Funny, I graduated in '91 and never felt that way at all back then. The Japan fears were over by the late 80s, computers were just starting to come on the scene in a big way. And given that I going to school for computers (which would never be outsourced like those lousy manufacturing jobs), I felt that my future was relatively secure. Twenty years later, I'm thinking it would be wise to have a healthy supply of food in hand, just in case of a sudden dollar collapse, and I'm taking side jobs to keep my options open. Make no mistake, we're not out of this by a long shot and the next 10 years will be substantially worse than the previous 10. Wait until our debt has grown so large that the world simply can't afford to keep buying it up anymore. That's when the real fireworks will start and you won't have to wait long to see it. The 90s were a freakin' golden age by comparison.
I haven't installed it yet, but this looks better than anything out there so far. Hopefully it's stable and truly supports any format ffmpeg supports. Cinelerra has been stuck in the mud for too long (especially on file formats and titles), avidemux is too limited, as is kdenlive. If it's good, maybe I'll get off my ass and add a gentoo ebuild. I don't edit video very often, but I've always wished the tools were just a little bit better than what we've had.
Given the ClimateGate scandal, do they really think teaming up with the CIA is going to bring people back into the fold? Why not cut their losses and move onto the next scare tactic already? You know, like bee extinction, hamster encephalitis (the next monkey pox) or cyborg terrorists. Surely they can think up brand new ways to sucker us out of our money.
That's nonsense. People don't hate people who leave them alone. At least, not in substantial numbers. It might take a couple of decades for the hate to wear off, but terrorist recruiting would eventually plummet if we would just stick to honest business, and nothing more. Don't forget, we weren't always hated in the region. That came with our increased political involvement, post WWI and then our support of Israel, post WWII. We live in a universe governed by cause and effect but Washington deals only in effects. The whole, "they're all crazy argument," is just lazy.
Engineers crave logic. Logical people are all driven somewhat crazy by the world we live in. That will manifest itself in all sorts of strange ways. This time, it manifested itself in exploding underwear (not a very smart engineer, judging by the design). As a kind of engineer myself, I look at how limited the damage would have been, if he had blown up the plane, versus the cost of going all ape-shit over it and I naturally come to the conclusion that people need to chill the fuck out. Even if they made airport security perfect, I can think of at least a dozen non-airplane ways to kill just as many people, without the terrorist(s) even having to sacrifice his life. The way to reduce terrorism is to stop creating new ones by stop bombing their families and stop manipulating their governments.
Loud commercials are the perfect reminder that I've forgotten to fast forward the DVR. Commercials that employ this behavior are really just shooting themselves in the foot (not to mention the station's foot).
Yeah, I used to think that way too. Government can work, if only we put the right people in charge to fix it. But that's the hitch, in reality, it never gets fixed and always drifts in the wrong direction. Theory doesn't count. I know a lot of people on the left were counting on Obama to clean things up, but even with the Dems controlling the house, senate, executive and judicial branches, what have they done? They've put the banks who got us into this mess in charge of writing any new "regulations" along with a gargantuan, unparalleled sum of our money to continue bubbling us to death. The ending of the war, which we were told we can "take to the bank," has expanded into Pakistan and is about to expand in Afghanistan. The left got everything they wanted and all they've done is behave like Bush on steroids. So who's the next savior gonna be? Will he be the one to actually do what he says? How many times should we do the same things, expecting different results?
So yes, in theory, government can do all these great things, but it's only ever used as a weapon. This is because good people prefer to stay out of the cess pool, that is Washington. It's a cess pool because power is concentrated there and typically, only bad people want power over others. So the worst of the worst flock to Washington and the good are always fighting an uphill battle. Any good things that are accomplished are matched by thousands of bad things. The corruption is unending. I'd rather disarm them all and deal with our problems on a local level. That would at least give the good people of the world a fighting chance.
The question I like to ask people is, has all the good Obama has done made up for all the bad that Bush has done? Do you think it ever will? If it's easier to destroy than create, then you need to win far more often than you lose in order to keep your head above the water. And that never happens. Or you can equate it to gambling. Over time, the house (the rich) always wins. The only way to win is not to play.
The cost of compliance is precisely what has been leading to the downward spiral in wages. That and a reckless monetary policy which has crapped out the whole economy. And while I agree that paperwork is a good thing if it protects us from thieves, all it does in reality is empower them. How do you think the rich manage to avoid paying taxes (not all, but some people)? They hire a lawyer to exploit the mountains of tax legislation to their benefit. They can afford to look for the loopholes. Your average person or small business can't even begin to compete in an environment that requires a team of lawyers to operate effectively in. This is why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The elite don't maintain their power in spite of regulations, but because of them. The gap is larger in this country than any other because there has never been a more heavily regulated populace in the history of mankind. Ask someone from the former Soviet Union. You'll likely find they agree.
I see you never worked in business. Bush's signing of Sarbanes-Oxley has driven many businesses offshore and enacted a high cost of compliance for those who've stayed (not to mention all the BS courses I have to take over it). The repeal of Glass-Steagall (which most talking heads on both sides of the aisle claim was responsible for our current economic mess), was signed into law by Bill Clinton. Bush was as anti-freemarket as any Democrat. And Obama is just as fascist as any Republican.
"There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules. America grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many citizens."
1600 suspected terrorists a day? If even 1% of that was real then we'd be dealing with 58,000 people a year intending to commit terrorist acts a year? Are we suppose to believe that the FBI has managed to stop them all in every case??? It's not that hard to blow a bus up or derail a train, so why aren't they doing it? Oh I know, because it's all bullshit.
The only terrorists I see are in the government and the media. They're the only ones using terror to get us to change our way of life. Ooh, Iran is gonna nuke the world, global warming/cooling is going to put our cities underwater/put us in a deep freeze, swine/bird flu/monkey pox/SARS is going to be the next plague that kills us all, main street will starve to death if we don't give your money to these bankers over here, Islamofascism seeks to establish a dictatorship over the world. Eurasia is our friend, Eastasia is our enemy. Eastasia is our friend, Eurasia is our enemy. It's gone well beyond the little boy who cried wolf at this point and has become more akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater. And in each case, the cry is the same: "We can protect you from all these horrors if only you give us more power. We all have to sacrifice to do what is necessary."
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." -- William Pitt
Interesting in light of the fact that the only people that I actually see pin up Dilbert cartoons outside their cube are managers. I'd think, if white people can't use the N-word, then managers shouldn't be able to use Dilbert cartoons. But what you say rings true to me.
I also think that's the reason the 1st amendment enjoys the strong protection that it does in America, while the rest of the constitution gets continually crapped on. The iron fisted Hitlers and Stalins of the world have short lived reigns. But if you can convince people they have a say in what happens to them (even if they have no influence), then they'll put up with almost anything.
Yeah, RA was the last one for me too. Age of Empires III killed the "age of" series. Rise of Legends killed the Rise of Nations series in it's infancy. I love RTS', but they keep trying to reinvent themselves instead of building on what they did right.
The RTS gold standard right now has to be Supreme Commander. If it wasn't for the sucky AI, I wouldn't need any other. But it got a few things right that should now be incorporated into every RTS out their. First is the stragtegic zoom. Don't give me some tight little view where I can only see a dozen units battle it out at the time, SupCom let's you zoom out to see the whole map. This is now indespensible for me. Any RTS without it is a relic.
Second, is the ability to queue up as many actions as you want, so long as you hold down the shift key. Most RTS' deal with micromanagement issues by limiting resource types or other options, dumbing down the games and making them less fun. But the ability to queue things up save so much time without taking anything away from the game.
Third, are the base defenses that are actually capable of defending your base. I barely even bother with base defenses in most RTS' because they're so easily overwhelmed. In supcom, you have to work to take them down.
And fourth, there's no limit to how many of my units I can add to one group. I never understood this limitation in older RTS' and I can't go back to anything less now that they finally got it right.
The only modern feature it (inexplicably) lacks is the ability to set your new unit waypoints to auto-join a group. I'd also like the formations to be more useful. Naval formations tend to spread out over half the map. But other than that, EVERY RTS should build off of these features and then focus more on AI than graphics. Sins of a Solar Empire is the only RTS I've seen since then, that gets this all (mostly) right. When the Age Of and C&C series starts catching on, I may revisit them. Oh did I mention that SupCom and Sins play just fine under wine? That's the icing on the cake.
There is an elite in this country, a revolving door for people to float between senior positions in government, industry and the media. The same people remain at the top, no matter how much or how often they screw up. The problem is not so much the injustice of it, the real problem is that these "elite," for lack of a better term, are so disconnected from everyday life and everyday people that incidents like this are par for the course. He didn't even have enough shame to keep his mouth shut about it. People like this don't even have the awareness to know how stupid they're being, yet the public still respects their "right" to tell us what we can and can't do with our lives. The man should be replaced upon demonstrating such naïveté, but it won't be thought twice of in a government so racked by incompetence and corruption. Incidents like this should inspire people to have more faith in themselves and less in their "leaders."
To quote a German, "None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." What gives one man the right to tell another what he can say? And who determines what constitutes a false accusation? You complain about us not knowing what war is like while simultaneously promoting the censorship of history. You talk about oppressive corporations, but they don't steal my money at gunpoint or tell me what I can do or say. I shouldn't "unfairly" attack politicians, because that's not what free speech is for?? How convenient that the only people in a position to decide what's unfair are the people being attacked. I'm sure that power won't be abused.
No, by resort I meant reinstalling the OS. I do keep/home,/var,/boot./opt and/usr/portage (for gentoo) on separate partitions. I've just never have an incident where I felt I would benefit from reinstalling linux. Windows is another story.
One of the major reasons I use linux is so that I don't have to resort to your method in the first place. What distro are you using? Perhaps you should be looking at others.
And that's why I quit Windows. Each OS requires a lot work to keep running smoothly, but windows was just too much of a pain in the ass for me with all the constant reboots and crashes. Linux is still a pain in the ass sometimes (especially the hell that is alsa), but the productivity gains I get from having a stable OS have more than made up for the occasional upgrade pains. Although, I will concede, it's still not an option for your average user.
Maybe they're getting tired of exchanging their wealth for our paper. I admire the way China is focused like a laser on their infrastructure and the acquisition of raw materials, while we're busy making up new problems to solve as a way of avoiding the very serious ones we already have. Perhaps if we focused on production, rather than consumption, we might have a little extra wealth to spend on our own decaying infrastructure.
I'm grateful to OO for its ability to render Office documents, but I've always been repulsed by the UI. It would be nice if that were a separate component that I could just switch out. It would probably be easier on them too.
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Funny, I graduated in '91 and never felt that way at all back then. The Japan fears were over by the late 80s, computers were just starting to come on the scene in a big way. And given that I going to school for computers (which would never be outsourced like those lousy manufacturing jobs), I felt that my future was relatively secure. Twenty years later, I'm thinking it would be wise to have a healthy supply of food in hand, just in case of a sudden dollar collapse, and I'm taking side jobs to keep my options open. Make no mistake, we're not out of this by a long shot and the next 10 years will be substantially worse than the previous 10. Wait until our debt has grown so large that the world simply can't afford to keep buying it up anymore. That's when the real fireworks will start and you won't have to wait long to see it. The 90s were a freakin' golden age by comparison.
I haven't installed it yet, but this looks better than anything out there so far. Hopefully it's stable and truly supports any format ffmpeg supports. Cinelerra has been stuck in the mud for too long (especially on file formats and titles), avidemux is too limited, as is kdenlive. If it's good, maybe I'll get off my ass and add a gentoo ebuild. I don't edit video very often, but I've always wished the tools were just a little bit better than what we've had.
Given the ClimateGate scandal, do they really think teaming up with the CIA is going to bring people back into the fold? Why not cut their losses and move onto the next scare tactic already? You know, like bee extinction, hamster encephalitis (the next monkey pox) or cyborg terrorists. Surely they can think up brand new ways to sucker us out of our money.
That's nonsense. People don't hate people who leave them alone. At least, not in substantial numbers. It might take a couple of decades for the hate to wear off, but terrorist recruiting would eventually plummet if we would just stick to honest business, and nothing more. Don't forget, we weren't always hated in the region. That came with our increased political involvement, post WWI and then our support of Israel, post WWII. We live in a universe governed by cause and effect but Washington deals only in effects. The whole, "they're all crazy argument," is just lazy.
Engineers crave logic. Logical people are all driven somewhat crazy by the world we live in. That will manifest itself in all sorts of strange ways. This time, it manifested itself in exploding underwear (not a very smart engineer, judging by the design). As a kind of engineer myself, I look at how limited the damage would have been, if he had blown up the plane, versus the cost of going all ape-shit over it and I naturally come to the conclusion that people need to chill the fuck out. Even if they made airport security perfect, I can think of at least a dozen non-airplane ways to kill just as many people, without the terrorist(s) even having to sacrifice his life. The way to reduce terrorism is to stop creating new ones by stop bombing their families and stop manipulating their governments.
Loud commercials are the perfect reminder that I've forgotten to fast forward the DVR. Commercials that employ this behavior are really just shooting themselves in the foot (not to mention the station's foot).
Yeah, I used to think that way too. Government can work, if only we put the right people in charge to fix it. But that's the hitch, in reality, it never gets fixed and always drifts in the wrong direction. Theory doesn't count. I know a lot of people on the left were counting on Obama to clean things up, but even with the Dems controlling the house, senate, executive and judicial branches, what have they done? They've put the banks who got us into this mess in charge of writing any new "regulations" along with a gargantuan, unparalleled sum of our money to continue bubbling us to death. The ending of the war, which we were told we can "take to the bank," has expanded into Pakistan and is about to expand in Afghanistan. The left got everything they wanted and all they've done is behave like Bush on steroids. So who's the next savior gonna be? Will he be the one to actually do what he says? How many times should we do the same things, expecting different results?
So yes, in theory, government can do all these great things, but it's only ever used as a weapon. This is because good people prefer to stay out of the cess pool, that is Washington. It's a cess pool because power is concentrated there and typically, only bad people want power over others. So the worst of the worst flock to Washington and the good are always fighting an uphill battle. Any good things that are accomplished are matched by thousands of bad things. The corruption is unending. I'd rather disarm them all and deal with our problems on a local level. That would at least give the good people of the world a fighting chance.
The question I like to ask people is, has all the good Obama has done made up for all the bad that Bush has done? Do you think it ever will? If it's easier to destroy than create, then you need to win far more often than you lose in order to keep your head above the water. And that never happens. Or you can equate it to gambling. Over time, the house (the rich) always wins. The only way to win is not to play.
The cost of compliance is precisely what has been leading to the downward spiral in wages. That and a reckless monetary policy which has crapped out the whole economy. And while I agree that paperwork is a good thing if it protects us from thieves, all it does in reality is empower them. How do you think the rich manage to avoid paying taxes (not all, but some people)? They hire a lawyer to exploit the mountains of tax legislation to their benefit. They can afford to look for the loopholes. Your average person or small business can't even begin to compete in an environment that requires a team of lawyers to operate effectively in. This is why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The elite don't maintain their power in spite of regulations, but because of them. The gap is larger in this country than any other because there has never been a more heavily regulated populace in the history of mankind. Ask someone from the former Soviet Union. You'll likely find they agree.
I see you never worked in business. Bush's signing of Sarbanes-Oxley has driven many businesses offshore and enacted a high cost of compliance for those who've stayed (not to mention all the BS courses I have to take over it). The repeal of Glass-Steagall (which most talking heads on both sides of the aisle claim was responsible for our current economic mess), was signed into law by Bill Clinton. Bush was as anti-freemarket as any Democrat. And Obama is just as fascist as any Republican.
"There is an increase of bureaucracy and rules. America grew because of the lack of rules. That has been forgotten. The rules are regarded as irritating and useless by many citizens."
Because if I didn't have a viable alternative to Windows, sooner or later, I would have headed to Seattle and gone postal on the Redmond campus.
1600 suspected terrorists a day? If even 1% of that was real then we'd be dealing with 58,000 people a year intending to commit terrorist acts a year? Are we suppose to believe that the FBI has managed to stop them all in every case??? It's not that hard to blow a bus up or derail a train, so why aren't they doing it? Oh I know, because it's all bullshit.
The only terrorists I see are in the government and the media. They're the only ones using terror to get us to change our way of life. Ooh, Iran is gonna nuke the world, global warming/cooling is going to put our cities underwater/put us in a deep freeze, swine/bird flu/monkey pox/SARS is going to be the next plague that kills us all, main street will starve to death if we don't give your money to these bankers over here, Islamofascism seeks to establish a dictatorship over the world. Eurasia is our friend, Eastasia is our enemy. Eastasia is our friend, Eurasia is our enemy. It's gone well beyond the little boy who cried wolf at this point and has become more akin to yelling fire in a crowded theater. And in each case, the cry is the same: "We can protect you from all these horrors if only you give us more power. We all have to sacrifice to do what is necessary."
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." -- William Pitt
Interesting in light of the fact that the only people that I actually see pin up Dilbert cartoons outside their cube are managers. I'd think, if white people can't use the N-word, then managers shouldn't be able to use Dilbert cartoons. But what you say rings true to me.
I also think that's the reason the 1st amendment enjoys the strong protection that it does in America, while the rest of the constitution gets continually crapped on. The iron fisted Hitlers and Stalins of the world have short lived reigns. But if you can convince people they have a say in what happens to them (even if they have no influence), then they'll put up with almost anything.
Yeah, RA was the last one for me too. Age of Empires III killed the "age of" series. Rise of Legends killed the Rise of Nations series in it's infancy. I love RTS', but they keep trying to reinvent themselves instead of building on what they did right.
The RTS gold standard right now has to be Supreme Commander. If it wasn't for the sucky AI, I wouldn't need any other. But it got a few things right that should now be incorporated into every RTS out their. First is the stragtegic zoom. Don't give me some tight little view where I can only see a dozen units battle it out at the time, SupCom let's you zoom out to see the whole map. This is now indespensible for me. Any RTS without it is a relic.
Second, is the ability to queue up as many actions as you want, so long as you hold down the shift key. Most RTS' deal with micromanagement issues by limiting resource types or other options, dumbing down the games and making them less fun. But the ability to queue things up save so much time without taking anything away from the game.
Third, are the base defenses that are actually capable of defending your base. I barely even bother with base defenses in most RTS' because they're so easily overwhelmed. In supcom, you have to work to take them down.
And fourth, there's no limit to how many of my units I can add to one group. I never understood this limitation in older RTS' and I can't go back to anything less now that they finally got it right.
The only modern feature it (inexplicably) lacks is the ability to set your new unit waypoints to auto-join a group. I'd also like the formations to be more useful. Naval formations tend to spread out over half the map. But other than that, EVERY RTS should build off of these features and then focus more on AI than graphics. Sins of a Solar Empire is the only RTS I've seen since then, that gets this all (mostly) right. When the Age Of and C&C series starts catching on, I may revisit them. Oh did I mention that SupCom and Sins play just fine under wine? That's the icing on the cake.
...with Obama, we get preemptive peace prizes.
There is an elite in this country, a revolving door for people to float between senior positions in government, industry and the media. The same people remain at the top, no matter how much or how often they screw up. The problem is not so much the injustice of it, the real problem is that these "elite," for lack of a better term, are so disconnected from everyday life and everyday people that incidents like this are par for the course. He didn't even have enough shame to keep his mouth shut about it. People like this don't even have the awareness to know how stupid they're being, yet the public still respects their "right" to tell us what we can and can't do with our lives. The man should be replaced upon demonstrating such naïveté, but it won't be thought twice of in a government so racked by incompetence and corruption. Incidents like this should inspire people to have more faith in themselves and less in their "leaders."
To quote a German, "None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free." What gives one man the right to tell another what he can say? And who determines what constitutes a false accusation? You complain about us not knowing what war is like while simultaneously promoting the censorship of history. You talk about oppressive corporations, but they don't steal my money at gunpoint or tell me what I can do or say. I shouldn't "unfairly" attack politicians, because that's not what free speech is for?? How convenient that the only people in a position to decide what's unfair are the people being attacked. I'm sure that power won't be abused.
Guess you never played Deus Ex then. Granted, you're fighting the UN, but presumably staffed by Americans.
No, by resort I meant reinstalling the OS. I do keep /home, /var, /boot. /opt and /usr/portage (for gentoo) on separate partitions. I've just never have an incident where I felt I would benefit from reinstalling linux. Windows is another story.
One of the major reasons I use linux is so that I don't have to resort to your method in the first place. What distro are you using? Perhaps you should be looking at others.
And that's why I quit Windows. Each OS requires a lot work to keep running smoothly, but windows was just too much of a pain in the ass for me with all the constant reboots and crashes. Linux is still a pain in the ass sometimes (especially the hell that is alsa), but the productivity gains I get from having a stable OS have more than made up for the occasional upgrade pains. Although, I will concede, it's still not an option for your average user.
Maybe they're getting tired of exchanging their wealth for our paper. I admire the way China is focused like a laser on their infrastructure and the acquisition of raw materials, while we're busy making up new problems to solve as a way of avoiding the very serious ones we already have. Perhaps if we focused on production, rather than consumption, we might have a little extra wealth to spend on our own decaying infrastructure.
I think you're problem is their are people out they're who got better grammer then ewe and your just jealous.
I guess now is not the right time to announce my OS written entirely in Javascript. It can already play the Bill Gates Pie in the Face game.
I'm grateful to OO for its ability to render Office documents, but I've always been repulsed by the UI. It would be nice if that were a separate component that I could just switch out. It would probably be easier on them too.