Fu*cking gophers again, chewing on the wires in the ground because they're warm (all that current) and the ancient paper/plastic coating tastes so good to them.
Actually the real problem in the 21st century is that 'Mutually Assured Destruction' doesn't work as a deterrent to people who are willing to commit mass murder and mass suicide for some god that they believe in. Say what you want about the commies, they weren't religious fanatics who would be willing to blow up the world in order to get 72 virgins.
We need to consider putting 'omnicide' (a word that I made up meaning a deliberate act resulting in the destruction of all human life on earth) technology into partial control of a group of rational, civilized people who can make sure that the governments that have omnicide technology don't bumble or get tricked into using it. And that nobody who doesn't have it gets access to it.
Omnicide technology is not having a few nuclear bombs. That would just make big explosions and create a lot of fall-out. Stupid and envoironmentally destructive, but not in the omnicide category. Having 5000-10000 hydrogen-to-helium converters put you in the OT category, though. So does having the technology to create super-diseases that spread rapidly and have no cure. Or earthquake control technology (which may or may not exist). Or asteroid-directional control technology, which definitely doesn't exist as yet. Or any other omnicide technology that I can't think of at the moment. (Can you think of something that I missed?)
I'd be surprised if such a group doesn't already exist, possibly with extra-human intelligence oversight.
Your insights are almost all true. You are correct in assuming that "all Americans are fat, dumb, loud, constantly suing each other and give firearms to their children for free,...". But it is not true for all Americans, only about half.
The other half are the ones who created the most prosperous, powerful, and advanced country in the world. The country that everybody and their uncle wants to move to. Nobody wants to move to Russia. Nobody.
We don't hang black people from trees; no more 'strange fruit'. As far as burning black people alive, well, it would seem that you have us confused with Africans. In many parts of Africa, "necklace-ing" is a popular way of dealing with someone from outside of your tribe who comes into your neighborhood.
Now that you're free as a country, why not learn about your country? Try reading "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. You'll learn a bit about why your country is so fucked up.
As for us, we have always been free to read dissidents like Noam Chomski and Howard Zinn. We know how our country works:we know the difference between history and propaganda.
As for airport security, well, we have a common enemy there. The crazy muslims want to kill your people as much as they want to kill our people. But fascism is new to us, but not to you. We tend to over-react, because we are still learning to be perfect assholes. But with all the former communists running around with little to do, we have the world's greatest teachers!
Take a ride on Air Chernobil or Aeroflot to outer space?
No thanks.
Russians are good at three things:
1) making cheap vodka. 2) dragging the local Jews out behind the outhouse and beating them to death in the snow. 3) crushing the hopes of world domination of any fool who invades their country at the beginning of the winter.
Advanced 21st technology and providing a warm holiday experience for foreigners is not on that list.
So go ahead. Mod me down to -2 hell for being a "troll, racist, etc...". It doesn't change the truth.
"information weapons" is just a catch phrase for telling truth to assholes like the people who run the Soviet Union. Er..ah..excuse me,.. the People's Democratic Republic of Russia. Whatever. The rulers of Russia were assholes 500 years ago, they were 100 years ago, they were 50 years ago and they are still assholes today. Nothing ever changes there in terms of leadership.
Normally I consider it not to be of any concern to anyone lucky enough not to live in Russia. But they have about 6000 hydrogen-to-helium converters that have a tendency to ignore environmental regulations on waste-heat management when they are operated. It would be best not to piss them off lest they decide to send a few of these H2He converters floating down on our neighborhoods. We get enough shit already from the idiot Moslems already about those fucking cartoons. We don't need any more problems from assholes who can't tell the difference between freedom-of-speech and a weapon.
This is what happens when nulkulturny shit-for-brains psychopaths get hydrogen-to-helium converters. We have to pretend that they are civilized people.
It really is in the best interest of all the freedom-loving people of the world to make sure that assholes don't get hydrogen-to-helium converters.
Your comment is interesting. I implies that the nukes may not exist, because if they did, and there was the ability to destroy life on earth and these systems were kept on hair-trigger readiness, then something would have happened already by now after @60 years.
I suspect that there is an "Omnicide Prevention Group" among the nuclear powers that works to identify 'Dr. Strangelove' characters and is enpowered to prevent them for creating 'Earth Burning' situations from happening.
Or we have been extremely lucky to have principled and moral men in the military guarding against these situations. Guys like the officer played by Denzel Washington in the movie Crimson Tide.
I'm anti-war, anti-military myself, but I salute these guys for being able to keep the peace since WWII.
Just as ants have no concept of your foot squashing them being signs of an advanced intelligence (you), so would flying saucers be considered a sign of beings from another planet. If they exist, (a far more advanced intelligence on earth than humans) then they would be good at keeping themselves hidden and secret.
Maybe they don't understand how we function any more than we understand how ants function.
Maybe by messing with our nukes they are protecting themselves in the way that we brush away ants at our picnics.
Or more realistically, the people who are in-charge of keeping the Dr. Strangelove characters from burning the earth are creating a collective hallucination of flying saucers and destroying the rogue nukes themselves. Since there has never been any real physical evidence of flying saucers actually existing, this is the most likely scenario.
Anyway, we should thank these guys for protecting us from the psychopaths in the military who want to burn the world and rule the ashes.
Do the Soviets (no I don't accept them as 'Russians'), the Chinese, the French, and the British have the same 'problem' with flying saucers fucking around with the nuclear bombs that we do?
Downloading is kind of dumb because unless you are a wizard at RIAA dodging technology, these people are looking for you and could, conceivably, actually find you. Especially if you're downloading a lot from your dorm room.
Another reason downloading is somewhat déclassé is because you have to specifically request a title, which means you have to know exactly what you want, which means that your cultural development is limited to what you already know and like.
One of the great features of Napster was that you could scan the lists of other people's offerings who were sharing files on Napster. Chances were high that if you liked a very specific form of music and you found great titles on another sharer's listing, then the other titles in their offered collection would be great even if you weren't familiar with the songs or bands . All the bulk 'pirate' websites since then don't offer this feature: they just offer a library of specific titles that you have to request.
Everyone has spare old hard disks hanging around. Let's fill up our old drives with music:art:video:films that we think are fantastic and share drives instead of files. No one will ever get caught by the MPAA/RIAA, and we will get exposed to new works that we would never be exposed to otherwise. This is what the media companies are supposed to do but fail so pathetically at doing.
I myself love movies. So when I upgraded my hard drive to a two terabyte I took the old 600 gigabyte and filled it with my favorite films copied from DVDs available at the public library. I share it with co-workers. Out of the sixty or so movies, they may have heard of only a few. But they are all good and they are all free and they are all available to them on the drive.
Here is a list of the movies on my old shared hard disk. What's on your shared hard disk? Goldfinger 1964 Unfaithfully Yours 1939** From Russia With Love 1963 Sea Change - Jesse Stone 2004 GoldenEye 1992 Taken 2007 For Your Eyes Only 1986 Night Passage - Jesse Stone 2005 Quantum of Solace 2007 The Seagull's Laughter (Iceland) 2004 The Departed 2007 Thunderball 1966 For A Few Dollars More 1967 El Topo (Mexico) 1967 La Jetee (France) 1962 Stone Cold - Jesse Stone 2006 Death In Paradise - Jesse Stone 2006 I Could Never Be Your Woman 2005 Lost Horizon 1939 Farewell, My Concubine (China) 1989 My Best Friend (France) 2001 Logan's Run 1975 Dr. No 1962 Black Sunday 1976 Infernal Affairs (Chinese-Hong Kong) 1999 You Only Live Twice 1967 Two English Girls (France) 1971 Truffaut The Godfather (part 1) 1972 CSI_Miami Season 5_Disk 5 2005 Dangerous Beauty 2006 Vicky Christina Barcelona 2007 City of God (Brazil) 2004 Marathon Man 1977 The World Is Not Enough 1996 Star Trek IV _ The Voyage Home 1986 Toby Dammit (Italy) 1966 Fellini Waitress 2006 A Hard Day's Night 1964 Space Cowboys 1999 Day For Night (France) 1974 Truffaut Hamlet (Mel Gibson) 1989 Beauty And The Beast (France) 1946 Bride and Prejudice (India) 2005 The Black Book (Netherlands) 2005 Sleepless In Seattle 1992 Nash Bridges [Wild Card] 1999 The Wings of a Dove 1998 Dangerous Liasions 1989 Love on the Run (France) 1979 Truffaut My Man Godfrey 1936** The Ninth Gate 2004 The Man Who Loved Women (France) 1979 Truffaut The Big Lebowski 1999 The Thomas Crown Affair 1998 American Gangster 2006 Dune 1982 Flawless 2007 Bandlieu 13 (France) 2008 Shine A Light (the Rolling Stones) 2008 Goodfellas 1990 The Dirty Dozen 1967 Ben And Board (France) 1970 Truffaut State of Play 2008
Secrecy is horseshit. Document classification is horseshit. If something needs to be secret, don't put it into a document. If something needs to be secret and you know it, then don't tell anybody. Three can keep a secret if two are dead and the other is scared shitless about what will happen if he tells the secret. And notice the pronoun 'he' in the last sentence. For God's sake, if you are serious about keeping a secret, don't tell it to a woman.
99.99999% of everything in the world classified as secret is just people covering up their mistakes from their superiors. Very, Very little actually needs to be kept secret.
Just do what you get paid to do. You get paid to teach people physics. Everything else is just horseshit designed to distract you from your duties. Just teach people physics. That is what people are paying you to do. So just do it.
If they want to use electronic calculators, let them. Until your Korean-teaching ability is better than your physics-teaching ability, don't hassle people for using electronic dictionaries.
Institutions of higher learning put far too much emphasis on grades and ratings and far too less on what they are being paid to do: impart advanced knowledge.
If you are worried that your students are using electronic devices to 'hussle' you into getting a better grade, then you are teaching them at too low a level. Make your curriculum more advanced and go faster in your lectures. The people who are seriously interested in what you do, i.e. the ones who are actually spending time with you to learn physics, will keep up. The rest will go do something more interesting to them.
Be serious; you're a teacher, so just fucking teach and stop bitching about people's calculators.
I use the internet so much, that I... oh shit, I forgot what I was going to say!
Oh yeah, have you been dumpster diving outside of a very profitable high-tech company and come across a protoboard that is covered with very expensive looking ICs on it? And it's got things like a MIDI port, video connectors, and RCA-jacks so you know it does something most likely very cool? And you go to the library to look up the numbers that are on the ICs in the collection of data books from fifty manufacturers and you can't find anything?
Then 20 years later, in the same situation, you just type the letter/numbers printed on the IC into Google and you get the 200-page PDF file of the data sheet and a set of links to open-source fully-debugged applications, and a near-secret link to the manufacturer's special $20 offer of a complete in-circuit-debugging development system?
And you are entertaining the notion that the internet is making us stupid? You are out of your mind. The internet is a knowledge amplifier! Anyone who might think that the Internet is making people stupid fails to realize that most people are already stupid...and the internet makes all the rest of us more aware of that fact because it is so efficient at making us so much smarter.
Why is Sony so obsessed with the outmoded past? They are trying to compress 21st-century technology into 19th-century education and publishing systems. Pathetic.
What Sony should be doing is to find a way to put the entire NYC, San Francisco, or London public library collection of books into a hand-held device, and then sell that device.
You can buy now, a multi-terabyte hard drive, for about $100? Or you will be able to in a year or two. Have you any idea how many zipped-text books will fit in a tera-byte? A million? Could you fit a million books into a bank of flash memory chips that could make up half the physical space of tablet-sized e-book reader?
Why is Sony thinking in metaphors of 'number of copies of a book' that a library has to physically lend to its readers? Why aren't they thinking in terms of how many millions of books that they can fit in a hand-held device?
Libraries were an important development in the era where words were distributed on bound stacks of printed paper. In the present era, where you can have 100000 books stored in the 16-gigabyte flash drive that you can balance on your finger, the concept of a library being limited to the number of paper-based books they have stored away is absurd.
Sony!...if you are going to thrive in the 21st century, stop thinking in terms of the 19th century!
It stretches credibility to believe that astronomers could detect volcanos on planets 30 eff-ing light years away. I think that they are just bullshitting the feds in order to get more funding, what with astronomy being a rather low priority with the USA trillons of dollars in debt, the banking system collapsing, and the easy sources of oil depleting.
What difference would it make anyway? Even if technology were to continue on the same arc that it has for the past 150 years, it would still be a 5000 year project to get to another planet that is 30 eff-ing light years away.
Don't you just love all the Star Trek films where faster-than-light giant interplanetary starships are exploring distant reaches of the galaxy in only 200 years from now ? In 200 years from now, we will still be paying off the Iraq/Afghanistan war and trying to figure out how to grow grass in the thin layer of topsoil that used to be the corn-belt of the North American MidWest. Not to mention protecting our kids for antibiotic-resistant TB that resulted from late-20th century abuses.
Jeez, guys, stop wasting our time with science fiction fantasies about volcanos on planets 30 eff-ing light years away!
This plan should continue to be developed, abet at a slower pace. In the event of national disaster, it could serve as a back-up to the existing internet structure. I know, I know, the internet itself was originally designed to be the backup of the national communications network in the event of a nuclear war that destroyed the centralized switching terminals of the phone system.
But the web now is much greater than its original design and much more fragile. In the event of a 'long emergency', if I may invoke James Howard Kunstler's dystopian scenario, it would be wise to have a low-speed low-tech internet-ready communications system in reserve.
Take the number of lawsuits filed against file sharers, - multiply by the average amount of money that you get from each lawsuit - subtract the total amount of money spent for lawyers to file the papers, etc... - assuming that anyone that you successfully sue will never buy a product that you make again, ever, in the future...subtract the expected future value of any sales of movie media for at least 40 years for each person that you successfully sue.
Now the numbers:
- 5000 file sharers sued successfully for about $1500-$2000 each. @$8,000,000
- Lawyer and court costs of about $400-$500 for each successful suit. -@$ 2,500,000
Each file sharer not buying product. Assume each file sharer would have bought three media products (DVD, BlueRay, download streams...) per year at $15 per product unit. Since file sharers are young, assume that $45/year for 40 years. 45*40*5000 - @$9,000,000
short term gain $8,000,000 long term loss @ $11,500,000
In American corporate logic, short term gain ALWAYS wins over greater long term loss.
Therefore, expect file sharing lawsuits to continue for the next ten years as they are today.
Manned space flight was a government program that has been determined to be too expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and few people believe that throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into space will solve them. Grown-up people who were elected to make hard and realistic decisions about our public funds have decided this. NASA and all its Tom Swift-space cadets are having a hard time accepting it. But sorry, guys... it's time to get real.
Sure, politicians will continue to announce great new projects like manned Mars missions. But then they will quietly de-fund them to nearly nothing a few years later. They don't have any choice. Money that would have been spent on these projects has already been spent; and it's gone.
People born into 20th-century America are prone to economic fantasy because they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is there is no trillion dollars available for space exploration. There is no trillion dollars for anything left in the USA, least of all for technological stunts done primarily for national prestige.
There won't be hundreds of billions of dollars spent on Space in the coming years because there was already a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $650,000 mortgages to $10/hr janitors.
All these fiscal misadventures created huge federal government budget deficits that have sucked away the possibility of giant government projects in the future; projects like Mars Missions. There simply aren't going to be these giant projects in the future. America is broke. Its economy is dissolving like a sugar cube in a cup of hot tea. It is the new reality: it is your new reality.
Space-cadets love to talk about the need to venture beyond the moon in order to save humanity from a soon-to-be dying Earth. But this is not science talking, it's a personality disorder. These guys assume that because their scientific prowess has created tools and techniques that can destroy the Earth, then it will inevitable happen. And that they have a right, and even a destiny, to make it happen.
These guys are not clear-eyed, sober-minded engineers: they are death-worshiping fascists. They are left-over Cold-War psychopaths from mid-20th century. They're pissed now because 'little-minded people' wouldn't let them burn the Earth and rule the ashes. These men are transparently insane, and you shouldn't pay serious attention to them. Fortunately, their time has gone and they don't have the political power that they did fifty years ago.
We live in a different age now. This is the era of limits. Understand this and we will all prosper in new and unexpected ways. We need to differentiate fact from fantasy and leave the fantasies to Hollywood. Space Exploration is a used-up quasi-religion that has begun to manifest itself as a mental disease among those people who continue to believe in it too strongly. Don't let that happen to you.
So are we just going to lie back and let the Chinese, Japanese, and Indians boldly go where no one has gone before? Are we just going to let them hop-scotch over the path that we have so steadfastly blazed into space? Not really, because they too are subject to the same economic reality. Underneath all the trash talk and hype, Japan is as broke as we are. And they don't have the cultural tradition of compulsively blasting out beyond their homeland that the Westerners do. There is nothing in space that the Japanese desperately need.
China and India are basically overpopulated third-world countries that have real limits on the number of expensive national-prestige pro
Be sure to teach them how ordinary base10 numbers are turned into base 2 (binary) and base 16 (hexidecimal) numbers. Then show them how base two numbers can be represented as electrical levels. Digit one as a voltage level (traditionally +5 volts in microprocessor electronics) and digit zero is ground (0 volts). Then show how a binary number can be transmitted over a wire by spacing the voltage levels at precise intervals and having start/stop bits. Explain how alphabet letters can be represented by numbers using ASCII and UniCode and then be converted into base2 numbers, transmitted, or stored.
Teach how ordinary values like light levels, colors, and temperatures can be turned into binary values using sensors. Show how a waveform like a sine wave or a sound wave can be turned into a series of binary numbers using an Analog-to-Digital converter.
It is astonishing how many people working with computers don't have any idea about how numbers and symbols can be represented by voltage levels and binary digits. I believe that these concepts can be understood by 14-year-olds if presented in a clear and comprehensive manner. When these concepts are grasped, it becomes easy to understand how computers work. Computers go from being near magical devices to being ordinary machines.
In my case, my teacher (when I was eleven in 1966) told us about base2 numbers. I thought that it was the most ridiculous thing that I had ever heard of. Then as a casual aside, she mentioned that computers worked on base2 numbers and went on to another topic. Years later, when studying digital electronics and microprocessors, reading about how a number could be stored and represented as a byte in base2 'transported' me right back to the 1966 classroom, as if a thirty year gap never happened.
He should be happy to be fired. If he's 61 then what the hell is he doing in Afghanistan? If he isn't a terrorist in training, scoring heroin, or actively engaged in killing people because they wear rags on their heads and cut the noses off little girls, then he has no business being there.
And if he's 61 then he's old enough to understand this and he shouldn't be bullshitting himself and everyone else pretending that there is any reason for him to be there.
I have come to believe that the recycling concept is just a ploy to make middle-class white people feel good without actually doing anything good. It is a perfect example of 'greenwash', i.e. brainwashing yourself with ecological fantasies.
Recycling depends on cheap energy, especially cheap diesel fuel. It is common to have three times as many giant garbage trucks driving around in the early morning hours in areas where recycling ordinances are enforced. One truck for the plastic only; one for the cardboard; and one for the degradable organic garbage. Bureaucrats love this as they get to allocate three times as many garbage-collection contracts to their supporters, while claiming to be 'ecologically responsible'.
But all these extra garbage trucks are driving around making noise and getting only about 7 miles to a gallon of diesel fuel. An aside: I live next to a popular restaurant in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Portland, Oregon (the greenwash capital of the world). Every goddam morning there are three huge garbage trucks pulling into the alley next to my apartment to service the recycle dumpsters. One for plastic and glass, one for cardboard, and one for 'garbage'. Three times as much noise and diesel use as necessary to do 'waste management' intelligently.
I contend that the amount of extra energy consumed in diesel fuel for extra sets of garbage trucks exceeds the amount of energy saved by recycling all this garbage. Especially since most of the 'recyclable' garbage gets mixed back together in the landfill anyway if there is no active market for the presorted garbage type.
It will be interesting to see how long this recycling madness continues when the price of diesel fuel goes above $6 a gallon and the cost of having three sets of garbage trucks exceeds the amount that people are willing to pay for 'waste management'.
If white people (and yes, it is only white people who get 'greenwashed' by this recycling idea) were actually serious about recycling, then they would demand that the grocery stores not create so much garbage in the first place. They would demand that food be offered for sale in reusable containers, along with other realistic methods of serious waste management. But when was the last time that middle-class white people were ever serious about something important?!?
Loved your post about your AOL work experience, Pezbian. It's the kind of writing that keeps me reading through the inane general comments on Slashdot looking for gems like yours.
You imply all Americans deserve to lose everything because a few douchbags got greedy? I'm sure your homeland is a paragon of civility, honor and integrity. You're such a shining example, after all. Smells like Eurotrash, long as we're making sweeping generalizations here.
I've lived in the USA all of my life. I've met a wide range of people from all social classes, ethnicity, and occupational backgrounds. I'm in my sixties, I hitchhiked across the USA many times in the 1960s. I've been around the world, but never to a communist country, Africa, or South America. I know Americans; I know America; I've seen America change over a half century.
America is doomed. And they deserve it. It's a nation of self-righteous, over-paid, ignorant peasants who took the greatest country on Earth and transformed it into strip-malled shithole. Other people in other countries have problems, sure, but nothing like this. And while, yes, I'm making sweeping generalizations here, they're all valid and true.
In my experience, the Europeans and other people in the civilized world aren't really interested in what happens to America and Americans anymore. They have more important things to deal with. We really don't matter to them anymore. We no longer have anything to offer them, and they don't find our Disneyland-based reality entertaining anymore.
If I had to sum up the entire 250 years of American vision, dream, and reality in one single image, it would be the 1975 television video of all the helicopters, arriving from the embassy in Saigon full of sleazy low-lifes desperate to come pollute the USA, being dumped into the ocean off the aircraft carrier to make room for more helicopters. All the greed, all the blood, all the lies, all the canned Jesus-sunbeam optimism, all the stupidity of the American experience in one image.
Watch for it, you'll see it again soon in a few years. Same image, but Baghdad instead of Saigon. Same war, same mentally-unbalanced people, different location, same result.
First, they should change their name to America Still Serves Here On-Line Everyone, or ASSHOLE. Then they should give free service to every one who bought stock in TimeWarner-AOL when experts proclaimed them to be the most important player in history of media and journalism only ten years ago. Stock that went from, what?, $100 a share to 10 cents a share?
Then give free WIFI to everyone whose pension or 401K lost a significant percentage of its value because money managers believed this nonsense.
Then have a live web-cam reality web show about the lives of the ultra-rich who took all the money from the investors and pension managers and are now living billionaire lives behind closed doors. People like Steven Case and Gerald Levin, remember them from ten years ago? New-Era Business visionaries? Can I get you another drink, sir? Both could be recycling their business talents supervising the night cleanup crew in a bowling alley on the outskirts of Tijuana. Or how about that chicken-brained affirmative-action fuckhead Perkins? Surely there is a high-school in some ghetto somewhere that he can go be a vice-principal in somewhere.
Jeez, don't get me started. Americans get what they deserve. People generally do, eventually.
Slashdaughters, let us avoid the tendency to take the focused ruling in a specific legal case and spread it over our most elaborate paranoid fantasies. We need to force our enemies to do that. They won't be able to enforce the legal rulings in their favor over more than a few isolated cases. Each new case will make their overall position appear more extreme and convince more undecided people that they are a lost cause. We have successfully used this tactic on the record industry; now the farmers can use it on the bio-engineered seed industry.
We need these news items to bring attention to the real problems in agriculture. The biggest problem is that it is over-dependent on fossil fuel for the supplementary necessities of large crop yields. Mainly fertilizer, but also for farm machinery use and post-harvest transportation of food (which has a short period between being ready-for-harvest and losing its nutritional value). Any disruption in the oil delivery process would not only disrupt our transportation, it would disrupt our food supply. Our food depends on these clowns in the Middle-East and psychopathic oil companies, not on Monsanto bullying poor farmers.
We can't feed our population without the oil to make the fertilizer, run the harvesters, and truck the produce. If oil goes to $250 a barrel, then a few months later gas goes to $7 a gallon, and ramen goes to $1 a packet. People, and that includes people like you, will start shoplifting, then start looting, then start shooting. Monsanto employees will be doing the same thing, too. Nobody will have much use for any kind of intellectual-property horseshit when their real property starts going up in flames.
At the present, keep up with the seed-bank bio-diversity people. Don't get distracted by lawyers and sensationalism-mongering journalists. Keep it real and only use fools for cheap entertainment.
How about making a micro miniature jet pack about the size of 20 oz beer can! Grandma can wear it on her shoulders. When she falls down, she just reaches over, pops the mini jet pack off her shoulder strap, point it at the ground, press the button, and hold on tight!
WHooosh! Upsee daisy again! No calls, no worries, no lying on the floor for days in your own mess. Just a convenient reload after each fall.
So how about it, guys? Let's do something for grand-ma! And maybe she'll let you sample some of her medicinal marijuana. Sure leaves all that trash dorm weed in the dirt!
I don't see the point of this entire article. Why not just buy a used $200 PC and install Linux on it? Or just keep the Windows and install Linux as a dual-boot (If possible)? There are millions of used $200 PCs available. Nearly all will last another five years at least with normal use.
For cheap cool music, I took a different approach. I wrote an open-source hardware controller for an inexpensive commercial MIDI tone module. The best tone module to use is the Yamaha TX81Z, because they are cheap and very flexible. They are widely available still because there were millions sold new about twenty years ago. They are available on eBay for about $60-$80. The sound engine is a four-operator FM synthesizer that can programmed to make all kinds of weird sounds, along with classic analog-synth sweeps and 80's video game sounds.
Instead of a real organ keyboard, I use a standard PS2 (purple connector miniDIN6) computer keyboard to play the notes. The standard PC keyboard has its own internal microcontroller. It sends a scancode when a key is pressed and also when the key is released, which makes it able to be used as a music keyboard. Its advantage is that it's really cheap, about a few dollars each. The disadvantage is that the keys are small, and, certain combinations of keys (played as chords) don't sound. The specific combinations depend on the keyboard manufacturer.
Google for the Two-Pot controller at the Yamaha TX81Z Homepage. I also do have later versions of the firmware, all open-source.
A month later the Attleboro Moon website appears, courtsey of all the attled people pissed at the newsPAPER acting like such a dick.
This website has local classified, blog spots where people can write to, local historical information (and there's a lot in a town 20 miles away from where the Pilgrims landed), grocery store ads, lost dog and cat pleas for help, road closure updates, legal notices, and, if they're really lucky, a MILF exchange.
Basically what the newspaper is supposed to be doing. With a 25 cents per posted message fee (1 word or a book length submission, all 25 cents a message), where you can pay in $10 or $25 dollar blocks through PayPal.
Newspaper people are complete lame-o's. They have been for the past twenty years. The bigger the paper, the bigger the fools running it.
Has anyone noticed that the towns that right next to each other in New England (like Attleboro and Taunton and Brighton) are on completely opposite ends of the country in merry-old-England? Tell people in England that you grew up in New England and rode your bicycle every day between Taunton and Attleboro and watch their mouths drop.
Slashdot Mirror
Fu*cking gophers again, chewing on the wires in the ground because they're warm (all that current) and the ancient paper/plastic coating tastes so good to them.
Actually the real problem in the 21st century is that 'Mutually Assured Destruction' doesn't work as a deterrent to people who are willing to commit mass murder and mass suicide for some god that they believe in. Say what you want about the commies, they weren't religious fanatics who would be willing to blow up the world in order to get 72 virgins.
We need to consider putting 'omnicide' (a word that I made up meaning a deliberate act resulting in the destruction of all human life on earth) technology into partial control of a group of rational, civilized people who can make sure that the governments that have omnicide technology don't bumble or get tricked into using it. And that nobody who doesn't have it gets access to it.
Omnicide technology is not having a few nuclear bombs. That would just make big explosions and create a lot of fall-out. Stupid and envoironmentally destructive, but not in the omnicide category. Having 5000-10000 hydrogen-to-helium converters put you in the OT category, though. So does having the technology to create super-diseases that spread rapidly and have no cure. Or earthquake control technology (which may or may not exist). Or asteroid-directional control technology, which definitely doesn't exist as yet. Or any other omnicide technology that I can't think of at the moment. (Can you think of something that I missed?)
I'd be surprised if such a group doesn't already exist, possibly with extra-human intelligence oversight.
Ask Muldar, he knows.
Your insights are almost all true. You are correct in assuming that "all Americans are fat, dumb, loud, constantly suing each other and give firearms to their children for free,...". But it is not true for all Americans, only about half.
The other half are the ones who created the most prosperous, powerful, and advanced country in the world. The country that everybody and their uncle wants to move to. Nobody wants to move to Russia. Nobody.
We don't hang black people from trees; no more 'strange fruit'. As far as burning black people alive, well, it would seem that you have us confused with Africans. In many parts of Africa, "necklace-ing" is a popular way of dealing with someone from outside of your tribe who comes into your neighborhood.
Now that you're free as a country, why not learn about your country? Try reading "The Gulag Archipelago" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. You'll learn a bit about why your country is so fucked up.
As for us, we have always been free to read dissidents like Noam Chomski and Howard Zinn. We know how our country works:we know the difference between history and propaganda.
As for airport security, well, we have a common enemy there. The crazy muslims want to kill your people as much as they want to kill our people. But fascism is new to us, but not to you. We tend to over-react, because we are still learning to be perfect assholes. But with all the former communists running around with little to do, we have the world's greatest teachers!
Take a ride on Air Chernobil or Aeroflot to outer space?
No thanks.
Russians are good at three things:
1) making cheap vodka.
2) dragging the local Jews out behind the outhouse and beating them to death in the snow.
3) crushing the hopes of world domination of any fool who invades their country at the beginning of the winter.
Advanced 21st technology and providing a warm holiday experience for foreigners is not on that list.
So go ahead. Mod me down to -2 hell for being a "troll, racist, etc...".
It doesn't change the truth.
"information weapons" is just a catch phrase for telling truth to assholes like the people who run the Soviet Union. Er..ah..excuse me,.. the People's Democratic Republic of Russia. Whatever. The rulers of Russia were assholes 500 years ago, they were 100 years ago, they were 50 years ago and they are still assholes today. Nothing ever changes there in terms of leadership.
Normally I consider it not to be of any concern to anyone lucky enough not to live in Russia. But they have about 6000 hydrogen-to-helium converters that have a tendency to ignore environmental regulations on waste-heat management when they are operated. It would be best not to piss them off lest they decide to send a few of these H2He converters floating down on our neighborhoods. We get enough shit already from the idiot Moslems already about those fucking cartoons. We don't need any more problems from assholes who can't tell the difference between freedom-of-speech and a weapon.
This is what happens when nulkulturny shit-for-brains psychopaths get hydrogen-to-helium converters. We have to pretend that they are civilized people.
It really is in the best interest of all the freedom-loving people of the world to make sure that assholes don't get hydrogen-to-helium converters.
Your comment is interesting. I implies that the nukes may not exist, because if they did, and there was the ability to destroy life on earth and these systems were kept on hair-trigger readiness, then something would have happened already by now after @60 years.
I suspect that there is an "Omnicide Prevention Group" among the nuclear powers that works to identify 'Dr. Strangelove' characters and is enpowered to prevent them for creating 'Earth Burning' situations from happening.
Or we have been extremely lucky to have principled and moral men in the military guarding against these situations. Guys like the officer played by Denzel Washington in the movie Crimson Tide.
I'm anti-war, anti-military myself, but I salute these guys for being able to keep the peace since WWII.
Just as ants have no concept of your foot squashing them being signs of an advanced intelligence (you), so would flying saucers be considered a sign of beings from another planet. If they exist, (a far more advanced intelligence on earth than humans) then they would be good at keeping themselves hidden and secret.
Maybe they don't understand how we function any more than we understand how ants function.
Maybe by messing with our nukes they are protecting themselves in the way that we brush away ants at our picnics.
Or more realistically, the people who are in-charge of keeping the Dr. Strangelove characters from burning the earth are creating a collective hallucination of flying saucers and destroying the rogue nukes themselves. Since there has never been any real physical evidence of flying saucers actually existing, this is the most likely scenario.
Anyway, we should thank these guys for protecting us from the psychopaths in the military who want to burn the world and rule the ashes.
Do the Soviets (no I don't accept them as 'Russians'), the Chinese, the French, and the British have the same 'problem' with flying saucers fucking around with the nuclear bombs that we do?
Downloading is kind of dumb because unless you are a wizard at RIAA dodging technology, these people are looking for you and could, conceivably, actually find you. Especially if you're downloading a lot from your dorm room.
Another reason downloading is somewhat déclassé is because you have to specifically request a title, which means you have to know exactly what you want, which means that your cultural development is limited to what you already know and like.
One of the great features of Napster was that you could scan the lists of other people's offerings who were sharing files on Napster. Chances were high that if you liked a very specific form of music and you found great titles on another sharer's listing, then the other titles in their offered collection would be great even if you weren't familiar with the songs or bands .
All the bulk 'pirate' websites since then don't offer this feature: they just offer a library of specific titles that you have to request.
Everyone has spare old hard disks hanging around. Let's fill up our old drives with music:art:video:films that we think are fantastic and share drives instead of files. No one will ever get caught by the MPAA/RIAA, and we will get exposed to new works that we would never be exposed to otherwise. This is what the media companies are supposed to do but fail so pathetically at doing.
I myself love movies. So when I upgraded my hard drive to a two terabyte I took the old 600 gigabyte and filled it with my favorite films copied from DVDs available at the public library. I share it with co-workers. Out of the sixty or so movies, they may have heard of only a few. But they are all good and they are all free and they are all available to them on the drive.
Here is a list of the movies on my old shared hard disk. What's on your shared hard disk?
Goldfinger 1964
Unfaithfully Yours 1939**
From Russia With Love 1963
Sea Change - Jesse Stone 2004
GoldenEye 1992
Taken 2007
For Your Eyes Only 1986
Night Passage - Jesse Stone 2005
Quantum of Solace 2007
The Seagull's Laughter (Iceland) 2004
The Departed 2007
Thunderball 1966
For A Few Dollars More 1967
El Topo (Mexico) 1967
La Jetee (France) 1962
Stone Cold - Jesse Stone 2006
Death In Paradise - Jesse Stone 2006
I Could Never Be Your Woman 2005
Lost Horizon 1939
Farewell, My Concubine (China) 1989
My Best Friend (France) 2001
Logan's Run 1975
Dr. No 1962
Black Sunday 1976
Infernal Affairs (Chinese-Hong Kong) 1999
You Only Live Twice 1967
Two English Girls (France) 1971 Truffaut
The Godfather (part 1) 1972
CSI_Miami Season 5_Disk 5 2005
Dangerous Beauty 2006
Vicky Christina Barcelona 2007
City of God (Brazil) 2004
Marathon Man 1977
The World Is Not Enough 1996
Star Trek IV _ The Voyage Home 1986
Toby Dammit (Italy) 1966 Fellini
Waitress 2006
A Hard Day's Night 1964
Space Cowboys 1999
Day For Night (France) 1974 Truffaut
Hamlet (Mel Gibson) 1989
Beauty And The Beast (France) 1946
Bride and Prejudice (India) 2005
The Black Book (Netherlands) 2005
Sleepless In Seattle 1992
Nash Bridges [Wild Card] 1999
The Wings of a Dove 1998
Dangerous Liasions 1989
Love on the Run (France) 1979 Truffaut
My Man Godfrey 1936**
The Ninth Gate 2004
The Man Who Loved Women (France) 1979 Truffaut
The Big Lebowski 1999
The Thomas Crown Affair 1998
American Gangster 2006
Dune 1982
Flawless 2007
Bandlieu 13 (France) 2008
Shine A Light (the Rolling Stones) 2008
Goodfellas 1990
The Dirty Dozen 1967
Ben And Board (France) 1970 Truffaut
State of Play 2008
Secrecy is horseshit. Document classification is horseshit. If something needs to be secret, don't put it into a document. If something needs to be secret and you know it, then don't tell anybody. Three can keep a secret if two are dead and the other is scared shitless about what will happen if he tells the secret. And notice the pronoun 'he' in the last sentence. For God's sake, if you are serious about keeping a secret, don't tell it to a woman.
99.99999% of everything in the world classified as secret is just people covering up their mistakes from their superiors. Very, Very little actually needs to be kept secret.
Just do what you get paid to do. You get paid to teach people physics. Everything else is just horseshit designed to distract you from your duties. Just teach people physics. That is what people are paying you to do. So just do it.
If they want to use electronic calculators, let them. Until your Korean-teaching ability is better than your physics-teaching ability, don't hassle people for using electronic dictionaries.
Institutions of higher learning put far too much emphasis on grades and ratings and far too less on what they are being paid to do: impart advanced knowledge.
If you are worried that your students are using electronic devices to 'hussle' you into getting a better grade, then you are teaching them at too low a level. Make your curriculum more advanced and go faster in your lectures. The people who are seriously interested in what you do, i.e. the ones who are actually spending time with you to learn physics, will keep up. The rest will go do something more interesting to them.
Be serious; you're a teacher, so just fucking teach and stop bitching about people's calculators.
I use the internet so much, that I ... oh shit, I forgot what I was going to say!
Oh yeah, have you been dumpster diving outside of a very profitable high-tech company and come across a protoboard that is covered with very expensive looking ICs on it? And it's got things like a MIDI port, video connectors, and RCA-jacks so you know it does something most likely very cool? And you go to the library to look up the numbers that are on the ICs in the collection of data books from fifty manufacturers and you can't find anything?
Then 20 years later, in the same situation, you just type the letter/numbers printed on the IC into Google and you get the 200-page PDF file of the data sheet and a set of links to open-source fully-debugged applications, and a near-secret link to the manufacturer's special $20 offer of a complete in-circuit-debugging development system?
And you are entertaining the notion that the internet is making us stupid? You are out of your mind. The internet is a knowledge amplifier! Anyone who might think that the Internet is making people stupid fails to realize that most people are already stupid...and the internet makes all the rest of us more aware of that fact because it is so efficient at making us so much smarter.
Why is Sony so obsessed with the outmoded past? They are trying to compress 21st-century technology into 19th-century education and publishing systems. Pathetic.
What Sony should be doing is to find a way to put the entire NYC, San Francisco, or London public library collection of books into a hand-held device, and then sell that device.
You can buy now, a multi-terabyte hard drive, for about $100? Or you will be able to in a year or two. Have you any idea how many zipped-text books will fit in a tera-byte?
A million? Could you fit a million books into a bank of flash memory chips that could make up half the physical space of tablet-sized e-book reader?
Why is Sony thinking in metaphors of 'number of copies of a book' that a library has to physically lend to its readers? Why aren't they thinking in terms of how many millions of books that they can fit in a hand-held device?
Libraries were an important development in the era where words were distributed on bound stacks of printed paper. In the present era, where you can have 100000 books stored in the 16-gigabyte flash drive that you can balance on your finger, the concept of a library being limited to the number of paper-based books they have stored away is absurd.
Sony! ...if you are going to thrive in the 21st century, stop thinking in terms of the 19th century!
It stretches credibility to believe that astronomers could detect volcanos on planets 30 eff-ing light years away. I think that they are just bullshitting the feds in order to get more funding, what with astronomy being a rather low priority with the USA trillons of dollars in debt, the banking system collapsing, and the easy sources of oil depleting.
What difference would it make anyway? Even if technology were to continue on the same arc that it has for the past 150 years, it would still be a 5000 year project to get to another planet that is 30 eff-ing light years away.
Don't you just love all the Star Trek films where faster-than-light giant interplanetary starships are exploring distant reaches of the galaxy in only 200 years from now ? In 200 years from now, we will still be paying off the Iraq/Afghanistan war and trying to figure out how to grow grass in the thin layer of topsoil that used to be the corn-belt of the North American MidWest. Not to mention protecting our kids for antibiotic-resistant TB that resulted from late-20th century abuses.
Jeez, guys, stop wasting our time with science fiction fantasies about volcanos on planets 30 eff-ing light years away!
This plan should continue to be developed, abet at a slower pace. In the event of national disaster, it could serve as a back-up to the existing internet structure. I know, I know, the internet itself was originally designed to be the backup of the national communications network in the event of a nuclear war that destroyed the centralized switching terminals of the phone system.
But the web now is much greater than its original design and much more fragile. In the event of a 'long emergency', if I may invoke James Howard Kunstler's dystopian scenario, it would be wise to have a low-speed low-tech internet-ready communications system in reserve.
Take the number of lawsuits filed against file sharers,
- multiply by the average amount of money that you get from each lawsuit
- subtract the total amount of money spent for lawyers to file the papers, etc...
- assuming that anyone that you successfully sue will never buy a product that you make again, ever, in the future...subtract the expected future value of any sales of movie media for at least 40 years for each person that you successfully sue.
Now the numbers:
- 5000 file sharers sued successfully for about $1500-$2000 each. @$8,000,000
- Lawyer and court costs of about $400-$500 for each successful suit. -@$ 2,500,000
Each file sharer not buying product. Assume each file sharer would have bought three media products (DVD, BlueRay, download streams...) per year at $15 per product unit. Since file sharers are young, assume that $45/year for 40 years. 45*40*5000 - @$9,000,000
short term gain $8,000,000 long term loss @ $11,500,000
In American corporate logic, short term gain ALWAYS wins over greater long term loss.
Therefore, expect file sharing lawsuits to continue for the next ten years as they are today.
Manned space flight was a government program that has been determined to be
too expensive and too limited in returns to be continued at its former funding
levels. We have serious problems now that we didn't have then, and few people
believe that throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into space will solve
them. Grown-up people who were elected to make hard and realistic decisions
about our public funds have decided this. NASA and all its Tom Swift-space
cadets are having a hard time accepting it. But sorry, guys... it's time to get real.
Sure, politicians will continue to announce great new projects like manned Mars
missions. But then they will quietly de-fund them to nearly nothing a few years
later. They don't have any choice. Money that would have been spent on these
projects has already been spent; and it's gone.
People born into 20th-century America are prone to economic fantasy because
they have lived their whole lives inside one. What they don't realize is there is
no trillion dollars available for space exploration. There is no trillion dollars
for anything left in the USA, least of all for technological stunts done primarily
for national prestige.
There won't be hundreds of billions of dollars spent on Space in the coming
years because there was already a trillion dollars spent on a Iraq-Afghanistan
war that accomplished nothing. There was a trillion dollars spent on
maintaining the fantasy that some Wall Street banks and investment firms are too
big to fail. There was a trillion dollars spent giving $650,000 mortgages to
$10/hr janitors.
All these fiscal misadventures created huge federal government budget
deficits that have sucked away the possibility of giant government projects
in the future; projects like Mars Missions. There simply aren't going to be
these giant projects in the future. America is broke. Its economy is dissolving
like a sugar cube in a cup of hot tea. It is the new reality: it is your new reality.
Space-cadets love to talk about the need to venture beyond the moon in order
to save humanity from a soon-to-be dying Earth. But this is not science
talking, it's a personality disorder. These guys assume that because their
scientific prowess has created tools and techniques that can destroy the Earth,
then it will inevitable happen. And that they have a right, and even a destiny,
to make it happen.
These guys are not clear-eyed, sober-minded engineers: they are death-worshiping
fascists. They are left-over Cold-War psychopaths from mid-20th century.
They're pissed now because 'little-minded people' wouldn't let them burn the Earth
and rule the ashes. These men are transparently insane, and you shouldn't pay
serious attention to them. Fortunately, their time has gone and they don't have
the political power that they did fifty years ago.
We live in a different age now. This is the era of limits. Understand this
and we will all prosper in new and unexpected ways. We need to differentiate
fact from fantasy and leave the fantasies to Hollywood. Space Exploration is
a used-up quasi-religion that has begun to manifest itself as a mental disease
among those people who continue to believe in it too strongly. Don't let that
happen to you.
So are we just going to lie back and let the Chinese, Japanese, and Indians boldly
go where no one has gone before? Are we just going to let them hop-scotch
over the path that we have so steadfastly blazed into space? Not really, because
they too are subject to the same economic reality. Underneath all the trash talk
and hype, Japan is as broke as we are. And they don't have the cultural
tradition of compulsively blasting out beyond their homeland that the
Westerners do. There is nothing in space that the Japanese desperately need.
China and India are basically overpopulated third-world countries that have
real limits on the number of expensive national-prestige pro
Be sure to teach them how ordinary base10 numbers are turned into base 2 (binary) and base 16 (hexidecimal) numbers. Then show them how base two numbers can be represented as electrical levels. Digit one as a voltage level (traditionally +5 volts in microprocessor electronics) and digit zero is ground (0 volts). Then show how a binary number can be transmitted over a wire by spacing the voltage levels at precise intervals and having start/stop bits. Explain how alphabet letters can be represented by numbers using ASCII and UniCode and then be converted into base2 numbers, transmitted, or stored.
Teach how ordinary values like light levels, colors, and temperatures can be turned into binary values using sensors. Show how a waveform like a sine wave or a sound wave can be turned into a series of binary numbers using an Analog-to-Digital converter.
It is astonishing how many people working with computers don't have any idea about how numbers and symbols can be represented by voltage levels and binary digits. I believe that these concepts can be understood by 14-year-olds if presented in a clear and comprehensive manner. When these concepts are grasped, it becomes easy to understand how computers work. Computers go from being near magical devices to being ordinary machines.
In my case, my teacher (when I was eleven in 1966) told us about base2 numbers. I thought that it was the most ridiculous thing that I had ever heard of. Then as a casual aside, she mentioned that computers worked on base2 numbers and went on to another topic. Years later, when studying digital electronics and microprocessors, reading about how a number could be stored and represented as a byte in base2 'transported' me right back to the 1966 classroom, as if a thirty year gap never happened.
He should be happy to be fired. If he's 61 then what the hell is he doing in Afghanistan? If he isn't a terrorist in training, scoring heroin, or actively engaged in killing people because they wear rags on their heads and cut the noses off little girls, then he has no business being there.
And if he's 61 then he's old enough to understand this and he shouldn't be bullshitting himself and everyone else pretending that there is any reason for him to be there.
So, yeah, dude, come home and get a life.
I have come to believe that the recycling concept is just a ploy to make middle-class white people feel good without actually doing anything good. It is a perfect example of 'greenwash', i.e. brainwashing yourself with ecological fantasies.
Recycling depends on cheap energy, especially cheap diesel fuel. It is common to have three times as many giant garbage trucks driving around in the early morning hours in areas where recycling ordinances are enforced. One truck for the plastic only; one for the cardboard; and one for the degradable organic garbage. Bureaucrats love this as they get to allocate three times as many garbage-collection contracts to their supporters, while claiming to be 'ecologically responsible'.
But all these extra garbage trucks are driving around making noise and getting only about 7 miles to a gallon of diesel fuel. An aside: I live next to a popular restaurant in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Portland, Oregon (the greenwash capital of the world). Every goddam morning there are three huge garbage trucks pulling into the alley next to my apartment to service the recycle dumpsters. One for plastic and glass, one for cardboard, and one for 'garbage'. Three times as much noise and diesel use as necessary to do 'waste management' intelligently.
I contend that the amount of extra energy consumed in diesel fuel for extra sets of garbage trucks exceeds the amount of energy saved by recycling all this garbage. Especially since most of the 'recyclable' garbage gets mixed back together in the landfill anyway if there is no active market for the presorted garbage type.
It will be interesting to see how long this recycling madness continues when the price of diesel fuel goes above $6 a gallon and the cost of having three sets of garbage trucks exceeds the amount that people are willing to pay for 'waste management'.
If white people (and yes, it is only white people who get 'greenwashed' by this recycling idea) were actually serious about recycling, then they would demand that the grocery stores not create so much garbage in the first place. They would demand that food be offered for sale in reusable containers, along with other realistic methods of serious waste management. But when was the last time that middle-class white people were ever serious about something important?!?
Loved your post about your AOL work experience, Pezbian. It's the kind of writing that keeps me reading through the inane general comments on Slashdot looking for gems like yours.
You imply all Americans deserve to lose everything because a few douchbags got greedy?
I'm sure your homeland is a paragon of civility, honor and integrity. You're such a shining example, after all.
Smells like Eurotrash, long as we're making sweeping generalizations here.
I've lived in the USA all of my life. I've met a wide range of people from all social classes, ethnicity, and occupational backgrounds. I'm in my sixties, I hitchhiked across the USA many times in the 1960s. I've been around the world, but never to a communist country, Africa, or South America. I know Americans; I know America; I've seen America change over a half century.
America is doomed. And they deserve it. It's a nation of self-righteous, over-paid, ignorant peasants who took the greatest country on Earth and transformed it into strip-malled shithole. Other people in other countries have problems, sure, but nothing like this. And while, yes, I'm making sweeping generalizations here, they're all valid and true.
In my experience, the Europeans and other people in the civilized world aren't really interested in what happens to America and Americans anymore. They have more important things to deal with. We really don't matter to them anymore. We no longer have anything to offer them, and they don't find our Disneyland-based reality entertaining anymore.
If I had to sum up the entire 250 years of American vision, dream, and reality in one single image, it would be the 1975 television video of all the helicopters, arriving from the embassy in Saigon full of sleazy low-lifes desperate to come pollute the USA, being dumped into the ocean off the aircraft carrier to make room for more helicopters. All the greed, all the blood, all the lies, all the canned Jesus-sunbeam optimism, all the stupidity of the American experience in one image.
Watch for it, you'll see it again soon in a few years. Same image, but Baghdad instead of Saigon. Same war, same mentally-unbalanced people, different location, same result.
First, they should change their name to America Still Serves Here On-Line Everyone, or ASSHOLE. Then they should give free service to every one who bought stock in TimeWarner-AOL when experts proclaimed them to be the most important player in history of media and journalism only ten years ago. Stock that went from, what?, $100 a share to 10 cents a share?
Then give free WIFI to everyone whose pension or 401K lost a significant percentage of its value because money managers believed this nonsense.
Then have a live web-cam reality web show about the lives of the ultra-rich who took all the money from the investors and pension managers and are now living billionaire lives behind closed doors. People like Steven Case and Gerald Levin, remember them from ten years ago? New-Era Business visionaries? Can I get you another drink, sir? Both could be recycling their business talents supervising the night cleanup crew in a bowling alley on the outskirts of Tijuana. Or how about that chicken-brained affirmative-action fuckhead Perkins? Surely there is a high-school in some ghetto somewhere that he can go be a vice-principal in somewhere.
Jeez, don't get me started. Americans get what they deserve. People generally do, eventually.
Slashdaughters, let us avoid the tendency to take the focused ruling in a specific legal case and spread it over our most elaborate paranoid fantasies. We need to force our enemies to do that. They won't be able to enforce the legal rulings in their favor over more than a few isolated cases. Each new case will make their overall position appear more extreme and convince more undecided people that they are a lost cause. We have successfully used this tactic on the record industry; now the farmers can use it on the bio-engineered seed industry.
We need these news items to bring attention to the real problems in agriculture. The biggest problem is that it is over-dependent on fossil fuel for the supplementary necessities of large crop yields. Mainly fertilizer, but also for farm machinery use and post-harvest transportation of food (which has a short period between being ready-for-harvest and losing its nutritional value). Any disruption in the oil delivery process would not only disrupt our transportation, it would disrupt our food supply. Our food depends on these clowns in the Middle-East and psychopathic oil companies, not on Monsanto bullying poor farmers.
We can't feed our population without the oil to make the fertilizer, run the harvesters, and truck the produce. If oil goes to $250 a barrel, then a few months later gas goes to $7 a gallon, and ramen goes to $1 a packet. People, and that includes people like you, will start shoplifting, then start looting, then start shooting. Monsanto employees will be doing the same thing, too. Nobody will have much use for any kind of intellectual-property horseshit when their real property starts going up in flames.
At the present, keep up with the seed-bank bio-diversity people. Don't get distracted by lawyers and sensationalism-mongering journalists. Keep it real and only use fools for cheap entertainment.
Hey all you jet pack affectionados!
How about making a micro miniature jet pack about the size of 20 oz beer can! Grandma can wear it on her shoulders. When she falls down, she just reaches over, pops the mini jet pack off her shoulder strap, point it at the ground, press the button, and hold on tight!
WHooosh! Upsee daisy again! No calls, no worries, no lying on the floor for days in your own mess. Just a convenient reload after each fall.
So how about it, guys? Let's do something for grand-ma! And maybe she'll let you sample some of her medicinal marijuana. Sure leaves all that trash dorm weed in the dirt!
I don't see the point of this entire article. Why not just buy a used $200 PC and install Linux on it? Or just keep the Windows and install Linux as a dual-boot (If possible)? There are millions of used $200 PCs available. Nearly all will last another five years at least with normal use.
For cheap cool music, I took a different approach. I wrote an open-source hardware controller for an inexpensive commercial MIDI tone module. The best tone module to use is the Yamaha TX81Z, because they are cheap and very flexible. They are widely available still because there were millions sold new about twenty years ago. They are available on eBay for about $60-$80. The sound engine is a four-operator FM synthesizer that can programmed to make all kinds of weird sounds, along with classic analog-synth sweeps and 80's video game sounds.
Instead of a real organ keyboard, I use a standard PS2 (purple connector miniDIN6) computer keyboard to play the notes. The standard PC keyboard has its own internal microcontroller. It sends a scancode when a key is pressed and also when the key is released, which makes it able to be used as a music keyboard. Its advantage is that it's really cheap, about a few dollars each. The disadvantage is that the keys are small, and, certain combinations of keys (played as chords) don't sound. The specific combinations depend on the keyboard manufacturer.
Google for the Two-Pot controller at the Yamaha TX81Z Homepage. I also do have later versions of the firmware, all open-source.
A month later the Attleboro Moon website appears, courtsey of all the attled people pissed at the newsPAPER acting like such a dick.
This website has local classified, blog spots where people can write to, local historical information (and there's a lot in a town 20 miles away from where the Pilgrims landed), grocery store ads, lost dog and cat pleas for help, road closure updates, legal notices, and, if they're really lucky, a MILF exchange.
Basically what the newspaper is supposed to be doing. With a 25 cents per posted message fee (1 word or a book length submission, all 25 cents a message), where you can pay in $10 or $25 dollar blocks through PayPal.
Newspaper people are complete lame-o's. They have been for the past twenty years. The bigger the paper, the bigger the fools running it.
Has anyone noticed that the towns that right next to each other in New England (like Attleboro and Taunton and Brighton) are on completely opposite ends of the country in merry-old-England? Tell people in England that you grew up in New England and rode your bicycle every day between Taunton and Attleboro and watch their mouths drop.