I was at Sprockets around April/May 1999. Boston, down central. Got hired by aD summer of 1999 and into 2000. I admire sprockets for their perseverance....it was definitely fake and CTO never stopped chatting me up about the B-52's (rock group), friday afternoon drinkfests and other nonsense.
ArsDigita taught me how to write real dB/web code on any platform. My sense after a couple weeks at Spockets was that I could run the whole company myself at 25 year old. It was messed up. They had no intention of releasing a real web client, because writing web/db would have taken about a month's work on my part.
Kozmo was full of niggers on scooters. I interviewed there once, the latino sysadmin told me that "certifications are very important."
As a comp sci major, suffice to say I should have been looking elsewhere. But I commend Kozmo for joining IT infrastructure with MTV and couches. It could have worked, maybe without the orange jackets.
I was using a web grocery service as early as 1996 and my only complaint was that their milk was warm.
This was for 50+ people. For my own use I go to the store every other day. Hell, I can walk. Interesting name "sprocket," see my other post in this thread.
I worked for Sprockets.com for a couple months as technical support while I learned web development elsewhere.
As best I could tell, Sprockets was completely fake. The goal was to build a new-media friendly collaboration tool. Emphasis was on appearance and real development work was outsourced to Israeli programmers who could barely keep up with...well they just sucked. I never saw a deliverable and never had any responsibilities.
We had four in-house developers, fresh college kids who mostly goofed around and laughed at their non-responsibilities. When I showed up to work at 11am, the infrastructure team bluntly offered me a free cellphone. They also threw stock at me like toilet paper.
I bailed on Sprockets to take a real development job at double salary, but about a year later I got a letter in the mail saying Sprockets was defunct and I could come to the office to take whatever I wanted. Fait accompli...venture capital=profit. I can't believe they got away with it, but my feeling is this was pre-planned from the start and they broke no actual laws. They knew what they were doing.
Call it VC raiding. Anybody who wasted venture capital should probably be jealous (and my future employer did exactly that.)
>The DNC could ignore his politics, but ignoring his ability to get average >citizens to pony up cash was suicide and they knew it.
Heh. That's a good rationalization and I buy it. My problem with Dean is that for someone who was supposed to be a presidential "leader" he was subverted by popularity contests around him - the media, the DNC, the pressures of the campaign. He has no backbone and quickly became the real-life version of Anakin Skywalker, willing to do whatever he perceived he was told. That's what I meant by mental illness. He trusts others blindly whereas most politicians know it's a game.
However, I thought Dean's platform was moderate and well-considered, and a good voice for libertarianism if it was properly labeled. If by vivisection you're talking about Bill Frist, that is truly disturbing but not surprising in the context of the neocon movement. Condoleeza Rice is a good example...black, ugly, stupid and immature all at the same time.
I'm hoping Colin Powell will step up, but it will take some prodding.
Personally I don't think either anarchism or libertarianism are political philosophies, more like vectors that indicate which direction you want your current government to take.
As for minimal government, I think government's responsibility is to accumulate agreed-upon knowledge so it will naturally grow over time. Government should present itself as invisible, which it mostly does. Traffic signs are 95% of the government I deal with on a day-to-day basis. No visitations, no propaganda, no paperwork... folks on probation don't have it the same of course.
Best example of amnesia is the virtual un-labeling of Howard Dean as a libertarian in 2000. If Dean wasn't a libertarian then I don't know who is. Call it friendly ignorance, the MSM was so confused over his "unconventional" stances that they never dropped the deadly L-word on him. But libertarian would have summed up the whole controversy.
Unfortunately Dean's problem is that he wasn't electable - and not because he wasn't popular, but because he was himself mentally ill (and now part of big money as DNC chairman). It's too bad because Dean's pro-gun, pro-healthcare, selective business policies were the most balanced libertarian platform I've seen. And people seemed to like it.
TiVo has a DirecTV HDTV combo box that this legislation would apparently cripple. Of course if you decouple the two devices you would seem to jump through the loophole.
I don't know if TiVo has released a standalone HD box yet, probably because re-encoding analog Y-Pb-Pr would be bandwidth intensive. But it'll eventually happen.
Yep. And the ultimate protection from all is the 2nd Amendment. Anyone who watches History Channel knows that guns are the most basic form of technology. When the 2nd Amendment is properly interpreted, all these restrictions will go away.
Note: I'm not advocating armed rebellion. I'm saying DVR's are guns.
The problem with people like Perens is that they should be on our side, but they don't articulate their views in a proper way:
"With freedom comes responsibility. It's time for us to start being good examples."
The real lesson of Napster is that basic research into file distribution was done for free, by college students, and was reverse-engineered with a profit model and ultimately became iTunes.
No theft, just a lot of hard work, and Bruce Perens shit all over it. He was right in warning us of "trusted clients" (crippled players) but Napster is a shoddy, socio-political rather than techno/legal excuse. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Return the CD to the store under the premise that it "doesn't work." They have to take it back.
I did this with a used copy of the Matrix after discovering the DVD had a spyware installer that was hard to get around. Any non-savvy user watching the Matrix on my computer would end up installing it. They looked at me funny but they took it back. Nobody at the store had tried the DVD on their PC before.
That's not a bad idea. I wrote a similar letter to an op-ed writer who was complaining about her newspaper cutting pensions. Basically I said, "In this day and age, how can you possibly not know how to start your own newspaper?"
Similarly, I heard Howard Dean giving a speech on C-SPAN where he was telling the crowd, "We need you to start organizing, start becoming involved in the political process. Not experts, ordinary people." They were apalled, it was like he had 3 heads.
Creative ideas like yours work in academic circles where there's a critical mass of motivated people. But out in ordinary society (I suppose this means the suburbs) people expect to be coddled because they're putting 90% of their resources towards child-rearing. IMO that's a dangerous way to live. In other words, when you find people who are smart enough to do this travel scheme, you will be so few in number that you will have far easier and more ordinary ways of getting rich instead.
Mmmm thank you, I'm actually impressed by these replies. I think the problem is that nuclear power was never demonstrated to be safe or cost-competitive here in the US and there are a number of worldwide accidents which suggests that the technology itself is a delicate single-point-of-failure.
I don't think US politicians are ready for nuclear power and if that's the greenies fault then they are doing a good job. These are the same pols who can't handle airline security or stand up to rigged elections or fake intelligence on Iraq.
I think the French will be beating us on nuclear power for some time. The French seem to be about $1-2 trillion ahead of us (accounting for our larger population) plus the benefit of knowlege.
Uranium is not a natural source of energy. It has to be refined first.
Then you have the problem of containment and disposal. Nuclear energy is supported by government subsidies that make oil look like a joke. Get a clue about fission before supporting it. How are you going to prevent a meltdown? How are you going to dispose of the waste?
GE is the art of getting Mac disks to work on Intel machines.
Not very promising. I'm glad you've reconciled GE with yourself, but getting software (DNA) to work on a machine (the organism) without studying it first is an excercise in late-night comedy.
As always, the computer programmers will have the last laugh. And since we are mostly retired, we have plenty of time to laugh at your mistakes.
I am reminded of the person who said, "Baseball is not a sport."
Good point, stamina does not come into play in golf, bowling, or baseball (except pitching). Still, these are valid games. I do enjoy bowling. Last time I bowled, I threw two strikes with a house ball and then started throwing gutterballs just to fit in. Suffice to say I haven't bowled since. Kind of a shame.
It seems fairly easy to reconstruct the front page of slashdot using regexps and form handling. Not that I've done it, but I've done other things. One of the entry-level tasks for a web firm I worked for was to scan 3 online bookstores for price info about a certain book and table the results. The web is not designed to be regexp-friendly but you can still do amazing things with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they were practicing. Remember the goal was to work their way up to fully-digital human characters.
I was at Sprockets around April/May 1999. Boston, down central. Got hired by aD summer of 1999 and into 2000. I admire sprockets for their perseverance....it was definitely fake and CTO never stopped chatting me up about the B-52's (rock group), friday afternoon drinkfests and other nonsense.
ArsDigita taught me how to write real dB/web code on any platform. My sense after a couple weeks at Spockets was that I could run the whole company myself at 25 year old. It was messed up. They had no intention of releasing a real web client, because writing web/db would have taken about a month's work on my part.
Lol. The average programmer sucks?
Warcraft 3 filelist has the same problem.
Kozmo was full of niggers on scooters. I interviewed there once, the latino sysadmin told me that "certifications are very important."
As a comp sci major, suffice to say I should have been looking elsewhere. But I commend Kozmo for joining IT infrastructure with MTV and couches. It could have worked, maybe without the orange jackets.
I was using a web grocery service as early as 1996 and my only complaint was that their milk was warm.
This was for 50+ people. For my own use I go to the store every other day. Hell, I can walk. Interesting name "sprocket," see my other post in this thread.
I worked for Sprockets.com for a couple months as technical support while I learned web development elsewhere.
As best I could tell, Sprockets was completely fake. The goal was to build a new-media friendly collaboration tool. Emphasis was on appearance and real development work was outsourced to Israeli programmers who could barely keep up with...well they just sucked. I never saw a deliverable and never had any responsibilities.
We had four in-house developers, fresh college kids who mostly goofed around and laughed at their non-responsibilities. When I showed up to work at 11am, the infrastructure team bluntly offered me a free cellphone. They also threw stock at me like toilet paper.
I bailed on Sprockets to take a real development job at double salary, but about a year later I got a letter in the mail saying Sprockets was defunct and I could come to the office to take whatever I wanted. Fait accompli...venture capital=profit. I can't believe they got away with it, but my feeling is this was pre-planned from the start and they broke no actual laws. They knew what they were doing.
Call it VC raiding. Anybody who wasted venture capital should probably be jealous (and my future employer did exactly that.)
>The DNC could ignore his politics, but ignoring his ability to get average
>citizens to pony up cash was suicide and they knew it.
Heh. That's a good rationalization and I buy it. My problem with Dean is that for someone who was supposed to be a presidential "leader" he was subverted by popularity contests around him - the media, the DNC, the pressures of the campaign. He has no backbone and quickly became the real-life version of Anakin Skywalker, willing to do whatever he perceived he was told. That's what I meant by mental illness. He trusts others blindly whereas most politicians know it's a game.
However, I thought Dean's platform was moderate and well-considered, and a good voice for libertarianism if it was properly labeled. If by vivisection you're talking about Bill Frist, that is truly disturbing but not surprising in the context of the neocon movement. Condoleeza Rice is a good example...black, ugly, stupid and immature all at the same time.
I'm hoping Colin Powell will step up, but it will take some prodding.
Personally I don't think either anarchism or libertarianism are political philosophies, more like vectors that indicate which direction you want your current government to take.
As for minimal government, I think government's responsibility is to accumulate agreed-upon knowledge so it will naturally grow over time. Government should present itself as invisible, which it mostly does. Traffic signs are 95% of the government I deal with on a day-to-day basis. No visitations, no propaganda, no paperwork... folks on probation don't have it the same of course.
Best example of amnesia is the virtual un-labeling of Howard Dean as a libertarian in 2000. If Dean wasn't a libertarian then I don't know who is. Call it friendly ignorance, the MSM was so confused over his "unconventional" stances that they never dropped the deadly L-word on him. But libertarian would have summed up the whole controversy.
Unfortunately Dean's problem is that he wasn't electable - and not because he wasn't popular, but because he was himself mentally ill (and now part of big money as DNC chairman). It's too bad because Dean's pro-gun, pro-healthcare, selective business policies were the most balanced libertarian platform I've seen. And people seemed to like it.
TiVo has a DirecTV HDTV combo box that this legislation would apparently cripple. Of course if you decouple the two devices you would seem to jump through the loophole.
I don't know if TiVo has released a standalone HD box yet, probably because re-encoding analog Y-Pb-Pr would be bandwidth intensive. But it'll eventually happen.
Yep. And the ultimate protection from all is the 2nd Amendment. Anyone who watches History Channel knows that guns are the most basic form of technology. When the 2nd Amendment is properly interpreted, all these restrictions will go away.
Note: I'm not advocating armed rebellion. I'm saying DVR's are guns.
The real lesson of Napster is that basic research into file distribution was done for free, by college students, and was reverse-engineered with a profit model and ultimately became iTunes.
No theft, just a lot of hard work, and Bruce Perens shit all over it. He was right in warning us of "trusted clients" (crippled players) but Napster is a shoddy, socio-political rather than techno/legal excuse. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Return the CD to the store under the premise that it "doesn't work." They have to take it back.
I did this with a used copy of the Matrix after discovering the DVD had a spyware installer that was hard to get around. Any non-savvy user watching the Matrix on my computer would end up installing it. They looked at me funny but they took it back. Nobody at the store had tried the DVD on their PC before.
That's not a bad idea. I wrote a similar letter to an op-ed writer who was complaining about her newspaper cutting pensions. Basically I said, "In this day and age, how can you possibly not know how to start your own newspaper?"
Similarly, I heard Howard Dean giving a speech on C-SPAN where he was telling the crowd, "We need you to start organizing, start becoming involved in the political process. Not experts, ordinary people." They were apalled, it was like he had 3 heads.
Creative ideas like yours work in academic circles where there's a critical mass of motivated people. But out in ordinary society (I suppose this means the suburbs) people expect to be coddled because they're putting 90% of their resources towards child-rearing. IMO that's a dangerous way to live. In other words, when you find people who are smart enough to do this travel scheme, you will be so few in number that you will have far easier and more ordinary ways of getting rich instead.
Mmmm thank you, I'm actually impressed by these replies. I think the problem is that nuclear power was never demonstrated to be safe or cost-competitive here in the US and there are a number of worldwide accidents which suggests that the technology itself is a delicate single-point-of-failure.
I don't think US politicians are ready for nuclear power and if that's the greenies fault then they are doing a good job. These are the same pols who can't handle airline security or stand up to rigged elections or fake intelligence on Iraq.
I think the French will be beating us on nuclear power for some time. The French seem to be about $1-2 trillion ahead of us (accounting for our larger population) plus the benefit of knowlege.
Agreed. Why post AC?
In Soviet Russia, You attack bears.
(In soviet russia, parents raise you).
It's all the same. America is a joke in progress.
It would work if it wasn't $20,000/lb or whatever. I don't think radioactive waste will affect us from 93 million miles away.
-The fifth grader in me.
Uranium is not a natural source of energy. It has to be refined first.
Then you have the problem of containment and disposal. Nuclear energy is supported by government subsidies that make oil look like a joke. Get a clue about fission before supporting it. How are you going to prevent a meltdown? How are you going to dispose of the waste?
GE is the art of getting Mac disks to work on Intel machines.
Not very promising. I'm glad you've reconciled GE with yourself, but getting software (DNA) to work on a machine (the organism) without studying it first is an excercise in late-night comedy.
As always, the computer programmers will have the last laugh. And since we are mostly retired, we have plenty of time to laugh at your mistakes.
Gorf on Intellivision was the only reason to put up with my schizophrenic aunt. That, and my blonde cousin and the game AD&D for the same platform.
I am reminded of the person who said, "Baseball is not a sport."
Good point, stamina does not come into play in golf, bowling, or baseball (except pitching). Still, these are valid games. I do enjoy bowling. Last time I bowled, I threw two strikes with a house ball and then started throwing gutterballs just to fit in. Suffice to say I haven't bowled since. Kind of a shame.
$120?????????????????
Thanks, I'll do something that involves girls.
It seems fairly easy to reconstruct the front page of slashdot using regexps and form handling. Not that I've done it, but I've done other things. One of the entry-level tasks for a web firm I worked for was to scan 3 online bookstores for price info about a certain book and table the results. The web is not designed to be regexp-friendly but you can still do amazing things with it.
Probably yeah. I think it's a gyroscopic effect. Thanks for the historical info.