When I was 17... I downloaded very good tunes... I downloaded very good tunes that I got through P2P My name was Chuck D... I stayed up downloading Queen... When I was 17
Of course, spreading the idea that it is a mainstream Christian belief that the entire universe is 6000 years old does help to make Christianity look silly, which is why this argument is always propped up by non-Christians.
Are you aware that a Gallup poll taken less than a year ago (December 2010) shows that 40% of Americans believe that the Universe and humans in their present form were created by God in the very recent past (less than 10,000 years ago)?
You and I may both wish that this were not the case, but the Young-Earth viewpoint is not a fringe idea that is held by a small number of zealots.
3) We need better trolls. The trolls right now are lame.
The decreased quality of trolls in recent years is directly proportional to the increased presence of the Linux infestation on the Internet. Back in the 1990s, most high-end Internet servers were running some form of proprietary UNIX or Windows NT. (You may recall the Netcraft study that showed that NT far outperformed the popular Linux distributions of the day.) They were respectable pieces of hardware running respectable operating systems. Furthermore, they were administered by intelligent engineers, full of independent thought and imbued with a lust for creativity and self-expression.
In the intervening years, the landscape has been polluted with low-cost commodity Intel boxes running some damnable variant of the Linux virus. With cute names like "Gentoo", "Ubuntu", and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", this operating system has hijacked the once-vibrant Internet community. The afore-mentioned Windows and UNIX administrators have been sent packing and replaced with soulless, hive-minded drones from the Linux gulags. And once this happened, the high-quality trolls were nowhere to be found.
Let's be perfectly clear about one thing: The Linux "community" is a liberal slaughterhouse of the mind. The goal of this community (rarely stated out loud but none the less obvious) is complete totalitarian Communism and an end to Western civilization. They see our dreams of prosperity and a high standard of living for our children and our grandchildren. They want to replace these dreams with a nightmarish reality: burning trash barrels on every corner, mile-long government bread lines, and children in burlap sacks drinking water out of discarded automobile tires.
This is what Linux has wrought. This is where they intend to bring us.
For what it's worth, I've used Norton 360 on my Windows machines since mid-2010 and am quite satisfied with it. I've never tried to uninstall it, so I can't speak to how well that works (if at all) but my experience has been that it's very unobtrusive.
Have you actually used a Norton product (e.g., 360) in the last couple of years? They used to have a bad reputation (and a well-deserved one at that) but their recent offerings are leaps and bounds better than the bloatware of the past.
The example that I always like to use is the Big Bang, which was first formulated by Monsignor Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest. At the time that it was proposed, it received significant disdain from the astronomical community, since most astronomers at that time believed that the Universe was eternal and static (the so-called "steady state") -- they felt that a beginning of space and time at some point in the finite past crossed over into the realm of religion and philosophy. On the other hand, the religious community (by and large) welcomed the Big Bang with open arms, since it was in accordance with the creation accounts of their particular belief systems.
But in the 80 years or so since the advent of the Big Bang theory, a funny (and depending on your point of view, sad) thing has happened: The two camps have almost completely switched sides. As the evidence came in, most astronomers and cosmologists came to accept the Big Bang. They saw the confirmation of Hubble's observations regarding the redshift of distant galaxies, the discovery of the CMBR, the evidence that the distribution of baryonic matter in the Universe is consistent with what is predicted by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, etc.
Unfortunately, for those segments of the religious community that have been hijacked by the rise of fundamentalism / fanaticism in the last 50 years or so, the Big Bang was no longer "good enough". The idea that the Universe came about in a dramatic cataclysm ("in the beginning...") became unacceptable since the timescale called for billions of years, rather than the six thousand or so that are dictated by a rigid literalist interpretation of the appropriate holy writ. It's not good enough that the prevailing scientific theory on the origin of the Universe calls for a beginning -- it's not fundamentalist enough.
The idea that science and religion are incompatible is poisonous and civilization-threatening. Getting back to the example, the idea that religious folks, of all people, should be opposed to the Big Bang theory is completely baffling. If I live to be a thousand years old, I'll never understand it. There's no shortage of beauty in modern science or ancient teachings; the conflicts (such as they are) are largely manufactured. And as you mention, the rising fundamentalist movement is a major player in this enterprise.
The only role that "the government" has in the realm of assisted suicide is to establish the legal framework under which it operates. That's it. The decision to initiate the process must be made by a terminally-ill person of sound mind, and it must then be concurred with and carried out by medical professionals. Doctors, not bureaucrats. You're suggesting that "the government" will initiate and carry out the process on people that it considers to be (for whatever reason) undesirable, and that puts you squarely in the black helicopter and tinfoil hat camp.
...but I'm going to join the chorus of voices here.
Saying that something in the natural sciences is "just a theory" or "still a theory" belies a certain misunderstanding about the scientific method. It suggests a belief in a mythical finish line that an idea can cross, thereby making the transition from "theory" to "law". Natural science does not work in this way. Natural science is not in the business of "proving" anything. If you're interested in proof, you should become a mathematician.
Put another way, a physicist with a baseball in his hand does not say "If I throw this ball up in the air, I shall prove that it will return to the ground." Rather, he (or she) says "If I throw this ball up in the air, I *predict* that it will return to the ground."
You see, that is what natural science is about: theories and predictions. A scientific theory rises and falls on the basis of how well it explains past and present phenomena and how well it predicts future phenomena. If it fails to do this, it is amended, tinkered with, or (in some cases) outright discarded. But from a scientific perspective, there is never a point where scientists declare victory and make the claim that they have discovered universal, unswerving truth.
Both men are playing characters, but (by and large) only one of their audiences has picked up on that fact.
I remember occasionally hearing Beck's radio show on the weekend several years ago (before he got his nightly program on CNN/HLN). It was mainly stream-of-consciousness ranting and skits, and most of it was not even overtly political. And in his early days at CNN, it was more of the same. But then a funny thing happened. Beck gradually discovered that as he made exploratory leaps into the realm of right-wing paranoia, he generated more buzz (e.g., message boards and link aggregation sites on the Internet) and got higher ratings.
And so in the mid-2000s, the character that Beck plays on TV slowly evolved into what it is today. And much like primeval hominids making the leap from the trees onto the savanna, Beck's move from CNN to Fox News coincided with him turning up the right-wing crazy to 11 and ripping off the knob.
I don't know what Beck's personal politics are. For all we know, he may be a raging liberal in his private life. But he's not dumb -- he knows what side his bread is buttered on, he is acutely aware of the fear, prejudice, and (yes) ignorance of his core audience, he plays them like a piano, and he's laughing all the way to the bank. Under normal circumstances, I'd say more power to him. Unfortunately, he's also fostering an environment of alarming rancor and derangement in American society -- and that's something that he's going to have to live with long after he's gone off the air.
Part of the problem is that anybody who proposes DoD cuts is immediately labeled a dangerous agitator who wants to embolden our enemies and put American lives at risk. There's a large and well-funded industry that's dedicated to perpetuating this myth, and they're frighteningly effective at their job. If we're to ever get the deficit situation under control, it will require a certain degree of maturity from the electorate -- along with the realization that there's enough pork in the defense budget to make a bacon replica of the Hoover Dam.
We also need a certain degree of maturity and a solidly-grounded perspective on taxes, as well -- but that's neither here nor there.
I'd have to agree with Quiet_Desperation on this -- gaming is really subjective.
Personally, I loved Fallout 3. The typical response to this is "Yeah, well, that's because you didn't play the original games." While I didn't play Fallout 2, I did play the original Fallout, and I also played the hell out of Wasteland a full decade before that (I suspect that relatively few people can make this claim). So I'm not lacking for "classic Fallout cred". While Fallout 3 was not a perfect game (no game is), it was still one of the most immersive and enjoyable experiences I've had in a game for quite some time.
I mean, seriously -- at one point you're raiding the National Air and Space Museum to retrieve the S-band transmitter from the Apollo lunar lander so that you can hang it off of the top of the Washington Monument to get a pirate radio station back on the air. How can you not have fun doing that?
I'd agree that New Vegas (also a terrific game) was a bit closer to the spirit of the original Fallout; it went back to the traditional desert setting, it brought back things like character traits that provided both bonuses and impediments, and more of the choices that you made during your adventure affected the eventual outcome of the game (and even that was not absent from Fallout 3, despite what others have said). But that doesn't mean that Fallout 3 wasn't a truly great game (Game of the Year, as it were).
To me, "Oblivion with guns" is not an insult at all -- it's a compliment. Hell, elsewhere in this thread there are highly-rated comments stating that truly great sequels cannot simply be MOTS (more of the same), and yet many of the people who disparage Fallout 3 do so on the basis that it's a departure from the formula of the first two games. Make up your mind, folks.
No reference to Jerry Pournelle is complete without this classic from rec.humor.funny (originally posted on BIX by Edmund X. DeJesus):
Usees Column by Gerry Pourwelle
When we finally got home from the monthly Rambling Writers Conference (this time in Djemaa-el-Fna), we found Fractal Manor's main hall shoulder deep in brand-new state-of-the-art totally free computer hardware and software for me to check out. Drat. I'll never get around to most of it, of course, and probably will end up dumpstering 90% or more. What I really need to properly handle all of the wonderful things companies send me absolutely free to review and enjoy with no obligation whatsoever on my part, is a trash compactor.
I thought I'd start by reconfiguring my main computer, the Hyena 986SXDXMCMXCIV. Right now the sectors on the hard disk run clockwise, but I heard a rumor that you can squeeze 0.2% more throughput by running them counterclockwise. It's worth the effort. Recommended.
I slid the shrink-wrap off version 7.126 of DiskMember Gold (I know, you thought I'd never upgrade from version 4.79, especially after all my bad-mouthing of versions 5.33 and 6.02, but what can I say? Only a Corinthian drinks kevis in a Veronese cantola.) and fired it up. No joy. I reread the documentation to no avail, then scanned the whole manual in, OCRed it, spell- checked the file and uploaded it to BIX with a question mark appended.
While I waited for a response, I tried the software out on the TriskaDeck 1313. This is the machine Bill Gibson uses when we collaborate. It loaded fine and ran fine, but it seems to have automatically moved every hard disk sector to a random location and erased all the File Allocation Tables. Luckily I had backed up the entire hard disk to a CD-ROM with the new BitByter 7000 CD-ROM Mastering Deck (only $40,000 and worth every penny. Recommended.) so in only 6 more hours I was back where I started.
While the disk was humming, I checked BIX with the Niebelungen Valkyrie we keep in a corner for when Sandy Solzhenitsyn is here writing. No answers yet.
On the chance that he might have some insight, I buzzed Bill Gates. He mumbled something about it probably being a hardware problem before excusing himself. That seemed plausible.
I called Jan Toady, president of Hyena, who indicated that a helicopter of ground-assault technical assistants was hovering near Fractal Manor 24 hours a day and that all I had to do was give the word and they'd parachute in. (Based on my own experience, I think Hyena offers the best service in the business, and not just because I mention their products every month in my column which millions of avid computer buyers read either. I bet you'd get the same service I do. Recommended.) I chuckled and said I'd try to puzzle it out a little more myself. He said okay and then talked me into accepting a free laptop with holographic display and telepathic mouse. A nice guy.
I also got Mike Spindler, Lou Gerstner and Ross Perot on a conference call, but except for a few offers on tractor trailers full of new equipment they couldn't help me.
My wife Svetlana (whose reading program can teach anyone with a $3000 computer how to read, and which is now available for PC-compatibles, Apples, Macintoshes and the Cray XMP for only $49.95 plus shipping and sales tax where applicable, have your MasterCard or VISA card ready and call 1-800-555-1212, operators standing by 24 hours a day) stuck her head in to say Hi.
That gave me the idea to try calling my sons for help. Number one son Bud is now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but when I called him he was busy in the War Room with the Secretary of Defense and some darn nerve gas missile crisis. It's always something with those civilians. Second son Robbie was in the middle of performing emergency brain surgery on the President, but promised to get back to me when he had a breather. Chip was arguing a landmark civil rights case before the Supreme Court when he answered my beeper message, but he seemed to thi
There was once a COBOL programmer in the mid to late 1990s. For the sake of this story, we'll call him Jack. After years of being taken for granted and treated as a technological dinosaur by all the UNIX programmers and Client/Server programmers and website developers, Jack was finally getting some respect. He'd become a private consultant specializing in Year 2000 conversions. He was working short-term assignments for prestige companies, traveling all over the world on different assignments. He was working 70 and 80 and even 90 hour weeks, but it was worth it.
Several years of this relentless, mind-numbing work had taken its toll on Jack. He had problems sleeping and began having anxiety dreams about the Year 2000. It had reached a point where even the thought of the year 2000 made him nearly violent. He must have suffered some sort of breakdown, because all he could think about was how he could avoid the year 2000 and all that came with it.
Jack decided to contact a company that specialized in cryogenics. He made a deal to have himself frozen until March 15th, 2000. This was a very expensive process and totally automated. He was thrilled. The next thing he would know is he'd wake up in the year 2000; after the New Year celebrations and computer debacles; after the leap day. Nothing else to worry about except getting on with his life.
He was put into his cryogenic receptacle, the technicians set the revive date, he was given injections to slow his heartbeat to a bare minimum, and that was that. The next thing that Jack saw was an enormous and very modern room filled with excited people. They were all shouting "I can't believe it " and "It's a miracle" and "He's alive ". There were cameras (unlike any he'd ever seen) and equipment that looked like it came out of a science fiction movie.
Someone who was obviously a spokesperson for the group stepped forward. Jack couldn't contain his enthusiasm. "It is over?" he asked. "Is 2000 already here? Are all the millennial parties and promotions and crises all over and done with?"
The spokesman explained that there had been a problem with the programming of the timer on Jack's cryogenic receptacle, it hadn't been year 2000 compliant. It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. But the spokesman told Jack that he shouldn't get excited; someone important wanted to speak to him.
Suddenly a wall-sized projection screen displayed the image of a man that looked very much like Bill Gates. This man was Prime Minister of Earth. He told Jack not to be upset. That this was a wonderful time to be alive. That there was world peace and no more starvation. That the space program had been reinstated and there were colonies on the moon and on Mars. That technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet, or to watch any entertainment, or to hear any music recorded anywhere.
"That sounds terrific," said Jack. "But I'm curious. Why is everybody so interested in me?"
"Well," said the Prime Minister. "The year 10000 is just around the corner, and it says in your files that you know COBOL".
Having the maturity to realize that taxes are a necessary part of living in a modern, safe, and orderly society does not make one a "big-government cheerleader". Yes, it would be great if everybody's tax rate was zero percent and all of the things that define the First World standard of living magically appeared ex nihilo. Unfortunately, this is not the case -- and it's the reason that the whole "government is robbing me at gunpoint" schtick never fails to elicit involuntary eye-rolling from folks who are more grounded in reality.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was 17...
I downloaded very good tunes...
I downloaded very good tunes that I got through P2P
My name was Chuck D...
I stayed up downloading Queen...
When I was 17
Of course, spreading the idea that it is a mainstream Christian belief that the entire universe is 6000 years old does help to make Christianity look silly, which is why this argument is always propped up by non-Christians.
Are you aware that a Gallup poll taken less than a year ago (December 2010) shows that 40% of Americans believe that the Universe and humans in their present form were created by God in the very recent past (less than 10,000 years ago)?
You and I may both wish that this were not the case, but the Young-Earth viewpoint is not a fringe idea that is held by a small number of zealots.
3) We need better trolls. The trolls right now are lame.
The decreased quality of trolls in recent years is directly proportional to the increased presence of the Linux infestation on the Internet. Back in the 1990s, most high-end Internet servers were running some form of proprietary UNIX or Windows NT. (You may recall the Netcraft study that showed that NT far outperformed the popular Linux distributions of the day.) They were respectable pieces of hardware running respectable operating systems. Furthermore, they were administered by intelligent engineers, full of independent thought and imbued with a lust for creativity and self-expression.
In the intervening years, the landscape has been polluted with low-cost commodity Intel boxes running some damnable variant of the Linux virus. With cute names like "Gentoo", "Ubuntu", and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", this operating system has hijacked the once-vibrant Internet community. The afore-mentioned Windows and UNIX administrators have been sent packing and replaced with soulless, hive-minded drones from the Linux gulags. And once this happened, the high-quality trolls were nowhere to be found.
Let's be perfectly clear about one thing: The Linux "community" is a liberal slaughterhouse of the mind. The goal of this community (rarely stated out loud but none the less obvious) is complete totalitarian Communism and an end to Western civilization. They see our dreams of prosperity and a high standard of living for our children and our grandchildren. They want to replace these dreams with a nightmarish reality: burning trash barrels on every corner, mile-long government bread lines, and children in burlap sacks drinking water out of discarded automobile tires.
This is what Linux has wrought. This is where they intend to bring us.
For what it's worth, I've used Norton 360 on my Windows machines since mid-2010 and am quite satisfied with it. I've never tried to uninstall it, so I can't speak to how well that works (if at all) but my experience has been that it's very unobtrusive.
Have you actually used a Norton product (e.g., 360) in the last couple of years? They used to have a bad reputation (and a well-deserved one at that) but their recent offerings are leaps and bounds better than the bloatware of the past.
The example that I always like to use is the Big Bang, which was first formulated by Monsignor Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest. At the time that it was proposed, it received significant disdain from the astronomical community, since most astronomers at that time believed that the Universe was eternal and static (the so-called "steady state") -- they felt that a beginning of space and time at some point in the finite past crossed over into the realm of religion and philosophy. On the other hand, the religious community (by and large) welcomed the Big Bang with open arms, since it was in accordance with the creation accounts of their particular belief systems.
But in the 80 years or so since the advent of the Big Bang theory, a funny (and depending on your point of view, sad) thing has happened: The two camps have almost completely switched sides. As the evidence came in, most astronomers and cosmologists came to accept the Big Bang. They saw the confirmation of Hubble's observations regarding the redshift of distant galaxies, the discovery of the CMBR, the evidence that the distribution of baryonic matter in the Universe is consistent with what is predicted by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, etc.
Unfortunately, for those segments of the religious community that have been hijacked by the rise of fundamentalism / fanaticism in the last 50 years or so, the Big Bang was no longer "good enough". The idea that the Universe came about in a dramatic cataclysm ("in the beginning...") became unacceptable since the timescale called for billions of years, rather than the six thousand or so that are dictated by a rigid literalist interpretation of the appropriate holy writ. It's not good enough that the prevailing scientific theory on the origin of the Universe calls for a beginning -- it's not fundamentalist enough.
The idea that science and religion are incompatible is poisonous and civilization-threatening. Getting back to the example, the idea that religious folks, of all people, should be opposed to the Big Bang theory is completely baffling. If I live to be a thousand years old, I'll never understand it. There's no shortage of beauty in modern science or ancient teachings; the conflicts (such as they are) are largely manufactured. And as you mention, the rising fundamentalist movement is a major player in this enterprise.
There's a difference between a troll and a crank. Ludwig was a crank.
The concept of compos mentis has been around for centuries. As it pertains to medicine, it is almost always a decision made by an individual's doctor.
The only role that "the government" has in the realm of assisted suicide is to establish the legal framework under which it operates. That's it. The decision to initiate the process must be made by a terminally-ill person of sound mind, and it must then be concurred with and carried out by medical professionals. Doctors, not bureaucrats. You're suggesting that "the government" will initiate and carry out the process on people that it considers to be (for whatever reason) undesirable, and that puts you squarely in the black helicopter and tinfoil hat camp.
Welcome to 1996, Tennessee!
Why do you assume that our "present models of the world" are insufficient to explain the existence of extraterrestrial life?
Apples and oranges.
Extraterrestrial intelligence, if it exists, is not (necessarily) supernatural.
Agreed 100%. We live in a society where adjectives like "educated" and "intellectual" are used as epithets rather than compliments.
The long-term prognosis for such a society is grim, to say the least.
...but I'm going to join the chorus of voices here.
Saying that something in the natural sciences is "just a theory" or "still a theory" belies a certain misunderstanding about the scientific method. It suggests a belief in a mythical finish line that an idea can cross, thereby making the transition from "theory" to "law". Natural science does not work in this way. Natural science is not in the business of "proving" anything. If you're interested in proof, you should become a mathematician.
Put another way, a physicist with a baseball in his hand does not say "If I throw this ball up in the air, I shall prove that it will return to the ground." Rather, he (or she) says "If I throw this ball up in the air, I *predict* that it will return to the ground."
You see, that is what natural science is about: theories and predictions. A scientific theory rises and falls on the basis of how well it explains past and present phenomena and how well it predicts future phenomena. If it fails to do this, it is amended, tinkered with, or (in some cases) outright discarded. But from a scientific perspective, there is never a point where scientists declare victory and make the claim that they have discovered universal, unswerving truth.
...is that Colbert's audience is in on the joke.
Both men are playing characters, but (by and large) only one of their audiences has picked up on that fact.
I remember occasionally hearing Beck's radio show on the weekend several years ago (before he got his nightly program on CNN/HLN). It was mainly stream-of-consciousness ranting and skits, and most of it was not even overtly political. And in his early days at CNN, it was more of the same. But then a funny thing happened. Beck gradually discovered that as he made exploratory leaps into the realm of right-wing paranoia, he generated more buzz (e.g., message boards and link aggregation sites on the Internet) and got higher ratings.
And so in the mid-2000s, the character that Beck plays on TV slowly evolved into what it is today. And much like primeval hominids making the leap from the trees onto the savanna, Beck's move from CNN to Fox News coincided with him turning up the right-wing crazy to 11 and ripping off the knob.
I don't know what Beck's personal politics are. For all we know, he may be a raging liberal in his private life. But he's not dumb -- he knows what side his bread is buttered on, he is acutely aware of the fear, prejudice, and (yes) ignorance of his core audience, he plays them like a piano, and he's laughing all the way to the bank. Under normal circumstances, I'd say more power to him. Unfortunately, he's also fostering an environment of alarming rancor and derangement in American society -- and that's something that he's going to have to live with long after he's gone off the air.
Part of the problem is that anybody who proposes DoD cuts is immediately labeled a dangerous agitator who wants to embolden our enemies and put American lives at risk. There's a large and well-funded industry that's dedicated to perpetuating this myth, and they're frighteningly effective at their job. If we're to ever get the deficit situation under control, it will require a certain degree of maturity from the electorate -- along with the realization that there's enough pork in the defense budget to make a bacon replica of the Hoover Dam.
We also need a certain degree of maturity and a solidly-grounded perspective on taxes, as well -- but that's neither here nor there.
I guess with my sewer-mouth, I won't need to apply for an astronaut post anywhere.
Well, you could have always flown with Pete Conrad.
I'd have to agree with Quiet_Desperation on this -- gaming is really subjective.
Personally, I loved Fallout 3. The typical response to this is "Yeah, well, that's because you didn't play the original games." While I didn't play Fallout 2, I did play the original Fallout, and I also played the hell out of Wasteland a full decade before that (I suspect that relatively few people can make this claim). So I'm not lacking for "classic Fallout cred". While Fallout 3 was not a perfect game (no game is), it was still one of the most immersive and enjoyable experiences I've had in a game for quite some time.
I mean, seriously -- at one point you're raiding the National Air and Space Museum to retrieve the S-band transmitter from the Apollo lunar lander so that you can hang it off of the top of the Washington Monument to get a pirate radio station back on the air. How can you not have fun doing that?
I'd agree that New Vegas (also a terrific game) was a bit closer to the spirit of the original Fallout; it went back to the traditional desert setting, it brought back things like character traits that provided both bonuses and impediments, and more of the choices that you made during your adventure affected the eventual outcome of the game (and even that was not absent from Fallout 3, despite what others have said). But that doesn't mean that Fallout 3 wasn't a truly great game (Game of the Year, as it were).
To me, "Oblivion with guns" is not an insult at all -- it's a compliment. Hell, elsewhere in this thread there are highly-rated comments stating that truly great sequels cannot simply be MOTS (more of the same), and yet many of the people who disparage Fallout 3 do so on the basis that it's a departure from the formula of the first two games. Make up your mind, folks.
Speaking of ego and nostalgia, I was also reminded of the story about how Jerry Pournelle got kicked off of the ARPAnet.
No reference to Jerry Pournelle is complete without this classic from rec.humor.funny (originally posted on BIX by Edmund X. DeJesus):
Usees Column by
Gerry Pourwelle
When we finally got home from the monthly Rambling Writers Conference (this time in Djemaa-el-Fna), we found Fractal Manor's main hall shoulder deep in brand-new state-of-the-art totally free computer hardware and software for me to check out. Drat. I'll never get around to most of it, of course, and probably will end up dumpstering 90% or more. What I really need to properly handle all of the wonderful things companies send me absolutely free to review and enjoy with no obligation whatsoever on my part, is a trash compactor.
I thought I'd start by reconfiguring my main computer, the Hyena 986SXDXMCMXCIV. Right now the sectors on the hard disk run clockwise, but I heard a rumor that you can squeeze 0.2% more throughput by running them counterclockwise. It's worth the effort. Recommended.
I slid the shrink-wrap off version 7.126 of DiskMember Gold (I know, you thought I'd never upgrade from version 4.79, especially after all my bad-mouthing of versions 5.33 and 6.02, but what can I say? Only a Corinthian drinks kevis in a Veronese cantola.) and fired it up. No joy. I reread the documentation to no avail, then scanned the whole manual in, OCRed it, spell- checked the file and uploaded it to BIX with a question mark appended.
While I waited for a response, I tried the software out on the TriskaDeck 1313. This is the machine Bill Gibson uses when we collaborate. It loaded fine and ran fine, but it seems to have automatically moved every hard disk sector to a random location and erased all the File Allocation Tables. Luckily I had backed up the entire hard disk to a CD-ROM with the new BitByter 7000 CD-ROM Mastering Deck (only $40,000 and worth every penny. Recommended.) so in only 6 more hours I was back where I started.
While the disk was humming, I checked BIX with the Niebelungen Valkyrie we keep in a corner for when Sandy Solzhenitsyn is here writing. No answers yet.
On the chance that he might have some insight, I buzzed Bill Gates. He mumbled something about it probably being a hardware problem before excusing himself. That seemed plausible.
I called Jan Toady, president of Hyena, who indicated that a helicopter of ground-assault technical assistants was hovering near Fractal Manor 24 hours a day and that all I had to do was give the word and they'd parachute in. (Based on my own experience, I think Hyena offers the best service in the business, and not just because I mention their products every month in my column which millions of avid computer buyers read either. I bet you'd get the same service I do. Recommended.) I chuckled and said I'd try to puzzle it out a little more myself. He said okay and then talked me into accepting a free laptop with holographic display and telepathic mouse. A nice guy.
I also got Mike Spindler, Lou Gerstner and Ross Perot on a conference call, but except for a few offers on tractor trailers full of new equipment they couldn't help me.
My wife Svetlana (whose reading program can teach anyone with a $3000 computer how to read, and which is now available for PC-compatibles, Apples, Macintoshes and the Cray XMP for only $49.95 plus shipping and sales tax where applicable, have your MasterCard or VISA card ready and call 1-800-555-1212, operators standing by 24 hours a day) stuck her head in to say Hi.
That gave me the idea to try calling my sons for help. Number one son Bud is now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but when I called him he was busy in the War Room with the Secretary of Defense and some darn nerve gas missile crisis. It's always something with those civilians. Second son Robbie was in the middle of performing emergency brain surgery on the President, but promised to get back to me when he had a breather. Chip was arguing a landmark civil rights case before the Supreme Court when he answered my beeper message, but he seemed to thi
Instead of pony, package contained bobcat. Would not buy again.
There was once a COBOL programmer in the mid to late 1990s. For the sake of this story, we'll call him Jack. After years of being taken for granted and treated as a technological dinosaur by all the UNIX programmers and Client/Server programmers and website developers, Jack was finally getting some respect. He'd become a private consultant specializing in Year 2000 conversions. He was working short-term assignments for prestige companies, traveling all over the world on different assignments. He was working 70 and 80 and even 90 hour weeks, but it was worth it.
Several years of this relentless, mind-numbing work had taken its toll on Jack. He had problems sleeping and began having anxiety dreams about the Year 2000. It had reached a point where even the thought of the year 2000 made him nearly violent. He must have suffered some sort of breakdown, because all he could think about was how he could avoid the year 2000 and all that came with it.
Jack decided to contact a company that specialized in cryogenics. He made a deal to have himself frozen until March 15th, 2000. This was a very expensive process and totally automated. He was thrilled. The next thing he would know is he'd wake up in the year 2000; after the New Year celebrations and computer debacles; after the leap day. Nothing else to worry about except getting on with his life.
He was put into his cryogenic receptacle, the technicians set the revive date, he was given injections to slow his heartbeat to a bare minimum, and that was that. The next thing that Jack saw was an enormous and very modern room filled with excited people. They were all shouting "I can't believe it " and "It's a miracle" and "He's alive ". There were cameras (unlike any he'd ever seen) and equipment that looked like it came out of a science fiction movie.
Someone who was obviously a spokesperson for the group stepped forward. Jack couldn't contain his enthusiasm. "It is over?" he asked. "Is 2000 already here? Are all the millennial parties and promotions and crises all over and done with?"
The spokesman explained that there had been a problem with the programming of the timer on Jack's cryogenic receptacle, it hadn't been year 2000 compliant. It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. But the spokesman told Jack that he shouldn't get excited; someone important wanted to speak to him.
Suddenly a wall-sized projection screen displayed the image of a man that looked very much like Bill Gates. This man was Prime Minister of Earth. He told Jack not to be upset. That this was a wonderful time to be alive. That there was world peace and no more starvation. That the space program had been reinstated and there were colonies on the moon and on Mars. That technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet, or to watch any entertainment, or to hear any music recorded anywhere.
"That sounds terrific," said Jack. "But I'm curious. Why is everybody so interested in me?"
"Well," said the Prime Minister. "The year 10000 is just around the corner, and it says in your files that you know COBOL".
(copypasta)
Having the maturity to realize that taxes are a necessary part of living in a modern, safe, and orderly society does not make one a "big-government cheerleader". Yes, it would be great if everybody's tax rate was zero percent and all of the things that define the First World standard of living magically appeared ex nihilo. Unfortunately, this is not the case -- and it's the reason that the whole "government is robbing me at gunpoint" schtick never fails to elicit involuntary eye-rolling from folks who are more grounded in reality.
This is because Anonymous is DDoSing you.
I've never forgiven him for that piece of shit "Informer" song.
(a licky boom-boom down)