The year was 1996. The place, New York City, center of the known universe. I spent my time solving Quickmail issues at a growing ad agency. 80 users on three floors, all fed through a single 56K modem. It would dial up as needed if no one held the connection open, so sometimes there was a 40 second pause, and if you sat close enough to the server room, you'd hear the tell tale beeps and whirrs of the modem dialing.
Soon after we upgraded to ISDN, doubling our speeds. Then to a quarter T1. Finally we had Bank of America as a client and they bought us a T1 for the Internet, and a secure T1 from NYC to SF for business with them.
It was the pinnacle of Internet access for me and my time at the agency. We had 150 users by then, an interactive department focusing on web design. Of course, with our connection maxing out at around 1 megabit per second, they were still concerned with keeping animated gifs under 6K.
This is what I was going to say. I'd pay for well researched news on major events instead of the speculation and opinion sites put out in the first 30 seconds of hearing about something.
This is right. Most plots have been done. It's how the plot is described, how the story is told that's important.
Method 1: Jack and Jill went up the hill. They found some water. Jack tripped on his way back down.
Method 2: Jack, the village upstart who always seemed hellbent on making others' lives miserable, was found, oddly, walking hand in hand with the virtuous Jill towards the secluded town well...
Indeed. It is actually a pro USA stance, though it is also an anti-US Government stance. Something both sides should do well to remember: the US Government is not the United States of America. When the government starts committing acts in the name of its citizens that those very citizens disagree with, this is when people get voted out in our happy democracy.
Yep. I asked a guy what car he was looking at, he says, "I want a big pickup truck." I asked if he was looking to haul a trailer, or do some farm work, etc. He said, "Nah, I'm a suburb guy. I just want a truck."
Why someone might want an $80,000 Tesla S? -- No emissions -- No gas -- Electric motor has some great torque -- They look different than most other cars
And it'll probably be the last "Oooh, shiny!" reason that's the actual reason.
I agree. I've read entire books on my iPhone (not iPad) out of necessity (because sometimes you just. need. to. finish. the. story.). But now that I own a Nook (though how much longer I'll have the content...) it's what I use. I can read the e-ink all day long and my eyes don't bug me at all - I have a little clip light which does great at night/on planes. I put up with the iPhone but my eyes were definitely not happy about it.
Okay, this was marked "Funny" but why go to a bookstore when you can browse, borrow, and read samples of books from anywhere? Why go to a music store when I can download from anywhere?
As long as the functionality of the bookstore is no greater than the functionality of my ebook reader, what is the draw? I can get reviews, recommendations, top 100 lists by genre, new releases, etc all in the palm of my hand, none of which I can get at the bookstore unless I bring my internet device.
So sure...want me to show up at your warehouse-sized bookstore? Give me some good live music (a la the Eolian). Give me cake. Give me coffee. Hell, give me a beer or glass of wine. Give me tables with cabled iPads so I can surf book selections whilst drinking my beer and listening to a lutist then go grab them off your shelf when I go. Or when I stay.
Save money and make your stores smaller. Maybe sell only certain genres, or hardcovers, or softcovers (because who buys hardcovers anymore?). But keep the food, keep the music, keep the kiosk tables, keep freaking quiz night, just give me a reason to walk in your store, because while I love me a good bookstore, I love me the beach/forest/cafe/couch/bed more.
While it was pitched that way it actually dealt heavily with various political and ethical issues.
Yes. One of the things I liked about TOS was you walked away feeling like there was a moral to the story. TNG had a couple of those, but most of it amounted to space drama or space adventure. Nothing too deep. Enjoyable, just not really thought provoking.
Sigh...no mod points, but this is really the problem. If I'm of a mind to carry a gun around, it likely means I'm of a mind to use one should a problem arise. And that threshold of when I pull out my gun varies between people. Some people need to be threatened with a gun themselves; others only require your foot to get stepped on accidentally, or a dirty look. Without a gun, their only response is a likely non-lethal shouting match or at worst a fist fight (which last longer than a gun battle and are more apt to be stopped by the audience, with the audience surviving the attempt). With a gun, someone is likely to die.
Guns have their place, but it isn't in your waistband, nor strapped to your back in an open-carry town. Those bozos carrying round rifles to inform people of their rights generated a bunch of 911 calls. Because, you know, you're carrying around rifles in the street. That's a culture change no one wants, thanks.
Okay, so as much as I hate to say this, referencing the Daily Show for facts is the liberal's answer to quoting Rush Limbaugh. Those shows are entertainment -- everything is taken out of context for humor or to drive home a point which may or may not be salient. John Stewart knows his stuff, certainly, and I am in no way comparing him to Mr. Limbaugh in terms of knowledge, but don't think for a minute that he presents an unbiased view of things. I'm betting the reason the gun laws were so successful in Australia has nothing to do with the laws themselves -- it has to do with the culture (as someone said). People weren't randomly killing each other en masse or in major gang warfare daily like we do here in the US of A (or however the media is presenting it).
Because, seriously. You might need a gun in Australia, but it's for the man-eating spiders.
I'm going to suggest that while there are larger open source consortiums like Apache that organize developers and projects such that they do wind up looking like a commercial project, you need to remember the main difference:
YOU are responsible for open source software implementations. There is no inherent support structure, there is no liability nor responsibility to maintain, fix, or continue development on an open source project. If you want to implement it, you are either paying for developer time (perhaps your own time) to perform those duties, or taking a risk that the project will continue to be updated by the author or others in the community.
Well, a contractor experienced supporting a particular industry would find the processes in place and help the customer learn about what can be done to improve them. Most customers moving to new tech won't know what to implement, they just know things need to be more efficient. As a contractor it is up to you to NOT do what the customer tells you, but to convince them to use the best solution for the problem.
And UC isn't even that prestigious. It's the best state school system in the U.S. Admittedly, the way the budgets are falling, it'll go private one of these years...
These big schools and their even bigger price tags But you know, brick and mortar, textbooks, electri...oh, right. Online. You think there'd be some sort of discount. Especially for a class I took in Junior year of high school. I can see paying $1400 for a specialized course like Nuclear Physics or Laser Science. But pre-calc?
Therefore, 1 bag of popcorn every 3 seconds....(144k bags * 3 sec per bag) / 3600 secs per hour = 120 hours
Because I'm aiming my laser at each bag individually. If I were going to cook a room-sized tin of kernels, I'd disperse the heat using a stained glass window.
I would imagine that going with a single source solution is what allowed them to afford it. "If you just use us, we'll keep your servers up until we don't, and we won't charge you an arm and a leg."
I saw Serenity before watching Firefly. It ranks in my 5 ten movies of all time (err...along with the Princess Bride if that gives you any idea of how I like my films). Firefly, of course, is a fleshing out of Serenity (or inverted vice versa) -- more detail of a great thing. I didn't feel the characters were different between TV and movie but I'll agree they all couldn't shine given the fact the movie wasn't 10 hours long. Which was a bummer.
Joss Whedon's Star Wars would be a bigger disaster than three episodes about Jar Jar.
I disagree. Serenity made me feel like Star Wars all over again: fun, smart, adventurous, light-hearted, but also thoughtful. Joss aces that kind of stuff. See Avengers for details.
I'm 100% certain everything I know I learned in school.
Not.
Send them to a piano instructor, make them join the debate team, have them crack a book that isn't assigned reading. Have them code a smartphone app that manages their time.
In fact if you bother to open a history book instead of the comic books you apparently feast upon for your simplistic world view, you'd find that MANY past civilizations have migrated after conditions changed where they were - this was all pre-technology.
I'll bite. Pre-tech we had about 6 billion fewer people. Now, almost all land in the world is owned or not worth owning or living upon. Small migrations may be possible but if larger migrations were possible, millions of people in Africa might have shifted to considerably more human friendly areas in the past century. People move because of hunger and war, but generally those migrations are not sustainable as a future settlement area because of the lack of resources, well, everywhere. They are expected to move back.
2) For the greater portion of humanity to survive we are dependent upon the machines and electronics that control our energy systems. Can you imagine 7 billion people forced to hunt for their food after the refrigerator warm up? Like the comic above, it wouldn't take long before we'd be hunting ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
The year was 1996. The place, New York City, center of the known universe. I spent my time solving Quickmail issues at a growing ad agency. 80 users on three floors, all fed through a single 56K modem. It would dial up as needed if no one held the connection open, so sometimes there was a 40 second pause, and if you sat close enough to the server room, you'd hear the tell tale beeps and whirrs of the modem dialing.
Soon after we upgraded to ISDN, doubling our speeds. Then to a quarter T1. Finally we had Bank of America as a client and they bought us a T1 for the Internet, and a secure T1 from NYC to SF for business with them.
It was the pinnacle of Internet access for me and my time at the agency. We had 150 users by then, an interactive department focusing on web design. Of course, with our connection maxing out at around 1 megabit per second, they were still concerned with keeping animated gifs under 6K.
And we liked it. We loved it.
It's absolutely ridiculous that they are upgrading multiple markets around the country and the nations capital is still getting a pittance
I wonder how many times a day that sentence is repeated in various venues by the citizens of DC?
This is what I was going to say. I'd pay for well researched news on major events instead of the speculation and opinion sites put out in the first 30 seconds of hearing about something.
This is right. Most plots have been done. It's how the plot is described, how the story is told that's important.
Method 1: Jack and Jill went up the hill. They found some water. Jack tripped on his way back down.
Method 2: Jack, the village upstart who always seemed hellbent on making others' lives miserable, was found, oddly, walking hand in hand with the virtuous Jill towards the secluded town well...
This is not an "anti-USA" stance,
Indeed. It is actually a pro USA stance, though it is also an anti-US Government stance. Something both sides should do well to remember: the US Government is not the United States of America. When the government starts committing acts in the name of its citizens that those very citizens disagree with, this is when people get voted out in our happy democracy.
People have different tastes from you
Yep. I asked a guy what car he was looking at, he says, "I want a big pickup truck." I asked if he was looking to haul a trailer, or do some farm work, etc. He said, "Nah, I'm a suburb guy. I just want a truck."
Why someone might want an $80,000 Tesla S?
-- No emissions
-- No gas
-- Electric motor has some great torque
-- They look different than most other cars
And it'll probably be the last "Oooh, shiny!" reason that's the actual reason.
I agree. I've read entire books on my iPhone (not iPad) out of necessity (because sometimes you just. need. to. finish. the. story.). But now that I own a Nook (though how much longer I'll have the content...) it's what I use. I can read the e-ink all day long and my eyes don't bug me at all - I have a little clip light which does great at night/on planes. I put up with the iPhone but my eyes were definitely not happy about it.
Okay, this was marked "Funny" but why go to a bookstore when you can browse, borrow, and read samples of books from anywhere? Why go to a music store when I can download from anywhere?
As long as the functionality of the bookstore is no greater than the functionality of my ebook reader, what is the draw? I can get reviews, recommendations, top 100 lists by genre, new releases, etc all in the palm of my hand, none of which I can get at the bookstore unless I bring my internet device.
So sure...want me to show up at your warehouse-sized bookstore? Give me some good live music (a la the Eolian). Give me cake. Give me coffee. Hell, give me a beer or glass of wine. Give me tables with cabled iPads so I can surf book selections whilst drinking my beer and listening to a lutist then go grab them off your shelf when I go. Or when I stay.
Save money and make your stores smaller. Maybe sell only certain genres, or hardcovers, or softcovers (because who buys hardcovers anymore?). But keep the food, keep the music, keep the kiosk tables, keep freaking quiz night, just give me a reason to walk in your store, because while I love me a good bookstore, I love me the beach/forest/cafe/couch/bed more.
...in crowbar manufacturing.
While it was pitched that way it actually dealt heavily with various political and ethical issues.
Yes. One of the things I liked about TOS was you walked away feeling like there was a moral to the story. TNG had a couple of those, but most of it amounted to space drama or space adventure. Nothing too deep. Enjoyable, just not really thought provoking.
Sigh...no mod points, but this is really the problem. If I'm of a mind to carry a gun around, it likely means I'm of a mind to use one should a problem arise. And that threshold of when I pull out my gun varies between people. Some people need to be threatened with a gun themselves; others only require your foot to get stepped on accidentally, or a dirty look. Without a gun, their only response is a likely non-lethal shouting match or at worst a fist fight (which last longer than a gun battle and are more apt to be stopped by the audience, with the audience surviving the attempt). With a gun, someone is likely to die.
Guns have their place, but it isn't in your waistband, nor strapped to your back in an open-carry town. Those bozos carrying round rifles to inform people of their rights generated a bunch of 911 calls. Because, you know, you're carrying around rifles in the street. That's a culture change no one wants, thanks.
Okay, so as much as I hate to say this, referencing the Daily Show for facts is the liberal's answer to quoting Rush Limbaugh. Those shows are entertainment -- everything is taken out of context for humor or to drive home a point which may or may not be salient. John Stewart knows his stuff, certainly, and I am in no way comparing him to Mr. Limbaugh in terms of knowledge, but don't think for a minute that he presents an unbiased view of things. I'm betting the reason the gun laws were so successful in Australia has nothing to do with the laws themselves -- it has to do with the culture (as someone said). People weren't randomly killing each other en masse or in major gang warfare daily like we do here in the US of A (or however the media is presenting it).
Because, seriously. You might need a gun in Australia, but it's for the man-eating spiders.
I'm going to suggest that while there are larger open source consortiums like Apache that organize developers and projects such that they do wind up looking like a commercial project, you need to remember the main difference:
YOU are responsible for open source software implementations. There is no inherent support structure, there is no liability nor responsibility to maintain, fix, or continue development on an open source project. If you want to implement it, you are either paying for developer time (perhaps your own time) to perform those duties, or taking a risk that the project will continue to be updated by the author or others in the community.
Graphene Aerogel Takes World's Lightest Material Crown
A crown should weigh heavy on a ruler's brow, lest he forget the weight of his responsibility.
Well, a contractor experienced supporting a particular industry would find the processes in place and help the customer learn about what can be done to improve them. Most customers moving to new tech won't know what to implement, they just know things need to be more efficient. As a contractor it is up to you to NOT do what the customer tells you, but to convince them to use the best solution for the problem.
And UC isn't even that prestigious.
It's the best state school system in the U.S. Admittedly, the way the budgets are falling, it'll go private one of these years...
These big schools and their even bigger price tags
But you know, brick and mortar, textbooks, electri...oh, right. Online. You think there'd be some sort of discount. Especially for a class I took in Junior year of high school. I can see paying $1400 for a specialized course like Nuclear Physics or Laser Science. But pre-calc?
Therefore, 1 bag of popcorn every 3 seconds....(144k bags * 3 sec per bag) / 3600 secs per hour = 120 hours
Because I'm aiming my laser at each bag individually. If I were going to cook a room-sized tin of kernels, I'd disperse the heat using a stained glass window.
I drank what?
I would imagine that going with a single source solution is what allowed them to afford it. "If you just use us, we'll keep your servers up until we don't, and we won't charge you an arm and a leg."
I saw Serenity before watching Firefly. It ranks in my 5 ten movies of all time (err...along with the Princess Bride if that gives you any idea of how I like my films). Firefly, of course, is a fleshing out of Serenity (or inverted vice versa) -- more detail of a great thing. I didn't feel the characters were different between TV and movie but I'll agree they all couldn't shine given the fact the movie wasn't 10 hours long. Which was a bummer.
the best sci-fi movie I'd seen in a long time
Yes.
Joss Whedon's Star Wars would be a bigger disaster than three episodes about Jar Jar.
I disagree. Serenity made me feel like Star Wars all over again: fun, smart, adventurous, light-hearted, but also thoughtful. Joss aces that kind of stuff. See Avengers for details.
I'm 100% certain everything I know I learned in school.
Not.
Send them to a piano instructor, make them join the debate team, have them crack a book that isn't assigned reading. Have them code a smartphone app that manages their time.
Great book(s). I think even the first book would need to be broken into at least two movies. Would probably make a good HBO mini-series.
I say that for one decade, you place the same restrictions on men that you have on women, and allow women to have the rights of men.
That'll learn 'em.
In fact if you bother to open a history book instead of the comic books you apparently feast upon for your simplistic world view, you'd find that MANY past civilizations have migrated after conditions changed where they were - this was all pre-technology.
I'll bite. Pre-tech we had about 6 billion fewer people. Now, almost all land in the world is owned or not worth owning or living upon. Small migrations may be possible but if larger migrations were possible, millions of people in Africa might have shifted to considerably more human friendly areas in the past century. People move because of hunger and war, but generally those migrations are not sustainable as a future settlement area because of the lack of resources, well, everywhere. They are expected to move back.
1) XKCD: Disaster Voyeurism
2) For the greater portion of humanity to survive we are dependent upon the machines and electronics that control our energy systems. Can you imagine 7 billion people forced to hunt for their food after the refrigerator warm up? Like the comic above, it wouldn't take long before we'd be hunting ourselves.