Why do you assume that it's the government's responsibility to fund solar research, and hence blame Reagan for diverting funds to other ends (say, perh., defeating the Soviet Union...)? Why is it not, say, the solar industry's job? Why not take a collection amongst environmental groups to pay for some research? In short, why must every man, woman and child be forced to fund your favourite area of research?
Not that I'm against solar power. I quite like the idea, actually. But I've yet to see it as at all economical in my situation. $70,000 for a home setup (I number ISTR from a back issue of Home Power or somesuch) is a tad steep. At even $300/month for electricity, that'll take 20 years to pay itself off. And by that time the system would be way too outdated. I can do better things with $70,000. Even at a 5% rate of return, I could turn it into $185,730, which could buy one whopping nice solar panel system in 2021, even if it _would_ be worth only about $103,834 in today's dollars. Now get that price down by a factor of ten, and I'd snap at the chance, esp. because I myself only use about $30/month, and would thus be putting $270/mo. back into the system and thus making money underneath net metering.
Luxury! We used to dream of having a sewer. No, we had it hard in those days. For a bed, all dear old dad could provide was the neighbour's piranha tank. But we were happy for it, we didn't know any better. Not like kids these days, with their slashdots and their hotels.
And to a Southerner, yankees are the ones responsible for rape, murder, looting, pillaging and the complete destruction of our economy, such that it took more than a century for the South to get back on its feet once more. We _don't_ like being called yankees, or yanks, or anything else along those lines...
The stereotypical activity for suburban children is to play soccer in local leagues. It tends to be the mother's job to take them to practice & games; hence the `soccer mom.' It refers to an imagined electorate of politically moderate women voters which politicians imagine will catapult them into victory. Given that so far the `soccer mom vote' has neither defeated nor won any victory for anyone, I find the whole idea rather suspect.
A shotgun with a tight choke ought to do the trick...
Of course, those folks living under authoritarian regimes will not be able to get the.22s or shotguns needed. But those of us lucky enough to be living under more enlightened rulers should have no problem.
Re:The Neverending wave of criticism of slackware.
on
Slackware 8.0 Released
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· Score: 2
Honestly, what's the difference between downloading source, compiling and installing and installing a binary package?
Here's a biggie: it lets one optimise the code for one's chip. A lot of stuff is still be compiled for the 386. I've an Athlon--why not compile my stuff for something used in this millenium? I just set my CFLAGS in my.bash_profile, and everything's fine from there on out.
Publicly funded software should be released into thge public domain: we funded it, and we deserve to be able to use it. Not just we the Open Source community, but also corporations (they pay taxes too, after all, and are made up of individuals as well). Now, being in the public domain means that software can be relicensed under the GPL, if that is what is desired. Thus bug fixes to GPLed software can be distributed under the GPL.
The point is, this is an ecellent first step on the way to making software which can paint. It may not be here today, but we are progressing twoards that end. What I find amusing is that this software has no concept of aesthetics or beauty; it is by no means a thinking machine. And yet it creates what we find to be aesthetically attractive pieces. Indicates to me that perh. artists are not more deeply connected to the soul or heart than the rest of us after all.
Well, while filters have existed in PhotoShop or the GIMP for ages, they tend to do a not altogether excellent job. Did you look at the one where they took an image and applied a watercolour filter? The result looked nothing like a watercolour, but had encoded in it what some folks might think a watercolour produced from an image might be. They then fed other photographs into the engine and produced what look to my untrained eye like real honest-to-goodness watercolours. I think that's pretty neat: they created good stuff by mimicing bad filters.
Re:If they're so sophisticated...
on
MilSpec Biotech
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· Score: 4
Reducing war is exactly in the military's interest, and it knows this. Who is it who dies in wars? Not politicians. Not mindless twits like the above poster. No, it's the soldiers and sailors who get their legs blown off, who are blinded, who spend the rest of their lives in pain and agony. The less killing and maiming, the happier the military is. Believe or not, some of the staunchest pacifists are in the military. Unlike some pacifists, though, they are realists: they know that if one wishes war, one prepares for peace, and that if one wishes peace, one prepares for war. They wish peace, and hence hone their warmaking skills.
War is a fact of life and of history. It is inevitable. But it can be controlled and the likelihood reduced. The only way to reduce it, though, is to make warfare cheap for oneself and expensive for the other guy--this means that he would be a fool to start hostilities.
Even worse, one of the things that makes real-life swimming (in a pool, not deep-diving) easy is that one always floats up. Normally I swim until my lungs are bursting, then just hold off inhaling until I've floated up and my head's out of the water--I don't have the oxygen in my system left to swim up and out.
I imagine that the pool would actually be a room filled with water; the swimmers would use air tanks. The advantage to floating in a normal 0G environment would be that one can swim much more easily through water than air. In fact, I can even foresee that it might make sense to fill certain spaces of a ship with water for exactly that reason. OTOH, the downside would be that one would need to store a lot of air.
When I was in school I absolutely hated group discussions and group work. I was not paying $20,000 a year to hear the opinions and thoughts f a bunch of uneducated morons like myself--I was trying to cease being an uneducated moron and paying for the thoughts of someone who actually knew what he was talking about.
In re. the unthinkability of the American plane being responsible, I have only to quote a popular radio show here in Denver this morning: `The Chinese are claiming that a prop plane rammed their fighter!?!'
But this is horribly OT...
Re:Responsible Gun Ownership
on
Republic.Com
·
· Score: 2
Moderators, I pray ye take heed! The above post deserves far more than a +2. Reasoned, thoughtful, well-argued, informative, interesting--all the things one should look for in a post. Indeed, for a moment I believed that I was reading kuro5hin.
BTW, the sentence `Having a gun in the car tells me I'm the one in trouble if hostilities occur' pefrectly describes the appropriate attitude towards weapons. It heartens me to read that there are such responsible folks out there.
And seriously, these pictures of aborted fetus's[sic]? Yuck the people who made this web site are fscked up!
And the people who shredded said ftuses are not fscked up? I think that it's a useful thing to demonstrate that what they destroy is not a lump of tissue but a human being. An arm, a hand, a head--these illustrate that we are not dealing with a tumour but with a man.
It's not necessarily standing up for what one believes to tell one's employer to fsck off and die. It's standing up for what one believes to quit and inform the employer why. Being rude and offensive never changed anyone's mind--being polite and intelligent has changed many a mind. That's one of the things one learns when one gets out of puberty: throwing a temper tantrum--whether it's a toddler's kicking and screaming or a teenager's whining and website making--is not an ideal solution; it rarely leads to resolution. far better to articulately explain why one opposes a policy. One might still sound immature, but it's a good kind of immature--the kind which is brimming with the promise of a capable adult.
Note how much more effective a post like this is than one which simply states `Yer wrong Sh1th34d! I'm l33t!'
Just ban filter-tips. Real cigarettes (e.g. Gauloises, St. Michel) taste better sans filter anyway. And all they leave behind is a bit of paper and a bit of leaf. Much nicer to the environment.
I always figured the drinking age should be 14 or 16 and the driving age 16 or 18. Let folks get drinking out of their systems before they start driving. And it'd make colleges much nicer places IMHO, somewhat less dedicated to `Whoopee I'm away from my parents!' and more towards studying. Not that there will ever be a complete cessation of the former sentiment--indeed, that's part of the function of a college: it's a relatively safe environment to make the sort of mistakes one makes when out of parental control.
The sole good theing about in loco parentis is that it tends to insulate students from legal and binding repercussions. In Texas I am informed that being convicted of posessing alcohol while underage will prevent a legal career. By comparison a university sentence is a mere slap on the wrist.
Of course, it would be better to get rid of stupid laws, as well as to show some more intelligence. But that will enver happen, not in this society.
The reasoning behind non-lethal weaponry is incorrect and highly dangerous. Troops should never be used in a situation unless deadly force is called for. That's the whole point of even having a military. We should be very cautious when committing troops, but when we do we should not hold back. If we determine that we are going to interfere in the internal affairs of another nation, then we damn well better be prepared to shed some blood doing so. If anything, the possibility of mass bloodshed acts as a slight deterrent to rash involvement.
The possibility of `safe' weaponry make sit all the more likely that we will use force where it is inappropriate. Remember that non-lethal does not mean non-harmful. It does not even mean non-lethal, but rather less-likely-lethal.
When I was a boy my father taught me never to point a gun at someone I did not want dead. Not wounded, not scared, not persuaded--DEAD. Force is the same thing. These new weapons may be less-dangerous; they are still dangerous to a degree. We should not use any weaponry until we are dead-certain that we wish our enemy dead and buried, not cowed, not scared, not persuaded to do things our way--dead.
It is my fond hope that we turn away from this sort of foolishness. I fear that we will not. Authoritarians like to wield authority; it's in their nature. Our current government is extraordinarily authoritarian (in historical terms; measured against most current governments it is remarkably libertarian). The thought of being able to wield force more easily makes those who run it quite happy indeed. Eventually, the jack-booted thugs will have an incredible selection of ways in which to annoy, inconvenience, slow, wound, cripple, disable or kill those who oppose them, whether foreign or countrymen.
You know what? The user experience on a well-laid out traditional HTML site is superb: it's fast, it's easy, it's obvious what's going on, it's not painful on the eyes. The problem came in when the 'net went public--when the great uinwashed masses came in, followed close behind by the marketers. Joe Sixpack is too stupid to read more than about six words in a row--the marketers know this,and size their text accordingly. He'd really rather not read anyway--the marketers know this, and use images instead. He's easily swayed by the stupidest things--the marketers know this, and include sound, swishy effects and every other form of anti-content possible.
Meanwhile those of us who would like to exchange information are looked down upon and laughed at. The best web pages are `plain' and `boring' by the standards of Joe Sixpack. Joe Sixpack is a moron.
It's not that it is so insecure, it is that it is so vital. One may model the risk of publicising information by looking at the percentage of folks using the software--if.01 of the population uses it, a publicised risk won't hurt many. If.99 use it, a publicised risk could hurt nearly everyone. When you realise that BIND runs the root servers and the TLDs, you must accept that a flaw in it could take out those machines, and thus the entire domain name system; the 'net would be fragmented into little pockets of local namespaces.
The odds of a bug are not important to the equation: if in all of history there were one dangerous bug in BIND, it would still be important that it be fixed and the information be distributed to those important servers first.
To those who argue that security through obscurity is a bad idea: yes, it is. But it is also better than no security. To pubicise problems before a fix has been made is equivalent to taking an ad out in the paper stating that one's locks no longer function. Far safer to keep that information private and try to fix those locks ASAP, hoping that for a moment the insecurity will escape notice.
It's not as though DNS is a non-vital service which can be turned off in case of security flaws; rather, it must continue to run, even when it is known that it has problems. One can stop running irc if it has problems; DNS, OTOH, is essential.
Well, not really, but who remembers IP addresses anymore?
Why don't you just move to another job? This is the tech industry--there are a lot of companies competing for workers. You can look for another job while still working at your current one; that's how every one of the folks to leave us recently has managed it.
Unions deal (poorly) with a monopoly on employment. There is no monopoly on employment in today's tech economy. He who thinks otherwise has his head in the sand. If you don't like where you are, go somewhere else. Every major city has multiple concerns going. Even little towns typically have more than one company going on. There might be sacrifices required--e.g. you may have to move, or accept a lower salary. It's all about what 40 hrs/wk. is worth to you. If it's worth losing your current seniority (although this can be managed) and a drop in pay, go for it.
Other people might be happy to work 60 hrs/wk. for more pay. It's called perfect competition. Since you're not willing to work those hours, you will not pull the same amount of money in that they do. Which is fair.
Re: 2.4.0 & XFree86 4.0.2
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, I'm having similar problems with 2.4.0 and XFree86 4.0.2. I went back to 2.2.16--which is playing havoc with my System.map, 'cause I'm too lazy to get a proper copy:-) Anytime I'd run Netscape, or a few other apps (xmms, gnucash), after a fairly short period of time the entire system would hang. 'Twas bloody annoying. I refuse to be reduced to only the console--this is my desktop machine here--and thus for the nonce I am back to 2.2.16.
I've a feeling I might need to fiddle with the shm filesystem and it'll go away; I understand that it's needed to make shared memory (and hence X) run properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I'm against solar power. I quite like the idea, actually. But I've yet to see it as at all economical in my situation. $70,000 for a home setup (I number ISTR from a back issue of Home Power or somesuch) is a tad steep. At even $300/month for electricity, that'll take 20 years to pay itself off. And by that time the system would be way too outdated. I can do better things with $70,000. Even at a 5% rate of return, I could turn it into $185,730, which could buy one whopping nice solar panel system in 2021, even if it _would_ be worth only about $103,834 in today's dollars. Now get that price down by a factor of ten, and I'd snap at the chance, esp. because I myself only use about $30/month, and would thus be putting $270/mo. back into the system and thus making money underneath net metering.
Luxury! We used to dream of having a sewer. No, we had it hard in those days. For a bed, all dear old dad could provide was the neighbour's piranha tank. But we were happy for it, we didn't know any better. Not like kids these days, with their slashdots and their hotels.
And to a Southerner, yankees are the ones responsible for rape, murder, looting, pillaging and the complete destruction of our economy, such that it took more than a century for the South to get back on its feet once more. We _don't_ like being called yankees, or yanks, or anything else along those lines...
The stereotypical activity for suburban children is to play soccer in local leagues. It tends to be the mother's job to take them to practice & games; hence the `soccer mom.' It refers to an imagined electorate of politically moderate women voters which politicians imagine will catapult them into victory. Given that so far the `soccer mom vote' has neither defeated nor won any victory for anyone, I find the whole idea rather suspect.
Of course, those folks living under authoritarian regimes will not be able to get the .22s or shotguns needed. But those of us lucky enough to be living under more enlightened rulers should have no problem.
Here's a biggie: it lets one optimise the code for one's chip. A lot of stuff is still be compiled for the 386. I've an Athlon--why not compile my stuff for something used in this millenium? I just set my CFLAGS in my .bash_profile, and everything's fine from there on out.
Mutt will understand a .mailcap, and can thus be used to configure lynx for reading HTML email. Very nice indeed.
Publicly funded software should be released into thge public domain: we funded it, and we deserve to be able to use it. Not just we the Open Source community, but also corporations (they pay taxes too, after all, and are made up of individuals as well). Now, being in the public domain means that software can be relicensed under the GPL, if that is what is desired. Thus bug fixes to GPLed software can be distributed under the GPL.
The point is, this is an ecellent first step on the way to making software which can paint. It may not be here today, but we are progressing twoards that end. What I find amusing is that this software has no concept of aesthetics or beauty; it is by no means a thinking machine. And yet it creates what we find to be aesthetically attractive pieces. Indicates to me that perh. artists are not more deeply connected to the soul or heart than the rest of us after all.
Well, while filters have existed in PhotoShop or the GIMP for ages, they tend to do a not altogether excellent job. Did you look at the one where they took an image and applied a watercolour filter? The result looked nothing like a watercolour, but had encoded in it what some folks might think a watercolour produced from an image might be. They then fed other photographs into the engine and produced what look to my untrained eye like real honest-to-goodness watercolours. I think that's pretty neat: they created good stuff by mimicing bad filters.
War is a fact of life and of history. It is inevitable. But it can be controlled and the likelihood reduced. The only way to reduce it, though, is to make warfare cheap for oneself and expensive for the other guy--this means that he would be a fool to start hostilities.
You do realise that gigawatt is pronounced jigawat, right? Gigabyte is pronounced jigabite, not gigabite. Look it up.
I imagine that the pool would actually be a room filled with water; the swimmers would use air tanks. The advantage to floating in a normal 0G environment would be that one can swim much more easily through water than air. In fact, I can even foresee that it might make sense to fill certain spaces of a ship with water for exactly that reason. OTOH, the downside would be that one would need to store a lot of air.
When I was in school I absolutely hated group discussions and group work. I was not paying $20,000 a year to hear the opinions and thoughts f a bunch of uneducated morons like myself--I was trying to cease being an uneducated moron and paying for the thoughts of someone who actually knew what he was talking about.
But this is horribly OT...
BTW, the sentence `Having a gun in the car tells me I'm the one in trouble if hostilities occur' pefrectly describes the appropriate attitude towards weapons. It heartens me to read that there are such responsible folks out there.
And the people who shredded said ftuses are not fscked up? I think that it's a useful thing to demonstrate that what they destroy is not a lump of tissue but a human being. An arm, a hand, a head--these illustrate that we are not dealing with a tumour but with a man.
Note how much more effective a post like this is than one which simply states `Yer wrong Sh1th34d! I'm l33t!'
Just ban filter-tips. Real cigarettes (e.g. Gauloises, St. Michel) taste better sans filter anyway. And all they leave behind is a bit of paper and a bit of leaf. Much nicer to the environment.
The sole good theing about in loco parentis is that it tends to insulate students from legal and binding repercussions. In Texas I am informed that being convicted of posessing alcohol while underage will prevent a legal career. By comparison a university sentence is a mere slap on the wrist.
Of course, it would be better to get rid of stupid laws, as well as to show some more intelligence. But that will enver happen, not in this society.
The possibility of `safe' weaponry make sit all the more likely that we will use force where it is inappropriate. Remember that non-lethal does not mean non-harmful. It does not even mean non-lethal, but rather less-likely-lethal.
When I was a boy my father taught me never to point a gun at someone I did not want dead. Not wounded, not scared, not persuaded--DEAD. Force is the same thing. These new weapons may be less-dangerous; they are still dangerous to a degree. We should not use any weaponry until we are dead-certain that we wish our enemy dead and buried, not cowed, not scared, not persuaded to do things our way--dead.
It is my fond hope that we turn away from this sort of foolishness. I fear that we will not. Authoritarians like to wield authority; it's in their nature. Our current government is extraordinarily authoritarian (in historical terms; measured against most current governments it is remarkably libertarian). The thought of being able to wield force more easily makes those who run it quite happy indeed. Eventually, the jack-booted thugs will have an incredible selection of ways in which to annoy, inconvenience, slow, wound, cripple, disable or kill those who oppose them, whether foreign or countrymen.
Sigh.
Meanwhile those of us who would like to exchange information are looked down upon and laughed at. The best web pages are `plain' and `boring' by the standards of Joe Sixpack. Joe Sixpack is a moron.
The odds of a bug are not important to the equation: if in all of history there were one dangerous bug in BIND, it would still be important that it be fixed and the information be distributed to those important servers first.
To those who argue that security through obscurity is a bad idea: yes, it is. But it is also better than no security. To pubicise problems before a fix has been made is equivalent to taking an ad out in the paper stating that one's locks no longer function. Far safer to keep that information private and try to fix those locks ASAP, hoping that for a moment the insecurity will escape notice.
It's not as though DNS is a non-vital service which can be turned off in case of security flaws; rather, it must continue to run, even when it is known that it has problems. One can stop running irc if it has problems; DNS, OTOH, is essential.
Well, not really, but who remembers IP addresses anymore?
Unions deal (poorly) with a monopoly on employment. There is no monopoly on employment in today's tech economy. He who thinks otherwise has his head in the sand. If you don't like where you are, go somewhere else. Every major city has multiple concerns going. Even little towns typically have more than one company going on. There might be sacrifices required--e.g. you may have to move, or accept a lower salary. It's all about what 40 hrs/wk. is worth to you. If it's worth losing your current seniority (although this can be managed) and a drop in pay, go for it.
Other people might be happy to work 60 hrs/wk. for more pay. It's called perfect competition. Since you're not willing to work those hours, you will not pull the same amount of money in that they do. Which is fair.
I've a feeling I might need to fiddle with the shm filesystem and it'll go away; I understand that it's needed to make shared memory (and hence X) run properly.