The trouble with the "Economist" article began with the introductory paragraph:
"The Internet was supposed to be all about freedom."
NO! The Internet was all about connecting different Department of Defense computers together so that resources could be shared! That's it! End of story! All of this nonsense about the Internet being some kind of utopian Libertarian commune is Leftist mind-rot! "The Economist" tends to lean that way.
Slashdot should have linked to an article more like http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~newman/chap2.html
Oh, you mean the religious leader with a million rounds of ammunition in a concrete bunker in the middle of his religious compound? The guy who fired on the first agents who knocked on his compound's door with a warrent? The guy who later stated that the armor personnel carriers shouldn't come too close to his compound, because he had enough firepower to destroy them? Since when was his case over freedom of speech?
If a terrorist or some "rogue nation" - the State Departments current euphemism of the month - really wanted to nail the states, they'd carry over a 15lb nuke in a backpack and take out half of LA.
Uh, no, I don't think so. The critical mass for a plutonium sphere is about 10 kg (equivalent to 22 lbs at sea level). For weapons-grade uranium, it's about 15 kg (equivalent to 33 lbs at sea level). In addition, you would have to have a few pounds of high explosives and some triggering circuitry. It isn't too likely you would get this all assembled in something lighter than 100 lbs... just as it isn't too likely that a Third World country would have the means of producing or acquiring such a device (despite the situation in the former Soviet states).
I've heard the "suitcase nuke" argument used against missile defense on previous occasions. It has always seemed like a lame argument to me; how is it better to leave all modes of delivery open (ICBM, bomber, VW), than to eliminate the more likely modes of delivery (ICBM and bomber)? Of course, in theory, a nuclear device could be trucked up to some building and detonated a la McVeigh-style. That's the reason that antimissile weapons should not be our only defense.
The "suitcase bomb" argument is one of false alternatives (among other crimes of bad reasoning)--either we allow missiles to deliver nukes, or we encourage VWs to deliver nukes. Even if those were the alternatives, I'd much rather force a hostile aggressor to have to come here himself and truck the bomb himself, than for him to put it in a machine that he can launch remotely and which will guide itself at hypersonic velocity.
The plane isn't flying itself. The computer only decides when to fire the laser at the target; it doesn't get the plane into the air from the runway, hunt down targets, then return for refueling and land under only computer guidance.
Re:Directed Energy Weapons or Projectiles?
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Laser-equipped 747
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You are talking about different modes of operation. The depleted uranium (DU) rounds used by the military are for close-range combat. The US Navy uses them to defend the ship against incoming anti-ship missiles, whereas the Army and Air Force are as likely to shoot them against (slow-moving) armored targets. In all cases, they are meant for use at relatively close range and low-to-moderate velocities (less than Mach 2).
The airborn laser is meant to be used at medium range (100 miles or so) on fast moving targets (several Mach number). This is outside the range of current DU projectiles (and SAMs). The idea is that the intense power of the laser beam will weaken the structure of vehicles traveling around Mach 2 or more. Aerodynamic forces would cause the target to disintigrate (aerodynamic forces on a weakened Mach structure is what destroyed the US space shuttle--the shuttle did not actually explode, but rather disintigrated).
A Scud missile re-entering the atmosphere is traveling at several Mach number, making it nearly impossible for a projectile to hit. The same is true of ICBMs. Directed energy weapons (such as lasers) show great promise in use for this class of target.
You may have in mind Korean Airline Flight 007, which was shot down with the loss of 269 civilian passengers by the Soviet military, after the civilian 747 jumbo jet wandered into Soviet territory. It is believed that KAF 007 had been on autopilot (usual practice), and the autopilot had been accidently set just a few degrees from the correct course.
I've heard lots of bad stories about Cyrix chips, but I can't let these go without praising the Cyrix P150+ that I used for over 3 years. I never had a bit of trouble out of that chip. What's more, it held up well to abuse. I haven't bothered to put the case cover back on my box, which would have been OK, except for my male cat... he scored a direct hit in the middle of the motherboard. I flushed out my motherboard with electronic cleaner, of course, but some of the pins on the P150+ chip still formed some corrosion. The printer port stopped working after a few months, as the control circuitry corroded, but the computer still ran fine otherwise, up to the day I finally upgraded to an AMD K6-2 500.
BTW, I help install the Point of Service computers in the US Post Office. They use Cyrix chips; the first year I did this job, I was installing the same P150+ that was running on my machine at home.
I got a job as a laser technician for a company in Garland, Texas, which paid my moving expenses from New Mexico. I worked in the Class 5 clean room, assemblying laser range finders; electronic techs worked outside the clean room assembling the electronics for the devices. It wasn't a very good experience, for many reasons, one of which were the 80+-hour work-weeks (paid hourly, at least) and various surly or rude employees.
I saw a few waves of layoffs outside the clean room. About November, there were hardly any electronic techs left. Even so, I was surprised when my turn came. I had my head stuck under the laminar flow hood of my workstation, trying to sort out the little screws and washers I needed, when my boss tapped me on the back and told me to follow him. I followed him around the clean room, where we picked up a few more people. He parked us in a hallway for a few minutes, then informed us that we were being layed off, and there would be a meeting we would need to attend the next week, so we could get our severance pay.
I was surprised when I arrived at the meeting. There were about 200 people layed off at that meeting, including some whom I hadn't expected to be cut until long after I was gone. The saddest sight to me was the frail woman who had served as receptionist and had to use a walker to get around; she was layed off along with the rest of us. I later heard that a month later, another round of 200 layoffs cleared out even more of the clean room.
About 5 years after my layoff, I returned to Garland, and I swung by the building where I had worked. It was completely vacant and locked, and weeds were growing out of the parking lot. Eventually, I found that the laser department had been sold to Litton; I don't know what Litton did with them.
I have thought about going back into the laser field (I have an AAS degree and a certificate in Laser Electro-Optic Technology), but my first and only experience wasn't very good, and I believe that computer technology has more potential for my benefit than does laser technology.
A lot of companies give no advance notice of termination; this is for security purposes. You can expect this kind of treatment at any job for which the employee handles critical or vital material that they could easily destroy. I'm not sure how that applied to us laser techs, though; I could understand it being true for Accounting.
"Advertisers brought us magazines, daily newspapers, radio theater, and many other aspects of our culture that have become highbrow, in some way BEYOND advertising."
An advertiser pays the newspaper, radio or TV station or magazine for advertising space, and then the newspaper, radio or TV station or magazine uses the money to provide content. The *CYCLE* is completed when the audience of the content buys the product from the advertiser. If you partake of the content, you get the ad; if you don't partake of the content, your chances of seeing or hearing the ad are much lower.
Now, the BIG question; What have Internet spammers brought the Internet community? The spam in my mailbox has little or nothing to do with any of the content I utilize. The content I utilize is not funded by spammers.
True, my mailbox at home gets junk mail sent to it, regardless of my lifestyle. In that case, the junk mailers pay the post office that delivers my mail; in fact, a large percentage of mail is paid (to the post office, among others) advertisement. In contrast, a spammer pays for his Internet connection (sometimes), and a pirated list of names. It's *my* ISP that has to take *my* money to install bigger facilities to handle all the junk mail that doesn't necessarily bring in a dime to *my* ISP.
I resent your sugar-coating the issue as much as I resent spam. The people who are sending me spam are not bringing me content, nor are they patrons of a better society. They are, instead, free-loading, greedy, opportunistic scumbags who will do anything to make a quick buck without having to work or pay for it. They are making *me* have to pay for *their* advertising, even if our only connection to each other is the fact they have *my* e-mail address (which they most likely gathered without my consent).
For the most part, I'm content simply to ignore the "Lose weight fast" and "Get out of debt now" spam sent my way. The ads that anger me are those for porn sites. I am a Christian, and I resent having my moral values attacked by some cheap sleazebag. I did nothing to merit the attention those spammer have given me. I resent their efforts, and all the more as children use the Net. In legitimate advertising, I can complain to the proprietor, or even take him to court. Slimebags are too ashamed to accept responsibility for their actions; they only want money. Like the roaches they are, they hide where they think I can't find them.
I'm personally getting worried (OK, paranoid) due to all this stuff I'm seeing on Slashdot.
Slashdot is not a scientific sampling of society; as such it is not necessarily representative of society. If you have a specific concern, you should explicitly describe it.
It seems like corporations have no desire other than to strip us of what few remaining freedoms we have, and the government is doing nothing to check their power scramble.
When you say, "what few remaining freedoms we have," you make it sound like you think you are in a concentration camp or police state. That would be an extreme attitude that has little bearing on reality.
It appears that you don't like the courts' decisions regarding property rights (those are the Slashdot articles that I've recall that have anything to do with corporations and court action). Have you ever heard the phrase, "There are no easy answers, only intelligent decisions"? Just as you and I have rights, so do corporations and those who finance record labels. Yes, sometimes people have used the courts to get something that was legally theirs, when it appeared that there were some odd ethical situations (such as suing others for copyright infringement when one's own work is based on copyright infringement). However, government cannot run on the basis of ad hoc feelings of right and wrong; if there were no standard for behavior, society could not function.
What I'm wondering is, just how bad IS it? Is the United States still the best choice of a place to live for safety, freedom, and quality of life?
Violent crime in the US is at the lowest level in decades. Unemployment is extremely low, inflation is low. George W. Bush has been elected President, and the Republicans hold the majority of the House and Senate in Congress.
Maybe you would be happier somewhere else, but I doubt I would be. BTW, I've visited Canada, Mexico, Spain, France, Italy and Israel.
I used to be all patriotic and really I believed that...now I'm not so sure.
I used to believe people who said they used to be one way, but now have second thoughts, but now I've been on Usenet long enough to think most people are just trying to hide their agenda when they say such things. "Cynical"... yes, that's the word.
I've been keeping my eye on other nations as places to live, and tallying whether they are cutting down on their citizens' freedoms, as well as whether they seem likely to be in any wars in the next 50 years... I'm personally getting tired of living in a nation where apparently no one in the capital city has read its constitution, or gives a damn. Where everyone elected to high political office breaks the oath they all take, to uphold and protect that same constitution.
Do you have any specific violations of the US Constitution in mind, or are you just using a dramatic word image for the effect?
I'd love to hear what my fellow Slashdotters have to say on the subject. If not the U.S., then where should I go?
Now, there's a wide-open invitation!
Please, no national biases, give me some actual info about places worth living. I'd like to get some ideas on this NOW though, so that if I decide to leave I can get out before doing so becomes a problem. (Did I mention I'm probably too paranoid about this?)
How about this; virtually every developed nation on Earth will be in some sort of armed conflict or face some sort of national crises in the next 50 years? The people in undeveloped nations, of course, will simply starve to death (except for their armies, but you probably wouldn't qualify).
If you don't like my suggestion, there is another option. You could work to make your world a better place. One way to do that is to learn what is really happening (from MANY reputable sources), learn what the laws really mean, and be careful with your facts.
I have a friend at my workplace who claims to have 20 Gig of MP3s. I learned this when I happened to mention to him that his inch-tall stack of CDs was a lot more music than I would ever listen to.
I have a membership with some music club that offered me a bunch of free CDs if I would buy a certain number. I bought my required number, but I haven't even bothered ordering the remainder of my free CDs.
I did not see any significant technical error in the article, unless one counts the author's strangly negative views that he seems to believe are dirty secrets, when in fact they are well-known and accepted trade-offs. The article also was not written as well as a static Web page on a professional site should have been, particularly concerning grammar and wording errors. Most of the language errors were minor, but there was one mistake that changed the meaning of the sentence. I believe that the line that reads,
"Compare this to the 8086 and 80286 whose 16-bit instructions could only use certain INSTRUCTIONS for certain operations"
should instead read,
"Compare this to the 8086 and 80286 whose 16-bit instructions could only use certain REGISTERS for certain operations."
(I emphasized the word that should be changed by capitalizing it.)
I very much appreciated the information and insights that the author provided in his article.
Funny how you managed to describe implementation and nothing regarding design or durability of the files which is whats required for a standard.
Why is that funny? Why would I go into such technical details in this thread, especially when the dissatisfaction expressed with DOC was that new versions of Word can't open old versions of Word? It seems to me that if you use an application that overcomes the problems you have, you don't need to worry about the technical aspects of the file format.
A point that should not be lost is when each score was playing. I notice that during man's routine life (most importantly, when he thinks he is so hot, but isn't really going anywhere), the scenes are slow-paced and "Blue Danube" plays. Then, there is the moment of fantastic inspiration that spurs man's evolution into something he desired but could not previously obtain. At those times, the score changes to "Also Sprach Zarathstra." It is probably significant that Zarathustra was the self-ascendant man in Friedrich Nietzsche's work "Thus Spake Zarathustra"(Richard Strauss was inspired by Nietzsche).
I take the slow pace and gentle music as an illustration that much of the "modern" (or futuristic) world is nice, but it is not taking man to his ultimate potential.
Frankly, "2001" was a bunch of baloney. (If you aren't familiar with US colloquialisms, that means the theme was nonsense.) Yeah, if you have a certain philosophical belief, you would think that "2001" is one of the greatest movies ever written. However, even a true believer has to face the fact that this movie has little bearing to the reality we witness--he just won't know the reason for that. The reason is that the premise of the movie is nonsense, and the theme is nonsense. Of course, my comment won't be popular; the world has been sold (the better term would be "brainwashed by") the Materialistic nonsense that is the core of "2001." Besides that, the meaning it assigns to life is ultimately worthless to humanity.
I will grant that the movie is aesthetically-pleasing--which simply means that you can wrap anything to make it look pretty. I doubt that I have ever seen a visually- or technically-superior movie. I suspect that most people watching it don't have a clue of the extent of the storytelling genius that is manifested in front of them... but, then, most people pay very little attention to the movies they watch.
OK, maybe you don't think of the US Navy as being a company, but they have the same policy. If a recruit doesn't advance to E-4 (often starting as E-1 to E-3) within 4 years, he is not eligible for re-enlistment. This was the same bunch that later released thousands of Navymen after the fall of the Soviet Union. Clearly, the Navy does not feel that it faces a serious worker shortage (though they always want a lot of new recruits).
Not only do you have to advance up the paygrades (E-1 to E-4), you also have change the type of job you are doing (otherwise, you won't make the advancement requirements). There was some debate as to the value in forcing someone who enjoys his job as a Navy truck driver into taking a desk job, for example.
Things may be a bit different in the IT world (for a while), because the job market is a little bit tight. I just read that about a half-million IT jobs went unfilled last year. Maybe 800 000 IT jobs will be unfilled this coming year. Demand is greatly outstripping supply in some areas (of course, I don't really see that in my field, but someone somewhere is making big bucks off this situation). So, your company may be taking a big risk in losing you.
Oh, that reminds me. My current company forced several techs to take supervisor jobs, including one man who fought it every step of the way. These things happen when a department is stressed in some way. In our case, the department's efforts were too little, too late; we don't need new supervisors in this department, anymore. Your department might be facing the same situation.
I have been involved in a lot of computer-related areas, including undergrad CSE studies. I already had an Associate's (2-year) degree in Laser Electro-Optic Technology before I took 4 semesters of CSE.
I looked at the requirements for finishing a BS in a computer degree. I could probably get a CS degree in 18 months, but it would take at least 24 months to finish a CE or CSE degree.
Last year, it was noted in the computer press that possessing certain certifications was worth just as much as a degree. If you hold the certification, and you can convince people that you know what you are doing, the employer probably won't care whether you have a BS or not.
It occured to me that I had no business getting any kind of job for which advanced calculus and differential equations were critical (e.g., people's lives would depend on getting exactly the correct answer every time). The professors at the school teaching me CSE had the philosophy that they weren't going to pass anyone who could not meet an extremely high level of accurate and fast problem-solving. I enjoy knowing all the technical details about technical things, and I enjoying putting things together, but I want to do it at my own pace, under less stress.
I think I could probably do well in CE, and easily pass all the required classes. The trouble is, CE might not quite be the environment I want. I want to be someplace that when people are impressed by new information, that information is new to the human race; esoteric, sophisticated and rational. The trouble with so much of IT is that so many people have odd little "theories"--myths, really--of what the machines are doing, or feel hot because they understand Ethernet.
I consider college to be something of a scam. I began taking college classes in high school, and I continued taking classes as I could for more than a decade--going on two, now. I've worked as a computer tech, computer operator and wordprocessor. Now, I work on a computer help desk doing telephone support.
I've programmed in 7 programming languages. I've taken classes on Novell networks. In all this time, I've seen the cost of college rise much faster than the rate of inflation. I've had enough of trying to scrounge around for enough money to stay in school just so I could be in debt for several years after graduation. The schools really don't care about the costs; they only care about how they are going to get money out of the students. The reason college costs have risen so fast is that schools know that students are a conduit for massive amounts of funding.
I generally agree with Eloquence, but maybe for slightly different (less enlightened) reasons. My experience with HTML has been that nothing really handles it well, by which I mean that I can simply produce my documents, format and manage them with the HTML-handling not requiring my attention. Instead of doing that, I find that I have to keep an eagle-eye on the output, because it probably won't be what I want. What's worse, HTML is not handled in standard ways by either editors or browsers. I regard HTML as being the barest minimum necessary to make a hyperlinked system work (and why would you use it for non-hyperlinked material?).
LaTeX is notably difficult to learn, though it is said to be worth the effort, if you need to typeset text (especially formulas).
PDF documents are annoying to load, and it is annoying to scroll through them (everytime I get near the bottom of the page, the last paragraph disappears and the next page is displayed). Besides, the files are a fairly large size.
I do not completely agree that plain old ASCII TXT files are insufficient for most tasks. True, the font is not that pleasing or easy to read, but the files are small and simple. It was used for 100 years (in the form of typewritten documents), and it worked just fine. Probably all editors and viewers can read it.
I would like to point out that WordPerfect can open any preserved file that any earlier version of WordPerfect has ever created. I can still access my WordPerfect 4.2 (DOS) files just as easily as my WordPerfect 8 documents. In fact, I've been told that if you have to open old and new Word documents, you need to get WordPerfect; unlike Word, WordPerfect can open all the Word documents, too. Formatting doesn't always survive, though. Furthermore, WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) had a beautiful equation editor, second to LaTeX. It doesn't handle HTML very well, though (minimal support).
I think it is important for humanity to understand their surroundings as best as possible. True, Pluto is distant, and doing any science there must be more expensive than doing similar science here. Perhaps when we get there, we will find that it is only an ordinary ball of ice.
It is important that we send at least one probe to Pluto to find out its true nature, close-up and in some detail. Whether there is something there or not, we should establish the character of the region. The best an Earth-area telescope will tell us for the forseeable future are certain general details; we might pin down the sizes of Pluto and her moon. We probably won't be able to see any but the largest surface details on Pluto, and we certainly couldn't do much study of Pluto's atmosphere (beyond maybe gaining insight into its composition). We probably will not know if Pluto or Charon has a magnetic field until we visit the bodies; that information alone is highly significant to theories of planetary formation and development.
It would probably be worth several million dollars just to get a detailed surface map of Pluto; how much money have we spent to get good maps of Earth? I admit that Earth maps have an immediate practical use, but we are talking about science, not necessarily immediate practical use. There once was a time when science was perhaps more pure, when people didn't view science in terms of material gain.
It would be a shame if Pluto's atmosphere were to freeze solid before we send a probe out there. It will be a few centuries before Pluto's atmosphere would vaporize, again.
I agree that it is important to prioritize our efforts. I am in favor of general space exploration. I believe that it would be extremely beneficial to astronomers for us to have an observatory established on Moon's far side. The advantages are many; all optical and radio noise from Earth would be completely blocked out by the large mass of Moon. There would be no atmosphere to interfere with observations. Mirrors could be larger on Moon than on Earth, due to the low gravity. It is likely that no one else is going to be tracking across the sky or ground near Moon's far side for most of the next century (it would be rare, anyway).
There is also the slim chance that He4, which appears to be abundant on Moon, would provide a better source of nuclear fusion fuel than Earth's oceans.
Slashdot Mirror
"The Internet was supposed to be all about freedom."
NO! The Internet was all about connecting different Department of Defense computers together so that resources could be shared! That's it! End of story! All of this nonsense about the Internet being some kind of utopian Libertarian commune is Leftist mind-rot! "The Economist" tends to lean that way. Slashdot should have linked to an article more like http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~newman/chap2.html
Uh, no, I don't think so. The critical mass for a plutonium sphere is about 10 kg (equivalent to 22 lbs at sea level). For weapons-grade uranium, it's about 15 kg (equivalent to 33 lbs at sea level). In addition, you would have to have a few pounds of high explosives and some triggering circuitry. It isn't too likely you would get this all assembled in something lighter than 100 lbs ... just as it isn't too likely that a Third World country would have the means of producing or acquiring such a device (despite the situation in the former Soviet states).
I've heard the "suitcase nuke" argument used against missile defense on previous occasions. It has always seemed like a lame argument to me; how is it better to leave all modes of delivery open (ICBM, bomber, VW), than to eliminate the more likely modes of delivery (ICBM and bomber)? Of course, in theory, a nuclear device could be trucked up to some building and detonated a la McVeigh-style. That's the reason that antimissile weapons should not be our only defense.
The "suitcase bomb" argument is one of false alternatives (among other crimes of bad reasoning)--either we allow missiles to deliver nukes, or we encourage VWs to deliver nukes. Even if those were the alternatives, I'd much rather force a hostile aggressor to have to come here himself and truck the bomb himself, than for him to put it in a machine that he can launch remotely and which will guide itself at hypersonic velocity.
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/US-Israel/thel.ht ml
The airborn laser is meant to be used at medium range (100 miles or so) on fast moving targets (several Mach number). This is outside the range of current DU projectiles (and SAMs). The idea is that the intense power of the laser beam will weaken the structure of vehicles traveling around Mach 2 or more. Aerodynamic forces would cause the target to disintigrate (aerodynamic forces on a weakened Mach structure is what destroyed the US space shuttle--the shuttle did not actually explode, but rather disintigrated).
A Scud missile re-entering the atmosphere is traveling at several Mach number, making it nearly impossible for a projectile to hit. The same is true of ICBMs. Directed energy weapons (such as lasers) show great promise in use for this class of target.
See also:
http://www.reagan.com/plate.main/ronald/speeches/r rspeech0f.html
http://www.airdisaster.com/cvr/kal007.html
Note the line where he says, "tweaked and recompiled the kernel." When was the last time you knew of someone who did that for any Microsoft product?
BTW, I help install the Point of Service computers in the US Post Office. They use Cyrix chips; the first year I did this job, I was installing the same P150+ that was running on my machine at home.
I saw a few waves of layoffs outside the clean room. About November, there were hardly any electronic techs left. Even so, I was surprised when my turn came. I had my head stuck under the laminar flow hood of my workstation, trying to sort out the little screws and washers I needed, when my boss tapped me on the back and told me to follow him. I followed him around the clean room, where we picked up a few more people. He parked us in a hallway for a few minutes, then informed us that we were being layed off, and there would be a meeting we would need to attend the next week, so we could get our severance pay.
I was surprised when I arrived at the meeting. There were about 200 people layed off at that meeting, including some whom I hadn't expected to be cut until long after I was gone. The saddest sight to me was the frail woman who had served as receptionist and had to use a walker to get around; she was layed off along with the rest of us. I later heard that a month later, another round of 200 layoffs cleared out even more of the clean room.
About 5 years after my layoff, I returned to Garland, and I swung by the building where I had worked. It was completely vacant and locked, and weeds were growing out of the parking lot. Eventually, I found that the laser department had been sold to Litton; I don't know what Litton did with them.
I have thought about going back into the laser field (I have an AAS degree and a certificate in Laser Electro-Optic Technology), but my first and only experience wasn't very good, and I believe that computer technology has more potential for my benefit than does laser technology.
A lot of companies give no advance notice of termination; this is for security purposes. You can expect this kind of treatment at any job for which the employee handles critical or vital material that they could easily destroy. I'm not sure how that applied to us laser techs, though; I could understand it being true for Accounting.
"Advertisers brought us magazines, daily newspapers, radio theater, and many other aspects of our culture that have become highbrow, in some way BEYOND advertising."
An advertiser pays the newspaper, radio or TV station or magazine for advertising space, and then the newspaper, radio or TV station or magazine uses the money to provide content. The *CYCLE* is completed when the audience of the content buys the product from the advertiser. If you partake of the content, you get the ad; if you don't partake of the content, your chances of seeing or hearing the ad are much lower.
Now, the BIG question; What have Internet spammers brought the Internet community? The spam in my mailbox has little or nothing to do with any of the content I utilize. The content I utilize is not funded by spammers.
True, my mailbox at home gets junk mail sent to it, regardless of my lifestyle. In that case, the junk mailers pay the post office that delivers my mail; in fact, a large percentage of mail is paid (to the post office, among others) advertisement. In contrast, a spammer pays for his Internet connection (sometimes), and a pirated list of names. It's *my* ISP that has to take *my* money to install bigger facilities to handle all the junk mail that doesn't necessarily bring in a dime to *my* ISP.
I resent your sugar-coating the issue as much as I resent spam. The people who are sending me spam are not bringing me content, nor are they patrons of a better society. They are, instead, free-loading, greedy, opportunistic scumbags who will do anything to make a quick buck without having to work or pay for it. They are making *me* have to pay for *their* advertising, even if our only connection to each other is the fact they have *my* e-mail address (which they most likely gathered without my consent).
For the most part, I'm content simply to ignore the "Lose weight fast" and "Get out of debt now" spam sent my way. The ads that anger me are those for porn sites. I am a Christian, and I resent having my moral values attacked by some cheap sleazebag. I did nothing to merit the attention those spammer have given me. I resent their efforts, and all the more as children use the Net. In legitimate advertising, I can complain to the proprietor, or even take him to court. Slimebags are too ashamed to accept responsibility for their actions; they only want money. Like the roaches they are, they hide where they think I can't find them.
Slashdot is not a scientific sampling of society; as such it is not necessarily representative of society. If you have a specific concern, you should explicitly describe it.
It seems like corporations have no desire other than to strip us of what few remaining freedoms we have, and the government is doing nothing to check their power scramble.
When you say, "what few remaining freedoms we have," you make it sound like you think you are in a concentration camp or police state. That would be an extreme attitude that has little bearing on reality.
It appears that you don't like the courts' decisions regarding property rights (those are the Slashdot articles that I've recall that have anything to do with corporations and court action). Have you ever heard the phrase, "There are no easy answers, only intelligent decisions"? Just as you and I have rights, so do corporations and those who finance record labels. Yes, sometimes people have used the courts to get something that was legally theirs, when it appeared that there were some odd ethical situations (such as suing others for copyright infringement when one's own work is based on copyright infringement). However, government cannot run on the basis of ad hoc feelings of right and wrong; if there were no standard for behavior, society could not function.
What I'm wondering is, just how bad IS it? Is the United States still the best choice of a place to live for safety, freedom, and quality of life?
Violent crime in the US is at the lowest level in decades. Unemployment is extremely low, inflation is low. George W. Bush has been elected President, and the Republicans hold the majority of the House and Senate in Congress.
Maybe you would be happier somewhere else, but I doubt I would be. BTW, I've visited Canada, Mexico, Spain, France, Italy and Israel.
I used to be all patriotic and really I believed that...now I'm not so sure.
I used to believe people who said they used to be one way, but now have second thoughts, but now I've been on Usenet long enough to think most people are just trying to hide their agenda when they say such things. "Cynical" ... yes, that's the word.
I've been keeping my eye on other nations as places to live, and tallying whether they are cutting down on their citizens' freedoms, as well as whether they seem likely to be in any wars in the next 50 years... I'm personally getting tired of living in a nation where apparently no one in the capital city has read its constitution, or gives a damn. Where everyone elected to high political office breaks the oath they all take, to uphold and protect that same constitution.
Do you have any specific violations of the US Constitution in mind, or are you just using a dramatic word image for the effect?
I'd love to hear what my fellow Slashdotters have to say on the subject. If not the U.S., then where should I go?
Now, there's a wide-open invitation!
Please, no national biases, give me some actual info about places worth living. I'd like to get some ideas on this NOW though, so that if I decide to leave I can get out before doing so becomes a problem. (Did I mention I'm probably too paranoid about this?)
How about this; virtually every developed nation on Earth will be in some sort of armed conflict or face some sort of national crises in the next 50 years? The people in undeveloped nations, of course, will simply starve to death (except for their armies, but you probably wouldn't qualify).
If you don't like my suggestion, there is another option. You could work to make your world a better place. One way to do that is to learn what is really happening (from MANY reputable sources), learn what the laws really mean, and be careful with your facts.
I have a membership with some music club that offered me a bunch of free CDs if I would buy a certain number. I bought my required number, but I haven't even bothered ordering the remainder of my free CDs.
"Compare this to the 8086 and 80286 whose 16-bit instructions could only use certain INSTRUCTIONS for certain operations"
should instead read,
"Compare this to the 8086 and 80286 whose 16-bit instructions could only use certain REGISTERS for certain operations."
(I emphasized the word that should be changed by capitalizing it.)
I very much appreciated the information and insights that the author provided in his article.
Why is that funny? Why would I go into such technical details in this thread, especially when the dissatisfaction expressed with DOC was that new versions of Word can't open old versions of Word? It seems to me that if you use an application that overcomes the problems you have, you don't need to worry about the technical aspects of the file format.
A point that should not be lost is when each score was playing. I notice that during man's routine life (most importantly, when he thinks he is so hot, but isn't really going anywhere), the scenes are slow-paced and "Blue Danube" plays. Then, there is the moment of fantastic inspiration that spurs man's evolution into something he desired but could not previously obtain. At those times, the score changes to "Also Sprach Zarathstra." It is probably significant that Zarathustra was the self-ascendant man in Friedrich Nietzsche's work "Thus Spake Zarathustra"(Richard Strauss was inspired by Nietzsche). I take the slow pace and gentle music as an illustration that much of the "modern" (or futuristic) world is nice, but it is not taking man to his ultimate potential.
Frankly, "2001" was a bunch of baloney. (If you aren't familiar with US colloquialisms, that means the theme was nonsense.) Yeah, if you have a certain philosophical belief, you would think that "2001" is one of the greatest movies ever written. However, even a true believer has to face the fact that this movie has little bearing to the reality we witness--he just won't know the reason for that. The reason is that the premise of the movie is nonsense, and the theme is nonsense. Of course, my comment won't be popular; the world has been sold (the better term would be "brainwashed by") the Materialistic nonsense that is the core of "2001." Besides that, the meaning it assigns to life is ultimately worthless to humanity. I will grant that the movie is aesthetically-pleasing--which simply means that you can wrap anything to make it look pretty. I doubt that I have ever seen a visually- or technically-superior movie. I suspect that most people watching it don't have a clue of the extent of the storytelling genius that is manifested in front of them ... but, then, most people pay very little attention to the movies they watch.
OK, maybe you don't think of the US Navy as being a company, but they have the same policy. If a recruit doesn't advance to E-4 (often starting as E-1 to E-3) within 4 years, he is not eligible for re-enlistment. This was the same bunch that later released thousands of Navymen after the fall of the Soviet Union. Clearly, the Navy does not feel that it faces a serious worker shortage (though they always want a lot of new recruits). Not only do you have to advance up the paygrades (E-1 to E-4), you also have change the type of job you are doing (otherwise, you won't make the advancement requirements). There was some debate as to the value in forcing someone who enjoys his job as a Navy truck driver into taking a desk job, for example. Things may be a bit different in the IT world (for a while), because the job market is a little bit tight. I just read that about a half-million IT jobs went unfilled last year. Maybe 800 000 IT jobs will be unfilled this coming year. Demand is greatly outstripping supply in some areas (of course, I don't really see that in my field, but someone somewhere is making big bucks off this situation). So, your company may be taking a big risk in losing you. Oh, that reminds me. My current company forced several techs to take supervisor jobs, including one man who fought it every step of the way. These things happen when a department is stressed in some way. In our case, the department's efforts were too little, too late; we don't need new supervisors in this department, anymore. Your department might be facing the same situation.
I have been involved in a lot of computer-related areas, including undergrad CSE studies. I already had an Associate's (2-year) degree in Laser Electro-Optic Technology before I took 4 semesters of CSE. I looked at the requirements for finishing a BS in a computer degree. I could probably get a CS degree in 18 months, but it would take at least 24 months to finish a CE or CSE degree. Last year, it was noted in the computer press that possessing certain certifications was worth just as much as a degree. If you hold the certification, and you can convince people that you know what you are doing, the employer probably won't care whether you have a BS or not. It occured to me that I had no business getting any kind of job for which advanced calculus and differential equations were critical (e.g., people's lives would depend on getting exactly the correct answer every time). The professors at the school teaching me CSE had the philosophy that they weren't going to pass anyone who could not meet an extremely high level of accurate and fast problem-solving. I enjoy knowing all the technical details about technical things, and I enjoying putting things together, but I want to do it at my own pace, under less stress. I think I could probably do well in CE, and easily pass all the required classes. The trouble is, CE might not quite be the environment I want. I want to be someplace that when people are impressed by new information, that information is new to the human race; esoteric, sophisticated and rational. The trouble with so much of IT is that so many people have odd little "theories"--myths, really--of what the machines are doing, or feel hot because they understand Ethernet. I consider college to be something of a scam. I began taking college classes in high school, and I continued taking classes as I could for more than a decade--going on two, now. I've worked as a computer tech, computer operator and wordprocessor. Now, I work on a computer help desk doing telephone support. I've programmed in 7 programming languages. I've taken classes on Novell networks. In all this time, I've seen the cost of college rise much faster than the rate of inflation. I've had enough of trying to scrounge around for enough money to stay in school just so I could be in debt for several years after graduation. The schools really don't care about the costs; they only care about how they are going to get money out of the students. The reason college costs have risen so fast is that schools know that students are a conduit for massive amounts of funding.
I generally agree with Eloquence, but maybe for slightly different (less enlightened) reasons. My experience with HTML has been that nothing really handles it well, by which I mean that I can simply produce my documents, format and manage them with the HTML-handling not requiring my attention. Instead of doing that, I find that I have to keep an eagle-eye on the output, because it probably won't be what I want. What's worse, HTML is not handled in standard ways by either editors or browsers. I regard HTML as being the barest minimum necessary to make a hyperlinked system work (and why would you use it for non-hyperlinked material?). LaTeX is notably difficult to learn, though it is said to be worth the effort, if you need to typeset text (especially formulas). PDF documents are annoying to load, and it is annoying to scroll through them (everytime I get near the bottom of the page, the last paragraph disappears and the next page is displayed). Besides, the files are a fairly large size. I do not completely agree that plain old ASCII TXT files are insufficient for most tasks. True, the font is not that pleasing or easy to read, but the files are small and simple. It was used for 100 years (in the form of typewritten documents), and it worked just fine. Probably all editors and viewers can read it. I would like to point out that WordPerfect can open any preserved file that any earlier version of WordPerfect has ever created. I can still access my WordPerfect 4.2 (DOS) files just as easily as my WordPerfect 8 documents. In fact, I've been told that if you have to open old and new Word documents, you need to get WordPerfect; unlike Word, WordPerfect can open all the Word documents, too. Formatting doesn't always survive, though. Furthermore, WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS) had a beautiful equation editor, second to LaTeX. It doesn't handle HTML very well, though (minimal support).
I think it is important for humanity to understand their surroundings as best as possible. True, Pluto is distant, and doing any science there must be more expensive than doing similar science here. Perhaps when we get there, we will find that it is only an ordinary ball of ice. It is important that we send at least one probe to Pluto to find out its true nature, close-up and in some detail. Whether there is something there or not, we should establish the character of the region. The best an Earth-area telescope will tell us for the forseeable future are certain general details; we might pin down the sizes of Pluto and her moon. We probably won't be able to see any but the largest surface details on Pluto, and we certainly couldn't do much study of Pluto's atmosphere (beyond maybe gaining insight into its composition). We probably will not know if Pluto or Charon has a magnetic field until we visit the bodies; that information alone is highly significant to theories of planetary formation and development. It would probably be worth several million dollars just to get a detailed surface map of Pluto; how much money have we spent to get good maps of Earth? I admit that Earth maps have an immediate practical use, but we are talking about science, not necessarily immediate practical use. There once was a time when science was perhaps more pure, when people didn't view science in terms of material gain. It would be a shame if Pluto's atmosphere were to freeze solid before we send a probe out there. It will be a few centuries before Pluto's atmosphere would vaporize, again. I agree that it is important to prioritize our efforts. I am in favor of general space exploration. I believe that it would be extremely beneficial to astronomers for us to have an observatory established on Moon's far side. The advantages are many; all optical and radio noise from Earth would be completely blocked out by the large mass of Moon. There would be no atmosphere to interfere with observations. Mirrors could be larger on Moon than on Earth, due to the low gravity. It is likely that no one else is going to be tracking across the sky or ground near Moon's far side for most of the next century (it would be rare, anyway). There is also the slim chance that He4, which appears to be abundant on Moon, would provide a better source of nuclear fusion fuel than Earth's oceans.