NE, NY states too small for this BS. Every other place in the world that is this physical size has an economic treaty with their neighboring small states to avoid tariffs like this.
Actually the Boston-to-WashingtonDC assemblage of little states into a single city-single economic zone has already happened. Its economic integration is overseen the US federal government. If the feds accept this new individual purchase tax on out-of-state goods enacted by a single one of this little pissant states, then they will have to do so for all the little pissant but legally-independent states that make up the Boston-Washington North American economic zone.
The overseers or guiders of the economic and legal framework that oversees this contradiction between mini-states and a single economic zone may frown on this development. They will take the case to US Supreme Court. In past cases like this, the Supremes voted against sales taxes on mail order for private individuals. I don't know the specific case but if they had voted to allow it then we would be paying it on all net purchases. This case would probably lose also if it made it that far.
I think that the New Yorkers are beginning to become aware that they chosen as their new leader a blind man who doesn't really like rich white people. The Albany pols are realizing that they need more money to keep up their little scams. This looks like an easy source.
I'm always amused at all the former powerhouse, but now presumptuous little legal entities using historical boundaries to magnify their status as states. Yes,they are old historical boundaries. But there are six separate states between the Northern Boston suburbs and the New Jersey suburbs of New York City. A distance of about 250 miles by 100 miles. There is one state for three of these economic areas on the west coast: California having the Bay Area, LA and the Valley suburbs, and San Diego-Tijuana zones.
Imagine every little municipality in each of these California zone going up to Ahh-nold and telling him that they are going to double the sales tax on everything that comes into their village and they aren't going to give any of to him.
Big Mistake!
Why all these little pissant states in the North East think that they can just do this and get away with it confounds us Westerners in the NAFTA zone. If I recall, you can cross from the eastern to the western edge of Rhode Island (one of these little NE pissant states) in an afternoon: on a bicycle.
Now that the US government as gone amok, it is not such a bad condition to be able to buy a new identity for $20. Say that you have signed a petition or participated in an anti-war action. You get arrested in a sweep and fined $100 for whatever the charge is that your local police use against demonstrators.
But it doesn't end there. Chances are that some flagwaving dickhead fascist in 'Homeland Security' puts your name on a terrorist-do-not-fly list. It will stay there forever along with a million other people who have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. You can't ever get your name off the list. And for the next fifty years, every traffic ticket, overdue library book, or downloaded song that might put you into the focus of the local dickhead squad pretending to be police will get you thrown into prison until your loyality to the corporate establishment can be reaffirmed. Which entails a $200 processing fee paid in cash to people who are doing the determination of the level of your threat to society. It gets old, and very expensive, very quickly.
So the ability to purchase a new 'clean' identity inexpensively becomes attractive since it allows you to get on with your daily life with the least amount of extortion from the authorities. Whether or not the new identity actually refers to a real person is irrelevant if you are not using this identity for financial fraudulent criminal activity.
Now as a Slashdot technogeek, you have come to believe that none of this applies to you. But since the people who are doing these shakedowns are primarily in it for the money, and, since, as technologists, YOU will be the ones in the future with the 'disposable income', then you will be finding that, yes, it does apply to you. Even though you didn't sign any petitions or go to any anti-war demonstrations in college.
This is the way that the world works once you venture outside your MUD. Perhaps you should incorporate some of these principles into your MUDs so that they won't come as such a shock when you exit them.
So looking at this guy's legislative website, he claims to be a 'first Latino to do this and that'. He's most proud of getting legislation passed to 'force drug dealers pay for the damage that they cause their community'. So it would appear that he specializes in vague undefined pseudo-laws primarily designed to shake down anyone without the resources to prevent this from happening (lawyers in the USA, private armies in Mexico). Basically another fine-and-upstanding slimeball politician. Wasn't Ahnaald going crunch up all this little schmucks into little balls and turn them into shiny new barbells?
Check out the shape of his legislative district (California #58). It's a true octopus. Precisely gerrymandered (an American term meaning the drawing of political boundaries to ensure permanent re-election of the people drawing the boundaries) down to the household to ensure that this bozo can never be voted away.
In the not-too-distant future, bozos like this will avoid tangling with the technicians in order to avoid having their slimy little scams and fiefdoms exposed on the web like this.
So what? I pose as a 500 year old Italian model. I'm on the internet and I pose as the first Italian supermodel. So shoot me. I needed an Internet avatar pen-name and was researching the life of Simonetta Vespucci at the time. You've seen her; she's the near-naked girl on the half-shell in Botticelli's Birth of Venus painting done in 1484. She was a real person and one of the most beautiful women in history. All the painters at the time (1470-1500) and place (Florence and Tuscany) were totally blown away by her elegance and style. She set the beauty standard until Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci started painting near-photographic images of a more down-to-earth form of beauty for women.
And what's all this about sex offenders? Hold on, I'm not defending the freaks and perverts here. But, ( and we're talking a big Spinal-Tap-sized -but- here) any schmuck who gets caught urinating outside a bar at 3am or caught swimming naked in a mountain lake by the Park Rangers gets classified as a 'sex offender'. If it's below the belt and above the knees and the police see it for any reason, then the poor guy is a 'sex offender' forever. Same for an 18-year-old guy caught kissing a 17-year-old girl (in many places). Or an 11 year old boy who puts his arms around a 10 year old girl and squeezes her while making 'kissy' noises. We had a case just like this in Oregon recently. It took a lot of public indignation to get the mad-dog district attorney to back off and be reasonable.
So yeah, teach your kids that anyone can pose as anyone on the social web sites. Then teach them about the Turing test - How can you tell if other party is what they claim to be? Teach your kids logic, reason, doubt, and due-process.
That would be really threatening to the public school administrators!
I 'discovered' that the best way to sing in tune (with recordings, or a group) is to cup one hand about one foot (@30cm) in front of your mouth and cup the other hand behind one of your ears.
While singing, your voice bounces off the hand in front of your mouth and then gets redirected into your ear. Then you can adjust the pitch of your voice to harmonize with that of the recording. This really makes a difference in your ability to sing in tune.
I thought that this was my secret trick until I saw the BeeGees on television long ago and Robin Gibb was using the same 'hand behind ear' technique to get his complex falsetto parts just right. The studio monitor fed his voice towards his ears.
I know, I know, the BeeGees, don't laugh, during the years 1975 to 1979 they were best male ensemble vocalist group in the popular music world. Dorks maybe by current standards, but who are Slashdaughters to judge in that regard?
Anyway, I realize that the last thing a Slashdot reader will ever do is sing. But most Slashdot readers have an obsession with doing things right, should the need ever arise, then in regards to singing, this is how it can be done right.
I suspect that this Microsoft program, like all Microsoft pop culture products, will go nowhere and die a slow, embarrassing death should it ever get released. It sounds to me (bad pun) like the auto-play features found on those plastic WalMart keyboards that are too cheap and dumb to have MIDI ports included on the back. Microsoft should put this code into open-source and take a tax write-off on the development costs.
And speaking of which, just exactly WHY is Microsoft researching automatic computer music product generation? If I recall correctly, don't they make personal computer operating systems and business software. I guess that it must be that since they found and eliminated all the bugs in their primary products that they were looking for a new challenge. And they want to get some of the glory that is coming from the Rock Star plastic button guitar weirdness that is currently popular among the less-musically-inclined sector of the population.
Since Yahoo! is in the delicate stage of being bought out by Microsoft, they're trying to avoid any lawsuits that could cause the buying price to be pulled lower. This is probably the reason that they are acting like consummate assholes. Normally the yahoos couldn't care less about pissant grandstanding through dubious legal stunts, but...this is a delicate moment in the take-over process.
Maybe Microsoft is behind this in order to use a barrage of picayune lawsuits as a justification for lowering their bid offer. Goodness knows, Microsoft's staff of eager-beaver Ivy League lawyers do live for this kind of thing.
A self-sustaining extraterrestrial human community
A human community on Mars could never be self-sustaining.
is necessary to avoid probable pandemics, asteroid impacts, or other situations that would have extreme adverse effects on Earth-based population.
These problems haven't destroyed human life on Earth in 50,000 years. They would destroy human life on Mars within months.
Therefore this research is in the public interest, Any research could be called public interest by this vague definition. Allow me to give a more precise definition - any research receiving public funds must be directed to a specific solution to an immediate life-threatening problem. Mars work doesn't qualify.
only pretentious, greedy twits with no concept of the future such as yourself... I'm only telling the truth to the star-struck geeks. I'm said nothing about spending public funds on myself, and scientists have told us that the future in concept and reality holds over-population, climate change, and ecological disaster. Funds spent on Mars follies would not be available to deal with these real problems here and now. Besides, the US federal government is broke and living on borrowed funds, as are the American people who supply the government with these funds.
And there's lots more that can come out of such research... Pass the Tang, dude!
In conclusion, Slashdot space cadets MUST prepare themselves for the coming fiscal reality that gives nothing more than lip-service and trivial amounts of public funds to their fantasy projects. The country is broke and is facing massive problems that will shake the government to its core. The 20th century is over and so is the era of space exploration. At least we still have Star Trek.
You made a clearly inaccurate statement about the locales you mentioned. That shows your ignorance.
Well, excuse me... I'm not polishing my doctorate thesis here. I'm typing Slashdot comments.
I said that the extereme regions of desert on the earth are essentially lifeless. What I meant is not that they don't have the occasional blade of grass or microscopic bug clinging to existence in a brutal environment. I meant that these places can't support human life. Which is the only type of life (if you are a human or a close equivalent) that counts.
In other words, the possible existence of microscopic bugs or one-celled proto-life forms don't mean shit outside of theoretical or theological context, which, in the real world where human and close equivalents actually live, doesn't mean shit.
And the allocation of public funds to investigate the remote possibility that some proto-virus or possible semblance of life might exist on a rock spinning in space millions of miles away is nothing more than a theft of public resources by anyone who would spend public funds (many billions of dollars of public funds) just to check this out.
Since the only people who consider this subject important are so-called scientists who want to rip off public funds in order to fund their fantasies and theologians who believe that the possible existence of life challenges their particular fantasies, then let them pay for interplanetary exploration with their own money. Not public funds.
And yes, you are a pretentious twit. Get used to it, because I'm not going to be the last person that points this out to you.
Earth deserts are hot in the day and cold in the night. I am assuming that the deserts on Mars are cold all the time because they are millions of miles further away from the sun.
What difference does it make? If a place is more often than not outside the temperature range of 0-100 degrees F, then it can't sustain human life.
If a place can't sustain human life, and is millions of miles away from where humans live, then anyone who seriously advocates spending public funds to go there is fucking crazy by any accepted clinical definition of the term.
Hopefully I'm not talking about you. In the present era, anyone who seriously talks about interplanetary travel is a fool and deserves to be publicly treated as one. To spend public money for 'research' in this area is a theft of public funds. And people who take public funds for 'research into interplanetary travel' are criminals who belong in jail.
This is true regardless of whatever some hallucinatory public officials promise the 'scientific community' in speeches.
If you want cold lifeless desert, go to Death Valley or Arabia or the Gobi. It's much closer. You get the same empty experience, and, most importantly, you don't cost your fellow taxpayers any money.
None of these, of course, are actually lifeless.
They are lifeless in the sense that they can't sustain human life, which is the only important thing in the galaxy to humans like you and me.
Stop being a pretentious twit. You, and all the other people who are seriously advocating spending billions of dollars of space exploration, are making the entire civilized community of the world look like selfish nitwits to billions of people who live on the edge of prosperity (but can watch what we say and do).
Earth problems are real; space exploration is fantasy. Grow up and start contributing to solving the real problems of the real world.
Basic research, even in areas that may seem quite remote from anything practical, is absolutely key to advancement.
Au contraire, mon ami, focused precision research is the absolute key to advancement in the 21st century. Unfocused research remote from practicality is just pissing in the wind at best and theft of public resources at worst. The era of the professional scientist, using the government funds of some superpower, doing basic research is a 20th century conceit that is effectively over.
The money isn't there anymore. The superpowers are broke. The long-term focused killer problems that need immediate attention of public funds are real, here and now.
To simply kill any research because one can't imagine an immediate benefit is a recipe for stagnation and lost opportunities.
In the real world, To simply fund any research because one can't imagine an immediate benefit is a recipe for stagnation and lost opportunities.
No you can't. It's millions of miles away. It's technologically possible to fire off an expensive rocket (hey, shit! it's not your money), but it's impossible to explore the place. The reports returned from the very expensive rockets that have been sent there indicate that the place is a dead dusty dry place. If it were 10,000 kilometers away from where you lived on earth, you wouldn't have any interest in it. So what makes a dead, dry place special when it's millions of miles away? Nothing!
Nobody is saying that humanity should stop dreaming. Focus dreams into stories and movies. When someone takes public funds for 'dreams' of trillion dollar projects to develop a dead rock millions of miles away, they aren't dreaming, they're sckeaming to rip off the public treasury for their own profit and call it 'science'. Fantasy is not science, and spending money on space exploration is stealing money from important realistic projects that need to be now...here on earth.
If you are serious about planning humanitie's future, then work on the problems of over-population, climate change, economic collapse, and environmental catastrophe that are happening now...here on earth.
To talk about space exploration and ignore real problems is to talk like a thief and a fool. Both of which we have too many of already. Grow up already and enter the real world.
There isn't any life on Mars. There probably has never been any life on Mars. What difference would it make if there had ever been?
There's life here. It's fragile. Mars is just a dot in the night sky. It's not worth dreams or fantasies.
And it's certainly not worth spending any money to go there (or send machines there). Because there is nothing there. Get over it.
If you want cold lifeless desert, go to Death Valley or Arabia or the Gobi. It's much closer. You get the same empty experience, and, most importantly, you don't cost your fellow taxpayers any money.
There are some fools in Slashdotland that will stand there with a straight face and tell you that we need to pay for interplanetary exploration because we might destroy life on earth and therefore need to have another place to go.
There is no other place to go. Life can not be supported off the earth. Reality is not science fiction. Hollywood is just a green screen and pixel manipulation.
If you want to protect live on earth, then stop doing things that will destroy life on earth. Stop making hydrogen bombs. Some fooling around with DNA-altered diseases. Make the people who are doing these things stop doing these things.
Stop pretending that your techno-fantasies are somehow grounded in reality. The earth is our home, it's our only home. We aren't going anywhere else. There's no other place to go. Every other place is too far away and can't support life in the long term.
They're just dots in the night sky. This is reality. Accept it.
Flash drives don't work on original iMacs. This was one of the first things we tried. The OS is so old that it doesn't recognize them as a device. We can't load USB drivers for the flash drives into the iMac because we can't load anything. There may be a tech solution to this situation, but we aren't tech experts. Neither of us has any Mac experience. When we talk to Mac people they say, buy this...buy that. My friend makes maybe $10 on a good day, he's not going to be buying any $1000 laptop. This iMac was given to him by people who probably realized that it was completely useless but didn't want to pay the recycling fee.
A friend of mine is recovering from being homeless. He sells newspapers about homelessness on the streets. He also publishes stories and drawings into small 'zines' and sells them. His income is from these sales and is several orders of magnitude below what is considered to be normal. No one will hire him to do anything, but he gets by.
A social service organization gave him an Apple iMac, one of the blue bubble machines from about eight years ago, IIRC. He wrote his next zine on it and some long 20+ page stories.
Now he can't get the material off the machine to get it published. On any normal computer, the absolute minimum low-end way to get data in and out is by a 3.5" floppy disk. When all else fails, this will work. You can use it to enter drivers to get other faster and better hardware working. You can ZIP your files that are larger than the disk size and copy this single large file onto multiple floppies. You can always get a floppy to work. It may be necessary to test several blank disks to good ones due to the present lack of quality control on current floppies, but you can get it to work. New PCs don't have floppy drives, but they have the connector cable sockets and support ICs on the the motherboards. Take the old floppy from your Windows 98 PC and connect it to your brand new PC. It appears and it works without any problem.
Not on the iMac. As a whim, psychopath Steve Jobs decided that there would be no floppy on his new iMac machine. Old shit, he said. An embarrassing obsolete relic of a backward age...no old junk on my new iMac because this machine is..the..fucking..future! You all remember this Jobs rant since he's been doing it for 30 years.
So this POS iMac was designed to have it be next to impossible to use a floppy. The fact that the floppy is the least-common-denominator means of exchanging data between vastly different small computer systems and that it is and remains solid, dependable, reliable technology means nothing to this schmuck. No floppy, the Jobs god decided it, and that is the end of the discussion. He relented and offered a floppy on a USB cable. But it was so expensive that no one bought it. He just smugly said that its sales failure justified his decision not to have a floppy. It had nothing to do with the fact that it cost ten times what secondhand PC floppy drives were selling for.
One small problem as my friend discovered. There's no way to get data files in or out of the iMac now. My friend has a cell phone but no service. He has to buy cards for its use. He can't plug the iMac modem into the wall because there is no landline telephone service to his living space. Who would he call to upload his work? He can't save to CD-ROM because the drive is read-only. He can't plug this iMac into a network because there is no network. We tried a crossover network cable between this iMac and my PC network jack. Nothing. Is there a serial port or a parallel port on this? There are no standard serial or parallel connectors, only weird Apple connectors. We can't print because we can't load printer drivers. We can't use USB flash disks because the iMAC OS doesn't recognize them. We can't download flash disk drivers from the web using a PC and transfer them to this iMAC because there is no floppy.
We have no idea of how to get his work out of this piece-of-shit Apple computer. I'm stunned and amazed that this situation can be so bad for a professional level computer that is less than ten years old. And it's all because of the nitwit decisions made by this stupid asshole Steve Jobs. Every single person who works at Apple is scared shitless of being randomly and groundlessly fired by this guy, so no one will tell him that when he's doing absolutely stupid things.
I just can't believe that anyone would buy anything from this company. I've been watching this company for thirty years. I'm amazed that they are still in business.
I really liked Arthur C. Clark's works. I liked 'Songs of a Distant Earth' the best. The 2001,2010,2060,3001 series was fantastic.
But it was science fiction. It will never be true, not the alien intelligence, not HAL, not monoliths on the moon, and especially not human travel to distant planets. Don't mod me down or call me a Luddite, but it's just not going to happen.
Guys, these are not distant points on the Earth like Antarctica or some other place that you can climb into to a machine, fill it with fuel and just go to. These are dots in the night sky. They are millions of miles away. And there is nothing there that can justify the unbelievably large public expense and the near-certain failure of such a journey. The prospect of increasing quote unquote scientific knowledge just doesn't cut it anymore.
Guess what! We're broke! We pissed away all the funds that you would have liked to have spent on space travel on wars, debt service, and bail-outs for sub-prime mortgage banks. Remember the senator who said fifty years ago, "A billion here, a billion there, soon you start talking about real money!". Well we spent a hundred billion here and a hundred billion there, lost a few hundred billion here and there and didn't log in a few hundred billion over the years on account of secret 'black box' projects. And now we're broke.
Not only are we broke, but we are facing climate change, overpopulation (and its endless expensive wars), and economic meltdown. The US dollar lost 50% of its value next to the world's second major currency (the euro) in less than five years. Housing prices are falling 5% a quarter, food costs are rising 10-20% a year, oil is over $100 a barrel, and gold is over $1000 an ounce. And we're broke, and deeply in debt on all levels.
Gentlemen, we must accept the finality of reality after having expired all the other options. There isn't going to be any manned space travel program to other planets. There is unlikely to be any more trips to the moon.
It was great, it was fun, it fired the imagination of generations. But it's over.
At least we still have Star Trek reruns.
Again, don't mod me down for pointing out the reality of our current situation. It is real and the space program no longer is.
Thank you. Damn. Slashdaughters are the toughest audience to explain this to. Go put your brains into solving some real problems. Forget space exploration.
No, don't shoot yourself. Your landlord will hate having to clean the carpet and they will increase the cleaning deposit for the next tenant, which could be me.
My point is that the unchallenged faith that technology will make a better world that is common among teckies is based on many factors of which technology is only one. Without all these other factors being right, then there is no general increase in prosperity resulting from new technologies.
Besides, an upper-middle-class life by the standards of 2000 is a damn good life. If you can obtain it, and keep it, by being employed in a tech-focused field, then great for you. It's not going to be an option for most people, even good people who deserve a better life.
This is my point and silly sarcasm won't change it. There's a new reality out there. Tech workers and students are isolated from it at the present. But that is changing, so be ready for these changes.
Slashdaughter geeks tend to get overexcited at the potential of major breakthroughs, like a room-temperature superconductor. In order to make a difference in the quality of life, these breakthroughs have to be supported by hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in upgrading the existing infrastructure.
For example, the best use of superconductors at the present would be to prevent the loss of enormous amounts of electricity between the power-generating stations and the home users. The percentage of energy lost is huge is this area. But the money simply isn't there to rebuild the electrical infrastructure to take advantage of this new superconductor (even if it did operate at standard temperature-pressure).
This is the same situation with all major new technologies, like high-percentage efficiency solar cells, etc... There is this hope among technologists that the incremental efficiency gains seen from implementing new technology on small scales ('Green' buildings, individual hybrid cars, cold light bulbs, etc...) will create a 'snowballing' effect where the money saved by the new technology will more than offset the cost of its manufacture and installation.
That was true in the 20th century in the era of cheap oil, but it isn't true anymore. And with the crisis of climate change and the permanent endless wars caused by overpopulation on the horizon, it is even less likely to happen.
All the incredible technological change and advances of the 21st century will do little more than keep a small percentage of the world's elite living at quality of life that was accepted as normal in 2000. It's a hard truth to come to grips with, but the sooner that you can integrate it into your geek consciousness, the easier that the adjustments will be for you as the 21st century's harsh new realities unfold themselves.
The 20th century is over. The money is gone. The cheap, easy oil is gone. The brains and spirit of unbounded hopefullness of the 20th century is fading rapidly. Enjoy life while you can, and don't give any more of your money to Steve Jobs or the RIAA.
I agree with your position. In an electronics production lab or factory floor it is insane to be tied to the same network as the rest of the company. And it is unreasonable to expect us to follow the same rules for the omnipresent company network.
Each department or workgroup needs to have a private network so people can load their own WinAmp, personal text editors and productivity-enhancing macros, MP3s, and oscilloscope controllers without having to interact with the rest of the company network.
But I've found that it is nearly impossible to convince anyone in any IT department of this reality. So it goes.
I'm not a 'milleniumial', I was born in the first half of the 20th century. When I work for a company, they want two things: productivity and security. Security means that I'm not going to harm the company physical property and co-workers. Productivity means that I produce more of what they sell than it costs them to pay me.
Two paracitical factors inhibit this arrangement: the IT department and the human resources (legal) department. The cousin ITs believe that they can build a framework according to their training that will make us all be more productive. The HR believe the same with a different framework. But since neither of them are engaged in the primary productive activity that makes the enterprise profitable, the inevitably screw it up. In a million little and not so little ways. So we fight back.
Case in point, in the USA the politicians and insurance companies have fucked-up the health care industry to the point where most employers will not hire people in order to avoid providing health insurance. They hire people on 'contracts' creating a class of permanent temporary workers. This is especially common in the electronics industry. We work some place for six months, then work another place for six months, etc... If we get sick, we point a gun at the head of some supermarket manager and have him give us the cash in the safe. It's the new American way, it will happen to you, so don't judge me for what I must do. I don't want to hurt anyone.
Anyway, we bring our own tools to new jobs. Our software programs that we customize and modify that will maximize our productivity. Tools like text editors, spreadsheet macros, graphics and CAD design programs. I'm going to spend forty hours learning CADbozoCAD when most of the industry uses BozoCAD, just because your company got it a 10% discount? Fuck that!
I'm going to put BozoCAD my computer that I work with. I'm going to create works and convert the results into standard formats. I'm going to ignore as much as possible any previous work done in any non-industry standard format. Is there a risk to your company network and even maybe the BSA Microsoft thugs? Possibly, but...I...don't...give...a...fuck. If you hire us and provide health insurance like all companies do in the rest of the civilized world, then I ( and the millions like me in this situation) would be more sensitive to these concerns. It's one of the unforseen issues that results from using perma-temps as your workforce.
Most production managers realize this and accept it. Most cousin ITs and dumb-as-shit Human Resources people don't. Because it doesn't fit into the frameworks that they built. But my paycheck depends on the companie's bottom line and as a production worker, I create that.
So it is a constant three-way battle between the cousin ITs (the information technology department of the company who maintain the company network),the perma-temps, and the HR lawyers. They ALWAYs believe that by firing us, they maintain control and security. But they don't provide the product that keeps the company in business. Their departments are not profit centers for the company.
So the game just goes around and around. This is why I have come to hate the IT department in any company. HR people are too stupid to be concerned with, and lawyers aren't human so don't waste emotional cycles on them.
I've had four flash drives in the past year. Every one lasts only a couple of months with light use before they stop being seen by different PCs. I have no idea why this happens. I can upload files from my home PC onto the flash drive OK but the PC at the library can't see these files or even acknowledge the presence of the flash disk (after working fine the day before).
Another problem with using flash drives as a form of virtual memory is that the ICs inside are basically EEPROMS and they can only be written to 10,000-50,000 times before they fail. A program that does a lot of memory swapping can 'wear out' a flash disk in a few months.
The decision of the Japanese authorities to cut off Japanese people from file sharing may be more of aspect of Japanese culture than a legal decision. File sharing is the fastest growing way of distributing cultural works (yes, even Brittany Spears pop tunes are cultural works) from outside Japan to Japan. This may be a sign that the Japanese authorities have come to believe that non-Japanese culture has become too prevalent in Japanese society.
Japan has never been a democracy. It has always been a rigid authoritarian culture. When the authorities decide to act, they simply announce their decision and everyone obeys. Japan did close themselves off from the west before for centuries between the late 1600s until the 1850s. This happened after the authorities decided that Western ways were becoming too powerful and were beginning to threaten their power. It may be happening again.
And, of course, it may be a total clusterfuck by a group of totally clueless bullies who have no idea of what they are fooling with. But then again, for young Japanese, what's the difference?
400 Million is nothing to Steve Jobs. Especially when he's forcing his computer company to spend it in order to validate his personal level of 'cool'. Believe me, he will just add $50 to the next Macintosh that he releases and all the Apple groupies will be so dazzled by the rounded corners and groovy glow-in-the-dark metallic plastic case that they won't care. And they, being the yuppie and oh-so-creative class of our society, will just start charging $100 an hour instead of $85 for the creative things that they do for their clients, who will just charge a little more to you.
So, yeah, as Steve says, the money doesn't matter when you're... doing... really... cool... shit... with...really... cool and talented people (who buy Macs). Money only matters to the proles who use PCs (uck!).
I love the Beatles, but this is just madness. These are forty year old song recordings. If you want them, then just go to the library, check out the CDs, and copy them, for Christ's sake.
And no my friends, you don't have to buy the White Album again. When you bought the album 40 years ago, you bought a lifetime license to listen to the music on that recording. It wasn't specifically written, and the so-called entertainment lawyers of the present will disagree, but nevertheless it is real and valid in any real-world sense. And the glorious Slashdaughters here live in the modern real world. Where entertainment lawyers don't really mean much.
Again, I love the Beatles. I download their MIDI files, run them through notation software and study all the little guitar turnarounds and chord progressions in their most obscure recordings. I remix their old audio recordings using the latest digital phase-cancelling and audio mastering software. Yes, I love the Beatles...
But these are forty year old recordings. They came out between 1962 and 1969. Believe me, when they did come out there was nobody under the age of thirty who gave a shit about any pop music recording from forty years previously (the 1920s).
So, yes, I understand why anyone under the age of 30 would feel a little annoyed by all the attention that this band and their records continue to receive in the present day. But, grow up and be cool a little. The Beatles were great. But their classic popular music now, along with all the rest of the classic popular music recordings.
If you don't like them, then just ignore them. And ignore the people who rant on about them.
If you like them or are just ambivalent, then just copy the songs and let it just be one more CD on the stack in the closet.
And for God's sake don't give Sir Paul or Yoko Ono or EMI any more money! Or you'll be subjected to Beatles revivals every few years for the rest of your lives!
Slashdot Mirror
NE, NY states too small for this BS. Every other place in the world that is this physical size has an economic treaty with their neighboring small states to avoid tariffs like this.
Actually the Boston-to-WashingtonDC assemblage of little states into a single city-single economic zone has already happened. Its economic integration is overseen the US federal government. If the feds accept this new individual purchase tax on out-of-state goods enacted by a single one of this little pissant states, then they will have to do so for all the little pissant but legally-independent states that make up the Boston-Washington North American economic zone.
The overseers or guiders of the economic and legal framework that oversees this contradiction between mini-states and a single economic zone may frown on this development. They will take the case to US Supreme Court. In past cases like this, the Supremes voted against sales taxes on mail order for private individuals. I don't know the specific case but if they had voted to allow it then we would be paying it on all net purchases. This case would probably lose also if it made it that far.
I think that the New Yorkers are beginning to become aware that they chosen as their new leader a blind man who doesn't really like rich white people. The Albany pols are realizing that they need more money to keep up their little scams. This looks like an easy source.
I'm always amused at all the former powerhouse, but now presumptuous little legal entities using historical boundaries to magnify their status as states. Yes,they are old historical boundaries. But there are six separate states between the Northern Boston suburbs and the New Jersey suburbs of New York City. A distance of about 250 miles by 100 miles. There is one state for three of these economic areas on the west coast: California having the Bay Area, LA and the Valley suburbs, and San Diego-Tijuana zones.
Imagine every little municipality in each of these California zone going up to Ahh-nold and telling him that they are going to double the sales tax on everything that comes into their village and they aren't going to give any of to him.
Big Mistake!
Why all these little pissant states in the North East think that they can just do this and get away with it confounds us Westerners in the NAFTA zone. If I recall, you can cross from the eastern to the western edge of Rhode Island (one of these little NE pissant states) in an afternoon: on a bicycle.
Now that the US government as gone amok, it is not such a bad condition to be able to buy a new identity for $20. Say that you have signed a petition or participated in an anti-war action. You get arrested in a sweep and fined $100 for whatever the charge is that your local police use against demonstrators.
But it doesn't end there. Chances are that some flagwaving dickhead fascist in 'Homeland Security' puts your name on a terrorist-do-not-fly list. It will stay there forever along with a million other people who have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism. You can't ever get your name off the list. And for the next fifty years, every traffic ticket, overdue library book, or downloaded song that might put you into the focus of the local dickhead squad pretending to be police will get you thrown into prison until your loyality to the corporate establishment can be reaffirmed. Which entails a $200 processing fee paid in cash to people who are doing the determination of the level of your threat to society. It gets old, and very expensive, very quickly.
So the ability to purchase a new 'clean' identity inexpensively becomes attractive since it allows you to get on with your daily life with the least amount of extortion from the authorities. Whether or not the new identity actually refers to a real person is irrelevant if you are not using this identity for financial fraudulent criminal activity.
Now as a Slashdot technogeek, you have come to believe that none of this applies to you. But since the people who are doing these shakedowns are primarily in it for the money, and, since, as technologists, YOU will be the ones in the future with the 'disposable income', then you will be finding that, yes, it does apply to you. Even though you didn't sign any petitions or go to any anti-war demonstrations in college.
This is the way that the world works once you venture outside your MUD. Perhaps you should incorporate some of these principles into your MUDs so that they won't come as such a shock when you exit them.
Thank you
So looking at this guy's legislative website, he claims to be a 'first Latino to do this and that'. He's most proud of getting legislation passed to 'force drug dealers pay for the damage that they cause their community'. So it would appear that he specializes in vague undefined pseudo-laws primarily designed to shake down anyone without the resources to prevent this from happening (lawyers in the USA, private armies in Mexico). Basically another fine-and-upstanding slimeball politician. Wasn't Ahnaald going crunch up all this little schmucks into little balls and turn them into shiny new barbells?
Check out the shape of his legislative district (California #58). It's a true octopus. Precisely gerrymandered (an American term meaning the drawing of political boundaries to ensure permanent re-election of the people drawing the boundaries) down to the household to ensure that this bozo can never be voted away.
In the not-too-distant future, bozos like this will avoid tangling with the technicians in order to avoid having their slimy little scams and fiefdoms exposed on the web like this.
So what? I pose as a 500 year old Italian model. I'm on the internet and I pose as the first Italian supermodel. So shoot me. I needed an Internet avatar pen-name and was researching the life of Simonetta Vespucci at the time. You've seen her; she's the near-naked girl on the half-shell in Botticelli's Birth of Venus painting done in 1484. She was a real person and one of the most beautiful women in history. All the painters at the time (1470-1500) and place (Florence and Tuscany) were totally blown away by her elegance and style. She set the beauty standard until Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci started painting near-photographic images of a more down-to-earth form of beauty for women.
And what's all this about sex offenders? Hold on, I'm not defending the freaks and perverts here. But, ( and we're talking a big Spinal-Tap-sized -but- here) any schmuck who gets caught urinating outside a bar at 3am or caught swimming naked in a mountain lake by the Park Rangers gets classified as a 'sex offender'. If it's below the belt and above the knees and the police see it for any reason, then the poor guy is a 'sex offender' forever. Same for an 18-year-old guy caught kissing a 17-year-old girl (in many places). Or an 11 year old boy who puts his arms around a 10 year old girl and squeezes her while making 'kissy' noises. We had a case just like this in Oregon recently. It took a lot of public indignation to get the mad-dog district attorney to back off and be reasonable.
So yeah, teach your kids that anyone can pose as anyone on the social web sites. Then teach them about the Turing test - How can you tell if other party is what they claim to be? Teach your kids logic, reason, doubt, and due-process.
That would be really threatening to the public school administrators!
I 'discovered' that the best way to sing in tune (with recordings, or a group) is to cup one hand about one foot (@30cm) in front of your mouth and cup the other hand behind one of your ears.
While singing, your voice bounces off the hand in front of your mouth and then gets redirected into your ear. Then you can adjust the pitch of your voice to harmonize with that of the recording. This really makes a difference in your ability to sing in tune.
I thought that this was my secret trick until I saw the BeeGees on television long ago and Robin Gibb was using the same 'hand behind ear' technique to get his complex falsetto parts just right. The studio monitor fed his voice towards his ears.
I know, I know, the BeeGees, don't laugh, during the years 1975 to 1979 they were best male ensemble vocalist group in the popular music world. Dorks maybe by current standards, but who are Slashdaughters to judge in that regard?
Anyway, I realize that the last thing a Slashdot reader will ever do is sing. But most Slashdot readers have an obsession with doing things right, should the need ever arise, then in regards to singing, this is how it can be done right.
I suspect that this Microsoft program, like all Microsoft pop culture products, will go nowhere and die a slow, embarrassing death should it ever get released. It sounds to me (bad pun) like the auto-play features found on those plastic WalMart keyboards that are too cheap and dumb to have MIDI ports included on the back. Microsoft should put this code into open-source and take a tax write-off on the development costs.
And speaking of which, just exactly WHY is Microsoft researching automatic computer music product generation? If I recall correctly, don't they make personal computer operating systems and business software. I guess that it must be that since they found and eliminated all the bugs in their primary products that they were looking for a new challenge. And they want to get some of the glory that is coming from the Rock Star plastic button guitar weirdness that is currently popular among the less-musically-inclined sector of the population.
Since Yahoo! is in the delicate stage of being bought out by Microsoft, they're trying to avoid any lawsuits that could cause the buying price to be pulled lower. This is probably the reason that they are acting like consummate assholes. Normally the yahoos couldn't care less about pissant grandstanding through dubious legal stunts, but...this is a delicate moment in the take-over process.
Maybe Microsoft is behind this in order to use a barrage of picayune lawsuits as a justification for lowering their bid offer. Goodness knows, Microsoft's staff of eager-beaver Ivy League lawyers do live for this kind of thing.
A self-sustaining extraterrestrial human community
...
A human community on Mars could never be self-sustaining.
is necessary to avoid probable pandemics, asteroid impacts, or other situations that would have extreme adverse effects on Earth-based population.
These problems haven't destroyed human life on Earth in 50,000 years. They would destroy human life on Mars within months.
Therefore this research is in the public interest,
Any research could be called public interest by this vague definition. Allow me to give a more precise definition - any research receiving public funds must be directed to a specific solution to an immediate life-threatening problem. Mars work doesn't qualify.
only pretentious, greedy twits with no concept of the future such as yourself
I'm only telling the truth to the star-struck geeks. I'm said nothing about spending public funds on myself, and scientists have told us that the future in concept and reality holds over-population, climate change, and ecological disaster. Funds spent on Mars follies would not be available to deal with these real problems here and now. Besides, the US federal government is broke and living on borrowed funds, as are the American people who supply the government with these funds.
And there's lots more that can come out of such research...
Pass the Tang, dude!
In conclusion, Slashdot space cadets MUST prepare themselves for the coming fiscal reality that gives nothing more than lip-service and trivial amounts of public funds to their fantasy projects. The country is broke and is facing massive problems that will shake the government to its core. The 20th century is over and so is the era of space exploration. At least we still have Star Trek.
You made a clearly inaccurate statement about the locales you mentioned. That shows your ignorance.
Well, excuse me... I'm not polishing my doctorate thesis here. I'm typing Slashdot comments.
I said that the extereme regions of desert on the earth are essentially lifeless. What I meant is not that they don't have the occasional blade of grass or microscopic bug clinging to existence in a brutal environment. I meant that these places can't support human life. Which is the only type of life (if you are a human or a close equivalent) that counts.
In other words, the possible existence of microscopic bugs or one-celled proto-life forms don't mean shit outside of theoretical or theological context, which, in the real world where human and close equivalents actually live, doesn't mean shit.
And the allocation of public funds to investigate the remote possibility that some proto-virus or possible semblance of life might exist on a rock spinning in space millions of miles away is nothing more than a theft of public resources by anyone who would spend public funds (many billions of dollars of public funds) just to check this out.
Since the only people who consider this subject important are so-called scientists who want to rip off public funds in order to fund their fantasies and theologians who believe that the possible existence of life challenges their particular fantasies, then let them pay for interplanetary exploration with their own money. Not public funds.
And yes, you are a pretentious twit. Get used to it, because I'm not going to be the last person that points this out to you.
You make a moronic statement,...
Please be more specific about which of my many reasonable and rational statements you consider to be 'moronic'.
Earth deserts are hot in the day and cold in the night. I am assuming that the deserts on Mars are cold all the time because they are millions of miles further away from the sun.
What difference does it make? If a place is more often than not outside the temperature range of 0-100 degrees F, then it can't sustain human life.
If a place can't sustain human life, and is millions of miles away from where humans live, then anyone who seriously advocates spending public funds to go there is fucking crazy by any accepted clinical definition of the term.
Hopefully I'm not talking about you. In the present era, anyone who seriously talks about interplanetary travel is a fool and deserves to be publicly treated as one. To spend public money for 'research' in this area is a theft of public funds. And people who take public funds for 'research into interplanetary travel' are criminals who belong in jail.
This is true regardless of whatever some hallucinatory public officials promise the 'scientific community' in speeches.
If you want cold lifeless desert, go to Death Valley or Arabia or the Gobi. It's much closer. You get the same empty experience, and, most importantly, you don't cost your fellow taxpayers any money.
None of these, of course, are actually lifeless.
They are lifeless in the sense that they can't sustain human life, which is the only important thing in the galaxy to humans like you and me.
Stop being a pretentious twit. You, and all the other people who are seriously advocating spending billions of dollars of space exploration, are making the entire civilized community of the world look like selfish nitwits to billions of people who live on the edge of prosperity (but can watch what we say and do).
Earth problems are real; space exploration is fantasy. Grow up and start contributing to solving the real problems of the real world.
Thank you.
Basic research, even in areas that may seem quite remote from anything practical, is absolutely key to advancement.
Au contraire, mon ami, focused precision research is the absolute key to advancement in the 21st century. Unfocused research remote from practicality is just pissing in the wind at best and theft of public resources at worst. The era of the professional scientist, using the government funds of some superpower, doing basic research is a 20th century conceit that is effectively over.
The money isn't there anymore. The superpowers are broke. The long-term focused killer problems that need immediate attention of public funds are real, here and now.
To simply kill any research because one can't imagine an immediate benefit is a recipe for stagnation and lost opportunities.
In the real world, To simply fund any research because one can't imagine an immediate benefit is a recipe for stagnation and lost opportunities.
The real reason we want to explore Mars?
Because we can
No you can't. It's millions of miles away. It's technologically possible to fire off an expensive rocket (hey, shit! it's not your money), but it's impossible to explore the place. The reports returned from the very expensive rockets that have been sent there indicate that the place is a dead dusty dry place. If it were 10,000 kilometers away from where you lived on earth, you wouldn't have any interest in it. So what makes a dead, dry place special when it's millions of miles away? Nothing!
Nobody is saying that humanity should stop dreaming. Focus dreams into stories and movies. When someone takes public funds for 'dreams' of trillion dollar projects to develop a dead rock millions of miles away, they aren't dreaming, they're sckeaming to rip off the public treasury for their own profit and call it 'science'. Fantasy is not science, and spending money on space exploration is stealing money from important realistic projects that need to be now...here on earth.
If you are serious about planning humanitie's future, then work on the problems of over-population, climate change, economic collapse, and environmental catastrophe that are happening now...here on earth.
To talk about space exploration and ignore real problems is to talk like a thief and a fool. Both of which we have too many of already. Grow up already and enter the real world.
Thank you.
There isn't any life on Mars. There probably has never been any life on Mars. What difference would it make if there had ever been?
There's life here. It's fragile. Mars is just a dot in the night sky. It's not worth dreams or fantasies.
And it's certainly not worth spending any money to go there (or send machines there). Because there is nothing there. Get over it.
If you want cold lifeless desert, go to Death Valley or Arabia or the Gobi. It's much closer. You get the same empty experience, and, most importantly, you don't cost your fellow taxpayers any money.
There are some fools in Slashdotland that will stand there with a straight face and tell you that we need to pay for interplanetary exploration because we might destroy life on earth and therefore need to have another place to go.
There is no other place to go. Life can not be supported off the earth. Reality is not science fiction. Hollywood is just a green screen and pixel manipulation.
If you want to protect live on earth, then stop doing things that will destroy life on earth. Stop making hydrogen bombs. Some fooling around with DNA-altered diseases. Make the people who are doing these things stop doing these things.
Stop pretending that your techno-fantasies are somehow grounded in reality. The earth is our home, it's our only home. We aren't going anywhere else. There's no other place to go. Every other place is too far away and can't support life in the long term.
They're just dots in the night sky. This is reality. Accept it.
Flash drives don't work on original iMacs. This was one of the first things we tried. The OS is so old that it doesn't recognize them as a device. We can't load USB drivers for the flash drives into the iMac because we can't load anything. There may be a tech solution to this situation, but we aren't tech experts. Neither of us has any Mac experience. When we talk to Mac people they say, buy this...buy that. My friend makes maybe $10 on a good day, he's not going to be buying any $1000 laptop. This iMac was given to him by people who probably realized that it was completely useless but didn't want to pay the recycling fee.
A friend of mine is recovering from being homeless. He sells newspapers about homelessness on the streets. He also publishes stories and drawings into small 'zines' and sells them. His income is from these sales and is several orders of magnitude below what is considered to be normal. No one will hire him to do anything, but he gets by.
A social service organization gave him an Apple iMac, one of the blue bubble machines from about eight years ago, IIRC. He wrote his next zine on it and some long 20+ page stories.
Now he can't get the material off the machine to get it published. On any normal computer, the absolute minimum low-end way to get data in and out is by a 3.5" floppy disk. When all else fails, this will work. You can use it to enter drivers to get other faster and better hardware working. You can ZIP your files that are larger than the disk size and copy this single large file onto multiple floppies. You can always get a floppy to work. It may be necessary to test several blank disks to good ones due to the present lack of quality control on current floppies, but you can get it to work. New PCs don't have floppy drives, but they have the connector cable sockets and support ICs on the the motherboards. Take the old floppy from your Windows 98 PC and connect it to your brand new PC. It appears and it works without any problem.
Not on the iMac. As a whim, psychopath Steve Jobs decided that there would be no floppy on his new iMac machine. Old shit, he said. An embarrassing obsolete relic of a backward age...no old junk on my new iMac because this machine is..the..fucking..future! You all remember this Jobs rant since he's been doing it for 30 years.
So this POS iMac was designed to have it be next to impossible to use a floppy. The fact that the floppy is the least-common-denominator means of exchanging data between vastly different small computer systems and that it is and remains solid, dependable, reliable technology means nothing to this schmuck. No floppy, the Jobs god decided it, and that is the end of the discussion. He relented and offered a floppy on a USB cable. But it was so expensive that no one bought it. He just smugly said that its sales failure justified his decision not to have a floppy. It had nothing to do with the fact that it cost ten times what secondhand PC floppy drives were selling for.
One small problem as my friend discovered. There's no way to get data files in or out of the iMac now. My friend has a cell phone but no service. He has to buy cards for its use. He can't plug the iMac modem into the wall because there is no landline telephone service to his living space. Who would he call to upload his work? He can't save to CD-ROM because the drive is read-only. He can't plug this iMac into a network because there is no network. We tried a crossover network cable between this iMac and my PC network jack. Nothing. Is there a serial port or a parallel port on this? There are no standard serial or parallel connectors, only weird Apple connectors. We can't print because we can't load printer drivers. We can't use USB flash disks because the iMAC OS doesn't recognize them. We can't download flash disk drivers from the web using a PC and transfer them to this iMAC because there is no floppy.
We have no idea of how to get his work out of this piece-of-shit Apple computer. I'm stunned and amazed that this situation can be so bad for a professional level computer that is less than ten years old. And it's all because of the nitwit decisions made by this stupid asshole Steve Jobs. Every single person who works at Apple is scared shitless of being randomly and groundlessly fired by this guy, so no one will tell him that when he's doing absolutely stupid things.
I just can't believe that anyone would buy anything from this company. I've been watching this company for thirty years. I'm amazed that they are still in business.
I really liked Arthur C. Clark's works. I liked 'Songs of a Distant Earth' the best. The 2001,2010,2060,3001 series was fantastic.
But it was science fiction. It will never be true, not the alien intelligence, not HAL, not monoliths on the moon, and especially not human travel to distant planets. Don't mod me down or call me a Luddite, but it's just not going to happen.
Guys, these are not distant points on the Earth like Antarctica or some other place that you can climb into to a machine, fill it with fuel and just go to. These are dots in the night sky. They are millions of miles away. And there is nothing there that can justify the unbelievably large public expense and the near-certain failure of such a journey. The prospect of increasing quote unquote scientific knowledge just doesn't cut it anymore.
Guess what! We're broke! We pissed away all the funds that you would have liked to have spent on space travel on wars, debt service, and bail-outs for sub-prime mortgage banks. Remember the senator who said fifty years ago, "A billion here, a billion there, soon you start talking about real money!". Well we spent a hundred billion here and a hundred billion there, lost a few hundred billion here and there and didn't log in a few hundred billion over the years on account of secret 'black box' projects. And now we're broke.
Not only are we broke, but we are facing climate change, overpopulation (and its endless expensive wars), and economic meltdown. The US dollar lost 50% of its value next to the world's second major currency (the euro) in less than five years. Housing prices are falling 5% a quarter, food costs are rising 10-20% a year, oil is over $100 a barrel, and gold is over $1000 an ounce. And we're broke, and deeply in debt on all levels.
Gentlemen, we must accept the finality of reality after having expired all the other options. There isn't going to be any manned space travel program to other planets. There is unlikely to be any more trips to the moon.
It was great, it was fun, it fired the imagination of generations. But it's over.
At least we still have Star Trek reruns.
Again, don't mod me down for pointing out the reality of our current situation. It is real and the space program no longer is.
Thank you. Damn. Slashdaughters are the toughest audience to explain this to. Go put your brains into solving some real problems. Forget space exploration.
No, don't shoot yourself. Your landlord will hate having to clean the carpet and they will increase the cleaning deposit for the next tenant, which could be me.
My point is that the unchallenged faith that technology will make a better world that is common among teckies is based on many factors of which technology is only one. Without all these other factors being right, then there is no general increase in prosperity resulting from new technologies.
Besides, an upper-middle-class life by the standards of 2000 is a damn good life. If you can obtain it, and keep it, by being employed in a tech-focused field, then great for you. It's not going to be an option for most people, even good people who deserve a better life.
This is my point and silly sarcasm won't change it. There's a new reality out there. Tech workers and students are isolated from it at the present. But that is changing, so be ready for these changes.
Thank you,
Slashdaughter geeks tend to get overexcited at the potential of major breakthroughs, like a room-temperature superconductor. In order to make a difference in the quality of life, these breakthroughs have to be supported by hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in upgrading the existing infrastructure.
For example, the best use of superconductors at the present would be to prevent the loss of enormous amounts of electricity between the power-generating stations and the home users. The percentage of energy lost is huge is this area. But the money simply isn't there to rebuild the electrical infrastructure to take advantage of this new superconductor (even if it did operate at standard temperature-pressure).
This is the same situation with all major new technologies, like high-percentage efficiency solar cells, etc... There is this hope among technologists that the incremental efficiency gains seen from implementing new technology on small scales ('Green' buildings, individual hybrid cars, cold light bulbs, etc...) will create a 'snowballing' effect where the money saved by the new technology will more than offset the cost of its manufacture and installation.
That was true in the 20th century in the era of cheap oil, but it isn't true anymore. And with the crisis of climate change and the permanent endless wars caused by overpopulation on the horizon, it is even less likely to happen.
All the incredible technological change and advances of the 21st century will do little more than keep a small percentage of the world's elite living at quality of life that was accepted as normal in 2000. It's a hard truth to come to grips with, but the sooner that you can integrate it into your geek consciousness, the easier that the adjustments will be for you as the 21st century's harsh new realities unfold themselves.
The 20th century is over. The money is gone. The cheap, easy oil is gone. The brains and spirit of unbounded hopefullness of the 20th century is fading rapidly. Enjoy life while you can, and don't give any more of your money to Steve Jobs or the RIAA.
I agree with your position. In an electronics production lab or factory floor it is insane to be tied to the same network as the rest of the company. And it is unreasonable to expect us to follow the same rules for the omnipresent company network.
Each department or workgroup needs to have a private network so people can load their own WinAmp, personal text editors and productivity-enhancing macros, MP3s, and oscilloscope controllers without having to interact with the rest of the company network.
But I've found that it is nearly impossible to convince anyone in any IT department of this reality. So it goes.
I'm not a 'milleniumial', I was born in the first half of the 20th century. When I work for a company, they want two things: productivity and security. Security means that I'm not going to harm the company physical property and co-workers. Productivity means that I produce more of what they sell than it costs them to pay me.
Two paracitical factors inhibit this arrangement: the IT department and the human resources (legal) department. The cousin ITs believe that they can build a framework according to their training that will make us all be more productive. The HR believe the same with a different framework. But since neither of them are engaged in the primary productive activity that makes the enterprise profitable, the inevitably screw it up. In a million little and not so little ways. So we fight back.
Case in point, in the USA the politicians and insurance companies have fucked-up the health care industry to the point where most employers will not hire people in order to avoid providing health insurance. They hire people on 'contracts' creating a class of permanent temporary workers. This is especially common in the electronics industry. We work some place for six months, then work another place for six months, etc... If we get sick, we point a gun at the head of some supermarket manager and have him give us the cash in the safe. It's the new American way, it will happen to you, so don't judge me for what I must do. I don't want to hurt anyone.
Anyway, we bring our own tools to new jobs. Our software programs that we customize and modify that will maximize our productivity. Tools like text editors, spreadsheet macros, graphics and CAD design programs. I'm going to spend forty hours learning CADbozoCAD when most of the industry uses BozoCAD, just because your company got it a 10% discount? Fuck that!
I'm going to put BozoCAD my computer that I work with. I'm going to create works and convert the results into standard formats. I'm going to ignore as much as possible any previous work done in any non-industry standard format. Is there a risk to your company network and even maybe the BSA Microsoft thugs? Possibly, but...I...don't...give...a...fuck. If you hire us and provide health insurance like all companies do in the rest of the civilized world, then I ( and the millions like me in this situation) would be more sensitive to these concerns. It's one of the unforseen issues that results from using perma-temps as your workforce.
Most production managers realize this and accept it. Most cousin ITs and dumb-as-shit Human Resources people don't. Because it doesn't fit into the frameworks that they built. But my paycheck depends on the companie's bottom line and as a production worker, I create that.
So it is a constant three-way battle between the cousin ITs (the information technology department of the company who maintain the company network),the perma-temps, and the HR lawyers. They ALWAYs believe that by firing us, they maintain control and security. But they don't provide the product that keeps the company in business. Their departments are not profit centers for the company.
So the game just goes around and around. This is why I have come to hate the IT department in any company. HR people are too stupid to be concerned with, and lawyers aren't human so don't waste emotional cycles on them.
I've had four flash drives in the past year. Every one lasts only a couple of months with light use before they stop being seen by different PCs. I have no idea why this happens. I can upload files from my home PC onto the flash drive OK but the PC at the library can't see these files or even acknowledge the presence of the flash disk (after working fine the day before).
Another problem with using flash drives as a form of virtual memory is that the ICs inside are basically EEPROMS and they can only be written to 10,000-50,000 times before they fail. A program that does a lot of memory swapping can 'wear out' a flash disk in a few months.
The decision of the Japanese authorities to cut off Japanese people from file sharing may be more of aspect of Japanese culture than a legal decision. File sharing is the fastest growing way of distributing cultural works (yes, even Brittany Spears pop tunes are cultural works) from outside Japan to Japan. This may be a sign that the Japanese authorities have come to believe that non-Japanese culture has become too prevalent in Japanese society.
Japan has never been a democracy. It has always been a rigid authoritarian culture. When the authorities decide to act, they simply announce their decision and everyone obeys. Japan did close themselves off from the west before for centuries between the late 1600s until the 1850s. This happened after the authorities decided that Western ways were becoming too powerful and were beginning to threaten their power. It may be happening again.
And, of course, it may be a total clusterfuck by a group of totally clueless bullies who have no idea of what they are fooling with. But then again, for young Japanese, what's the difference?
400 Million is nothing to Steve Jobs. Especially when he's forcing his computer company to spend it in order to validate his personal level of 'cool'. Believe me, he will just add $50 to the next Macintosh that he releases and all the Apple groupies will be so dazzled by the rounded corners and groovy glow-in-the-dark metallic plastic case that they won't care. And they, being the yuppie and oh-so-creative class of our society, will just start charging $100 an hour instead of $85 for the creative things that they do for their clients, who will just charge a little more to you.
... doing ... really ... cool... shit... with ...really ... cool and talented people (who buy Macs). Money only matters to the proles who use PCs (uck!).
So, yeah, as Steve says, the money doesn't matter when you're
I love the Beatles, but this is just madness. These are forty year old song recordings. If you want them, then just go to the library, check out the CDs, and copy them, for Christ's sake.
And no my friends, you don't have to buy the White Album again. When you bought the album 40 years ago, you bought a lifetime license to listen to the music on that recording. It wasn't specifically written, and the so-called entertainment lawyers of the present will disagree, but nevertheless it is real and valid in any real-world sense. And the glorious Slashdaughters here live in the modern real world. Where entertainment lawyers don't really mean much.
Again, I love the Beatles. I download their MIDI files, run them through notation software and study all the little guitar turnarounds and chord progressions in their most obscure recordings. I remix their old audio recordings using the latest digital phase-cancelling and audio mastering software. Yes, I love the Beatles...
But these are forty year old recordings. They came out between 1962 and 1969. Believe me, when they did come out there was nobody under the age of thirty who gave a shit about any pop music recording from forty years previously (the 1920s).
So, yes, I understand why anyone under the age of 30 would feel a little annoyed by all the attention that this band and their records continue to receive in the present day. But, grow up and be cool a little. The Beatles were great. But their classic popular music now, along with all the rest of the classic popular music recordings.
If you don't like them, then just ignore them. And ignore the people who rant on about them.
If you like them or are just ambivalent, then just copy the songs and let it just be one more CD on the stack in the closet.
And for God's sake don't give Sir Paul or Yoko Ono or EMI any more money! Or you'll be subjected to Beatles revivals every few years for the rest of your lives!