn't believe in patents, yet holds several.
A bullshitter AND a hypocrite!
I, for one, wish they had peer reviewed THE SCREENPLAY.
What a shit movie that was.
Ever!
Oh boy... you's trollin'!
I don't want cheaper insurance by being monitored. That's how any invasion of privacy begins: voluntarily. A few years later, it will become mandatory. Eventually, the government gets involved and makes it into law.
Privacy isn't about having something to hide. It's about not letting your civil rights be stripped away in the name of profit and control.