I loved the last quote of the "Call centres put Indian mores on the hook" article. According to the article a lot of Indians are dropping out of university to work at call centers because it's quick money, and pretty good pay, relatively speaking. The quote is "A good college education is vital in the long run for career growth. What if the call centre bubble bursts one day?" Sounds a lot like kids here in the US that dropped out of college to join the dot-com bubble. Now some in India are worried about their youngsters doing the same thing to join the "call center bubble". Kindof struck me as funny, I guess.
And how can they track me and everyone else at the same time and keep records of this. The states don't have that kind of money.
If they have the money to implement the RFID scanners in the first place, they certainly could store the data. Hard drive space is cheap.
hmmm... I thought DR-DOS came about after MS-DOS. At any rate, I had a 386 with DR-DOS on it. That was right around the time that Digital Research had been bought by Caldera. I later had Novell DOS 7, which came out right around 1995 somewhere and was ignored because of Windows95. Novell DOS 7, btw, was pretty good, with multitasking (not just task-switching), multiple command consoles, and networking built-in... not bad for DOS.
Funny how all this is mixed up... DR-DOS went to Caldera and then to Novell and became Novell DOS. Novell bought SYS-V, then licensed it to SCO, who used to be Caldera, who used to be SCO, or something. And now SCO, who used to be Caldera and used to (and still does, I supposed) work on Linux, is using their alleged ownership of SYS-V to go after IBM (didn't they used to be the bad guys..?)... and in effect go after Linux. All financed by Microsoft with a dash of Sun thrown in for flavor.
I use Netscape (currently 7.1) instead of Mozilla for one reason: the website that I use to check on my 401k will accept Netscape but not Mozilla. I'm glad they didn't limit it to just IE. For that reason alone, I'm glad Netscape is still updating their browser. On a different note, I always get a sad feeling when I'm talking to somebody at work thinks that IE _IS_ the Internet and when you mention Netscape, they say, "What's that?" Almost make you cry...:)
I read the space.com article you referred to. Do a google search for "lifters". That's what I think they are. Various people have built lifters in their garages, powered from a regular power outlet. Imagine what you could do if you scaled that up a bit (okay, a lot) and powered it from an on-board nuclear reactor. That's my theory. Man, I hope that's what they are and that they declassify them soon so we can all drool over their specs...
hmm... if Mohammud said that, Jesus said it first. Matthew 26:6-13 tells of a woman who poured an expensive bottle of perfume over Jesus. Some of the disciples of Jesus complained saying the perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus recognized and appreciated the beauty of what the woman had done for him. In Matthew 26:11, he says, "The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me."
cool... we had a ZX81 too, and I'm in the US. Later we had a Timex Sinclair 2068... similar to the ZX Spectrum. My dad did payroll for his small company (2 or 3 employees) on the ZX81. I grew up programming the ZX81 and later the TS2068, then a Commodore 128 and finally a PC. I must say, the PC was a big disappointment at the time. Anyway, it's cool to run across somebody else who used a ZX81. And, yeah, when we got the 16Kb ram pack, we were in memory heaven!:)
They're not (directly) working on cruise missiles, although the tech could be used for that. They're trying to invent a cheaper way to get to orbit. This is just a test bed to figure out the scram jet. The plan is for a standard jet engine to get you to supersonic speeds, the scram jet to get you to hypersonic speeds and the edge of the atmosphere. Once you're going, say, Mach 7 and most of the atmosphere is below you, you fire the rocket engine to get you the rest of the way to orbit. This approach wouldn't require the rocket to carry as much oxydizer, thus less weight, less cost.
Speaking of PI and E... If you consider what are probably the 5 most important numbers: 0,1,e,i,pi... ever wonder how they're related? Try this e^(i*pi)+1
Excuse me but when I've got my kids confined in the car for long periods of time, I'd rather we discuss current events, history, science, and literature than have them zonked out in front of a passive entertainment device. Long car trips is a great time to talk to your kids - they can't get away. Try it out.
We're talking about a 3-year old here, so discussing current events, etc isn't going to get you very far. We don't let him watch much TV anyway, so watching a little Winnie-the-Pooh on the way to grandma's house is a nice treat.
hmmm... I think that in most states, it's illegal to have a TV mounted where the driver can see it. There's a reason TVs/DVDs (and now satellite, apparently) are showing up in vehicles... kids. It's a life saver on long trips. Of course, I realize the union of the sets "/.'ers" and "have kids" is rather small...
Back in college, we had a bunch of Sun systems and they were named flare1, flare2, flare3, etc. flare12 had the most memory (40 MB!) and disk space, but flare13 was our fastest... it was a Sparc II! Those were the days...
I love this site sometimes - where else can you post completely clueless questions and be virtually guaranteed to get an intelligent response from at least two people with PhDs in semiconductor physics?:-)</blockquote>
What you meant to say was that you're virtually guaranteed to get a clueless response from at least two people claiming to have a PhD in semiconductor physics.:-) Right?
If they overturn this do-not-call list, and presumably the state lists as well... and if the telemarketers start calling me again... I will have no mercy in giving them a hard time. When I used to receive telemarking calls (before getting on TN's do-not-call list a few years ago), I would always feel a little guilty for harrassing the telemarketers. No more. If they overturn the do-not-call lists and start calling again, I will have no mercy. I suspect about 50 million people feel the same way I do!
This is exactly the problem my wife (then a teacher, now a stay-at-home mom) had with MS Office on the computer at work (school). All the Microsoft auto-formatting crap kept getting in her way and causing her documents, letters home to parents, etc to look terrible. She would come home and use our WordPerfect whenever possible.
spoken by a true yuppy. While you live in a land of concrete and steel and the only drinkable water has a brand name, I live in a land of grass and trees and safely drink water pumped straight out of the ground. When you're at the gym working out on the stairmaster, I'm in my garden working out on the tiller. For your toil and trouble, you get a bill from the health club. For my toil and trouble, I get fresh corn-on-the-cob all summer long. What you call fly-over-territory, I call paradise. I can only hope that most of the folks like you continue to view where I live as fly-over-territory. Maybe it'll stay that way.
You're not looking at it the right way. All they have to do for vendor lock-in is to make the Office 2003 file formats for.doc,.xls, etc incompatible with previous versions and use some form of encryption. Doesn't matter how good the encryption is, it'll be illegal to decrypt it (DMCA). We use a cad program at work that silently encrypted our cad files. Simply opening and saving the file with the new version of the software upgraded the format to the encrypted version (without you knowing about it). There was an outrage against the company (not Microsoft) after all the users figured out what had happened, but it was too late. All those files can now be opened in that application only. We only found this out when we wanted to switch to a different cad system, and the files couldn't be converted. Of course, we always have the option of redoing all that work in a new cad system! My guess is that if you use Office 2003, you'll be locked in to MS Office forever, unless you're willing to re-create your documents in something else.
If you look at this, you'll see that the DOW began to flatten out in mid 1999 and the highest peak was around Jan 2000 (a year before Bush was in the White House). Most of the slide has happened since Bush entered the White House, but the DOW has since turned around and stands again where it was in early 1999. Obviously the DOW isn't the entire economy, but anybody with a brain knows that the economy had already started to falter before Bush took office.
hmmm... my guess is that when grilled or cooked in a cast iron skillet, they're getting a little real meat flavor from stuff that was grilled there before.:) Kind of like how McDonald's french fries taste good because they taste like beef tallow. They used to be fried in beef tallow, but since they can't do that anymore because of the fat, the taste is manufactured in a chemical factory in New Jersey.
antibiotic resistance need not come from mutation. If we kill off all the non-resistant bacteria, then only the resistant are left to propagate, but they haven't developed any new DNA or anything. No evolution, no mutations, so, yes, it happens very quickly. (As soon as you kill off all the non-resistant bacteria.)
Actually, the "states rights" movement comes from the tenth ammendment:
Amendment X.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
In other words, if the Constitution doesn't explicitly give a certain power or right to the Federal government, it is reserved for the states.
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dude... that's a chart from 2000... I do believe Clinton was still in office then.
I loved the last quote of the "Call centres put Indian mores on the hook" article. According to the article a lot of Indians are dropping out of university to work at call centers because it's quick money, and pretty good pay, relatively speaking. The quote is "A good college education is vital in the long run for career growth. What if the call centre bubble bursts one day?" Sounds a lot like kids here in the US that dropped out of college to join the dot-com bubble. Now some in India are worried about their youngsters doing the same thing to join the "call center bubble". Kindof struck me as funny, I guess.
And how can they track me and everyone else at the same time and keep records of this. The states don't have that kind of money.
If they have the money to implement the RFID scanners in the first place, they certainly could store the data. Hard drive space is cheap.
hmmm... I thought DR-DOS came about after MS-DOS. At any rate, I had a 386 with DR-DOS on it. That was right around the time that Digital Research had been bought by Caldera. I later had Novell DOS 7, which came out right around 1995 somewhere and was ignored because of Windows95. Novell DOS 7, btw, was pretty good, with multitasking (not just task-switching), multiple command consoles, and networking built-in... not bad for DOS.
Funny how all this is mixed up... DR-DOS went to Caldera and then to Novell and became Novell DOS. Novell bought SYS-V, then licensed it to SCO, who used to be Caldera, who used to be SCO, or something. And now SCO, who used to be Caldera and used to (and still does, I supposed) work on Linux, is using their alleged ownership of SYS-V to go after IBM (didn't they used to be the bad guys..?)... and in effect go after Linux. All financed by Microsoft with a dash of Sun thrown in for flavor.
Now, who's on first...?
I use Netscape (currently 7.1) instead of Mozilla for one reason: the website that I use to check on my 401k will accept Netscape but not Mozilla. I'm glad they didn't limit it to just IE. For that reason alone, I'm glad Netscape is still updating their browser. On a different note, I always get a sad feeling when I'm talking to somebody at work thinks that IE _IS_ the Internet and when you mention Netscape, they say, "What's that?" Almost make you cry... :)
I read the space.com article you referred to. Do a google search for "lifters". That's what I think they are. Various people have built lifters in their garages, powered from a regular power outlet. Imagine what you could do if you scaled that up a bit (okay, a lot) and powered it from an on-board nuclear reactor. That's my theory. Man, I hope that's what they are and that they declassify them soon so we can all drool over their specs...
hmm... if Mohammud said that, Jesus said it first. Matthew 26:6-13 tells of a woman who poured an expensive bottle of perfume over Jesus. Some of the disciples of Jesus complained saying the perfume could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus recognized and appreciated the beauty of what the woman had done for him. In Matthew 26:11, he says, "The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me."
I agree with your post, btw.
cool... we had a ZX81 too, and I'm in the US. Later we had a Timex Sinclair 2068... similar to the ZX Spectrum. My dad did payroll for his small company (2 or 3 employees) on the ZX81. I grew up programming the ZX81 and later the TS2068, then a Commodore 128 and finally a PC. I must say, the PC was a big disappointment at the time. Anyway, it's cool to run across somebody else who used a ZX81. And, yeah, when we got the 16Kb ram pack, we were in memory heaven! :)
ray guns... you mean like this?
They're not (directly) working on cruise missiles, although the tech could be used for that. They're trying to invent a cheaper way to get to orbit. This is just a test bed to figure out the scram jet. The plan is for a standard jet engine to get you to supersonic speeds, the scram jet to get you to hypersonic speeds and the edge of the atmosphere. Once you're going, say, Mach 7 and most of the atmosphere is below you, you fire the rocket engine to get you the rest of the way to orbit. This approach wouldn't require the rocket to carry as much oxydizer, thus less weight, less cost.
Speaking of PI and E... If you consider what are probably the 5 most important numbers: 0,1,e,i,pi... ever wonder how they're related? Try this e^(i*pi)+1
We're talking about a 3-year old here, so discussing current events, etc isn't going to get you very far. We don't let him watch much TV anyway, so watching a little Winnie-the-Pooh on the way to grandma's house is a nice treat.
hmmm... I think that in most states, it's illegal to have a TV mounted where the driver can see it. There's a reason TVs/DVDs (and now satellite, apparently) are showing up in vehicles... kids. It's a life saver on long trips. Of course, I realize the union of the sets "/.'ers" and "have kids" is rather small...
Back in college, we had a bunch of Sun systems and they were named flare1, flare2, flare3, etc. flare12 had the most memory (40 MB!) and disk space, but flare13 was our fastest... it was a Sparc II! Those were the days...
If they overturn this do-not-call list, and presumably the state lists as well... and if the telemarketers start calling me again... I will have no mercy in giving them a hard time. When I used to receive telemarking calls (before getting on TN's do-not-call list a few years ago), I would always feel a little guilty for harrassing the telemarketers. No more. If they overturn the do-not-call lists and start calling again, I will have no mercy. I suspect about 50 million people feel the same way I do!
This is exactly the problem my wife (then a teacher, now a stay-at-home mom) had with MS Office on the computer at work (school). All the Microsoft auto-formatting crap kept getting in her way and causing her documents, letters home to parents, etc to look terrible. She would come home and use our WordPerfect whenever possible.
spoken by a true yuppy. While you live in a land of concrete and steel and the only drinkable water has a brand name, I live in a land of grass and trees and safely drink water pumped straight out of the ground. When you're at the gym working out on the stairmaster, I'm in my garden working out on the tiller. For your toil and trouble, you get a bill from the health club. For my toil and trouble, I get fresh corn-on-the-cob all summer long. What you call fly-over-territory, I call paradise. I can only hope that most of the folks like you continue to view where I live as fly-over-territory. Maybe it'll stay that way.
nitpick... threw not through. We threw it away.
You're not looking at it the right way. All they have to do for vendor lock-in is to make the Office 2003 file formats for .doc, .xls, etc incompatible with previous versions and use some form of encryption. Doesn't matter how good the encryption is, it'll be illegal to decrypt it (DMCA). We use a cad program at work that silently encrypted our cad files. Simply opening and saving the file with the new version of the software upgraded the format to the encrypted version (without you knowing about it). There was an outrage against the company (not Microsoft) after all the users figured out what had happened, but it was too late. All those files can now be opened in that application only. We only found this out when we wanted to switch to a different cad system, and the files couldn't be converted. Of course, we always have the option of redoing all that work in a new cad system! My guess is that if you use Office 2003, you'll be locked in to MS Office forever, unless you're willing to re-create your documents in something else.
If you look at this, you'll see that the DOW began to flatten out in mid 1999 and the highest peak was around Jan 2000 (a year before Bush was in the White House). Most of the slide has happened since Bush entered the White House, but the DOW has since turned around and stands again where it was in early 1999. Obviously the DOW isn't the entire economy, but anybody with a brain knows that the economy had already started to falter before Bush took office.
hmmm... my guess is that when grilled or cooked in a cast iron skillet, they're getting a little real meat flavor from stuff that was grilled there before. :) Kind of like how McDonald's french fries taste good because they taste like beef tallow. They used to be fried in beef tallow, but since they can't do that anymore because of the fat, the taste is manufactured in a chemical factory in New Jersey.
antibiotic resistance need not come from mutation. If we kill off all the non-resistant bacteria, then only the resistant are left to propagate, but they haven't developed any new DNA or anything. No evolution, no mutations, so, yes, it happens very quickly. (As soon as you kill off all the non-resistant bacteria.)
Actually, the "states rights" movement comes from the tenth ammendment:
Amendment X.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
In other words, if the Constitution doesn't explicitly give a certain power or right to the Federal government, it is reserved for the states.