Oh sure, you could calculate a series of mathematically elegant trajectories that would allow spacecraft to use minimum energy to traverse the solar system by surfing along various gravipotential boundaries. Or you could build big, throbbing manly Orion rockets.
I personally favor building big manly throbbing Orion rockets, but that's because chaos theory makes my brain hurt and because things that explode are cool.
Micro$oft's bottom line if you began re-engineering pieces of their operating systems. As an example take M$'s network stack in Win9x and Win NT, it sucked. Now, we know that it' s possible to write decent third-party OS extensions for Windoze, witness Trumpet Winsock. What if, and I realize that I am speaking out of my ass here, some group of programmers were to look at an OS such as WinNT or Win98 and figure out how to fix the more objectionable pieces of the OS (e.g, the network stack) and then released those fixes into the public domain with a GPL'd license?
If you were able to say to users "Yeah, you could upgrade to WinXP to fix all of those horrible bugs or you could download this nifty free software package and do the same thing to your Win98, NT, 2k installations and not have to comply with objectionable licensing terms, ever-increasing licensing fees and the probability that you're going to have to buy new hardware anyways" how many people would do this.
I can tell you that for the company I used to work for until Monday, a large dot.com in the
Seattle area named after a prominent South American river, there was little or no enthusiasm among the Wintel techies or the finance people for replacing our Wintel hardware running Win2k and NT or for paying
the license fees for XP. Given business conditions today I really don't think that we were unique in this respect.
One area that the article did not touch on
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
is Linux in embedded devices. I have a Tivo at home which runs, if I have read correctly, a modified version of Linux. The PS/2 also runs a modified version of Linux (please correct me if I'm wrong on this). Linux provides those considering building devices such as consoles and PVRs a reliable and scalable operating system that can be adapted to many environments. This allows developers to come up with interesting new devices (such as the Tivo) without paying the Microsoft tax, both financially for licensing and also in terms of the performance and reliability issues that arise when you try to shoehorn a desktop OS into an embedded device.
Thousands of airplanes built in the 1930, 1940s and 1950s crashed. We're still building the damned things and we're still flying in them, despite the fact that Islamic whackjobs like to drive them into tall buildings. I would love to take a trip across the ocean on a blimp. And spending three days to get across the ocean to Berlin on a blimp is in my mind better than having to fly through Chicago O'Hare and Frankfurt am Main.
Please step away from the crackpipe. Sir, put the crackpipe down and please step away from it. I have a Sunfire Signature Classic Tube Preamplifier, I picked it up a few years ago when I had some money and it was being liquidated by Magnolia HiFi in Seattle. It's a neat amp, it's built like a tank, has an impressive phono stage, does not have lots of useless flashing lights and has a neat window in the front so you can look inside and see the tubes. This amp, which lists for about $2000 and which I paid $900 for, has specifications that are almost identical to the $250 Onkyo preamp that it replaced. Does it sound better than the Onkyo preamp? Well, I would have to say, with ears battered by 13 years of working on armored vehicles and spending weekends at a firing range, that it doesn't, it just looks cooler. Compare the published specifications on any piece of tube gear with those of a similar piece of solid-state gear and you will find that the solid state gear performs better in terms of distortion. Also tube gear is horrendously inefficient. I was considering building a pair of tube power amplifiers a few years back. I was interested in a 200 wpc design, one of the biggest reasons I didn't build these was the fact that each amp would consume about 1Kw of power. Now, if the audio power output is 200wpc where are those extra 800 watts going? Well, they're making the room warmer, which is fine in the winter, when you can play your music and have a 1600 watt space heater, but is not so good in the summer.
I saw AoTC at the Cinerama in downtown Seattle last Friday. The Cinerama is set up to do 70mm and it's damned impressive when they do (LoTR was completely awesome). Yet I was unimpressed with AoTC, there were digital artifacts scattered throughout the film which I assume are caused by the TI DLP system used for projecting the movie. If digital can make it easier to distribute films great, but not if the quality is going to suck.
Hollywood makes a living by manipulating people's feelings and emotions. They make a very good living at it so you'd have trouble competing with their dollars but more important, you will find it very difficult to compete with their propaganda resources. They might make TV spots with famous actors or actresses about how property rights made this country great. Or they might start casting nefarious hackers and pirates as bad guys in TV series or movies. I'm sure there's many other ways they can "persuade" public opinion on this subject in very effective ways.
Twaddle and nonsense, if Hollywood is so fucking smart then why can't they get anyone to buy Mariah Carey's last album or go see her movie? In fact if the entertainment companies are run by these supergeniuses with evil mind control powers then why did they have to pay Mariah Carey 28 million dollars to go away? If Hollywood is so smart then why did they give Kevin Costner umpty million dollars to make WaterWorld and then, apparently not having learned anything from the experience, give him umpty million more dollars for The Postman? If Hollywood is go great at persuasion then why is it that they can't get anyone to see a movie with Shaquille O'Neil in it? Look, if you, and all of the other people who are making this "oh no, Hollywood will use their evil mind control mojo and we'll lose so there's nothing we can do" are too lazy and too stupid and just too chickenshit to do anything then just up and admit it and then log off, go back to your hovel in your parent's basement and resume jacking off to your PhotoShopped porno GIFs of a nude Seven of Nine, because the rest of us have work to do.
Hollywood is a bunch of pussies, look how they ran scared when Joe Lieberman started talking about having hearings on movie and TV violence. As for ads I can think of some great ones to run in California against Dianne Feinstein. How about a buying lots of billboard space in Santa Clara and environs and putting up a picture of Dianne Feinstein with the caption "Dianne Feinstein, the best damn Senator that Hollywood money can buy" or
"Dianne Feinstein, Saving Hollywood, screwing Silicon Valley".
Or how about taking out ads in conservative districts, such as Hollings saying thing such as "Last year Disney released dozens of horrible filthy movies that contradict family values, and Senator Hollings took all sorts of money from them. Please ask Senator Hollings why he accepts
money from these peddlers of filth and smut"?
The point is that there is lots that could be done to hammer on these people, and hammer on them hard and make them bleed and make the people who are trying to pass SSSCA or CBTPDA think twice about it. Unfortunately pissing and moaning is not going to be a successful tactic in this battle.
The real problem is that of Rev'ing. Turbines arent designed for the stop and start nature that road driving entails. Turbines work fine for things like boats and planes, because those accelerate at a constant speed, and then remain at a certain speed for long periods of time. Turbines also do not decelerate the same way as piston based engines. They take a great deal of time to stop spinning (in fact, a turbine engine will continue to spin for awhile after you turn the thing off). You cannot simply do a direct drive system. It won't work.
Really, it won't? That's funny, it seemed to work pretty well on the M-1 Abrams IP that I used to command. In fact it worked so well that I got one up to 70MPH on the way back to the motor pool from the Multi-Purpose Range Complex at the Yakima Firing Center. While the M-1's mileage at idle is shit, hence the addition of the 10 horsepower APU on the newer models the mileage at speed almost matches that of the M60 series with their 750HP Continental V-12 diesels. Plus the turbine exhaust is handy for heating meals, drying clothes or keeping warm in the winter.
Actually lots of poor people have their cars stolen, the assholes who steal them aren't into it for the money, they just want to joyride and fuck something up. The guy whose car is stolen is then fucked becuase he has no way to get to work, pick up his kids, get groceries, etc. He's probably not a card-carrying, slashdot reading member of the lumpenintelligentsia such as yourself though, so you really don't care.
Lets examine the situation here: A "late model sedan" a.k.a late 90s Honda is put in a poor, run down neighborhood and left with the doors unlocked.
Poor people recognize this car: A) Does not belong there. (Despite what the article says) B) Is not owned by anyone they know. C) Is unlocked. (By trying the door)
For a person walking by this car represents easy money. If you were poor, would you walk by $10,000+ sitting on the street?
Granted, most of the people who steal this car are going to already be car theives. But you have to admit there is a distinct possibility that this car could tempt someone who was not a car thief to become one.
Let's examine the situation here: Federal agents posing as arab sheiks offer bribes to members of Congress. Several of them accept and are then arrested. Granted, most of the congressmen who took these bribes were criminals. But you have to admit that these bribes could tempt someone who was not a criminal to become one. Oh wait, we're describing Abscam, Oh wait, this is a bullshit defense and most of them ended up in jail where they belonged. Perhaps they met some car thieves there.
Seems now the refrain goes: "Give me your tired, your poor..." - so I can throw them in jail.
Only if they're car thieves.
Take an introductory college course in Criminal Justice or Sociology. It'll really open your eyes.
Take some advanced college courses in criminal justice or sociology, then you might actually learn something and not spout mindless crap like this on/.
I'll leave you with this: Who steals more: poor people scraping a living, or rich people in the boardrooms of corporate America? What theft has more impact on the lives of most people?
Who cares? What does the one have to do with the other? The last asshole I heard using this defense was Rush Limbaugh, Limbaugh was trying to explain how the Democrats were worse Bush because they sucked up to Global Crossing and Enron while Bush only sucked up to Enron. I didn't buy this bullshit line of reasoning (if you can call it that) from Limbaugh and I'm certainly not going to buy it from you.
Bullshit. This is not 'Gone In 60 Seconds', this is real life, and a large proportion of crime is opportunistic
And how does that excuse it? If someone date raped your friend because she was drunk would you accept the defense of "Hey, the bitch was drunk and passed out so I figured `here's an opportunity` ripped her panties off and fucked her in the ass"?
This may not be entrapment, but it is dangling a carrot in front of desparate people and bored kids.
Well first of all any kid who wants to relieve his boredom by stealing cars needs to spend some serious time in the joint. There he can relieve his boredom by trying to figure out how not to be anally raped in the shower. Anyone who is desperate enough to steal a car should get to spend similar time in the joint. I view this as a means of punishing stupid people with poor impulse control. Were it up to me the cars would have a claymore mine wired into the dashboard behind the steering wheel. As soon as the car is on a clear stretch of road you'd detonate the mine and let 700.32 calibre steel pellets shred the fucker who stole the car. This would cost some money, as the car wouldn't be good for much after this, but paying $25,000 or so to eliminate the kind of people who steal cars strikes me as a good bargain.
I have the pleasure of living in King County Washington which has the distinction, dubious, of being one of the highest car theft areas in the United States. Most car thieves in King County do little if any time. Which means that they get out of jail and steal more cars and sometimes these car thieves do things such as run their stolen cars into other people's cars at high speeds, killing the occupants of the other car as happened last December to a couple who was driving home late at night not more than five miles from my house. But we shouldn't condemn them for stealing cars and endangering others and occasionally killing people, we should remember that they're frail and human. And while we're at it we should remember that Ken Lay and those execs at Enron are frail and human, and the accountants at Arthur Andersen are frail and human and the guys who slammed those airplanes into the World Trade Center were frail and human too. Bleeding heart forgiveness for everyone! Let that be the order of the day.
I live in Washington State. Our government decided to spend 500 million dollars to purchase a new baseball stadium for our piece of shit baseball team, the Seattle Mariners, this despite the fact that the voters had voted this down in a referendum. The government said "Whoops, you guys didn't vote the way we wanted, here's your new stadium, fuck you!" and voted the funding for the new stadium into law by using a clause in the state constitition that prohibits voter initiatives on "emergency" measures. I guess the possibility of not having a third-rate baseball team in your town is some kind of emergency. Two years later Paul Allen, he of Microsoft and TicketMaster fame, purchased a state election. He wanted a new stadium for the Seattle Seahawks, which he had just purchased. Allen went to the state legislature and said "Here's the deal, if you put this on the ballot I'll pay for the election". Of course this got put on the ballot and Paul Allen got the taxpayers to buy him a new stadium. Now, while all of this was going on Seattle's streets were falling apart and congestion was increasing. Did the politicians say "we need to fix these things and we have no money for stadiums and even if we did paying for them is not something that government should do?" Fuck no, they handed out taxpayer money to corporate interests while letting basic government services decline.
In Seattle the city council managed to issue councilmanic debt, not requiring voter approval, to pay for a new parking garage for the Nordstrom family's department store and a new downtown concert hall. But when it came to finding money for parks and libraries the city council punted the issue to the voters by putting levies on the ballot. The lesson here? Most elected officials don't care about schools, or libraries, or police or emergency medical service or public health or anything else. They're filth who, if you give them access to your money, will piss it away to buy favor with whatever special interest groups they need to suck up to in order to stay in office. The lesson is that it is amazing that the politicians who found the will to save baseball and football in Seattle, by pumping over a billion taxpayer dollars into paying for their stadiums, and then effectively handing them the deed, can't find the will to make government run efficiently and honestly or to provide basic services. The lesson is that these people cannot be trusted and the only way to deal with them is to make sure that when the government has money it is tightly constrained in what it can do with it. No general funds and sunsets on all taxes. During the boom times of the late 1990s, when state and local governments were collecting money hand over fist, especially in the Seattle area, they pissed it away as fast as they could get it. And when voters, who saw what was going on and wondered why it was that the state could afford to tax them for new stadiums while failing to provide basic services killed off a few taxes, most notably the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax, the politicians responded by saying "don't blame us when everything falls apart, you don't want to pay taxes". Of course now that the local economy has tanked the politicians are closing parks (never mind that King County spent 50 million dollars on a computer system that they had to scrap or is spending $250,000 dollars on public art to beautify a garbage transfer station) and blaming the voters.
Now, the voters of King County are a fairly generous lot, school levies usually pass here, when the local public transit agency needed more funding their levy passed, the park and library levies in Seattle passed. The lesson here is that when voters are asked to pay for basic public services and the price is reasonable they will tax themselves to do so, however they are unwilling to give corrupt politicians carte blanche to spend their money.
It's a legit question. I used to purchase used textbooks when I was a student at the University of Washington (the university of a thousand years and a million laughs) and so did everyone else. Hell, I once had a basic psych textbook that had been resold a dozen times. Buying used textbooks, especially for all of the shit courses I had to take where I just wanted to forget the course as soon as the quarter ended, saved me a lot of money and as far as I can see the authors of these overpriced tomes never got dime one off of the sale of the used volume. Where are the self-righteous jackoffs in the Author's Guild on this issue? This has been going on for years at colleges all over the United States and has to add up to a significant chunk of change.
Yeah, where is the demand for this? I mean really, how often have you been at home and seen something on the TV and said "Oh My God! I have to have that now." Interactive TV is one of those crap ideas that keeps popping up every few years
and then dies a ignominous death soon afterwards. Who the fuck wants to interact with their TV? I saw VideoDrome and that showed me that all in
all interacting with my TV is probably a bad idea.
So you're losing control over your sphincters about the potential of having a bunch of NaBH4 in your car but you're sanguine about your current daily drive where you have 10-20 gallons of gasoline in your car? You are aware of course that gasoline is just a wee bit flammable?
But I'm waiting for someone to hack the new Maytag Neptune washer and dryers, the ones with the 4" plasma touch screen. I want one that will run Linux and play DVDs while I'm doing my laundry. Or actually if I had the washer and dryer I could have one running Linux and the other serving as a game/DVD console, and I could wash my clothes.
I ran into Greg Bear in the early 1990s at the UW Book Store. I had met Mr. Bear at several signings and was at the book store purchasing some Poul Anderson novels for my stepmother who now and then will read a science fiction novel. Greg noticed that I had two Poul Anderson novels and asked me if I would like to have them autographed. I said sure and he took me around the corner and there was Poul Anderson. Poul signed both of the books and another that I bought for myself (just to have him sign it). What a nice guy, taking time out from his shopping trip to sign a fan's books. I was pretty speechless and stammered something about being a huge fan.
His novella "Sam Hill" reprinted in _The Best of Poul Anderson_ is a classic about the abuses of government databases that is as relevant today as when it was written almost 50 years ago.
Too busy meditating to see the real world?
on
Amiga Comeback?
·
· Score: 1
Wrong! The only thing worse than an Amiga advocate is a Team OS/2 advocate. My nightmare is being trapped in an elevator with a guy wearing a "Ross for Boss" T-shirt and a "Team OS/2" hat just as his medication wears off.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805059857
http://www.islandone.org/Propulsion/ProjectOrion.h tml
I personally favor building big manly throbbing Orion rockets, but that's because chaos theory makes my brain hurt and because things that explode are cool.
If you were able to say to users "Yeah, you could upgrade to WinXP to fix all of those horrible bugs or you could download this nifty free software package and do the same thing to your Win98, NT, 2k installations and not have to comply with objectionable licensing terms, ever-increasing licensing fees and the probability that you're going to have to buy new hardware anyways" how many people would do this.
I can tell you that for the company I used to work for until Monday, a large dot.com in the Seattle area named after a prominent South American river, there was little or no enthusiasm among the Wintel techies or the finance people for replacing our Wintel hardware running Win2k and NT or for paying the license fees for XP. Given business conditions today I really don't think that we were unique in this respect.
is Linux in embedded devices. I have a Tivo at home which runs, if I have read correctly, a modified version of Linux. The PS/2 also runs a modified version of Linux (please correct me if
I'm wrong on this). Linux provides those considering building devices such as consoles and PVRs a reliable and scalable operating system that can be adapted to many environments. This allows developers to come up with interesting new devices (such as the Tivo) without paying the Microsoft tax, both financially for licensing and also in terms of the performance and reliability issues that arise when you try to shoehorn a desktop OS into an embedded device.
Thousands of airplanes built in the 1930, 1940s and 1950s crashed. We're still building the damned things and we're still flying in them, despite the fact that Islamic whackjobs like to drive them into tall buildings. I would love to take a trip across the ocean on a blimp. And
spending three days to get across the ocean
to Berlin on a blimp is in my mind better than having to fly through Chicago O'Hare and Frankfurt am Main.
Please step away from the crackpipe. Sir, put the crackpipe down and please step away from it. I have a Sunfire Signature Classic Tube Preamplifier, I picked it up a few years ago when I had some money and it was being liquidated by Magnolia HiFi in Seattle. It's a neat amp, it's built like a tank, has an impressive phono stage, does not have lots of useless flashing lights and has a neat window in the front so you can look inside and see the tubes. This amp, which lists for about $2000 and which I paid $900 for, has specifications that are almost identical to the $250 Onkyo preamp that it replaced. Does it sound better than the Onkyo preamp? Well, I would have to say, with ears battered by 13 years of working on armored vehicles and spending weekends at a firing range, that it doesn't, it just looks cooler. Compare the published specifications on any piece of tube gear with those of a similar piece of solid-state gear and you will find that the solid state gear performs better in terms of distortion.
Also tube gear is horrendously inefficient. I was considering building a pair of tube power amplifiers a few years back. I was interested in a 200 wpc design, one of the biggest reasons I didn't build these was the fact that each amp would consume about 1Kw of power. Now, if the audio power output is 200wpc where are those extra 800 watts going? Well, they're making the room warmer, which is fine in the winter, when you can play your music and have a 1600 watt space heater, but is not so good in the summer.
I saw AoTC at the Cinerama in downtown Seattle last Friday. The Cinerama is set up to do 70mm and it's damned impressive when they do (LoTR was
completely awesome). Yet I was unimpressed with AoTC, there were digital artifacts scattered throughout the film which I assume are caused by the TI DLP system used for projecting the movie.
If digital can make it easier to distribute films great, but not if the quality is going to suck.
Twaddle and nonsense, if Hollywood is so fucking smart then why can't they get anyone to buy Mariah Carey's last album or go see her movie? In fact if the entertainment companies are run by these supergeniuses with evil mind control powers then why did they have to pay Mariah Carey 28 million dollars to go away? If Hollywood is so smart then why did they give Kevin Costner umpty million dollars to make WaterWorld and then, apparently not having learned anything from the experience, give him umpty million more dollars for The Postman? If Hollywood is go great at persuasion then why is it that they can't get anyone to see a movie with Shaquille O'Neil in it? Look, if you, and all of the other people who are making this "oh no, Hollywood will use their evil mind control mojo and we'll lose so there's nothing we can do" are too lazy and too stupid and just too chickenshit to do anything then just up and admit it and then log off, go back to your hovel in your parent's basement and resume jacking off to your PhotoShopped porno GIFs of a nude Seven of Nine, because the rest of us have work to do.
Hollywood is a bunch of pussies, look how they ran scared when Joe Lieberman started talking about having hearings on movie and TV violence. As for ads I can think of some great ones to run in California against Dianne Feinstein. How about a buying lots of billboard space in Santa Clara and environs and putting up a picture of Dianne Feinstein with the caption "Dianne Feinstein, the best damn Senator that Hollywood money can buy" or "Dianne Feinstein, Saving Hollywood, screwing Silicon Valley".
Or how about taking out ads in conservative districts, such as Hollings saying thing such as "Last year Disney released dozens of horrible filthy movies that contradict family values, and Senator Hollings took all sorts of money from them. Please ask Senator Hollings why he accepts money from these peddlers of filth and smut"?
The point is that there is lots that could be done to hammer on these people, and hammer on them hard and make them bleed and make the people who are trying to pass SSSCA or CBTPDA think twice about it. Unfortunately pissing and moaning is not going to be a successful tactic in this battle.
Really, it won't? That's funny, it seemed to work pretty well on the M-1 Abrams IP that I used to command. In fact it worked so well that I got one up to 70MPH on the way back to the motor pool from the Multi-Purpose Range Complex at the Yakima Firing Center. While the M-1's mileage at idle is shit, hence the addition of the 10 horsepower APU on the newer models the mileage at speed almost matches that of the M60 series with their 750HP Continental V-12 diesels. Plus the turbine exhaust is handy for heating meals, drying clothes or keeping warm in the winter.
Because they are poor.
Actually lots of poor people have their cars stolen, the assholes who steal them aren't into it for the money, they just want to joyride and fuck something up. The guy whose car is stolen is then fucked becuase he has no way to get to work, pick up his kids, get groceries, etc. He's probably not a card-carrying, slashdot reading member of the lumpenintelligentsia such as yourself though, so you really don't care.
Lets examine the situation here:
A "late model sedan" a.k.a late 90s Honda is put in a poor, run down neighborhood and left with the doors unlocked.
Poor people recognize this car:
A) Does not belong there. (Despite what the article says)
B) Is not owned by anyone they know.
C) Is unlocked. (By trying the door)
For a person walking by this car represents easy money. If you were poor, would you walk by $10,000+ sitting on the street?
Granted, most of the people who steal this car are going to already be car theives. But you have to admit there is a distinct possibility that this car could tempt someone who was not a car thief to become one.
Let's examine the situation here: Federal agents posing as arab sheiks offer bribes to members of Congress. Several of them accept and are then arrested. Granted, most of the congressmen who took these bribes were criminals. But you have to admit that these bribes could tempt someone who was not a criminal to become one. Oh wait, we're describing Abscam, Oh wait, this is a bullshit defense and most of them ended up in jail where they belonged. Perhaps they met some car thieves there.
Seems now the refrain goes: "Give me your tired, your poor..." - so I can throw them in jail.
Only if they're car thieves.
Take an introductory college course in Criminal Justice or Sociology. It'll really open your eyes.
Take some advanced college courses in criminal justice or sociology, then you might actually learn something and not spout mindless crap like this on
I'll leave you with this:
Who steals more: poor people scraping a living, or rich people in the boardrooms of corporate America? What theft has more impact on the lives of most people?
Who cares? What does the one have to do with the other? The last asshole I heard using this defense was Rush Limbaugh, Limbaugh was trying to explain how the Democrats were worse Bush because they sucked up to Global Crossing and Enron while Bush only sucked up to Enron. I didn't buy this bullshit line of reasoning (if you can call it that) from Limbaugh and I'm certainly not going to buy it from you.
And how does that excuse it? If someone date raped your friend because she was drunk would you accept the defense of "Hey, the bitch was drunk and passed out so I figured `here's an opportunity` ripped her panties off and fucked her in the ass"?
This may not be entrapment, but it is dangling a carrot in front of desparate people and bored kids.
Well first of all any kid who wants to relieve his boredom by stealing cars needs to spend some serious time in the joint. There he can relieve his boredom by trying to figure out how not to be anally raped in the shower. Anyone who is desperate enough to steal a car should get to spend similar time in the joint. I view this as a means of punishing stupid people with poor impulse control. Were it up to me the cars would have a claymore mine wired into the dashboard behind the steering wheel. As soon as the car is on a clear stretch of road you'd detonate the mine and let 700 .32 calibre steel pellets shred the fucker who stole the car. This would cost some money, as the car wouldn't be good for much after this, but paying $25,000 or so to eliminate the kind of people who steal cars strikes me as a good bargain.
I have the pleasure of living in King County Washington which has the distinction, dubious, of being one of the highest car theft areas in the United States. Most car thieves in King County do little if any time. Which means that they get out of jail and steal more cars and sometimes these car thieves do things such as run their stolen cars into other people's cars at high speeds, killing the occupants of the other car as happened last December to a couple who was driving home late at night not more than five miles from my house. But we shouldn't condemn them for stealing cars and endangering others and occasionally killing people, we should remember that they're frail and human. And while we're at it we should remember that Ken Lay and those execs at Enron are frail and human, and the accountants at Arthur Andersen are frail and human and the guys who slammed those airplanes into the World Trade Center were frail and human too. Bleeding heart forgiveness for everyone! Let that be the order of the day.
In Seattle the city council managed to issue councilmanic debt, not requiring voter approval, to pay for a new parking garage for the Nordstrom family's department store and a new downtown concert hall. But when it came to finding money for parks and libraries the city council punted the issue to the voters by putting levies on the ballot. The lesson here? Most elected officials don't care about schools, or libraries, or police or emergency medical service or public health or anything else. They're filth who, if you give them access to your money, will piss it away to buy favor with whatever special interest groups they need to suck up to in order to stay in office. The lesson is that it is amazing that the politicians who found the will to save baseball and football in Seattle, by pumping over a billion taxpayer dollars into paying for their stadiums, and then effectively handing them the deed, can't find the will to make government run efficiently and honestly or to provide basic services. The lesson is that these people cannot be trusted and the only way to deal with them is to make sure that when the government has money it is tightly constrained in what it can do with it. No general funds and sunsets on all taxes. During the boom times of the late 1990s, when state and local governments were collecting money hand over fist, especially in the Seattle area, they pissed it away as fast as they could get it. And when voters, who saw what was going on and wondered why it was that the state could afford to tax them for new stadiums while failing to provide basic services killed off a few taxes, most notably the Motor Vehicle Excise Tax, the politicians responded by saying "don't blame us when everything falls apart, you don't want to pay taxes". Of course now that the local economy has tanked the politicians are closing parks (never mind that King County spent 50 million dollars on a computer system that they had to scrap or is spending $250,000 dollars on public art to beautify a garbage transfer station) and blaming the voters.
Now, the voters of King County are a fairly generous lot, school levies usually pass here, when the local public transit agency needed more funding their levy passed, the park and library levies in Seattle passed. The lesson here is that when voters are asked to pay for basic public services and the price is reasonable they will tax themselves to do so, however they are unwilling to give corrupt politicians carte blanche to spend their money.
It's a legit question. I used to purchase used textbooks when I was a student at the University of Washington (the university of a thousand years and a million laughs) and so did everyone else. Hell, I once had a basic psych textbook that had been resold a dozen times. Buying used textbooks, especially for all of the shit courses I had to take where I just wanted to forget the course as soon as the quarter ended, saved me a lot of money and as far as I can see the authors of these overpriced tomes never got dime one off of the sale of the used volume. Where are the self-righteous jackoffs in the Author's Guild on this issue? This has been going on for years at colleges all over the United States and has to add up to a significant chunk of change.
Yeah, where is the demand for this? I mean really, how often have you been at home and seen something on the TV and said "Oh My God! I have to have that now." Interactive TV is one of those crap ideas that keeps popping up every few years and then dies a ignominous death soon afterwards. Who the fuck wants to interact with their TV? I saw VideoDrome and that showed me that all in all interacting with my TV is probably a bad idea.
So you're losing control over your sphincters about the potential of having a bunch of NaBH4 in your car but you're sanguine about your current daily drive where you have 10-20 gallons of gasoline in your car? You are aware of course that gasoline is just a wee bit flammable?
But I'm waiting for someone to hack the new Maytag Neptune washer and dryers, the ones with the 4" plasma touch screen. I want one that will run Linux and play DVDs while I'm doing my laundry. Or actually if I had the washer and dryer I could have one running Linux and the other serving as a game/DVD console, and I could wash my clothes.
I ran into Greg Bear in the early 1990s at the UW Book Store. I had met Mr. Bear at several signings and was at the book store purchasing some Poul Anderson novels for my stepmother who now and then will read a science fiction novel. Greg noticed that I had two Poul Anderson novels and asked me if I would like to have them autographed. I said sure and he took me around the corner and there was Poul Anderson. Poul signed both of the books and another that I bought for myself (just to have him sign it). What a nice guy, taking time out from his shopping trip to sign a fan's books. I was pretty speechless and stammered something about being a huge fan.
His novella "Sam Hill" reprinted in _The Best of Poul Anderson_ is a classic about the abuses of government databases that is as relevant today as when it was written almost 50 years ago.
Wrong! The only thing worse than an Amiga advocate is a Team OS/2 advocate. My nightmare is being trapped in an elevator with a guy wearing a "Ross for Boss" T-shirt and a "Team OS/2" hat just as his medication wears off.
Cheers
multiplexo