Okay, I just read most of the posts. There is much truth therein.
Out of my own ignorance and un-brightness I post a few thoughts.
Apart from general overhead (rent/lease/taxes, wages, utilities, whathaveyou) the single largest hassle as I see it is in inventory. This has always been a large factor in, for instance, hardware stores. With electronics all the problems of inventory are magnified - everything stocked is automatically obsolete before it even reaches the shelves, for starters. Don't even bring up things such as support, drivers, etc.
That's bad enough for old-fashioned business models. Complicating factors such as lack of awareness and understanding on the part of customers and staff only exacerbate the situation. Emphasizing 'bottom-line Friday' and 'get the sale' as distinct from establishing customer relations and developing accounts helps clinch the fail.
The owners and smart stockholders will always make out like bandits, especially if they've paid the slightest attention to the standard CYA aspects of law and tax law no matter what happens to the brick and mortar realities. The CEOs and such will do quite fine even if they technically "lose" some money due to bankruptcy/failure of the businesses they're 'in charge of.'
The only people hurt will be everyone else. [paragraph unwritten because it's obvious/transparent/redundant]
In the meantime, everyone who shows up to work has bills to pay - they all have need of income: their livelihood, and lives, depend upon it. Yet, as I've been saying for thirty years and more: if you show up for work and do not understand, janitor to CEO, that the only reason you have a job and the only reason there is a business is because you have customers. and act accordingly, you might as well turn around and go find something useful to do or kill yourself and remove a burden from the species.
One way or another, whether it be pumping septic tanks or working out of my real estate office, I spent half my working life in sales. While I was happy to have happy customers, to this day I prefer, and strove for, _satisfied_ customers; that is, people who knew I stood behind what I did or that the company for whom I worked did so. Everything else, IMHFO, is dross. YMMV.
That Best Buy is going down the tubes is simply a matter of time. Whether owners, management, and staff change their world view or no, perhaps it's just a matter of watching another species of dinosaur die. I'm young enough to be sad and old enough to simply try to make it through the next day. When the local hardware store and bookstore close, then, apart from the congenial tavern, should I be able to afford them, it'll be all she wrote apart from what's available to me on the 'Net.
Reading quickly through the bill, seems pretty good; hope it works out. If nothing else I think it's a good start. I particularly liked the open data stuff; anyone who's had to deal with files through different versions of various word-manglers and such, or changing storage media, should appreciate it.
One thing that stood out, though: Why is the judiciary exempted?
I've noticed a number of complaints about PSI, some like yours. I noted it seemed to increase my boot time by about ten seconds, so I set it for delayed start. With a quad-core and plenty of RAM I never noticed any appreciable slow down whilst it scanned or updated. Do you think maybe this is a case of "YMMV"?
I take a look at Chrome every few versions or so, but I do not use it, for various 'comfort' reasons; I haven't decided whether it's useful for me to install Chromium since I seem to get by just fine with Opera and Firefox.
Unless it's absolutely needful to run anything from Adobe, I prefer to use open-source alternatives, because they suit my admittedly pedestrian needs.
On Windows systems, I've used Secunia to good effect since their on-line scanner became available; later I used PSI on Vista and Windows 7. I found the later versions in particular to be very useful and easy to use. While I now run Linux, save for a few Windows virtual machines, I continue to highly recommend PSI to any general user running Windows.
True that. I've now got seven stents - all titanium, for the simple reason they're strong, light, and non-reactive.
Back in '76 I over-filled my stainless Zippo; it leaked, I got one helluva leaking rash - instant "nickel allergy". To this day the only metal my body will tolerate for anything more than moderately brief contact is titanium.
As for the printed jaw, I'd be interested to see some follow-up on this - the possibilities are intriguing.
Too many get hung up on short-sighted quibbles. It may be that 'the Singularity', should it happen, will render much of this discussion moot. It mayhap that a gamma-ray burster will end things. But to give up, whatever the 'realistic' or Druidistic rational, strikes me as simply lazy defeatism.
For those who complain that Space is vast: distance is only relevant in terms of delta-v and habitability of the conveyance.
As you say, do we doom our DNA or do we make the attempt to continue. Some argue that we haven't the moral right to survive. I prefer Fuller's approach, when asked if he thought there was a purpose or meaning to Life. He didn't claim to have an answer but mused that perhaps the purpose of intelligence in Universe was to counteract entropy. May sound a bit silly, but hey, it's something to be going on with, and I prefer it to anything from Bishop Usher and his ilk (and most of the many in between.)
We've traded fun for pleasure, risk in pursuit of discovery for safety, the frontier for the next widget, exploration for big-screen TV, and any kind of long-term thought and effort to the consumption of entertainments pitched to the lowest-common denominators of thought and feeling.
Were you not AC I'd mod you +1 Insightful, and another for your signature line.
War is but poorly understood, if at all, by those who have not done it. I haven't; most of my friends have. According to them, behaviour is a function of training, discipline, leadership, and circumstance. Much of the populace, especially in "first-world" countries, haven't a clue, and have little or no inclination to get one. "Heat of battle" is often-bandied, rarely understood.
Interesting. I also like the check-off option in state and federal tax returns - although I'd prefer equal distribution out of that pool to all qualifying candidates.
Small but real correction: generally, felons who've satisfied their incarceration/probation debt have most of their rights re-instated, including the franchise.
Firefly dreams? Hardly, although I note that someone got around to scoring me as flamebait. Thank you, whomever.
Ok, practical. I posit no magical tech - that's a strawman and I should think you'd know it for such. Nor do I need to posit 'significant and fundamental' breakthroughs in anything. Perhaps some background reading may be of use.
You're quite right, though, there are some major issues at hand. Costs are one, as you point out. Yet, major projects have been done over long time periods at great cost. Canals and cathedrals come to mind. Historically, humans have paid for what they've deemed worthwhile.
The mechanics. Many smart people have and are working on it. Again, some reading may be useful. As an aside, I favor the use of proxies (robots) wherever reasonable, both for exploration, assay, and construction. Initially, human missions for interesting things and experience. I favor a Moon base for starters, as did the Army in '57-'59.
Distance is irrelevant, other than expressed as delta-v, time, and consumables.
Another couple of isssues: protection from various radiations, and long-term effects of less than g. We've got some decent base data, but no way as yet to extrapolate with high confidence.
What will we do? I dunno. My view is that going to Mars ought to be done as a serious step towards colonization (a long-term endeavour), 'twere i done; I can think of plenty of other interesting, useful, activities of various durations.
Perhaps, though, you've decided that since _you_ can't figure it out, no one can, thus it's automagically nuttery. So be it.
Sorry you are, eh? How valorous of you, anonymous coward.
Which space? This thread, that part of humanity's mind-space which deals in such things, or somewhere in between?
Where, for you, is the line 'tween nuttery and not-nuttery? Geo-stationary? Or have you decided, in your ineffable wisdom, simply that whatever now is, is OK, and that we must all lock ourselves into the stultified arena of 'this far, and no further'? Shall we leave the future to the same mentalities of those who proclaimed that Man would never fly, that transmitting pictures through the air was the fevered product of an opium dream?
Perhaps unbeknownst to you, there are many well-qualified people working on this and related matters, things - feasible and practical - and endeavours which may clash with your mindset. Plenty of information is readily available to anyone with a jot of curiousity, to anyone, that is, but a dolt, or a knee-jerk negativist.
Or perhaps you have your own enlightened viewpoint for matters off-planet, the right way, the one true way, which you don't care to share, but rather content yourself with dropping a turd in the punchbowl?
How wonderfully brave of you to volunteer for down mods whilst posting as an anonymous coward. Yep, you'd make Darwin proud, you would. Were I less filled with seasonal bonhomie I'd consider you an excellent candidate for post-partum abortion. Meanwhile, I'll just take up my cane and move on.
Ditto. After looking at alternatives, for my needs LastPass is just about perfect; been using it since it was available. Pass phrase is tucked away a few places in case I fall under a bus. Built-in generator works well, one can always add a char or three. I've changed my pass phrase twice, and sometimes change site passwords, based on email notices of possible intrusion or on a whim. Works well via browser plugin.
"You can get unlimited water in the river or falling out of the sky."
This presumes one is so fortunate as to have ready access to a river upstream from where others are dumping their wastes, or to have on hand (or materials to build) a cistern, and further presumes sufficient flow or rainfall.
Admittedly I'm blessed with having municipal water from a tap, and I'll drink it in a pinch, but much prefer it filtered first.
My preference, sans reasonable access to known-good spring water, is to drink water with a pleasing set of adjuncts - be it coffee, tea, or as part of a concoction of barley, yeast, and hops.
Living in even a smaller city, circa 50,000, not being able to see the night sky is something that's annoyed me for decades. Yet, for various reasons, I'm kinda stuck with it.
I don't think you're wrong. I started paying attention during Nixon's reign and it seems to me that the long-term trend is toward increased repression, disregard for law, lack of due process, and rampant anti-intellectualism.
With the development of the Internet and the great rise in its use, among a few other things, I had hopes it might could prevail against 'the dinosaurs of darkness' but, now? I guess that I just don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I just read most of the posts. There is much truth therein.
Out of my own ignorance and un-brightness I post a few thoughts.
Apart from general overhead (rent/lease/taxes, wages, utilities, whathaveyou) the single largest hassle as I see it is in inventory. This has always been a large factor in, for instance, hardware stores. With electronics all the problems of inventory are magnified - everything stocked is automatically obsolete before it even reaches the shelves, for starters. Don't even bring up things such as support, drivers, etc.
That's bad enough for old-fashioned business models. Complicating factors such as lack of awareness and understanding on the part of customers and staff only exacerbate the situation. Emphasizing 'bottom-line Friday' and 'get the sale' as distinct from establishing customer relations and developing accounts helps clinch the fail.
The owners and smart stockholders will always make out like bandits, especially if they've paid the slightest attention to the standard CYA aspects of law and tax law no matter what happens to the brick and mortar realities. The CEOs and such will do quite fine even if they technically "lose" some money due to bankruptcy/failure of the businesses they're 'in charge of.'
The only people hurt will be everyone else. [paragraph unwritten because it's obvious/transparent/redundant]
In the meantime, everyone who shows up to work has bills to pay - they all have need of income: their livelihood, and lives, depend upon it. Yet, as I've been saying for thirty years and more: if you show up for work and do not understand, janitor to CEO, that the only reason you have a job and the only reason there is a business is because you have customers. and act accordingly, you might as well turn around and go find something useful to do or kill yourself and remove a burden from the species.
One way or another, whether it be pumping septic tanks or working out of my real estate office, I spent half my working life in sales. While I was happy to have happy customers, to this day I prefer, and strove for, _satisfied_ customers; that is, people who knew I stood behind what I did or that the company for whom I worked did so. Everything else, IMHFO, is dross. YMMV.
That Best Buy is going down the tubes is simply a matter of time. Whether owners, management, and staff change their world view or no, perhaps it's just a matter of watching another species of dinosaur die. I'm young enough to be sad and old enough to simply try to make it through the next day. When the local hardware store and bookstore close, then, apart from the congenial tavern, should I be able to afford them, it'll be all she wrote apart from what's available to me on the 'Net.
Brave new world, indeed. Cheers.
Thanks. Yeah, 'politics'; I saw some of that years back at local level. Getting stuff done beats failed clean sweep.
Hope the court system works out well for y'all.
Belated congrats on the bill, btw; it's readable and seems well laid out.
Reading quickly through the bill, seems pretty good; hope it works out. If nothing else I think it's a good start. I particularly liked the open data stuff; anyone who's had to deal with files through different versions of various word-manglers and such, or changing storage media, should appreciate it.
One thing that stood out, though: Why is the judiciary exempted?
I've noticed a number of complaints about PSI, some like yours. I noted it seemed to increase my boot time by about ten seconds, so I set it for delayed start. With a quad-core and plenty of RAM I never noticed any appreciable slow down whilst it scanned or updated. Do you think maybe this is a case of "YMMV"?
Both?
I take a look at Chrome every few versions or so, but I do not use it, for various 'comfort' reasons; I haven't decided whether it's useful for me to install Chromium since I seem to get by just fine with Opera and Firefox.
Unless it's absolutely needful to run anything from Adobe, I prefer to use open-source alternatives, because they suit my admittedly pedestrian needs.
On Windows systems, I've used Secunia to good effect since their on-line scanner became available; later I used PSI on Vista and Windows 7. I found the later versions in particular to be very useful and easy to use. While I now run Linux, save for a few Windows virtual machines, I continue to highly recommend PSI to any general user running Windows.
True that. I've now got seven stents - all titanium, for the simple reason they're strong, light, and non-reactive.
Back in '76 I over-filled my stainless Zippo; it leaked, I got one helluva leaking rash - instant "nickel allergy". To this day the only metal my body will tolerate for anything more than moderately brief contact is titanium.
As for the printed jaw, I'd be interested to see some follow-up on this - the possibilities are intriguing.
Nicely put. We've got a choice: go on or give up.
Too many get hung up on short-sighted quibbles. It may be that 'the Singularity', should it happen, will render much of this discussion moot. It mayhap that a gamma-ray burster will end things. But to give up, whatever the 'realistic' or Druidistic rational, strikes me as simply lazy defeatism.
For those who complain that Space is vast: distance is only relevant in terms of delta-v and habitability of the conveyance.
As you say, do we doom our DNA or do we make the attempt to continue. Some argue that we haven't the moral right to survive. I prefer Fuller's approach, when asked if he thought there was a purpose or meaning to Life. He didn't claim to have an answer but mused that perhaps the purpose of intelligence in Universe was to counteract entropy. May sound a bit silly, but hey, it's something to be going on with, and I prefer it to anything from Bishop Usher and his ilk (and most of the many in between.)
We've traded fun for pleasure, risk in pursuit of discovery for safety, the frontier for the next widget, exploration for big-screen TV, and any kind of long-term thought and effort to the consumption of entertainments pitched to the lowest-common denominators of thought and feeling.
Gary Hart
Were you not AC I'd mod you +1 Insightful, and another for your signature line.
War is but poorly understood, if at all, by those who have not done it. I haven't; most of my friends have. According to them, behaviour is a function of training, discipline, leadership, and circumstance. Much of the populace, especially in "first-world" countries, haven't a clue, and have little or no inclination to get one. "Heat of battle" is often-bandied, rarely understood.
What hand-waving? See the GAO study asked for by Jesse Helms, for instance.
"a way of bankrupting the economy of the USSR" You're about twenty years early on that.
What was the military justification? We already had ICBMs and spy satellites, and were actively pursuing better ones.
Interesting. I also like the check-off option in state and federal tax returns - although I'd prefer equal distribution out of that pool to all qualifying candidates.
Small but real correction: generally, felons who've satisfied their incarceration/probation debt have most of their rights re-instated, including the franchise.
Firefly dreams? Hardly, although I note that someone got around to scoring me as flamebait. Thank you, whomever.
Ok, practical. I posit no magical tech - that's a strawman and I should think you'd know it for such. Nor do I need to posit 'significant and fundamental' breakthroughs in anything. Perhaps some background reading may be of use.
You're quite right, though, there are some major issues at hand. Costs are one, as you point out. Yet, major projects have been done over long time periods at great cost. Canals and cathedrals come to mind. Historically, humans have paid for what they've deemed worthwhile.
The mechanics. Many smart people have and are working on it. Again, some reading may be useful. As an aside, I favor the use of proxies (robots) wherever reasonable, both for exploration, assay, and construction. Initially, human missions for interesting things and experience. I favor a Moon base for starters, as did the Army in '57-'59.
Distance is irrelevant, other than expressed as delta-v, time, and consumables.
Another couple of isssues: protection from various radiations, and long-term effects of less than g. We've got some decent base data, but no way as yet to extrapolate with high confidence.
What will we do? I dunno. My view is that going to Mars ought to be done as a serious step towards colonization (a long-term endeavour), 'twere i done; I can think of plenty of other interesting, useful, activities of various durations.
Perhaps, though, you've decided that since _you_ can't figure it out, no one can, thus it's automagically nuttery. So be it.
Thanks for the reply.
Sorry you are, eh? How valorous of you, anonymous coward.
Which space? This thread, that part of humanity's mind-space which deals in such things, or somewhere in between?
Where, for you, is the line 'tween nuttery and not-nuttery? Geo-stationary? Or have you decided, in your ineffable wisdom, simply that whatever now is, is OK, and that we must all lock ourselves into the stultified arena of 'this far, and no further'? Shall we leave the future to the same mentalities of those who proclaimed that Man would never fly, that transmitting pictures through the air was the fevered product of an opium dream?
Perhaps unbeknownst to you, there are many well-qualified people working on this and related matters, things - feasible and practical - and endeavours which may clash with your mindset. Plenty of information is readily available to anyone with a jot of curiousity, to anyone, that is, but a dolt, or a knee-jerk negativist.
Or perhaps you have your own enlightened viewpoint for matters off-planet, the right way, the one true way, which you don't care to share, but rather content yourself with dropping a turd in the punchbowl?
How wonderfully brave of you to volunteer for down mods whilst posting as an anonymous coward. Yep, you'd make Darwin proud, you would. Were I less filled with seasonal bonhomie I'd consider you an excellent candidate for post-partum abortion. Meanwhile, I'll just take up my cane and move on.
Flame? For what - telling the truth?
Nah, you nailed it, man.
Ditto. After looking at alternatives, for my needs LastPass is just about perfect; been using it since it was available. Pass phrase is tucked away a few places in case I fall under a bus. Built-in generator works well, one can always add a char or three. I've changed my pass phrase twice, and sometimes change site passwords, based on email notices of possible intrusion or on a whim. Works well via browser plugin.
Yup, I've used filters and iodine, sometimes bleach, whilst camping, fifty or so years ago. Thanks for reminding me.
"You can get unlimited water in the river or falling out of the sky."
This presumes one is so fortunate as to have ready access to a river upstream from where others are dumping their wastes, or to have on hand (or materials to build) a cistern, and further presumes sufficient flow or rainfall.
Admittedly I'm blessed with having municipal water from a tap, and I'll drink it in a pinch, but much prefer it filtered first.
My preference, sans reasonable access to known-good spring water, is to drink water with a pleasing set of adjuncts - be it coffee, tea, or as part of a concoction of barley, yeast, and hops.
Yup, I love it. Part genius, part insanity, all fun, and in a good cause as well. It's also the most... energetic website I can recall seeing.
Because they're Stalinist?
I've met maybe two cops in the past thirty years who would not immediately arrest Thomas Jefferson.
A great photo indeed, saved it.
Living in even a smaller city, circa 50,000, not being able to see the night sky is something that's annoyed me for decades. Yet, for various reasons, I'm kinda stuck with it.
Thanks. Now I know where to look.
Why was this rated -1?
I don't think you're wrong. I started paying attention during Nixon's reign and it seems to me that the long-term trend is toward increased repression, disregard for law, lack of due process, and rampant anti-intellectualism.
With the development of the Internet and the great rise in its use, among a few other things, I had hopes it might could prevail against 'the dinosaurs of darkness' but, now? I guess that I just don't know.