No, it's the second movie that never happened. I could be wrong about H3, but there was some, I believe, made-for-TV movie that was mostly about Duncan but had a short appearance by Connor. It's been a long long time since I saw it, but I don't remember it being any worse than the rest of the TV series.
The TV series was amazingly good, BTW, if you compare it to Highlander 2. But absent that, it was decent.
There's only a few applications now that I can think of offhand: 1) backup (this is a pretty important one; it takes forever to back up a 1TB drive over the internet at current speeds; 100Mb/s or even 1Gb/s would greatly improve this, making whole-drive backups feasible over the internet to remote providers. 2) video-on-demand. Netflix is great, but the quality is a little low, and it always has problems on Friday and Saturday nights for me during peak hours. 3) Home servers would be nice too, since they're basically disallowed by most ISPs now.
Looking into the future, video-on-demand is going to need more bandwidth, especially as we demand higher quality/resolution. When we move to 4K video screens, we're going to need much more bandwidth to have video-on-demand to those services. Also, if you have multiple people in the same house wanting to watch VoD simultaneously (different programs on different devices), you'll need even more bandwidth to support that.
Finally, just as no one imagined all the applications personal computers and the internet would enable back in the 1970s, there's no way to imagine all the applications 100Mb/s networks will enable now.
I thought most of our holy books said it was perfectly OK to slaught other humans as long as they're of some other tribe or don't believe in the correct god. The same books will elsewhere say not to murder people, so the whole thing is a big contradiction.
Again, that's manufacturing defects. Deming did indeed revolutionize manufacturing with statistical quality control, however that does absolutely nothing for poor design. There's different kinds of "quality", and a poorly-designed product (from a user PoV) can have zero manufacturing defects and still be called "low quality". The poster above seems to be complaining more about product design than about manufacturing defects.
What the hell are you talking about? Back in the 80s and 90s, Japanese products were world-leading in quality (and not just lack of manufacturing defects, but design quality too). There might be some quality problems with some Asian companies (and some Asian countries), but they're not all the same.
I never said anything about new vs. antiquated. Ferraris had V12 engines back in the 70s and 80s, when the Chevette was new. I really meant "good" vs. "crappy", and as far as I can tell, most other kernels are definitely crappy compared to Linux in many ways, especially in the context of embedded mobile devices. A lot of people seem to like FreeBSD for instance, but good luck installing that on any kind of mobile device and getting good performance from the UI; that OS was never optimized for low-latency use and it doesn't have a lot of device driver support. Or there's HURD; I don't think I need to go into much detail about how that wouldn't exactly work well on a cellphone in its present state. Even the proprietary stuff isn't all that great; I worked with Nucleus Plus once and it seemed like basically an overpriced piece of crap to me; ok maybe for some simpler embedded devices but definitely not suited for anything as complicated as a modern Android 4.1 device.
It's more like saying that a car's particular engine isn't important, and you can just replace a Ferrari's V12 engine with a Chevette engine and the driver will barely notice the difference.
I don't think it's possible to enforce them (and still actually have any electronic products): we don't even make passive parts (resistors, capacitors, etc.) and many other necessary components in the US any more. A lot of high-end chips are still made here (Intel CPUs namely), and I suppose they could move the packaging back here if necessary (Intel CPUs are made here, then the bare dies sent to Thailand IIRC to be packaged into the LGA packages you're used to seeing, then most of them sent back here for sale), but the lower-end chips, diodes, power transistors, passives, and other stuff isn't.
The neutrality thing doesn't work well unless you arm yourself to the teeth to back it up, the way Switzerland did (and still does). Back in WWII times, they had all their bridges rigged with explosives in case of German attack, there were anti-aircraft cannons hidden in barns, and of course the entire male population is issued a rifle and trains in the militia.
If you declare yourself to be neutral and non-violent, someone is just going to come in and walk all over you at some point.
Is it racism to be concerned that our military is using computer parts that can't (or won't) be produced at home?
No, which is why the US government should only use US-made computers, made with only US-made components.
Oh wait, there is no such thing. But that's OK, they can pass such a law, and since no computers or electronics are actually made in the US any more, the US government can just go back to using pencils and paper (no copy machines either, since those aren't US-made either).
With the people I see covered in tattoos, it's pretty obvious that they aren't making a lot of money in their careers, and probably don't get much above minimum wage. You don't see lower-income people traveling the world, but for some reason you do see a subset of them spending all their money on tattoos. If you have plenty of money, spending some on frivolous stuff is fine, but if you're barely hanging on, and you have kids, it's extremely irresponsible.
Like tattoos. People who don't have tattoos seem to want to create an entire psychodrama in their heads about the motivation and world-view of the person with the tattoo. But sometimes, it really is just because somebody wanted a fleur-de-lis on their calf because they like the way it looks.
I think it's a little more complex than that. The way I see it (as a non-tattooed person who thinks they're kinda stupid), there's a big, big difference between someone with a smallish tattoo on their calf, or 2 or 3 tattoos in various places, and someone whose arms and legs or other body parts are entirely covered in them. The first person is just someone who wanted to adorn themselves, much like someone who wears earrings (except that tattoos can't be taken out easily when you get tired of them), whereas the latter is someone with an obsession. Tattoos are not cheap, so having large amounts of skin covered with them adds up to a lot of money, and it says something about someone who wants to spend that much money on adorning themselves instead of making a house downpayment, investing, or saving for their kids' college tuition.
As for adorning yourself with tokens of geekdom, it doesn't cost anything to read XKCD or other such things online, and to post links to your favorite ones. You can drop XKCD like a hot potato any time you want and read some other webcomic instead. Tattoos, OTOH, are expensive, and permanent. I'm not so sure that's a very good analogy.
Never seen anything like that. I guess you midwesterners haven't learned about Netflix yet. Why on earth would anyone go to a store and rent a DVD or two for the cost of a monthly Netflix membership?
Nope, that bathroom was never visited by the cats, and only rarely by humans. It was a spare bathroom and didn't get much use. That's why we locked him in there. Also, it was tile, so it was very easy to clean up. And I don't remember him peeing in there at all or making any kind of mess; he happily used the little litter box I made for him. When we let him run around the rest of the house, around the cats (for supervised play), he didn't cause any problems at all. If it weren't for the smell (of the ferret himself, not his pee) I probably would have wanted to keep him.
No, that law doesn't apply to every US company, so with that one exception, it does run its finances like any other company: it doesn't comingle its funds with the US Treasury, it's entirely self-sufficient, just like most normal companies (except big banks, oil companies, and ag companies).
It's already "nationalized", it's just run as a private corporation rather than a Federal agency. It's actually much better that way; most Federal agencies are horribly mismangaged and wasteful; the USPS is actually extremely efficient and well-run. If it weren't for Congress meddling with it, at the behest of lobbyists, they wouldn't have this problem, and they'd be profitable. Also, the USPS has been independent since 1971; that's long before UPS and FedEx were the heavyweights they are now.
Turning it into a Federal agency wouldn't change Congressional meddling. Congress can just as easily meddle with a Federal agency as with a government-owned corporation, and actually moreso. As a separate entity, it's easy to see how the USPS is doing and it has more isolation from stupid politics; Congress has to actually pass laws and such to affect the USPS's operations and behavior. A Federal agency, OTOH, is completely up to the whims of the guy in the White House (as well as the budget-makers in Congress), and things there can change radically every time someone new is elected or Congress decides to do something stupid like cut their budget. The way it is now, Congress has no real say over the USPS's budget or how they handle their money, except for legal mandates like this stupid pension-funding law. Congress can't just yank their funding for no reason, the way they can with every other Federal agency; the USPS is entirely self-funded, and uses no taxpayer money to operate. Change that to a Federal agency, and its revenues would go into the Treasury, and its operating costs would come out of the Treasury, being entirely comingled. It'd be very easy for Congress to simply defund the USPS (regardless of how much money they're making in revenue), cripple it, then point to that and say "look! It doesn't work! We need to eliminate it!" and then pass a new law to eliminate the USPS altogether, or sell it off to a private corporation.
Maybe you should try actually educating yourself about the USPS and the issues involved, and also about how the US government works (which obviously you don't know much about, since you're not American, obvious by your spelling of "nationalise"), before spouting a bunch of nonsense.
The only way to fix the issues facing the USPS is to fix the US government itself, and the corruption which has completely taken it over. The problems with the USPS are just minor symptoms of much, much larger problems with the US federal government, all caused by extreme corruption, turning into an entirely undemocratic, mercantilist/corporatist (some might say fascist) government. The way I see it, it's entirely hopeless at this point, and the only thing to do is wait for it to collapse under its own weight, just like the Roman Empire did.
Actually, the USPS already takes photos of every piece of mail and saves it. They might not know what's inside, but they can tell the NSA who you've been communicating with.
You don't seem to understand how the USPS works. The USPS is NOT part of the government, it's a government-owned corporation. That means it has to run its finances exactly the way every other company does: it brings in revenue from customers, and then spends that revenue on expenses (operating expenses including salaries, capital expenses, and employee pensions). If they hire more people, then they have to raise their prices to pay them, which means more people switch to shipping stuff by UPS/FedEx, or they just don't send any mail at all. The USPS gets a lot of its revenue from junk mail, unfortunately. If they jack up the price of sending junk mail, then the junk mailers will send much less of it, which equals much less revenue from the USPS to pay all these new employees, which means they go bankrupt.
The USPS is, in fact, quite reluctant to hire ANY new employees at this time, because it costs so much, since they have to pre-fund every employee's pension fund for the next 75 years, thanks to the stupid law Congress passed in 2006 (with both Dems and Reps, so save your partisan bullshit). This is why the USPS has been moving to shut down Post Offices and instead encourage more franchise operations, called CPUs (contract postal units); the franchise operations act as postal clerks and handle normal mail duties like any PO location, but they're separate companies and not USPS employees so the USPS doesn't have to deal with any pensions for them.
It was the same way in several Phoenix-area neighorhoods when I lived in that crappy city. I lived in two different houses, built in the 80s, and they had centralized mailboxes scattered throughout the subdivision; each location had 32 boxes IIRC.
The thing that really sucked about it was that the individual boxes were quite small, and could barely hold all the junk mail. This isn't a bad idea, as long they make the boxes much bigger so you don't miss something if you forget to check your mail one day to clear enough space because it's so full of junkmail that the carrier saves your mail for the next day.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's the second movie that never happened. I could be wrong about H3, but there was some, I believe, made-for-TV movie that was mostly about Duncan but had a short appearance by Connor. It's been a long long time since I saw it, but I don't remember it being any worse than the rest of the TV series.
The TV series was amazingly good, BTW, if you compare it to Highlander 2. But absent that, it was decent.
He's your nephew, you forgetful fool. Don't you remember sparring with him in Highlander 3?
I guess that's a good point.
He is a shill.
There's only a few applications now that I can think of offhand: 1) backup (this is a pretty important one; it takes forever to back up a 1TB drive over the internet at current speeds; 100Mb/s or even 1Gb/s would greatly improve this, making whole-drive backups feasible over the internet to remote providers. 2) video-on-demand. Netflix is great, but the quality is a little low, and it always has problems on Friday and Saturday nights for me during peak hours. 3) Home servers would be nice too, since they're basically disallowed by most ISPs now.
Looking into the future, video-on-demand is going to need more bandwidth, especially as we demand higher quality/resolution. When we move to 4K video screens, we're going to need much more bandwidth to have video-on-demand to those services. Also, if you have multiple people in the same house wanting to watch VoD simultaneously (different programs on different devices), you'll need even more bandwidth to support that.
Finally, just as no one imagined all the applications personal computers and the internet would enable back in the 1970s, there's no way to imagine all the applications 100Mb/s networks will enable now.
I thought most of our holy books said it was perfectly OK to slaught other humans as long as they're of some other tribe or don't believe in the correct god. The same books will elsewhere say not to murder people, so the whole thing is a big contradiction.
Again, that's manufacturing defects. Deming did indeed revolutionize manufacturing with statistical quality control, however that does absolutely nothing for poor design. There's different kinds of "quality", and a poorly-designed product (from a user PoV) can have zero manufacturing defects and still be called "low quality". The poster above seems to be complaining more about product design than about manufacturing defects.
What the hell are you talking about? Back in the 80s and 90s, Japanese products were world-leading in quality (and not just lack of manufacturing defects, but design quality too). There might be some quality problems with some Asian companies (and some Asian countries), but they're not all the same.
I never said anything about new vs. antiquated. Ferraris had V12 engines back in the 70s and 80s, when the Chevette was new. I really meant "good" vs. "crappy", and as far as I can tell, most other kernels are definitely crappy compared to Linux in many ways, especially in the context of embedded mobile devices. A lot of people seem to like FreeBSD for instance, but good luck installing that on any kind of mobile device and getting good performance from the UI; that OS was never optimized for low-latency use and it doesn't have a lot of device driver support. Or there's HURD; I don't think I need to go into much detail about how that wouldn't exactly work well on a cellphone in its present state. Even the proprietary stuff isn't all that great; I worked with Nucleus Plus once and it seemed like basically an overpriced piece of crap to me; ok maybe for some simpler embedded devices but definitely not suited for anything as complicated as a modern Android 4.1 device.
It's more like saying that a car's particular engine isn't important, and you can just replace a Ferrari's V12 engine with a Chevette engine and the driver will barely notice the difference.
I don't think it's possible to enforce them (and still actually have any electronic products): we don't even make passive parts (resistors, capacitors, etc.) and many other necessary components in the US any more. A lot of high-end chips are still made here (Intel CPUs namely), and I suppose they could move the packaging back here if necessary (Intel CPUs are made here, then the bare dies sent to Thailand IIRC to be packaged into the LGA packages you're used to seeing, then most of them sent back here for sale), but the lower-end chips, diodes, power transistors, passives, and other stuff isn't.
In Hannibal's day, mountains were indeed a giant defensive military advantage. In the age of bomber aircraft, not so much.
Ford Pintos (the first generation, not the revised ones) were completely safe cars... as long as no one rear-ended you in one.
The neutrality thing doesn't work well unless you arm yourself to the teeth to back it up, the way Switzerland did (and still does). Back in WWII times, they had all their bridges rigged with explosives in case of German attack, there were anti-aircraft cannons hidden in barns, and of course the entire male population is issued a rifle and trains in the militia.
If you declare yourself to be neutral and non-violent, someone is just going to come in and walk all over you at some point.
Is it racism to be concerned that our military is using computer parts that can't (or won't) be produced at home?
No, which is why the US government should only use US-made computers, made with only US-made components.
Oh wait, there is no such thing. But that's OK, they can pass such a law, and since no computers or electronics are actually made in the US any more, the US government can just go back to using pencils and paper (no copy machines either, since those aren't US-made either).
With the people I see covered in tattoos, it's pretty obvious that they aren't making a lot of money in their careers, and probably don't get much above minimum wage. You don't see lower-income people traveling the world, but for some reason you do see a subset of them spending all their money on tattoos. If you have plenty of money, spending some on frivolous stuff is fine, but if you're barely hanging on, and you have kids, it's extremely irresponsible.
Like tattoos. People who don't have tattoos seem to want to create an entire psychodrama in their heads about the motivation and world-view of the person with the tattoo. But sometimes, it really is just because somebody wanted a fleur-de-lis on their calf because they like the way it looks.
I think it's a little more complex than that. The way I see it (as a non-tattooed person who thinks they're kinda stupid), there's a big, big difference between someone with a smallish tattoo on their calf, or 2 or 3 tattoos in various places, and someone whose arms and legs or other body parts are entirely covered in them. The first person is just someone who wanted to adorn themselves, much like someone who wears earrings (except that tattoos can't be taken out easily when you get tired of them), whereas the latter is someone with an obsession. Tattoos are not cheap, so having large amounts of skin covered with them adds up to a lot of money, and it says something about someone who wants to spend that much money on adorning themselves instead of making a house downpayment, investing, or saving for their kids' college tuition.
As for adorning yourself with tokens of geekdom, it doesn't cost anything to read XKCD or other such things online, and to post links to your favorite ones. You can drop XKCD like a hot potato any time you want and read some other webcomic instead. Tattoos, OTOH, are expensive, and permanent. I'm not so sure that's a very good analogy.
Never seen anything like that. I guess you midwesterners haven't learned about Netflix yet. Why on earth would anyone go to a store and rent a DVD or two for the cost of a monthly Netflix membership?
5. Check to see if a local video store has it.
2003 called and wants you back. There's no such thing as a "local video store" any more (except maybe for the adult shops).
If you'd been here any real time at all, you'd know that Slashdot's moderation system doesn't work at all.
Nope, that bathroom was never visited by the cats, and only rarely by humans. It was a spare bathroom and didn't get much use. That's why we locked him in there. Also, it was tile, so it was very easy to clean up. And I don't remember him peeing in there at all or making any kind of mess; he happily used the little litter box I made for him. When we let him run around the rest of the house, around the cats (for supervised play), he didn't cause any problems at all. If it weren't for the smell (of the ferret himself, not his pee) I probably would have wanted to keep him.
No, that law doesn't apply to every US company, so with that one exception, it does run its finances like any other company: it doesn't comingle its funds with the US Treasury, it's entirely self-sufficient, just like most normal companies (except big banks, oil companies, and ag companies).
It's already "nationalized", it's just run as a private corporation rather than a Federal agency. It's actually much better that way; most Federal agencies are horribly mismangaged and wasteful; the USPS is actually extremely efficient and well-run. If it weren't for Congress meddling with it, at the behest of lobbyists, they wouldn't have this problem, and they'd be profitable. Also, the USPS has been independent since 1971; that's long before UPS and FedEx were the heavyweights they are now.
Turning it into a Federal agency wouldn't change Congressional meddling. Congress can just as easily meddle with a Federal agency as with a government-owned corporation, and actually moreso. As a separate entity, it's easy to see how the USPS is doing and it has more isolation from stupid politics; Congress has to actually pass laws and such to affect the USPS's operations and behavior. A Federal agency, OTOH, is completely up to the whims of the guy in the White House (as well as the budget-makers in Congress), and things there can change radically every time someone new is elected or Congress decides to do something stupid like cut their budget. The way it is now, Congress has no real say over the USPS's budget or how they handle their money, except for legal mandates like this stupid pension-funding law. Congress can't just yank their funding for no reason, the way they can with every other Federal agency; the USPS is entirely self-funded, and uses no taxpayer money to operate. Change that to a Federal agency, and its revenues would go into the Treasury, and its operating costs would come out of the Treasury, being entirely comingled. It'd be very easy for Congress to simply defund the USPS (regardless of how much money they're making in revenue), cripple it, then point to that and say "look! It doesn't work! We need to eliminate it!" and then pass a new law to eliminate the USPS altogether, or sell it off to a private corporation.
Maybe you should try actually educating yourself about the USPS and the issues involved, and also about how the US government works (which obviously you don't know much about, since you're not American, obvious by your spelling of "nationalise"), before spouting a bunch of nonsense.
The only way to fix the issues facing the USPS is to fix the US government itself, and the corruption which has completely taken it over. The problems with the USPS are just minor symptoms of much, much larger problems with the US federal government, all caused by extreme corruption, turning into an entirely undemocratic, mercantilist/corporatist (some might say fascist) government. The way I see it, it's entirely hopeless at this point, and the only thing to do is wait for it to collapse under its own weight, just like the Roman Empire did.
Actually, the USPS already takes photos of every piece of mail and saves it. They might not know what's inside, but they can tell the NSA who you've been communicating with.
You don't seem to understand how the USPS works. The USPS is NOT part of the government, it's a government-owned corporation. That means it has to run its finances exactly the way every other company does: it brings in revenue from customers, and then spends that revenue on expenses (operating expenses including salaries, capital expenses, and employee pensions). If they hire more people, then they have to raise their prices to pay them, which means more people switch to shipping stuff by UPS/FedEx, or they just don't send any mail at all. The USPS gets a lot of its revenue from junk mail, unfortunately. If they jack up the price of sending junk mail, then the junk mailers will send much less of it, which equals much less revenue from the USPS to pay all these new employees, which means they go bankrupt.
The USPS is, in fact, quite reluctant to hire ANY new employees at this time, because it costs so much, since they have to pre-fund every employee's pension fund for the next 75 years, thanks to the stupid law Congress passed in 2006 (with both Dems and Reps, so save your partisan bullshit). This is why the USPS has been moving to shut down Post Offices and instead encourage more franchise operations, called CPUs (contract postal units); the franchise operations act as postal clerks and handle normal mail duties like any PO location, but they're separate companies and not USPS employees so the USPS doesn't have to deal with any pensions for them.
It was the same way in several Phoenix-area neighorhoods when I lived in that crappy city. I lived in two different houses, built in the 80s, and they had centralized mailboxes scattered throughout the subdivision; each location had 32 boxes IIRC.
The thing that really sucked about it was that the individual boxes were quite small, and could barely hold all the junk mail. This isn't a bad idea, as long they make the boxes much bigger so you don't miss something if you forget to check your mail one day to clear enough space because it's so full of junkmail that the carrier saves your mail for the next day.