"What if you're calling International 911? The system won't know where you are!"
Reminds me of the V. Postrel book "The Future and Its Enemies" -- it's always nice to see things like this where the Enemies are temporarily set back;)
Some movies really need the visual aspects to work well, but like you say, if you've seen it once, the audio can really be enough of a cue.
The only movie I actually transferred to audio cassette to listen to in the car so far is "Carlito's Way," which works really well, in my opinion. The Godfather would probably be a good choice. The Monty Python soundtracks-to-movies are also great;)
That came with two short (6' and 3') lengths of cable, and adapter ends to make phone cord, ethernet, and several varieties of USB connection. Not bad for the price:)
"I'm a business traveller as well. I have cat5 cable with me at all times. One thing though - couldn't you just get a couple of plug converters for each end of the cat5 cable, so you don't have to carry both types of cables with you?"
I picked up a couple such plug-end convertors recently (for $10 at Big Lots, of all places. And if you're familiar with that store, it really is "of all places";)), and like that idea of saving space, *but*... the flat variety of phone cord is very cheap, and it's inexpensive redundancy to have a small bundle of it along; a 50-foot length takes up less room than even a 6-foot length of standard ethernet cable.
Yes, that's about what I did with the "frankenmodem" linked from the article (using an SMC router+base station rather than US Robotics), and I agree that it's better for being modular. But the price in ounces and cable tangle is much higher:) Luckily, that doesn't always matter, but when it does, I'm happy that the WiFlyer is so much smaller.
I don't want to have to say "Oh, I want to see commercials about new coffee makers from Sweden!" because I don't know that I do or don't.
What I want is more of a heirarchical list of categories to which I can say *NO*.
Ads for medicines, generally, I could do without, especially ones which relieve symptoms I am anatomically incapable of experiencing (several obvious choices), or about which I don't care enough to pay for medicine (toenail fungus is tragic?). Ads for cars (until / unless I'm shopping for a new one), I don't need. Etc.
timothy
Re:I for one do not welcome our advertising overlo
on
Don't Click on the Blue E
·
· Score: 2, Informative
MajorDick wrote: Unless of course that is slashdots ID , in that case great part of submarine income on Slashdots part"
Why is it assumed that college students (or high-school, or middle-school) need to have hot-and-cold running music, enough that colleges should be persuaded to provide special accomodation for it? I can't be the only one to find a retail music pipe (financially benefitting the music industry, and I'm sure the schools, too) a bit removed from the schools' likely missions. How about a chocolate pipe, too? College kids like chocolate! And how about a pneumatic tube stuffed with clothing from the Gap flowing through each dorm? Grab a T-shirt you like (and if you don't like any, just get some because "that's what college students are supposed to be, like, doing these days"), and it'll be debited to your campus-cash card linked to your ID.
Nothing wrong with getting music online: there are lots of free offerings, and quite a few music-for-money sites with various pros and cons. And when colleges provide both housing and networking it doesn't make sense to have them locked down to academic-only use (more work than letting it be open, and hoping that it sometimes and somewhat benefits enough people either academically or as a creature comfort to be worth having it in the first place), but shouldn't it pretty much end there?
I don't like to think of music (inspired creative effort made manifest in a series of notes and words, expressing and eliciting a range of emotional states, divine / sublime) as the equivalent of those perpetually-on sodium-discharge lights, a commodity background prop that's simply expected to be everywhere you look (or listen).
Apple (and others) have shown that it's perfectly possible to sell music piecemiel online; great! What sense does it make for a college administration to tie themselves to one vendor of a product that doesn't even have anything to do with the reason that college exists? Why not just say "OK, you've got an Internet connection to every dorm room; how you use it isn't worth micromanaging, but please only do legal things."
Only semi-cynical, I think it has to be because colleges want to make money, and aren't always as particular as they could be about how they go about it.
A distro which, out-of-the-box, no-foolin', detected-and-it-works, can find and use a USB wireless device, so I can get one of these: http://www.keybola.com/
I wonder if the laws of physics prior to special relativity account for all the strange time relationships you can see in old movies, where people seem to move in rapidly varying relationships with respect to time. Thanks, Einstein, for making everyone move at a more predictable pace -- I figure things like growing seasons and skiing on moguls must have been much harder with the old physics.
I hope you're right about the lack of fluff, and don't have specific reason to doubt it.
I'd prefer that the "major decision makers in this country" be ordinary citizens living their individual private lives rather than politicians, though; I'd like the job of Congress (generally) to be fairly pedestrian: keep laws in tune with the grand scheme laid out by the Constitution, in some cases by writing new ones and in some cases by revising or eliminating old ones.
I do not believe that new laws are generally beneficial (especially ones that interfere with what should be decided by the market -- which, to me, means "just about everything" -- but I'll stipulate preemptively that there might be some cases where laws make enough sense to be worth the coercion which accompanies them).
heh -- if I hadn't refreshed the page and noticed that there were nearly no comments up, I might have left well enough alone. And I don't think anyone was misled by your phrasing; I just get hung up on certain words, and am not a big fan of the way the government tends to spend my money, so that's what my brain made my fingers do. "No additional charge" sure would be awkward, of course, I was just being contrary about it.
Of course, for a micro-rant... 700 people and nearly 100 million dollars?! That's pretty hefty, per-head. Do they write with James Bond typewriters?
The reckless spending I'm thinking of (which is both cause and symptom of the cavalier taxation) isn't on the CRS, which I understand to be pretty good value -- as government spending goes -- especially if it increases the apparent intelligence of the members of Congress.
Also, while I tend to vote libertarian, I don't think anyone wants to pay taxes for things that are actually "superfluous" -- right? As to how I'd prefer politicians legislated, well, I'd mostly prefer they do it *less.*
However, those things on which the government does spend money should be made to benefit the commonwealth as well as they practically can be; in the case of distilled knowledge as in CRS reports, this (opening them up) is the best thing that could happen. However, I still think it's worthwhile distinguishing this from "free," when all that money comes from somewhere; when the government is of / for / by the people, the government per se does not have its own money, only that granted by the populace to do its job. It's a leaky system, though, and there are lots of frictions (some of them quite reasonable) that sometimes make it hard to return as much value as I'd like for the tax dollars spent.
And it's late, and I have stuff to do, so... I'll end my rant here!
"Ted Bridis of the Associated Press reports that more than 8000 Congressional Research Service reports produced exclusively for legislators are now available to the public for free."
Shouldn't that read something more like "Ted Bridis of the Associated Press reports that more than 8000 Congressional Research Service reports produced exclusively for legislators are now available to the public, who already paid for it, and whose children will keep paying thanks to reckless spending and cavalier taxation, at no additional charge"?
That complaint aside, kudos to the people who helped liberate some of the knowledge (and probably some of the fluff) that tax dollars have paid for.
"Muslims, on the other hand, are not technically recognised as a racial group, so you can argue that they're not protected. "
What do you mean "technically"? Islam is a religion, *not* a racial category.
And that's setting aside whatever you think of the merits of thinking of people as belonging to races in the first place:) (I have only started the book "The Race Myth" [http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=65-05 25948252-2%5D -- but I'm far enough into it to recommend it as a powerful, important book)
I (sort of) agree with you; about half of my computer stable is ruled out by the DVD version. However, a) I also don't have any floppy drives; there's no one format that will make everyone happy all the time b) DVD seems a pretty conservative standard to aim for in the near future -- the new high-capacity media that are coming out in the same size disk I bet will all (or mostly) be backward compatible and c) since there's a CD version, too, the DVD version can be in the future for those without DVD drives everywhere. CDs remain my favorite target medium, though -- they are as close to ubiquitous as things generally get in the computer world. Even if (when) DVD drives are as widespread as CD drives are now, that's still a lot of data to pull down, and expensive if you don't have absolutely all-you-can-eat data service.
I forget whether it was knoppix or mepis that did the best job of it, but I used this approach to help a friend's grandmother save the files from her virus-stuffed Windows PC. (Booted up with the LiveCD, moved files to external disk, removed suspicious files from the Windows partition... inelegant, and I'm certain it was not a great job of it, but the machine did work better afterward.)
She wants me to put on Linux so she can just never have the Windows problems again anyhow, and perhaps I'll take that risk. However, she can get free (and frequent;)) Windows support at work, and since I won't be living nearby anymore, that might be the smarter thing to keep doing. Hopefully her boss gets sick of it and says to switch to Linux;)
They might again (hey, hope springs eternal), but No, Walmart is not selling boxed Linux of any sort in their stores right now. (Corrections welcome!)
For a time, though, they were selling Mandrake (old Slashdot stories address this, I'm sure -- search for "Walmart"); I think it was between versions 6 and 8, or 7 and 8 -- I bought two of the boxes at different points just to register a blip on their radar (also, because I needed a distro, and that was easier than downloading over dialup). I have good memories of Mandrake; it did *not* install smoothly on every machine on which I tried it, but it had a pretty good track record with me, and a sensible, nicely graphical installer.
They often do carry software, just not very much of it -- it's a big Everything store, so they do have to choose their product line with different criteria than I'd have for it, especially when it comes to software. Of course, for those willing to install it, the average Linux distro either replaces or circumvents much of the other software they'd rather you buy separately. (Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, low-end graphics / word processing, etc.)
a) States (and the Feds) should be ashamed that they have not been doing this since they first required W2s
b) Muggers have long since been polite enough to tell you up front how much you are supposed to give them ("all of it"); the government is still finding out how much of the teat it can slice open before the cow keels over
c) What percentage of adult Americans pay end-of-year taxes at all? (I don't know; I've heard wildly different numbers -- you tell me, and tell me where you get the number from!) I say "end-of-year" to distinguish from other taxes, such as sales taxes, that people pay without filling out special forms.
d) If the folks who create the Federal income tax form can deign to ask me if I'd like to contribute to a free-money pot for politicians running in order to spend even more of my money (ha!), why can't they also ask if I'd like to contribute to the National Endowment for the Arts (ha!) and other non-essential spending (ha! again)? Why don't they ask me if I'd like to contribute to the Fund for Global Military Adventuring (No, thank you. Please return me to the main menu.)?
e) Why did Bush give up his only slim chance to win my vote by nixing all talk of a national sales tax after his one mention of it?
f) If not a Nat'l Sales Tax, why doesn't some politician repeat what Jack Kemp said about a postcard-sized return? Our tax code is Byzantine, tough to understand fully without a full-time background in it, even in the simpler forms. It's worse if you want to take advantage of any of the many, many loopholes. Most taxpayers haven't a chance.
But I did mention singles, and I do remember them:) (Even have quite a few that have sat unplayed for many years.) However, singles are usually only available for the few "chartworthy" tracks on an album, rather than all the tracks. And of course, they have an advantage in that often the B-side is something not available elsewhere, like a live track, or an outtake, or a wholly new song that didn't make it onto an album... I had the vinyl version of the strange-but-loud cover of "Just like Heaven" from Dinosaur Jr, and I think the B-side was a 33rpm mini-compilation. (Could be confusing it with another one, though.) I also like the primitive backup system that some singles had of containing the same track on both sides, in case one scratched;)
This looks great (as someone else has linked to in this thread) for aerial photography, whether by kite or rocket -- the sort of thing that you don't want to risk an expensive camera with.
What other things would you use this for? Underwater robots? Car-attached home-made action shots? Glued to back of pet turtle?
There have to be some cool applications for which a $30 video camera would be perfect;)
I don't use ITMS -- partly because I don't like iTunes, partly because I already have more music (purchased on CD) than I need to listen to for most of the rest of my life, partly because of simple indifference in the world of other ways to spend my time and money. Not that I won't buy more music later, or don't buy some music now, but there's so much I've not thoroughly heard of in the far-too-many CDs I purchased in my impetuous youth that I have no desire to go buy music generically. (When I run into a specific artist's music that appeals, that's a different story.)
That said, iTunes lets people buy 1 song at a time, and more importantly is an example for others to take up that "Hey, per-album pricing is not the only possible way for the world of purchasable music to work." Yes, there have been singles around for a while (vinyl / tape / CD... maybe very small wax cylinders), but this fully unitizes (if this is a word) the song as a unit. Things get weird when songs are very, very long (or very, very short), but simple pricing is I think overall better than, say, per-second:)
And *that* said, I like the pricing model but find the aesthetics of actually purchasing one song at a time a little weird, because of the annoying brain mole who insists that music albums should be heard in the track order they were ordained to follow by the artist; I feel a litle guilty to hear only *part* of the White album, for instance, or a single track from New Order's "Substance." ("Technique" is perhaps the best example of an album that flows as a work of art from first track to last.)
I was doing it only to get money, not to get experimental medicine per se; the experiments at Pharmaco (at least the ones I've ever considered) are Phase II clinical trials, investigating in part the absorption rates of the medicines under study.
I never gave much credence to the nuttier stories about heart stoppage etc, I just consider them part of a funny corner of Austin culture;)
I did a few Pharmaco studies -- one complete, one where IIRC I was a standby, and turned out not to be needed.
It wasn't too bad: I've described it before as a mix of summer camp, hospital, insane asylum, and low-security prison. (These last three, I guess could be usefully combined.)
The biggest problem is that I failed to think as I should have about hydration: you need to drink enough water if you're going to have a fair amount of liquid extracted through holes in your arms; at one point, after various unsuccessful stabs at my arms, the doctor (who was a bit arrogant and standoffish, but certainly not terrible) gave me a shunt, so I didn't have to get stuck any more, and advised me to drink water so I'd have more to give, so to speak.
I got more schoolwork done there than I probably did on any other weekends, which was good, because that's not something I was winning any awards for. The food was bland but edible; the only thing I didn't eat was the mayo-containing coleslaw. Entertainment was scarce -- pool, television, a bank of phones -- but there was a computer room, and I brought books.
It's regimented and strange -- but for a couple of weekends, I got iirc $600, and an understanding of the place / system, and I don't regret it. Maybe I'll do it again sometime, out of interest / curiosity at how it's changed in the last decade than anything else.
timothy
p.s. There are lots of rumors about the studies there, including the fabled "heart stopper" where they give you $40,000 to stop and then re-start your heart. Likewise, the "lose a toe" one, where they amputate a toe to test some anti-bleeding drug. I dunno about the veracity of either, but I know when I laughingly told my brother about the heart-stopping one, he paused and asked "Really? 40 thousand?" very thoughtfully.
Slashdot Mirror
"What if you're calling International 911? The system won't know where you are!"
;)
Reminds me of the V. Postrel book "The Future and Its Enemies" -- it's always nice to see things like this where the Enemies are temporarily set back
timothy
Some movies really need the visual aspects to work well, but like you say, if you've seen it once, the audio can really be enough of a cue.
;)
The only movie I actually transferred to audio cassette to listen to in the car so far is "Carlito's Way," which works really well, in my opinion. The Godfather would probably be a good choice. The Monty Python soundtracks-to-movies are also great
timothy
For $10, I didn't get *just* the plugs.
:)
That came with two short (6' and 3') lengths of cable, and adapter ends to make phone cord, ethernet, and several varieties of USB connection. Not bad for the price
timothy
"I'm a business traveller as well. I have cat5 cable with me at all times. One thing though - couldn't you just get a couple of plug converters for each end of the cat5 cable, so you don't have to carry both types of cables with you?"
;)), and like that idea of saving space, *but* ... the flat variety of phone cord is very cheap, and it's inexpensive redundancy to have a small bundle of it along; a 50-foot length takes up less room than even a 6-foot length of standard ethernet cable.
I picked up a couple such plug-end convertors recently (for $10 at Big Lots, of all places. And if you're familiar with that store, it really is "of all places"
" Ah, but what about the 80 minute CD's ? "
Bad metronome.
timothy
Yes, that's about what I did with the "frankenmodem" linked from the article (using an SMC router+base station rather than US Robotics), and I agree that it's better for being modular. But the price in ounces and cable tangle is much higher :) Luckily, that doesn't always matter, but when it does, I'm happy that the WiFlyer is so much smaller.
Cheers,
Tim
I don't want to have to say "Oh, I want to see commercials about new coffee makers from Sweden!" because I don't know that I do or don't.
What I want is more of a heirarchical list of categories to which I can say *NO*.
Ads for medicines, generally, I could do without, especially ones which relieve symptoms I am anatomically incapable of experiencing (several obvious choices), or about which I don't care enough to pay for medicine (toenail fungus is tragic?). Ads for cars (until / unless I'm shopping for a new one), I don't need. Etc.
timothy
MajorDick wrote: Unless of course that is slashdots ID , in that case great part of submarine income on Slashdots part"
Clearly, it's all a conspiracy.
It's so secret that it's right there hiding in the open, in the book review guidelines linked from every Slashdot review.
timothy
Why is it assumed that college students (or high-school, or middle-school) need to have hot-and-cold running music, enough that colleges should be persuaded to provide special accomodation for it? I can't be the only one to find a retail music pipe (financially benefitting the music industry, and I'm sure the schools, too) a bit removed from the schools' likely missions. How about a chocolate pipe, too? College kids like chocolate! And how about a pneumatic tube stuffed with clothing from the Gap flowing through each dorm? Grab a T-shirt you like (and if you don't like any, just get some because "that's what college students are supposed to be, like, doing these days"), and it'll be debited to your campus-cash card linked to your ID.
Nothing wrong with getting music online: there are lots of free offerings, and quite a few music-for-money sites with various pros and cons. And when colleges provide both housing and networking it doesn't make sense to have them locked down to academic-only use (more work than letting it be open, and hoping that it sometimes and somewhat benefits enough people either academically or as a creature comfort to be worth having it in the first place), but shouldn't it pretty much end there?
I don't like to think of music (inspired creative effort made manifest in a series of notes and words, expressing and eliciting a range of emotional states, divine / sublime) as the equivalent of those perpetually-on sodium-discharge lights, a commodity background prop that's simply expected to be everywhere you look (or listen).
Apple (and others) have shown that it's perfectly possible to sell music piecemiel online; great! What sense does it make for a college administration to tie themselves to one vendor of a product that doesn't even have anything to do with the reason that college exists? Why not just say "OK, you've got an Internet connection to every dorm room; how you use it isn't worth micromanaging, but please only do legal things."
Only semi-cynical, I think it has to be because colleges want to make money, and aren't always as particular as they could be about how they go about it.
Rant, rant, rant.
timothy
That's what I want to find :)
A distro which, out-of-the-box, no-foolin', detected-and-it-works, can find and use a USB wireless device, so I can get one of these: http://www.keybola.com/
Anyone hit such a one yet?
I wonder if the laws of physics prior to special relativity account for all the strange time relationships you can see in old movies, where people seem to move in rapidly varying relationships with respect to time. Thanks, Einstein, for making everyone move at a more predictable pace -- I figure things like growing seasons and skiing on moguls must have been much harder with the old physics.
timothy
I hope you're right about the lack of fluff, and don't have specific reason to doubt it.
I'd prefer that the "major decision makers in this country" be ordinary citizens living their individual private lives rather than politicians, though; I'd like the job of Congress (generally) to be fairly pedestrian: keep laws in tune with the grand scheme laid out by the Constitution, in some cases by writing new ones and in some cases by revising or eliminating old ones.
I do not believe that new laws are generally beneficial (especially ones that interfere with what should be decided by the market -- which, to me, means "just about everything" -- but I'll stipulate preemptively that there might be some cases where laws make enough sense to be worth the coercion which accompanies them).
timothy
heh -- if I hadn't refreshed the page and noticed that there were nearly no comments up, I might have left well enough alone. And I don't think anyone was misled by your phrasing; I just get hung up on certain words, and am not a big fan of the way the government tends to spend my money, so that's what my brain made my fingers do. "No additional charge" sure would be awkward, of course, I was just being contrary about it.
... 700 people and nearly 100 million dollars?! That's pretty hefty, per-head. Do they write with James Bond typewriters?
Of course, for a micro-rant
timothy
Hey, that's not what I said! (Or meant) :)
... I'll end my rant here!
The reckless spending I'm thinking of (which is both cause and symptom of the cavalier taxation) isn't on the CRS, which I understand to be pretty good value -- as government spending goes -- especially if it increases the apparent intelligence of the members of Congress.
Also, while I tend to vote libertarian, I don't think anyone wants to pay taxes for things that are actually "superfluous" -- right? As to how I'd prefer politicians legislated, well, I'd mostly prefer they do it *less.*
However, those things on which the government does spend money should be made to benefit the commonwealth as well as they practically can be; in the case of distilled knowledge as in CRS reports, this (opening them up) is the best thing that could happen. However, I still think it's worthwhile distinguishing this from "free," when all that money comes from somewhere; when the government is of / for / by the people, the government per se does not have its own money, only that granted by the populace to do its job. It's a leaky system, though, and there are lots of frictions (some of them quite reasonable) that sometimes make it hard to return as much value as I'd like for the tax dollars spent.
And it's late, and I have stuff to do, so
Cheers,
timothy
"Ted Bridis of the Associated Press reports that more than 8000 Congressional Research Service reports produced exclusively for legislators are now available to the public for free."
Shouldn't that read something more like "Ted Bridis of the Associated Press reports that more than 8000 Congressional Research Service reports produced exclusively for legislators are now available to the public, who already paid for it, and whose children will keep paying thanks to reckless spending and cavalier taxation, at no additional charge"?
That complaint aside, kudos to the people who helped liberate some of the knowledge (and probably some of the fluff) that tax dollars have paid for.
Ahem.
timothy
"Muslims, on the other hand, are not technically recognised as a racial group, so you can argue that they're not protected. "
:) (I have only started the book "The Race Myth" [http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=65-05 25948252-2%5D -- but I'm far enough into it to recommend it as a powerful, important book)
What do you mean "technically"? Islam is a religion, *not* a racial category.
And that's setting aside whatever you think of the merits of thinking of people as belonging to races in the first place
timothy
I (sort of) agree with you; about half of my computer stable is ruled out by the DVD version. However, a) I also don't have any floppy drives; there's no one format that will make everyone happy all the time b) DVD seems a pretty conservative standard to aim for in the near future -- the new high-capacity media that are coming out in the same size disk I bet will all (or mostly) be backward compatible and c) since there's a CD version, too, the DVD version can be in the future for those without DVD drives everywhere. CDs remain my favorite target medium, though -- they are as close to ubiquitous as things generally get in the computer world. Even if (when) DVD drives are as widespread as CD drives are now, that's still a lot of data to pull down, and expensive if you don't have absolutely all-you-can-eat data service.
timothy
I forget whether it was knoppix or mepis that did the best job of it, but I used this approach to help a friend's grandmother save the files from her virus-stuffed Windows PC. (Booted up with the LiveCD, moved files to external disk, removed suspicious files from the Windows partition ... inelegant, and I'm certain it was not a great job of it, but the machine did work better afterward.)
;)) Windows support at work, and since I won't be living nearby anymore, that might be the smarter thing to keep doing. Hopefully her boss gets sick of it and says to switch to Linux ;)
She wants me to put on Linux so she can just never have the Windows problems again anyhow, and perhaps I'll take that risk. However, she can get free (and frequent
timothy
They might again (hey, hope springs eternal), but No, Walmart is not selling boxed Linux of any sort in their stores right now. (Corrections welcome!)
For a time, though, they were selling Mandrake (old Slashdot stories address this, I'm sure -- search for "Walmart"); I think it was between versions 6 and 8, or 7 and 8 -- I bought two of the boxes at different points just to register a blip on their radar (also, because I needed a distro, and that was easier than downloading over dialup). I have good memories of Mandrake; it did *not* install smoothly on every machine on which I tried it, but it had a pretty good track record with me, and a sensible, nicely graphical installer.
They often do carry software, just not very much of it -- it's a big Everything store, so they do have to choose their product line with different criteria than I'd have for it, especially when it comes to software. Of course, for those willing to install it, the average Linux distro either replaces or circumvents much of the other software they'd rather you buy separately. (Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, low-end graphics / word processing, etc.)
timothy
a) States (and the Feds) should be ashamed that they have not been doing this since they first required W2s
b) Muggers have long since been polite enough to tell you up front how much you are supposed to give them ("all of it"); the government is still finding out how much of the teat it can slice open before the cow keels over
c) What percentage of adult Americans pay end-of-year taxes at all? (I don't know; I've heard wildly different numbers -- you tell me, and tell me where you get the number from!) I say "end-of-year" to distinguish from other taxes, such as sales taxes, that people pay without filling out special forms.
d) If the folks who create the Federal income tax form can deign to ask me if I'd like to contribute to a free-money pot for politicians running in order to spend even more of my money (ha!), why can't they also ask if I'd like to contribute to the National Endowment for the Arts (ha!) and other non-essential spending (ha! again)? Why don't they ask me if I'd like to contribute to the Fund for Global Military Adventuring (No, thank you. Please return me to the main menu.)?
e) Why did Bush give up his only slim chance to win my vote by nixing all talk of a national sales tax after his one mention of it?
f) If not a Nat'l Sales Tax, why doesn't some politician repeat what Jack Kemp said about a postcard-sized return? Our tax code is Byzantine, tough to understand fully without a full-time background in it, even in the simpler forms. It's worse if you want to take advantage of any of the many, many loopholes. Most taxpayers haven't a chance.
Grrrrr.
timothy
But I did mention singles, and I do remember them :) (Even have quite a few that have sat unplayed for many years.) However, singles are usually only available for the few "chartworthy" tracks on an album, rather than all the tracks. And of course, they have an advantage in that often the B-side is something not available elsewhere, like a live track, or an outtake, or a wholly new song that didn't make it onto an album ... I had the vinyl version of the strange-but-loud cover of "Just like Heaven" from Dinosaur Jr, and I think the B-side was a 33rpm mini-compilation. (Could be confusing it with another one, though.) I also like the primitive backup system that some singles had of containing the same track on both sides, in case one scratched ;)
timothy
This looks great (as someone else has linked to in this thread) for aerial photography, whether by kite or rocket -- the sort of thing that you don't want to risk an expensive camera with.
;)
What other things would you use this for? Underwater robots? Car-attached home-made action shots? Glued to back of pet turtle?
There have to be some cool applications for which a $30 video camera would be perfect
timothy
I don't use ITMS -- partly because I don't like iTunes, partly because I already have more music (purchased on CD) than I need to listen to for most of the rest of my life, partly because of simple indifference in the world of other ways to spend my time and money. Not that I won't buy more music later, or don't buy some music now, but there's so much I've not thoroughly heard of in the far-too-many CDs I purchased in my impetuous youth that I have no desire to go buy music generically. (When I run into a specific artist's music that appeals, that's a different story.)
... maybe very small wax cylinders), but this fully unitizes (if this is a word) the song as a unit. Things get weird when songs are very, very long (or very, very short), but simple pricing is I think overall better than, say, per-second :)
That said, iTunes lets people buy 1 song at a time, and more importantly is an example for others to take up that "Hey, per-album pricing is not the only possible way for the world of purchasable music to work." Yes, there have been singles around for a while (vinyl / tape / CD
And *that* said, I like the pricing model but find the aesthetics of actually purchasing one song at a time a little weird, because of the annoying brain mole who insists that music albums should be heard in the track order they were ordained to follow by the artist; I feel a litle guilty to hear only *part* of the White album, for instance, or a single track from New Order's "Substance." ("Technique" is perhaps the best example of an album that flows as a work of art from first track to last.)
timothy
Hi, there.
;)
I was doing it only to get money, not to get experimental medicine per se; the experiments at Pharmaco (at least the ones I've ever considered) are Phase II clinical trials, investigating in part the absorption rates of the medicines under study.
I never gave much credence to the nuttier stories about heart stoppage etc, I just consider them part of a funny corner of Austin culture
Tim
I did a few Pharmaco studies -- one complete, one where IIRC I was a standby, and turned out not to be needed.
It wasn't too bad: I've described it before as a mix of summer camp, hospital, insane asylum, and low-security prison. (These last three, I guess could be usefully combined.)
The biggest problem is that I failed to think as I should have about hydration: you need to drink enough water if you're going to have a fair amount of liquid extracted through holes in your arms; at one point, after various unsuccessful stabs at my arms, the doctor (who was a bit arrogant and standoffish, but certainly not terrible) gave me a shunt, so I didn't have to get stuck any more, and advised me to drink water so I'd have more to give, so to speak.
I got more schoolwork done there than I probably did on any other weekends, which was good, because that's not something I was winning any awards for. The food was bland but edible; the only thing I didn't eat was the mayo-containing coleslaw. Entertainment was scarce -- pool, television, a bank of phones -- but there was a computer room, and I brought books.
It's regimented and strange -- but for a couple of weekends, I got iirc $600, and an understanding of the place / system, and I don't regret it. Maybe I'll do it again sometime, out of interest / curiosity at how it's changed in the last decade than anything else.
timothy
p.s. There are lots of rumors about the studies there, including the fabled "heart stopper" where they give you $40,000 to stop and then re-start your heart. Likewise, the "lose a toe" one, where they amputate a toe to test some anti-bleeding drug. I dunno about the veracity of either, but I know when I laughingly told my brother about the heart-stopping one, he paused and asked "Really? 40 thousand?" very thoughtfully.