I'm right there with you. I'm in Seattle. #3 for traffic in the U.S. Before I owned a car, I took the bus to work, and really didn't get out that much. It didn't get me to where I needed to go in a quick amount of time. For instance, I can drive from my apartment to work in downtown (3 miles) in 15 minutes. The same bus trip takes 45 minutes. Where's the sense in that?
For any outsider that's ever been here, traffic is a joke, as is the "solution" to solve it: Sound Transit. Grade-level Light Rail is not light at all, and it'd make more sense to build out the monorail here than to build more expensive light rail everywhere.
I like the idea of of the ULT, but it would require too many tracks to link it up to many short-hop urban locations. What I think it would be great for, however, is some sort of automated freeway. Drive your car on, have the system take over the driving for you, and cruise right along without having to worry about what traffic is doing in front of you. It's all automated.
And it's more efficient. When you can cut down the distance between each vehicle, you can use the roadway more effectively. Plus, everybody will be regulated at one speed, eliminating the tailgaters and the slowpokes.
For urban hops, you need efficient bus service, and good capacity/speed rail. I favor monorail, for the fact that it's elevated and gets vehicles off the road, and that it's a bit faster than light rail because it's elevated. And, its got the capacity for PAX, so it usually is a good fit, especially for commuters.
I liked Space: Above and Beyond (I was 14 when it first aired; my tastes weren't as developed.), but now when I watch the reruns on Sci-Fi I can't help thinking that it's about one or two coed shower scenes from a Starship Troopers.
The Simpsons still makes me laugh. Alot. Futurama needs to be marketed more toward the scientific/geek crowd. That show has so much more potential. There are some truly genious writers on that show. My favorite line was from when Al Gore was on: I'm a tenth-level vice president!
King of the Hill only occasionally makes me laugh, but moreso makes me cringe. Malcolm in the Middle makes me cringe, but in a good way. That show is just ha-freaking-lariously dysfunctional. That's its "charm."
And, I'm going to get flamed for this, but I miss the days of Earth 2. I still like that show.
I've ordered an iMac mainly because it's not much larger than the Pismo PowerBook I used to put on my desk, compared now with the Blue & White G3 I have (which takes up a lot more space). Then you have the G4 under the dome, with SuperDrive, and 60GB of space and it looks like a good computer.
I don't use my computer for gaming so much, anyway. That's what my PS2 is for. And, I'm more interested in using my computer for organizing media (pictures, mp3s, movies) and using it as my MP3 playback server using iHam on iRye. The iMac will serve this purpose very well.
Unfortunately, not everybody reads networking magazines, or knows what college is like now for people. NY Times has always, in my opinion, played to a huge, and older audience that might not be privy to these issues (mainly because they weren't issues when they were in college).
What might be obvious to you might be new information to the majority of the population.
Perhaps, yes, there might be an addiction problem. But, also you have people leaving their computers on at night, and going to bed, while their file-sharing services are online. If they're sharing, or downloading, large amounts of data, then they're going to hit the limit, even if they aren't actually in front of the computer. That could make the addiction argument null and void.
That'd be the Bank of America Tower. I seriously wonder how many of those there are now in downtown Seattle. 4th and Columbia, 5th and Marion, 4th and Madison, and probably more.
I get screwed when the fog rolls in, I'm at the Union Bank of California, and we're usually not higher than the fog.
At least I don't have internal injuries...
on
Merry Christmas
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· Score: 1
Thank God Santa Bot didn't launch a bike at me this year;-)
At first I thought this should be under the "It's Funny, Laugh" category. Then, I read the article. Now I'm positive it should be under the "It's Sad, Cry" category.
Part of me is glad I didn't go to a 4-year school.
Comparisons between VHS, S-VHS, TiVo Compression
on
Comparing the DVRs?
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· Score: 1
I've noticed that even SP speed S-VHS looks worse than TiVo High Quality, and sometimes even TiVo Medium quality. I'm pleasantly surprised how well the TiVo handles most content, and Best Quality is just that, it's really clear, and the difference from source transmission and the TiVo is very small.
Of course, I watch the TV from about 6' back, which is normal for 27" TVs, but it looks great. For 30-minute shows, I usually use medium quality, for shows I like, high quality, and shows I want to archive, Best quality.
TiVo's a very neat toy. No doubt about it. I'm starting to think of it not as a toy, however. It's starting to become of TV life in my house.
Now that I have a TiVo, I start watching a show long enough into it to skip the commercials. If I really want to watch commercials, I'll go to Adcritic and watch them there.
I will say, I can watch a helluva lot more TV with the TiVo, though, and I have.
My first Usenet posts were in early 1996, looking for possible sources for a high school project. A later post showed how much of an ignorant Windows user I was, bashing the fuck out of Mac users.
Funny, now I own no computers running Windows, use a Mac exclusively, and my home NAT box is a Linux box.
My, how 6 years of using computers have changed me.
DHCP set up on my Linux box (running NAT for a few other computers), and we're off and running (finally). I'm not entirely pleased that AT&T is capping customers off at 1.5Mbps, but I'll live. Anything's better than 56k.
According to a report on Channel 5 (KING-TV) here in Seattle, AT&T is supposed to have everybody in the Seattle area switched over to the AT&T Broadband Internet (sans @Home) by Sunday morning.
I had to set up my OS X box as the firewall so that the rest of the computers here can get out to the net. This is brutal. No linux firewall (no modem for it), no transparent cache (I might set this up later under OS X, if I can).
I've had DSL, and now Cable Modem for years. This sucks. Seriously.
I guess this is another way to look at it:-) (I can't wait to get the upgrade. I REALLY want to run OS X as my primary OS, but it's just too slow in 10.0.x).
The total cost of OS X is now $150. $130 for 10.0 plus $20 for 10.1. Well, that doesn't seem too bad, now does it? Consider that with OS X 10.0 you didn't need to already have OS 9 installed to install X over top. Have any of you people seen how much XP is going to be for a FULL install?!? It's freaking insane!
Of course, the price goes down to $130 if you want to drive to the Apple retailer to pick up a copy of OS X.
Yes, 10.0 was bad. So was Windows 95 (original release), but it was leaps and bounds over Win 3.x. And so is the same for OS X. Now it's just that we pay a heckuva lot less for an OS from Apple than others do from M$.
Culkin *could* have been a good comedic actor. And, no, I didn't watch Home Alone 2. I did so, because I heard how bad the film sucked. I did enjoy the first Home Alone, however.
You're right, the imprinting scene was quite good. Osmont most certainly deserves some sort of award for his performance.
Personally, I thought it was a beautiful film, well shot, well directed, and well acted. Haley Joel Osmont will have a good future for himself, if he doesn't end up getting tossed aside when he's no longer cute (MacCauley Culkin, anyone?).
I found that much of the film would alienate an audience, with the somewhat eery ways David learned to integrate himself into the family. Watching him constantly strive for affection and love was exhausting. The ending, while not exciting, was the most emotional part of the movie.
Normal American audiences like it when the story is told to them, and this movie, unfortunately, did that with narration. Like I've heard from others, Kubrick probably wouldn't have wanted that, but considering the number of children that were in the theater when I saw the movie, perhaps it's a good thing it was there. Besides, I doubt most of those kids will understand what much of the movie was about.
There were a lot of similarities to other Kubrick films -- musical score reminiscent of 2001, awkward silences reminiscent of 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut. Spielberg has said in the past that he really likes doing movies like this, but has to do the Jurassic Parks to pay the bills.
Here's hoping we can get more interesting cinema like this from Spielberg.
1. Catch a matinee. Like pretty much any other movie (with the exception of Shrek and The Dish), don't pay full price for the crap that Hollywood stuffs down our throats. It's just not worth it.
2. If the movie starts at 2pm, walk into the theater at about 3:20 for the start of the battle. Trust me, you're not missing much before that part, and the battle is really quite incredible. For the next 55 minutes or so of the battle, you should get your money's worth. The bombing of Tokyo isn't as exciting, and Baldwin's portrayal of Doolittle is cliched and, frankly, stupid. Doolittle was a smart man, and Bay's made him look like a melodramatic ass.
As far as love stories intertwined with historical tragedies go, Titanic was a better movie. Much better.
Although diesels may be much more efficient, if you start putting strict environmental controls on them, they'll start to decline in efficiency. Gasoline engines could be marginally more efficient if they didn't have catalytic convertors and other emission controls. The main reason for this is less constricted airflow going out of the tailpipe. I do not advocate reducing pollution controls to increase efficiency however. There have to be better ways.
I drive a gasoline 4-cyl. Jetta. I've pined for a TDI VW (Jetta, Golf, New Beetle, etc.) for sometime. I've not had the chance to drive one, but I've followed behind a few, and it's really surprising not to smell the exhaust. It's amazing what VW's done with those engines. I'd recommend that anybody should read this article about VW's 25th anniversary of the TDI: http://www.vwvortex.com/news/index_25tdi.html.
I work 3 12-hour shifts a week. 6pm to 6am Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. My weekend starts on Wednesday. Working graveyard sucks a bit, but it's quiet in the call center, I got lots of preventitive maintenance done, and I'm not as stressed out as when I was working 9-6 days.
From what I understand, though, my shift's changing to 4 10s soon, early day shift (5am to 4pm, 10 plus 1 hour lunch). I'll live, but it won't be as good as what I've got right now.
I'm in favor of a 35 hour workweek. There are plenty of people to fill jobs these days, and if they're happy, they'll work harder and be more productive.
It's okay to use the word fuck if you actually fucked up something in your broadcast, but not if you're talking about fucking, in a sexual sense? Oh, and if you're talking about someone who's a little shit, that's okay, because you're not talking about actually taking a dump. I love this puritanical nonsense.
Tristani's right though, "...this policy statement will likely become instead a "how-to" manual for those licensees who wish to tread the line drawn by our cases." In essense, in her dissent, she's saying that the FCC shouldn't have released the policy statement because doing so would have given broadcasters the information they need to know to keep themselves from getting into trouble. The FCC must not be making enough off money from fines if they want to keep policy too vague to understand.
I'm GLAD that the FCC finally released this policy statement. I've been waiting years to actually see what THEY view as indecent. It's funny, though, that even though some of it might be offensive to me, I can always just TURN OFF the radio or TV!
That's the beauty of freedom. Nobody's forcing me to listen to those offensive programs, and I have the freedom to stop listening. I make the decisions, not the goddamned FCC. 18 USC 1464 and the right-wing Supreme Court we have are jokes.
The poster below that says protecting children and society from so-called indecent and obscene speech like this weakens society is right. When government makes the decisions for us, our freedom is diminished. I hate to sound like the shrub, but that's not what America is all about.
...no more well-funded Space program. I seriously doubt this administration is interested in the pursuit of science. The only reason they'd shovel money into the space program would be if we still had a Cold War enemy like the Soviet Union to compete against.
Go China Go! You're our only hope (for a better space program).
I understand that incandescents can be efficient (for heat) in winter, but not that efficient, as far as my apartment is concerned. I've seen no noticeable increase in temperature when using the incadescent lamps.
I usually like to keep my living room constant at 20-22C.
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I'm right there with you. I'm in Seattle. #3 for traffic in the U.S. Before I owned a car, I took the bus to work, and really didn't get out that much. It didn't get me to where I needed to go in a quick amount of time. For instance, I can drive from my apartment to work in downtown (3 miles) in 15 minutes. The same bus trip takes 45 minutes. Where's the sense in that?
For any outsider that's ever been here, traffic is a joke, as is the "solution" to solve it: Sound Transit. Grade-level Light Rail is not light at all, and it'd make more sense to build out the monorail here than to build more expensive light rail everywhere.
I like the idea of of the ULT, but it would require too many tracks to link it up to many short-hop urban locations. What I think it would be great for, however, is some sort of automated freeway. Drive your car on, have the system take over the driving for you, and cruise right along without having to worry about what traffic is doing in front of you. It's all automated.
And it's more efficient. When you can cut down the distance between each vehicle, you can use the roadway more effectively. Plus, everybody will be regulated at one speed, eliminating the tailgaters and the slowpokes.
For urban hops, you need efficient bus service, and good capacity/speed rail. I favor monorail, for the fact that it's elevated and gets vehicles off the road, and that it's a bit faster than light rail because it's elevated. And, its got the capacity for PAX, so it usually is a good fit, especially for commuters.
Anyway, just my $0.02.
I liked Space: Above and Beyond (I was 14 when it first aired; my tastes weren't as developed.), but now when I watch the reruns on Sci-Fi I can't help thinking that it's about one or two coed shower scenes from a Starship Troopers.
The Simpsons still makes me laugh. Alot. Futurama needs to be marketed more toward the scientific/geek crowd. That show has so much more potential. There are some truly genious writers on that show. My favorite line was from when Al Gore was on: I'm a tenth-level vice president!
King of the Hill only occasionally makes me laugh, but moreso makes me cringe. Malcolm in the Middle makes me cringe, but in a good way. That show is just ha-freaking-lariously dysfunctional. That's its "charm."
And, I'm going to get flamed for this, but I miss the days of Earth 2. I still like that show.
I've ordered an iMac mainly because it's not much larger than the Pismo PowerBook I used to put on my desk, compared now with the Blue & White G3 I have (which takes up a lot more space). Then you have the G4 under the dome, with SuperDrive, and 60GB of space and it looks like a good computer.
I don't use my computer for gaming so much, anyway. That's what my PS2 is for. And, I'm more interested in using my computer for organizing media (pictures, mp3s, movies) and using it as my MP3 playback server using iHam on iRye. The iMac will serve this purpose very well.
Besides, it looks great.
Unfortunately, not everybody reads networking magazines, or knows what college is like now for people. NY Times has always, in my opinion, played to a huge, and older audience that might not be privy to these issues (mainly because they weren't issues when they were in college).
What might be obvious to you might be new information to the majority of the population.
Perhaps, yes, there might be an addiction problem. But, also you have people leaving their computers on at night, and going to bed, while their file-sharing services are online. If they're sharing, or downloading, large amounts of data, then they're going to hit the limit, even if they aren't actually in front of the computer. That could make the addiction argument null and void.
Her: Can we go down and see them?
Me: Sure, we've got 4 1/2 months.
Her: But I want to see them now...
Man, I hope they like sabotage.
--Bernie
That'd be the Bank of America Tower. I seriously wonder how many of those there are now in downtown Seattle. 4th and Columbia, 5th and Marion, 4th and Madison, and probably more.
I get screwed when the fog rolls in, I'm at the Union Bank of California, and we're usually not higher than the fog.
Thank God Santa Bot didn't launch a bike at me this year ;-)
Look out! Santa's through the perimeter!
Merry X-mas.
At first I thought this should be under the "It's Funny, Laugh" category. Then, I read the article. Now I'm positive it should be under the "It's Sad, Cry" category.
Part of me is glad I didn't go to a 4-year school.
I've noticed that even SP speed S-VHS looks worse than TiVo High Quality, and sometimes even TiVo Medium quality. I'm pleasantly surprised how well the TiVo handles most content, and Best Quality is just that, it's really clear, and the difference from source transmission and the TiVo is very small.
Of course, I watch the TV from about 6' back, which is normal for 27" TVs, but it looks great. For 30-minute shows, I usually use medium quality, for shows I like, high quality, and shows I want to archive, Best quality.
TiVo's a very neat toy. No doubt about it. I'm starting to think of it not as a toy, however. It's starting to become of TV life in my house.
Now that I have a TiVo, I start watching a show long enough into it to skip the commercials. If I really want to watch commercials, I'll go to Adcritic and watch them there.
I will say, I can watch a helluva lot more TV with the TiVo, though, and I have.
Your words will come back to haunt you.
My first Usenet posts were in early 1996, looking for possible sources for a high school project. A later post showed how much of an ignorant Windows user I was, bashing the fuck out of Mac users.
Funny, now I own no computers running Windows, use a Mac exclusively, and my home NAT box is a Linux box.
My, how 6 years of using computers have changed me.
--Bernie
DHCP set up on my Linux box (running NAT for a few other computers), and we're off and running (finally). I'm not entirely pleased that AT&T is capping customers off at 1.5Mbps, but I'll live. Anything's better than 56k.
According to a report on Channel 5 (KING-TV) here in Seattle, AT&T is supposed to have everybody in the Seattle area switched over to the AT&T Broadband Internet (sans @Home) by Sunday morning.
We'll see, but here's hoping.
Roger that. 46,667bps here. Ugh.
I had to set up my OS X box as the firewall so that the rest of the computers here can get out to the net. This is brutal. No linux firewall (no modem for it), no transparent cache (I might set this up later under OS X, if I can).
I've had DSL, and now Cable Modem for years. This sucks. Seriously.
I guess this is another way to look at it :-) (I can't wait to get the upgrade. I REALLY want to run OS X as my primary OS, but it's just too slow in 10.0.x).
The total cost of OS X is now $150. $130 for 10.0 plus $20 for 10.1. Well, that doesn't seem too bad, now does it? Consider that with OS X 10.0 you didn't need to already have OS 9 installed to install X over top. Have any of you people seen how much XP is going to be for a FULL install?!? It's freaking insane!
Of course, the price goes down to $130 if you want to drive to the Apple retailer to pick up a copy of OS X.
Yes, 10.0 was bad. So was Windows 95 (original release), but it was leaps and bounds over Win 3.x. And so is the same for OS X. Now it's just that we pay a heckuva lot less for an OS from Apple than others do from M$.
--Bernie
Not a bad trailer, but now I really want to see it in a theater... but for now I'll live with watching it here.
Culkin *could* have been a good comedic actor. And, no, I didn't watch Home Alone 2. I did so, because I heard how bad the film sucked. I did enjoy the first Home Alone, however.
You're right, the imprinting scene was quite good. Osmont most certainly deserves some sort of award for his performance.
--Bernie
Personally, I thought it was a beautiful film, well shot, well directed, and well acted. Haley Joel Osmont will have a good future for himself, if he doesn't end up getting tossed aside when he's no longer cute (MacCauley Culkin, anyone?).
I found that much of the film would alienate an audience, with the somewhat eery ways David learned to integrate himself into the family. Watching him constantly strive for affection and love was exhausting. The ending, while not exciting, was the most emotional part of the movie.
Normal American audiences like it when the story is told to them, and this movie, unfortunately, did that with narration. Like I've heard from others, Kubrick probably wouldn't have wanted that, but considering the number of children that were in the theater when I saw the movie, perhaps it's a good thing it was there. Besides, I doubt most of those kids will understand what much of the movie was about.
There were a lot of similarities to other Kubrick films -- musical score reminiscent of 2001, awkward silences reminiscent of 2001 and Eyes Wide Shut. Spielberg has said in the past that he really likes doing movies like this, but has to do the Jurassic Parks to pay the bills.
Here's hoping we can get more interesting cinema like this from Spielberg.
1. Catch a matinee. Like pretty much any other movie (with the exception of Shrek and The Dish), don't pay full price for the crap that Hollywood stuffs down our throats. It's just not worth it.
2. If the movie starts at 2pm, walk into the theater at about 3:20 for the start of the battle. Trust me, you're not missing much before that part, and the battle is really quite incredible. For the next 55 minutes or so of the battle, you should get your money's worth. The bombing of Tokyo isn't as exciting, and Baldwin's portrayal of Doolittle is cliched and, frankly, stupid. Doolittle was a smart man, and Bay's made him look like a melodramatic ass.
As far as love stories intertwined with historical tragedies go, Titanic was a better movie. Much better.
--Bernie
Although diesels may be much more efficient, if you start putting strict environmental controls on them, they'll start to decline in efficiency. Gasoline engines could be marginally more efficient if they didn't have catalytic convertors and other emission controls. The main reason for this is less constricted airflow going out of the tailpipe. I do not advocate reducing pollution controls to increase efficiency however. There have to be better ways.
I drive a gasoline 4-cyl. Jetta. I've pined for a TDI VW (Jetta, Golf, New Beetle, etc.) for sometime. I've not had the chance to drive one, but I've followed behind a few, and it's really surprising not to smell the exhaust. It's amazing what VW's done with those engines. I'd recommend that anybody should read this article about VW's 25th anniversary of the TDI: http://www.vwvortex.com/news/index_25tdi.html.
--Bernie
I work 3 12-hour shifts a week. 6pm to 6am Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. My weekend starts on Wednesday. Working graveyard sucks a bit, but it's quiet in the call center, I got lots of preventitive maintenance done, and I'm not as stressed out as when I was working 9-6 days.
From what I understand, though, my shift's changing to 4 10s soon, early day shift (5am to 4pm, 10 plus 1 hour lunch). I'll live, but it won't be as good as what I've got right now.
I'm in favor of a 35 hour workweek. There are plenty of people to fill jobs these days, and if they're happy, they'll work harder and be more productive.
--Bernie
It's okay to use the word fuck if you actually fucked up something in your broadcast, but not if you're talking about fucking, in a sexual sense? Oh, and if you're talking about someone who's a little shit, that's okay, because you're not talking about actually taking a dump. I love this puritanical nonsense.
Tristani's right though, "...this policy statement will likely become instead a "how-to" manual for those licensees who wish to tread the line drawn by our cases." In essense, in her dissent, she's saying that the FCC shouldn't have released the policy statement because doing so would have given broadcasters the information they need to know to keep themselves from getting into trouble. The FCC must not be making enough off money from fines if they want to keep policy too vague to understand.
I'm GLAD that the FCC finally released this policy statement. I've been waiting years to actually see what THEY view as indecent. It's funny, though, that even though some of it might be offensive to me, I can always just TURN OFF the radio or TV!
That's the beauty of freedom. Nobody's forcing me to listen to those offensive programs, and I have the freedom to stop listening. I make the decisions, not the goddamned FCC. 18 USC 1464 and the right-wing Supreme Court we have are jokes.
The poster below that says protecting children and society from so-called indecent and obscene speech like this weakens society is right. When government makes the decisions for us, our freedom is diminished. I hate to sound like the shrub, but that's not what America is all about.
--B
...no more well-funded Space program. I seriously doubt this administration is interested in the pursuit of science. The only reason they'd shovel money into the space program would be if we still had a Cold War enemy like the Soviet Union to compete against.
Go China Go! You're our only hope (for a better space program).
--Bernie
I understand that incandescents can be efficient (for heat) in winter, but not that efficient, as far as my apartment is concerned. I've seen no noticeable increase in temperature when using the incadescent lamps.
I usually like to keep my living room constant at 20-22C.
--Bernie