Re:Hmm...Giganews and other services are still the
on
R.I.P Usenet: 1980-2008
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, I was going to ask how much bandwidth is USENET daily? Because everyone seems to have quite a bit of extra disk space, why not do your own USENET server? If EVERYONE did (like everyone used to), then it would be cool again. Other than USENET, there's no good forum syndication. Sure you have RSS and stuff, but it doesn't lend itself to multi-hop groups. Maybe a modern version of NNTP could be built on HTTP/XML? I know there are web-based newsreaders and stuff, but it seems like the problem is actually getting a feed, for free.
Pump an bunch of water, what could possibly go wrong? That might have worked in the middle ages but solar power demands efficient storage. There isn't enough to go around as it is, and you want to burn it moving tons of water? What about the pump's efficiency? What about the friction in the pipes? In the words of Samir Naehninejhad: Tom, this idea, this is horrible.
Surely a frictionless flywheel is the most efficient, currently (no pun intended) viable solution. A number of vendors, such as Beacon Energy have products in service already. No chemicals, no research, no haz-mat crew. Plus if they apply a light vacuum, the efficiency increases! With the new carbon composites they will have these rotating at 100,000rpm+ in the near future, and we will be able to easily and renewably store energy during dark hours.
The most important thing is that we need to CUT BACK on our nighttime power use. The easiest thing would be to simply change the workday for all government employees to sunrise-sunset. It works naturally, because that's when people want to work. And in the winter, people can sleep more, like we were meant to (which lowers heating costs because you're in PJ's and under the covers, and [if you ever get off Slashdot], perhaps snuggling with a Lady). Since most other industries depend on government services to some degree (from post office to the city planning department), they would evenutally fall in sync.
And of course, cutting back in general would be even better. Most of our energy use is cars. So, provide tax incentives to people who live close enough to walk (1 mile) or bike (3 miles) to work each day. Even if you don't walk or bike, you still get the tax incentive if you just choose to live close to work because you are saving lots of gas that way. I predict an even more massive rise in Downtown real estate prices in every city because of this. Not only that, less car-miles means less accidents, and lower insurance payouts. It also means less wear on the roads, meaning less tax expense, so we could spend the same money on something else, like education. People will buy fewer cars, which means less energy is required to produce and ship steel. WHAT ABOUT THE JOBS?! Well, for one thing, we're going to lower the work week 1 hour per day to 35 hours a week. What will you do with all that spare time? WALK!
Most forums today offer some sort of moderation. Plus, I think there's been enough cases of people getting prosecuted in the real world to make everyone a little more toned down. Back in the old days things were a lot more careless. People would regularly make death threats or worse. Later on we also had things like WinNuke when the AOL kiddies started flooding on. Nowadays if you make a threat even in jest you are likely to have the FBI or someone knocking at your door, if you aren't sued. I mean, they're listening to everything so you can pretty safely assume that.
I really think the internet has become much more civil, if anything, since the hundreds of millions of people have started using it. I mean, really. Sure there's the 3-4000 connections to my computer each night by portscanning zombies; there's always a few people making inappropriate comments on slashdot. Hold on, I'm going to go browse at 0 to see how......OH MY FUCKING GOD! I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo, and somebody was giving booze to these goddamn things! Won't be long now before they tear us to shreds. DISREGARD THIS POST, AND BUY CONDOMS! FOR YOUR ENTIRE BODY! WHAT HAVE WE DONE?!?!
That's sort of what I'm talking about. Perhaps not doing actual calculations and stuff. People could contribute in any way they could. Some people might just make a logo for the craft, others might help write some code.
I understand what you're saying; there's a lot of space travel that can't be done by ordinary people, and bringing those extraordinary people together safely is expensive. But there is a vast untapped reserve of undiscovered genius in this country, who don't think they will ever get a chance to change the world, or discover new things outside the planet, and that's a real shame. When there's more interest in basically anesthesizing yourself with drugs than contributing to a better future, it's a sign of a society's failure. History HAS shown that, although I'm not a fan of history. I see this apathy everywhere I go. Maybe I'm crazy but I think people want to be inspired, and for as long as anyone can remember we haven't been. Or if we have, it's about stupid war stuff and not something positive.
It has jumped in price, but that cheese still takes the same (or less) Joules of energy and hours of human time to produce and deliver to your supermarket. And there's no shortage of Joules out there that I can see (i'm burning quite a few on this stupid thread, and these are expensive "Beer-joules"), so someone must be making some money at our expense.
Ok, bad example. What about waiting in the McDonald's drive-thru with your car running?
The hours that barista could have spent bettering humanity instead have been spent receiving a handout from the rich? Is that any less wasteful now that you've clarified there's no waste in the actual product?
Man, this has digressed. NASA is the epitome of this. Except the handout is going to the shareholders of a contractor (a group I might be a member of) and the handout is coming from the taxpayer. But what if we could get the same work that the contractor does for less time and energy, through the power of inspiration? That's ALL I was saying.
Yeah, but you're not thinking about the big picture. The ACTUAL cost to produce the food, house, clothing item, whatever, in energy and time (human time), is lower than ever in history. Because of the free market, the focus has been on efficiency. Tractors pretty much drive themselves nowadays on the big corporate farms. And they use less energy because their engines are more efficient. I can think of a thousand examples. I generalize it into basically robotics. A robot can give you time, in return for energy. Now we are at a point where a robot can do the work with less energy than a comparable human. Because they are efficently turning energy into pure work, not wasting it playing Gears of War or soemthing.
What you're seeing is a temporary disruption in the free market because of lack of confidence in the paper we use to exchange. It doesn't change the fact that it is, physically speaking, cheaper. I understand that prices are higher, but the underlying physical concepts that "money" is just an abstraction of have changed for the better, and will continue to do so every year. It's a great leap to make, I understand, but I'm not a crackpot. I'm a scientist.
That's absolutely false. Starch, in small bulk quantities that are readily available at your local supermarket, is available at no more than 5 cents per ounce, even in today's dollars.
45 grams of rice has approximately 160 calories. 45 grams of rice = 1.59oz or about 8 cents.
A normal human, doing real work, needs about 2000 calories a day. If eating only rice or potatoes or any of the other starch items available at your supermarket for 5c/oz, an American could "get by" with 562.5 grams or 19.84 oz or about $1 per day.
I moved that up to $1.50 to include $.50 worth of beans or other complementing food group (or vitamin supplement) to make a complete meal.
Of course, if you don't move an inch during the day, as most of us, you need far less than 2000 calories to survive. Eat like kings? Ok, maybe not, but survival? Easily. Of course, if you were willing to buy a whole YEAR of rice at once, you could get it substantially cheaper.
Now, every other food in America is made from grain, or it's another vegetable, which you could easily grow yourself. Protein, such as beef, is basically made from corn, but it has a lot of middlemen collecting money so that.05/oz turns into a lot more, because of the cost of land, water, energy to move the cattle, etc. Not to mention the fact that due to the centralized nature of the cattle processing industry a lot of extra energy is wasted so the owners can make more money. In reality, ALL food would be much cheaper if you could grow it all locally.
Obviously that would rid us of some choices, some opportunities to eat rare imported foods, wine, etc. But it would not really affect our quality of life that much. Eating enough is good enough. Everything else is luxury.
I mean, people readily pay $4 for a cup of basically water at Starbucks. Doesn't that bother you? No! Because you're entitled to it, you work hard for your money and should be able to blow $4 meaninglessly. But in mechanical engineering, that's called WASTE.
My example is just a test, really. I'm not proposing anyone change their lives. But I'm saying we waste SO MUCH, and with a proper leader we could put so much of that waste to good use, and barely affect our lives. And the adaptability of the human race is amazing. You would never miss it once you made it a week or two.
I don't really see the "dollar price" of things as being relevant, since it's been drastically diluted by, well, the government printing money. By "Cheap" I'm talking in terms of Time (work hours) and Energy (joules). Money is not a precise way to measure the cheapness of things in real life.
People simply working for a common goal is "Communism"? EVERY great advance in history is a result of people sacrificing for a common goal. Take the Manhattan project, as a for instance. The inspiration, in this case, was a horrible war. Why, if someone mentions the mere possibility of doing something together, NOT because of a war, but because we're HUMANS and WE CAN, it's branded as "communism"? That couldn't be further from the truth. Your mindset is the result of brainwashing by the people who REALLY benefit from the so called free market. There isn't a free market here anymore.
I call for a FREER market, where anyone who is willing or able can contribute, rather than sitting on our thumbs and watching our tax dollars flow into the pockets of the space oligarchy. History only proves what HAS happened, not what can. Free society works because people are rewarded for merit. What I'm saying is that people are discouraged because they are NOT being fairly rewarded for their merit. And a collective success, for all humanity, would be a mental reward, a turning point in human history. For money, yes, but also for everyone's livelyhood.
We sit at a time where the basic necessities in life, WORLD-WIDE are less expensive in time and energy than ever before in history. The reason for this is technology. We HAVE time, especially in America, to spend thinking about the greater goals of humanity because we don't have to spend all of our time worrying about food, shelter, medicine, etc. This is a direct result of the free market, not because we all decided to collectively create a better standard of living. A FEW men, GREAT men, made these things possible through their hard work and ingenuity.
The competing and crawling we are all doing now is simply to make more waste, not produce anything. To get more luxuries that are basically made by robots nowadays. And so people are discouraged. They are not seeing anything INSPIRING anymore.
So there are two ways to go about it. Rally everyone around their fears, their unseen enemies, their negative emotions OR rally everyone around their hopes, dreams of peace for all, their positive emotions. That is not COMMUNISM. That's humanism at it's finest. Capital, human capital, money, rewards for those who succeed; these are all essential to the goals of humankind because you're right--people want to compete. But will it be a friendly game or a war? It seems to me that you have given in to the dark side, and no longer recognize that we--as humans--are all one, stuck on this planet with nowhere to run except together. In the melting pot that is America, there is no greater concept.
So, why don't you stop looking at the past and start looking at the future and stop giving in to your fears (which were probably created by some newspaper anyway)?
Well, large joint missions to space tend to inspire unity in disparate peoples. I think it's great that East and West are working with one another to see the moon again. And I was thinking that we in America really need to rethink our economic system to work when we're all just getting what we need, rather than what we want. Really, even with prices rising, everything is as cheap if not cheaper than it's ever been in history. And not just in America but world-wide. A family of four can eat like kings in America for under $200 a month, which is only 11 percent of their annual income (at the povery line, 20,500).
We could easily go to the moon again. Things cost much less than the estimates when people actually care. That's the thing about the past 30 years, and especially the past decade in America. We all knew that we were going to work and really producing nothing meaningful. Perhaps we might do some sort of creative service, but were we really fulfilling any useful cause? NO! And it was all for selfish reasons. A COLLECTIVE goal, like space travel, inspires people to do more work than what they are paid for. That means more productivity and a lower overall cost for the same work.
In fact, why not OPEN SOURCE the entire lunar thing to colleges and universities, high schools, geeks everywhere. Using version control systems you could allow everyone to put in a patch, and of course it would all be reviewed before anythign was built but why not? The real problem with space travel in America is NASA, because they are so convinced they are the only people who know how to do it. But guess what, it's all old military people mostly (there's some good science, I'm not going to deny that) in the administration, a vestige of the cold war. It's still run like a branch of the military, and the contractors know how to exploit that for maximum profit. What we need is the contractors to ACTUALLY COMPETE, rather than consolidate. We need people to actually care, to bill 10 hours and put in 20, not MILK THE SYSTEM. Actually care about what you're building.
That goes beyond space, to the country itself. It's a radical idea, actually caring. Don't wait for someone else to do it for you. And be persistent.
Well, you're crawling, so you're already getting a list of what people link TO; all you have to do is index that and spit out the reverse: Who links to page x? The interesting thing about Google is the way they made a self-aware machine that basically asks for more hardware and puts it to use. All they need to do is feed it webpages in the form of network connections (and a lot of them are fed to it by webmasters using the webmaster tools). Adwords is the same way. They knew that they only had to get slightly better results than everyone else to make money in advertising online. Online advertising still SUCKS but at least they have a huge index to match ads to.
Every other one of their business models is a variation on either: self-aware computers which expand themselves (a pretty simple idea, really), indexing, and ads.
I don't want to undermine them at all, I think it's a great thing they did, but the thing is, what else will they do? I mean, they hacked the web. Great! But will they turn professional or will they take the money and run the the shit hits the fan? This is all still so new (only 10 years old), there's a lot of rise and fall yet. I'm sure they have more up their sleeves, and hiring the smartest talent was a good move. Now they just need some managers...
Probably the people you saw (or claim to have seen) were what we call 'stronken' which, in English would translate to 'strunk', a combination of stoned and drunken...
I like the idea of just having a transparent layer in the language that wraps around whatever datastore you're using. I like the idea behind LINQ (Language Integrated Query), which is a Microsoft thing in C# 3.0 that basically lets you use SQL type queries on any "Set" of objects, be it a relational database table or tables, flat file or even arrays and data structures. Although it's kindof clunky, it might work for building prototypes because you don't have to worry about the data store, just the types. There is a similar project for Ruby called Ambition which looks pretty cool also.
Now, I know ODBC was supposed to do abstraction to a pretty full level, but to add arrays is the kicker for me. It's not efficient at all, but it make sense from a human perspective. That means it's easier to write code. I know Drupal and a few other CMS systems use a database abstraction layer (sort of), that will translate queries into whatever database you're using. It's not perfect, though. I know I'm always writing tons of functions in PHP to get the SQL the hell offa my page. Prepared statements and procedures are ok for that also. And if I want a lightweight SQL server, there's SQL Lite already!
Anyway, a better use of time would be to bring LINQ to this side of the street. I really think M$FT has something, for once. I mean, I saw a demo where they did a full AJAX app in about 10 minutes, you can run the query, joining a SQL query (adapter) with an array you already had, and maybe union that with an XML file and return the result as, well, you can return ANY data type you can bring in; so you could return a SQL resultset, or an array or XML or JSON or whatever you want. It handles MOST of the fuss for you. You have to do some mapping ahead of time but you can use XSD or a mapping array or a SQL JOIN table......... It's a universal adapter. BRING ONE TO PHP or at least RUBY. Or I could deal with a Python version.
Find a file on a network share (such as with Apple's AFP)
Now try to find a way to copy the file's path (afp://xyx/wwjhs/etc) to the clipboard. Without opening terminal. Without buying a third party app. You can't.
And sending people links to files on a fileshare on the LAN is something office workers do EVERY DAY. Otherwise I have to send a copy, by email. It's hyperlinking, man! We've been doing it for decades.
Whereas the newer versions of Windows are totally going into pure hyperlinking. Sharepoint Services is free with every Windows Server product, and it's quite good. It seamlessly integrates with their Office products. So you have an end to end content creation to publishing solution, which the Mac no longer has. Well, a competing, similarly priced solution.
That's not to say Apple isn't trying to whip something like this up, but I don't see them competing in the business arena at the level of Microsoft anytime soon.
You can add Powershell to vista pretty easily, and strip off most of the junk. But what you really want is to move to 64 bit and Vista 64 is pretty dicey even in SP1. They tend to test the server products more completely before release. So they might have something there. But really, people should be complaining about why Vista isn't good, not moving to the next OS already..
The bottom line is they are basically the same, with different modules. So if you configure 08 with the exact same configuration as Vista, it will run just as crappy.
Personally, I have been forced into using Leopard (Mac OSX) at work for the past two months and I have been very pleased. UNIX is just great. Powershell is a step in the right direction but I'm not too impressed with it. You have to be very very knowledgable about all of the classes to use it effectively. For most tasks I am only needing text anyway, so why add the extra bloat of object piping? The only problem with Mac OSX is the GUI but I can run X and do most of what I want. I mean, I like the Mac GUI, but some of the stuff is frustrating to a power user. And all the addons cost money! It works pretty well for a dev box, with linux test and production servers to back it up. The best part is the huge, beautiful monitor and really really great fonts and typesetting. Nothing on windows comes close.
I have a beta of 2008 rolling around here somewhere that I picked up at the launch event. I also have VS 2008 which I believe is the finest IDE available. Although Eclipse could trump that if they could just move faster. So maybe I'll try this. Most places want you to use windows and I'm getting rusty already.
As of December 13, 2007, the Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
On May 2, 2007, News Corp. made an unsolicited takeover bid for Dow Jones, offering US$60 a share for stock that had been selling for US$33 a share. The Bancroft family, which controls more than 60% of the voting power, at first rejected the offer, but later reconsidered its position.
Three months later, on August 1, 2007, News Corp. and Dow Jones entered into a definitive merger agreement. The controversial US$5 billion sale added The Wall Street Journal to the media tycoon's news empire, which already included Fox News Channel, the New York Post, and London's The Times.
On December 13, 2007, shareholders representing more than 60 percent of Dow Jones's voting stock approved the company's acquisition by News Corp.
So they really are mainstream, insofar as Fox News is mainstream. Brachli has left now for the Washington Post, I daresay the WSJ's days are numbered. I wonder if Rupert has been short selling bank stocks since they are trying to start bank runs by putting "BANK RUN?" at the bottom of their cable news channel.
Judging by the utilities response, there were probably some loopholes in this act they already have plans in motion for. The Bush administration is known for making deals with energy. That's why they were shocked to have the whole thing thrown out. Most likely, the holes came down from the top, and the EPA threw in some licensing requirements at the last minute. They lucked out and got the whole thing thrown out.
There was a lot of selling of coal and natural gas companies on the East Coast in the last few years in anticipation of this act so it probably threw a wrench into the spokes of the alternate plans (nuclear). Most likely Dick Cheney and the nuclear lobby collaborated on this one. You're probably saying, "Dick Cheney?!" Well, yes. Wyoming is home to the largest deposits of uranium around. He's worked at power and energy companies for all his life. The act alone would I'm sure fuel some speculation in the Uranium markets, of which he and his family are major players.
The 15 year uranium chart clearly shows this amazing run up culminating in the sell off (in late 2007). I don't think we will be hearing from any of these guys for another 10 years, because they have just pulled the biggest scam in the history of America, they have ALL the money now (and just to make sure they printed a lot of extra and gave it to themselves). Oh, and they all moved to Dubai (Halliburton is now headquartered in Dubai, and deals equally with Euros and trades on the Dubai exchange).
The thing is a president has to be presidential. The job is to lead and basically tell the bureaucracy what to do. Making choices that single one group over another is not presidential. The president's job is to lobby congress for laws, and run the executive branch. Just like the president of the company you work for, he doesn't worry about the little stuff.
The thing is, we have a case where a president is blatantly favoring his, his vice-president's, and his father's buddies. At least Clinton kept it under wraps. But this is what happens in this country, and why we replace the president every 4-8 years. It's amazing we can move the head guy that often and still be so stable politically.
This graph should illustrate the point. Baby boomers are of course, the TV generation. They were there when it all started. Frankly, there are just so many of them compared to us (over 80 million, I believe), they skew the results of everything. And they always have.
We will be paying for these people's meals in the next 20 years. I hope you're ready to work long hours for not much of anything because that's the reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was going to ask how much bandwidth is USENET daily? Because everyone seems to have quite a bit of extra disk space, why not do your own USENET server? If EVERYONE did (like everyone used to), then it would be cool again. Other than USENET, there's no good forum syndication. Sure you have RSS and stuff, but it doesn't lend itself to multi-hop groups. Maybe a modern version of NNTP could be built on HTTP/XML? I know there are web-based newsreaders and stuff, but it seems like the problem is actually getting a feed, for free.
Pump an bunch of water, what could possibly go wrong? That might have worked in the middle ages but solar power demands efficient storage. There isn't enough to go around as it is, and you want to burn it moving tons of water? What about the pump's efficiency? What about the friction in the pipes? In the words of Samir Naehninejhad: Tom, this idea, this is horrible.
Surely a frictionless flywheel is the most efficient, currently (no pun intended) viable solution. A number of vendors, such as Beacon Energy have products in service already. No chemicals, no research, no haz-mat crew. Plus if they apply a light vacuum, the efficiency increases! With the new carbon composites they will have these rotating at 100,000rpm+ in the near future, and we will be able to easily and renewably store energy during dark hours.
The most important thing is that we need to CUT BACK on our nighttime power use. The easiest thing would be to simply change the workday for all government employees to sunrise-sunset. It works naturally, because that's when people want to work. And in the winter, people can sleep more, like we were meant to (which lowers heating costs because you're in PJ's and under the covers, and [if you ever get off Slashdot], perhaps snuggling with a Lady). Since most other industries depend on government services to some degree (from post office to the city planning department), they would evenutally fall in sync.
And of course, cutting back in general would be even better. Most of our energy use is cars. So, provide tax incentives to people who live close enough to walk (1 mile) or bike (3 miles) to work each day. Even if you don't walk or bike, you still get the tax incentive if you just choose to live close to work because you are saving lots of gas that way. I predict an even more massive rise in Downtown real estate prices in every city because of this. Not only that, less car-miles means less accidents, and lower insurance payouts. It also means less wear on the roads, meaning less tax expense, so we could spend the same money on something else, like education. People will buy fewer cars, which means less energy is required to produce and ship steel. WHAT ABOUT THE JOBS?! Well, for one thing, we're going to lower the work week 1 hour per day to 35 hours a week. What will you do with all that spare time? WALK!
Most forums today offer some sort of moderation. Plus, I think there's been enough cases of people getting prosecuted in the real world to make everyone a little more toned down. Back in the old days things were a lot more careless. People would regularly make death threats or worse. Later on we also had things like WinNuke when the AOL kiddies started flooding on. Nowadays if you make a threat even in jest you are likely to have the FBI or someone knocking at your door, if you aren't sued. I mean, they're listening to everything so you can pretty safely assume that.
I really think the internet has become much more civil, if anything, since the hundreds of millions of people have started using it. I mean, really. Sure there's the 3-4000 connections to my computer each night by portscanning zombies; there's always a few people making inappropriate comments on slashdot. Hold on, I'm going to go browse at 0 to see how... ...OH MY FUCKING GOD! I was right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo, and somebody was giving booze to these goddamn things! Won't be long now before they tear us to shreds. DISREGARD THIS POST, AND BUY CONDOMS! FOR YOUR ENTIRE BODY! WHAT HAVE WE DONE?!?!
That's sort of what I'm talking about. Perhaps not doing actual calculations and stuff. People could contribute in any way they could. Some people might just make a logo for the craft, others might help write some code.
I understand what you're saying; there's a lot of space travel that can't be done by ordinary people, and bringing those extraordinary people together safely is expensive. But there is a vast untapped reserve of undiscovered genius in this country, who don't think they will ever get a chance to change the world, or discover new things outside the planet, and that's a real shame. When there's more interest in basically anesthesizing yourself with drugs than contributing to a better future, it's a sign of a society's failure. History HAS shown that, although I'm not a fan of history. I see this apathy everywhere I go. Maybe I'm crazy but I think people want to be inspired, and for as long as anyone can remember we haven't been. Or if we have, it's about stupid war stuff and not something positive.
It has jumped in price, but that cheese still takes the same (or less) Joules of energy and hours of human time to produce and deliver to your supermarket. And there's no shortage of Joules out there that I can see (i'm burning quite a few on this stupid thread, and these are expensive "Beer-joules"), so someone must be making some money at our expense.
Ok, bad example. What about waiting in the McDonald's drive-thru with your car running?
The hours that barista could have spent bettering humanity instead have been spent receiving a handout from the rich? Is that any less wasteful now that you've clarified there's no waste in the actual product?
Man, this has digressed. NASA is the epitome of this. Except the handout is going to the shareholders of a contractor (a group I might be a member of) and the handout is coming from the taxpayer. But what if we could get the same work that the contractor does for less time and energy, through the power of inspiration? That's ALL I was saying.
Yeah, but you're not thinking about the big picture. The ACTUAL cost to produce the food, house, clothing item, whatever, in energy and time (human time), is lower than ever in history. Because of the free market, the focus has been on efficiency. Tractors pretty much drive themselves nowadays on the big corporate farms. And they use less energy because their engines are more efficient. I can think of a thousand examples. I generalize it into basically robotics. A robot can give you time, in return for energy. Now we are at a point where a robot can do the work with less energy than a comparable human. Because they are efficently turning energy into pure work, not wasting it playing Gears of War or soemthing.
What you're seeing is a temporary disruption in the free market because of lack of confidence in the paper we use to exchange. It doesn't change the fact that it is, physically speaking, cheaper. I understand that prices are higher, but the underlying physical concepts that "money" is just an abstraction of have changed for the better, and will continue to do so every year. It's a great leap to make, I understand, but I'm not a crackpot. I'm a scientist.
That's absolutely false. Starch, in small bulk quantities that are readily available at your local supermarket, is available at no more than 5 cents per ounce, even in today's dollars.
45 grams of rice has approximately 160 calories.
45 grams of rice = 1.59oz or about 8 cents.
A normal human, doing real work, needs about 2000 calories a day. If eating only rice or potatoes or any of the other starch items available at your supermarket for 5c/oz, an American could "get by" with 562.5 grams or 19.84 oz or about $1 per day.
I moved that up to $1.50 to include $.50 worth of beans or other complementing food group (or vitamin supplement) to make a complete meal.
Of course, if you don't move an inch during the day, as most of us, you need far less than 2000 calories to survive. Eat like kings? Ok, maybe not, but survival? Easily. Of course, if you were willing to buy a whole YEAR of rice at once, you could get it substantially cheaper.
Now, every other food in America is made from grain, or it's another vegetable, which you could easily grow yourself. Protein, such as beef, is basically made from corn, but it has a lot of middlemen collecting money so that .05/oz turns into a lot more, because of the cost of land, water, energy to move the cattle, etc. Not to mention the fact that due to the centralized nature of the cattle processing industry a lot of extra energy is wasted so the owners can make more money. In reality, ALL food would be much cheaper if you could grow it all locally.
Obviously that would rid us of some choices, some opportunities to eat rare imported foods, wine, etc. But it would not really affect our quality of life that much. Eating enough is good enough. Everything else is luxury.
I mean, people readily pay $4 for a cup of basically water at Starbucks. Doesn't that bother you? No! Because you're entitled to it, you work hard for your money and should be able to blow $4 meaninglessly. But in mechanical engineering, that's called WASTE.
My example is just a test, really. I'm not proposing anyone change their lives. But I'm saying we waste SO MUCH, and with a proper leader we could put so much of that waste to good use, and barely affect our lives. And the adaptability of the human race is amazing. You would never miss it once you made it a week or two.
I don't really see the "dollar price" of things as being relevant, since it's been drastically diluted by, well, the government printing money. By "Cheap" I'm talking in terms of Time (work hours) and Energy (joules). Money is not a precise way to measure the cheapness of things in real life.
People simply working for a common goal is "Communism"? EVERY great advance in history is a result of people sacrificing for a common goal. Take the Manhattan project, as a for instance. The inspiration, in this case, was a horrible war. Why, if someone mentions the mere possibility of doing something together, NOT because of a war, but because we're HUMANS and WE CAN, it's branded as "communism"? That couldn't be further from the truth. Your mindset is the result of brainwashing by the people who REALLY benefit from the so called free market. There isn't a free market here anymore.
I call for a FREER market, where anyone who is willing or able can contribute, rather than sitting on our thumbs and watching our tax dollars flow into the pockets of the space oligarchy. History only proves what HAS happened, not what can. Free society works because people are rewarded for merit. What I'm saying is that people are discouraged because they are NOT being fairly rewarded for their merit. And a collective success, for all humanity, would be a mental reward, a turning point in human history. For money, yes, but also for everyone's livelyhood.
We sit at a time where the basic necessities in life, WORLD-WIDE are less expensive in time and energy than ever before in history. The reason for this is technology. We HAVE time, especially in America, to spend thinking about the greater goals of humanity because we don't have to spend all of our time worrying about food, shelter, medicine, etc. This is a direct result of the free market, not because we all decided to collectively create a better standard of living. A FEW men, GREAT men, made these things possible through their hard work and ingenuity.
The competing and crawling we are all doing now is simply to make more waste, not produce anything. To get more luxuries that are basically made by robots nowadays. And so people are discouraged. They are not seeing anything INSPIRING anymore.
So there are two ways to go about it. Rally everyone around their fears, their unseen enemies, their negative emotions OR rally everyone around their hopes, dreams of peace for all, their positive emotions. That is not COMMUNISM. That's humanism at it's finest. Capital, human capital, money, rewards for those who succeed; these are all essential to the goals of humankind because you're right--people want to compete. But will it be a friendly game or a war? It seems to me that you have given in to the dark side, and no longer recognize that we--as humans--are all one, stuck on this planet with nowhere to run except together. In the melting pot that is America, there is no greater concept.
So, why don't you stop looking at the past and start looking at the future and stop giving in to your fears (which were probably created by some newspaper anyway)?
Well, large joint missions to space tend to inspire unity in disparate peoples. I think it's great that East and West are working with one another to see the moon again. And I was thinking that we in America really need to rethink our economic system to work when we're all just getting what we need, rather than what we want. Really, even with prices rising, everything is as cheap if not cheaper than it's ever been in history. And not just in America but world-wide. A family of four can eat like kings in America for under $200 a month, which is only 11 percent of their annual income (at the povery line, 20,500).
We could easily go to the moon again. Things cost much less than the estimates when people actually care. That's the thing about the past 30 years, and especially the past decade in America. We all knew that we were going to work and really producing nothing meaningful. Perhaps we might do some sort of creative service, but were we really fulfilling any useful cause? NO! And it was all for selfish reasons. A COLLECTIVE goal, like space travel, inspires people to do more work than what they are paid for. That means more productivity and a lower overall cost for the same work.
In fact, why not OPEN SOURCE the entire lunar thing to colleges and universities, high schools, geeks everywhere. Using version control systems you could allow everyone to put in a patch, and of course it would all be reviewed before anythign was built but why not? The real problem with space travel in America is NASA, because they are so convinced they are the only people who know how to do it. But guess what, it's all old military people mostly (there's some good science, I'm not going to deny that) in the administration, a vestige of the cold war. It's still run like a branch of the military, and the contractors know how to exploit that for maximum profit. What we need is the contractors to ACTUALLY COMPETE, rather than consolidate. We need people to actually care, to bill 10 hours and put in 20, not MILK THE SYSTEM. Actually care about what you're building.
That goes beyond space, to the country itself. It's a radical idea, actually caring. Don't wait for someone else to do it for you. And be persistent.
Well, you're crawling, so you're already getting a list of what people link TO; all you have to do is index that and spit out the reverse: Who links to page x? The interesting thing about Google is the way they made a self-aware machine that basically asks for more hardware and puts it to use. All they need to do is feed it webpages in the form of network connections (and a lot of them are fed to it by webmasters using the webmaster tools). Adwords is the same way. They knew that they only had to get slightly better results than everyone else to make money in advertising online. Online advertising still SUCKS but at least they have a huge index to match ads to.
Every other one of their business models is a variation on either: self-aware computers which expand themselves (a pretty simple idea, really), indexing, and ads.
I don't want to undermine them at all, I think it's a great thing they did, but the thing is, what else will they do? I mean, they hacked the web. Great! But will they turn professional or will they take the money and run the the shit hits the fan? This is all still so new (only 10 years old), there's a lot of rise and fall yet. I'm sure they have more up their sleeves, and hiring the smartest talent was a good move. Now they just need some managers...
Probably the people you saw (or claim to have seen) were what we call 'stronken' which, in English would translate to 'strunk', a combination of stoned and drunken...
Oh! You mean DRONED!
I like the idea of just having a transparent layer in the language that wraps around whatever datastore you're using. I like the idea behind LINQ (Language Integrated Query), which is a Microsoft thing in C# 3.0 that basically lets you use SQL type queries on any "Set" of objects, be it a relational database table or tables, flat file or even arrays and data structures. Although it's kindof clunky, it might work for building prototypes because you don't have to worry about the data store, just the types. There is a similar project for Ruby called Ambition which looks pretty cool also.
Now, I know ODBC was supposed to do abstraction to a pretty full level, but to add arrays is the kicker for me. It's not efficient at all, but it make sense from a human perspective. That means it's easier to write code. I know Drupal and a few other CMS systems use a database abstraction layer (sort of), that will translate queries into whatever database you're using. It's not perfect, though. I know I'm always writing tons of functions in PHP to get the SQL the hell offa my page. Prepared statements and procedures are ok for that also. And if I want a lightweight SQL server, there's SQL Lite already!
Anyway, a better use of time would be to bring LINQ to this side of the street. I really think M$FT has something, for once. I mean, I saw a demo where they did a full AJAX app in about 10 minutes, you can run the query, joining a SQL query (adapter) with an array you already had, and maybe union that with an XML file and return the result as, well, you can return ANY data type you can bring in; so you could return a SQL resultset, or an array or XML or JSON or whatever you want. It handles MOST of the fuss for you. You have to do some mapping ahead of time but you can use XSD or a mapping array or a SQL JOIN table......... It's a universal adapter. BRING ONE TO PHP or at least RUBY. Or I could deal with a Python version.
It's a neat idea, but only if it's absolutely perfect. And is -anything- perfect?
And the article said this was GENERAL MOTORS so I think we know the answer to your question...
Anytime your boss has his own police force, it's possible to be hit with this type of retailiation.
Yeah, but there's no evidence! What are they going to do, bring the router to the courtroom?
Find a file on a network share (such as with Apple's AFP)
Now try to find a way to copy the file's path (afp://xyx/wwjhs/etc) to the clipboard. Without opening terminal. Without buying a third party app. You can't.
And sending people links to files on a fileshare on the LAN is something office workers do EVERY DAY. Otherwise I have to send a copy, by email. It's hyperlinking, man! We've been doing it for decades.
Whereas the newer versions of Windows are totally going into pure hyperlinking. Sharepoint Services is free with every Windows Server product, and it's quite good. It seamlessly integrates with their Office products. So you have an end to end content creation to publishing solution, which the Mac no longer has. Well, a competing, similarly priced solution.
That's not to say Apple isn't trying to whip something like this up, but I don't see them competing in the business arena at the level of Microsoft anytime soon.
You can add Powershell to vista pretty easily, and strip off most of the junk. But what you really want is to move to 64 bit and Vista 64 is pretty dicey even in SP1. They tend to test the server products more completely before release. So they might have something there. But really, people should be complaining about why Vista isn't good, not moving to the next OS already..
The bottom line is they are basically the same, with different modules. So if you configure 08 with the exact same configuration as Vista, it will run just as crappy.
Personally, I have been forced into using Leopard (Mac OSX) at work for the past two months and I have been very pleased. UNIX is just great. Powershell is a step in the right direction but I'm not too impressed with it. You have to be very very knowledgable about all of the classes to use it effectively. For most tasks I am only needing text anyway, so why add the extra bloat of object piping? The only problem with Mac OSX is the GUI but I can run X and do most of what I want. I mean, I like the Mac GUI, but some of the stuff is frustrating to a power user. And all the addons cost money! It works pretty well for a dev box, with linux test and production servers to back it up. The best part is the huge, beautiful monitor and really really great fonts and typesetting. Nothing on windows comes close.
I have a beta of 2008 rolling around here somewhere that I picked up at the launch event. I also have VS 2008 which I believe is the finest IDE available. Although Eclipse could trump that if they could just move faster. So maybe I'll try this. Most places want you to use windows and I'm getting rusty already.
Did you know there are more people employed in government jobs than in Manufacturing in the US?
Actually, it's interesting you should mention that, since the same company that owns Fox News owns it now:
From the WSJ wikipedia entry:
As of December 13, 2007, the Wall Street Journal is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
On May 2, 2007, News Corp. made an unsolicited takeover bid for Dow Jones, offering US$60 a share for stock that had been selling for US$33 a share. The Bancroft family, which controls more than 60% of the voting power, at first rejected the offer, but later reconsidered its position.
Three months later, on August 1, 2007, News Corp. and Dow Jones entered into a definitive merger agreement. The controversial US$5 billion sale added The Wall Street Journal to the media tycoon's news empire, which already included Fox News Channel, the New York Post, and London's The Times.
On December 13, 2007, shareholders representing more than 60 percent of Dow Jones's voting stock approved the company's acquisition by News Corp.
So they really are mainstream, insofar as Fox News is mainstream. Brachli has left now for the Washington Post, I daresay the WSJ's days are numbered. I wonder if Rupert has been short selling bank stocks since they are trying to start bank runs by putting "BANK RUN?" at the bottom of their cable news channel.
Judging by the utilities response, there were probably some loopholes in this act they already have plans in motion for. The Bush administration is known for making deals with energy. That's why they were shocked to have the whole thing thrown out. Most likely, the holes came down from the top, and the EPA threw in some licensing requirements at the last minute. They lucked out and got the whole thing thrown out.
There was a lot of selling of coal and natural gas companies on the East Coast in the last few years in anticipation of this act so it probably threw a wrench into the spokes of the alternate plans (nuclear). Most likely Dick Cheney and the nuclear lobby collaborated on this one. You're probably saying, "Dick Cheney?!" Well, yes. Wyoming is home to the largest deposits of uranium around. He's worked at power and energy companies for all his life. The act alone would I'm sure fuel some speculation in the Uranium markets, of which he and his family are major players.
The 15 year uranium chart clearly shows this amazing run up culminating in the sell off (in late 2007). I don't think we will be hearing from any of these guys for another 10 years, because they have just pulled the biggest scam in the history of America, they have ALL the money now (and just to make sure they printed a lot of extra and gave it to themselves). Oh, and they all moved to Dubai (Halliburton is now headquartered in Dubai, and deals equally with Euros and trades on the Dubai exchange).
The thing is a president has to be presidential. The job is to lead and basically tell the bureaucracy what to do. Making choices that single one group over another is not presidential. The president's job is to lobby congress for laws, and run the executive branch. Just like the president of the company you work for, he doesn't worry about the little stuff.
The thing is, we have a case where a president is blatantly favoring his, his vice-president's, and his father's buddies. At least Clinton kept it under wraps. But this is what happens in this country, and why we replace the president every 4-8 years. It's amazing we can move the head guy that often and still be so stable politically.
I called my senator and used the script on the EFF site. That's about all I can do right now.
This graph should illustrate the point. Baby boomers are of course, the TV generation. They were there when it all started. Frankly, there are just so many of them compared to us (over 80 million, I believe), they skew the results of everything. And they always have.
We will be paying for these people's meals in the next 20 years. I hope you're ready to work long hours for not much of anything because that's the reality.