These government shenanigans remind me of another dumb joke. Before they built the chunnel they had put the project up for bid. Everyone was bidding multiple billions of dollars but then one guy comes up and says he can do it for a flat $1million.
Did he win the contract? No. Because the next guy goes to the beuracrat in charge and says he'd do it for $2billion + $1million. $1billion for guy #2. $1billion for the government guy's private bank account and the leftover million goes to pay the first bidder to do the actual work.
There are two (English|Scottish) Lords bragging about who's family was more important.
The first Lord says that while doing renovations on their family castle they found a buried copper cable 2 miles long put down in the 1500's. This, he says, proves his family invented the telegraph hundreds of years before any one else.
The second Lord says that while doing renovations on HIS castle they found NO cable. THIS proves, he says, that his family was using WIRELESS, hundreds of years before the first Lord's family was using telegraph.
Furthermore, Linux is specifically architectured for the server market, which is why it's seen so much success in the enterprise. Trying to tweak it to run on a PDA is an excercise in feudalism.
I think you meant "futilism".
I dub ye sir Personal Information Manager. Arise Sir PIM.
I know this was moderated up as funny but I don't get the joke. I know of people who built academic careers on views like this.
First, I want to point out factual errors:
Take Larry Niven's Ringworld series, for instance, in which the main character is transported to a future Earth that consists of two immortal factions of humanity - boys and girls.
That book wasn't Ringworld. It was "World Out of Time". It wasn't a series it was a single book. There were no homosexual acts that I remember in that particular book and there could not have been because there were less than a dozen sexually mature (mature in the biological sense) males in the book. The reason being that there was a technique for producing immortality but it involved arresting developement before people reached puberty.
I would admit being one of 12 men with thousands of women available is a pubescent dream and not a fantasy a mature male would need to indulge in, but I think it does raise the question about how society would develope if you had two groups immortal people with slight differences in thinking (and there are proven differences in the structure of the brains of male and female children). Given a tendancy for people to make divisions between US and THEM based on arbitrary differences like skin color or language and division based along secondary sexual differences once the primary purpose of these differences is eliminated seems to make sense to me.
Science Fiction is one of the few literatures where the behaviour of GROUPS of people and societies can be explored. Other literature focuses more on the individual. Politically Correct Academics who criticise all views of society except the PC one almost HAVE to hate SF since it presents multiple opposing views of how people MAY get along given alternate conditions.
Similiarly, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" examines a society that developes out of a group of prisoners. The Male/Female ratio among prisoners is known to be tilted to the Male side. Prison populations also tend to be crude and are among the type to ogle women and make rude comments. The social customs in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" seem believable to me as something that might develope among such a population.
If you've read 4000 books then you've probably read everything SF/Fantasy that is out currently in Barnes and Nobles. Expand beyong SF/Fantasy to related classics, history and source material.
Go to Project Gutenburg (http://www.gutenberg.net/) and look up some Charles Dickens, Herman Melville.
Why them?
If you've read fantasy you must have read Gene Wolfe's Earth of the New Sun Series. (If you haven't then read them. NOT the books of the LONG Sun, I wasn't crazy about them.)
The first book has a lot of settings and some of the language taken from Dickens' Great Expectations. The scene where Severen meets Baldanders in the Inn is taken from Moby Dick, so read that too. There are of course elements of Frankenstein in the later books but I think that is from the movie versions more than the actual book (Mary Shelly).
The book Frankenstein is really not what you would expect. I didn't get into it. Dracula was pretty good. PG also has the Invisble Man, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde etc.
You could also read Jules Verne's books,H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series, and Sherlock Holmes books there.
Related to King Arthur you can read Tennysons' "The Idylls of the King", Nennius's "History of the Britons" which is one of the earliest mentions of Arthur. Gildas "On The Ruin Of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae)". The last two historical documents written in the Dark Ages that mention King Arthur.
Not in PG but something you might not have read but would enjoy if you like Gene Wolfe, find a translation of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. The originals are in Spanish but there are English collections. He writes little surreal stories and The New Sun Books take a lot of theme and atmosphere from them.
One of his stories is about an infinite library with every book ever written or could be written on the shelves. The first book is all the letter "A" written down. The second book would be all "a"'s and then at the end is a "b" and so on. Somewhere in the library a book with the story of your life in it and it was there before you were born. Borges writes stuff like that.
So: Gene Wolfe Jorge Luis Borges Charles Dickens Herman Melville H.G. Wells Jules Verne Edgar Rice Burroughs Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The thing is, the line is still "straight." According to general relativity, gravity isn't really a force. Objects always move in straight lines called "geodesics" (unless subjected to non-gravitational forces), but they appear to curve through space because space-time itself is curved.
I believe you but I am still a little fuzzy.
If earth were the only thing in the Universe and it was moving for some reason it would travel in a straight line from one side of the Universe to the other.
If we placed the sun at some stationary point somewhere near this path I could see how this distortion could apparently deflect the straight path so that it would no longer appear straight.
But the Earth orbits the sun in an elipse. That means the formerly infinite line, or at least a line extending from one side of the Universe to the other is now bent completely around the sun into that elipse. So if there were two points on opposite ends of that line at either edge of the universe, then they are now next to each other somewhere on that elipse like Dec 31 being next to Jan 1. when before they were at either end of the year.
I could belive this of a black hole but not of the Sun. How do you get eliptical orbits from Universe wide straight lines?
quote: Like poking a finger into a stretched rubber sheet, creating a depression. So objects near them tend to tumble into the depression - bingo! this is gravity.
I see this on the science shows all the time. It is a nice visual representation of the theory but gravity is what causes things to fall into depressions. It seems there is something wrong with illustrating a theory on why things fall towards other things by showing something falling into a depression. This is like saying things fall down because things fall down.
Is there a different way of illustrating it like so: What is the mechanism that causes space distorted by gravity to suck things into it from space not distorted by gravity (or less distorted). Does the distortion make it easier for the mass to travel to it and through it?
Sort of like trying to walk through underbrush in a jungle. If the underbrush is thicker across an east/west gradient (thicker in the west thinner in the east) and you want to travel north-west you end up veering toward true north just because it is easier to move that way than more to the west.
Or is there an illustration concerning energy. Does space distorted bya gravity field a region where kinetic energy is given or taken away from an object depending on its direction of travel (you gain kinetic energy heading into a gravity well, lose it heading out. Light is red shifted heading out, blue shifted heading in. Is it correct to see it in terms of a region of space that effects gravity.
I am not sure if either of the above are good analogies.
What I am asking is if anyone have an illustration that doesn't involve "falling" to explain gravity? I don't like the "things fall because they fall" bit.
In my years of Desktop Support I found that non-techie users always used Outlook as their filing system. They left all their attachments in their messages and used to find things by searching through their emails by sender's name, date, subject, and text indexing built into Outlook.
Since the whole.pst(email file) was one big file this was a really bad idea and I used to try to show the users how to set up a useful directory structure in which to store their attachments but they never wanted to bother learning anything but Word, Excel and Outlook.
If you could reproduce the search abilities of Outlook in the OS then these people still probably wouldn't use it but it is worth a try.
Bryant Park is smallish, behind the New York Public Library (the big classical greek temple looking building with the lions in front, it was in Ghostbusters 1). Actually it is on the top of the the stacks of the Library which exten underground below it.
It is the middle of the Mid-Town Business area so there are few if any dogs. It is too small to jog in, too open to hide and mug people in, no homeless, hari-krishna's, watch guys etc. that I've ever seen (which may have something to do by the fact that it is run by a corporation and like a mall they can exclude people, I'm not sure of that part)
Your description is closer to Tompkins Square Park, Washington Square Park and a few others but they can be nice too.
I think this is an accurate guess at how these deals came about.
A bad MBA or stock Market analyst see that MS just signed a deal where their largest single customer (Dell) now pays 50% less for MS product in exchange for a possible 10% more sales (90% ->100%) would have rejected the deal (MBA) or downgraded the stock (Wall Street Analyst).
The deal is a good one for MS because in THE LONG TERM. This deal and others like it would result in a monopoly and higher profits. The megalomaniacal goal on one man (GATES) and his LONG TERM vision of the future of his company is what is missing from the Managers and MBA's that Cringley talks about. They just want to increase this quarter's profits or make it to the IPO and then sell out. A monopoly would take too long.
Short term goals and management by Wall Street is bad for both evil and good companies.
I was living in Virginia near in the Tidewater area-- lots of military bases. I went out my front door for some reason looked up and saw a slowly moving, very large configuration of light colored objects. My mind interpreted it as an array of landing lights on a large V shaped plane. I got scared for a second because it must have been less than 10 feet above my roof, maybe 30 feet above my head and HUGE. It was also completely quiet. I got a fright. It was either a UFO or a huge unpowered military plane was going to crash on my front lawn.
A second later I heard a quiet HONK (just one). Then it was like a switch was thrown in my brain and I saw it was just the white bellies of a bunch of geese coming into a landing in the marshes behind the houses across the street.
I do not know for sure if MS gave the University something for free, they probably gave them a good discount on a mass license and you are paying for it indirectly through your tuition. This is like consumers paying for it indirectly when they get a computer. they think it is "free" also. I am sure there was some official in the University that got a few nice sales lunches if nothing else to sign the deal. What if you did not want Windows? What if you had only one computer and wanted to put only Linux on it? Well I am sure MS gets a cut of you tuition anyway and some University guy is on a free trip to Hawaii somewhere to "evaluate" other MS software.
Problems with this: From the Lobbying side: Who would pay Cable, DSL money for 384K when you can get 11M from the town? No one. So Cable and DSL and Powell's son will fight such an idea, tooth and claw.
From the Common Sense side: Once Internet access becomes a government service and drives out the competition (see above) everything on the Internet becomes subject to political censoring. No religious content: seperation of church and state. No porn, gotta protect the children. No commercial activity from users its a public utility. No hate groups, no hate speech, only politically correct speech.
Each town would build a Great Firewall of China around themselves like in South Park.
Your town could get around 1st amendment issues by saying that this is one of many ways to access the Internet and you are free to sign up with another provider. Only no other provider could exist in your town because it could not compete with a publicly subsidized system.
Don't get me wrong. I was thinking about a public utility wireless network the other day while looking at all the ugly cable strung up through my neighborhood. I would love for it to be a reality but the above causes me to doubt it would ever happen, or be a good thing if it did.
I read the original comment in this thread and thought at first exactly what you did. AIDS doesn't just happen. There are certain behaviours that lead to infection. To think otherwise and blame others or just random fate is self-delusional.
Then again, early on people did not know that these behaviours would result in AIDS.
Imagine finding out 5 years from now that drinking one bottle of a certain brand of beer caused fatal liver and kidney damage that doesn't develope for 5 years. Then find out that it is your brand. Then have to listen to people who never drank beer start telling you that everyone knew alcohol consumption causes liver problems and it was your own fault for drinking any kind of beer, even in small quantities or occasionally 5 years ago. That would suck.
Of course, this analogy would only apply to the early cases of AIDS. Anyone engaing in high risk behaviour these days is a different story. Such behaviour is inexcusable now.
Tolkien was a Catholic, raised by a priest.
C.S. Lewis was a Protestant Christian who thought it unusual that a Catholic could be so well educated (Catholics were not allowed to attend Universities in England until relatively recent times, late last century/early this century).
I do not think Tolkien converted Lewis. Lewis was evanglical (see Narnia, the Screwtape Letters other christian writings) Tolkien was not evangelical. There are themes of good and evil in his writings but no allegory for Christ like Aslan in Narnia.
For those who have read the Simirilion, another source for Tolkien was the prophetic writings of William Blake who used the names "Valar" and "Orc" though orc is an old word for monster, there are others.
Great for a real city (NY) Lousy for post WW2 city
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I live in NYC. In the 5 boroughs something like this would be great. Places like Hong Kong, downtown London, Chicago, small cities in Italy, any REAL city where people actually walk around, this would be great.
Places like LA, Phoenix, suburban Long Island where there are no pedestrians anyway would not be suitable for this.
The TIME article said that speeds of 3-4 times walking speed would be normal.
In NYC bike messengers already get around the city faster than cars. I see doctors and 60 year old women go through the Village on those Razor scooters. Parking spaces cost more to rent per month than whole houses do in other parts of the country. I go weeks without driving now and didn't own a car until I moved out of NYC temporarily for a few years. Cars in NYC are evil and most people avoid them. A reliable, speedy machine that takes up about the same space as a person would be very welcome.
As for price, Give it 5 or 10 years and it will be down around a few hundred dollars. In the expensive bike range. Not to mention the used market.
Of course by then GM or Ford will get into the market and we will have SUV Gingers that weigh 10 tons, run on gasoline and have ostrich skin leather heated bucket seats.
Its the railroad monopolies again. They own the rails and decide what goes over them at what price. They end up controlling distribution of products, then products, then the towns the railroads go through.
When newspapers, music, tv,movies being sent to movie theaters for digital projection, stock market quotes etc etc etc all go over the same rails...uhm cables and a few companies control the cables, then they will control the content, the businesses that provide the content and evetually the people who use the content.
I think people are ignoring that MS is attacking the use of GPL in Government sponsored projects.
BSD they like. They can steal that code.
GPL they don't like. They are attacking it in different ways:
1. Saying that it will make commercial companies loose money.
2. Saying that Government should not use or sponsor GPL products.
This leaves non-commercial organizations, educational centers and individuals.
Or does it?
Right now religiuosly affiliated organizations have to comply with a whole list of Federal regulations if they want Government money. Educational Institutions also. This is used to do things like prevent discrimination. That is a good thing.
But what if MS lobbying got a law passed that would ban University Employees or students using University Equipment from using/developing GPL'd software because it is "un-American" and hurts the economy? Or any other organization that takes Federal money? The organization is free to use/develope GPL'd software, it just doesn't get Federal Grants, Student Aid dollars, Research Grants etc. What would MIT do?
I think they would mandate a BSD style license on all software projects. And MS would scoop up the codde.
I read a lot. Sometimes I read two or three books concurrently (not at once, just a few chapters of one fiction book, a few chapters of a non-fiction book and then back to the fiction.) So maybe I am not the typical reader but I have read "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Dracula" on my Palm Pilot while standing on line, on the bus, on the subway. It is not the best screen in the world, but I already carry it around for other reasons and I would not buy such a device specifically to read books. It is icing on the cake. I get to read when I haven't planned on it and having a IIIxe with 8 megs of RAM I can carry multiple books without them taking up any space (as I said, I was already carrying the Palm for the address book and other functions).
The radiation refered to is a spreading outward from a point or center into new environments. A diagram would look like a circle with rays i.e. a child's picture of the sun. That is the meaning of radiation in this context, not nuclear radiation, even though both are concerned with mutation, they are different concepts.
I would agree with you about sending money to debt repayment vs. a tax cut but what is going to happen is that it will be spent on expanding the government and when the economy slows down we will have a bigger yearly bill for expanded government services as well as a debt.
At least with a tax cut the government is still smaller and maybe there won't be a slow down as fast. Plus in the worst case inflation brings down the amount of money we owe in the debt (since that is measured in dollars).
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the lame and boring want privacy in the bedroom too, if only to make sure nobody knows how lame and boring they are in bed.
These government shenanigans remind me of another dumb joke.
Before they built the chunnel they had put the project up for bid. Everyone was bidding multiple billions of dollars but then one guy comes up and says he can do it for a flat $1million.
Did he win the contract? No. Because the next guy goes to the beuracrat in charge and says he'd do it for $2billion + $1million. $1billion for guy #2. $1billion for the government guy's private bank account and the leftover million goes to pay the first bidder to do the actual work.
There are two (English|Scottish) Lords bragging about who's family was more important.
The first Lord says that while doing renovations on their family castle they found a buried copper cable 2 miles long put down in the 1500's. This, he says, proves his family invented the telegraph hundreds of years before any one else.
The second Lord says that while doing renovations on HIS castle they found NO cable. THIS proves, he says, that his family was using WIRELESS, hundreds of years before the first Lord's family was using telegraph.
Honest question. I thought patents expire after 15 years or so. Wasn't much of the Unix design done more than 15 years ago?
Furthermore, Linux is specifically architectured for the server market, which is why it's seen so much success in the enterprise. Trying to tweak it to run on a PDA is an excercise in feudalism.
I think you meant "futilism".
I dub ye sir Personal Information Manager. Arise Sir PIM.
I thank thee M'Lord
First, I want to point out factual errors:
That book wasn't Ringworld. It was "World Out of Time". It wasn't a series it was a single book. There were no homosexual acts that I remember in that particular book and there could not have been because there were less than a dozen sexually mature (mature in the biological sense) males in the book. The reason being that there was a technique for producing immortality but it involved arresting developement before people reached puberty.
I would admit being one of 12 men with thousands of women available is a pubescent dream and not a fantasy a mature male would need to indulge in, but I think it does raise the question about how society would develope if you had two groups immortal people with slight differences in thinking (and there are proven differences in the structure of the brains of male and female children). Given a tendancy for people to make divisions between US and THEM based on arbitrary differences like skin color or language and division based along secondary sexual differences once the primary purpose of these differences is eliminated seems to make sense to me.
Science Fiction is one of the few literatures where the behaviour of GROUPS of people and societies can be explored. Other literature focuses more on the individual. Politically Correct Academics who criticise all views of society except the PC one almost HAVE to hate SF since it presents multiple opposing views of how people MAY get along given alternate conditions.
Similiarly, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" examines a society that developes out of a group of prisoners. The Male/Female ratio among prisoners is known to be tilted to the Male side. Prison populations also tend to be crude and are among the type to ogle women and make rude comments. The social customs in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" seem believable to me as something that might develope among such a population.
If you've read 4000 books then you've probably read everything SF/Fantasy that is out currently in Barnes and Nobles. Expand beyong SF/Fantasy to related classics, history and source material.
Go to Project Gutenburg (http://www.gutenberg.net/) and look up some Charles Dickens, Herman Melville.
Why them?
If you've read fantasy you must have read Gene Wolfe's Earth of the New Sun Series. (If you haven't then read them. NOT the books of the LONG Sun, I wasn't crazy about them.)
The first book has a lot of settings and some of the language taken from Dickens' Great Expectations. The scene where Severen meets Baldanders in the Inn is taken from Moby Dick, so read that too. There are of course elements of Frankenstein in the later books but I think that is from the movie versions more than the actual book (Mary Shelly).
The book Frankenstein is really not what you would expect. I didn't get into it. Dracula was pretty good. PG also has the Invisble Man, Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde etc.
You could also read Jules Verne's books,H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series, and Sherlock Holmes books there.
Related to King Arthur you can read Tennysons' "The Idylls of the King", Nennius's "History of the Britons" which is one of the earliest mentions of Arthur. Gildas "On The Ruin Of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae)". The last two historical documents written in the Dark Ages that mention King Arthur.
Not in PG but something you might not have read but would enjoy if you like Gene Wolfe, find a translation of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges. The originals are in Spanish but there are English collections. He writes little surreal stories and The New Sun Books take a lot of theme and atmosphere from them.
One of his stories is about an infinite library with every book ever written or could be written on the shelves. The first book is all the letter "A" written down. The second book would be all "a"'s and then at the end is a "b" and so on. Somewhere in the library a book with the story of your life in it and it was there before you were born. Borges writes stuff like that.
So:
Gene Wolfe
Jorge Luis Borges
Charles Dickens
Herman Melville
H.G. Wells
Jules Verne
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Has it been slashdotted or...
It's a Government cover-up!!! THEY don't want us to see the evidence so they enlisted Slashdot to nuke their server.
The truth is out there!
The thing is, the line is still "straight." According to general relativity, gravity isn't really a force. Objects always move in straight lines called "geodesics" (unless subjected to non-gravitational forces), but they appear to curve through space because space-time itself is curved.
I believe you but I am still a little fuzzy.
If earth were the only thing in the Universe and it was moving for some reason it would travel in a straight line from one side of the Universe to the other.
If we placed the sun at some stationary point somewhere near this path I could see how this distortion could apparently deflect the straight path so that it would no longer appear straight.
But the Earth orbits the sun in an elipse. That means the formerly infinite line, or at least a line extending from one side of the Universe to the other is now bent completely around the sun into that elipse. So if there were two points on opposite ends of that line at either edge of the universe, then they are now next to each other somewhere on that elipse like Dec 31 being next to Jan 1. when before they were at either end of the year.
I could belive this of a black hole but not of the Sun. How do you get eliptical orbits from Universe wide straight lines?
quote: Like poking a finger into a stretched rubber sheet, creating a depression. So objects near them tend to tumble into the depression - bingo! this is gravity.
I see this on the science shows all the time. It is a nice visual representation of the theory but gravity is what causes things to fall into depressions. It seems there is something wrong with illustrating a theory on why things fall towards other things by showing something falling into a depression. This is like saying things fall down because things fall down.
Is there a different way of illustrating it like so:
What is the mechanism that causes space distorted by gravity to suck things into it from space not distorted by gravity (or less distorted). Does the distortion make it easier for the mass to travel to it and through it?
Sort of like trying to walk through underbrush in a jungle. If the underbrush is thicker across an east/west gradient (thicker in the west thinner in the east) and you want to travel north-west you end up veering toward true north just because it is easier to move that way than more to the west.
Or is there an illustration concerning energy. Does space distorted bya gravity field a region where kinetic energy is given or taken away from an object depending on its direction of travel (you gain kinetic energy heading into a gravity well, lose it heading out. Light is red shifted heading out, blue shifted heading in. Is it correct to see it in terms of a region of space that effects gravity.
I am not sure if either of the above are good analogies.
What I am asking is if anyone have an illustration that doesn't involve "falling" to explain gravity?
I don't like the "things fall because they fall" bit.
In my years of Desktop Support I found that non-techie users always used Outlook as their filing system. They left all their attachments in their messages and used to find things by searching through their emails by sender's name, date, subject, and text indexing built into Outlook.
.pst(email file) was one big file this was a really bad idea and I used to try to show the users how to set up a useful directory structure in which to store their attachments but they never wanted to bother learning anything but Word, Excel and Outlook.
Since the whole
If you could reproduce the search abilities of Outlook in the OS then these people still probably wouldn't use it but it is worth a try.
Bryant Park is smallish, behind the New York Public Library (the big classical greek temple looking building with the lions in front, it was in Ghostbusters 1). Actually it is on the top of the the stacks of the Library which exten underground below it.
It is the middle of the Mid-Town Business area so there are few if any dogs. It is too small to jog in, too open to hide and mug people in, no homeless, hari-krishna's, watch guys etc. that I've ever seen (which may have something to do by the fact that it is run by a corporation and like a mall they can exclude people, I'm not sure of that part)
Your description is closer to Tompkins Square Park, Washington Square Park and a few others but they can be nice too.
I think this is an accurate guess at how these deals came about.
A bad MBA or stock Market analyst see that MS just signed a deal where their largest single customer (Dell) now pays 50% less for MS product in exchange for a possible 10% more sales (90% ->100%) would have rejected the deal (MBA) or downgraded the stock (Wall Street Analyst).
The deal is a good one for MS because in THE LONG TERM. This deal and others like it would result in a monopoly and higher profits. The megalomaniacal goal on one man (GATES) and his LONG TERM vision of the future of his company is what is missing from the Managers and MBA's that Cringley talks about. They just want to increase this quarter's profits or make it to the IPO and then sell out. A monopoly would take too long.
Short term goals and management by Wall Street is bad for both evil and good companies.
I was living in Virginia near in the Tidewater area-- lots of military bases. I went out my front door for some reason looked up and saw a slowly moving, very large configuration of light colored objects. My mind interpreted it as an array of landing lights on a large V shaped plane. I got scared for a second because it must have been less than 10 feet above my roof, maybe 30 feet above my head and HUGE. It was also completely quiet. I got a fright. It was either a UFO or a huge unpowered military plane was going to crash on my front lawn.
A second later I heard a quiet HONK (just one). Then it was like a switch was thrown in my brain and I saw it was just the white bellies of a bunch of geese coming into a landing in the marshes behind the houses across the street.
I do not know for sure if MS gave the University something for free, they probably gave them a good discount on a mass license and you are paying for it indirectly through your tuition. This is like consumers paying for it indirectly when they get a computer. they think it is "free" also. I am sure there was some official in the University that got a few nice sales lunches if nothing else to sign the deal. What if you did not want Windows? What if you had only one computer and wanted to put only Linux on it? Well I am sure MS gets a cut of you tuition anyway and some University guy is on a free trip to Hawaii somewhere to "evaluate" other MS software.
Problems with this:
From the Lobbying side:
Who would pay Cable, DSL money for 384K when you can get 11M from the town? No one. So Cable and DSL and Powell's son will fight such an idea, tooth and claw.
From the Common Sense side:
Once Internet access becomes a government service and drives out the competition (see above) everything on the Internet becomes subject to political censoring.
No religious content: seperation of church and state. No porn, gotta protect the children. No commercial activity from users its a public utility. No hate groups, no hate speech, only politically correct speech.
Each town would build a Great Firewall of China around themselves like in South Park.
Your town could get around 1st amendment issues by saying that this is one of many ways to access the Internet and you are free to sign up with another provider. Only no other provider could exist in your town because it could not compete with a publicly subsidized system.
Don't get me wrong. I was thinking about a public utility wireless network the other day while looking at all the ugly cable strung up through my neighborhood. I would love for it to be a reality but the above causes me to doubt it would ever happen, or be a good thing if it did.
I read the original comment in this thread and thought at first exactly what you did. AIDS doesn't just happen. There are certain behaviours that lead to infection. To think otherwise and blame others or just random fate is self-delusional.
Then again, early on people did not know that these behaviours would result in AIDS.
Imagine finding out 5 years from now that drinking one bottle of a certain brand of beer caused fatal liver and kidney damage that doesn't develope for 5 years. Then find out that it is your brand. Then have to listen to people who never drank beer start telling you that everyone knew alcohol consumption causes liver problems and it was your own fault for drinking any kind of beer, even in small quantities or occasionally 5 years ago. That would suck.
Of course, this analogy would only apply to the early cases of AIDS. Anyone engaing in high risk behaviour these days is a different story. Such behaviour is inexcusable now.
Tolkien was a Catholic, raised by a priest.
C.S. Lewis was a Protestant Christian who thought it unusual that a Catholic could be so well educated (Catholics were not allowed to attend Universities in England until relatively recent times, late last century/early this century).
I do not think Tolkien converted Lewis. Lewis was evanglical (see Narnia, the Screwtape Letters other christian writings) Tolkien was not evangelical. There are themes of good and evil in his writings but no allegory for Christ like Aslan in Narnia.
For those who have read the Simirilion, another source for Tolkien was the prophetic writings of William Blake who used the names "Valar" and "Orc" though orc is an old word for monster, there are others.
I live in NYC. In the 5 boroughs something like this would be great. Places like Hong Kong, downtown London, Chicago, small cities in Italy, any REAL city where people actually walk around, this would be great.
Places like LA, Phoenix, suburban Long Island where there are no pedestrians anyway would not be suitable for this.
The TIME article said that speeds of 3-4 times walking speed would be normal.
In NYC bike messengers already get around the city faster than cars. I see doctors and 60 year old women go through the Village on those Razor scooters. Parking spaces cost more to rent per month than whole houses do in other parts of the country. I go weeks without driving now and didn't own a car until I moved out of NYC temporarily for a few years. Cars in NYC are evil and most people avoid them. A reliable, speedy machine that takes up about the same space as a person would be very welcome.
As for price, Give it 5 or 10 years and it will be down around a few hundred dollars. In the expensive bike range. Not to mention the used market.
Of course by then GM or Ford will get into the market and we will have SUV Gingers that weigh 10 tons, run on gasoline and have ostrich skin leather heated bucket seats.
Its the railroad monopolies again. They own the rails and decide what goes over them at what price. They end up controlling distribution of products, then products, then the towns the railroads go through.
When newspapers, music, tv,movies being sent to movie theaters for digital projection, stock market quotes etc etc etc all go over the same rails...uhm cables and a few companies control the cables, then they will control the content, the businesses that provide the content and evetually the people who use the content.
Bad news.
I think people are ignoring that MS is attacking the use of GPL in Government sponsored projects.
BSD they like. They can steal that code.
GPL they don't like. They are attacking it in different ways:
1. Saying that it will make commercial companies loose money.
2. Saying that Government should not use or sponsor GPL products.
This leaves non-commercial organizations, educational centers and individuals.
Or does it?
Right now religiuosly affiliated organizations have to comply with a whole list of Federal regulations if they want Government money. Educational Institutions also. This is used to do things like prevent discrimination. That is a good thing.
But what if MS lobbying got a law passed that would ban University Employees or students using University Equipment from using/developing GPL'd software because it is "un-American" and hurts the economy? Or any other organization that takes Federal money? The organization is free to use/develope GPL'd software, it just doesn't get Federal Grants, Student Aid dollars, Research Grants etc. What would MIT do?
I think they would mandate a BSD style license on all software projects. And MS would scoop up the codde.
Max Headroom
20 minutes into the future.
Gimme the star
I read a lot. Sometimes I read two or three books concurrently (not at once, just a few chapters of one fiction book, a few chapters of a non-fiction book and then back to the fiction.) So maybe I am not the typical reader but I have read "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Dracula" on my Palm Pilot while standing on line, on the bus, on the subway. It is not the best screen in the world, but I already carry it around for other reasons and I would not buy such a device specifically to read books. It is icing on the cake. I get to read when I haven't planned on it and having a IIIxe with 8 megs of RAM I can carry multiple books without them taking up any space (as I said, I was already carrying the Palm for the address book and other functions).
The radiation refered to is a spreading outward from a point or center into new environments. A diagram would look like a circle with rays i.e. a child's picture of the sun. That is the meaning of radiation in this context, not nuclear radiation, even though both are concerned with mutation, they are different concepts.
I would agree with you about sending money to debt repayment vs. a tax cut but what is going to happen is that it will be spent on expanding the government and when the economy slows down we will have a bigger yearly bill for expanded government services as well as a debt.
At least with a tax cut the government is still smaller and maybe there won't be a slow down as fast. Plus in the worst case inflation brings down the amount of money we owe in the debt (since that is measured in dollars).