As you precisely suggest with your hornet's nest analogy, the US is so far and away the best armed and attack-capable nation, no enemy would consider an ICBM-based attack against it any more.
In the post Cold War world, the threat from ICBMs is pretty low on the list.
The Global Economy means that the US border is incredibly porous to freight, vessels, and shipping containers, not to mention suitcase-bearing tourists, etc. No hostile nation will run the risk of getting into a rocket war with the US. They'll stealth the weapons in, maybe piece by piece.
This way, when they detonate (admittedly lower yield than an airburst, but good enough, and possibly worse fallout), it's not even clear whodunnit. So the US public cries out for revenge, and the government picks one of the potential perps ("blow up the usual suspects") for a raid.
There's no space-based defense against this. Spending trillions of dollars doesn't make us any safer.
It's analogous to feeling while safe driving your car around through a dangerous neighborhood because you have power locks on the doors, when in fact, anyone wishing you harm can just break the window and drag you out.
My respect for these "experts" is low, and I'm surprised when countries like Russia act scared of their projects (US citizens are who should be scared, since we're going to pay the taxes to spawn this make-work jobs program for the military industrial complex).
Precisely. If I were the leader of China or Russia, I'd feign great consteration at the missile "shield" as well.
Oh No! I'd say. Violates treaties and destabilizes! I'd protest.
All the while, I'd be gloating about the stupid Yanks spending themselves into a bottomless abyss of debt, while I perfected the art of concealing suitcase-sized bombs in shipping containers.
(Of course, the point's not really that the policy-makers in the US government are stupid either. They don't care if the system works. It's totally secondary to the real goal. They're aiming at a different target altogether: making all their buddies in the Defense Industry rich.)
Operative Term is Stimulate (renamed SITO after a second-rate art school threatened to sue over the OTIS acronym) was doing this kind of collaborative artwork back in '94 or '95.
It got ported to the web, but it started out as an ftp-based exercise.
Check it out at http://www.sito.org bukra fil mish mish -
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Some Militias certainly *did* engage in a lot of criminal activity. Many of them have as a central tenet of their charters to overthrow the government, which they consider illegal. There are cases of bank robbery, harassing people with bogus liens, supporting anti-abortion terrorists, etc.
As for eco-terrorists being Marxists or anarchists... well, I don't doubt some of them are. But look at the numbers here. I'd be more concerned about the so-called "Captains of Industry," those corporate leaders, who openly show contempt for the people and laws of this Country in their quest for profits. Look at situations and places like Love Canal, Romulus, and countless other places where big companies poisoned an area, and then left without even bothering to inform the local residents of the danger. You want your eyes opened? Look at the TRIS - Toxic Release Inventory System published by the EPA; there's even a nice search by city interface provided by another organization. bukra fil mish mish -
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Passwords aren't always the limiting defense in security.
Back in the day, we had all the machines in the research lab have the root password of "Mr.Root" (or "Mr.System" for the VMS machines).
It was all pretty secure.
We were not connected to the outside world on a network, and you had to pass through two safe doors to get to the lab. The combination on those safe doors was swiping your badge in the reader and waving your ID to the guys with the guns.
Never had a single compromised system, either. bukra fil mish mish -
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Good God, man! New World Produce is the sole legitimate differentiator of civilized and uncivilized.
I'd go off on a lengthy screed about the spread of the peanut, chocolate, coffee, potatos, triticale, and so on, but I've already been labelled "politically correct," so I'll just shut up now. bukra fil mish mish -
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Well, I guess my point was that the system was dependent upon getting involved in war, which limited its long-term viability. bukra fil mish mish -
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
To use a bad example: Hitler was one of the most efficient and charismatic leaders of the past
century. Nazi Germany had probably the best-run (ie most efficient at carrying out stated goals)
government in a very long time. Should we emulate them? Admire them?
In the very short term it was efficiently run. In the longer term, it failed utterly.
Technical excellence requires winning in the short term and the long term. bukra fil mish mish -
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My 88 year-old Grandmother wanted a computer "and the internet" for her 85th birthday. I foolishly went with an eMachine that seemed to be everything she wanted. Bad choice. Hardware problems have plagued us, and Win98 runs even worse on that machine than others.
My Grandmother is a very intelligent woman. She was a medical doctor long before it was common to have women doctors. She understands using processes, doing lab work, scientific method, following recipes, etc. But she still has some difficulties. She's still quite sharp, has a reasonably good memory, and decent motor control.
In any case, the big discovery about "intuitive user interfaces" is that they aren't. Why do you double-click on an icon on the desktop, single-click on a browser link, click and drag on a menu, and single-click on a toolbar? The inconsistencies are aggravating. Even if you try to break it down, you get completely tangled up: "when there's a little picture (icon), you double-click, except when it's in a toolbar. A toolbar is when all those little icons are at the top of a window. Well, yes, you can arrange all your desktop icons to be at the top of the window, but it's still not a toolbar." Etc.
My overall findings are that:
1. Coordination is a problem. Mouse control, click speed, etc, are difficult. You can compensate somewhat for this by changing mouse sensitivity and double-click rate.
2. Resolution matters. After trying many combinations, I eventually got her set up on a 17" viewable monitor running at 640x480 resolution. Bletch, you say? But it makes those icons "bigger" and easier to hit. It actually helps a lot.
3. Extensive written out procedures for dealing with common problems help, but don't solve the problem. When an unexpected error message pops up while following a procedure, the rest of it goes out the window.
4. Playing around is helpful but can cause problems. Learning by trying things is great, but you do need someone who can undo the mess. One time, she accidently pulled the tool-bars out of MS Word. She went through the menus to try to bring them back, but was looking for "buttons" rather than toolbar, so she couldn't get them back. This led to randomly trying options in the Word prefs. It took me an hour to straighten everything back out.
Still, it's remarkable to me how much of this stuff my grandmother gets. I hope that when I'm in my 80s, I'll still be able to figure out how to use the Home Defrobnicator to instavid the grandkids... bukra fil mish mish -
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Not politically correct. I glossed over some of the detail of other issues, but this is factually correct.
There was a raging civil war in the Inca empire at the time of Pizarro's conquest. Specifically, Atahuallpa Inca was gaining dominance over Huascar for control of the Inca Empire at the time of Pizarro's fourth mission. Pizarro had gone on three exploratory excursions beginning in 1524. (You'll see references to two missions, and his successful invasion as the "third" visit because the first expedition in 1524 never actually got to any part of the Inca empire.)
The civil war was a fight over who would ascend the throne after both Huayna-Capac, the ruling Inca, and his heir, Ninan Cuyuchi died. On one of the earlier Spanish missions, smallpox had been introduced, and swept through the country. Both Huayna-Capac and Ninan Cuyuchi died of smallpox.
The famous fourth mission, in 1532, is where Pizarro landed around Tumbez, on the northern coast. Tumbez was a ruin, destroyed by the civil war. Reinforcements followed Pizarro, and he began his conquest with 168 men and somewhere around 60 horses.
From Tumbez, Pizarro & co headed south into the mountains towards Cajamarca. Around that same time, Atahuallpa's forces captured Huascar outside of Cuzco, and Atahuallpa was heading back to the capital. Both sides were demoralized by losses from both disease and battle. On the journey to Cajamarca, Pizarro successfully recruited locals who were loyal to Huascar to join his army.
When they met Atahuallpa's army, the Spanish played a trick on the Atahuallpa's ambassadorial mission, and kidnapped Atahuallpa and killed his bodyguards. There was no large-scale conflict between the armies at this point.
Here's where it gets very political and drawn out. Atahuallpa tries to ransom himself with a room filled with gold. Eventually, Pizarro has him murdered. During this period, however, Huascar's supporters were not idle, and were allying with various local tribes who had been oppressed by the Incas (like the Imara).
There were numerous battles with varying groups, and the Inca empire was pretty much crushed.
The event you're talking about, was during a final rebellion against the Spanish in 1536, where Manco Inca raised a huge army to attach the Spanish in Cuzco. This is where the badly outnumbered Spanish managed to break out of the siege on horseback and then quickly counterattacked the Inca army at Sacsayhuaman. This was, as you say, a stunning victory due to strategy, luck, and superior weaponry. It was not, however, how the Conquistadors took over the Empire.
(Similarly, when Cortez took over Mexico City earlier, smallpox was killing over 1,000 Aztecs per day. The demoralizing effect of this, coupled with the Spanish armor, guns, and apparent immunity to the disease, all contributed to his victory.) bukra fil mish mish -
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
The Incas were far from "primitive." They had metallurgy, architecture, and over 103 species of potato. They did lack gunpowder.
Their fall to Spain was much more due to their lack of immunity to smallpox than anything the Spanish intentionally did.
Then there are the Maori of New Zealand. They didn't have gunpowder or metal, but they invented what became modern trench warfare and seriously kicked ass until the British resorted to the Treaty and Treachery technique.
By and large, though, the success of Western Imperialism owes at least as much to disease as it does technology. bukra fil mish mish -
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This is almost exactly as predicted by Vonnegut in his short story, The Big Space Fuck, where "important men" show their importance by putting sperm samples aboard a rocket which is shot into interstallar space.
This story, incidently, is supposed to be the first entry into the Library of Congress that has the word "Fuck" in its title.
bukra fil mish mish -
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What matters is what gets codified into law by the treaty, and what the unexpected side-effects of that law may be.
Laws get applied according to the need of the lawyers. There are a lot of dramatic cases of this. For example, Operation Rescue (radical anti-abortion group) was prosecuted under RICO statutes -- a law created to control organized crime. Similarly, Blue Cross Health Insurance is being sued under RICO because they control how physicians deal out healthcare to their clients. Appropriate? Maybe (depends on your politics), but certainly not what was intended by the original authors in the '70s.
So yes, you should be worried. bukra fil mish mish -
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So do I have to put a click-through EULA on all my sites, stating that only US/EU citizens may view them without waiving their rights to sue me?
Then if I end up parodying someone in Bourkino Faso, and they sue me for the parody, I can counter-sue for license violation? Of course, in Bourkino Faso, the penalty for parody could be a flogging, whereas a licensing violation penalty here in the US is a fine or probation.
I guess the only way to make that scheme work is become the resident of my own autonomous, sovereign nation where I can effectively control the local laws.
Yup. It's a big ol' mess, that's fer sure. bukra fil mish mish -
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Inventors, innovation, and money.
on
Mundie Responds
·
· Score: 5
I like how Mundie casts it solely as a money issue, and how he cites a few notable, successful, capitalist inventors (Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford) to make it seem like all innovation is about wealth.
He left out a lot of inventors who weren't in it for the money, or who got cheated by big capital: Tesla died penniless, as did Baron Karl von Drais de Sauerbrun, Jan Matzeliger, Mandee Daguerre, Walter Shaw, Samuel Morse, William Friese-Greene, Lee de Forest, Johann Gutenberg, Henry Trengrouse, and on and on....
Then there are all the inventors/researchers who did what they did not for money, but for the love of it. Let's look at computer scientists. Does anyone think that Nicholas Wirth, Edsger Dijkstra, Grace Hopper, Steve Wozniak, Don Knuth, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Kenneth Thompson, Linus, etc, etc, were doing it all for the money?
There's doing it for money, which is the world Mundie understands, and then there's doing it for love, which he finds very threatening. bukra fil mish mish -
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I've liberally coated the outside of my twelfth-floor office window with powdered corn-starch.
squitch... squitch.. squitch... squitch... squitch... sq --- pop!
A
H
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
!
Suction cups require a pretty clean surface to work. I suppose a clever climber could carry a big vat of vaseline, and smear it over the surface to get airtight contact. bukra fil mish mish -
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
But even if that were true... has anyone stolen nuclear materiel from those labs? If not, your point is pretty much moot, because
there isn't gonna be much secret information floating around a power station.
Having worked at a conventional power plant (fuel oil/gas turbine) run by the Air Force, I can attest to the fact that there's a significant amount of sensitive, if not secret, information at such a facility.
In fact, for security reasons, much of the infrastructure of such as plant is considered sensitive. You don't want terrorists to know which walls are load-bearing, or which conduits could control the turbines, etc.
bukra fil mish mish -
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Of course, in the old days, we used to get our yuks by programming the TI (or other prudish voice synthesizers) to say things like:
Fa Queue Ice hole
Talk sec stew me beach
etc. Needless to say, I was much younger in those days. Today I'd rather have them say things like "Thanks for calling RetroAxle Inc. For a list of the ways technology has made your life better, please press 1..." bukra fil mish mish -
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
A lot of them voted with their feet when the company "offered" relocation to Houston or else.
Evidently, the promise of Vast Amounts of Money[tm] didn't outweigh the certainty of moving to Houston. Why that's any worse than Dallas is anyone's guess. bukra fil mish mish -
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As controversial as it is, many scientists are convinced that Genetics probably map out a morphological potential space, and that it's actually chaotic factors that resolve actual organism growth within that space.
While certain spaces are tightly constrained, others are more general. So simple things like eye color have a tightly constrained space (and are likely to be predictable by genetics), complex things like "creativity" will probably prove much more elusive.
(Begin Wild Speculation)
My personal suspicion is that genetics will prove to be a boom industry, and will be good to address certain kinds of cosmetic things, treat/prevent certain kinds of diseases, and so on. Everyone will be beautiful according the the fashion of the time of their birth, and no-one will suffer from ailments like MS or diabetes. But we'll discover that the stuff that we *really* want to change will be out of our reach -- too many variables. So we won't ever be able to have kids who can see in the IR spectrum, have ultra-fast x12 reflexes, or have 300 point IQs. Still, it'll be an interesting world (particularly for that unfortunate generation whose parents thought it was really, really cool for their kids to have a thrid eye).
(End wild speculation)
(See Goodwin's How the Leopard Changed its Spots for a good and admittedly controversial intro to the "post-genetic" theory of biology). bukra fil mish mish -
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Slashdot Mirror
Thus spake Jello: "The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory."
In the post Cold War world, the threat from ICBMs is pretty low on the list.
The Global Economy means that the US border is incredibly porous to freight, vessels, and shipping containers, not to mention suitcase-bearing tourists, etc. No hostile nation will run the risk of getting into a rocket war with the US. They'll stealth the weapons in, maybe piece by piece.
This way, when they detonate (admittedly lower yield than an airburst, but good enough, and possibly worse fallout), it's not even clear whodunnit. So the US public cries out for revenge, and the government picks one of the potential perps ("blow up the usual suspects") for a raid.
There's no space-based defense against this. Spending trillions of dollars doesn't make us any safer.
It's analogous to feeling while safe driving your car around through a dangerous neighborhood because you have power locks on the doors, when in fact, anyone wishing you harm can just break the window and drag you out.
Precisely. If I were the leader of China or Russia, I'd feign great consteration at the missile "shield" as well.
Oh No! I'd say. Violates treaties and destabilizes! I'd protest.
All the while, I'd be gloating about the stupid Yanks spending themselves into a bottomless abyss of debt, while I perfected the art of concealing suitcase-sized bombs in shipping containers.
(Of course, the point's not really that the policy-makers in the US government are stupid either. They don't care if the system works. It's totally secondary to the real goal. They're aiming at a different target altogether: making all their buddies in the Defense Industry rich.)
No, it was Otis School of Art and Design. The whole story.
bukra fil mish mish
-
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Operative Term is Stimulate (renamed SITO after a second-rate art school threatened to sue over the OTIS acronym) was doing this kind of collaborative artwork back in '94 or '95.
It got ported to the web, but it started out as an ftp-based exercise.
Check it out at http://www.sito.org
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Some Militias certainly *did* engage in a lot of criminal activity. Many of them have as a central tenet of their charters to overthrow the government, which they consider illegal. There are cases of bank robbery, harassing people with bogus liens, supporting anti-abortion terrorists, etc.
As for eco-terrorists being Marxists or anarchists... well, I don't doubt some of them are. But look at the numbers here. I'd be more concerned about the so-called "Captains of Industry," those corporate leaders, who openly show contempt for the people and laws of this Country in their quest for profits. Look at situations and places like Love Canal, Romulus, and countless other places where big companies poisoned an area, and then left without even bothering to inform the local residents of the danger. You want your eyes opened? Look at the TRIS - Toxic Release Inventory System published by the EPA; there's even a nice search by city interface provided by another organization.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Passwords aren't always the limiting defense in security.
Back in the day, we had all the machines in the research lab have the root password of "Mr.Root" (or "Mr.System" for the VMS machines).
It was all pretty secure.
We were not connected to the outside world on a network, and you had to pass through two safe doors to get to the lab. The combination on those safe doors was swiping your badge in the reader and waving your ID to the guys with the guns.
Never had a single compromised system, either.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Good God, man! New World Produce is the sole legitimate differentiator of civilized and uncivilized.
I'd go off on a lengthy screed about the spread of the peanut, chocolate, coffee, potatos, triticale, and so on, but I've already been labelled "politically correct," so I'll just shut up now.
bukra fil mish mish
-
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Well, I guess my point was that the system was dependent upon getting involved in war, which limited its long-term viability.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
In the very short term it was efficiently run. In the longer term, it failed utterly.
Technical excellence requires winning in the short term and the long term.
bukra fil mish mish
-
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I say we support whichever side looks like they're losing.
bukra fil mish mish
-
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Consistency! Ah, therein lies the rub!
My 88 year-old Grandmother wanted a computer "and the internet" for her 85th birthday. I foolishly went with an eMachine that seemed to be everything she wanted. Bad choice. Hardware problems have plagued us, and Win98 runs even worse on that machine than others.
My Grandmother is a very intelligent woman. She was a medical doctor long before it was common to have women doctors. She understands using processes, doing lab work, scientific method, following recipes, etc. But she still has some difficulties. She's still quite sharp, has a reasonably good memory, and decent motor control.
In any case, the big discovery about "intuitive user interfaces" is that they aren't. Why do you double-click on an icon on the desktop, single-click on a browser link, click and drag on a menu, and single-click on a toolbar? The inconsistencies are aggravating. Even if you try to break it down, you get completely tangled up: "when there's a little picture (icon), you double-click, except when it's in a toolbar. A toolbar is when all those little icons are at the top of a window. Well, yes, you can arrange all your desktop icons to be at the top of the window, but it's still not a toolbar." Etc.
My overall findings are that:
1. Coordination is a problem. Mouse control, click speed, etc, are difficult. You can compensate somewhat for this by changing mouse sensitivity and double-click rate.
2. Resolution matters. After trying many combinations, I eventually got her set up on a 17" viewable monitor running at 640x480 resolution. Bletch, you say? But it makes those icons "bigger" and easier to hit. It actually helps a lot.
3. Extensive written out procedures for dealing with common problems help, but don't solve the problem. When an unexpected error message pops up while following a procedure, the rest of it goes out the window.
4. Playing around is helpful but can cause problems. Learning by trying things is great, but you do need someone who can undo the mess. One time, she accidently pulled the tool-bars out of MS Word. She went through the menus to try to bring them back, but was looking for "buttons" rather than toolbar, so she couldn't get them back. This led to randomly trying options in the Word prefs. It took me an hour to straighten everything back out.
Still, it's remarkable to me how much of this stuff my grandmother gets. I hope that when I'm in my 80s, I'll still be able to figure out how to use the Home Defrobnicator to instavid the grandkids...
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Not politically correct. I glossed over some of the detail of other issues, but this is factually correct.
There was a raging civil war in the Inca empire at the time of Pizarro's conquest. Specifically, Atahuallpa Inca was gaining dominance over Huascar for control of the Inca Empire at the time of Pizarro's fourth mission. Pizarro had gone on three exploratory excursions beginning in 1524. (You'll see references to two missions, and his successful invasion as the "third" visit because the first expedition in 1524 never actually got to any part of the Inca empire.)
The civil war was a fight over who would ascend the throne after both Huayna-Capac, the ruling Inca, and his heir, Ninan Cuyuchi died. On one of the earlier Spanish missions, smallpox had been introduced, and swept through the country. Both Huayna-Capac and Ninan Cuyuchi died of smallpox.
The famous fourth mission, in 1532, is where Pizarro landed around Tumbez, on the northern coast. Tumbez was a ruin, destroyed by the civil war. Reinforcements followed Pizarro, and he began his conquest with 168 men and somewhere around 60 horses.
From Tumbez, Pizarro & co headed south into the mountains towards Cajamarca. Around that same time, Atahuallpa's forces captured Huascar outside of Cuzco, and Atahuallpa was heading back to the capital. Both sides were demoralized by losses from both disease and battle. On the journey to Cajamarca, Pizarro successfully recruited locals who were loyal to Huascar to join his army.
When they met Atahuallpa's army, the Spanish played a trick on the Atahuallpa's ambassadorial mission, and kidnapped Atahuallpa and killed his bodyguards. There was no large-scale conflict between the armies at this point.
Here's where it gets very political and drawn out. Atahuallpa tries to ransom himself with a room filled with gold. Eventually, Pizarro has him murdered. During this period, however, Huascar's supporters were not idle, and were allying with various local tribes who had been oppressed by the Incas (like the Imara).
There were numerous battles with varying groups, and the Inca empire was pretty much crushed.
The event you're talking about, was during a final rebellion against the Spanish in 1536, where Manco Inca raised a huge army to attach the Spanish in Cuzco. This is where the badly outnumbered Spanish managed to break out of the siege on horseback and then quickly counterattacked the Inca army at Sacsayhuaman. This was, as you say, a stunning victory due to strategy, luck, and superior weaponry. It was not, however, how the Conquistadors took over the Empire.
(Similarly, when Cortez took over Mexico City earlier, smallpox was killing over 1,000 Aztecs per day. The demoralizing effect of this, coupled with the Spanish armor, guns, and apparent immunity to the disease, all contributed to his victory.)
bukra fil mish mish
-
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The Incas were far from "primitive." They had metallurgy, architecture, and over 103 species of potato. They did lack gunpowder.
Their fall to Spain was much more due to their lack of immunity to smallpox than anything the Spanish intentionally did.
Then there are the Maori of New Zealand. They didn't have gunpowder or metal, but they invented what became modern trench warfare and seriously kicked ass until the British resorted to the Treaty and Treachery technique.
By and large, though, the success of Western Imperialism owes at least as much to disease as it does technology.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
This story, incidently, is supposed to be the first entry into the Library of Congress that has the word "Fuck" in its title.
bukra fil mish mish
-
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It doesn't matter *why* the law gets written.
What matters is what gets codified into law by the treaty, and what the unexpected side-effects of that law may be.
Laws get applied according to the need of the lawyers. There are a lot of dramatic cases of this. For example, Operation Rescue (radical anti-abortion group) was prosecuted under RICO statutes -- a law created to control organized crime. Similarly, Blue Cross Health Insurance is being sued under RICO because they control how physicians deal out healthcare to their clients. Appropriate? Maybe (depends on your politics), but certainly not what was intended by the original authors in the '70s.
So yes, you should be worried.
bukra fil mish mish
-
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That's yet another in a long list of reasons not to have a TV.
What really bothers me is that there can be (are?) ISPs who monitor traffic and sell the data to companies like Doubleclick.
Does a tin-foil helmet work over ethernet?
Shiny side in, out, or only on 10-base-T?
bukra fil mish mish
-
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So do I have to put a click-through EULA on all my sites, stating that only US/EU citizens may view them without waiving their rights to sue me?
Then if I end up parodying someone in Bourkino Faso, and they sue me for the parody, I can counter-sue for license violation? Of course, in Bourkino Faso, the penalty for parody could be a flogging, whereas a licensing violation penalty here in the US is a fine or probation.
I guess the only way to make that scheme work is become the resident of my own autonomous, sovereign nation where I can effectively control the local laws.
Yup. It's a big ol' mess, that's fer sure.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
I like how Mundie casts it solely as a money issue, and how he cites a few notable, successful, capitalist inventors (Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford) to make it seem like all innovation is about wealth.
He left out a lot of inventors who weren't in it for the money, or who got cheated by big capital: Tesla died penniless, as did Baron Karl von Drais de Sauerbrun, Jan Matzeliger, Mandee Daguerre, Walter Shaw, Samuel Morse, William Friese-Greene, Lee de Forest, Johann Gutenberg, Henry Trengrouse, and on and on....
Then there are all the inventors/researchers who did what they did not for money, but for the love of it. Let's look at computer scientists. Does anyone think that Nicholas Wirth, Edsger Dijkstra, Grace Hopper, Steve Wozniak, Don Knuth, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Kenneth Thompson, Linus, etc, etc, were doing it all for the money?
There's doing it for money, which is the world Mundie understands, and then there's doing it for love, which he finds very threatening.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
I've liberally coated the outside of my twelfth-floor office window with powdered corn-starch.
.. squitch ... squitch ... squitch ... sq --- pop!
squitch... squitch
A
H
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
h
!
Suction cups require a pretty clean surface to work. I suppose a clever climber could carry a big vat of vaseline, and smear it over the surface to get airtight contact.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Having worked at a conventional power plant (fuel oil/gas turbine) run by the Air Force, I can attest to the fact that there's a significant amount of sensitive, if not secret, information at such a facility.
In fact, for security reasons, much of the infrastructure of such as plant is considered sensitive. You don't want terrorists to know which walls are load-bearing, or which conduits could control the turbines, etc.
bukra fil mish mish
-
Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
Of course, in the old days, we used to get our yuks by programming the TI (or other prudish voice synthesizers) to say things like:
Fa Queue Ice hole
Talk sec stew me beach
etc. Needless to say, I was much younger in those days. Today I'd rather have them say things like "Thanks for calling RetroAxle Inc. For a list of the ways technology has made your life better, please press 1..."
bukra fil mish mish
-
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A lot of them voted with their feet when the company "offered" relocation to Houston or else.
Evidently, the promise of Vast Amounts of Money[tm] didn't outweigh the certainty of moving to Houston. Why that's any worse than Dallas is anyone's guess.
bukra fil mish mish
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While certain spaces are tightly constrained, others are more general. So simple things like eye color have a tightly constrained space (and are likely to be predictable by genetics), complex things like "creativity" will probably prove much more elusive.
(Begin Wild Speculation)
My personal suspicion is that genetics will prove to be a boom industry, and will be good to address certain kinds of cosmetic things, treat/prevent certain kinds of diseases, and so on. Everyone will be beautiful according the the fashion of the time of their birth, and no-one will suffer from ailments like MS or diabetes. But we'll discover that the stuff that we *really* want to change will be out of our reach -- too many variables. So we won't ever be able to have kids who can see in the IR spectrum, have ultra-fast x12 reflexes, or have 300 point IQs. Still, it'll be an interesting world (particularly for that unfortunate generation whose parents thought it was really, really cool for their kids to have a thrid eye).
(End wild speculation)
(See Goodwin's How the Leopard Changed its Spots for a good and admittedly controversial intro to the "post-genetic" theory of biology).
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(should have said "slow de-compressor" but you get the picture)
bukra fil mish mish
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