The romantic image of the lone amateur working away on some brilliant new conception of the universe that has so far eluded all those smart-ass PhD's with their books and fancy papers may be appealing, but the truth of the matter is, if that's the mold you try to fit, you're most likely to end up like these guys.
Wow. I formally request that somebody smart follow that first link and report back here, 'cause I'm just too dumb (apparently) to understand what that guy is trying to say. I don't even know the answer to the rhetorical questions, such as:
Educated cubeless stupid, you think stupid.
Why worship a dumb 1 day god when I
demonstrate 4 simultaneous 24 hour days
within a single 24 hour rotation of Earth?
The second link is easier, as the great prophet (and ebay entrepreneur) Sollog only offers wisdom upon payment of a nominal fee.
The internet has sure made life easier. I used to have to go looking for mimeographed sheets* stapled to telephone poles to find this kind of stuff.
* Usually 8.5x14, printed on both sides, 8- or 10-point type, with ADDITIONAL material scrawled into the margins. I once found a TWO sheet screed in San Angelo, TX on how various corporate logos SECRET CONTAIN THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST, but that was a rare find.
Just out of curiosity I've checked Yahoo! finance and AFAICT TiVo was profitable this year and has almost a 100 million in cash. Can someone explain to me where the "half billion" in net losses is coming from?
They're half a billion in debt, but are currently making a profit. Frankly, the link to the "half billion" figure is to some jackass "Business 2.0" staff writer's personal weblog. This "Om Malik" guy doesn't really impress me. He's a lower-tier writer with questionable opinions. Frankly, anyone who looks only at debt while ignoring profits is a dunce. The/. article lapping it up is the typical misunderstanding of the world of finance. Nobody seems to understand the difference between "defecit" and "debt".
and why I would never buy any piece of hardware that relies on a subscription. All the more if they offer a "lifetime" subscription where you pay up front. People have fallen into this trap with health clubs as well - what is the chance that the company behind the hardware will outlive me?
Don't be dense. A lifetime subscription doesn't have to last forever to be worth it, it only has to last long enough to be cheaper than perpetual monthly fees. At this point, that's 23 months. If TiVo lasts 2 more years, "lifetime" is cheaper. I paid $199 more than two years ago-- I've saved more than that. If you have an objection to paying for the service at all that's one thing, but saying "lifetime" is a bad idea just shows ignorance of basic mathematics.
This doesn't make sense; they don't allow servers, but they don't seem to mind BitTorrent, which consumes a lot more upstream bandwidth than webservers.
I think it's less of a case of "don't seem to mind" than it is "can't find a way to stop without alienating all their customers".
The only way to change this behaviour and reject a domain transfer by default, is to lock the domain with the registrar. Many of the registrars responded to this policy change by proactively locking all domains hosted with them with little warning (Network Solutions, for example)
Anyway, it's quite likely that this domain in question simply didn't get locked (or was actively unlocked by the administrator because it was deemed inconvenient?).
FWIW, domain locking is available with Dotster, but you have to specifically request it. I'd bet that nobody even thought to do it.
What about a job in academia (tenure), government,... thats about all I can think of but there's probably more examples where the bottom line isn't a guillotine
From what I hear, tenure isn't the job-for-life it used to be. If you're not publishing and bringing in grant money, tenure won't save you. Of course, academics who don't bring in grant money don't get tenure in the first place, so the only ones in danger are the very rare few who slack off once they're "in".
Re:Education no longer matters
on
Who Needs Harvard?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I'm frusterated myself. I'm an senior studying English
I know, it's just a typo where you hit "er" together when you meant "r" but it's still funny.
Saying that Pu-244 exists in nature is pedantically correct, yet totally stupid. Yes it exists in nature, no it does not exist in nature in any quantities you can detect without a mass-spectrometer or outside the heart of a supernova.
It's not particularly relevant to the topic at hand, but it's not "totally stupid". While Pu does not exist in statistically significant quantities in nature, it does exist. Your statement of "Plutonium has too short a half-life to exist naturally; It has to be produced in nuclear reactors" left the impression that all Pu on earth is entirely man-made, which is simply not the case. While it's true that the Pu in the Huygens RTG was entirely man-made (contrary to the original poster's assertion), your statement was factually incorrect: it does exist naturally. Your description makes it sound like Pu is like Darmstadtium (HL in the msec range).
Um, no. Plutonium has too short a half-life to exist naturally. It has to be produced in nuclear reactors.
Pu-244 exists in nature and has a half life of 80 million years. If you're talking about Pu-239 thru -242, you should specify those particular isotopes.
The imposition of globalist panmixia powered by advanced transportation and habitation technologies is resulting in precisely the same sort of sociopathic opportunism in other layers of abstraction of industrial civilization.
People who demonize isolationists are themselves acting as the moral equivalent of HIV.
Huh? Sounds like a simple expansion of JG's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, only with overly complicated philosophy undergrad words. Simpler explanations with more insight are usually more impressive, BTW, than statements of the obvious couched in obscure terms.
He is especially great after natural disasters because he has dual masters in Geology and physics (I have no clue why he works in a public school)
My physics teacher in high school was constantly being hounded by oil companies, universities, and private research labs to come work for them and make tons o' money. From what I hear, he's still teaching there 20 years later. Good teachers like teaching, it seems.
I'm a volunteer Fire Fighter, I do it because I choose to help, it's not nice sometimes, but I still do it. And I understand perfectly what rights are, You're just being pedantic and I really don't want to get into a conversation based around symantics.
You think the difference between rights and preferences is semantics, and that pointing out that the position you took was factually incorrect is pedantic? Then I guess we have nothing to discuss.
Shouldn't he consider the rights of the people who scrape up these arse-hats?
You obviously don't understand what rights are. It's perfectly within their right to find alternate employment. If they choose to work as a firefighter, part of the job description includes scraping dumbasses who don't wear seatbelts off the pavement. It may be their preference not to, but preferences are not rights.
> there will never be a problem for a criminal to
> find a gun that does not contain this "smart" technology.
The point of "smart guns" is not to prevent you from killing people, but to prevent other people from taking your gun away from you and killing you. This is quite relevant for police officers, who are in most places the only ones with a gun.
Except that the police in New Jersey are exempt from the law and won't be using these smart guns.
"More components mean more points of potential failure. "
That's only true if the new components have the same reliablility as the ones that they replace - if they are more reliable the whole might be more reliable....
Sorry, but that line of reasoning is downright silly. No electronic contrivance is ever going to be more reliable than a spring loaded hammer released by a lever (trigger), and no amount of "what if" engineering will ever make it so.
Now, if you could show that home intruders were routinely turning guns back on their owners, I'd be more impressed. But while I'm sure you can come up with the odd anecdote here or there, the vast bulk of cases goes the other way.
I think he was mis-stating the old hackneyed stat of "you're more likely to be killed with your own gun than to kill an intruder with it." As you say, being killed by an angry family member is a totally different category of incident, and it fails to take into account the fact that most law-abiding citizens don't kill intruders with their guns, but rather just chase them off by brandishing it and/or announcing their posession of it.
His assertion that "you're more likely to have your gun pointed at you than you are to point it at someone else" is completely false, but we know people like that don't care about rational analysis, don't we...
Not saying I like it, but he is right - our constitution says nothing about a right to privacy, the only privacy is that which is granted by individual laws
Your understanding of constitutional rights is flawed. The Bill of Rights was not intended to be an all-inclusive laundry list of the rights of man. The 9th Amendment addresses this directly:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
What this means is, essentially, "just because it's not written here, doesn't mean it ain't a right". The courts have found we have a right to privacy and said right is protected. Just because it didn't specifically make it into the framers' Top 10 List doesn't mean it only exists as a privilege granted by goverment. But expecting the government to stick to the constitution in all but a handwaving sense is to expect too much. The 10th amendment is already all but totally ignored.
This isn't a way to start your own telecom. There's no means of interfacing with the system at large other than by buying the services of an existing telecom at regular commercial rates. You can't, for example, realistically offer me and fifty of my random neighbors cheaper phone service in our houses with this. This is simply a way to build a PBX-type phone system that can inexpensively serve more than one physical location over an IP network. Timothy apparently doesn't understand the difference between being a telecommunications provider and simply owning a PBX or key system.
The converse is true, too. You have to tell someone in Texas that you are recording the call if you call them from California. (not sure if california requires a tone to indicate recording though)
Last I checked, california was an either-or state. Either tell them verbally, or have a beep at least every 15 seconds. I always wondered what constitutes an audible beep. Is 20 kHz tone at 2db for 1/60th second good enough?
You don't have to be secure, you just have to be more inconvenient than your neighbor.
Two guys camping look out the tent and see a bear tearing up their stuff. "What'll we do?" asks the first. The second says nothing, but starts putting on running shoes. The first says "You're crazy! you can't outrun a bear!" The second looks up at him and says "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun YOU."
I just came from a City Council hearing in Brooklyn. People testified how the remaining industrial areas in Red Hook and the Navy Yard, full of entrepreneurs and 20th Century infrastructure in downtown Brooklyn, can't get broadband (DSL, cablemodem, fiber) because Verizon's monopoly keeps them lazily fat on just the lowhanging fruit elsewhere in NYC.
True, but I think Verizon is a special case: a combination of the worst baby bell (Bell Atlantic) and the most inept and inefficient non-bell ILEC (GTE). I swear, GTE used to go to the California PUC and essentially say "we let bumbling fools run our operation, therefore we need to raise rates" and the PUC had no choice but to agree and let 'em do it 'cause it was true. Los Angeles was served in a patchwork of territories split between GTE and Pac Bell, and GTE's rates were consistently higher and their service was (and as Verizon, still is) consistently worse.
Just because it's easier for Seoul to get its citizens on broadband doesn't make it any less a competitive threat.
I'm not sure getting broadband to every Bubba in the woods, Jebediah on his farm, and Kaczynski in his mountain shack is relevant to competition. The fact that the US has vast swathes of nearly empty countryside means that they'll have a greater percentage of "disconnected" areas. The fact that there's no great competitive loss as a result is overlooked. A proper comparison would be per-capita broadband connections sub-divided into categories based on population density.
"with a mechanical guidance system that was essentially just sophisticated clockwork and gyros adjusting tiny fins in the exhaust stream"
No, actually it used some quite sophisticated analog computer (analog electronic feedback loop) to control the fins. There are some papers about this on the net, and believe me - an average EE can not design this after his analog control systems class.
The system was designed by the same guy, Helmut Hoelzer, that was later head of the nasa computing center. Go figure..
I did a little looking and you're right, it was a very impressive analog computer. I must've confused it with the V-1, which used a sophisticated system of pendulums and gyros as a mechanical "autopilot" stabilization system, with a clockwork timer that "reset" the mechanism for a negative altitude after a preselected flight time (thereby diving it towards the ground).
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. I formally request that somebody smart follow that first link and report back here, 'cause I'm just too dumb (apparently) to understand what that guy is trying to say. I don't even know the answer to the rhetorical questions, such as:
The second link is easier, as the great prophet (and ebay entrepreneur) Sollog only offers wisdom upon payment of a nominal fee.
The internet has sure made life easier. I used to have to go looking for mimeographed sheets* stapled to telephone poles to find this kind of stuff.
* Usually 8.5x14, printed on both sides, 8- or 10-point type, with ADDITIONAL material scrawled into the margins. I once found a TWO sheet screed in San Angelo, TX on how various corporate logos SECRET CONTAIN THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST, but that was a rare find.
They're half a billion in debt, but are currently making a profit. Frankly, the link to the "half billion" figure is to some jackass "Business 2.0" staff writer's personal weblog. This "Om Malik" guy doesn't really impress me. He's a lower-tier writer with questionable opinions. Frankly, anyone who looks only at debt while ignoring profits is a dunce. The /. article lapping it up is the typical misunderstanding of the world of finance. Nobody seems to understand the difference between "defecit" and "debt".
Don't be dense. A lifetime subscription doesn't have to last forever to be worth it, it only has to last long enough to be cheaper than perpetual monthly fees. At this point, that's 23 months. If TiVo lasts 2 more years, "lifetime" is cheaper. I paid $199 more than two years ago-- I've saved more than that. If you have an objection to paying for the service at all that's one thing, but saying "lifetime" is a bad idea just shows ignorance of basic mathematics.
I think it's less of a case of "don't seem to mind" than it is "can't find a way to stop without alienating all their customers".
Anyway, it's quite likely that this domain in question simply didn't get locked (or was actively unlocked by the administrator because it was deemed inconvenient?).
FWIW, domain locking is available with Dotster, but you have to specifically request it. I'd bet that nobody even thought to do it.
From what I hear, tenure isn't the job-for-life it used to be. If you're not publishing and bringing in grant money, tenure won't save you. Of course, academics who don't bring in grant money don't get tenure in the first place, so the only ones in danger are the very rare few who slack off once they're "in".
I know, it's just a typo where you hit "er" together when you meant "r" but it's still funny.
It's not particularly relevant to the topic at hand, but it's not "totally stupid". While Pu does not exist in statistically significant quantities in nature, it does exist. Your statement of "Plutonium has too short a half-life to exist naturally; It has to be produced in nuclear reactors" left the impression that all Pu on earth is entirely man-made, which is simply not the case. While it's true that the Pu in the Huygens RTG was entirely man-made (contrary to the original poster's assertion), your statement was factually incorrect: it does exist naturally. Your description makes it sound like Pu is like Darmstadtium (HL in the msec range).
Pu-244 exists in nature and has a half life of 80 million years. If you're talking about Pu-239 thru -242, you should specify those particular isotopes.
Huh? Sounds like a simple expansion of JG's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, only with overly complicated philosophy undergrad words. Simpler explanations with more insight are usually more impressive, BTW, than statements of the obvious couched in obscure terms.
My physics teacher in high school was constantly being hounded by oil companies, universities, and private research labs to come work for them and make tons o' money. From what I hear, he's still teaching there 20 years later. Good teachers like teaching, it seems.
You think the difference between rights and preferences is semantics, and that pointing out that the position you took was factually incorrect is pedantic? Then I guess we have nothing to discuss.
You obviously don't understand what rights are. It's perfectly within their right to find alternate employment. If they choose to work as a firefighter, part of the job description includes scraping dumbasses who don't wear seatbelts off the pavement. It may be their preference not to, but preferences are not rights.
what do you think the P in EMP stands for?
The point of "smart guns" is not to prevent you from killing people, but to prevent other people from taking your gun away from you and killing you. This is quite relevant for police officers, who are in most places the only ones with a gun.
Except that the police in New Jersey are exempt from the law and won't be using these smart guns.
That's only true if the new components have the same reliablility as the ones that they replace - if they are more reliable the whole might be more reliable ....
Sorry, but that line of reasoning is downright silly. No electronic contrivance is ever going to be more reliable than a spring loaded hammer released by a lever (trigger), and no amount of "what if" engineering will ever make it so.
I think he was mis-stating the old hackneyed stat of "you're more likely to be killed with your own gun than to kill an intruder with it." As you say, being killed by an angry family member is a totally different category of incident, and it fails to take into account the fact that most law-abiding citizens don't kill intruders with their guns, but rather just chase them off by brandishing it and/or announcing their posession of it.
His assertion that "you're more likely to have your gun pointed at you than you are to point it at someone else" is completely false, but we know people like that don't care about rational analysis, don't we...
True, but it appears that new jersey aims to change that!
Your understanding of constitutional rights is flawed. The Bill of Rights was not intended to be an all-inclusive laundry list of the rights of man. The 9th Amendment addresses this directly:
What this means is, essentially, "just because it's not written here, doesn't mean it ain't a right". The courts have found we have a right to privacy and said right is protected. Just because it didn't specifically make it into the framers' Top 10 List doesn't mean it only exists as a privilege granted by goverment. But expecting the government to stick to the constitution in all but a handwaving sense is to expect too much. The 10th amendment is already all but totally ignored.This isn't a way to start your own telecom. There's no means of interfacing with the system at large other than by buying the services of an existing telecom at regular commercial rates. You can't, for example, realistically offer me and fifty of my random neighbors cheaper phone service in our houses with this. This is simply a way to build a PBX-type phone system that can inexpensively serve more than one physical location over an IP network. Timothy apparently doesn't understand the difference between being a telecommunications provider and simply owning a PBX or key system.
Last I checked, california was an either-or state. Either tell them verbally, or have a beep at least every 15 seconds. I always wondered what constitutes an audible beep. Is 20 kHz tone at 2db for 1/60th second good enough?
Two guys camping look out the tent and see a bear tearing up their stuff. "What'll we do?" asks the first. The second says nothing, but starts putting on running shoes. The first says "You're crazy! you can't outrun a bear!" The second looks up at him and says "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun YOU."
True, but I think Verizon is a special case: a combination of the worst baby bell (Bell Atlantic) and the most inept and inefficient non-bell ILEC (GTE). I swear, GTE used to go to the California PUC and essentially say "we let bumbling fools run our operation, therefore we need to raise rates" and the PUC had no choice but to agree and let 'em do it 'cause it was true. Los Angeles was served in a patchwork of territories split between GTE and Pac Bell, and GTE's rates were consistently higher and their service was (and as Verizon, still is) consistently worse.
I'm not sure getting broadband to every Bubba in the woods, Jebediah on his farm, and Kaczynski in his mountain shack is relevant to competition. The fact that the US has vast swathes of nearly empty countryside means that they'll have a greater percentage of "disconnected" areas. The fact that there's no great competitive loss as a result is overlooked. A proper comparison would be per-capita broadband connections sub-divided into categories based on population density.
No, actually it used some quite sophisticated analog computer (analog electronic feedback loop) to control the fins. There are some papers about this on the net, and believe me - an average EE can not design this after his analog control systems class.
The system was designed by the same guy, Helmut Hoelzer, that was later head of the nasa computing center. Go figure..
I did a little looking and you're right, it was a very impressive analog computer. I must've confused it with the V-1, which used a sophisticated system of pendulums and gyros as a mechanical "autopilot" stabilization system, with a clockwork timer that "reset" the mechanism for a negative altitude after a preselected flight time (thereby diving it towards the ground).