To be honest, I would rather the currency was pegged to something hard to gather. As for the antisemitic meme stuff, I didn't mention anything in that vein, you did. Try your macro somewhere else were the context makes more sense.
Actually, they do here in Alaska. Some communities are so far outside the "fire service" area it isn't practical to respond to every call. Other's choose not to pay the taxes and the fire services will only respond if there is someone in the house, and the likely give you a nice bill. I had a friend who saw one of his neighbors houses go up in this exact way, he called the "local" fire department and reported the fire, they asked if anyone was home and when he said no, they told him to let it burn. The main concern was neighboring structures and forest fires since no lives were in danger.
This sums up the central problem, promises of "free stuff because you deserve it" will always win against the core idea of "work hard and you will see rewards in the end". Nah, i'll just sign up for the "free stuff" train, they have holograms and hip young candidates who do IAMA's on reddit.
Say you issue a UBI to everyone that amounts to 10% of their income. Everybody now has a "free" 10% boost. Congratulations you have now inflated the currency by 10%. When dodging pitchforks, a duck and weave motion may be best.
The next logical step usually is price controls to 'hold down inflation" which leads to shortages of products and consuming of your pets in the end.
Of course a private company can express whatever view they like. The real danger here is the echo chamber effect at play. Most of tech is heavily biased towards the left/authoritarian side of the field lately which is a shame. The early days had places such as alt.sex.hamster.and.duct.tape with a voracious defense of freedom of speech. Now I see hate speech clauses showing up in all sorts of places. In the end, if you only allow admittance of similar views and like thought you will create a mono culture. Mono cultures tend to fail.
Google is forgetting that nearly half of our nation voted for the president. I wonder how many contracts for google's cloud services will be renewed by the federal government? This sort of obvious bias will likely have a measurable effect on the bottom line. Maybe they'll learn from this or fail and someone else will learn from the mistake. Likely not though, I suspect more collusion to ban "bad" actors such as Alex Jones.
Wrong-o! The point of the 2nd is as a final stop against a tyrannical government. This means "military hardware". One of the founders actually addressed the exact question of canons aboard ships in regards to the 2nd early on. I'm too tired tonight to look up the exact reference though so you'll just dismiss the idea out of hand.
Good old Cody Wilson. I suspect he's running low on funds and needs some media facetime to pay a few bills. It's a good troll either way though. This whole episode reminds me of having to pull pgp sources off non-US servers in the early days because our freedom loving government decided encryption was a munition. It's sad to see how often attempts to ban disruptive technologies occur by default these days. No, you won't be able to 3d print a glock 19 but the idea is really what is important here. Plus, how often do you see the 1st and 2nd being at the forefront of an issue?
For all the people throwing knee jerk stereotypical responses around keep in mind the central idea of the legal filings around this is to keep source code protected as speech. I would think an OSS crowd would applaud this idea but since it's an evil baby killing gun being coded people conflate this particular speech with BAD. It's rather like banning wrong think on facebook or twitter actually. It's hard to stand up for the rights of idiots and assholes in order to protect your right to be an idiot or asshole. Since the decision to stand up is hard that should be a strong signal to make sure you do stand up.
What an amazing idea! Let's just ban an entire industry that literately is the foundation to modern society and rely totally on imports to cover our needs. I'm sure with all the bunny rabbits dancing and the sunflowers singing the chorus all will work out just fine.
Let's face it, 100% of the users on the internet are never going to learn to practice safe sex. So say you get an infection rate of 20%, that's still plenty of garbage floating around. It's time to start implementing a default deny policy on executables. Shriner and others have talked about this for years and windows 7 has the ability to lock down the OS to only binaries signed by allowed certificates. Implementation on unix like machines is already starting and it would be simple to start adding further hooks into the kernel to block unsigned binaries from even entering address space. This is not to say the signing mechanisms won't be attacked but we have to start moving forward. Virus and e-mail scanners will always be one step behind unless they figure out preemptive solutions that work and don't effect the end user. Once you start making the OS difficult to the user you've lost sight of the whole point and they'll happily click around you're pretty little warning boxes anyway.
Maybe they just wanted to have childs... 2.5 years is a long time and they probably changed their mind
The above makes sense. Couples who already were comfortable with having a child would be ideal couples to participate in a study of birth control effectiveness.
You wouldn't want the set with whom panic would arise at the mere thought of their birth control method failing.
I'm going to have to agree with Brett. It does suck that our government has taken such a turn towards security away from individual privacy as of late. The stereotypical image of the evil g-man shrugging his unconcerned shoulders over a bird coming down on city full of people is silly. There are plenty of people who work for the federal government who care quite a bit about all those "taxpayers" keeping them in the job.
On a related note take a look at the role of the "range safety officer" during satellite launches. Then think about the range safety officer with his hand over the "destroy" button during shuttle launches.
If you think it's a conspiracy just GO THERE! It's outside of Glenallen and I think you'll find the people are very nice and open. There are no secret underground labs filled with people strapped to strange machines.
Glenallen (and it's neighbor Gakona) doesn't have any property taxes and no local government to speak of. For the most part any police or governmental involvement will be via the state government or a federal agency. People move to glenallen and put a little cabin and choose to live off the grid to remove themselves from society and the governing agencies. If the government themselves decide to move to glenallen and build large installation that has the capability to run off the grid you have a perfect breeding ground for these conspiracies.
All of these conspiracy theories reek of someone who didn't get the job he/she wanted at UAF. Imagine if you have an ex-professor who is very grumpy at the HAARP project walk into town and put a voice to your fears. You have to remember the winters are Cold and Long up here. Towards solstice we have precious little useable daylight to work with. People end up staying inside all the time talking to the same people about the same old things. Somethings get worse than a friday night sewing circle. Combine those factors with this big installation down the road that you don't fully understand and you start to see things that just aren't there.
From what I understand, one of the guys repairing and rebuilding the transmitters there is also an avid ham. HARRP has often been involved with ham's during their experiments and provides great services to the HAM community including a ionosound used to "look" at the ionosphere (Ref 1). If you want to hear strange noises go to any HAM's house and ask to listen to HF. You can spot a HAM's house by the large amounts of wire and aluminum in the air in the form of towers and antennas. The HF bands are full of strange and wonderful noises that if you let your mind wander could become alien communication sounds. In reality it's probably that power transformer down the street but that's not quite so exciting.
If you want a conspiracy you only need to look towards the current administration and military actions around the world. Even there though I doubt there is a wide conspiracy going on, our upper echelons of government are just too incompetent to hold a broad sweeping evil conspiracy. Instead it's composed of 70% idealism and 30% ignorance in the form of reforming the world to be like america.
Realistically most users don't even need most of the new features that are out there. The only reason to get some of them is because BUG fixes go with it. Why can't people work more on bugs first before they go onto to new features? Instead the typical release cycle goes like this:
Version 1.0: Release! Let the peasants rejoice! Version 1.1: Opps! The Solaris peasants need this fixed. While I was at it I put in a plugin system. Rejoice again peasants! Version 1.2: Umm...plugin system is really busted, fixed it. Version 1.4: Okay okay, so I had a FEW bugs, I fixed that and now the plugins work again! Version 1.5: Bob released a really BITCHN plugin but it breaks things. Compatibility with Bob's plugin. Version 1.6: Oh yeah, PPC people may want to use this too. Version 1.7: Umm...Bob's plugin patch busted i386 but you'll need a new version of libassine.
and so on, rinse and repeat.
Oh well....this is why I dig ham radio, some things don't change because they don't need to.
The distance and latency problem is indeed the main issue. I've only worked with Starband systems so i can't talk for the other providers out there but....
typically i saw a ping time of about 600-800 ms. Working with ssh over a connection such as this is a bit hard but if you know your keyboard shortcuts you can do alright. You just have to think about what your going to do before hand and not be addicted to the backspace command. Another option is to edit files using emacs or vim's ssh remote access method.
Starband's 480 line of modems now has the "TCP acceleration" software built in which helps out quite a bit. I suspect what happens is some sort of UDP encapsulation but please don't quote me on that one, i'm not sure of the internals. However, in practice it's quite nice. Once you use their built in http proxy loading a web page acts just like a typical broadband connection. large file-transfers in the downstream direction works very nice as well with speeds of about 100k/sec or so.
Upstream is a different matter. If I understand how the bird is working they use a round robin arraignment for receiving the uplinks from the client ground stations. This means that you have to wait your turn before you can x-mit data up to the bird. Latency kicks in again and upload speeds slow down quite a bit. As of right now i've got a server uploading data files at about 11k/sec. Better than nothing though, and rather cheap and easy to setup.
I agree 100% regarding the ultimate freedom a car brings. We have been given the great opportunity in this country to be able to drive form state to state without any hinderance to speak of. In fact, if we get pulled over at all we often recount it as one of those "rare and embarrassing things" that happened during the trip.
It is this attitude that will have to change very soon or else the US economy will suffer more than we have felt from some whim of the stock market.
Those countries that know how to live close together and have effective methods of transportation put in place will most likely experience a growth period.
The trouble is that our government recently has had a hard time looking at the true causes of problems. Instead we have chosen to elect leaders who provide short term knee jerk solutions that often only get our wheels stuck more in the mud. I can easily see the US government going to war over oil resources more and more in the future in order to cling to our way of life.
Unless we find a way to provide a alternative to cheap fossil fuel transportation, I suspect the US will enter a decline. And with such a large land-mass it's not as if we can just quickly centralize our population.
Anyway, i'll be in the back making some tin foil hats.
Time and time again we see that adversity often brings out the best in people. When your dealing with blocks of stone instead of simple wooden structures a "looks big enough" eyeball measurement will not work. So you invent various mathematical ways of figuring out the exact dimensions to be used. Little wonder the pyramids amaze people today, they HAD to come up with a better way of building it, or else you could beat the slaves all you wanted yet nothing would get built. Why? Because once the slave moved the same stone up and down the building site for something like "just another few cuts" several times he would certainly wonder if a beating would be preferable. When it's not just your life on the line but the potential lives of millions creating something as awful as the atom bomb becomes more than just a "job" it becomes a goal and a driving force beyond any money you might be paid.
These guys not only managed to trump the engineers but hopefully managed to show us all that simple is often better.
I think all engineering schools should require that every student aspiring to graduate should spend a good portion of their time working on the physical aspect of whatever they are designing. If they are mechanical engineers then make them work on cars and turn wrenches for a summer. If they want to work as electrical engineers make them climb up the towers and hang antennas. Then they might be able to see that beyond the paper. There is quite the difference between a true engineer who thinks of the end result and someone who can only see their jobs and paycheck.
In alot of cases in Alaska Telestar 7 or IA-7 was the only bird you can hope to get a shot too. Starband's silly response of "get them onto dialup" dosen't make any sense when your phone service is provided via a amplified cell phone antenna.
This isn't something any company would like to have happen. I would love to hear more details about it.
Most locations outside of the road system in Alaska have no other pracitcal means of reaching them other than float plane. Runways are typicaly put in larger towns but, for the most part untill the winter, finding something flat to land on can be a challenge. That's the great part about lakes and float planes, water is mostly flat. Coastal communities can be reached by boat however the time spent is considerable and when your trying to get something done spending 3-7 hours in a boat eats up your daily schedule. Plus you have to consider the weather when traveling long distances via boat, small craft advisories are considered a decent day most of the time:)
I've read slashdot from a location only accessable via float plane running on a generator over a starband connection. Sitting in a tent sending e-mail and reading slashdot while swatting mosquitos definitaly ranks up there.
As I type this I have a uptime of about 4 days. I have found on mac systems the sleep and resume features are excellent. I never turn off this machine and just wake it from sleep all the time. Works great. My sisters x86 though.....not so great, resuming take forever and sometimes the thing just crashes on resume.
I'm glad to see TA in the #1 slot. I can still remember clearly the battles that raged at our small computer store. We would get about 6 people together on a large map and dig in. After much probing and spying eventually someone's base would crack just enough to allow in an attacking wedge. From there your allies would scream in with air support and start knocking down base defenses. All this would be happening and then suddenly you would notice your own base just got nuked away! What happened to the anti-nukes!?!?!?! Well while your where happily wreaking havoc on your enemy's base he had invisable bots hanging around your anti-nukes in case you smashed his defenses. And then to top it all off the guy in the corner that nobody thought much about would come stomping in with a dozen game stopping Mech's and everyone would collectively piss themselves.
The game truly did bring a great amount of strategy to the gamer. You had soooo many choices about how to play it. You certainly could try and build a million of one type of unit and form a overwhelming attack force but a well constructed base would chew threw all your units easily. Or you could play the long game and try and outthink your oppenent. Imagine the only precursor to a major attack being your power suddenly shutting down for no reason. Then you look and all your fusion reactor have just been nuked and your radar shows an incoming squad of fighters. All these things and a well balanced load (until you start adding to many extra units) made it a great game indeed.
And with the internet being the place it is now there have been many great addons made over time. TA Demo recorder is one of the best for allied multiplayer IMHO. The whiteboard and signal flare features aloud you to mark areas for air strikes even if your ally couldn't see. "Hit their power!!!! Now!" Or how about the resource sharing that was built into the game? With three allies you could have one person concetrate on base defense, another on ecomony and recon, and another be the war cheif. This worked so well in fact that after awhile (10 hours or so) we had to play a free for all just to give the mind a break.
Heck I should just shut up about this game for now, go try it. Go over to planetannilation.com and see where you can still buy it, buy TA and the Core expansion and get a few friends over and try it out. Demo Recorder is higly recommended but a bit buggy sometimes.
I remember my first song being a Porno For Pyro's song. I remember the 486DX66 sitting beside my bed would barley play it using winplay 3 or whatever that stupid thing was called. So then someone on undernet suggested I install linux. From there I got my sound card working and managed to get mpg123 to play it using a bit of downsampling. After that I had to build a decent download manager to grab mp3's while I slept (anyone remeber ncftp 2?) It's safe to say that mp3's where one of the major reasons I switched over to linux.
It wasn't much later that I was taking stacks of zip disks to school and grabbing mp3's off hotline servers at about 500k/sec. The challenge was getting hfs drivers for linux. Seeing something scream across the network in about 5 minutes made me want a server of my own. Hence I started to investigate colocation and other options. Before I knew it I was working installing linux machines for various places. Mp3's took a back burner and now I'm using iTunes for all my music. All my CD's are encoded in high bitrate AAC's and I buy the songs I want using akami's great network.
So it's safe to say that MP3's actually did fuel invocation and growth in this nerds life. The funny part was in the beginning it was mainly about building a collection that supplemented your music CDs. The Piracy of the thing wasn't really an issue. Heck most people hosted mp3's off ftp servers that you could log into freely. Now there are groups dedicated to releasing mp3s onto SuperNova and such. I know several people who started on linux because there where no good ftp servers for windows that would handle incoming directories properly.
Oh well, now there are simply more and more people doing it so it's no longer in the shadows as much.
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest, I would rather the currency was pegged to something hard to gather. As for the antisemitic meme stuff, I didn't mention anything in that vein, you did. Try your macro somewhere else were the context makes more sense.
You really missed the point of 1984. Control of the language is thought control which was kind of the whole point he was trying to get across.
All this from the human who won't even put a name to his words on a public forum.
"Socialist programs" do not equate to "socialism". Double plus redef word think.
Actually, they do here in Alaska. Some communities are so far outside the "fire service" area it isn't practical to respond to every call. Other's choose not to pay the taxes and the fire services will only respond if there is someone in the house, and the likely give you a nice bill. I had a friend who saw one of his neighbors houses go up in this exact way, he called the "local" fire department and reported the fire, they asked if anyone was home and when he said no, they told him to let it burn. The main concern was neighboring structures and forest fires since no lives were in danger.
This sums up the central problem, promises of "free stuff because you deserve it" will always win against the core idea of "work hard and you will see rewards in the end". Nah, i'll just sign up for the "free stuff" train, they have holograms and hip young candidates who do IAMA's on reddit.
Say you issue a UBI to everyone that amounts to 10% of their income. Everybody now has a "free" 10% boost. Congratulations you have now inflated the currency by 10%. When dodging pitchforks, a duck and weave motion may be best.
The next logical step usually is price controls to 'hold down inflation" which leads to shortages of products and consuming of your pets in the end.
Of course a private company can express whatever view they like. The real danger here is the echo chamber effect at play. Most of tech is heavily biased towards the left/authoritarian side of the field lately which is a shame. The early days had places such as alt.sex.hamster.and.duct.tape with a voracious defense of freedom of speech. Now I see hate speech clauses showing up in all sorts of places. In the end, if you only allow admittance of similar views and like thought you will create a mono culture. Mono cultures tend to fail.
Google is forgetting that nearly half of our nation voted for the president. I wonder how many contracts for google's cloud services will be renewed by the federal government? This sort of obvious bias will likely have a measurable effect on the bottom line. Maybe they'll learn from this or fail and someone else will learn from the mistake. Likely not though, I suspect more collusion to ban "bad" actors such as Alex Jones.
Wrong-o! The point of the 2nd is as a final stop against a tyrannical government. This means "military hardware". One of the founders actually addressed the exact question of canons aboard ships in regards to the 2nd early on. I'm too tired tonight to look up the exact reference though so you'll just dismiss the idea out of hand.
Good old Cody Wilson. I suspect he's running low on funds and needs some media facetime to pay a few bills. It's a good troll either way though. This whole episode reminds me of having to pull pgp sources off non-US servers in the early days because our freedom loving government decided encryption was a munition. It's sad to see how often attempts to ban disruptive technologies occur by default these days. No, you won't be able to 3d print a glock 19 but the idea is really what is important here. Plus, how often do you see the 1st and 2nd being at the forefront of an issue?
For all the people throwing knee jerk stereotypical responses around keep in mind the central idea of the legal filings around this is to keep source code protected as speech. I would think an OSS crowd would applaud this idea but since it's an evil baby killing gun being coded people conflate this particular speech with BAD. It's rather like banning wrong think on facebook or twitter actually. It's hard to stand up for the rights of idiots and assholes in order to protect your right to be an idiot or asshole. Since the decision to stand up is hard that should be a strong signal to make sure you do stand up.
What an amazing idea! Let's just ban an entire industry that literately is the foundation to modern society and rely totally on imports to cover our needs. I'm sure with all the bunny rabbits dancing and the sunflowers singing the chorus all will work out just fine.
Idiots.
Let's face it, 100% of the users on the internet are never going to learn to practice safe sex. So say you get an infection rate of 20%, that's still plenty of garbage floating around. It's time to start implementing a default deny policy on executables. Shriner and others have talked about this for years and windows 7 has the ability to lock down the OS to only binaries signed by allowed certificates. Implementation on unix like machines is already starting and it would be simple to start adding further hooks into the kernel to block unsigned binaries from even entering address space. This is not to say the signing mechanisms won't be attacked but we have to start moving forward. Virus and e-mail scanners will always be one step behind unless they figure out preemptive solutions that work and don't effect the end user. Once you start making the OS difficult to the user you've lost sight of the whole point and they'll happily click around you're pretty little warning boxes anyway.
The internet is no longer safe, use a condom.
Maybe they just wanted to have childs...
2.5 years is a long time and they probably changed their mind
The above makes sense. Couples who already were comfortable with having a child would be ideal couples to participate in a study of birth control effectiveness.
You wouldn't want the set with whom panic would arise at the mere thought of their birth control method failing.
I'm going to have to agree with Brett. It does suck that our government has taken such a turn towards security away from individual privacy as of late. The stereotypical image of the evil g-man shrugging his unconcerned shoulders over a bird coming down on city full of people is silly. There are plenty of people who work for the federal government who care quite a bit about all those "taxpayers" keeping them in the job.
On a related note take a look at the role of the "range safety officer" during satellite launches. Then think about the range safety officer with his hand over the "destroy" button during shuttle launches.
Ahmen to that brother.
If you think it's a conspiracy just GO THERE! It's outside of Glenallen and I think you'll find the people are very nice and open. There are no secret underground labs filled with people strapped to strange machines.
Glenallen (and it's neighbor Gakona) doesn't have any property taxes and no local government to speak of. For the most part any police or governmental involvement will be via the state government or a federal agency. People move to glenallen and put a little cabin and choose to live off the grid to remove themselves from society and the governing agencies. If the government themselves decide to move to glenallen and build large installation that has the capability to run off the grid you have a perfect breeding ground for these conspiracies.
All of these conspiracy theories reek of someone who didn't get the job he/she wanted at UAF. Imagine if you have an ex-professor who is very grumpy at the HAARP project walk into town and put a voice to your fears. You have to remember the winters are Cold and Long up here. Towards solstice we have precious little useable daylight to work with. People end up staying inside all the time talking to the same people about the same old things. Somethings get worse than a friday night sewing circle. Combine those factors with this big installation down the road that you don't fully understand and you start to see things that just aren't there.
From what I understand, one of the guys repairing and rebuilding the transmitters there is also an avid ham. HARRP has often been involved with ham's during their experiments and provides great services to the HAM community including a ionosound used to "look" at the ionosphere (Ref 1). If you want to hear strange noises go to any HAM's house and ask to listen to HF. You can spot a HAM's house by the large amounts of wire and aluminum in the air in the form of towers and antennas. The HF bands are full of strange and wonderful noises that if you let your mind wander could become alien communication sounds. In reality it's probably that power transformer down the street but that's not quite so exciting.
If you want a conspiracy you only need to look towards the current administration and military actions around the world. Even there though I doubt there is a wide conspiracy going on, our upper echelons of government are just too incompetent to hold a broad sweeping evil conspiracy. Instead it's composed of 70% idealism and 30% ignorance in the form of reforming the world to be like america.
Ref 1: http://137.229.36.30/cgi-bin/digisonde/latest.cgi
Amen to that brother.
Realistically most users don't even need most of the new features that are out there. The only reason to get some of them is because BUG fixes go with it. Why can't people work more on bugs first before they go onto to new features? Instead the typical release cycle goes like this:
Version 1.0: Release! Let the peasants rejoice!
Version 1.1: Opps! The Solaris peasants need this fixed. While I was at it I put in a plugin system. Rejoice again peasants!
Version 1.2: Umm...plugin system is really busted, fixed it.
Version 1.4: Okay okay, so I had a FEW bugs, I fixed that and now the plugins work again!
Version 1.5: Bob released a really BITCHN plugin but it breaks things. Compatibility with Bob's plugin.
Version 1.6: Oh yeah, PPC people may want to use this too.
Version 1.7: Umm...Bob's plugin patch busted i386 but you'll need a new version of libassine.
and so on, rinse and repeat.
Oh well....this is why I dig ham radio, some things don't change because they don't need to.
The distance and latency problem is indeed the main issue. I've only worked with Starband systems so i can't talk for the other providers out there but....
typically i saw a ping time of about 600-800 ms. Working with ssh over a connection such as this is a bit hard but if you know your keyboard shortcuts you can do alright. You just have to think about what your going to do before hand and not be addicted to the backspace command. Another option is to edit files using emacs or vim's ssh remote access method.
Starband's 480 line of modems now has the "TCP acceleration" software built in which helps out quite a bit. I suspect what happens is some sort of UDP encapsulation but please don't quote me on that one, i'm not sure of the internals. However, in practice it's quite nice. Once you use their built in http proxy loading a web page acts just like a typical broadband connection. large file-transfers in the downstream direction works very nice as well with speeds of about 100k/sec or so.
Upstream is a different matter. If I understand how the bird is working they use a round robin arraignment for receiving the uplinks from the client ground stations. This means that you have to wait your turn before you can x-mit data up to the bird. Latency kicks in again and upload speeds slow down quite a bit. As of right now i've got a server uploading data files at about 11k/sec. Better than nothing though, and rather cheap and easy to setup.
I agree 100% regarding the ultimate freedom a car brings. We have been given the great opportunity in this country to be able to drive form state to state without any hinderance to speak of. In fact, if we get pulled over at all we often recount it as one of those "rare and embarrassing things" that happened during the trip.
It is this attitude that will have to change very soon or else the US economy will suffer more than we have felt from some whim of the stock market.
Those countries that know how to live close together and have effective methods of transportation put in place will most likely experience a growth period.
The trouble is that our government recently has had a hard time looking at the true causes of problems. Instead we have chosen to elect leaders who provide short term knee jerk solutions that often only get our wheels stuck more in the mud. I can easily see the US government going to war over oil resources more and more in the future in order to cling to our way of life.
Unless we find a way to provide a alternative to cheap fossil fuel transportation, I suspect the US will enter a decline. And with such a large land-mass it's not as if we can just quickly centralize our population.
Anyway, i'll be in the back making some tin foil hats.
I can't help but be amazed by these kids.
Time and time again we see that adversity often brings out the best in people. When your dealing with blocks of stone instead of simple wooden structures a "looks big enough" eyeball measurement will not work. So you invent various mathematical ways of figuring out the exact dimensions to be used. Little wonder the pyramids amaze people today, they HAD to come up with a better way of building it, or else you could beat the slaves all you wanted yet nothing would get built. Why? Because once the slave moved the same stone up and down the building site for something like "just another few cuts" several times he would certainly wonder if a beating would be preferable. When it's not just your life on the line but the potential lives of millions creating something as awful as the atom bomb becomes more than just a "job" it becomes a goal and a driving force beyond any money you might be paid.
These guys not only managed to trump the engineers but hopefully managed to show us all that simple is often better.
I think all engineering schools should require that every student aspiring to graduate should spend a good portion of their time working on the physical aspect of whatever they are designing. If they are mechanical engineers then make them work on cars and turn wrenches for a summer. If they want to work as electrical engineers make them climb up the towers and hang antennas. Then they might be able to see that beyond the paper. There is quite the difference between a true engineer who thinks of the end result and someone who can only see their jobs and paycheck.
In alot of cases in Alaska Telestar 7 or IA-7 was the only bird you can hope to get a shot too. Starband's silly response of "get them onto dialup" dosen't make any sense when your phone service is provided via a amplified cell phone antenna.
This isn't something any company would like to have happen. I would love to hear more details about it.
Most locations outside of the road system in Alaska have no other pracitcal means of reaching them other than float plane. Runways are typicaly put in larger towns but, for the most part untill the winter, finding something flat to land on can be a challenge. That's the great part about lakes and float planes, water is mostly flat. Coastal communities can be reached by boat however the time spent is considerable and when your trying to get something done spending 3-7 hours in a boat eats up your daily schedule. Plus you have to consider the weather when traveling long distances via boat, small craft advisories are considered a decent day most of the time :)
I've read slashdot from a location only accessable via float plane running on a generator over a starband connection. Sitting in a tent sending e-mail and reading slashdot while swatting mosquitos definitaly ranks up there.
As I type this I have a uptime of about 4 days. I have found on mac systems the sleep and resume features are excellent. I never turn off this machine and just wake it from sleep all the time. Works great. My sisters x86 though.....not so great, resuming take forever and sometimes the thing just crashes on resume.
Google also has a list of the "hidden features" here
I'm glad to see TA in the #1 slot. I can still remember clearly the battles that raged at our small computer store. We would get about 6 people together on a large map and dig in. After much probing and spying eventually someone's base would crack just enough to allow in an attacking wedge. From there your allies would scream in with air support and start knocking down base defenses. All this would be happening and then suddenly you would notice your own base just got nuked away! What happened to the anti-nukes!?!?!?! Well while your where happily wreaking havoc on your enemy's base he had invisable bots hanging around your anti-nukes in case you smashed his defenses. And then to top it all off the guy in the corner that nobody thought much about would come stomping in with a dozen game stopping Mech's and everyone would collectively piss themselves.
The game truly did bring a great amount of strategy to the gamer. You had soooo many choices about how to play it. You certainly could try and build a million of one type of unit and form a overwhelming attack force but a well constructed base would chew threw all your units easily. Or you could play the long game and try and outthink your oppenent. Imagine the only precursor to a major attack being your power suddenly shutting down for no reason. Then you look and all your fusion reactor have just been nuked and your radar shows an incoming squad of fighters. All these things and a well balanced load (until you start adding to many extra units) made it a great game indeed.
And with the internet being the place it is now there have been many great addons made over time. TA Demo recorder is one of the best for allied multiplayer IMHO. The whiteboard and signal flare features aloud you to mark areas for air strikes even if your ally couldn't see. "Hit their power!!!! Now!" Or how about the resource sharing that was built into the game? With three allies you could have one person concetrate on base defense, another on ecomony and recon, and another be the war cheif. This worked so well in fact that after awhile (10 hours or so) we had to play a free for all just to give the mind a break.
Heck I should just shut up about this game for now, go try it. Go over to planetannilation.com and see where you can still buy it, buy TA and the Core expansion and get a few friends over and try it out. Demo Recorder is higly recommended but a bit buggy sometimes.
I remember my first song being a Porno For Pyro's song. I remember the 486DX66 sitting beside my bed would barley play it using winplay 3 or whatever that stupid thing was called. So then someone on undernet suggested I install linux. From there I got my sound card working and managed to get mpg123 to play it using a bit of downsampling. After that I had to build a decent download manager to grab mp3's while I slept (anyone remeber ncftp 2?) It's safe to say that mp3's where one of the major reasons I switched over to linux.
It wasn't much later that I was taking stacks of zip disks to school and grabbing mp3's off hotline servers at about 500k/sec. The challenge was getting hfs drivers for linux. Seeing something scream across the network in about 5 minutes made me want a server of my own. Hence I started to investigate colocation and other options. Before I knew it I was working installing linux machines for various places. Mp3's took a back burner and now I'm using iTunes for all my music. All my CD's are encoded in high bitrate AAC's and I buy the songs I want using akami's great network.
So it's safe to say that MP3's actually did fuel invocation and growth in this nerds life. The funny part was in the beginning it was mainly about building a collection that supplemented your music CDs. The Piracy of the thing wasn't really an issue. Heck most people hosted mp3's off ftp servers that you could log into freely. Now there are groups dedicated to releasing mp3s onto SuperNova and such. I know several people who started on linux because there where no good ftp servers for windows that would handle incoming directories properly.
Oh well, now there are simply more and more people doing it so it's no longer in the shadows as much.