I'm really beginning to like ASUS. Not only do I like their approach to hardware a lot, but that was the most straight forward, unintentionally entertaining, non-bullshit video I've EVER seen from a corporation. I mean, yeah, it was dippy YouTube stuff, but seriously; Can you imagine any other main stream computer company allowing their tech monkeys to represent the mothership without the message first passing through a legion of marketing directors, lawyers and various haircuts in suits? Hell no!
Imagine the plasticy, dumbed down crappola video with gawdawful elevator music and bad overlay graphic effects you would have gotten in nearly every other situation.
I heard this great story from a friend of mine; his grandfather sent him a tool box filled with broken clocks. That's it. Best gift ever!
As a kid, I had lots of internal drive; I was into model rockets and building my own toys and even a full-size R2 robot. But the basic foundation which allowed this was my Dad having introduced me to do-it-yourselfmanship. Give your son tools. Heck, set up a work shop in the house, and build things yourself; kids emulate, and plus you'll have fun. My father would re-model rooms and build walls and decks and all kinds of cool stuff. He was really good at it, too, and he'd explain what he was doing while doing it if I asked.
Pre-packaged science toys are neat, and I went through a few of them, but they also stream-line a kid's awareness; make them think that knowledge comes in shrink-wrapped, consumer packaging. Pre-packaged reality is for the sheep, and it teaches a subtle lesson in dependence on the system rather than giving them the confidence to work, literally, outside the box in the real world.
One of the ways my father got my mind ticking was when I started pining for a pinball machine, clearly well beyond my pocket allowance budget. My dad said, "Well, heck. Let's build one."
So we did. And it was lame. --My Dad thought pinball was about trying to launch marbles into little holes. We did build a cool wooden table which was the right shape using a jig-saw, and he came up with a neat spring-loaded plunger, but I wanted electronic bumpers and blinking lights and such. So on my own steam, I visited electronic parts stores in search of various bits and pieces to create my vision. I learned about basic electronics and how to rectify AC current by bugging the shop owners with lots of newbie questions, etc. It led to a half-assed pinball machine, but it was still pretty cool for my age, and I learned a ton. --But none of that would have been possible if my Dad hadn't taught me how to use a soldering iron and power tools. He had given me the confidence to know that humans are smart and that with an inventive mind, you can do almost anything.
If I were you, I'd take your son to public science fairs and rocketry clubs and robotics clubs and whatnot. Stuff to fire the imagination. Also be sure to introduce him to the wonderful world of surplus electronic parts stores.
But above all. . .
Tools.
Buy tools and show him how they work, how to respect them. Build a decent work bench. Set it up with a good, solid vice. Lead by example. Build some awesome projects around the house, and make getting the tools a part of the game. In short, be an empowered geek. While pre-packaged stuff is fine sometimes, never let it dominate. Don't let other people do it for you if you can avoid it, because building stuff yourself is half the fun. This attitude will help your son in life in ways you can't even imagine!
As much as I was unpleasantly gobsmacked by the Midichlorians thing, I do recognize it as an earnest attempt on Lucas' part to match up his universe with the real one.
In Star Wars, the Force IS out there, like water in a river and we are all little row boats bobbing in the current. --To manipulate the water, (the Force), you need something to stick in the water. Like midichlorians, the more 'Oars' you have to work with, the more you can alter how the Force affects you. (Sorry. That's a horrible metaphor, but it's the best I was able to come up in the moment).
In our reality, one opinion is that the vital particles in question are Iron atoms. --Our version of the 'Force' is simply referred to as 'Energy', and it has both similar and very different properties as compared to the Star Wars simplicities. --Keeping in mind that Lucas scooped the Star Wars magic system whole cloth from our own world.
But of course, there is not 'magic'. Nothing happens without a reason, and the same is true of our world. There is always an underlying mechanic which can be measured and understood given enough time and insight.
As a kid, I blithely did as I was told to do; go to college because that's what you're supposed to do. Most of the students I meet are similarly confused about the reality of things; after being hammered for their entire lives to that point by the education system's insistence on going to college and university, that this is what good little boys and girls should strive for, this is hardly any surprise.
I was lucky. I met a teacher who advised me to get out, and while it caused a huge upset in my family, I did so, and almost instantly became very happy and successful in life.
I recommend apprenticing under professionals in whatever career path you want to follow. --You just offer yourself up as free labor while expressing a passionate desire to learn the craft/trade/whatever. This is impressive to professionals; they get free help and they derive joy in passing on what they know to an enthusiastic kid. --Every teacher will tell you the joy they feel when they encounter actual passion in a student; it's rare and it is a joy, (I know this, having taught a number of up and comers myself in a similar manner). Among the advantages are not having to rack up any student debt, as well as being able to learn directly relevant skills in the workplace much more effectively than any class room can offer; skills which are current and vital in the real world. You also make real connections in the industry which can hook you up with good positions later on. Essentially, as you prove your worth and develop your skills and knowledge, job offers just naturally spring up. In the real world, college credentials are not required for employment if you are clever and earnest in developing your skills.
This is not to say that school can't be fun or useful, (learning Flash, or basic accounting, for example, is worth taking a few classes for), but it's important to go into a school environment knowing exactly what you want to get out of it all. It's also much less expensive when you pinpoint specific skills and learn them in this way. Going into a university setting blind and confused while using the student loan system is a one-way ticket to debt slavery.
Of course, if you want to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer, school is pretty much a necessity, but there are MANY other life paths one can follow which offer great satisfaction and a comfortable living.
The Zombie/Unthinking follower (ie, everybody who blithely marched after Bush into the Iraq war and all his other self-made disasters), makes sense. --It is quite natural for Thinking People to fear this kind of monster threat. McCain supporters certainly seemed utterly mindless and vile, and there were altogether too many of them. I felt at times like holing up in my house with a golf club. --Or that any time I shot one down in debate, (easy enough to do), it JUST WOULDN'T DIE because it was too stupid to realize it was dead. --Or it would simply be replaced by another slavering ghoul.
Vampires exist in healthier environments, where people are aware enough to create strong, milk & honey societies, which by contrast, are fed upon by the leeches of society.
It all boils down to psychopathy and evil people either feeding on the masses, or convincing people to follow self-destructive courses of action. I have no trouble believing that the Vampie/Zombie thing is a subconscious manifestation in fiction of these forces.
I must say that I definitely feel the threat of destruction by mindless zombies has lifted for the time being. I didn't realize just how heavy it had gotten until it was gone!
So. . . bring on the Vampires! I got my stakes ready!
As you describe, I still run and require my desktop setup. I only picked up a netbook to replace my worn out but trusty old WindowsCE portable word processing device from 1998. I was never in the market for a new machine capable of running Vista in the first place.
Although, when the new school term began this Fall, the guys at the computer store told me that university students descended like a plague of locusts and cleaned out their stock of netbooks in under a week. --Sales which would likely have been Vista laptops otherwise, so I can see that as a source of MS misery. I have not talked with any student owners of netbooks, so I don't know how happy they are with them, but I know that mine has become indispensable to me.
I might also be led to believe that with the influx of Linux netbooks, it has raised general public awareness of Linux which by extension lowers the fear-of-new-things for people buying fresh desktop systems. I bet Ubuntu has gotten a boost from emboldened regular consumers of new regular systems as a result. I do know a couple of young twenty-something year-olds who talk about their Ubuntu systems without any trace of irony or awareness that it might be seen as unusual.
Tennant was amazing. I'd have loved to have seen Moffat write for him some more, but hey. . . I was also really annoyed when Christopher Eccleston was replaced, but Tennant was perfect, both as the Doctor and as the natural progression from Eccleston's edgy just-survived-the-time-war Doctor to happy and bouncy in-love-with-life Doctor.
I hope Moffat lives up to his past work and hope his casting is as spot on for the new guy.
If you're using it to play videos, then suddenly, you need a second device and a wire. If you need headphones, then it becomes three devices and another wire, which means it becomes awkward and tangled to use and store, which means it won't get used unless you are really driven. And if the intent is to share the experience with more than just yourself, you'd need more than one second set of head phones.
I can see a pocket projector becoming much more useful when it includes a decent sound system, has increased luminosity and plays media directly from a USB memory stick, all of which are possible. Though, for a single user, a netbook does all of that and much more.
Remember? TV's allowed us to view things without having to turn out the lights or worry about setting up a projector.
Still, if you happen to be doing lots of small presentations on the road, I can see this device as having real benefit over lugging around a big projector.
I did well also, but I also got to see the public purse not just mis-spent, but turned inside out and thrown into debt. All arguments aside, the difference is this: Spend public money on A) War profiteers with no return on the investment, or B) Schools, Health Care and Clean Energy. Seems like a clear choice to me.
As for the whole, "Blame only yourself for your failures", well, that's fine to a point. . , but how successful would you have been if you'd had abusive, drug-using parents, had suffered from an improperly developed brain due to childhood malnourishment, had been sent to school in a poor neighborhood which couldn't afford books, and had been told by everybody around that you were worthless? Do you REALLY think that you would be where you are today if you had all of that piled on you?
Here's an ugly little secret about American democracy: We don't count all the votes. In 2004, based on the data from the US Elections Assistance Commission, 3,006,080 votes were not counted: "spoiled," unreadable and blank ballots; "provisional" ballots rejected; mail-in ballots disqualified.
This Tuesday, it will be worse. Much worse.
That's what I found while traveling the nation over the last year for BBC Television and Rolling Stone Magazine, working with voting rights attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This we guarantee: there will be far more votes disappeared by Tuesday night than the three million lost in 2004. A six-million vote swipe, quite likely, shifts 4 percent of the ballots, within the margin of error of the tightest polls.
Begin with this harsh statistic: since the last election, more than ten million voters have been purged from the nation's vote registries. And that's just the start of the steal.
I'm more annoyed that people constantly spout stupidity just about 24/7 but I have no right to forcibly shut them up.
Conceited. It's good that we don't have that right, because believe me, to somebody else you are one of those spouting stupidity.
Its NOT your TV. Its NOT your PROPERTY. Leave if you don't like it. Or maybe here's a thought, ASK the propriator if they'll turn it off, down, etc.
Settle down. It's just a tool to be applied when appropriate. If you're in a sports bar, you'd be very rude to use such a device. If you're in an airport which is blasting everybody with an endless CNN loop nobody requested, especially when you're trying to sleep during a 10-hour layover due to a flight delay and nobody on the floor has the ability to modify the background noise, (lived through that one a couple of times), then hell yes, I'd love to have an off-switch for the overhead TV. I'd probably ask the people around me first if they minded, and if you happened to be there, I bet you'd be obliging unless you really are as much of a jerk as you sound here. (Luckily most people are not. They just like to blow off steam on-line.)
In any case, I can't imagine that anybody actually ever uses these devices in a practical manner; it'd be a lot of trouble to carry one around all the time.
The base setting for a public space is one of silence, which is then filled with various signals. A TV is an advertising vehicle, and I would argue that the true asshole in this equation is the person who has unilaterally decided to infringe upon everybody's attention with his/her message without permission.
If you believe that being hammered at by a TV is the normal state in your environment and that you are somehow harmed when that signal is shut off, then you are Borg, dude.
As manufactured a stage-production as this whole show is, as much as the 'choice' is between soft and hard fascism, one is SOFT and the other is HARD.
And yes, the election system is rigged from every angle conceivable, but all voices shouting in unison in the right moments CAN change things. Even a rigged election can be overwhelmed with enough votes; I'd estimate that unless the Democrats win by a 10% margin, (in real votes versus reported votes), then McCain will take the Whitehouse and the world will continue to burn. Voices DO count; Look at France with their nation-wide strikes, where government fears the people, as it bloody-well should be. No wonder Bush made a point of publicly denouncing the French and the official reality we are fed is that, 'Protest does nothing'.
George Carlin advised that to vote means to give up the right to complain. That's nonsense. You can complain just fine no matter what you do. In fact, if things are going wrong, it's your obligation to make noise and dig your heels in. Voting takes the least amount of courage because its the one time you can complain without getting pepper-sprayed. Get out there and DO it.
The media has put too much effort in getting Obama elected.
Either that, or enough effort so that if McCain wins, the resulting uproar will require the declaration of martial law and an extension of the current administration.
However, I am more apt to think that the more likely attempt to extend Bush's reign will be an assassination between tomorrow and January, which will have the same net effect. Of course, as generally happens, some unforeseen eventuality will probably come along to change the rules. In any case, I wouldn't rule out a significant fuss on the 5th.
I'm writing this on my eee1000H, which you could only ever get with XP; no Linux option.
Hardware-wise, it's a fantastic little machine; it does everything I want and it's very comfortable to use. --I actually prefer a machine with a bit of weight, (the eee1000 is perhaps the heaviest netbook in its class), for the same reason I don't like my corded phone to be a featherlight piece of plastic. The eee1000H feels solid and it doesn't scoot around like a toy, but it also remains both comfortable and wonderfully portable, like a mid-sized hardcover book.
So the main reason I picked it up over the SSD 1000 with Linux was that it was less expensive, thanks to the finagling of MS to make the XP release cheaper than the Linux version. (Quite the trick, given that the XP license wasn't free!) If they'd released the 1000H with Linux, I would have bought that hands down as it would no doubt have chopped another $50 or more from the price. The custom ASUS-brew Linux seemed fine to me when I tried it on the other machines. But XP does a nearly flawless job, so I have no complaints with that. I wonder what will happen when XP is phased out.
The big news here, I think, is that ASUS is phasing out the smaller screen versions of the eee. I do love the 10" screen on the 1000, but I think they could have done well if they'd put out a 900 with a bigger keyboard. --They did release one like this, but it ran an old Celeron, which seemed silly to me, but who knows? Maybe they had some surplus Celerons they wanted to liquidate. A 900 with an Atom chip and a proper keyboard would have been a hard choice to pass up, but as it stood, the choice was clear to me. --Big keyboard and an Atom processor, sweet battery life. Though, to be honest, after using the excellent 10" screen, I'd be reluctant now to go smaller. It's an almost perfect machine and the price is probably going to go down over the next few months to keep pace with the competition. I hear HP is releasing its latest contender in January.
This is how our parents' generation dealt with very real nightmare they lived through - you could argue that these films and other productions were a channeling of their collective traumas.
That's fair enough. I suppose I'm more annoyed at myself. I was just a kid when I saw (and was deeply impressed with) my first Bond movie. I didn't have any post war trauma to deal with, so my only excuse was being young and ignorant, so I do rather feel like I was fed a line, even if it wasn't deliberate. I can certainly forgive my parents, but the message is still false.
As for Star Wars. . . That I see in a different light altogether; it wasn't about 'good' government agents versus the megalomaniac. It was about freedom fighters struggling against imperial tyranny. The Star Wars message, and that echoed more recently by Firefly, holds even more validity today than it did thirty years ago. Far more so than the Bond franchise.
Hey there, geekoid! How's the downward spiral treating you these days?
No need for pity. I certainly don't pity you. People like us have strong opinions and we are both intelligent and we're not likely to alter our views, (though I am open to altering mine should new information arise rather than fight to maintain faulty belief structures for reasons of ego etc., which is where I suspect we differ, but that's not the issue).
Sure, I happen to think you're 180 degrees south of correct on many points, but I also recognize that this is your business and your choice. People who make solid choices and act on those choices are not the ones who need pity. We both have courses which we intend to follow, and that's actually pretty awesome. We have direction, and we both like the directions we have chosen, so you know, 'go us'. The ones who are pitiable are those who have avoided looking or making any choices at all.
-FL
Funny how times change. . .
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But these days, in this world, the government secret agent is now the villain.
To hell with Bond. --He's the guy planting bombs on the 'tube' for Israel in order to blame on some young Arab patsies in a scam only the media sells and utter imbeciles believe in.
The 'Bond' of today is an emotionally unstable thug with learning disabilities in service to a corrupt government trying its formal best to enslave its population with a deliberately broken money system, drugs and lots and lots of cameras.
The hell with Bond. I can't believe we were all so damned naive in the Sixties and Seventies. Dr. No and all those other metaphors for power-lunacy were either working for the government or the government was working for them. No difference at the top. And we, the plebes, were eating that garbage up like candy.
You dropped the word 'voted' from your sentence the same way GOP agents aim to lose/drop/ignore/prevent millions of Democratic votes in November. The election is already stolen. Why the hell isn't the television media all over this? Hands are dripped red.
--The only mention is the utterly benign ACORN nonsense the Republicans are hollering about, which as it happens, is simply a case of the psychopath blaming the victim for its own crimes.
12-year old mentality pouting bullies whose arguing tactics involve repeating lies loudly, ignoring facts, and disobeying social rules until they are physically restrained. . , these are the people who are determining the future of our world.
I know an old, crusty, mean old German bitch of a woman who is a total misery to be near and who seems to derive her only satisfaction in life from ruining people's days. I just learned this week that she was a card-carrying member of the Hitler Youth when she was a kid. Golly. But that's not the frustrating part. These evil bastards who never had any intention of playing fair in a real, genuine democratic society are the last ones to be punished when dictatorial fascism takes over. Their comfort zone exists within the muted gray-scale of harshness and general misery in all social benchmarks. The average racist inbred moron will probably not be shot or starved by the results of their actions. And if they are starved and mistreated, they will handily blame it on the liberals.
When can we brush aside the nonsense and recognize that some 'adults' are really just learning-disabled assholes, and give them only the limited rights we give to children? Why on earth are we allowing them ANY kind of decision making powers? They have plunged us into idiotic wars and they have plundered the economy and worst of all, they refuse to acknowledge that any of it was their fault. Forehead Tattoos for Retarded Assholes.
Scenario #1. .. Obama wins, is assassinated, and Joe Biden, self-described Zionist, takes the reigns and the world continues on its merry way to hell. Biden strikes me as rather snake-like, although I have no rational reason for thinking this.
Scenario #2. .. McCain and Palin take the Whitehouse through fraud and American public ignites leading to martial law. (Not likely. People are too well fed and entertained at the moment.)
Scencario #3. .. See #2, but allow people to start really suffering under economic depression and starvation for a year or so. Throw in a few more bad things, and then martial law becomes much more reasonable to expect. Especially if McCain, life-long loser, dies and Palin the idiot paladin for god who believes Jesus will return in her life-time, steps up to the plate.
The road to a sane future involves Obama doing three things. . .
1. Winning the election. 2. Turning out to really not be evil, living up to his promises, and NOT getting into any new land wars in Asia. And keeping Biden on a very short leash. 3. Not Getting Killed.
It's a thin road, easy to fall off. Reality will almost certainly serve up something unique and unexpected, but whatever the case, any outcome would just be an indicator of a behind the scenes war being won or lost.
1. The Queen of England is a lizard in a human costume. 2. The Earth is only 5000 years old and the bible is verbatim truth. 3. The Earth is Flat. 4. The "Photon Belt" is coming along with the hollow Nibiru/Planet X filled with alien troops. 5. Elvis is still alive.
To me, those kinds of ideas resonate on the frequency of 'Bullshit'. --And I'm not (just) saying that facetiously. They really DO feel/sound/smell lame in a way which I can't quite put my finger on, but which I can sense from a mile away as being simply wrong. This does not stop many people from believing them, however, which suggests to me that not everybody knows how to use their nose, so to speak.
By contrast, I find that alternate/invisible levels of reality over-lapping ours and traversed by non-human beings visible to us via the near-ubiquitous UFO reports (among other things) in fact doesn't fail my smell-test. There's just something about it all which resonates differently than Elvis.
The mountains of evidence in all its variety also helps to make it convincing. --Though I sometimes think that to dissuade people with well-tuned noses, there is a hefty effort put forth to 'Elvis-ify' the UFO phenomenon by painting it with the same brush as that other nonsense.
Then there are those who don't do any sniff-testing at all, but just believe and react the way they are told to. While it may appear to be a subtle difference, (it's not actually that subtle except to those who are so embroiled), there IS a difference between the smell-test, and measuring something against one's library of accepted facts and experiencing an automatic negative emotional response against anything which isn't in the official card catalog.
Anyway. . , when I give the albeit cool-sounding plasma-tv airship idea offered up by your father the smell-test, it doesn't do so well.
If the number of UFOs are constant, and there are many more cameras, why aren't we seeing many more pictures flooding the intertubes?
You must look in order to see. --This is always the case when it comes to subjects which do not bear the stamp of, "Official Truth".
There are actually quite a lot of phone camera UFO pictures. Videos, too. --Many tend to be poorly shot and of low resolution, but that's to be expected given that the objects are photographed with crappy cameras at great distances by untrained people. I expect as resolutions on phone cameras get more powerful, we'll also get better images.
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I'm really beginning to like ASUS. Not only do I like their approach to hardware a lot, but that was the most straight forward, unintentionally entertaining, non-bullshit video I've EVER seen from a corporation. I mean, yeah, it was dippy YouTube stuff, but seriously; Can you imagine any other main stream computer company allowing their tech monkeys to represent the mothership without the message first passing through a legion of marketing directors, lawyers and various haircuts in suits? Hell no!
Imagine the plasticy, dumbed down crappola video with gawdawful elevator music and bad overlay graphic effects you would have gotten in nearly every other situation.
Damn. ASUS is run by humans!
-FL
I heard this great story from a friend of mine; his grandfather sent him a tool box filled with broken clocks. That's it. Best gift ever!
As a kid, I had lots of internal drive; I was into model rockets and building my own toys and even a full-size R2 robot. But the basic foundation which allowed this was my Dad having introduced me to do-it-yourselfmanship. Give your son tools. Heck, set up a work shop in the house, and build things yourself; kids emulate, and plus you'll have fun. My father would re-model rooms and build walls and decks and all kinds of cool stuff. He was really good at it, too, and he'd explain what he was doing while doing it if I asked.
Pre-packaged science toys are neat, and I went through a few of them, but they also stream-line a kid's awareness; make them think that knowledge comes in shrink-wrapped, consumer packaging. Pre-packaged reality is for the sheep, and it teaches a subtle lesson in dependence on the system rather than giving them the confidence to work, literally, outside the box in the real world.
One of the ways my father got my mind ticking was when I started pining for a pinball machine, clearly well beyond my pocket allowance budget. My dad said, "Well, heck. Let's build one."
So we did. And it was lame. --My Dad thought pinball was about trying to launch marbles into little holes. We did build a cool wooden table which was the right shape using a jig-saw, and he came up with a neat spring-loaded plunger, but I wanted electronic bumpers and blinking lights and such. So on my own steam, I visited electronic parts stores in search of various bits and pieces to create my vision. I learned about basic electronics and how to rectify AC current by bugging the shop owners with lots of newbie questions, etc. It led to a half-assed pinball machine, but it was still pretty cool for my age, and I learned a ton. --But none of that would have been possible if my Dad hadn't taught me how to use a soldering iron and power tools. He had given me the confidence to know that humans are smart and that with an inventive mind, you can do almost anything.
If I were you, I'd take your son to public science fairs and rocketry clubs and robotics clubs and whatnot. Stuff to fire the imagination. Also be sure to introduce him to the wonderful world of surplus electronic parts stores.
But above all. . .
Tools.
Buy tools and show him how they work, how to respect them. Build a decent work bench. Set it up with a good, solid vice. Lead by example. Build some awesome projects around the house, and make getting the tools a part of the game. In short, be an empowered geek. While pre-packaged stuff is fine sometimes, never let it dominate. Don't let other people do it for you if you can avoid it, because building stuff yourself is half the fun. This attitude will help your son in life in ways you can't even imagine!
-FL
As much as I was unpleasantly gobsmacked by the Midichlorians thing, I do recognize it as an earnest attempt on Lucas' part to match up his universe with the real one.
In Star Wars, the Force IS out there, like water in a river and we are all little row boats bobbing in the current. --To manipulate the water, (the Force), you need something to stick in the water. Like midichlorians, the more 'Oars' you have to work with, the more you can alter how the Force affects you. (Sorry. That's a horrible metaphor, but it's the best I was able to come up in the moment).
In our reality, one opinion is that the vital particles in question are Iron atoms. --Our version of the 'Force' is simply referred to as 'Energy', and it has both similar and very different properties as compared to the Star Wars simplicities. --Keeping in mind that Lucas scooped the Star Wars magic system whole cloth from our own world.
But of course, there is not 'magic'. Nothing happens without a reason, and the same is true of our world. There is always an underlying mechanic which can be measured and understood given enough time and insight.
-FL
As a kid, I blithely did as I was told to do; go to college because that's what you're supposed to do. Most of the students I meet are similarly confused about the reality of things; after being hammered for their entire lives to that point by the education system's insistence on going to college and university, that this is what good little boys and girls should strive for, this is hardly any surprise.
I was lucky. I met a teacher who advised me to get out, and while it caused a huge upset in my family, I did so, and almost instantly became very happy and successful in life.
I recommend apprenticing under professionals in whatever career path you want to follow. --You just offer yourself up as free labor while expressing a passionate desire to learn the craft/trade/whatever. This is impressive to professionals; they get free help and they derive joy in passing on what they know to an enthusiastic kid. --Every teacher will tell you the joy they feel when they encounter actual passion in a student; it's rare and it is a joy, (I know this, having taught a number of up and comers myself in a similar manner). Among the advantages are not having to rack up any student debt, as well as being able to learn directly relevant skills in the workplace much more effectively than any class room can offer; skills which are current and vital in the real world. You also make real connections in the industry which can hook you up with good positions later on. Essentially, as you prove your worth and develop your skills and knowledge, job offers just naturally spring up. In the real world, college credentials are not required for employment if you are clever and earnest in developing your skills.
This is not to say that school can't be fun or useful, (learning Flash, or basic accounting, for example, is worth taking a few classes for), but it's important to go into a school environment knowing exactly what you want to get out of it all. It's also much less expensive when you pinpoint specific skills and learn them in this way. Going into a university setting blind and confused while using the student loan system is a one-way ticket to debt slavery.
Of course, if you want to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer, school is pretty much a necessity, but there are MANY other life paths one can follow which offer great satisfaction and a comfortable living.
-FL
The Zombie/Unthinking follower (ie, everybody who blithely marched after Bush into the Iraq war and all his other self-made disasters), makes sense. --It is quite natural for Thinking People to fear this kind of monster threat. McCain supporters certainly seemed utterly mindless and vile, and there were altogether too many of them. I felt at times like holing up in my house with a golf club. --Or that any time I shot one down in debate, (easy enough to do), it JUST WOULDN'T DIE because it was too stupid to realize it was dead. --Or it would simply be replaced by another slavering ghoul.
Vampires exist in healthier environments, where people are aware enough to create strong, milk & honey societies, which by contrast, are fed upon by the leeches of society.
It all boils down to psychopathy and evil people either feeding on the masses, or convincing people to follow self-destructive courses of action. I have no trouble believing that the Vampie/Zombie thing is a subconscious manifestation in fiction of these forces.
I must say that I definitely feel the threat of destruction by mindless zombies has lifted for the time being. I didn't realize just how heavy it had gotten until it was gone!
So. . . bring on the Vampires! I got my stakes ready!
-FL
As you describe, I still run and require my desktop setup. I only picked up a netbook to replace my worn out but trusty old WindowsCE portable word processing device from 1998. I was never in the market for a new machine capable of running Vista in the first place.
Although, when the new school term began this Fall, the guys at the computer store told me that university students descended like a plague of locusts and cleaned out their stock of netbooks in under a week. --Sales which would likely have been Vista laptops otherwise, so I can see that as a source of MS misery. I have not talked with any student owners of netbooks, so I don't know how happy they are with them, but I know that mine has become indispensable to me.
I might also be led to believe that with the influx of Linux netbooks, it has raised general public awareness of Linux which by extension lowers the fear-of-new-things for people buying fresh desktop systems. I bet Ubuntu has gotten a boost from emboldened regular consumers of new regular systems as a result. I do know a couple of young twenty-something year-olds who talk about their Ubuntu systems without any trace of irony or awareness that it might be seen as unusual.
This post was written on an eee1000 running XP.
-FL
I cannot believe I missed this news!
Tennant was amazing. I'd have loved to have seen Moffat write for him some more, but hey. . . I was also really annoyed when Christopher Eccleston was replaced, but Tennant was perfect, both as the Doctor and as the natural progression from Eccleston's edgy just-survived-the-time-war Doctor to happy and bouncy in-love-with-life Doctor.
I hope Moffat lives up to his past work and hope his casting is as spot on for the new guy.
-FL
Not so good for the regular consumer.
If you're using it to play videos, then suddenly, you need a second device and a wire. If you need headphones, then it becomes three devices and another wire, which means it becomes awkward and tangled to use and store, which means it won't get used unless you are really driven. And if the intent is to share the experience with more than just yourself, you'd need more than one second set of head phones.
I can see a pocket projector becoming much more useful when it includes a decent sound system, has increased luminosity and plays media directly from a USB memory stick, all of which are possible. Though, for a single user, a netbook does all of that and much more.
Remember? TV's allowed us to view things without having to turn out the lights or worry about setting up a projector.
Still, if you happen to be doing lots of small presentations on the road, I can see this device as having real benefit over lugging around a big projector.
-FL
I did well also, but I also got to see the public purse not just mis-spent, but turned inside out and thrown into debt. All arguments aside, the difference is this: Spend public money on A) War profiteers with no return on the investment, or B) Schools, Health Care and Clean Energy. Seems like a clear choice to me.
As for the whole, "Blame only yourself for your failures", well, that's fine to a point. . , but how successful would you have been if you'd had abusive, drug-using parents, had suffered from an improperly developed brain due to childhood malnourishment, had been sent to school in a poor neighborhood which couldn't afford books, and had been told by everybody around that you were worthless? Do you REALLY think that you would be where you are today if you had all of that piled on you?
-FL
Just watched the McCain concession speech. Nice to see the old man act like a gentleman for the first time in months.
Now we just have to make it through to January without Bush blowing us all up.
-FL
This is not in the bag.
Read the rest here.
-FL
Oh my! You can't agree on something as simple as voting without resisting the urge to make a (very) feeble personal jab of some sort?
Ego first, country second. You'd do well in politics.
-FL
I'm more annoyed that people constantly spout stupidity just about 24/7 but I have no right to forcibly shut them up.
Conceited. It's good that we don't have that right, because believe me, to somebody else you are one of those spouting stupidity.
Its NOT your TV. Its NOT your PROPERTY. Leave if you don't like it. Or maybe here's a thought, ASK the propriator if they'll turn it off, down, etc.
Settle down. It's just a tool to be applied when appropriate. If you're in a sports bar, you'd be very rude to use such a device. If you're in an airport which is blasting everybody with an endless CNN loop nobody requested, especially when you're trying to sleep during a 10-hour layover due to a flight delay and nobody on the floor has the ability to modify the background noise, (lived through that one a couple of times), then hell yes, I'd love to have an off-switch for the overhead TV. I'd probably ask the people around me first if they minded, and if you happened to be there, I bet you'd be obliging unless you really are as much of a jerk as you sound here. (Luckily most people are not. They just like to blow off steam on-line.)
In any case, I can't imagine that anybody actually ever uses these devices in a practical manner; it'd be a lot of trouble to carry one around all the time.
-FL
The base setting for a public space is one of silence, which is then filled with various signals. A TV is an advertising vehicle, and I would argue that the true asshole in this equation is the person who has unilaterally decided to infringe upon everybody's attention with his/her message without permission.
If you believe that being hammered at by a TV is the normal state in your environment and that you are somehow harmed when that signal is shut off, then you are Borg, dude.
-FL
Yes, yes. . . And you can quit any time you want, right?
-FL
As manufactured a stage-production as this whole show is, as much as the 'choice' is between soft and hard fascism, one is SOFT and the other is HARD.
And yes, the election system is rigged from every angle conceivable, but all voices shouting in unison in the right moments CAN change things. Even a rigged election can be overwhelmed with enough votes; I'd estimate that unless the Democrats win by a 10% margin, (in real votes versus reported votes), then McCain will take the Whitehouse and the world will continue to burn. Voices DO count; Look at France with their nation-wide strikes, where government fears the people, as it bloody-well should be. No wonder Bush made a point of publicly denouncing the French and the official reality we are fed is that, 'Protest does nothing'.
George Carlin advised that to vote means to give up the right to complain. That's nonsense. You can complain just fine no matter what you do. In fact, if things are going wrong, it's your obligation to make noise and dig your heels in. Voting takes the least amount of courage because its the one time you can complain without getting pepper-sprayed. Get out there and DO it.
-FL
The media has put too much effort in getting Obama elected.
Either that, or enough effort so that if McCain wins, the resulting uproar will require the declaration of martial law and an extension of the current administration.
However, I am more apt to think that the more likely attempt to extend Bush's reign will be an assassination between tomorrow and January, which will have the same net effect. Of course, as generally happens, some unforeseen eventuality will probably come along to change the rules. In any case, I wouldn't rule out a significant fuss on the 5th.
-FL
I'm writing this on my eee1000H, which you could only ever get with XP; no Linux option.
Hardware-wise, it's a fantastic little machine; it does everything I want and it's very comfortable to use. --I actually prefer a machine with a bit of weight, (the eee1000 is perhaps the heaviest netbook in its class), for the same reason I don't like my corded phone to be a featherlight piece of plastic. The eee1000H feels solid and it doesn't scoot around like a toy, but it also remains both comfortable and wonderfully portable, like a mid-sized hardcover book.
So the main reason I picked it up over the SSD 1000 with Linux was that it was less expensive, thanks to the finagling of MS to make the XP release cheaper than the Linux version. (Quite the trick, given that the XP license wasn't free!) If they'd released the 1000H with Linux, I would have bought that hands down as it would no doubt have chopped another $50 or more from the price. The custom ASUS-brew Linux seemed fine to me when I tried it on the other machines. But XP does a nearly flawless job, so I have no complaints with that. I wonder what will happen when XP is phased out.
The big news here, I think, is that ASUS is phasing out the smaller screen versions of the eee. I do love the 10" screen on the 1000, but I think they could have done well if they'd put out a 900 with a bigger keyboard. --They did release one like this, but it ran an old Celeron, which seemed silly to me, but who knows? Maybe they had some surplus Celerons they wanted to liquidate. A 900 with an Atom chip and a proper keyboard would have been a hard choice to pass up, but as it stood, the choice was clear to me. --Big keyboard and an Atom processor, sweet battery life. Though, to be honest, after using the excellent 10" screen, I'd be reluctant now to go smaller. It's an almost perfect machine and the price is probably going to go down over the next few months to keep pace with the competition. I hear HP is releasing its latest contender in January.
-FL
This is how our parents' generation dealt with very real nightmare they lived through - you could argue that these films and other productions were a channeling of their collective traumas.
That's fair enough. I suppose I'm more annoyed at myself. I was just a kid when I saw (and was deeply impressed with) my first Bond movie. I didn't have any post war trauma to deal with, so my only excuse was being young and ignorant, so I do rather feel like I was fed a line, even if it wasn't deliberate. I can certainly forgive my parents, but the message is still false.
As for Star Wars. . . That I see in a different light altogether; it wasn't about 'good' government agents versus the megalomaniac. It was about freedom fighters struggling against imperial tyranny. The Star Wars message, and that echoed more recently by Firefly, holds even more validity today than it did thirty years ago. Far more so than the Bond franchise.
-FL
Hey there, geekoid! How's the downward spiral treating you these days?
No need for pity. I certainly don't pity you. People like us have strong opinions and we are both intelligent and we're not likely to alter our views, (though I am open to altering mine should new information arise rather than fight to maintain faulty belief structures for reasons of ego etc., which is where I suspect we differ, but that's not the issue).
Sure, I happen to think you're 180 degrees south of correct on many points, but I also recognize that this is your business and your choice. People who make solid choices and act on those choices are not the ones who need pity. We both have courses which we intend to follow, and that's actually pretty awesome. We have direction, and we both like the directions we have chosen, so you know, 'go us'. The ones who are pitiable are those who have avoided looking or making any choices at all.
-FL
But these days, in this world, the government secret agent is now the villain.
To hell with Bond. --He's the guy planting bombs on the 'tube' for Israel in order to blame on some young Arab patsies in a scam only the media sells and utter imbeciles believe in.
The 'Bond' of today is an emotionally unstable thug with learning disabilities in service to a corrupt government trying its formal best to enslave its population with a deliberately broken money system, drugs and lots and lots of cameras.
The hell with Bond. I can't believe we were all so damned naive in the Sixties and Seventies. Dr. No and all those other metaphors for power-lunacy were either working for the government or the government was working for them. No difference at the top. And we, the plebes, were eating that garbage up like candy.
How embarrassing!
-FL
You dropped the word 'voted' from your sentence the same way GOP agents aim to lose/drop/ignore/prevent millions of Democratic votes in November. The election is already stolen. Why the hell isn't the television media all over this? Hands are dripped red.
--The only mention is the utterly benign ACORN nonsense the Republicans are hollering about, which as it happens, is simply a case of the psychopath blaming the victim for its own crimes.
12-year old mentality pouting bullies whose arguing tactics involve repeating lies loudly, ignoring facts, and disobeying social rules until they are physically restrained. . , these are the people who are determining the future of our world.
I know an old, crusty, mean old German bitch of a woman who is a total misery to be near and who seems to derive her only satisfaction in life from ruining people's days. I just learned this week that she was a card-carrying member of the Hitler Youth when she was a kid. Golly. But that's not the frustrating part. These evil bastards who never had any intention of playing fair in a real, genuine democratic society are the last ones to be punished when dictatorial fascism takes over. Their comfort zone exists within the muted gray-scale of harshness and general misery in all social benchmarks. The average racist inbred moron will probably not be shot or starved by the results of their actions. And if they are starved and mistreated, they will handily blame it on the liberals.
When can we brush aside the nonsense and recognize that some 'adults' are really just learning-disabled assholes, and give them only the limited rights we give to children? Why on earth are we allowing them ANY kind of decision making powers? They have plunged us into idiotic wars and they have plundered the economy and worst of all, they refuse to acknowledge that any of it was their fault. Forehead Tattoos for Retarded Assholes.
-FL
Scenario #1. . . Obama wins, is assassinated, and Joe Biden, self-described Zionist, takes the reigns and the world continues on its merry way to hell. Biden strikes me as rather snake-like, although I have no rational reason for thinking this.
Scenario #2. . . McCain and Palin take the Whitehouse through fraud and American public ignites leading to martial law. (Not likely. People are too well fed and entertained at the moment.)
Scencario #3. . . See #2, but allow people to start really suffering under economic depression and starvation for a year or so. Throw in a few more bad things, and then martial law becomes much more reasonable to expect. Especially if McCain, life-long loser, dies and Palin the idiot paladin for god who believes Jesus will return in her life-time, steps up to the plate.
The road to a sane future involves Obama doing three things. . .
1. Winning the election.
2. Turning out to really not be evil, living up to his promises, and NOT getting into any new land wars in Asia. And keeping Biden on a very short leash.
3. Not Getting Killed.
It's a thin road, easy to fall off. Reality will almost certainly serve up something unique and unexpected, but whatever the case, any outcome would just be an indicator of a behind the scenes war being won or lost.
-FL
Here's three:
1. The Queen of England is a lizard in a human costume.
2. The Earth is only 5000 years old and the bible is verbatim truth.
3. The Earth is Flat.
4. The "Photon Belt" is coming along with the hollow Nibiru/Planet X filled with alien troops.
5. Elvis is still alive.
To me, those kinds of ideas resonate on the frequency of 'Bullshit'. --And I'm not (just) saying that facetiously. They really DO feel/sound/smell lame in a way which I can't quite put my finger on, but which I can sense from a mile away as being simply wrong. This does not stop many people from believing them, however, which suggests to me that not everybody knows how to use their nose, so to speak.
By contrast, I find that alternate/invisible levels of reality over-lapping ours and traversed by non-human beings visible to us via the near-ubiquitous UFO reports (among other things) in fact doesn't fail my smell-test. There's just something about it all which resonates differently than Elvis.
The mountains of evidence in all its variety also helps to make it convincing. --Though I sometimes think that to dissuade people with well-tuned noses, there is a hefty effort put forth to 'Elvis-ify' the UFO phenomenon by painting it with the same brush as that other nonsense.
Then there are those who don't do any sniff-testing at all, but just believe and react the way they are told to. While it may appear to be a subtle difference, (it's not actually that subtle except to those who are so embroiled), there IS a difference between the smell-test, and measuring something against one's library of accepted facts and experiencing an automatic negative emotional response against anything which isn't in the official card catalog.
Anyway. . , when I give the albeit cool-sounding plasma-tv airship idea offered up by your father the smell-test, it doesn't do so well.
-FL
If the number of UFOs are constant, and there are many more cameras, why aren't we seeing many more pictures flooding the intertubes?
You must look in order to see. --This is always the case when it comes to subjects which do not bear the stamp of, "Official Truth".
There are actually quite a lot of phone camera UFO pictures. Videos, too. --Many tend to be poorly shot and of low resolution, but that's to be expected given that the objects are photographed with crappy cameras at great distances by untrained people. I expect as resolutions on phone cameras get more powerful, we'll also get better images.
-FL