Hah! This is what I love about Slashdot! Where else can one discuss technical issues and expand the horizons of their porn star knowledge.
I also see from the wording of my post that I shouldn't post on Slashdot at 4 in the morning.
Although, Ada's great^n grand daughter as a script kiddy hacker sounds like a great premise for a cyberpunk story. I don't believe Ada ever had kids though.
If you're looking for a great light-weight but full featured graphical text editor geared toward programmers under Linux I highly recommend Cream for Vim. On the other hand, if you'd rather have an easy to use editor in shell that doesn't suck for coding, I would suggest JOE (Joe's Own Editor) which you can download here.
The high wages you speak of are illusory and only a few highly skilled trades workers in larger metropolitan areas can even hope of making that much. Often the work is seasonal at best and otherwise spotty.
Here in the "boonies" where I live, trades workers are lucky if they can make $30K per year, and then only if they own their own business. Their hired help makes much less. Due to the general lack of construction in rural areas, the market tends to work against people doing this sort of work. Here in upstate NY, unemployment during the winter is counted on as part of one's wages.
What? You say that's OK because it costs so much less to live in rural areas? This is another myth. While things such as housing (trailers!) may be much cheaper if your area hasn't been gentrified because your town has sought to commodify the rural experience by promoting tourism, (see Thomas) what you will spend on car maintainance, gas, heating, electricity, food and other essential services will make a city dweller gasp. You know, they actually charge us more for gas in the boonies because they say it costs more to transport it? While a small apartment in Boston may cost $1200, the city's infrastructure and cultural availability mitigate living costs.
As for the ones who own their own businesses, they may charge quite a bit, but they will be lucky to get half of what they charge. This is the kind of faulty logic that people use when complaining about their auto mechanic charging $45/hr. If they are working for somebody else, chances are they're only seeing $10-$15 per hour and if they aren't the overhead is eating them alive.
We haven't even considered things like health insurance which is often next to impossible to obtain at an affordable price for a business owner or independent contractor and thus both the owner and employees foot the health care bills themselves. Better not get sick! A single visit to the emergency room will easily set you back $2,500. Also, if you become disabled, even assuming you qualify for SSI or SSD, count on your total monthly income falling to under $600 per month.
Obviously you have never done electrical or plumbing work on a construction project either. Make no mistake, this is hard physical labor and not at all like running some additional CAT5 in your already well constructed house. Yeah, there are older trades workers, but would you really want to be doing this kind of work past age 40?
Could possibly be clay. The Mini-TES website at Arizona State University has some slides of Mini-TES data. In this particular slide they're showing an unidentified mineral that definitely looks like it has bound water.
I think the spam business now consists of mostly addresses being sold to other spammers.
I've thought the same thing for years. It's similar to the online porn industry. The little guy throws up a website and gets into a few affiliate programs and thinks the traffic and money is just going to come rolling in. In reality, it's incredibly difficult to get your little porn site noticed amid the thousands of others.
The ones making the money are those selling porn hosting services, content, etc. and these turn out to be mostly a handful of large companies. There was a really good story on Kuro5hin about this about a year ago from someone who actually tried, and sort of succeeded, to make money in the porn industry. My observations regarding the spam industry are that it's just about the same.
Don't think I haven't thought about going over to the dark side and starting to spam either, if not for a living, then at least part-time to make beer and hardware money. I mean, if you are honest with yourself, who wouldn't? It's the allure of easy money. What could be easier than sending out half a million e-mails for a $50 product and having just a 5% of a percent (.0005) sales rate. It's hard to think of an easier way to make $12,500. Alas, it can't be that easy because if it was, everybody would be doing it.
I used to work for a small busines that used a similar method, although they had a box for unpaid bills too. Once a month the bills from the unpaid box would be grabbed and paid (if there was money) and then thrown in the paid box. It actually worked out pretty well.
The DaVinci Code is pretty much like a literary Irwin Allen disaster flick, but less entertaining.
Find yourself a copy of Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Same ground is covered, much more entertaining.
No shuttle missions ever flew from Vandenberg, although there were quite a few landings there.
Part of the reason is that the launch facility was rife with problems. However, the bigger reason is political, in my opinion. Basically, NASA needed the Air Force as reluctant partner in order to get funding from Congress for the shuttle program. From what I understand, the Air Force was interested in using the Shuttle to put spy satellites into polar orbit.
Polar orbit is not something that could be achieved from Kennedy primarily because NASA would never risk putting the Shuttle on a trajectory where early launch failure could result in the orbiter and boosters plowing into a populated area. One does not have such worries at Vandenberg with nothing but desert and Canadians in tehe way should the Shuttle fail.
The numerous problems with the Vandenberg facility (rumoured to have a Native-American curse on it), some really bad press coverage and changes in Air Force administration resulted in the abandonment of SLC-6. The Air Force figured that they could get their spy sats into polar orbit more easily and cheaply with Titans.
BTW: If a Shuttle had ever been launched from Vandenberg, I think it would have been the Discovery. If I am remembering correctly, as part of the deal NASA struck with the Air Force, they actually got ownership of the Discovery. I apologize if any of this is factually incorrect, I am pulling straight from memory here. If you peruse the sci.space.shuttle newsgroup you'll find some truly informative articles there from people who really know about this stuff because they were the ones who actually worked on the shuttle program.
The Shuttle launch complex at Vandenberg AFB, SLC-6, was built with heaters originally. Had 39B at Kennedy been so equipped, there is a good chance the Challenger tragedy would never have ocurred. Of course, no Shuttle ever launched from Vandenberg and SLC-6 was abandoned in place. There was a particularly haunting photo that was floating around the web back in the 90s showing SLC-6 sitting there all rusted out (I googled but couldn't find it). I believe SLC-6 has since been rebuilt to fly Atlas-Centaurs.
Heh -- yeah, I saw this one of times it was a Slashdot story. Of course I immediately bent, folded and spindled an old AOL disk.:-) It proudly sits atop my computer, along with my Matchbox Mars Pathfinder rover. I'm always disappointed because visitors to my apartment never recognize either one.:-(
Origami and Math. My calculus teacher in high school had a whole array (pardon the pun) of paper polyhedra.
Origami dinosaurs. I love the paper Tyranosaurus. Now if I only had paper Marshall, Will and Holly's to go with these I could play Origami Land of the Lost!
I wonder though, how much of the cost of developing the internet was recouped when the government sold off the NSF backbone. Also, the internet was originally developed for the military and as such, development costs primarily came out of the DOD budget. Finally, the web was developed not in the U.S. but at CERN and as such very few U.S. taxpayer dollars went into web development, other than Federal web sites.
As I stated in another post, the taxes and fees on my POTS line run about 30%. While I don't mind contributing to the telecommunications commons, 30% seems usury, particularly when we are taxed every where we turn these days (Federal, state, local, school, sales, etc.). I would expect that for the 90% of the population who earn less than $100,000 per year, that at least 50% of their income goes to taxes and fees in one way or another.
OTOH, I think you're absolutely dead on that commercial interests rarely create anything really new and you're certainly correct that the invisible hand has not touched rural and impoverished areas. It just seems to me that we have a habit of imposing the taxes and fees in this country on the very people who can least afford to pay them when the large corporations should be paying for the privilege of doing business in this country. I fail to see how any of the five remaining kids of Sam Walton would have any less incentive to continue to do business if they each only made $19 billion instead of $20 billion.
Doesn't change the fact that in the end, Packard Bell went out of business...
That'd be news to Packard Bell.:-) Actually, after acquiring Zenith's PC line, they were acquired by NEC and continue to do business under the Packard Bell name in Europe. At the time (1996) they shipped more PCs than any other manfacturer in the U.S. Oddly enough, despite using cheap components, they couldn't compete in the US when PC prices started to fall so rapidly. Perhaps it's no so much that Packard Bell went out of business because of their shoddy reputation as all the other PC manufacturers began behaving just like Packard Bell.
PS: In reference to your sig... Not to start a language flame war, but like Java, early Packard Bell computers were slow and clunky. As the company matured, they started turning out some pretty decent machines and they had IMHO, perhaps the damn best support web site. You could enter the serial number of any machine they built and find out exactly what was in it when it shipped. Similarly, while not perfect, I kind of think Java has grown up too and is a pretty decent programming language for a wide variety of applications. I wouldn't go trying to program an OS in it though. Everything has it's purpose (except perhaps our Pretender In Chief).
I'm pretty sure cell phones don't broadcast GPS. AFAIK they are only able to determine your position relative to the current cell you are using. When you dial 911 with a cell phone, you are just patched through to the nearest E911 call center and there is the fact that you still have to actually dial 911. Of course, two or more cell towers could be used to determine your position more accurately, but then an outside agency would have to be really determined to find you.
Those On-Star systems do use GPS though I think. My father had an incident where the passenger side air bag deployed for no good reason while driving his car and the On-Star operator immediately cut in asking if he was OK. They knew his position exactly.
Even your landline phone does not magically broadcast your GPS coordinates. When you dial (and as above you must dial) 911, your call is again patched through to the appropriate E911 call center, along with your Caller ID information. The E911 center computers correlate the Caller ID info with the records stored for that number in their database and display it for the E911 operator. I do not believe you can block Caller ID for 911 calls as that would sort of defeat their purpose. Again, if a determined outside agency wishes to know where you are or tap your phone, they have much more direct methods than E911 (and with the expansion of FBI powers that was just rammed through Congress, likely they don't even need a court order). But then, you don't have anything to hide, do you citizen?;-)
However, if you wish, I am having a Giftmas special on little tin foil hats for your phone this month. Only $19.99 (after $50 rebate + tax and S/H). Festive holiday colors!
Well, from your prospective it shouldn't make a difference, other than with all the major phone networks either moving or having moved to VOIP, you should be seeing a large reduction in your phone bill -- at least for your landline. The phone companies are certainly seeing a large reduction in their expenses. The problem is, the phone companies are still charging you as if they were running their same old switched networks. Here's an article by Clay Shirky that explains this arguement much better than me.
On top of the phone companies' price gouging (IMHO), you are literally being soaked in federal, state and other fees and taxes. For instance, for my landline I subscribe to Sprint's Complete Sense Unlimited plan which gives me unlimited local and long distance (within the U.S.) plus a bunch of goodies for about $50 monthly. Yet my monthly bill often runs about $65. That additional $15 monthly is certainly not from using directory assistance (which is not about $2 a pop for me) or goodies not included in my plan. While I don't begrudge the 35 cents for E911 service and maybe I wouldn't begrudge the taxes either if I thought they were going to pay for something worthwhile instead of stormtroopers shooting and gassing innocent people in Florida. The FCC fees I feel are a complete rip-off. Either way, nearly 30% taxes and fees is outrageous!
Right now I am considering switching to Vonage for my landline. At $35 monthly for the same type of service plan I get from Sprint, and no added fees I think I can deal with any of the annoyances that might come with it. Now if I could find a good alternative to Time-Warner Cable for my broadband.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah! This is what I love about Slashdot! Where else can one discuss technical issues and expand the horizons of their porn star knowledge.
I also see from the wording of my post that I shouldn't post on Slashdot at 4 in the morning.
Although, Ada's great^n grand daughter as a script kiddy hacker sounds like a great premise for a cyberpunk story. I don't believe Ada ever had kids though.
If you're looking for a great light-weight but full featured graphical text editor geared toward programmers under Linux I highly recommend Cream for Vim. On the other hand, if you'd rather have an easy to use editor in shell that doesn't suck for coding, I would suggest JOE (Joe's Own Editor) which you can download here.
The high wages you speak of are illusory and only a few highly skilled trades workers in larger metropolitan areas can even hope of making that much. Often the work is seasonal at best and otherwise spotty.
Here in the "boonies" where I live, trades workers are lucky if they can make $30K per year, and then only if they own their own business. Their hired help makes much less. Due to the general lack of construction in rural areas, the market tends to work against people doing this sort of work. Here in upstate NY, unemployment during the winter is counted on as part of one's wages.
What? You say that's OK because it costs so much less to live in rural areas? This is another myth. While things such as housing (trailers!) may be much cheaper if your area hasn't been gentrified because your town has sought to commodify the rural experience by promoting tourism, (see Thomas) what you will spend on car maintainance, gas, heating, electricity, food and other essential services will make a city dweller gasp. You know, they actually charge us more for gas in the boonies because they say it costs more to transport it? While a small apartment in Boston may cost $1200, the city's infrastructure and cultural availability mitigate living costs.
As for the ones who own their own businesses, they may charge quite a bit, but they will be lucky to get half of what they charge. This is the kind of faulty logic that people use when complaining about their auto mechanic charging $45/hr. If they are working for somebody else, chances are they're only seeing $10-$15 per hour and if they aren't the overhead is eating them alive.
We haven't even considered things like health insurance which is often next to impossible to obtain at an affordable price for a business owner or independent contractor and thus both the owner and employees foot the health care bills themselves. Better not get sick! A single visit to the emergency room will easily set you back $2,500. Also, if you become disabled, even assuming you qualify for SSI or SSD, count on your total monthly income falling to under $600 per month.
Obviously you have never done electrical or plumbing work on a construction project either. Make no mistake, this is hard physical labor and not at all like running some additional CAT5 in your already well constructed house. Yeah, there are older trades workers, but would you really want to be doing this kind of work past age 40?
Could possibly be clay. The Mini-TES website at Arizona State University has some slides of Mini-TES data. In this particular slide they're showing an unidentified mineral that definitely looks like it has bound water.
Wierd... still doesn't resolve for me... "http://www.mepis.org could not be found"
Had to use the IP: 69.56.218.11
I wonder if RoadRunner is blocking the domain for some reason.
mepis.org doesn't seem to resolve...
Oddly enough, yes! A couple of them anyway. :-)
...five minutes later after coming back from getting coffee: D'oh!
I actually did this once... while logged in as root... at the top level in /home... on a production server. Thank baphomet for nightly backups!
Hopefully none of my clients are reading this. :-)
As the AC asked, why specifically do you believe that ZoneAlarm is one of the worst possible firewalls?
I've thought the same thing for years. It's similar to the online porn industry. The little guy throws up a website and gets into a few affiliate programs and thinks the traffic and money is just going to come rolling in. In reality, it's incredibly difficult to get your little porn site noticed amid the thousands of others.
The ones making the money are those selling porn hosting services, content, etc. and these turn out to be mostly a handful of large companies. There was a really good story on Kuro5hin about this about a year ago from someone who actually tried, and sort of succeeded, to make money in the porn industry. My observations regarding the spam industry are that it's just about the same.
Don't think I haven't thought about going over to the dark side and starting to spam either, if not for a living, then at least part-time to make beer and hardware money. I mean, if you are honest with yourself, who wouldn't? It's the allure of easy money. What could be easier than sending out half a million e-mails for a $50 product and having just a 5% of a percent (.0005) sales rate. It's hard to think of an easier way to make $12,500. Alas, it can't be that easy because if it was, everybody would be doing it.
I used to work for a small busines that used a similar method, although they had a box for unpaid bills too. Once a month the bills from the unpaid box would be grabbed and paid (if there was money) and then thrown in the paid box. It actually worked out pretty well.
The DaVinci Code is pretty much like a literary Irwin Allen disaster flick, but less entertaining. Find yourself a copy of Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Same ground is covered, much more entertaining.
Yeah, this was my other major brain fart. Thanks for the correction.
Your right. Major brain fart. I was actually thinking of Edwards AFB.
No shuttle missions ever flew from Vandenberg, although there were quite a few landings there.
Part of the reason is that the launch facility was rife with problems. However, the bigger reason is political, in my opinion. Basically, NASA needed the Air Force as reluctant partner in order to get funding from Congress for the shuttle program. From what I understand, the Air Force was interested in using the Shuttle to put spy satellites into polar orbit.
Polar orbit is not something that could be achieved from Kennedy primarily because NASA would never risk putting the Shuttle on a trajectory where early launch failure could result in the orbiter and boosters plowing into a populated area. One does not have such worries at Vandenberg with nothing but desert and Canadians in tehe way should the Shuttle fail.
The numerous problems with the Vandenberg facility (rumoured to have a Native-American curse on it), some really bad press coverage and changes in Air Force administration resulted in the abandonment of SLC-6. The Air Force figured that they could get their spy sats into polar orbit more easily and cheaply with Titans.
BTW: If a Shuttle had ever been launched from Vandenberg, I think it would have been the Discovery. If I am remembering correctly, as part of the deal NASA struck with the Air Force, they actually got ownership of the Discovery. I apologize if any of this is factually incorrect, I am pulling straight from memory here. If you peruse the sci.space.shuttle newsgroup you'll find some truly informative articles there from people who really know about this stuff because they were the ones who actually worked on the shuttle program.
The Shuttle launch complex at Vandenberg AFB, SLC-6, was built with heaters originally. Had 39B at Kennedy been so equipped, there is a good chance the Challenger tragedy would never have ocurred. Of course, no Shuttle ever launched from Vandenberg and SLC-6 was abandoned in place. There was a particularly haunting photo that was floating around the web back in the 90s showing SLC-6 sitting there all rusted out (I googled but couldn't find it). I believe SLC-6 has since been rebuilt to fly Atlas-Centaurs.
Heh -- yeah, I saw this one of times it was a Slashdot story. Of course I immediately bent, folded and spindled an old AOL disk. :-) It proudly sits atop my computer, along with my Matchbox Mars Pathfinder rover. I'm always disappointed because visitors to my apartment never recognize either one. :-(
I've always been fascinated by origami and paper models. Perhaps that's because I am so very bad at both. Anyway, here's some more paper goodness.
Check here.
I wonder though, how much of the cost of developing the internet was recouped when the government sold off the NSF backbone. Also, the internet was originally developed for the military and as such, development costs primarily came out of the DOD budget. Finally, the web was developed not in the U.S. but at CERN and as such very few U.S. taxpayer dollars went into web development, other than Federal web sites.
As I stated in another post, the taxes and fees on my POTS line run about 30%. While I don't mind contributing to the telecommunications commons, 30% seems usury, particularly when we are taxed every where we turn these days (Federal, state, local, school, sales, etc.). I would expect that for the 90% of the population who earn less than $100,000 per year, that at least 50% of their income goes to taxes and fees in one way or another.
OTOH, I think you're absolutely dead on that commercial interests rarely create anything really new and you're certainly correct that the invisible hand has not touched rural and impoverished areas. It just seems to me that we have a habit of imposing the taxes and fees in this country on the very people who can least afford to pay them when the large corporations should be paying for the privilege of doing business in this country. I fail to see how any of the five remaining kids of Sam Walton would have any less incentive to continue to do business if they each only made $19 billion instead of $20 billion.
That'd be news to Packard Bell. :-) Actually, after acquiring Zenith's PC line, they were acquired by NEC and continue to do business under the Packard Bell name in Europe. At the time (1996) they shipped more PCs than any other manfacturer in the U.S. Oddly enough, despite using cheap components, they couldn't compete in the US when PC prices started to fall so rapidly. Perhaps it's no so much that Packard Bell went out of business because of their shoddy reputation as all the other PC manufacturers began behaving just like Packard Bell.
PS: In reference to your sig... Not to start a language flame war, but like Java, early Packard Bell computers were slow and clunky. As the company matured, they started turning out some pretty decent machines and they had IMHO, perhaps the damn best support web site. You could enter the serial number of any machine they built and find out exactly what was in it when it shipped. Similarly, while not perfect, I kind of think Java has grown up too and is a pretty decent programming language for a wide variety of applications. I wouldn't go trying to program an OS in it though. Everything has it's purpose (except perhaps our Pretender In Chief).
I'm pretty sure cell phones don't broadcast GPS. AFAIK they are only able to determine your position relative to the current cell you are using. When you dial 911 with a cell phone, you are just patched through to the nearest E911 call center and there is the fact that you still have to actually dial 911. Of course, two or more cell towers could be used to determine your position more accurately, but then an outside agency would have to be really determined to find you.
Those On-Star systems do use GPS though I think. My father had an incident where the passenger side air bag deployed for no good reason while driving his car and the On-Star operator immediately cut in asking if he was OK. They knew his position exactly.
Even your landline phone does not magically broadcast your GPS coordinates. When you dial (and as above you must dial) 911, your call is again patched through to the appropriate E911 call center, along with your Caller ID information. The E911 center computers correlate the Caller ID info with the records stored for that number in their database and display it for the E911 operator. I do not believe you can block Caller ID for 911 calls as that would sort of defeat their purpose. Again, if a determined outside agency wishes to know where you are or tap your phone, they have much more direct methods than E911 (and with the expansion of FBI powers that was just rammed through Congress, likely they don't even need a court order). But then, you don't have anything to hide, do you citizen? ;-)
However, if you wish, I am having a Giftmas special on little tin foil hats for your phone this month. Only $19.99 (after $50 rebate + tax and S/H). Festive holiday colors!
Well, from your prospective it shouldn't make a difference, other than with all the major phone networks either moving or having moved to VOIP, you should be seeing a large reduction in your phone bill -- at least for your landline. The phone companies are certainly seeing a large reduction in their expenses. The problem is, the phone companies are still charging you as if they were running their same old switched networks. Here's an article by Clay Shirky that explains this arguement much better than me.
On top of the phone companies' price gouging (IMHO), you are literally being soaked in federal, state and other fees and taxes. For instance, for my landline I subscribe to Sprint's Complete Sense Unlimited plan which gives me unlimited local and long distance (within the U.S.) plus a bunch of goodies for about $50 monthly. Yet my monthly bill often runs about $65. That additional $15 monthly is certainly not from using directory assistance (which is not about $2 a pop for me) or goodies not included in my plan. While I don't begrudge the 35 cents for E911 service and maybe I wouldn't begrudge the taxes either if I thought they were going to pay for something worthwhile instead of stormtroopers shooting and gassing innocent people in Florida. The FCC fees I feel are a complete rip-off. Either way, nearly 30% taxes and fees is outrageous!
Right now I am considering switching to Vonage for my landline. At $35 monthly for the same type of service plan I get from Sprint, and no added fees I think I can deal with any of the annoyances that might come with it. Now if I could find a good alternative to Time-Warner Cable for my broadband.