Every government, organization, or knitting club in history has encountered the same problem. You get together, agree on a certain set of rules and practices, and start a society.
But over time, more and more rules are added, and things start getting cumbersome. Instead of a little red school house with one teacher and a dozen students, you have a school with several teachers, a hundred students, and a principal. Then you have a few schools with hundreds of students, dozens of teachers, and a school board. Sooner or later, you have a "school district" with hundreds of teachers, thousands of students, principals, coaches, band directors, custodians, paperwork, security cameras, and even more paperwork.
Modern teachers don't spend most of their time teaching. They spend most of their time socializing delinquents, filling out sexual harassment paperwork, documenting troublemakers, grading tests, and working out the lesson plans for the next two weeks, which have to be approved by their bosses.
Teaching? That's for the copious spare time left over after they take Little Johnny to the office because he wore a "Free Kevin!" t-shirt, and nobody knows what in the hell that's supposed to mean.
A class is a board with a teacher on one end and a student on the other.
"You guys have rights, your not allowed to do anything other than those things your rights allow you to do."
Rights under U.S. law are restrictions on the government, not on the citizens. Those rights allow us to do anything not specifically prohibited by law, and there are strong restictions on the law itself.
In other words, you have it backwards. You folks across the Pond can only do what your government lets you do, unless told otherwise. Over here, we can do pretty much what we want, unless the government comes up with a specific restriction that says other wise, and even those restrictions have very specific and strong limits.
One of the great geek shopping experiences. Need an LCD? Laser optics? Discarded missile parts? Anonymous chunks of machined aluminum? Oscilloscopes? Wave-solder machines?
Visiting Disney to get a view of Orlando is like visiting New Jersey to get a view of Wall Street.
...except Newark is closer to Wall Street than Disney is to most of Orlando.
If you want a high-tech theme park, go to Universal Studios Islands of Adventure. The Spider-Man ride, for example.
If you want high-tech business and a look at how people will be working a few years from now, go to a large trade show at the half-mile-long Orange County Convention Center and get a look backstage.
You also need to see Lake Eola. Late afternoon. Part of the reason Orlando got that "City Beautiful" nickname. Go see it, then have some dinner and hit the club scene on a weekend. (Not Church Street- the club district north of there).
I've been hearing about the opportunity represented by HIV for a long time. A number of doctors have pointed out that it's a potential key to the human immune system. The first time I heard this was in the mid 1980s.
Second... there are at least *three* unrelated cancer cures in various stages of testing. Not treatments. Cures. I've seen photos of mice with massive tumors in "before" pictures, and no tumors in the "after" shots.
The next four or five years will be incredibly interesting on most health fronts.
A Terabyte database isn't that huge any more... they're relatively common, in fact. Just about any of the Fortune 100 could point to a petabyte database right now.
For example, Amazon.com is well over a petabyte (a thousand terabytes).
I was one of the first five or six people to play Illuminati. I was working at SJG in 1980/81, and one evening Steve brought out this new project, a card game. Steve Jackson is an insane genius-type, but quite fun...
(I also co-wrote one of his other games, BTW. Look it up.)
Try and find a copy of _Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions_. A fun read, if you're in the right mood. Project Chariot was one of the more innocuous ones they came up with. There was Gasbuggy, which was actually tried in Mississippi, an attempt to free natural gas from a tapped-out field. Didn't work that well.
I can't find my copy of the book (yes, I do have a copy here somewhere), but my favorite one was the proposed "new Canal," to replace the Panama Canal. The idea was to evacuate a few hundred thousand people from a hundred-mile wide stretch of Nicaragua, then set off a couple of hundred thermonuclear bombs, digging a hundred-yard wide trench across Central America.
Not to mention, of course, "make a new pass in the mountains near Needles, California, to cut thirty miles off of the route of Interstate 40." This one almost got adopted. The Mojave Indians might have objected, but what the hey...
Despite reports of "no probs" today, the recently-upgraded computer system at the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles went belly-up statewide on 9/9/99.
It's interesting watching CNN Headline News talk about a "hitch'free" day, when the local news here is all over the story.
In a related story, Intel also gave out a press release that the Athlon chip, by competitor AMD, is also a dead issue.
"I mean, how menay people do you know who own machines with Athlons in them?" said an unnamed Intel spokesman. "In another year or so, Intel will be selling chips at least that fast, and if we ever get Merced to work, it might be that fast, too."
The same folks who claimed that Apple "broke" the G4 are also claiming that they found an easy fix for the problem. If Apple wanted the aftermarket G4s locked out, do you thing they would have done something simple, or something long and complicated?
Not to mention that, out of a number of ROM changes over the last couple of months, *one* (and only one) broke the G4 upgrades designed by *one* company...
Of course, when MS comes out with the *real* follow-on for Windows 98, their already confused naming conventions will have to undergo some big revisions.
If you design your logo to look sufficiently like Red Hat's, they certainly could. And probably would, since their stockholders would throw a fit if the people running the company didn't defend Red Hat's trade dress.
PC laptops aren't anywhere *near* as fast as that, and the best of them only have 66 MHz buses, along with slower compnoents in just about every other sense. There are some new PC laptops that can run at full speed when plugged in, but we used to call those "luggables." When running normally, they're dogs.
Even at the same clock speed, current PC laptops just don't measure up. Not to mention that they're much more expensive for equivalent machines.
Yeah, you get a PC that's about half the speed, and you get to carry four kilos of extra gear around with it to make it useful...
I's seen too many folks with these "teenycomps," and *none* of them go anywhere without the external CD-ROM, power hookups, docking station, and the other crap that they never seem to mention when they talk about how small the machine is.
Not to mention that the keyboards are too small for someone with even medium-sized hands.
They've been playing "Blair Witch" in ten theaters in major markets for the last few weeks. It's also been at a number of film festivals over the last few months.
I've been taking pics with cheapie 110 and 35mm cameras for years, and have gottne into some digital stuff, but I've been looking more into the 35mm world recently. Low-light, elapsed-time, and other types of pics are still not very good on digital, and probably won't be for a while, since the under-$1000 digital market is aimed at what most folks use.
I took some B&W last week that will blow up quite nicely to poster size, which isn't a viable option with current (or near-future) digital cameras- at least, for under a few hundred bucks.
Sites like/. are the most apparent focal points for a change in news sources, but there's a lot more to it than that.
When the Oklahoma City bombing happened, there was a lot of discussion and posting, and I spent a good bit of the following 24 hours in various IRC channels. The "real" media outlets were jabbering on and on about how it was an "obvious Mideastern terror tactic," with zero thought about other possibilities.
Meanwhile, the net denizens on IRC had already started pointing out things like "anyone can make a truck bomb," and that the ATF had offices in the Murrow building. When someone mentioned that the bombing had happened on the anniversary date of the Branch Davidian fire, it all came together. By the middle of that evening, we had put it all in place.
It took another six hours for someone from CNN to mention the above ("this just in"), and the print media took almost two days to start reporting it.
The Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta was another case. When they ran the video of the explosion, I taped it at home, and figured out from the speed of the fragments that it was a gunpowder bomb. One of the folks online asked me a lot of pointed questions about it, and logged off. Half an hour later, CNN used the same points I had made, in the same order, with the same phrasing.
Slashdot Mirror
Most schools restrict teachers to using "approved" books and materials, and teachers can get in serious trouble if they stray from that material.
Every government, organization, or knitting club in history has encountered the same problem. You get together, agree on a certain set of rules and practices, and start a society.
But over time, more and more rules are added, and things start getting cumbersome. Instead of a little red school house with one teacher and a dozen students, you have a school with several teachers, a hundred students, and a principal. Then you have a few schools with hundreds of students, dozens of teachers, and a school board. Sooner or later, you have a "school district" with hundreds of teachers, thousands of students, principals, coaches, band directors, custodians, paperwork, security cameras, and even more paperwork.
Modern teachers don't spend most of their time teaching. They spend most of their time socializing delinquents, filling out sexual harassment paperwork, documenting troublemakers, grading tests, and working out the lesson plans for the next two weeks, which have to be approved by their bosses.
Teaching? That's for the copious spare time left over after they take Little Johnny to the office because he wore a "Free Kevin!" t-shirt, and nobody knows what in the hell that's supposed to mean.
A class is a board with a teacher on one end and a student on the other.
"You guys have rights, your not allowed to do anything other than those things your rights allow you to do."
Rights under U.S. law are restrictions on the government, not on the citizens. Those rights allow us to do anything not specifically prohibited by law, and there are strong restictions on the law itself.
In other words, you have it backwards. You folks across the Pond can only do what your government lets you do, unless told otherwise. Over here, we can do pretty much what we want, unless the government comes up with a specific restriction that says other wise, and even those restrictions have very specific and strong limits.
...is tech heaven.
...and hell.
One of the great geek shopping experiences. Need an LCD? Laser optics? Discarded missile parts? Anonymous chunks of machined aluminum? Oscilloscopes? Wave-solder machines?
It's all there, from time to time...
Visiting Disney to get a view of Orlando is like visiting New Jersey to get a view of Wall Street.
...except Newark is closer to Wall Street than Disney is to most of Orlando.
If you want a high-tech theme park, go to Universal Studios Islands of Adventure. The Spider-Man ride, for example.
If you want high-tech business and a look at how people will be working a few years from now, go to a large trade show at the half-mile-long Orange County Convention Center and get a look backstage.
You also need to see Lake Eola. Late afternoon. Part of the reason Orlando got that "City Beautiful" nickname. Go see it, then have some dinner and hit the club scene on a weekend. (Not Church Street- the club district north of there).
It's just three 1280 by 1024 panels slapped into a single unit, with half-inch black strips between the panels.
I've been hearing about the opportunity represented by HIV for a long time. A number of doctors have pointed out that it's a potential key to the human immune system. The first time I heard this was in the mid 1980s.
Second... there are at least *three* unrelated cancer cures in various stages of testing. Not treatments. Cures. I've seen photos of mice with massive tumors in "before" pictures, and no tumors in the "after" shots.
The next four or five years will be incredibly interesting on most health fronts.
...'nuff said...
A Terabyte database isn't that huge any more... they're relatively common, in fact. Just about any of the Fortune 100 could point to a petabyte database right now.
For example, Amazon.com is well over a petabyte (a thousand terabytes).
Steve and I had fun writing it...
I was one of the first five or six people to play Illuminati. I was working at SJG in 1980/81, and one evening Steve brought out this new project, a card game. Steve Jackson is an insane genius-type, but quite fun...
(I also co-wrote one of his other games, BTW. Look it up.)
Read "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling.
I can't find my copy of the book (yes, I do have a copy here somewhere), but my favorite one was the proposed "new Canal," to replace the Panama Canal. The idea was to evacuate a few hundred thousand people from a hundred-mile wide stretch of Nicaragua, then set off a couple of hundred thermonuclear bombs, digging a hundred-yard wide trench across Central America.
Not to mention, of course, "make a new pass in the mountains near Needles, California, to cut thirty miles off of the route of Interstate 40." This one almost got adopted. The Mojave Indians might have objected, but what the hey...
Despite reports of "no probs" today, the recently-upgraded computer system at the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles went belly-up statewide on 9/9/99.
It's interesting watching CNN Headline News talk about a "hitch'free" day, when the local news here is all over the story.
In a related story, Intel also gave out a press release that the Athlon chip, by competitor AMD, is also a dead issue.
"I mean, how menay people do you know who own machines with Athlons in them?" said an unnamed Intel spokesman. "In another year or so, Intel will be selling chips at least that fast, and if we ever get Merced to work, it might be that fast, too."
So Intel (the maker of USB 2, a competitor to FireWire when it's released in another year and a half or so), gets to decide that FireWire is dying?
How about the SEVEN MILLION FireWire camcorders sold last year?
How about the TWO MILLION Macs sold with FireWire last year?
How about the THREE MILLION PCs that have FireWire installed (built-in and aftermarket) that were sold last year?
Leave it to Intel to declare something dead they can't make money on.
Oh- and as far as that massive $1 per port FireWire licensing fee... do you think that's really making any difference to anyone?
Then why is the fix an "easy work around?"
The same folks who claimed that Apple "broke" the G4 are also claiming that they found an easy fix for the problem. If Apple wanted the aftermarket G4s locked out, do you thing they would have done something simple, or something long and complicated?
Not to mention that, out of a number of ROM changes over the last couple of months, *one* (and only one) broke the G4 upgrades designed by *one* company...
It's just NT 5 with a new name.
Of course, when MS comes out with the *real* follow-on for Windows 98, their already confused naming conventions will have to undergo some big revisions.
If you design your logo to look sufficiently like Red Hat's, they certainly could. And probably would, since their stockholders would throw a fit if the people running the company didn't defend Red Hat's trade dress.
I was just thinking of an old quote...
"The Devil can quote scripture for his own purposes."
PC laptops aren't anywhere *near* as fast as that, and the best of them only have 66 MHz buses, along with slower compnoents in just about every other sense. There are some new PC laptops that can run at full speed when plugged in, but we used to call those "luggables." When running normally, they're dogs.
Even at the same clock speed, current PC laptops just don't measure up. Not to mention that they're much more expensive for equivalent machines.
Yeah, you get a PC that's about half the speed, and you get to carry four kilos of extra gear around with it to make it useful...
I's seen too many folks with these "teenycomps," and *none* of them go anywhere without the external CD-ROM, power hookups, docking station, and the other crap that they never seem to mention when they talk about how small the machine is.
Not to mention that the keyboards are too small for someone with even medium-sized hands.
They've been playing "Blair Witch" in ten theaters in major markets for the last few weeks. It's also been at a number of film festivals over the last few months.
I've been taking pics with cheapie 110 and 35mm cameras for years, and have gottne into some digital stuff, but I've been looking more into the 35mm world recently. Low-light, elapsed-time, and other types of pics are still not very good on digital, and probably won't be for a while, since the under-$1000 digital market is aimed at what most folks use.
I took some B&W last week that will blow up quite nicely to poster size, which isn't a viable option with current (or near-future) digital cameras- at least, for under a few hundred bucks.
Sites like /. are the most apparent focal points for a change in news sources, but there's a lot more to it than that.
When the Oklahoma City bombing happened, there was a lot of discussion and posting, and I spent a good bit of the following 24 hours in various IRC channels. The "real" media outlets were jabbering on and on about how it was an "obvious Mideastern terror tactic," with zero thought about other possibilities.
Meanwhile, the net denizens on IRC had already started pointing out things like "anyone can make a truck bomb," and that the ATF had offices in the Murrow building. When someone mentioned that the bombing had happened on the anniversary date of the Branch Davidian fire, it all came together. By the middle of that evening, we had put it all in place.
It took another six hours for someone from CNN to mention the above ("this just in"), and the print media took almost two days to start reporting it.
The Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta was another case. When they ran the video of the explosion, I taped it at home, and figured out from the speed of the fragments that it was a gunpowder bomb. One of the folks online asked me a lot of pointed questions about it, and logged off. Half an hour later, CNN used the same points I had made, in the same order, with the same phrasing.