Repeat after me: The plural form does not take an apostrophe. The plural form does not take an apostrophe. The plural form does not take an apostrophe. etc.
To the point, I say get a lawyer and do it right if it's worth doing at all. Doing a halfass job of establishing prior art would make an after-the-fact battle somewhat easier, but if you really think you've got something here, talk to someone who does this for a living.
Um, you got it backwards. The "sub-woofer" is an attractant to backwards-baseball-cap-wearing sloping-brow ne'er-do-wells who appear to be symbiotic with hydrocarbon-consuming exoskeletons adorned with superfluous blue lights and chrome trash cans attached to the posterior. I think they're rodents, but an insect classification wouldn't surprise me.
I look at the bottom line because I believe in capitalism. None of the points you listed are negative.
Pardon me if I don't share your Pollyanna-esque attitude. But they really do screw their workers, hometowns and suppliers with a two-by-four.
Walmart strategy: Blow into town, build a store, drop prices loss-leader style, put local mom-n-pops out of business. Put the hurt on the local K- or T-store while you're at it. Now, you're doing this with marginalized labor, but once the other businesses are fried, the poor whiners have nowhere else to go. Now, raise your prices back up to profitable levels, cut benefits to the employees, and eighty-six anyone who even discusses organizing.
I can't believe you'd be so facile as to ignore the connections between Walmart's demonstrably unethical corporate behavior and its effects. Take music/video/books, for instance: When a single retailer controls such an overwhelmingly large chunk of the market, their purchasing decisions have a profound and chilling effect on content. Is this any different from a large, monopolistic software manufacturer influencing what PC makers will ship to customers? Or a media/entertainment giant who owns most of the national broadband access and decides to dictate whose content will traverse the network?
You sound like the prototypical market libertarian -- giving capitalism the purported ethical high ground and claiming automatic self-limiting behavior on the part of the system is pretty laughable. From a theoretical standpoint, the system is driven by the individual desire for acquisition. External controls have to be in place because you always get runaway conditions. Think about the car metaphor: a free market is an excellent engine, but provides little more than a hazard in the absence of good steering and brakes.
Sure, look at the bottom line, if that's all you care about.
Or look at the way they treat their employees, and have built up one of the most anti-union enterprises in recent history. Or look again at their predatory pricing model, where the first new Walmart in a given area will aggressively undercut the existing businesses and drive them under, so that it can then raise prices and feed off the spoils of being the only game in town.
Or for really big fun, look closely at their censorship of artistic product (yes, be very lenient in your definition of "art") which has created a climate in which record labels, motion picture studios and publishers dictate what artists can release based on the sensibilities emanating from Bentonville, Arkansas. If you're not tired of looking yet, check out the pedigrees of some of the goods they sell and look at the way their suppliers have moved production from Trailerville, USA to Mexico and now to China in order to meet the pinch-every-last-penny demands of Wallyworld.
Or, you can do like me and lots of other folks and say BUGGER ALL THAT. We don't benefit from a monoculture in this realm any more than we benefit from all farmers planting the same variety of corn, or everyone running the same OS. Screw Sprawlmart, and mix a bit of ethics with your patterns of consumption.
Want to hear a tale of double irony? Qwest is my local telco, but I'm not a customer. I've hated them for years. Around '98 I was shopping for ISDN to my home. Qwest wouldn't do it -- even if they would, they said they would charge an ungodly (many hundreds) engineering and buildout, plus their rate was $70/month for 150 hrs of single B channel, with a metered rate after that. NB #1: I live in a central part of a metro area of nearly 1 million. NB #2: My house is 26,000 feet from the CO (!).
Fine, sez I. I'd rather stick rusted, lye-soaked icepicks through my eyeballs than get a premium service from these vultures. But dialup was slow, and one day a rep from Brooks Fiber came to my workplace wanting to talk about becoming our frame relay and Internet vendor. After we went through the basic Q and realized that they couldn't quite offer anything to beat our in-place solutions, I asked him if they offered a BRI product to my exchange. He called an engineer, and within a minute told me they did. I asked him about the rate. "$70 a month flat, no cap."
Without skipping a beat I asked him if he could bring a contract over later that day. He did, I signed, and four weeks later I had ISDN at my house. I paid zero dollars for engineering, buildout and installation, in spite of the fact that all this took place on Qwest copper and necessitated a repeater because the circuit was WAY over 18,000 feet. And four years later the only downtime I've ever had was due to that antiquated copper contracting in a cold snap...but because I was dealing with a CLEC I was able to get it fixed over Thanksgiving weekend.
Oh yeah, the irony part. Brooks got bought by MCI, which was subsequently gobbled by Worldcom. I don't like to think about what could happen now. It's like being a tiny mammal staring up at two dinosaurs who've been locked in mortal battle, and noticing that they're both dying of blood loss.
Re:Left-wing media a financial failure?
on
Salon in Dire Straits
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Umm, follow the money. Right-wing rags and media outfits rake in the bucks because the wealthy and wanna-be corporate elites know that they'll get much more favorable treatment from their little lapdogs. Just like the current administration...bought and paid for by Enron, Arthur Anderson and friends.
The engine of a free market economy can only be useful to society when coupled with the steering and brakes of an honest and responsive democratic government. What the US has got now is an oligarchy and a farce, and we're gonna pay for it bigtime.
You can put any random group of audiophiles together with a similarly random set of audio engineers and get a fight going. Part of the problem stems from exactly what's described above, but it goes deeper.
A lot of engineers assume that audiophiles are poseurs and pretentious wankers easily separated from their money. Sometimes that assumption is incorrect. Likewise, a lot of audiophiles seem to think that engineers determine the quality of a system by reading specs and crunching numbers. It ain't always so. Most audio professionals are passionate about good sound and have really good ears as well as the tech chops necessary to record and/or reinforce musical performances.
I've been an audio engineer for many years, and a musician for most of my life. I won't have some tweak telling me that just because he uses fuzzy terminology like "warm" or "crisp" that he's got a superior method of describing sounds that I could tell him have excessive second-order distortion in the low midrange or an artificially derived and phase-incoherent overemphasis around 8-10 kHz. And I'm sure he wouldn't want me explaining how my most memorable listening of Mahler's Fourth was a worn cassette tape of the Cleveland Orchestra, played through a car stereo as I lay back on the hood and watched a meteor shower....
Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying that we can agree to disagree, but I wish the audiophiles would spend more time listening to the engineers and less time reading glossy magazines.
OK. I'm convinced now. The system of moderation on Slashdot is hopelessly broken. A means of winnowing comments and adding value by filtering signal from noise is now responsible for adding even worse noise.
Come on, folks. A post about tobacco manufacturers' extreme cupidity and criminally disingenuous behavior is VERY MUCH ON TOPIC in a discussion of Vendor Lies. And a rejoinder, however contentious, that cigarettes only kill when people smoke them, is not necessarily flamebait. It's merely an extreme viewpoint. Jeebus.
Over the years, I've valued Slashdot for its ability to point me toward news that I might not have had the time or inclination to search for. I've enjoyed the discussion of topics, rolled my eyes at the 8th-grade spelling mistakes committed by Cmdr Taco (you know you're barely making it when you run a "news site" and can't even afford a proofreader), actually snickered at the original iterations of trolls such as the Portman and penisbird posts, and have generally believed that moderation was a worthwhile service to bubble-sort the conversations.
In light of some of the poo that has splattered off the rotating blade recently, it's painfully obvious that the ship is adrift. The Slashdot concept is creaking and groaning under the weight of its own execution. Did the community exceed its critical mass back at UID #300000?
Pay-per-view is only a reasonable proposal when there is value added to the basic content. All I know is that the value of moderation is being subtracted faster than it's added, and I'd be curious to see if there's any legitimate way to fix it.
Your family bought land on the assumption that its value would appreciate. It didn't. This is known as speculation. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, the rest of the time you break even. Advice? Get a better crystal ball, get used to it, or get over it.
With profuse apologies to Monty Python - I couldn't help but think of this:
M = Man looking for support, R = Receptionist, Q = Mr. Morrell
M: Ah. I'd like to have some support, please.
R: Certainly sir. Have you been here before?
M: No, I haven't, this is my first time.
R: I see. Well, do you want to have just one support incident, or were you thinking of taking a course?
M: Well, what is the cost?
R: Well, It's one pound for a five minute incident, but only eight pounds for a course of ten.
M: Well, I think it would be best if I perhaps started off with just the one and then see how it goes.
R: Fine. Well, I'll see who's free at the moment. Pause
R: Mr. DeBakey's free, but he's a little bit conciliatory.
Ahh yes, Try Mr. Barnard; room 12.
M: Thank you.
(Walks down the hall. Opens door.)
Q: WHAT DO YOU WANT?
M: Well, I was told outside that...
Q: Don't give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings!
M: What?
Q: Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, malodorous, pervert!!!
M: Look, I CAME HERE FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT, I'm not going to just stand...!!
Q: OH, oh I'm sorry, but this is abuse.
M: Oh, I see, well, that explains it.
Q: Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.
M: Oh, Thank you very much. Sorry.
Q: Not at all.
M: Thank You. (Under his breath) Stupid git!!
People who haven't browsed in an MDI environment just don't get it. But to me, it's one of the coolest things about Opera. The ability to fire up my "morning five" and flip back and forth among them is superb.
Why should this functionality be relegated to the window manager? Other apps have MDI - word processors, graphical editors, IDEs - why should I need to spawn yet another browser instance just to open a new page?
There's an even cooler twist to Opera's implementation: crash-proofing. We have a god-awful static problem in my office, and if I forget to touch my ground wire before my magnesium-encased notebook, Bad Things can happen. A couple of times the whole thing has simply shut down hard. But when it finishes fscking and comes back up and I start Opera, it asks me if I'd like to continue the interrupted session as they were left. This can save oodles of time on searches.
What's even worse is watching WAGs and anecdotal gurge get modded up by the similarly clue-challenged, thereby creating a higher noise floor for better posts that may come later.
Please, Yankovic, when you ask for props from the sidelines, let us know if you're looking for civil libertarians or market libertarians. I'm getting increasingly weary of apologists for monopolies dolling their arguments up in pseudo-Randian terms.
You're either for individual freedoms, or you're for letting a handful of enormous corporate entities dictate what kind of world we inhabit. Choose one.
Irony runs deeper than you think. One of the top causes of habitat destruction and species extirpation (as well as extinctions) is the raising of cattle. Australia wouldn't have nearly so many endangered species if its colonizers hadn't tried to turn the continent into a fucking ranch.
Over 1 billion cattle graze the planet, mostly in environments that are not suited to their presence. This is insanity. Eat less beef!
I can vouch for this firsthand. When my sister phoned in the morning to tell us to turn on the news, the first thing we thought about was my best friend from high school, who lives in the East Village. He often has occasion to be downtown (designs retail spaces). Of course, I tried the phones first, with zero success. Then I emailed him, hoping that he was already at his office in the garment district and would let me know he was OK.
Anyway, I got a reply from him within the hour. His DSL circuit in the apartment was moving packets just fine, his ISP was alive, and I got his eyewitness account of something that he said "never wanted to see in my lifetime." It might have been days before a phone line opened up and I got to talk to him, but packet switched data transmission got our messages up with alacrity.
The Taliban are a bunch of political opportunists. They saw a long-standing power vacuum after the mujaheddin were unable to settle generations-old clan squabbles and form a government that could clean up the mess that was postwar Afghanistan. They rushed in to fill that vacuum, spouting messages of Islamic purity and promising to purge their country of evil influences. And they're not even clerics. Their name means "students."
They are nothing more than a sham regime propped up by the militant factions in Pakistan and greased by Osama bin Laden's blood-stained millions. The vast majority of Afghans, reeling from the ill-fated Soviet incursion and the tribal wars that followed, are too weary, hungry and disorganized to kick them out. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't like to.
The WTC was unusual in super-skyscraper construction. Since the modern skyscraper era began in the 1880s, the standard approach has been to build a steel frame to support the static and live loads of the structure. The outer walls became merely the skin over the skeleton.
In the WTC, the outer walls were structurally vital. They comprised a series of palisade-like columns tied together as an exoskeleton, and supported a significant portion of the buildings themselves.
As the upper floors collapsed, the shock loads were transmitted down through the exoskeleton and the whole shebang came down. A "traditional" skyscraper might not have collapsed as utterly as the WTC towers did. But it's all armchair conjecture at this point. Few major buildings are designed to be rammed by commercial aircraft and remain standing.
I know. I own old analog synths that generate "square" waves. Ever hook the output of one of these puppies up to a scope?
If you want to kill a voice-coil speaker, give it DC. Full rail from the power amp. Whoops, that'll fry the amp first;-) Next best practice is to use a low frequency square wave with a duty cycle of 90 percent. Watch as the woofer tries to jump out of its surround.
I could quite easily create a Red Book-compliant audio CD that would turn many speakers into pretty confetti. Square waves, high duty cycle, full amplitude, you get the picture....if you put it in and started playing it at a decent volume, you'd have some injured components. Your ears would hurt, too. I won't, though. Not enough free time.
That's the 100th meridian, friend. The most significant barrier to settlement on the "frontier." East of this line, enough precipitation occurs to support food crops. West of it, you have to divert water (dams) or mine it (wells) to have agriculture.
The reason for this divide is the large pool of relatively warm water to the south -- the Gulf of Mexico. Frontal systems crossing the midsection of the continent are relatively moisture-starved until they can tap the much higher precipitable waters in the atmosphere influenced by the Gulf.
In spite of the govt's effort to populate the drylands of the West in the late 19th century, Ma Nature played her winning card with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Now, even though the high plains are intensively farmed once again, it's only because of powerful electric pumps which will deplete most of the Ogallala aquifer in the next 20-50 years. After that, the left hand side of that line will be really dark.
Slashdot Mirror
Repeat after me: The plural form does not take an apostrophe. The plural form does not take an apostrophe. The plural form does not take an apostrophe. etc.
To the point, I say get a lawyer and do it right if it's worth doing at all. Doing a halfass job of establishing prior art would make an after-the-fact battle somewhat easier, but if you really think you've got something here, talk to someone who does this for a living.
Now mod this down and get it over with.
Besides, a 900-foot Jesus would kick his ass, anyhoo....
It's the song the Winged Monkeys in the Wizard of Oz movie sing:
(in low, somewhat menacing Slavic Male Chorus tone)
OEone
Eo-one!
OEone
Eo-one!
Um, you got it backwards. The "sub-woofer" is an attractant to backwards-baseball-cap-wearing sloping-brow ne'er-do-wells who appear to be symbiotic with hydrocarbon-consuming exoskeletons adorned with superfluous blue lights and chrome trash cans attached to the posterior. I think they're rodents, but an insect classification wouldn't surprise me.
Pardon me if I don't share your Pollyanna-esque attitude. But they really do screw their workers, hometowns and suppliers with a two-by-four.
Walmart strategy: Blow into town, build a store, drop prices loss-leader style, put local mom-n-pops out of business. Put the hurt on the local K- or T-store while you're at it. Now, you're doing this with marginalized labor, but once the other businesses are fried, the poor whiners have nowhere else to go. Now, raise your prices back up to profitable levels, cut benefits to the employees, and eighty-six anyone who even discusses organizing.
I can't believe you'd be so facile as to ignore the connections between Walmart's demonstrably unethical corporate behavior and its effects. Take music/video/books, for instance: When a single retailer controls such an overwhelmingly large chunk of the market, their purchasing decisions have a profound and chilling effect on content. Is this any different from a large, monopolistic software manufacturer influencing what PC makers will ship to customers? Or a media/entertainment giant who owns most of the national broadband access and decides to dictate whose content will traverse the network?
You sound like the prototypical market libertarian -- giving capitalism the purported ethical high ground and claiming automatic self-limiting behavior on the part of the system is pretty laughable. From a theoretical standpoint, the system is driven by the individual desire for acquisition. External controls have to be in place because you always get runaway conditions. Think about the car metaphor: a free market is an excellent engine, but provides little more than a hazard in the absence of good steering and brakes.
Good day, anyway.
Or look at the way they treat their employees, and have built up one of the most anti-union enterprises in recent history. Or look again at their predatory pricing model, where the first new Walmart in a given area will aggressively undercut the existing businesses and drive them under, so that it can then raise prices and feed off the spoils of being the only game in town.
Or for really big fun, look closely at their censorship of artistic product (yes, be very lenient in your definition of "art") which has created a climate in which record labels, motion picture studios and publishers dictate what artists can release based on the sensibilities emanating from Bentonville, Arkansas. If you're not tired of looking yet, check out the pedigrees of some of the goods they sell and look at the way their suppliers have moved production from Trailerville, USA to Mexico and now to China in order to meet the pinch-every-last-penny demands of Wallyworld.
Or, you can do like me and lots of other folks and say BUGGER ALL THAT. We don't benefit from a monoculture in this realm any more than we benefit from all farmers planting the same variety of corn, or everyone running the same OS. Screw Sprawlmart, and mix a bit of ethics with your patterns of consumption.
But don't take my word for it, look for yourself.
Fine, sez I. I'd rather stick rusted, lye-soaked icepicks through my eyeballs than get a premium service from these vultures. But dialup was slow, and one day a rep from Brooks Fiber came to my workplace wanting to talk about becoming our frame relay and Internet vendor. After we went through the basic Q and realized that they couldn't quite offer anything to beat our in-place solutions, I asked him if they offered a BRI product to my exchange. He called an engineer, and within a minute told me they did. I asked him about the rate. "$70 a month flat, no cap."
Without skipping a beat I asked him if he could bring a contract over later that day. He did, I signed, and four weeks later I had ISDN at my house. I paid zero dollars for engineering, buildout and installation, in spite of the fact that all this took place on Qwest copper and necessitated a repeater because the circuit was WAY over 18,000 feet. And four years later the only downtime I've ever had was due to that antiquated copper contracting in a cold snap...but because I was dealing with a CLEC I was able to get it fixed over Thanksgiving weekend.
Oh yeah, the irony part. Brooks got bought by MCI, which was subsequently gobbled by Worldcom. I don't like to think about what could happen now. It's like being a tiny mammal staring up at two dinosaurs who've been locked in mortal battle, and noticing that they're both dying of blood loss.
Umm, follow the money. Right-wing rags and media outfits rake in the bucks because the wealthy and wanna-be corporate elites know that they'll get much more favorable treatment from their little lapdogs. Just like the current administration...bought and paid for by Enron, Arthur Anderson and friends.
The engine of a free market economy can only be useful to society when coupled with the steering and brakes of an honest and responsive democratic government. What the US has got now is an oligarchy and a farce, and we're gonna pay for it bigtime.
Anyone else see the office-copier butt-scans coming?
You can put any random group of audiophiles together with a similarly random set of audio engineers and get a fight going. Part of the problem stems from exactly what's described above, but it goes deeper.
A lot of engineers assume that audiophiles are poseurs and pretentious wankers easily separated from their money. Sometimes that assumption is incorrect. Likewise, a lot of audiophiles seem to think that engineers determine the quality of a system by reading specs and crunching numbers. It ain't always so. Most audio professionals are passionate about good sound and have really good ears as well as the tech chops necessary to record and/or reinforce musical performances.
I've been an audio engineer for many years, and a musician for most of my life. I won't have some tweak telling me that just because he uses fuzzy terminology like "warm" or "crisp" that he's got a superior method of describing sounds that I could tell him have excessive second-order distortion in the low midrange or an artificially derived and phase-incoherent overemphasis around 8-10 kHz. And I'm sure he wouldn't want me explaining how my most memorable listening of Mahler's Fourth was a worn cassette tape of the Cleveland Orchestra, played through a car stereo as I lay back on the hood and watched a meteor shower....
Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying that we can agree to disagree, but I wish the audiophiles would spend more time listening to the engineers and less time reading glossy magazines.
hoo boy, this takes me back....
See the following thread in rec.audio.pro. Start reading at message number 13.
nyuk, nyuk
OK. I'm convinced now. The system of moderation on Slashdot is hopelessly broken. A means of winnowing comments and adding value by filtering signal from noise is now responsible for adding even worse noise.
Come on, folks. A post about tobacco manufacturers' extreme cupidity and criminally disingenuous behavior is VERY MUCH ON TOPIC in a discussion of Vendor Lies. And a rejoinder, however contentious, that cigarettes only kill when people smoke them, is not necessarily flamebait. It's merely an extreme viewpoint. Jeebus.
Over the years, I've valued Slashdot for its ability to point me toward news that I might not have had the time or inclination to search for. I've enjoyed the discussion of topics, rolled my eyes at the 8th-grade spelling mistakes committed by Cmdr Taco (you know you're barely making it when you run a "news site" and can't even afford a proofreader), actually snickered at the original iterations of trolls such as the Portman and penisbird posts, and have generally believed that moderation was a worthwhile service to bubble-sort the conversations.
In light of some of the poo that has splattered off the rotating blade recently, it's painfully obvious that the ship is adrift. The Slashdot concept is creaking and groaning under the weight of its own execution. Did the community exceed its critical mass back at UID #300000?
Pay-per-view is only a reasonable proposal when there is value added to the basic content. All I know is that the value of moderation is being subtracted faster than it's added, and I'd be curious to see if there's any legitimate way to fix it.
Let me get this straight:
Your family bought land on the assumption that its value would appreciate. It didn't. This is known as speculation. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, the rest of the time you break even. Advice? Get a better crystal ball, get used to it, or get over it.
Ummm, IMHO fair use is still alive. Until further notice, I reserve the right to space-shift any content that I have purchased.
Mikey can perform unnatural acts on a wildebeest for all I care. Come and get me, Disney lawyers!
M = Man looking for support, R = Receptionist, Q = Mr. Morrell
M: Ah. I'd like to have some support, please.
R: Certainly sir. Have you been here before?
M: No, I haven't, this is my first time.
R: I see. Well, do you want to have just one support incident, or were you thinking of taking a course?
M: Well, what is the cost?
R: Well, It's one pound for a five minute incident, but only eight pounds for a course of ten.
M: Well, I think it would be best if I perhaps started off with just the one and then see how it goes.
R: Fine. Well, I'll see who's free at the moment.
Pause
R: Mr. DeBakey's free, but he's a little bit conciliatory.
Ahh yes, Try Mr. Barnard; room 12.
M: Thank you.
(Walks down the hall. Opens door.)
Q: WHAT DO YOU WANT?
M: Well, I was told outside that...
Q: Don't give me that, you snotty-faced heap of parrot droppings!
M: What?
Q: Shut your festering gob, you tit! Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, coffee-nosed, malodorous, pervert!!!
M: Look, I CAME HERE FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT, I'm not going to just stand...!!
Q: OH, oh I'm sorry, but this is abuse.
M: Oh, I see, well, that explains it.
Q: Ah yes, you want room 12A, Just along the corridor.
M: Oh, Thank you very much. Sorry.
Q: Not at all.
M: Thank You. (Under his breath) Stupid git!!
People who haven't browsed in an MDI environment just don't get it. But to me, it's one of the coolest things about Opera. The ability to fire up my "morning five" and flip back and forth among them is superb.
Why should this functionality be relegated to the window manager? Other apps have MDI - word processors, graphical editors, IDEs - why should I need to spawn yet another browser instance just to open a new page?
There's an even cooler twist to Opera's implementation: crash-proofing. We have a god-awful static problem in my office, and if I forget to touch my ground wire before my magnesium-encased notebook, Bad Things can happen. A couple of times the whole thing has simply shut down hard. But when it finishes fscking and comes back up and I start Opera, it asks me if I'd like to continue the interrupted session as they were left. This can save oodles of time on searches.
Brilliant.
What's even worse is watching WAGs and anecdotal gurge get modded up by the similarly clue-challenged, thereby creating a higher noise floor for better posts that may come later.
Maybe we need a "fact stick" mod category....
You're either for individual freedoms, or you're for letting a handful of enormous corporate entities dictate what kind of world we inhabit. Choose one.
Over 1 billion cattle graze the planet, mostly in environments that are not suited to their presence. This is insanity. Eat less beef!
I can vouch for this firsthand. When my sister phoned in the morning to tell us to turn on the news, the first thing we thought about was my best friend from high school, who lives in the East Village. He often has occasion to be downtown (designs retail spaces). Of course, I tried the phones first, with zero success. Then I emailed him, hoping that he was already at his office in the garment district and would let me know he was OK.
Anyway, I got a reply from him within the hour. His DSL circuit in the apartment was moving packets just fine, his ISP was alive, and I got his eyewitness account of something that he said "never wanted to see in my lifetime." It might have been days before a phone line opened up and I got to talk to him, but packet switched data transmission got our messages up with alacrity.
The Taliban are a bunch of political opportunists. They saw a long-standing power vacuum after the mujaheddin were unable to settle generations-old clan squabbles and form a government that could clean up the mess that was postwar Afghanistan. They rushed in to fill that vacuum, spouting messages of Islamic purity and promising to purge their country of evil influences. And they're not even clerics. Their name means "students."
They are nothing more than a sham regime propped up by the militant factions in Pakistan and greased by Osama bin Laden's blood-stained millions. The vast majority of Afghans, reeling from the ill-fated Soviet incursion and the tribal wars that followed, are too weary, hungry and disorganized to kick them out. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't like to.
In the WTC, the outer walls were structurally vital. They comprised a series of palisade-like columns tied together as an exoskeleton, and supported a significant portion of the buildings themselves.
As the upper floors collapsed, the shock loads were transmitted down through the exoskeleton and the whole shebang came down. A "traditional" skyscraper might not have collapsed as utterly as the WTC towers did. But it's all armchair conjecture at this point. Few major buildings are designed to be rammed by commercial aircraft and remain standing.
If you want to kill a voice-coil speaker, give it DC. Full rail from the power amp. Whoops, that'll fry the amp first ;-) Next best practice is to use a low frequency square wave with a duty cycle of 90 percent. Watch as the woofer tries to jump out of its surround.
Big fun...
The reason for this divide is the large pool of relatively warm water to the south -- the Gulf of Mexico. Frontal systems crossing the midsection of the continent are relatively moisture-starved until they can tap the much higher precipitable waters in the atmosphere influenced by the Gulf.
In spite of the govt's effort to populate the drylands of the West in the late 19th century, Ma Nature played her winning card with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Now, even though the high plains are intensively farmed once again, it's only because of powerful electric pumps which will deplete most of the Ogallala aquifer in the next 20-50 years. After that, the left hand side of that line will be really dark.