Went through similar stuff back in '65 and again in '06; scholarship and work the first time, grants and loans the second. Health issues put the kibosh on latest attempt; exhaustion and rising costs on the first. Sorry to hear of your troubles.
Nothing, so far. The U.S. Constitution, once upon a time, helped. Other than that? Regular fair publicly financed elections. Term limits (although I dislike the thought of losing good people who've just learned enough of what their job involves being arbitrarily removed, it's the only way I see to having a chance to yank out the empire builders.) No revolving doors to industry or judiciary. (Also a loss, as above, but also a protection.)
Tongue in cheek, anyone wanting "to serve" in public office is disqualified. Select by lottery from pool, as with jury duty, vote for whomever seems to best have their shit together.
Prison food and medical care for all but the better Federal prisons are not things to be lusted for, or equate to that available in civilian life for all but the most poor, say around poverty level or below.
You left out c) there's a lot of shit laws on the books. And d) Prison is a big profit machine for a very few businesses. Go look up their connections for a real eye-opener. Also putting people in prison is great for the idiots running on law and order planks, never mind the real cost to the voters. Prisons are a basic suck to the economy. Stats are most crimes of violence are way down over the past forty years - and the correlation with prison population is weak at best. A low percentage of inmates are there for violent crimes. But don't believe me, go dig around a bit, all the info is there and fairly easily gotten.
Not bad, and I agree that education is a key element to much.
But why does damn near every 'good' job these days require a fucking college degree? Many use little more than what can be gotten readily with a year or two of voc-ed, if that. (1986 want ad in local paper for a dish washer at country club ended with "Send resume [sic]..." Inflation indeed.)
Further, ask yourself why have we effectively demonized such activity as parking cars or cleaning? It's useful work which in some manner makes life better for others. Should this not be a source of pride? And a liveable income as well? Why do we continually stratify tasks such that we have people upon whom we look down our noses? Doesn't this say something a bit nasty about the fragility and skew of our own perceptions about self-worth? Why is someone who brings food to a table or washes the dishes that come back somehow a lesser being? Is it required to have a de facto caste system? Or is that just the way it is because that's just the way it is? Seems to me what humans make they can generally un-make, or make differently.
It's not the resources per se I'm concerned about - not that they're a non-issue, anything but. However, the three most critical areas in resource are energy (the generation thereof and what is involved in that), food (we've plenty to feed everyone; hunger is a function of transport, corruption, and political will - to simply decide that no one goes to bed hungry. It's quite doable, but few see the real need to do so.), and information. The latter encompasses censorship, unrealistic copyright and paywall thus access to books, but most importantly real education, by which I mean the inculcation and training of curious, analytical thinking from pre-school throughout one's life.
I'm thinking that energy production is key. Most current methods are exceedingly impolite to the planet and its lifeforms. So-called renewable sources often entail means and materials that themselves are not so 'green'.
Short term, do what can readily be done viz. solar, geothermal (OTEC, for instance), wind, wave, and tide. At the same time, rapidly get up and running on production basis several of the modular or sealed disposable fission plants best suited to the task, and get seriously onto the thorium cycle - which would also take care of the bulk of all the most dangerous of wastes and weaponizable stuff.
While that's in gear, immediately get truly committed to ASAP solar power satellites. Enormous up-front costs? Yes. Some non-trivial environmental costs? Also yes. High fixed operating costs? Unknown in all particulars, but probably not too bad at all. Fantastic payback? Damn betcha. Energy independence - for the whole planet? Yes, indeedy. (Remember the predictions in the '50s of nuclear energy as being too cheap to meter? Yes, well, this is the closest we're going to get to it, if done well.)
Finally, pull the thumb out and throw a hundred billion at fusion. Stand back, forget about it, get on with other things. Don't forget to act surprised when it works. If it doesn't? Hell bells, how much per year did Iraq cost just the US? What's the cost of the current not-really-operational fleet of F-35s? How much money got sucked out of the economy by the asshole bankers and their friends and owners? How much is spent on professional sports just in the US? How much is spent on pizza? Get some perspective, folks.
(While we're at it, with an order of magnitude and more of energy available, many things become possible; so also work on getting carbon dioxide down to more reasonable level, and think on getting rid of the waste heat from the use of current and future energy. It's gotta go somewhere.)
Perspective leads back, of course, to books. The trail for some may be arduous; for people who read it's a no-brainer. Take in a little Bookminster Fuller while you're at it. Stretch. Wide reading more readily allows wider seeing and thinking; the sports page, law books, and tech manuals, not so much.
There has been inflation of many erstwhile useful terms - diva, icon, mega this and that, ditto mini, micro, and nano. Hero is I think one of the worse offenders. Its overuse removes accuracy, utility, relevance, and respect.
Another usage that grinds my teeth is the adding of an "s" to -craft, as in aircraft, spacecraft, watercraft. While it may be the usual evolution of language in action it still hits me sideways.
And yes, the writing on Discovery, mentioned below, has gone downhill; writing in most pubs and sites I visit has also generally gone downhill. The 'majors' of press and magazines still do pretty well; the rest, not so much.
Reporters, "journalists", whathaveyou, are getting lazy. Worse, imprecise, and not just sloppy; they don't seem to care. (Seems to me it's even worse if they don't _know_ the difference.) They don't seem to trouble themselves with antecedents, tense, other basic grammar stuff - agreement of subject and verb, confusion or inattention about adjective and adverb. People are getting paid for writing that would not have made it past my sixth-grade teacher. They throw some shit on the page, run it by some idiot editor, and out on the wire it goes.
Apart from ignorance and laziness, I suppose it has to do with the general decline in reading and its comprehension. The latter shows up even here. The general level of knowledge about the world in which we live is staggeringly low. It's only going to get worse, as the new crop of children raised by television and thumb games begins to take the reins of society.
This is not the usual 'get off my lawn' what's-the-world-coming-to that has happened every generation. Maybe its just me, but I consider that non-readers simply haven't the tools needed to do well at much of anything in other than some rather narrow technical areas. We're seeing a preview now, of those born in the '70s, the first true television generation, at its prime. Look, see how well they're doing.
In the seeking of moar money just to pay the bills*, the rise of the two-earner household, my generation, sucked in and trapped by the seductive spoils of success handed down, screwed the pooch. Instead of tightening the belt, foregoing some toys, pulling the plug and kicking the rugrats outside, requiring a weekly book report, we bought a second TV. Yay.
*To be fair, the rise of massive shifts in wealth and that wealth being sequestered by its recipients rather than being plowed back into the general economy, combined with the emasculation of the middle- and working-class, and the rise of robotics without the necessary changes in education and a sweeping structural revolution in how we build an economy, rather did a number on us all. I know no other time in history of something like this.
Within a generation or two we lost easily 30% of our jobs to automation of various kinds and the trend continues. Having the remainder of much of that done overseas is but time-shifting until those societies reach post-industrial; it may be stop-gap good for a corporation but does no good to the people without replacement work. Expecting a formerly competent assembly-line worker to magically transform himself into a computer programming or support tech via some voc-ed classes is the height of arrogant stupidity.
The wealthy have little need to attend reality; they simply buy insulation for themselves. The rest of us will continue into an ever-larger shit-storm of debt and need and scraping by. We are the pool of organic labor units, to be used for scut work and soldiery, and, for some, middling tech jobs or science work. For a very lucky few, a way out for a good idea capitalized by a vc. (Eventually, tho, your wonderful idea will simply be taken, by law or by crook.)
There are workable solutions but none will take them; the powers-that-be have no compelling reason to do so, even as their system collapses around them, since they are essentially blinded by their sense of entitlement. (For clarity, TPTB are not the wealthy; they work in roundabout fashion for the interests of the wealthy.)
Shit. This started as a small grammar-related post.
Good info, good question - would we learn 1000x more.
"But are they "better" than manned exploration? No."
And that's the thing - we won't know until humans go there to answer it. I suppose, did we wait long enough, say, fifty to a hundred years, with robotic missions every few years, with increasingly robust packages for sampling and analysis, it might reach a point that sending humans to Mars will require a purpose other than exploration.
(for the grammar nazis, yeah, too many commas; sorry, I tend to write as I speak.)
Well, it depends. Since '06 I've used Net10; if I can save up $60, I get 900 minutes. Texts are a nickel. To keep the phone activated for a year w/o adding minutes runs $100 (last I looked, a few years ago.) Costs me minutes incoming and outgoing; minutes roll over forever, no roaming or long distance charges.
Last month I was down to 12 minutes and out of money. Because I can qualify due low income and disability, applied for and got a Lifeline phone (interesting program, if you want some facts.) It's a halfway decent Motorola feature phone, discontinued by Verizon a few years ago, and runs on their network. The OS is crippled by the budget service provider, so no Internet, no email, no voice-recognition control, etc. Comes with 250 minutes per month. However, for $25 a month I get unlimited vox and text. In this case, "unlimited" means 4000 minutes.
It's the only thing I can afford, given my few other bills. It's my only phone. Would I like a better phone? Sure, a bit - better camera, a storage card, a few of the features. As it is, tho, it's fine: make and gets calls and makes a decent alarm clock. Only device I might really like would be an e-book reader. For everything else, I've got my old home-assembled tower (which I would dearly love to upgrade).
I've watched the cell industry for decades now, and it's even worse than the cable companies and ISPs. It's government-sanctioned Rip-Off Land. Maybe, just maybe, it will improve some, but it's got a long way to go to bring costs in line with services. Meanwhile we 'hunt and peck' for good deals for some balance of need and want.
As an aside, I realize you are speaking in general terms, and you may already be aware of this, but one can indeed watch stuff from Netflix on a Linux desktop, at least if it's Ubuntu. See compholio.com and https://launchpad.net/~ehoover/+archive/compholio/
Works fine on my Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit desktop, anyway. Before I had to watch from within an XP VM under VirtualBox, which does work, just with less screen space available, leastways how I set it up. Don't know if it will work on your laptop's distro, tho. I've also used the compholio setup on 12.10 and 12.04.
I haven't followed biz history very much, so as I cast about for other companies that fit the bill you portray, I'm left with... Microsoft is a one-off. (There was the old British East India Trading Company or something, might've come close?) And you're right, it would, or will, make for a fascinating study, especially if anyone could gather enough of the pieces (people, projects, politics, decisions) to put it together.
Apropos of little, I do know that every time I poke around their research, I come away marveling at some of the things they're looking at. But maybe I'm just easily amused; I'd like to know what smarter people think.
Years back when I opened my current account I set it up with a security word - two, actually - to be used if I did business over the phone via customer service or for use in case any cashier had any question as to my identity. I also stipulated that using it be required for withdrawing or moving above a certain amount.
It's not that I have lots of money; quite the opposite. I took a precaution against losing what little I have at a given moment as my survival depends upon it.
This has been used maybe a dozen times in past ten years or so. Once I got a phone call from the bank - somebody was at a branch asking to withdraw money, claiming to be my sister, had a note 'from me' with my written permission with a scrawled signature not entirely dissimilar to mine. I called back to a known-good telephone number and a given extension, used my password. Whoever it was didn't get my money.
From what I later heard, police later caught her; it was a sideline activity of opportunity. Apparently she'd gotten my bank statement from a dumpster. Now I take the mandatory bi-monthly written statements to the bank for shredding. (I can download the statements and save them, so I still have a record. How good that record may be compared to the printed one for legal purposes I don't know.)
Of course I'm left depending on the security of the bank's internal computer network viz. the pass words, and the one I access for on-line banking. Best I can do with what is.
I like it. Science and its review done in plain sight; the closed groups might be handled via the comments section.
The people who won't like this are those who don't know how science works, who can't see the end of their nose 'cuz it's stuck up the ass end of a perverted sense of prestige, who just happen all too often to be the people who run places and make endowments.
This may also help with otherwise lost, unpopular, or seemingly screwy papers; there will at least be a place where they can be found. Even a screwy or plain wrong idea can stimulate a good question for research.
And to establish over time a reputation for publishing good stuff. With enough time comes tradition. With either comes cachet.
"Do good, be good. Continue." describes 'most any thriving community, I think. With enough people contributing in some fashion I don't see why self-organized publishing can't work - or at least not automatically fail. Doing it wiki-style is intruiging, and the community would need to work out ways to handle injudicious editing, for example.
Society at large has, I believe, over-riding interest in research results. Since funding generally is a blend of tax-funded grants, grants and endowments from academe and industry, it seems reasonable to expect those results to be available freely or at cost to print (as is done for maps from the several government agencies when I get hardcopy.) Nominal fees for postage, hosting, whathaveyou, don't seem unreasonable at first blush. (Please correct me where I've strayed.)
If I view (and download) from on-line source, it's free. If I want a bound printed copy, charge me at cost. Else GFY.
There are no rights, natural or otherwise, only what we collectively decide so, and such that the powers that be haven't yet either made illegal or require licensing for their exercise. Inroads to the latter are continuing (c.f. free assembly, for instance.)
Rights as you speak of are only so if we are willing to fight* for them if needs be. That's how we have them now, anyway.
*This need not be literal or extreme by any stretch; it might mean little more than greater collective involvement in local politics at city, county, and state levels, and contributing to those who work on our behalf at legislatures and before the courts. Key is _involvement_, and not next week, or next year, or letting our grandchildren do it. It means having gradual quiet bits of conversation with neighbors; if you think you haven't such, then develop them. It means staying abreast of local issues - who owns the city, who does the construction, who zones what and why, how decisions on these things are done, who runs the school board, who decides curriculum and hours, and on and on. Being a member of society entails a bit more than paying one's taxes and shoveling the sidewalk - which is where too may of us stop.
If we continually 'let somebody else do it' then eventually there won't be enough of those others, and decisions will be from the top down. Power ought to be exercised by those who don't want it but do so from duty, not by those who avidly seek it. The latter have nobody's best interests at heart but their own. Selah.
Moderation? The keystone is intellectual honesty. It requires the integrity to be unflinchingly self-honest.
One must be continually, often brutally, honest of perceptions, assumptions, predisposition, and doctrine, however and whence.
One seeks not an arbitrary middle-ground, but rather grounds things through a personal lens based on learning, thought, and asking "if what I propose for them I suppose to be good, how would I feel, what would I think, were it to happen to me? What would I feel and think were I in their place? What are the ramifications for all of us?"
One strives to find what is good for oneself, the generic individual, and the sum of individuals we deem society. Good encompasses right from wrong, value from price, demonstrable from assertion.
It's a work in progress. Looks like a retirement project to me as well. Best I got, top of head.
I suspect the hunt for moderates may remind us of Diogenes.
Yeah, true; makes a fine counter-point to Jefferson's assertion that the future of the Republic requires a literate electorate. Even if people can read it doesn't do anything to help if all they read are the sports page and Cosmo. Sheesh, by '72 or thereabouts less than half of adults read books - any kind of books at all, let alone history, biography, science, philosophy....
One of the things that led to King George dropping the hammer on coffee houses as hotbeds of sedition (after the tax stuff, and morality of 'idleness') was the practice in them and not a few taverns of the 'reading corner' where, at least a night a week, books were read from and discussed; it was a way for anyone literate or no to participate in learning beyond what was available to them otherwise. We haven't any such structure or practice today. (Book clubs don't really count, I should think.) What we have instead is the passive consumption of trash TV for the masses. And 'the masses' don't give a shit, except wanting 'their' cable channel.
No mention of Salk or Sabin? (I remember getting the Salk vaccine in grade school back late Fifties, can't right now recall the exact year, what grade I was in, or where, but it was a 'Big Deal'. Friend of mine from first and second grade got polio halfway through second, developed worst form, later died from something else while living in an iron lung.)
Anyway, tell me, just how did Bill cure polio? (I'll give you a clue: there is no cure, only vaccines used for immunization.)
Now, I don't get out much, but this is the first time I've seen an OS castigated by an ad hominem attack. Congrats.
And I'll be happy to look forward to seeing what you might come up with. 'Course, you could always ask Kim Dotcom.
Not sure we need a whole new paradigm, or even a pair of nickels. (sorry, it's late) Mostly just extend current protections to email and the like. The concepts and legal structure are already in place or in the wings.
See, here's the thing - we're told stuff about 'reasonable expectation of privacy' (the area of which seems to be shrinking by the decade) to the extent that soon there will be none at all - either privacy or its expectation. We're told, and we expect, since it at first blush makes sense, that for instance a conversation between two people on the street carries no expectation for privacy.
Thing is, in many societies if you happen to pass two people talking in normal tones while you may hear a snippet, a sentence or two, you likely won't pay it much mind, it's basically in one ear and out the other. This will vary a bit. You might overhear something that relates to something you like or dislike, either one of which might do more to engage your attention. In the main, tho, you'll regard their conversation as none of your business and thus, essentially, private.
Extend this to two people talking at a table in a restaurant. Same deal. The cops and the lawyers and the courts and the legislatures all pretty much say those aren't private, when in fact most of us might well tend to say that they are; here privacy and our collective sense of what makes up 'good manners' or courtesy coincide. In Japan, for instance, or even on many crowded islands, there even arises willful inattention - to accord privacy to that which demonstrably is not so. Boils down to we mostly generally (at least, my generation did) try to be polite and not nosy - not just because we expect the same in return but just as simply because it was thought wrong to do otherwise.
The technical minded and those who know about email will say, "hey, idjit, it's sent in _cleartext_ ffs". Yeah. It is. So? If you come across a letter left on a counter in the break room or so, are you gonna just start reading it? In my day, no. Today? I don't know.
Sorry, dehole, rambling instead of sleeping. Glad, pleased, even a bit proud you stopped to think a bit on my post. And I know I missed a point I wanted to try to make. Fun getting old and tired. Be well, and good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Went through similar stuff back in '65 and again in '06; scholarship and work the first time, grants and loans the second. Health issues put the kibosh on latest attempt; exhaustion and rising costs on the first. Sorry to hear of your troubles.
Nothing, so far. The U.S. Constitution, once upon a time, helped. Other than that? Regular fair publicly financed elections. Term limits (although I dislike the thought of losing good people who've just learned enough of what their job involves being arbitrarily removed, it's the only way I see to having a chance to yank out the empire builders.) No revolving doors to industry or judiciary. (Also a loss, as above, but also a protection.)
Tongue in cheek, anyone wanting "to serve" in public office is disqualified. Select by lottery from pool, as with jury duty, vote for whomever seems to best have their shit together.
Prison food and medical care for all but the better Federal prisons are not things to be lusted for, or equate to that available in civilian life for all but the most poor, say around poverty level or below.
You left out c) there's a lot of shit laws on the books. And d) Prison is a big profit machine for a very few businesses. Go look up their connections for a real eye-opener. Also putting people in prison is great for the idiots running on law and order planks, never mind the real cost to the voters. Prisons are a basic suck to the economy. Stats are most crimes of violence are way down over the past forty years - and the correlation with prison population is weak at best. A low percentage of inmates are there for violent crimes. But don't believe me, go dig around a bit, all the info is there and fairly easily gotten.
Not bad, and I agree that education is a key element to much.
But why does damn near every 'good' job these days require a fucking college degree? Many use little more than what can be gotten readily with a year or two of voc-ed, if that. (1986 want ad in local paper for a dish washer at country club ended with "Send resume [sic]..." Inflation indeed.)
Further, ask yourself why have we effectively demonized such activity as parking cars or cleaning? It's useful work which in some manner makes life better for others. Should this not be a source of pride? And a liveable income as well? Why do we continually stratify tasks such that we have people upon whom we look down our noses? Doesn't this say something a bit nasty about the fragility and skew of our own perceptions about self-worth? Why is someone who brings food to a table or washes the dishes that come back somehow a lesser being? Is it required to have a de facto caste system? Or is that just the way it is because that's just the way it is? Seems to me what humans make they can generally un-make, or make differently.
It's not the resources per se I'm concerned about - not that they're a non-issue, anything but. However, the three most critical areas in resource are energy (the generation thereof and what is involved in that), food (we've plenty to feed everyone; hunger is a function of transport, corruption, and political will - to simply decide that no one goes to bed hungry. It's quite doable, but few see the real need to do so.), and information. The latter encompasses censorship, unrealistic copyright and paywall thus access to books, but most importantly real education, by which I mean the inculcation and training of curious, analytical thinking from pre-school throughout one's life.
I'm thinking that energy production is key. Most current methods are exceedingly impolite to the planet and its lifeforms. So-called renewable sources often entail means and materials that themselves are not so 'green'.
Short term, do what can readily be done viz. solar, geothermal (OTEC, for instance), wind, wave, and tide. At the same time, rapidly get up and running on production basis several of the modular or sealed disposable fission plants best suited to the task, and get seriously onto the thorium cycle - which would also take care of the bulk of all the most dangerous of wastes and weaponizable stuff.
While that's in gear, immediately get truly committed to ASAP solar power satellites. Enormous up-front costs? Yes. Some non-trivial environmental costs? Also yes. High fixed operating costs? Unknown in all particulars, but probably not too bad at all. Fantastic payback? Damn betcha. Energy independence - for the whole planet? Yes, indeedy. (Remember the predictions in the '50s of nuclear energy as being too cheap to meter? Yes, well, this is the closest we're going to get to it, if done well.)
Finally, pull the thumb out and throw a hundred billion at fusion. Stand back, forget about it, get on with other things. Don't forget to act surprised when it works. If it doesn't? Hell bells, how much per year did Iraq cost just the US? What's the cost of the current not-really-operational fleet of F-35s? How much money got sucked out of the economy by the asshole bankers and their friends and owners? How much is spent on professional sports just in the US? How much is spent on pizza? Get some perspective, folks.
(While we're at it, with an order of magnitude and more of energy available, many things become possible; so also work on getting carbon dioxide down to more reasonable level, and think on getting rid of the waste heat from the use of current and future energy. It's gotta go somewhere.)
Perspective leads back, of course, to books. The trail for some may be arduous; for people who read it's a no-brainer. Take in a little Bookminster Fuller while you're at it. Stretch. Wide reading more readily allows wider seeing and thinking; the sports page, law books, and tech manuals, not so much.
There has been inflation of many erstwhile useful terms - diva, icon, mega this and that, ditto mini, micro, and nano. Hero is I think one of the worse offenders. Its overuse removes accuracy, utility, relevance, and respect.
Another usage that grinds my teeth is the adding of an "s" to -craft, as in aircraft, spacecraft, watercraft. While it may be the usual evolution of language in action it still hits me sideways.
And yes, the writing on Discovery, mentioned below, has gone downhill; writing in most pubs and sites I visit has also generally gone downhill. The 'majors' of press and magazines still do pretty well; the rest, not so much.
Reporters, "journalists", whathaveyou, are getting lazy. Worse, imprecise, and not just sloppy; they don't seem to care. (Seems to me it's even worse if they don't _know_ the difference.) They don't seem to trouble themselves with antecedents, tense, other basic grammar stuff - agreement of subject and verb, confusion or inattention about adjective and adverb. People are getting paid for writing that would not have made it past my sixth-grade teacher. They throw some shit on the page, run it by some idiot editor, and out on the wire it goes.
Apart from ignorance and laziness, I suppose it has to do with the general decline in reading and its comprehension. The latter shows up even here. The general level of knowledge about the world in which we live is staggeringly low. It's only going to get worse, as the new crop of children raised by television and thumb games begins to take the reins of society.
This is not the usual 'get off my lawn' what's-the-world-coming-to that has happened every generation. Maybe its just me, but I consider that non-readers simply haven't the tools needed to do well at much of anything in other than some rather narrow technical areas. We're seeing a preview now, of those born in the '70s, the first true television generation, at its prime. Look, see how well they're doing.
In the seeking of moar money just to pay the bills*, the rise of the two-earner household, my generation, sucked in and trapped by the seductive spoils of success handed down, screwed the pooch. Instead of tightening the belt, foregoing some toys, pulling the plug and kicking the rugrats outside, requiring a weekly book report, we bought a second TV. Yay.
*To be fair, the rise of massive shifts in wealth and that wealth being sequestered by its recipients rather than being plowed back into the general economy, combined with the emasculation of the middle- and working-class, and the rise of robotics without the necessary changes in education and a sweeping structural revolution in how we build an economy, rather did a number on us all. I know no other time in history of something like this.
Within a generation or two we lost easily 30% of our jobs to automation of various kinds and the trend continues. Having the remainder of much of that done overseas is but time-shifting until those societies reach post-industrial; it may be stop-gap good for a corporation but does no good to the people without replacement work. Expecting a formerly competent assembly-line worker to magically transform himself into a computer programming or support tech via some voc-ed classes is the height of arrogant stupidity.
The wealthy have little need to attend reality; they simply buy insulation for themselves. The rest of us will continue into an ever-larger shit-storm of debt and need and scraping by. We are the pool of organic labor units, to be used for scut work and soldiery, and, for some, middling tech jobs or science work. For a very lucky few, a way out for a good idea capitalized by a vc. (Eventually, tho, your wonderful idea will simply be taken, by law or by crook.)
There are workable solutions but none will take them; the powers-that-be have no compelling reason to do so, even as their system collapses around them, since they are essentially blinded by their sense of entitlement. (For clarity, TPTB are not the wealthy; they work in roundabout fashion for the interests of the wealthy.)
Shit. This started as a small grammar-related post.
Good info, good question - would we learn 1000x more.
"But are they "better" than manned exploration? No."
And that's the thing - we won't know until humans go there to answer it. I suppose, did we wait long enough, say, fifty to a hundred years, with robotic missions every few years, with increasingly robust packages for sampling and analysis, it might reach a point that sending humans to Mars will require a purpose other than exploration.
(for the grammar nazis, yeah, too many commas; sorry, I tend to write as I speak.)
don't know about the rest of your message but the Wahabi are sure a nasty bunch
Well, it depends. Since '06 I've used Net10; if I can save up $60, I get 900 minutes. Texts are a nickel. To keep the phone activated for a year w/o adding minutes runs $100 (last I looked, a few years ago.) Costs me minutes incoming and outgoing; minutes roll over forever, no roaming or long distance charges.
Last month I was down to 12 minutes and out of money. Because I can qualify due low income and disability, applied for and got a Lifeline phone (interesting program, if you want some facts.) It's a halfway decent Motorola feature phone, discontinued by Verizon a few years ago, and runs on their network. The OS is crippled by the budget service provider, so no Internet, no email, no voice-recognition control, etc. Comes with 250 minutes per month. However, for $25 a month I get unlimited vox and text. In this case, "unlimited" means 4000 minutes.
It's the only thing I can afford, given my few other bills. It's my only phone. Would I like a better phone? Sure, a bit - better camera, a storage card, a few of the features. As it is, tho, it's fine: make and gets calls and makes a decent alarm clock. Only device I might really like would be an e-book reader. For everything else, I've got my old home-assembled tower (which I would dearly love to upgrade).
I've watched the cell industry for decades now, and it's even worse than the cable companies and ISPs. It's government-sanctioned Rip-Off Land. Maybe, just maybe, it will improve some, but it's got a long way to go to bring costs in line with services. Meanwhile we 'hunt and peck' for good deals for some balance of need and want.
As an aside, I realize you are speaking in general terms, and you may already be aware of this, but one can indeed watch stuff from Netflix on a Linux desktop, at least if it's Ubuntu. See compholio.com and
https://launchpad.net/~ehoover/+archive/compholio/
Works fine on my Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit desktop, anyway. Before I had to watch from within an XP VM under VirtualBox, which does work, just with less screen space available, leastways how I set it up. Don't know if it will work on your laptop's distro, tho. I've also used the compholio setup on 12.10 and 12.04.
Spot on.
I haven't followed biz history very much, so as I cast about for other companies that fit the bill you portray, I'm left with...
Microsoft is a one-off. (There was the old British East India Trading Company or something, might've come close?) And you're right, it would, or will, make for a fascinating study, especially if anyone could gather enough of the pieces (people, projects, politics, decisions) to put it together.
Apropos of little, I do know that every time I poke around their research, I come away marveling at some of the things they're looking at. But maybe I'm just easily amused; I'd like to know what smarter people think.
Years back when I opened my current account I set it up with a security word - two, actually - to be used if I did business over the phone via customer service or for use in case any cashier had any question as to my identity. I also stipulated that using it be required for withdrawing or moving above a certain amount.
It's not that I have lots of money; quite the opposite. I took a precaution against losing what little I have at a given moment as my survival depends upon it.
This has been used maybe a dozen times in past ten years or so. Once I got a phone call from the bank - somebody was at a branch asking to withdraw money, claiming to be my sister, had a note 'from me' with my written permission with a scrawled signature not entirely dissimilar to mine. I called back to a known-good telephone number and a given extension, used my password. Whoever it was didn't get my money.
From what I later heard, police later caught her; it was a sideline activity of opportunity. Apparently she'd gotten my bank statement from a dumpster. Now I take the mandatory bi-monthly written statements to the bank for shredding. (I can download the statements and save them, so I still have a record. How good that record may be compared to the printed one for legal purposes I don't know.)
Of course I'm left depending on the security of the bank's internal computer network viz. the pass words, and the one I access for on-line banking. Best I can do with what is.
And here I was thinking of Harry Harrison's James Bolivar DiGriz.
If we colonize Mars, it won't be the World Wide Web anymore. Ever think of that?
Sure it will. World is self-defining. It will just be larger than it is now. With some hellacious latency in a few spots.
I like it. Science and its review done in plain sight; the closed groups might be handled via the comments section.
The people who won't like this are those who don't know how science works, who can't see the end of their nose 'cuz it's stuck up the ass end of a perverted sense of prestige, who just happen all too often to be the people who run places and make endowments.
This may also help with otherwise lost, unpopular, or seemingly screwy papers; there will at least be a place where they can be found. Even a screwy or plain wrong idea can stimulate a good question for research.
And to establish over time a reputation for publishing good stuff. With enough time comes tradition. With either comes cachet.
"Do good, be good. Continue." describes 'most any thriving community, I think. With enough people contributing in some fashion I don't see why self-organized publishing can't work - or at least not automatically fail. Doing it wiki-style is intruiging, and the community would need to work out ways to handle injudicious editing, for example.
Society at large has, I believe, over-riding interest in research results. Since funding generally is a blend of tax-funded grants, grants and endowments from academe and industry, it seems reasonable to expect those results to be available freely or at cost to print (as is done for maps from the several government agencies when I get hardcopy.) Nominal fees for postage, hosting, whathaveyou, don't seem unreasonable at first blush. (Please correct me where I've strayed.)
If I view (and download) from on-line source, it's free. If I want a bound printed copy, charge me at cost. Else GFY.
There are no rights, natural or otherwise, only what we collectively decide so, and such that the powers that be haven't yet either made illegal or require licensing for their exercise. Inroads to the latter are continuing (c.f. free assembly, for instance.)
Rights as you speak of are only so if we are willing to fight* for them if needs be. That's how we have them now, anyway.
*This need not be literal or extreme by any stretch; it might mean little more than greater collective involvement in local politics at city, county, and state levels, and contributing to those who work on our behalf at legislatures and before the courts. Key is _involvement_, and not next week, or next year, or letting our grandchildren do it. It means having gradual quiet bits of conversation with neighbors; if you think you haven't such, then develop them. It means staying abreast of local issues - who owns the city, who does the construction, who zones what and why, how decisions on these things are done, who runs the school board, who decides curriculum and hours, and on and on. Being a member of society entails a bit more than paying one's taxes and shoveling the sidewalk - which is where too may of us stop.
If we continually 'let somebody else do it' then eventually there won't be enough of those others, and decisions will be from the top down. Power ought to be exercised by those who don't want it but do so from duty, not by those who avidly seek it. The latter have nobody's best interests at heart but their own. Selah.
Moderation? The keystone is intellectual honesty. It requires the integrity to be unflinchingly self-honest.
One must be continually, often brutally, honest of perceptions, assumptions, predisposition, and doctrine, however and whence.
One seeks not an arbitrary middle-ground, but rather grounds things through a personal lens based on learning, thought, and asking "if what I propose for them I suppose to be good, how would I feel, what would I think, were it to happen to me? What would I feel and think were I in their place? What are the ramifications for all of us?"
One strives to find what is good for oneself, the generic individual, and the sum of individuals we deem society. Good encompasses right from wrong, value from price, demonstrable from assertion.
It's a work in progress. Looks like a retirement project to me as well. Best I got, top of head.
I suspect the hunt for moderates may remind us of Diogenes.
Yeah, true; makes a fine counter-point to Jefferson's assertion that the future of the Republic requires a literate electorate. Even if people can read it doesn't do anything to help if all they read are the sports page and Cosmo. Sheesh, by '72 or thereabouts less than half of adults read books - any kind of books at all, let alone history, biography, science, philosophy....
One of the things that led to King George dropping the hammer on coffee houses as hotbeds of sedition (after the tax stuff, and morality of 'idleness') was the practice in them and not a few taverns of the 'reading corner' where, at least a night a week, books were read from and discussed; it was a way for anyone literate or no to participate in learning beyond what was available to them otherwise. We haven't any such structure or practice today. (Book clubs don't really count, I should think.) What we have instead is the passive consumption of trash TV for the masses. And 'the masses' don't give a shit, except wanting 'their' cable channel.
Wait, whut? (may be replying in wrong place but:)
Does not Ubuntu provide a core install specifically for embedded use?
Excuse me, but "Bill Gates = cured Polio [sic]"
No mention of Salk or Sabin? (I remember getting the Salk vaccine in grade school back late Fifties, can't right now recall the exact year, what grade I was in, or where, but it was a 'Big Deal'. Friend of mine from first and second grade got polio halfway through second, developed worst form, later died from something else while living in an iron lung.)
Anyway, tell me, just how did Bill cure polio? (I'll give you a clue: there is no cure, only vaccines used for immunization.)
Now, I don't get out much, but this is the first time I've seen an OS castigated by an ad hominem attack. Congrats.
got mine about ten hours ago
Reminded me of the formulas and tables in ye olde CRC Handbook. Neat project, tho.
And I'll be happy to look forward to seeing what you might come up with. 'Course, you could always ask Kim Dotcom.
Not sure we need a whole new paradigm, or even a pair of nickels. (sorry, it's late) Mostly just extend current protections to email and the like. The concepts and legal structure are already in place or in the wings.
See, here's the thing - we're told stuff about 'reasonable expectation of privacy' (the area of which seems to be shrinking by the decade) to the extent that soon there will be none at all - either privacy or its expectation. We're told, and we expect, since it at first blush makes sense, that for instance a conversation between two people on the street carries no expectation for privacy.
Thing is, in many societies if you happen to pass two people talking in normal tones while you may hear a snippet, a sentence or two, you likely won't pay it much mind, it's basically in one ear and out the other. This will vary a bit. You might overhear something that relates to something you like or dislike, either one of which might do more to engage your attention. In the main, tho, you'll regard their conversation as none of your business and thus, essentially, private.
Extend this to two people talking at a table in a restaurant. Same deal. The cops and the lawyers and the courts and the legislatures all pretty much say those aren't private, when in fact most of us might well tend to say that they are; here privacy and our collective sense of what makes up 'good manners' or courtesy coincide. In Japan, for instance, or even on many crowded islands, there even arises willful inattention - to accord privacy to that which demonstrably is not so. Boils down to we mostly generally (at least, my generation did) try to be polite and not nosy - not just because we expect the same in return but just as simply because it was thought wrong to do otherwise.
The technical minded and those who know about email will say, "hey, idjit, it's sent in _cleartext_ ffs". Yeah. It is. So? If you come across a letter left on a counter in the break room or so, are you gonna just start reading it? In my day, no. Today? I don't know.
Sorry, dehole, rambling instead of sleeping. Glad, pleased, even a bit proud you stopped to think a bit on my post. And I know I missed a point I wanted to try to make. Fun getting old and tired. Be well, and good luck.