One thing people don't tend to understand about how another wireless provider stacks up with another is that their all pretty much the same.
I live in southern PA, and here AT&T has fantastic coverage compared to the competition. However, perhaps in your area AT&T's coverage sucks compared to Verizon or T-mobile. It all depends on where you live, where you travel, and what provider has the best coverage for the areas your going to be in.
I traveled from as far north as Pittsburgh PA, to Myrtle Beach, SC. I never lost service in my home area (southern PA), or while traveling beteween those places.
However! i did lose coverage momentarily on a strech of road in my town, and i always lose it there. Not only that, but the radio stations fuzz out on that road too. The only thing i can think of is that the road goes through two relitively large hills, maybe that's why?
In any case, when I purchased my phone/plan in august, i was well prepared. I asked people in my home area what provider they had and how well their service/support was. I checked the coverage maps of all the major wireless carriers, and i even called each major provider's support line 3 (times per carrier) and averaged out the wait times to see who was the clearly the most responsive. (did it at 6pm, peak time) In the end i then compared rates and options. Who charges what for what features etc, and checked to see who had the features i wanted for the best price.
I know this sounds like a crap-load of work, but the homework i did paid off in spades. If you do you're part in checking this type of stuff out beforehand, the contract you sign won't come back and haunt you when you drop calls repeatedly or get crappy customer service. The more checking out you do, the better off you'll be, trust me:)
My friend and I are co-owners of a PC repair/local dialup ISP/wireless store. We're in the process of getting set up to be an authorized AT&T wireless reseller.
At first, I thought this number portability thing was instantanious throughout the country. (I assumed wrong I guess) But according to Dave, the AT&T representive who came down to give us the paperwork and crash-course said that our local market won't be affected until MAY of NEXT YEAR.
I'm assuming for the moment that the number portability is happening in the large cities, and then it'll trickle down to the smaller cities and towns. (Must look this stuff up)
What sucks the most is we're near the PA-MD border,(on the PA side) and thus we serve 2 different markets because of our store's location. I believe Baltimore's (and surrounding locations) transition into number portability has happened already. But We're already getting tons of people coming in from our home market (southern PA) who want to take advantage of AT&T's current deals, and they want to carry their existing phone number with them. There's also a few who want to transfer they're hardline home numbers to their cellphones. They get really pissed off when i'm forced to tell them that it won't happen for our area until the beginning of May in 2004.
All in all, this crap isn't going to be easy and i can see it's already going to be a pain in the ass. I haven't shopped for a new phone lately, but i'm willing to wager it's not going to be smooth sailing getting my number transferred.
A penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
The bigger they are (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc) the harder they're hit with brute force tactics. Two of which are very large ISPs, it makes total sense to me that spammers would see this as a goldmine, a huge cache of users. As with goldmines, it takes more work to get the goods out, but it's well worth it to their profit margins.
I've had a weird instance with email going out my mail client (Outlook, but I switched to Mozilla Mail now) without knowing it. Here's the story:
1. Just opened up outlook and looked in the "sent" folder to re-read an email i sent to a friend.
2. I find 4-5 emails that were mailed to addresses I never heard of, with the messages saying something to the effect of: "please remove me from your mailing list." (The messages were all identical to each other).
3. This has only happened twice, and then stopped. I haven't found any more suspicious sent email in my "sent" folder.
FYI: This is a personal computer, no one else uses it but me.
Now, i don't send alot of email, and when I do I know who i sent it to. I also know not to write emails back to spammers even with a "remove from list" message enclosed, because it just sends the spammers the signal that my email account exists and is active, which results in even more spam. (so i've heard at least)
Any idea what caused this?
I've also heard that the main reasons one gets an email trojan is by clicking on a link in a email, or downloading/running an email attachment.
I also know about "drive-by downloading" that happens while visiting websites. The next thing you know you got spyware coming out the ass because of this. (and of course certian programs sneakily install them as well.)
My second question is, could it be possible for a website to install this trojan on your computer without you knowing it? I mean, they do it with spyware, I don't see why they couldn't do this with email trojans as well.
Hell. It's possible that the `trojan' installed merely pulls images off of Usenet and saves them to the hard disk for the attacker to collect later, and it just happened that somebody had posted some kiddie porn to Usenet so this program captured it -- so there's six thousand `normal porn' images, and three `kiddie porn' images on the disk. Who knows?
That could quite possibly be the case. The more porn volume on your HDD, the more chances you could have 2-3+ `kiddie porn' pictures on you're system as well.
Authorities aren't lax on what they deem `kiddie porn' either. Didn't one of those child porn laws also include computer-rendered pictures of kids doing some sexual acts? Not only that but I've also heard that some pictures parents take (little girls all dolled up, bathtub pictures) could be grounds for violation of that law as well.
But you're right with that, there's probably more then meets the eye there.
Not that i'm arguing with your post, but just imagine for a moment with me.
Tom and Sarah go to their local GM place. They want a baby. So the doctors take a sperm, they take an egg, and give the couple a menu of all the GM enhancements currently available. Now, following the general rules of capitialism, each one of the enhancements would probably be priced different. Sort of like car parts. An engine (the "smart" gene") would probably be priced higher, then say, something cosmetic, like a new paint job (different color hair/eyes/skin).
Or it could come in the form of each enhancement being sold seperately, or perhaps, "package deals". Such as cosmetic changes along with strength enhancements for example.
In any case, I agree with your point that everyone's idea of what is "good" is different, and as a result we're likely to see different kids with different GM enhancements. However, money will probably be the chief limiting factor of not "getting everything on the menu". It'd probably be too expensive. Since everyone's income levels and willingness to spend varies, so will their childrens GM enhancements.
Probably the wealthy will be the only ones who will be able to afford all of of the enhancements at first, until new enhancements come out, which in theory drops the prices of the already existing ones. But GM is more along the lines of pharmaceutical and medical fields, so...that pricing scheme probably won't work really well.
Personally, ordering a "child" like you'd order a Subway Sub just gives me the feeling of "wrong" for some reason. Now, i understand if the parients have a genetic disease that they don't want to pass on to their children, or want to make their child more immune to diseases from the get go. There's nothing wrong with that, it's genetic medicine/vaccinations really.
Some would argue that the human genome is sacred, while others see it as fair game. I see it as a codebase in which scientists can use their GM skills to remove the "bugs" (disease, etc) and make us all more robust as a result.
But to use this kind of technology for the sheer pleasure of picking your child's hair color, or how strong/smart/artistic/etc you want him/her to be is just wrong to me. The kid isn't a customizable product, it's a human being, and as such, he/she should be allowed to make it's own decision of what he/she wants when they are able to.
What's the point of a child having a "smart gene" if the child isn't brought up in a good home? Or if the child has other interests instead of going to college and getting doctorate degree?
Just because that child has the "traits" in his/her genes, doesn't necessarly mean that those traits will be used by the child to their fullest extent or in the ways that you want the child to use them. I mean, for all we know, smart-gene kids could grow up into cunning criminals.:)
In the end, I personally would use the technology available to make sure that my child is as healthly and as disease-resistent as possible and that's it. Anything more wouldn't really be worth it to me under the circumstances above.
People were, at points in history, adults when they turn thirteen or fourteen.
I totally agree. You could definately write a whole book with research on that subject alone. I'm just curious how the hell did we get to where we are now from back then. *shrugs*
I'm not basing my reality on one TV network, I do realize that without the association made to video games and wrestling (or what have you) that his particular story would be just ordinary and probably not covered anywhere else except perhaps his local community.
This kid is on Court TV because kids aren't that impressionable. This child was uniquely fucked up and committed a relatively unique crime because he was so uniquely fucked up, and that is what makes him interesting enough to get Court TV...
A lot of kids have idols, people they look up to because they think their cool. A few impersonate their idols, and try to do what they do. That's a common thing for kids to do period. Yes, most kids don't go this far, like the boy did. That doesn't mean he's fucked up, it means he was confused.
What makes this kid unique is that his parents let him (a 12 year old) babysit a toddler by himself. Both parents were often out and he was by himself a great deal of the time. That and he was a rabid fan of pro-wresling and video games. He killed his cousin with a pro-wrestling manuever. I'm sure he didn't mean to kill him, but what do you expect when you see guys on TV smacking each other down and leave the ring exactly like they did when they first started to fight? The boy expected his cousin to not be hurt.
If that kid knew that he could seriously injure or kill his baby cousin, would he still do it? I highly doubt it.
I don't blame the media, video games or music. However, as with anything, they do have the inherent power to be influential. When you're exposed to these things without having learned a good sense of right and wrong *first*, you're bound to get confused on the finer points and make mistakes.
With wrestling, it's easy for kids to take it as face value: It's real. They don't see those guys in the hospital later on because of injuries, they don't see a wrestler going through intense amount of pain because they didn't fall the way the should have. They don't realize that it's carefully choreographed and the person who's doing the move has to do it convincingly, and the guy on the recieving end has to fall in such a way to prevent injury.
Look at the way glamor magizines do to the self-esteem of a young girl. All they do is glamorize what people precieve as beautiful. This just leaves the impression on a young girl's mind that something must be wrong with them becuase they don't look like the women they see in the pictures.
This type of influence is everywhere. It should be the job of the parents to talk to their children about these things, *before* the child develops their own assumptions which could very well be wrong. I don't know about you, but i wouldn't want my daughter to grow up with a piss poor self-esteem and feeling lonely and unworthy because of some glamor magazines or the pretty women splattered all over MTV. She may turn out that way, or, she may just turn out okay despite those influances. But in either case, I'd want to be there while she's flipping though the magazines in disgust, or watching the models on tv and wishing she was like them, and let her know it is okay to look the way you do, bacuase you are unique, and that makes you special.
Kids are impressionable to varying degrees. Because of this, it'd the job of every parent to make sure they help their children know right from wrong, and to develop a blanced way of looking at the world around them. It's old advice but it's good. All you can do is try the very best you can as much as possible, and hope that it was enough.
Just recently I watched a show on Court TV about a 12 year old killing his baby cousin (one or two years old) using a WWF wrestling move. He was left to babysit his cousin alone as well. The show also talked about video game violence in brief, basically saying that it's on of the mediums that kids may want to immitate in real life.
The question that comes to my mind is: Are video games/wrestling/media/etc causing the violence, or are the kids?
Well, that's a no-brainer, kids are committing the acts. I've known many young boys who really look up to WWF wrestlers and immitate violent acts such as those in video games. Not because they want to hurt anybody, but because they want to immitate their idols and what they see. With wresling, the see a guy get a beatdown, and magically get back up, and after the show is over, they walk out of the ring unscathed. With video games, I think it's the player's interaction, coupled with the glamorization of violence that would make some kids want to try it out in real life.
Kids *are* impressionable like that. Which on one hand makes this topic understandable. But what is the media in general supposed to do about it? Make everything sugar-coated and soft for the sake of preventing some deaths? Should the world go on a censor-spree because one kid may pick up a gun and decide to go on a killing spree while exclaiming "I'll bury you in a lunckbox!"?
Every parent wants to blame video games, the gun manufacters, the internet, movies, you name it. It's easier to pass the buck then it is to accept the responsibilty. Oh parents are taking responsibility because they banded together and got a bill passed in to law? How exactly does that help?
"Because just as parents don't want retailers to sell beer or wine to their children or tobacco to our children because it's bad for them, they're saying 'Help us. Don't make this stuff available to our kids.' Parents absolutely do need to take responsibility, but in society today, you and I both know that it's pretty easy for kids to go next door and get hold of something that parents won't allow them to have."
This is understadable as well. Retailers shouldn't be selling alcohol or tobacco to minors, just as gun manufacters shouldn't be selling guns to minors. There are laws to prevent that, and they do help the problem. However, these are things that directly harm children. With video games and the media, they're more passive, so the direct link isn't as clear.
In any case, there's something about American parents not wanting to take responsibility for their children. You shouldn't leave a 2 year old in the care of a 12 year old, period. Or if your child gets a hold of your gun and kills someone, who's at fault, you or the kid?
Most of these cases are directly linked to the parents inability or laziness. It's true, parents can't keep an eye on their kids 24/7, but they can take steps and get more involved in their kids lives. "Let me read the box on that video game", or "what are you watching on tv?" Just don't leave them to do whatever they want. Spend time with them and what they're doing, be their moral conscious and guide while their playing that video game, or cheering their favorite wrestler on.
The more you get involved with what you're kids do, the more you can instill in them what is acceptable in real life, and what is not.
Just to be fair about this, It was said by either Rumsfield or Bush, not sure which, that the quote "the war would be one of days and weeks, not months and years." was taken directy from his mouth. I heard it as well. As far as liberation is concerned that's another thing i'd like to bring to the table.
The premise for this war was to rid Iraq and Saddam Hussain of weapons of mass distruction. Since the U.N. couldn't seem to "resolve" the crisis at hand, the U.S. decided that it'd do it by force. If liberation and a new Iraqi government was stated in the early stages of this ordeal, it was a card that was seriously underplayed by the administration. But soon after the war started, and it got it's name: "Iraqi Freedom". That's when the story seemed to have changed. It's about Iraqi freedom now. If the U.S wanted to simply enforce U.N. resolution 1441 or any other resolution against iraq, the war could be considered by many to be a legal course of action.
But it's way more than that. It's about removing Saddam Hussain and his regime, and building up a more friendlier pro-american, pro-deomocracy government. There's nothing in the U.N resolutions that said that would be a consequence if Iraq didn't comply with it's U.N. obligations.
I don't mean to sound callous or unsympathetic to the iraqi people, but i'm looking at this from a technical stand point. If your going to go to war for something, like disarming Iraq, then go and do it. But don't tear up a country and rebuild it in your image while your at it. No wonder it sends the message it does to arab people. It's arrogent.
Yes I hate Saddam as much as any other person, and yes i am an American. Yes, getting rid of Saddam and his regime would help the iraqi people. But that wasn't part of the plan. The plan was to get rid of Iraq's WMD. It was something everyone in the U.N. agreed to. Now if the U.S. was in Iraq to simply *remove* those WMD, then people like France, and all the other countries who oppose the war, could live with the use of force to reach their agreed consensus: Iraq must be disarmed.
I support our troops reguardless, as well as the British troops and Aussies. It's the administration that i'm concerned about, and I cannot stress this point enough.
I remember when i got my first digital camera, an HP 215 and came with a 4mb CF card. It introduced me to flash memory from the get go as a "digital film" medium.
I also write a fair amount documents myself. I used to put them in a folder on my hard drive because there's a lot of space there to begin with, and I don't really have a need to transport my docs anywhere other than at home. If you upgrade regularly or do a lot of "house cleaning" on your HDD, (as in remove junk stuff you don't need anymore), or if you move files around a lot on your computer, or partition..things start to disappear over time.
My biggest problem was moving files around trying to organize them, and saving documents in different locations on my hard drive. I wound up forgetting where i put certian docs. When i clean up my HDD and remove stuff i don't need anymore, I wound up deleting some documents I wish I still had.
This is where CompactFlash came in for me. I was never a fan of floppy disks to begin with because the data capacity is so small by today's standards. That, and their really horrible with holding data for a extended period of time. Bad sectors are a royal nightmare if you store anything of value on a floppy.
So i got myself a 64meg CF card, a PCMCIA card reader, and a USB card reader, and it's a true lifesaver and a great replacement for floppies. The pendrives are awesome for portability and transporting things from PC to PC, I plan to get one of those as well.
I was never a fan of zip disks etc, either. It's still the same basic idea of a floppy only more modernized. It's not solid-state, and aren't nearly as reliable as other mediums.
CD-Rs are still my main method of backing up data. Their capacity/cost/reliability ratio is great for things like mp3s and video files. However, documents aren't all that big to begin wtih unless you have hordes of them to backup. That and it's read only once you burn. So i find it wasteful to burn a CD-R for a few megs worth of documents, even if CD-Rs are under.10 cents per disk.
CD-RWs are too cumbersome for me to really be worthwhile. If you want to store data at work, school, a friend's house, etc, they have to have a CD-RW burner as well. Not exactly an efficient way to store data on the go like flash is.
So Compactflash was the sweet-spot for me. Good storage compacty for what i want to use it for. Great reliablity, durable, reuseable, portable, and comes in a nice array of capacities from 8MB to 1GB.
The new XD flash cards are way too small for me. Something nearly as small as a dime isn't something i want to store my data on. Odds are I'd lose the card before I got my money's worth of use out of it. SD/SM/MMC cards are too thin and tend to break easy. Compact flash is big enough where you don't have to worry so much about it breaking or losing it, big enough to hold in your hand comfortabily, yet small enough for use in PDAs and cameras. Their great!
To answer your question about failure rates:
If kept in a dry and cool place, and if you take care of it (as in not dropping it on hard surfaces, etc) The average lifespan of a CF card is about *1 million* reads and writes. However, another thing to take into consideration is data retention. A lot of CF cards and pen drives specify data retention up to 10 years.
So they're pretty damn reliable for as small as they are.:)
Don't forget about the cable co's practices a while back either. They charged for every tv you had in your house as well. Cable splitters were the rage then, as you could share the same signal to multiple TVs. In the end, they don't really care anymore.
Nowadays with digital cable, it's like they're purposely trying to turn the clock back agian. You want digital cable in the second room? You need a second cable box now. To be honest,(I have adelphia)I'm not sure what their policy is for having an unauthorized (as in, hey we didn't give you that to use!) cable box for use in another room is.
I guess i could go out and purchase another motorola box for my bedroom, but i'm a bit wary of doing that. I know they can practically ping the "authorized" box in the livingroom, so i'm sure if i hooked up a second box that I bought, they'd spot that and send me a nasty letter or something. This is all in theory anyway, any info about this would be appreciated.:)
A guy walks into a bar. He says to the other guy, "Hey! I got these great CABLE descramblers for DirecTV SATELLITE systems!" The other guy says "okay, i'll take two! buh-dum-dum.
Seriously, your friend probably has a hacked satellite reciever box. There is a card inside which can be modified or replaced with "all you can get" info on that card. I don't know any more spacifics because i'm a cable person. However, i know a few guys with direcTV who have done this sort of thing.
Since when were universities law-enforcement? However it's not surprising that congress would be riding schools about it. After all, someone's probably lining their pockets to do it.
Breaking a law, is breaking a law. The responsibility of enforcing laws falls on law enforcement, like the police, FBI, you get the picture. Schools have a job to teach their students, keep them fed and safe. Not to be baby-sitters and watchdogs for the government.
The irony is that student tuition is income for the schools. They use it to pay teachers, get books, computer labs...and bandwidth as well. A lot of schools already took voluntary mesurements to limit the p2p bandwidth hogging. This i can understand.
What exactly is the incentive for universities to become the copyright police? What are they getting out of this? As far as I can tell, there just getting bitched at by the RIAA and congress. Unless either one of them gives scools financial support to aid in napping copyright offenders, there isn't any incentive for them. What are they going to do? Take schools to court because there's songs floating around their networks?
Some things cease to amaze me. Other things however, never cease.
It strikes me kind of odd that NASA fought congress about the Pluto/Kuiper Probe. Science is science, space is space, Their giving NASA the money, what's the problem?
The only conclusion i can come up with is that NASA wanted money for something else. That and perhaps congress wanted to get a signal to NASA. "Hey NASA, try building something that'll last for a while, something that you don't have to strip and rebuild every time. It'll give you practice, and with that practice you can put that experience into making better, more reliable shuttles."
I read that Bush signed off on nuclear engines a bit ago, basically paving the way for a missle defense system or some such. (memory's sketchy, but i believe that's the case) I'm surprised that NASA wouldn't try to develop those engines and incorperate them into the pluto probe. It'd make the journey faster and it'd be a good way to test-drive them.
In any case, NASA needs a project like this. No doubt, the pioneer 10 misson was very exciting to see. Old tech still kicking and doing it's job way longer then it was expected to. That tells me that NASA really knew how to build things that l-a-s-t back in the day.
There's hardly any info on Pluto to begin with, and the only pictures we have are fuzzy distant images or artists' conceptions. I'd really like to see actual pictures of pluto up-close-and-personal myself.
All in all, if NASA works on this hard, and there's no hangups, this probe should last a good long time.
It is better that way. After recording a guitar session, you can only do so much with the mix of all the strings.
But according to digital idea, this may be a good example of a benifit:
Supposed you just recorded the guitar track of your song, and when you strummed the last chord, you get some serious nasty ass fret-buzz on one string. You could always go back and pinpoint that string by itself, and re-record just that string being played, and paste it over the buzzed string in your recording, given how your how have your recording setup, It could be done.
The idea that you can manipulte individual strings at the processing end could be very useful. Hit the wrong string in a chord? no problem, just replace that wrong string with the right one, mesh them all together. It adds alot of hackability of guitar recordings.
This may be totally wrong, I'm not quite sure, the site's dead. But could this be done?
Your right of course. NOBODY in bands you hear today plays guitar like they really mean it. I have a alot of songs from the 60's/70's/80's where they really really made it scream and sing, practically giving the guitar a life and voice of it's own.
I don't know if this digital guitar will change anything. Personally, I believe it has alot more to do with how the labels find bands. There are quite a few people out there who can rock a guitar like you wouldn't believe, but when it comes to getting them into bands, I don't think the RIAA really cares about a band or artists musical talent like they used to. After all, that lack of talent can all be made up for with pre-processed effects and sampling these days.
There's a walmart supercenter just a town over, takes about 10 min to get there, this is in Sothern York County PA, US. An interesting story follows too:
Around the early 90's or so (I.E. a good while ago) they built this giant hill that you drive up and it's flattened off. They put a Kmart, Hallmark, Radio Shack, etc up there.
Around 2000-2001 the built a "sister" hill beside it, which is closer to the interstate that runs from MD to PA. They put a huge ass walmart in there, and lots of other shops--basically a nice sized strip mall. Everybody and their grandmother moved their businesses into that strip mall, including the businesses on the first hill.
Now the first hill, after 3 or so stores finally make their move, will be totally barren. the second hill is where all the action is now when it comes to retail in that town. Needless to say, Walmart led that revolution here, and it's a pain in the ass to get to the Interstate highway now.
Sidenote--this area used to be a rural area but it's quickly changing into a small city becuase of what walmart started here.
Their extremely popular places, especially the super-centers where they have a grocery store, a auto-repair place, a haircutting place, a dept. store, practically everything jam packed into one huge store.
I also heard walmart is planning on building some stores overseas. My bet is their trying to become the second coming of McDonalds, in terms of popularity and wide spread stores.
What's the point if we have the tech and ability to spawn our human selves in another solar system? I mean, take out earth, put humans on another earth-like planet with a sun, and what you do you get? More of the same. We as humans need to socially evolve more before we can think about leaving earth for a new planetary home. In time, I think we can achieve that, but it's going to be a LONG while.
NASA needs a good bitch slapping. Seriously. What ever happened to the X-"pick a number" cheaper/better re-usable replacement vehicles we've been reading about for so long? Every one of them was scrubbed. It is my belief that NASA's #1 priority should be safety at all costs, no matter if they think it something minor. (read: minor Columbia damages prior to takeoff) Everything should be treated as serious and life threating and should be checked out accordingly.
The #2 priority should be finding a cheaper way of getting humans into space. As it stands, strapping a shuttle to a HUGE non-reusable rocket with tons of fuel is about as efficient as buying a car every time you go to the store. They need to stick to one shuttle replacement project and stick with it till completion. It doesn't make sense why congress would throw money at the previous X-33, etc shuttle replacements only to have nothing to show for it in the end. That's about as wasteful as the current means of getting a shuttle into space.
#3 priority should be more infomation given to taxpayers about how these projects in space could actually help us humans on earth. How do ants in space have anything to do with helping you as an human, a consumer, and a taxpayer? Granted some of the projects like robotic exploration obviously helps the robotics field, and studying astronauts in low gravity may help to understand certian illnesses here on earth. They've been doing an okay job with this, but it could be alot better, and it could help some people justify space exploration as well. (FYI, i know it's worth it:) )
#4 prority should be to find ways in which they can get corperate sponsoring. Russia seems to have this idea. I don't mean necessarly letting civilians on paid trips to the ISS, but by other means. The more ways NASA can get funding, the more money they can invest in projects that benifit us as humans, the better.
#5: The goverment should crack the whip a bit and set guidelines on what NASA should accomplish outside of scientific projects and safety. Things like "Man on mars" or "base on moon" or something that sets our imaginations on fire a little. It'd be nice to see NASA inspire us the way it did with the moon landing. (Yeah, i think NASA did it.)
Can't think of anything else right now, but that'd be a decent start IMHO. YMMV however:)
I get ya now. The poster's you were trying to respond to are claiming the act of smoking in of itself is appealiing, and they'd do it anyway even without the nicotine present in the first place.
I got hung up on the very slight differences:
1. Claiming that they'd continue to smoke even without the nicotine.
2. Claiming that they'd smoke even if nicotine wasn't present in the first place.
Although they weren't as clearly defined as i just made them, it is a big difference, which is what kept this thread going for so long:)
I seriously doubt, and i mean seriously doubt, that i'd still be smoking if the cigarettes i smoked in the beginning had no nicotine in them. However, quitting smoking nicotine cigarettes...then wanting to continue to smoke something without nicotine...I could actually see myself doing.
Does this clarification on my part, clear this up? We on the same page now?
THANK YOU! When i first saw the webpage, i thought, *in smooth sexy voice* "Helllllo Parsec!" But i was concerned because it was all 3D and sort of far flung of what I remembered about the TI Parsec.
Great game though, The woman's voice in the game was pretty smooth and clear. Ruined many a good joystick playing *that* hot little number...:)
People get habituated to acts that have no physical craving for. My girlfriend chews her fingernails, not because they taste good, but out of simple nerviousness. My mother who quit smoking 25 years ago _still_ sucks on lollypops and pretzel sticks like she was still smoking. The physical craving of the nicotine has left her body, but the byproduct of the act of smoking, the hand-to-mouth, got so ingrained into her lifestyle and brain that it may never fully disappear.
I understand that what gets reinforced is the act of smoking, but I've had people tell me that they would be habituated to the act even if there was no nicotine, which I don't find credible.
I'm not sure if i'm reading this wrong, and if i am, let me know. But that sounds like your contradicting yourself a bit. You _understand_ that the act of smoking is reinforced by the nicotine. Yet, you _don't find_ people who say that they'd still smoke even without the nicotine credible?
That'd be understandable if those people aren't regular smokers. Like a person who never smoked before, or hasn't smoked enough to become addicted to the nicotine, goes and buys some herbal cigarettes and suddenly gets hooked on them. I wouldn't find that credible either. is this what you mean?
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One thing people don't tend to understand about how another wireless provider stacks up with another is that their all pretty much the same.
:)
I live in southern PA, and here AT&T has fantastic coverage compared to the competition. However, perhaps in your area AT&T's coverage sucks compared to Verizon or T-mobile. It all depends on where you live, where you travel, and what provider has the best coverage for the areas your going to be in.
I traveled from as far north as Pittsburgh PA, to Myrtle Beach, SC. I never lost service in my home area (southern PA), or while traveling beteween those places.
However! i did lose coverage momentarily on a strech of road in my town, and i always lose it there. Not only that, but the radio stations fuzz out on that road too. The only thing i can think of is that the road goes through two relitively large hills, maybe that's why?
In any case, when I purchased my phone/plan in august, i was well prepared. I asked people in my home area what provider they had and how well their service/support was. I checked the coverage maps of all the major wireless carriers, and i even called each major provider's support line 3 (times per carrier) and averaged out the wait times to see who was the clearly the most responsive. (did it at 6pm, peak time) In the end i then compared rates and options. Who charges what for what features etc, and checked to see who had the features i wanted for the best price.
I know this sounds like a crap-load of work, but the homework i did paid off in spades. If you do you're part in checking this type of stuff out beforehand, the contract you sign won't come back and haunt you when you drop calls repeatedly or get crappy customer service. The more checking out you do, the better off you'll be, trust me
My friend and I are co-owners of a PC repair/local dialup ISP/wireless store. We're in the process of getting set up to be an authorized AT&T wireless reseller.
At first, I thought this number portability thing was instantanious throughout the country. (I assumed wrong I guess) But according to Dave, the AT&T representive who came down to give us the paperwork and crash-course said that our local market won't be affected until MAY of NEXT YEAR.
I'm assuming for the moment that the number portability is happening in the large cities, and then it'll trickle down to the smaller cities and towns. (Must look this stuff up)
What sucks the most is we're near the PA-MD border,(on the PA side) and thus we serve 2 different markets because of our store's location. I believe Baltimore's (and surrounding locations) transition into number portability has happened already. But We're already getting tons of people coming in from our home market (southern PA) who want to take advantage of AT&T's current deals, and they want to carry their existing phone number with them. There's also a few who want to transfer they're hardline home numbers to their cellphones. They get really pissed off when i'm forced to tell them that it won't happen for our area until the beginning of May in 2004.
All in all, this crap isn't going to be easy and i can see it's already going to be a pain in the ass. I haven't shopped for a new phone lately, but i'm willing to wager it's not going to be smooth sailing getting my number transferred.
A penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
The bigger they are (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc) the harder they're hit with brute force tactics. Two of which are very large ISPs, it makes total sense to me that spammers would see this as a goldmine, a huge cache of users. As with goldmines, it takes more work to get the goods out, but it's well worth it to their profit margins.
Never under-estimate the power of spammers.
I've had a weird instance with email going out my mail client (Outlook, but I switched to Mozilla Mail now) without knowing it. Here's the story:
1. Just opened up outlook and looked in the "sent" folder to re-read an email i sent to a friend.
2. I find 4-5 emails that were mailed to addresses I never heard of, with the messages saying something to the effect of: "please remove me from your mailing list." (The messages were all identical to each other).
3. This has only happened twice, and then stopped.
I haven't found any more suspicious sent email in my "sent" folder.
FYI: This is a personal computer, no one else uses it but me.
Now, i don't send alot of email, and when I do I know who i sent it to. I also know not to write emails back to spammers even with a "remove from list" message enclosed, because it just sends the spammers the signal that my email account exists and is active, which results in even more spam. (so i've heard at least)
Any idea what caused this?
I've also heard that the main reasons one gets an email trojan is by clicking on a link in a email, or downloading/running an email attachment.
I also know about "drive-by downloading" that happens while visiting websites. The next thing you know you got spyware coming out the ass because of this. (and of course certian programs sneakily install them as well.)
My second question is, could it be possible for a website to install this trojan on your computer without you knowing it? I mean, they do it with spyware, I don't see why they couldn't do this with email trojans as well.
Hell. It's possible that the `trojan' installed merely pulls images off of Usenet and saves them to the hard disk for the attacker to collect later, and it just happened that somebody had posted some kiddie porn to Usenet so this program captured it -- so there's six thousand `normal porn' images, and three `kiddie porn' images on the disk. Who knows?
That could quite possibly be the case. The more porn volume on your HDD, the more chances you could have 2-3+ `kiddie porn' pictures on you're system as well.
Authorities aren't lax on what they deem `kiddie porn' either. Didn't one of those child porn laws also include computer-rendered pictures of kids doing some sexual acts? Not only that but I've also heard that some pictures parents take (little girls all dolled up, bathtub pictures) could be grounds for violation of that law as well.
But you're right with that, there's probably more then meets the eye there.
Not that i'm arguing with your post, but just imagine for a moment with me.
:)
Tom and Sarah go to their local GM place. They want a baby. So the doctors take a sperm, they take an egg, and give the couple a menu of all the GM enhancements currently available. Now, following the general rules of capitialism, each one of the enhancements would probably be priced different. Sort of like car parts. An engine (the "smart" gene") would probably be priced higher, then say, something cosmetic, like a new paint job (different color hair/eyes/skin).
Or it could come in the form of each enhancement being sold seperately, or perhaps, "package deals". Such as cosmetic changes along with strength enhancements for example.
In any case, I agree with your point that everyone's idea of what is "good" is different, and as a result we're likely to see different kids with different GM enhancements. However, money will probably be the chief limiting factor of not "getting everything on the menu". It'd probably be too expensive. Since everyone's income levels and willingness to spend varies, so will their childrens GM enhancements.
Probably the wealthy will be the only ones who will be able to afford all of of the enhancements at first, until new enhancements come out, which in theory drops the prices of the already existing ones. But GM is more along the lines of pharmaceutical and medical fields, so...that pricing scheme probably won't work really well.
Personally, ordering a "child" like you'd order a Subway Sub just gives me the feeling of "wrong" for some reason. Now, i understand if the parients have a genetic disease that they don't want to pass on to their children, or want to make their child more immune to diseases from the get go. There's nothing wrong with that, it's genetic medicine/vaccinations really.
Some would argue that the human genome is sacred, while others see it as fair game. I see it as a codebase in which scientists can use their GM skills to remove the "bugs" (disease, etc) and make us all more robust as a result.
But to use this kind of technology for the sheer pleasure of picking your child's hair color, or how strong/smart/artistic/etc you want him/her to be is just wrong to me. The kid isn't a customizable product, it's a human being, and as such, he/she should be allowed to make it's own decision of what he/she wants when they are able to.
What's the point of a child having a "smart gene" if the child isn't brought up in a good home? Or if the child has other interests instead of going to college and getting doctorate degree?
Just because that child has the "traits" in his/her genes, doesn't necessarly mean that those traits will be used by the child to their fullest extent or in the ways that you want the child to use them. I mean, for all we know, smart-gene kids could grow up into cunning criminals.
In the end, I personally would use the technology available to make sure that my child is as healthly and as disease-resistent as possible and that's it. Anything more wouldn't really be worth it to me under the circumstances above.
People were, at points in history, adults when they turn thirteen or fourteen.
I totally agree. You could definately write a whole book with research on that subject alone. I'm just curious how the hell did we get to where we are now from back then. *shrugs*
I'm not basing my reality on one TV network, I do realize that without the association made to video games and wrestling (or what have you) that his particular story would be just ordinary and probably not covered anywhere else except perhaps his local community.
This kid is on Court TV because kids aren't that impressionable. This child was uniquely fucked up and committed a relatively unique crime because he was so uniquely fucked up, and that is what makes him interesting enough to get Court TV...
A lot of kids have idols, people they look up to because they think their cool. A few impersonate their idols, and try to do what they do. That's a common thing for kids to do period. Yes, most kids don't go this far, like the boy did. That doesn't mean he's fucked up, it means he was confused.
What makes this kid unique is that his parents let him (a 12 year old) babysit a toddler by himself. Both parents were often out and he was by himself a great deal of the time. That and he was a rabid fan of pro-wresling and video games. He killed his cousin with a pro-wrestling manuever. I'm sure he didn't mean to kill him, but what do you expect when you see guys on TV smacking each other down and leave the ring exactly like they did when they first started to fight? The boy expected his cousin to not be hurt.
If that kid knew that he could seriously injure or kill his baby cousin, would he still do it? I highly doubt it.
I don't blame the media, video games or music. However, as with anything, they do have the inherent power to be influential. When you're exposed to these things without having learned a good sense of right and wrong *first*, you're bound to get confused on the finer points and make mistakes.
With wrestling, it's easy for kids to take it as face value: It's real. They don't see those guys in the hospital later on because of injuries, they don't see a wrestler going through intense amount of pain because they didn't fall the way the should have. They don't realize that it's carefully choreographed and the person who's doing the move has to do it convincingly, and the guy on the recieving end has to fall in such a way to prevent injury.
Look at the way glamor magizines do to the self-esteem of a young girl. All they do is glamorize what people precieve as beautiful. This just leaves the impression on a young girl's mind that something must be wrong with them becuase they don't look like the women they see in the pictures.
This type of influence is everywhere. It should be the job of the parents to talk to their children about these things, *before* the child develops their own assumptions which could very well be wrong. I don't know about you, but i wouldn't want my daughter to grow up with a piss poor self-esteem and feeling lonely and unworthy because of some glamor magazines or the pretty women splattered all over MTV. She may turn out that way, or, she may just turn out okay despite those influances. But in either case, I'd want to be there while she's flipping though the magazines in disgust, or watching the models on tv and wishing she was like them, and let her know it is okay to look the way you do, bacuase you are unique, and that makes you special.
Kids are impressionable to varying degrees. Because of this, it'd the job of every parent to make sure they help their children know right from wrong, and to develop a blanced way of looking at the world around them. It's old advice but it's good. All you can do is try the very best you can as much as possible, and hope that it was enough.
But as with any hurd, there are major slackers.
Just recently I watched a show on Court TV about a 12 year old killing his baby cousin (one or two years old) using a WWF wrestling move. He was left to babysit his cousin alone as well. The show also talked about video game violence in brief, basically saying that it's on of the mediums that kids may want to immitate in real life.
The question that comes to my mind is: Are video games/wrestling/media/etc causing the violence, or are the kids?
Well, that's a no-brainer, kids are committing the acts. I've known many young boys who really look up to WWF wrestlers and immitate violent acts such as those in video games. Not because they want to hurt anybody, but because they want to immitate their idols and what they see. With wresling, the see a guy get a beatdown, and magically get back up, and after the show is over, they walk out of the ring unscathed. With video games, I think it's the player's interaction, coupled with the glamorization of violence that would make some kids want to try it out in real life.
Kids *are* impressionable like that. Which on one hand makes this topic understandable. But what is the media in general supposed to do about it? Make everything sugar-coated and soft for the sake of preventing some deaths? Should the world go on a censor-spree because one kid may pick up a gun and decide to go on a killing spree while exclaiming "I'll bury you in a lunckbox!"?
Every parent wants to blame video games, the gun manufacters, the internet, movies, you name it. It's easier to pass the buck then it is to accept the responsibilty. Oh parents are taking responsibility because they banded together and got a bill passed in to law? How exactly does that help?
"Because just as parents don't want retailers to sell beer or wine to their children or tobacco to our children because it's bad for them, they're saying 'Help us. Don't make this stuff available to our kids.' Parents absolutely do need to take responsibility, but in society today, you and I both know that it's pretty easy for kids to go next door and get hold of something that parents won't allow them to have."
This is understadable as well. Retailers shouldn't be selling alcohol or tobacco to minors, just as gun manufacters shouldn't be selling guns to minors. There are laws to prevent that, and they do help the problem. However, these are things that directly harm children. With video games and the media, they're more passive, so the direct link isn't as clear.
In any case, there's something about American parents not wanting to take responsibility for their children. You shouldn't leave a 2 year old in the care of a 12 year old, period. Or if your child gets a hold of your gun and kills someone, who's at fault, you or the kid?
Most of these cases are directly linked to the parents inability or laziness. It's true, parents can't keep an eye on their kids 24/7, but they can take steps and get more involved in their kids lives. "Let me read the box on that video game", or "what are you watching on tv?" Just don't leave them to do whatever they want. Spend time with them and what they're doing, be their moral conscious and guide while their playing that video game, or cheering their favorite wrestler on.
The more you get involved with what you're kids do, the more you can instill in them what is acceptable in real life, and what is not.
Just to be fair about this, It was said by either Rumsfield or Bush, not sure which, that the quote "the war would be one of days and weeks, not months and years." was taken directy from his mouth. I heard it as well. As far as liberation is concerned that's another thing i'd like to bring to the table.
The premise for this war was to rid Iraq and Saddam Hussain of weapons of mass distruction. Since the U.N. couldn't seem to "resolve" the crisis at hand, the U.S. decided that it'd do it by force. If liberation and a new Iraqi government was stated in the early stages of this ordeal, it was a card that was seriously underplayed by the administration. But soon after the war started, and it got it's name: "Iraqi Freedom". That's when the story seemed to have changed. It's about Iraqi freedom now. If the U.S wanted to simply enforce U.N. resolution 1441 or any other resolution against iraq, the war could be considered by many to be a legal course of action.
But it's way more than that. It's about removing Saddam Hussain and his regime, and building up a more friendlier pro-american, pro-deomocracy government. There's nothing in the U.N resolutions that said that would be a consequence if Iraq didn't comply with it's U.N. obligations.
I don't mean to sound callous or unsympathetic to the iraqi people, but i'm looking at this from a technical stand point. If your going to go to war for something, like disarming Iraq, then go and do it. But don't tear up a country and rebuild it in your image while your at it. No wonder it sends the message it does to arab people. It's arrogent.
Yes I hate Saddam as much as any other person, and yes i am an American. Yes, getting rid of Saddam and his regime would help the iraqi people. But that wasn't part of the plan. The plan was to get rid of Iraq's WMD. It was something everyone in the U.N. agreed to. Now if the U.S. was in Iraq to simply *remove* those WMD, then people like France, and all the other countries who oppose the war, could live with the use of force to reach their agreed consensus: Iraq must be disarmed.
I support our troops reguardless, as well as the British troops and Aussies. It's the administration that i'm concerned about, and I cannot stress this point enough.
I remember when i got my first digital camera, an HP 215 and came with a 4mb CF card. It introduced me to flash memory from the get go as a "digital film" medium.
.10 cents per disk.
:)
I also write a fair amount documents myself. I used to put them in a folder on my hard drive because there's a lot of space there to begin with, and I don't really have a need to transport my docs anywhere other than at home. If you upgrade regularly or do a lot of "house cleaning" on your HDD, (as in remove junk stuff you don't need anymore), or if you move files around a lot on your computer, or partition..things start to disappear over time.
My biggest problem was moving files around trying to organize them, and saving documents in different locations on my hard drive. I wound up forgetting where i put certian docs. When i clean up my HDD and remove stuff i don't need anymore, I wound up deleting some documents I wish I still had.
This is where CompactFlash came in for me. I was never a fan of floppy disks to begin with because the data capacity is so small by today's standards. That, and their really horrible with holding data for a extended period of time. Bad sectors are a royal nightmare if you store anything of value on a floppy.
So i got myself a 64meg CF card, a PCMCIA card reader, and a USB card reader, and it's a true lifesaver and a great replacement for floppies. The pendrives are awesome for portability and transporting things from PC to PC, I plan to get one of those as well.
I was never a fan of zip disks etc, either. It's still the same basic idea of a floppy only more modernized. It's not solid-state, and aren't nearly as reliable as other mediums.
CD-Rs are still my main method of backing up data. Their capacity/cost/reliability ratio is great for things like mp3s and video files. However, documents aren't all that big to begin wtih unless you have hordes of them to backup. That and it's read only once you burn. So i find it wasteful to burn a CD-R for a few megs worth of documents, even if CD-Rs are under
CD-RWs are too cumbersome for me to really be worthwhile. If you want to store data at work, school, a friend's house, etc, they have to have a CD-RW burner as well. Not exactly an efficient way to store data on the go like flash is.
So Compactflash was the sweet-spot for me. Good storage compacty for what i want to use it for. Great reliablity, durable, reuseable, portable, and comes in a nice array of capacities from 8MB to 1GB.
The new XD flash cards are way too small for me. Something nearly as small as a dime isn't something i want to store my data on. Odds are I'd lose the card before I got my money's worth of use out of it. SD/SM/MMC cards are too thin and tend to break easy. Compact flash is big enough where you don't have to worry so much about it breaking or losing it, big enough to hold in your hand comfortabily, yet small enough for use in PDAs and cameras. Their great!
To answer your question about failure rates:
If kept in a dry and cool place, and if you take care of it (as in not dropping it on hard surfaces, etc) The average lifespan of a CF card is about *1 million* reads and writes. However, another thing to take into consideration is data retention. A lot of CF cards and pen drives specify data retention up to 10 years.
So they're pretty damn reliable for as small as they are.
***Figure source: http://www.memorywizards.com/pd_flash_usb_drv.cfm
Don't forget about the cable co's practices a while back either. They charged for every tv you had in your house as well. Cable splitters were the rage then, as you could share the same signal to multiple TVs. In the end, they don't really care anymore.
:)
Nowadays with digital cable, it's like they're purposely trying to turn the clock back agian. You want digital cable in the second room? You need a second cable box now. To be honest,(I have adelphia)I'm not sure what their policy is for having an unauthorized (as in, hey we didn't give you that to use!) cable box for use in another room is.
I guess i could go out and purchase another motorola box for my bedroom, but i'm a bit wary of doing that. I know they can practically ping the "authorized" box in the livingroom, so i'm sure if i hooked up a second box that I bought, they'd spot that and send me a nasty letter or something. This is all in theory anyway, any info about this would be appreciated.
A guy walks into a bar. He says to the other guy, "Hey! I got these great CABLE descramblers for DirecTV SATELLITE systems!" The other guy says "okay, i'll take two! buh-dum-dum.
Seriously, your friend probably has a hacked satellite reciever box. There is a card inside which can be modified or replaced with "all you can get" info on that card. I don't know any more spacifics because i'm a cable person. However, i know a few guys with direcTV who have done this sort of thing.
Since when were universities law-enforcement? However it's not surprising that congress would be riding schools about it. After all, someone's probably lining their pockets to do it.
Breaking a law, is breaking a law. The responsibility of enforcing laws falls on law enforcement, like the police, FBI, you get the picture. Schools have a job to teach their students, keep them fed and safe. Not to be baby-sitters and watchdogs for the government.
The irony is that student tuition is income for the schools. They use it to pay teachers, get books, computer labs...and bandwidth as well.
A lot of schools already took voluntary mesurements to limit the p2p bandwidth hogging. This i can understand.
What exactly is the incentive for universities to become the copyright police? What are they getting out of this? As far as I can tell, there just getting bitched at by the RIAA and congress. Unless either one of them gives scools financial support to aid in napping copyright offenders, there isn't any incentive for them. What are they going to do? Take schools to court because there's songs floating around their networks?
Some things cease to amaze me. Other things however, never cease.
It strikes me kind of odd that NASA fought congress about the Pluto/Kuiper Probe. Science is science, space is space, Their giving NASA the money, what's the problem?
The only conclusion i can come up with is that
NASA wanted money for something else. That and perhaps congress wanted to get a signal to NASA. "Hey NASA, try building something that'll last for a while, something that you don't have to strip and rebuild every time. It'll give you practice, and with that practice you can put that experience into making better, more reliable shuttles."
I read that Bush signed off on nuclear engines a bit ago, basically paving the way for a missle defense system or some such. (memory's sketchy, but i believe that's the case) I'm surprised that NASA wouldn't try to develop those engines and incorperate them into the pluto probe. It'd make the journey faster and it'd be a good way to test-drive them.
In any case, NASA needs a project like this. No doubt, the pioneer 10 misson was very exciting to see. Old tech still kicking and doing it's job way longer then it was expected to. That tells me that NASA really knew how to build things that l-a-s-t back in the day.
There's hardly any info on Pluto to begin with, and the only pictures we have are fuzzy distant images or artists' conceptions. I'd really like to see actual pictures of pluto up-close-and-personal myself.
All in all, if NASA works on this hard, and there's no hangups, this probe should last a good long time.
It is better that way. After recording a guitar session, you can only do so much with the mix of all the strings.
But according to digital idea, this may be a good example of a benifit:
Supposed you just recorded the guitar track of your song, and when you strummed the last chord, you get some serious nasty ass fret-buzz on one string. You could always go back and pinpoint that string by itself, and re-record just that string being played, and paste it over the buzzed string in your recording, given how your how have your recording setup, It could be done.
The idea that you can manipulte individual strings at the processing end could be very useful. Hit the wrong string in a chord? no problem, just replace that wrong string with the right one, mesh them all together. It adds alot of hackability of guitar recordings.
This may be totally wrong, I'm not quite sure, the site's dead. But could this be done?
I dunno, maybe i'm out of my league here, but we're talking about guitars running on wireless technologies to connect instrument pieces together.
Your guitar isn't going to be running on the internet. And ISP connection latentcy, site latentcy should be taken into consideration?
I figure the best way to test wireless devices like 802.11 for speed would be to do all the testing locally with two machines.
This seems obvious to me, but then agian, i never actually messed with wifi, so just take this as a friendly "huh?" and help me out.
Your right of course. NOBODY in bands you hear today plays guitar like they really mean it. I have a alot of songs from the 60's/70's/80's where they really really made it scream and sing, practically giving the guitar a life and voice of it's own.
I don't know if this digital guitar will change anything. Personally, I believe it has alot more to do with how the labels find bands. There are quite a few people out there who can rock a guitar like you wouldn't believe, but when it comes to getting them into bands, I don't think the RIAA really cares about a band or artists musical talent like they used to. After all, that lack of talent can all be made up for with pre-processed effects and sampling these days.
It's a shame really.
There's a walmart supercenter just a town over, takes about 10 min to get there, this is in Sothern York County PA, US. An interesting story follows too:
:)
Around the early 90's or so (I.E. a good while ago) they built this giant hill that you drive up and it's flattened off. They put a Kmart, Hallmark, Radio Shack, etc up there.
Around 2000-2001 the built a "sister" hill beside it, which is closer to the interstate that runs from MD to PA. They put a huge ass walmart in there, and lots of other shops--basically a nice sized strip mall. Everybody and their grandmother moved their businesses into that strip mall, including the businesses on the first hill.
Now the first hill, after 3 or so stores finally make their move, will be totally barren. the second hill is where all the action is now when it comes to retail in that town. Needless to say, Walmart led that revolution here, and it's a pain in the ass to get to the Interstate highway now.
Sidenote--this area used to be a rural area but it's quickly changing into a small city becuase of what walmart started here.
Their extremely popular places, especially the super-centers where they have a grocery store, a auto-repair place, a haircutting place, a dept. store, practically everything jam packed into one huge store.
I also heard walmart is planning on building some stores overseas. My bet is their trying to become the second coming of McDonalds, in terms of popularity and wide spread stores.
Hope this helps
What's the point if we have the tech and ability to spawn our human selves in another solar system? I mean, take out earth, put humans on another earth-like planet with a sun, and what you do you get? More of the same. We as humans need to socially evolve more before we can think about leaving earth for a new planetary home. In time, I think we can achieve that, but it's going to be a LONG while.
NASA needs a good bitch slapping. Seriously. What ever happened to the X-"pick a number" cheaper/better re-usable replacement vehicles we've been reading about for so long? Every one of them was scrubbed. It is my belief that NASA's #1 priority should be safety at all costs, no matter if they think it something minor. (read: minor Columbia damages prior to takeoff) Everything should be treated as serious and life threating and should be checked out accordingly.
:) )
:)
The #2 priority should be finding a cheaper way of getting humans into space. As it stands, strapping a shuttle to a HUGE non-reusable rocket with tons of fuel is about as efficient as buying a car every time you go to the store. They need to stick to one shuttle replacement project and stick with it till completion. It doesn't make sense why congress would throw money at the previous X-33, etc shuttle replacements only to have nothing to show for it in the end. That's about as wasteful as the current means of getting a shuttle into space.
#3 priority should be more infomation given to taxpayers about how these projects in space could actually help us humans on earth. How do ants in space have anything to do with helping you as an human, a consumer, and a taxpayer? Granted some of the projects like robotic exploration obviously helps the robotics field, and studying astronauts in low gravity may help to understand certian illnesses here on earth. They've been doing an okay job with this, but it could be alot better, and it could help some people justify space exploration as well. (FYI, i know it's worth it
#4 prority should be to find ways in which they can get corperate sponsoring. Russia seems to have this idea. I don't mean necessarly letting civilians on paid trips to the ISS, but by other means. The more ways NASA can get funding, the more money they can invest in projects that benifit us as humans, the better.
#5: The goverment should crack the whip a bit and set guidelines on what NASA should accomplish outside of scientific projects and safety. Things like "Man on mars" or "base on moon" or something that sets our imaginations on fire a little. It'd be nice to see NASA inspire us the way it did with the moon landing. (Yeah, i think NASA did it.)
Can't think of anything else right now, but that'd be a decent start IMHO. YMMV however
"I'm. A. Dumbass."
that's exactly his point.
I get ya now. The poster's you were trying to respond to are claiming the act of smoking in of itself is appealiing, and they'd do it anyway even without the nicotine present in the first place.
:)
I got hung up on the very slight differences:
1. Claiming that they'd continue to smoke even without the nicotine.
2. Claiming that they'd smoke even if nicotine wasn't present in the first place.
Although they weren't as clearly defined as i just made them, it is a big difference, which is what kept this thread going for so long
I seriously doubt, and i mean seriously doubt, that i'd still be smoking if the cigarettes i smoked in the beginning had no nicotine in them. However, quitting smoking nicotine cigarettes...then wanting to continue to smoke something without nicotine...I could actually see myself doing.
Does this clarification on my part, clear this up? We on the same page now?
THANK YOU! When i first saw the webpage, i thought, *in smooth sexy voice* "Helllllo Parsec!" But i was concerned because it was all 3D and sort of far flung of what I remembered about the TI Parsec.
Great game though, The woman's voice in the game was pretty smooth and clear. Ruined many a good joystick playing *that* hot little number...:)
People get habituated to acts that have no physical craving for. My girlfriend chews her fingernails, not because they taste good, but out of simple nerviousness. My mother who quit smoking 25 years ago _still_ sucks on lollypops and pretzel sticks like she was still smoking. The physical craving of the nicotine has left her body, but the byproduct of the act of smoking, the hand-to-mouth, got so ingrained into her lifestyle and brain that it may never fully disappear.
I understand that what gets reinforced is the act of smoking, but I've had people tell me that they would be habituated to the act even if there was no nicotine, which I don't find credible.
I'm not sure if i'm reading this wrong, and if i am, let me know. But that sounds like your contradicting yourself a bit. You _understand_ that the act of smoking is reinforced by the nicotine. Yet, you _don't find_ people who say that they'd still smoke even without the nicotine credible?
That'd be understandable if those people aren't regular smokers. Like a person who never smoked before, or hasn't smoked enough to become addicted to the nicotine, goes and buys some herbal cigarettes and suddenly gets hooked on them. I wouldn't find that credible either. is this what you mean?