I do not think that it is realistic for people to believe that they can make it from the bottom to the top. That rarely ever happens (Steve Jobs is a reasonably good example, Bill Gates is not)
It's really whacked to think that you can make it to the top through the kindness of strangers.
A person living in the conditions you describe is highly unlikely to ever succeed, really. That's unfortunate. However, this should not prevent her from doing as well as possible. Which is a matter of one's own abilities and will more than anything else. Even if she can make her children's opportunities better, it's worthwhile. This does not guarantee the success of later generations however. They have to do the same thing; give their successors enough forward momentum to give them a chance.
The momentum can be financial success, but I don't think that's the only form it need take, and it's probably one of the worst types. A motiviation to succeed, a sense of ethics, a strong will, etc. are all the sorts of things that are frequently rewarded if you're going to use them right. Even if you're poor, giving your kids the drive to better themselves is more important than money. There are ways around money, but there aren't any around drive.
My paternal great-grandfather immigrated to the US from Russia. He eventually ran a scrap metal business in New Hampshire. His son, my grandfather, joined the Army Air Corps during the war, became a teacher, and after that took up various administrative jobs related to teaching. My father put himself through college and law school, and is now a successful lawyer. Upon leaving school, I started working and I've supported myself for some time now. I'm just starting out, but I want to surpass previous generations in being able to give that boost to my kids.
Some people just don't have what it takes, and will pretty likely fail. I know a lot of people like that. Ultimately it happens to everyone's line, and that's natural. When you get to be at the top of the heap there's not always anywhere to go.
The cycle that you speak of can be broken, but I don't think that that's the important issue here. Lots of people who happen to be minorities have the right kind of drive. Starting from a worse position (using wealth to gauge success) just means it'll take longer. The better people will, in time, rise to the top. Some of them have enormous forward momentum, and this can translate into inertia that their descendants can ride on for years.
If Gates gives all his money to his kids, his family will be set for a long time, but unless they have the right kind of spirit to them, sooner or later his descendants will be asking yours if they want space fries with that.
Just try to succeed. If you keep at it, and get your kids to do the same, and so forth, someday there will be rewards for it. Just don't go expecting to reap a thousand times what you sow.
Well, perhaps I was a little harsh. I grew up in Tallahassee, and lived there for about fifteen years. I still go back to see my family frequently. So I'm very aware of its shortcomings, and perhaps too used to it to recognize the good side of things.
Tallahassee and the panhandle definately have a certain presence. They've been around long enough to have acquired a personality, and it's not a half bad one. I had thought that I was pointing this out in my earlier post, but perhaps it did not come through as clearly as I had intended. But the personality of the area is not quite the same as culture, which I was interpreting as something more along the lines of 'high culture.'
However, Tally broke some round number in the 1990 census. This has caused a whole bunch of chain stores to move into town. They're really turning the place into the same generic Anytown USA hellhole that I'd like to avoid.
Personally, I'll always rate north Florida above south Florida. The only good places south of Gainesville would be Tampa/St. Pete and the Keys. Key West has been suffering in recent years, but since hardly anyone outside of the state is aware that they're a whole chain of islands, the others are still pretty cool, or were the last time I was there. Kinda wish that they hadn't put in the highway - now you have to go to the Dry Tortugas to get away from it all.
Orlando and the West Palm/Miami sprawl though.... man, I wouldn't mind melting some icecaps to get rid of them. Just blocks and blocks and blocks of strip malls and identical, poorly built houses. Huge surface roads and even bigger highways. It's a nightmare, IMHO. What gall an Orlando poster has to criticize anyone on culture!
I think that a couple of the reasons that Florida is having so much trouble attracting tech companies are these: First, the tourist market overshadows everything else, with the possible exception of farming. (which we are consistently losing to California, because they tend to have slightly better weather)
Second, there is a crappy school system. UF is good, and FSU and UM probably come in second, but everything else is awful. And there are no private universities to speak of, partially because everything's still very new, and partially because we have a lot of AARP members that fsck up our taxes, etc. because they have no interest in it: they're retirees from out of state.
You can't deny that the Valley would have been as successful if not for the good technical schools out there. In Boston we've got Harvard (for managers) and MIT (for geeks) and a zillion other schools, coming out of the woodwork. This situation is not likely to change anytime soon, so a lot of technical people from Florida tend to leave. Lord knows I never thought I'd live in Massachusetts, of all places! (But I'm moving, so instead of living with a bunch of Yankees in MA, I'll be living with a bunch of tree-huggers in WA;)
It's the armpit of Florida, both socially and geographically.
Don't be silly. Florida doesn't have a culture at all. My part of the state, the panhandle, has been a backward, rural area practically forever, and we likes it like that. We wouldn't know culture if it bit us on the ass. When Tallahassee was trying to find a motto for a tourist campaign, my favorite suggestion was "Tallahassee: Exits 28, 29, 30 and 31"
When I tell people I'm from Florida, they immediately ask about Orlando or Miami. I've begun to tell people I'm from South Georgia, since it's far more accurate.
However, everything south of Gainesville is still new, and is only habitable due to the miracles of Air Conditioning, Malaria Control and the US Army Corps of Engineers. (Although that last one is turning out to be a major fsck up) The penninsula has not had the TIME to develop any kind of culture with which it can show up the panhandle.
Miami (which effectively includes everything up into West Palm) had a very small culture for a while, and then it promptly died. What's left is a huge urban sprawl that is *very* similar to Los Angeles. I don't think that anyone who's really dealt with Miami much likes it. I can't stand the place.
Tampa/St. Pete are okay, but not amazing. The Cape area, on the opposite side of the penninsula is even deader. St. Augustine (which is very old) and Daytona are about as far south as I'd like to go on the Atlantic coast.
Orlando however, is just awful. Boston and San Francisco have hundreds of years behind them. They have histories, and until this century people from all classes actually lived there and raised families there, and their kids grew up and usually stayed. Orlando would be nothing more than orange groves and probably landfills if Uncle Walt hadn't shown up. While they've brought the wealth and population increase associated with civilization, all that you've got to show for it is a jillion tourists and a town that's more or less faceless because who's going to develop anything nice in Orlando anyway? No one'll care, and no one'll ever be interested in seeing it. The only public works project that's important to Orlando is, I'd guess, the airport. It's the only damn visible thing to the hordes of people that come through the place.
Boston, NYC, SF, etc. became neat cities for the sakes of the people who lived there. It was just incidental that it attracted other people. Their wealth was acquired through various industries and persuits that didn't depend on tourism. Tourists can be appeased with a Potemkin village because they don't have time to dig deep. And that'll never be satisfying for real.
Panama City only gets redneck tourists, and I can deal with that, being from the panhandle. Orlando gets all kinds of tourists, and a hell of a lot more of them to boot.
However, I did not go to FSU. I'm _from_ Tallahassee (arguably a worse thing). If I had stayed in Florida I'd've gone to UF. But instead I escaped and went to school up in Massachusetts.
Heh. The town from The Truman Show was not Celebration, FL at all. It was actually Seaside, FL, which is located near Panama City, up on the Gulf coast. The film crew was only allowed to film there because they built a new school for the town.
There are an amazing number of zoning and construction restrictions to get houses to fit into the 'style' that the town planners wanted. For instance, each house must have a tin roof (for that beachcomber look) and each one must have a unique white picket fence design. And they do.
There is one house, IIRC built by an architect who disagreed with the board though. There were slightly less restrictions then, and he built his house as a protest, exploiting every hole he could. They've closed the holes behind him, but his house, Darkside (each house must be named, BTW) does stand out from the others.
It is really expensive, and most of the houses there are vacation houses, owned by either a single family, or a group of families collectively. Many are available for short-term rental by other vacationers, which is how most of the people who keep homes there recoup their investment. Relatively few people actually live there full time, and the place is VERY small, and VERY dense.
I've been there several times though, which is easy, since I used to live in Tallahassee, which is not far away. Seaside's nice for a vacation, but there's too many tourists now; Panama City Beach and Destin are a bit more fun, anyway.
As for Tallahassee, where I live, you'd hate to live there, but it's a generic town, undergoing a bit of urban sprawl, and it's not all that expensive. You can always get a doublewide, you know.
However, FL is a crappy place to live, culturally. And you don't want to live anywhere south of Gainesville, other than Tampa/St. Pete, or the Keys. Orlando is solid Disney tourists and Miami is LA-East in terms of how it's laid out, how much fun it is to live there, etc.
Rockets in general are okay. The Air Force had developed a number of manned, piloted planes (as opposed to the NASA rockets, which were pretty much ballistic) with a combination of conventional jet engines and rocket engines.
They were reusable, achieved altitudes that were pretty close to the Mercury capsule altitudes and could land on the groud and be reused. Had the program continued they probably would have built a plane that could achieve LEO sometime in the 60's.
I don't mind using big rockets for heavy lifting, but I have always preferred the idea of establishing a space station in Earth orbit from which both small ferries to Earth and missions to the Moon (and other heavenly objects) could be launched. Von Braun also pushed for that idea, but as long as he was building big ass rockets anyway the Lunar Orbit Rendevous plan killed any chance for a permanent space station.
The International station and Mir are pipsqueaks comapred to Skylab, which rode up on one Saturn V and would still be operational today had they not put it in too low of an orbit. The thing was as big as a house.
Had things worked out differently, I think that we could have wound up with a fleet of LEO-capable space planes, a wicked huge space station and a large, permanent (or semi-permanent) base on the moon.
It's true though, that a lot of the Apollo program decisions were motivated by the political need to get to the moon by 1970 at the latest. And the rush to get there meant that no infrastructure was left to permit the space program to grow. It was a one time goal that accomplished very little in the end.
There's Bob Forward's ideas on light sails. He proposed (and has written a couple of so-so novels about) a multi-stage light sail.
Essentially, you'd need a number of very powerful lasers and the solar system's biggest Fresnel lens, both of which would remain in the system and provide power to the craft. The light pressure pushes the sail at a reasonable speed to wherever.
Eventually when you need to switch from accelleration to decelleration (so as to remain in the destination system), the main body of the sail detaches from the payload (which retains a smaller sail, pointing in the opposite direction). The main sail then deforms just enough to focus a lot of light at the small sail. This slows down the ship for an insertion orbit into the system.
It's interesting, but would require a hell of a lot of engineering work to build. On the plus side that laser would probably keep alien invasions at bay.
Then you should get X-Kryptonite, which will give you super powers (assuming you're an ordinary human being). Then you can either use your new powers to get rid of nosy cops, or build a Fortress of Solitude(TM) in some desolate area. Perhaps New Jersey.
It's true though. And since we're talking about a planet-wide issue, should the US government have to get the permission of every one of the approx. 6 billion people that live here? Does this apply to private entities (individuals and corporations) which are conducting risky work?
The airplane argument I mentioned earlier is this: I hate to fly. I'm absolutely terrified of flying. Really. So I don't fly unless I absolutely have to; it's a stressful experience that I would be all too happy to not have to deal with. However, given that I am strongly concerned about planes dropping out of the sky on a more or less random basis, why should I be put at risk of having planes that I'm not even in falling on _me_? There's no reason for pilots et al to risk my safety by flying planes at all, even if I'm on the ground.
The answer of course, is that if something is not immediately dangerous and extremely risky, it can be done without having to get approval from the people who may be effected. The Cassini probe was determined to not be likely to endanger people, and thus, it was approved. Had it not been considered to be sufficiently safe, it would never have gone ahead at all.
Well of course that was all just a hoax. Nothing ever happened at Grovers' Mill, NJ in 1938. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to work here at Yoyodyne.
I concur. Although I wimped out and ended up in the English department, I was originally a Physics major (going from one of the hardest to one of the easiest majors, if you must know). I can't stand people disguising their opinions as fact.
I did very poorly in that class, primarily IMHO because I disagreed with him all the time, and on a number of occassions pointed out that he was provably wrong on something, and corrected him. It's all in the past now, so I don't really care much anymore, but he certainly made me realize that a lot of crap that I had tacitly supported or accepted was in fact, crap. That's good anyway.
Now, while I like the Cassini mission, and I'm willing to defend it from people with a science background of 'Plutonium is pure evil,' I don't really like NASA all that much.
I would have preferred that the USAF had been given more opportunities to research spaceflight. Between Von Braun's ultimately stupid utter reliance on rocketry and NASA's unwillingness to conduct the Apollo mission gradually (with a permanent Skylab-type installation in the mid-60's) we're really not at all as far ahead in space as we should be. About the only good thing there is regarding NASA, IMHO is that they are basically a civilian agency. It would have been crappy to let the military dominate space, but I could accept joint programs.
Well, one of the reasons for the selection of Cape Canaveral (or whatever they're calling it these days) as a launch site was that rockets which had problems shortly after launch would end up in the Atlantic Ocean. It's not as though that part of Florida is a particularly nice place to live. And I know, I'm from Florida.
However, given that the Pu is encased in an extremely durable salt/ceramic mix, it's not nearly so dangerous as a hunk of raw Pu would be.
Okay. How about (although we couldn't have known this for a fact then) that it really did work;)
Most of my arguments for were rebuttals towards their arguments against.
People complained that NASA had no right to risk everyone. I replied that NASA does not really need to ask, that it is impractical at best to require everyone to ask for consent to risk (including the airplane thing, which I'll skip for brevity), and that the risk is quite low due to a number of factors. They include the precision of orbital mechanics, the success of previous RTG-equipped craft, the sturdiness of the RTG and the likely effects that the RTG could have in a worst case scenario.
Another person had asked why an alternative power source was not used (i.e. photovoltaic cells). I pointed out the low efficiency of said cells and that there is very little light from the Sun at the distance of Saturn's orbit and the dangers that the large number of objects in the Saturnian system pose to big ass solar panels.
Sadly, the class shifted to a mailing list, rather than continue to use the newsgroup (which was specific to that class!) for some reason after this whole thing wrapped up. Personally, I would have liked to rekindle it.;) I'd like to say that you can go to dejanews and read through the posts, but since the group was specific to the school, it's not archived there, or anywhere in fact. Pity.
I think I'll always have fond memories of the Cassini mission. Back a couple of years ago when debates were running rampant before NASA launched it, I got involved in a really enjoyable debate with some Sociology students at school.
The teacher in that class, who IMHO would ban himself if he realized that upon death he'll undergo radioactive decay, was always saying to his students 'Subvert the dominant paridigm.' And whenever he told his students to jump, every single one of the bozos asked how high.
I bashed through their anti-Cassini arguments like a knife through vaporized butter. My shining moment was when one of them complimented me for having subverted the dominant paridigm of the class. That was cool.
Well I don't have personal experience with what each of those companies uses internally, but most large businesses in my experience, use Office pretty extensively. YMMV.
For various computer manufacturers, I'd expect that they would normally use their own hardware, and in Sun's case, this would make using Office pretty hard. However, software houses and businesses in areas MS is still moving into (telecommunications, journalism, etc.) are likely to use Office.
The Libyan hit teams are not compatible with Win32. So MS purchased Syrian hit teams, slapped on a better looking interface, and called it MS ActiveSyrian HitTeam 95.
Sadly, Libyasoft lost a lot of their customers because of this.
The Downside to Success [long, semi-off topic]
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Quack!
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Katz makes some interesting observations, although he doesn't really seem to be offering more than a vauge solution.
He's pretty clearly against censorship, but I think that some of the details of this bear a little more looking into. The way I see it (and to his credit, Katz does touch on this), there are basically two forms of censorship. A general form, and a specific form.
The general form simply censors objectionable material from everybody. The CDA, while claiming to have been specific censorship (since that's less objectionable in this day and age), was actually general censorship. The Hays office (the persecuor to the MPAA) censored movies for everyone. Various governments and religions have done the same, all throughout history.
General censorship doesn't work so well here and now, though, mostly because of various benefits acquired by the people who'd like not to be censored, or have things which interest them censored. Of late, the courts have ruled that while some material may not be appropriate for some, or even most people, no one is forcing that material down everyone's throat. If you have to make an effort to get this month's copy of Ass Freaks, then there's no particular reason to prevent it from being kept out of the hands of those people that want it, and who can (presumably) handle it. (Don't start thinking dirty just yet)
The sucessful cases of general censorship tend to occur at a fine level, I think, rather than a broad one. I'd blame that on peer pressure. A small bunch of moral zealots can usually get large indifferent groups of people to follow them, by implying that to do otherwise would be immoral. There's a good example here.;) 'Course, a Supreme Court justice really couldn't care less about what someone in East Fooville thinks about him, so a more objective, and I'd say rational mindset tends to prevail.
Specific censorship, which Katz gets oh so riled up about, is more along the lines of censoring material from some specific group who just can't handle it. This could be an ethnic minority, it could be based on gender, or religion, or income, and lately is based on age. The age basis is more difficult to fight because there really are good reasons for minors to minors in a lot of cases. This isn't necessarily fair, but let's assume that we're all okay with that for now.
Anyway, what's happening is that our pals the moral zealots (it may be a different bunch of moral zealots, but for purposes of this argument moral zealotry is a black box) cannot prevent American Pie (for example) from reaching a broad audience. Nor can people who wish that it wasn't associated with Don McLean, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. What can be done is to prevent it from reaching a specific audience. Minors are an easy target as they don't have complete freedom and it's easy to claim that you're doing things 'to protect the children.'
This is a pretty weak excuse of course, and should carry as little weight as the also oft-abused 'in God's name.' Both could be accurate and fair, but so many people claim to do so many contradictory things for the same reasons that it's difficult not to find them distasteful now.
This could all be okay, potentially. But it's not, because censorship is usually a lousy practice. In most cases it's just a grab for power by some group. Should it succeed, further censorings will be more likely to be accepted. Failure is generally ignored, making it a very easy game if you're patient. Worse yet, by censoring things based on the agenda of one or more groups of zealots, they can manipulate how people think in order to propigate their particular meme.
To limit the number of voices, the individual freedoms and the number of ideas in a society has much the same effect as standing on a garden hose. It cripples society as a whole, even if the one segment of it that's standing on the hose attains a higher position than it had before. Although I run the risk of Godwin's law being invoked, Germany had a really thriving culture for some time. WW1 and the penalties imposed upon Germany had deleterious effects, and of course Nazi Germany had a pretty wretched culture, even before WW2.
However wrongheaded the zealots usually are though, they may have stumbled upon an interesting idea. What if there is a problem with morals in today's society?
In the case of America, a lot of the specific censorship aimed at minors can be traced back to the failure of the prohibition effort in '33 and the rise of the baby boomers (as a generation x'er it's almost too easy for me to blame everything on my parents, but that's not my goal here). The former was a resounding defeat to the general censorship movement - even though in this case it was a prohibition against a tangible good and not on information. The latter was like seeing a hunted animal stand in front of a brick wall and hold up a sign that said 'Shoot here'; a generation known for rebelliousness made an easy target.
But a significant part of this wave of censorship, which I think we're still in*, is that there are some valid causes behind it. That's not to endorse censorship, but merely to say that the reasons that are being invoked to censor people may be symptoms of an actual problem, and that it's not _entirely_ an exertion of power. * Although now it's often conducted by people who didn't like being censored themselves, yet can act hypocritically without blinking.** ** So I'm not perfect.
So the question comes up, are we less moral now than we used to be? Honestly, I think that we are, or at least, that it's changed from being an unspoken thing to something that's at the forefront of our society. Certainly things have, and continue to change a lot. Perhaps this churn is being mistaken for an overall lapse in morals.
My personal hypothesis is that around, and for quite a while after WW2, America was at the top of the heap as far as the world goes. However, in that fairly complacent environment, sprung up the rebellious baby boomer generation, who presented themselves as an easy target, as already pointed out. More importantly though, what we had was a situation in which the people who would, just as a side-effect of the passage of time, end up running things and raising their successors actively pushing away from the zenith of their society. And a good number of the people at that zenith were helping, by attempting to cause a sort of counter-reformation. So if we hit a peak for society as a whole during the reign of our (assuming/. readers are approx. my age) grandparents, we're dropping now.
Now, this doesn't mean that we'll all end up like rejects from some Gibson novel in twenty years. But if you're familiar with the confucian concept of the mandate of heaven, we are probably in the process of losing it in a general sense, even though we're doing great in some specific areas (e.g. computing). This is okay in a general sense, since there is something of a cycle in which various cultures are really on top of things for a while, with each successor usually improving upon the last like something out of Asimov.
We took over from the British. They took over from, I'd say, France (and to an extent, China, which was having dynastic problems anyway, which is pretty crappy timing). France, from Italy. Italy from the Arab world. Arabs from the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire from the cohesive Roman Empire, from the Hellenistic Greeks, from Egyptians & Mesopotamians, at which point things get a bit murky. Am I too focused on western civilization? Probably, but feel free to add data to this idea, or tear it down entirely if you've got something better. This is still quite a chain, and we're not done being the king of the hill for some time, I'd say.
Unfortunately, this is not so hot for those of us who do have a good sense of morals and all the other junk that I've been lumping in with it which combine to make a really badass culture. Our solutions are limited.
Give up, let each succeeding generation be worse off and give someone else a chance to be the best culture around. We ourselves will still have a good time of it, since it takes a while for the decay process to work, and as a part of it much of our culture will get assimilated into others, so there's no great loss.
There's the option of attempting to revitalize our culture, but I don't think that this has worked in the past, nor do I think it's especially healthy. It would represent a longing for a culture that's died naturally instead of trying to just go the hell forward with whatever you've got (the Japanese did have a good run at this in many ways from the Meiji restoration through WW2, although they still had plenty of problems that screwed them later on).
For long-term planners, there's the pilgrimesque option of migrating in order to hitch up with a rising culture (consider it first round VC) or starting your own. Insofar as the puritans (not the same group of people, as pilgrims, btw) go, this was really unsuccessful as seen from their point of view. Their descendants were did not adhere to the morality they grew up in, probably because it was sterile, as well as a hard act to follow. They, along with a wide assortment of other immigrants to the new world (convicts, traders, etc.) managed to put something really badass together, but it took over a hundred years just to get the basics down, and another hundred and fifty or so to begin aiming for the top of the hill. So this approach may work well as a seed for a totally different, successful culture, but it is unlikely to work on it's own. (based on a very small sample group;)
I'm afraid that I can't see any especially good way to get out of this and still have a functioning, good society which outlives the people that want a functioning, good society (good morally, not good as in okay; a lot of this presupposes that a moral, yet flexible society will automagically do well as opposed to a moral, rigid one or an immoral one of any kind). Certainly it would involve a major shift in the way that people think and act.
Getting back to this specific article (what a hike that is), I think that yes, it's very important for parents to personally raise their kids. TV is not only a poor substitute for parenting, but the culture distributed across TV is pretty poor as well. Myself, I watch some of the better cartoons (Simpsons, Reboot, Family Guy) and sometimes the Weather Channel. But banning TV is probably not a good solution.
What I'd like to see (and this probably is unrealistic, but I'm no expert on the subject) is for businesses et al to arrange either for their workers to work half days, or for a shorter part of the week so that two parents working 20 hours can support a family OR to pay one parent enough to support his family (in exchange for a full work week) so that the other parent can stay at home. Unfortunately, many businesses are short sighted and ignore the effects that they have on society. Ultimately we get treated as the 'commons' (as in the tragedy of) and everyone, even businesses, suffer.
Okay, let's review what MS has already done to get the majority of computer users by the short and curlies.
Used an OS monopoly to monopolize business applications
Colluded with Intel. Most likely, the reason is that MS promised to only write OSes for Intel chips (was there ever a serious effort for Alphas & PPCs? Didn't think so), and in return Intel doesn't compete with MS, since they're one of the few people that have a similar chokehold
Set up proprietary and ever changing document formats to help out their business app monopoly
Working on setting up UCITA, to prevent people from reverse engineering their products, even if only for compatibility reasons
And now we get an announcement that they're considering application rentals. This does not come as a suprise to me. In December, I started to put together the pieces, based on some comments made by Ballmer and Gates, and determined that MS was planning to move towards a subscription model. That is, you get Office2002, but it expires in 2003, and you are forced to buy the new one. This would also help drive sales of the OS and of new boxes, due to the aforementioned document issue.
The other really interesting thing I noticed though, was that they were working on a system by which Office would not be a set of applications at all. Instead, they would be subscription-model web sites. Login to www.word.com, write a document, and it's saved as a web page somewhere on the site. You can email it to people through a connection to hotmail. Access it from any place. And pay through the nose, since there won't be any other choice.
Now, that's the next step. First they need to get people to become used to the subscription model and wait a bit for bandwidth to improve.
There is a great side effect too. Since everyone already uses Windows & Office, and they'll have prevented anyone from keeping old copies of the software around (by expiring it & by preventing them from reading new files), everyone, even MS's competetors will be stuck with the web version of Office. Now who here believes that confidential files by Oracle, Sun, Apple, AOL, or whomever, will stay that way while on MS's web site?
At that time, yes there were ROM issues. The current ROM is mostly implimented in software now. There's a small ROM left, and I'm pretty sure that it is mostly just open firmware.
However, the OS is pretty closely tied to the hardware in a lot of other respects, so I still would like to see a legal, working clone (with MacOS on it - any modern version) before I buy it. A PPC running Linux is not special though; there are PPCs running AIX, BeOS and some even had NT and OS/2.
$500? The regular OS retails for about $100. Consumer OS X will pretty certainly be the same. The cloners were licensing the OS for less than $100/copy. If it had gone too high, they could have switched to buying it retail and reselling it, but their margins were too tight to make it effective for them.
More likely you'll see clones with just LinuxPPC but that may (a PPC mb != Mac mb) also support various MacOSes.
Well, I don't play quake at all (it's ugly), but when I do play 1st person shooters (Marathon, Doom, Unreal) I keep my right hand on the keypad and left hand on the w/a/s/d keys (thumb on space). Since I put movement, sidestep, weapon selects and both triggers on the keypad, I'm just busy.
Once in a while I switch to the mouse (for sniping) but never in the thick of things. The mouse is too inaccurate for my tastes, unless I carefully aim. The keypad is great, OTOH. Since I've got aiming also mapped to left hand keys, I usually don't play with the mouse at all. And I play real good.
Historically, right-wing and religious particularly Protestant) fundamentalism have been very close. Look at voting patterns for, say, people from the Bible Belt who consider themselves very religious. Think they're all voting Democrat? I think not.
You're not from the South, are you? _Historically_, ever since the end of the War Between the States, Southerners have voted Democratic. Hell, there usually weren't even Republicans on the ballots in most places. Lincoln was a Republican, and a Republican-strong North moved in on us, and this caused about a hundred years' worth of resentment down here. Back then, the Republicans were more of a liberal party and the Democrats were more conservative. They've since flip-flopped.
The South finally began to vote Republican when Nixon was campaigning in the late 60's. The civil rights movement, which was also not all that popular among a goodly number of Southerners (and very popular among others) had some strong ties to the Democrats. Nixon realized that Southern voters were being ignored, and engineered an amazing Republican turnout down here. So your 'history' only seems to go back about thirty years, IMHO.
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I do not think that it is realistic for people to believe that they can make it from the bottom to the top. That rarely ever happens (Steve Jobs is a reasonably good example, Bill Gates is not)
It's really whacked to think that you can make it to the top through the kindness of strangers.
A person living in the conditions you describe is highly unlikely to ever succeed, really. That's unfortunate. However, this should not prevent her from doing as well as possible. Which is a matter of one's own abilities and will more than anything else. Even if she can make her children's opportunities better, it's worthwhile. This does not guarantee the success of later generations however. They have to do the same thing; give their successors enough forward momentum to give them a chance.
The momentum can be financial success, but I don't think that's the only form it need take, and it's probably one of the worst types. A motiviation to succeed, a sense of ethics, a strong will, etc. are all the sorts of things that are frequently rewarded if you're going to use them right. Even if you're poor, giving your kids the drive to better themselves is more important than money. There are ways around money, but there aren't any around drive.
My paternal great-grandfather immigrated to the US from Russia. He eventually ran a scrap metal business in New Hampshire. His son, my grandfather, joined the Army Air Corps during the war, became a teacher, and after that took up various administrative jobs related to teaching. My father put himself through college and law school, and is now a successful lawyer. Upon leaving school, I started working and I've supported myself for some time now. I'm just starting out, but I want to surpass previous generations in being able to give that boost to my kids.
Some people just don't have what it takes, and will pretty likely fail. I know a lot of people like that. Ultimately it happens to everyone's line, and that's natural. When you get to be at the top of the heap there's not always anywhere to go.
The cycle that you speak of can be broken, but I don't think that that's the important issue here. Lots of people who happen to be minorities have the right kind of drive. Starting from a worse position (using wealth to gauge success) just means it'll take longer. The better people will, in time, rise to the top. Some of them have enormous forward momentum, and this can translate into inertia that their descendants can ride on for years.
If Gates gives all his money to his kids, his family will be set for a long time, but unless they have the right kind of spirit to them, sooner or later his descendants will be asking yours if they want space fries with that.
Just try to succeed. If you keep at it, and get your kids to do the same, and so forth, someday there will be rewards for it. Just don't go expecting to reap a thousand times what you sow.
In the US local directory assistance is 411 (and this has become synonymous, in a slangy sort of way, with 'information').
To get directory assistance for a different area code, you dial xxx-555-1212, where xxx is the area code you wish to get information about.
This is really pointless, but what the hell.
Tallahassee and the panhandle definately have a certain presence. They've been around long enough to have acquired a personality, and it's not a half bad one. I had thought that I was pointing this out in my earlier post, but perhaps it did not come through as clearly as I had intended. But the personality of the area is not quite the same as culture, which I was interpreting as something more along the lines of 'high culture.'
However, Tally broke some round number in the 1990 census. This has caused a whole bunch of chain stores to move into town. They're really turning the place into the same generic Anytown USA hellhole that I'd like to avoid.
Personally, I'll always rate north Florida above south Florida. The only good places south of Gainesville would be Tampa/St. Pete and the Keys. Key West has been suffering in recent years, but since hardly anyone outside of the state is aware that they're a whole chain of islands, the others are still pretty cool, or were the last time I was there. Kinda wish that they hadn't put in the highway - now you have to go to the Dry Tortugas to get away from it all.
Orlando and the West Palm/Miami sprawl though.... man, I wouldn't mind melting some icecaps to get rid of them. Just blocks and blocks and blocks of strip malls and identical, poorly built houses. Huge surface roads and even bigger highways. It's a nightmare, IMHO. What gall an Orlando poster has to criticize anyone on culture!
I think that a couple of the reasons that Florida is having so much trouble attracting tech companies are these: First, the tourist market overshadows everything else, with the possible exception of farming. (which we are consistently losing to California, because they tend to have slightly better weather)
Second, there is a crappy school system. UF is good, and FSU and UM probably come in second, but everything else is awful. And there are no private universities to speak of, partially because everything's still very new, and partially because we have a lot of AARP members that fsck up our taxes, etc. because they have no interest in it: they're retirees from out of state.
You can't deny that the Valley would have been as successful if not for the good technical schools out there. In Boston we've got Harvard (for managers) and MIT (for geeks) and a zillion other schools, coming out of the woodwork. This situation is not likely to change anytime soon, so a lot of technical people from Florida tend to leave. Lord knows I never thought I'd live in Massachusetts, of all places! (But I'm moving, so instead of living with a bunch of Yankees in MA, I'll be living with a bunch of tree-huggers in WA ;)
Don't be silly. Florida doesn't have a culture at all. My part of the state, the panhandle, has been a backward, rural area practically forever, and we likes it like that. We wouldn't know culture if it bit us on the ass. When Tallahassee was trying to find a motto for a tourist campaign, my favorite suggestion was "Tallahassee: Exits 28, 29, 30 and 31"
When I tell people I'm from Florida, they immediately ask about Orlando or Miami. I've begun to tell people I'm from South Georgia, since it's far more accurate.
However, everything south of Gainesville is still new, and is only habitable due to the miracles of Air Conditioning, Malaria Control and the US Army Corps of Engineers. (Although that last one is turning out to be a major fsck up) The penninsula has not had the TIME to develop any kind of culture with which it can show up the panhandle.
Miami (which effectively includes everything up into West Palm) had a very small culture for a while, and then it promptly died. What's left is a huge urban sprawl that is *very* similar to Los Angeles. I don't think that anyone who's really dealt with Miami much likes it. I can't stand the place.
Tampa/St. Pete are okay, but not amazing. The Cape area, on the opposite side of the penninsula is even deader. St. Augustine (which is very old) and Daytona are about as far south as I'd like to go on the Atlantic coast.
Orlando however, is just awful. Boston and San Francisco have hundreds of years behind them. They have histories, and until this century people from all classes actually lived there and raised families there, and their kids grew up and usually stayed. Orlando would be nothing more than orange groves and probably landfills if Uncle Walt hadn't shown up. While they've brought the wealth and population increase associated with civilization, all that you've got to show for it is a jillion tourists and a town that's more or less faceless because who's going to develop anything nice in Orlando anyway? No one'll care, and no one'll ever be interested in seeing it. The only public works project that's important to Orlando is, I'd guess, the airport. It's the only damn visible thing to the hordes of people that come through the place.
Boston, NYC, SF, etc. became neat cities for the sakes of the people who lived there. It was just incidental that it attracted other people. Their wealth was acquired through various industries and persuits that didn't depend on tourism. Tourists can be appeased with a Potemkin village because they don't have time to dig deep. And that'll never be satisfying for real.
Panama City only gets redneck tourists, and I can deal with that, being from the panhandle. Orlando gets all kinds of tourists, and a hell of a lot more of them to boot.
However, I did not go to FSU. I'm _from_ Tallahassee (arguably a worse thing). If I had stayed in Florida I'd've gone to UF. But instead I escaped and went to school up in Massachusetts.
Heh. The town from The Truman Show was not Celebration, FL at all. It was actually Seaside, FL, which is located near Panama City, up on the Gulf coast. The film crew was only allowed to film there because they built a new school for the town.
There are an amazing number of zoning and construction restrictions to get houses to fit into the 'style' that the town planners wanted. For instance, each house must have a tin roof (for that beachcomber look) and each one must have a unique white picket fence design. And they do.
There is one house, IIRC built by an architect who disagreed with the board though. There were slightly less restrictions then, and he built his house as a protest, exploiting every hole he could. They've closed the holes behind him, but his house, Darkside (each house must be named, BTW) does stand out from the others.
It is really expensive, and most of the houses there are vacation houses, owned by either a single family, or a group of families collectively. Many are available for short-term rental by other vacationers, which is how most of the people who keep homes there recoup their investment. Relatively few people actually live there full time, and the place is VERY small, and VERY dense.
I've been there several times though, which is easy, since I used to live in Tallahassee, which is not far away. Seaside's nice for a vacation, but there's too many tourists now; Panama City Beach and Destin are a bit more fun, anyway.
As for Tallahassee, where I live, you'd hate to live there, but it's a generic town, undergoing a bit of urban sprawl, and it's not all that expensive. You can always get a doublewide, you know.
However, FL is a crappy place to live, culturally. And you don't want to live anywhere south of Gainesville, other than Tampa/St. Pete, or the Keys. Orlando is solid Disney tourists and Miami is LA-East in terms of how it's laid out, how much fun it is to live there, etc.
Rockets in general are okay. The Air Force had developed a number of manned, piloted planes (as opposed to the NASA rockets, which were pretty much ballistic) with a combination of conventional jet engines and rocket engines.
They were reusable, achieved altitudes that were pretty close to the Mercury capsule altitudes and could land on the groud and be reused. Had the program continued they probably would have built a plane that could achieve LEO sometime in the 60's.
I don't mind using big rockets for heavy lifting, but I have always preferred the idea of establishing a space station in Earth orbit from which both small ferries to Earth and missions to the Moon (and other heavenly objects) could be launched. Von Braun also pushed for that idea, but as long as he was building big ass rockets anyway the Lunar Orbit Rendevous plan killed any chance for a permanent space station.
The International station and Mir are pipsqueaks comapred to Skylab, which rode up on one Saturn V and would still be operational today had they not put it in too low of an orbit. The thing was as big as a house.
Had things worked out differently, I think that we could have wound up with a fleet of LEO-capable space planes, a wicked huge space station and a large, permanent (or semi-permanent) base on the moon.
It's true though, that a lot of the Apollo program decisions were motivated by the political need to get to the moon by 1970 at the latest. And the rush to get there meant that no infrastructure was left to permit the space program to grow. It was a one time goal that accomplished very little in the end.
There's Bob Forward's ideas on light sails. He proposed (and has written a couple of so-so novels about) a multi-stage light sail.
Essentially, you'd need a number of very powerful lasers and the solar system's biggest Fresnel lens, both of which would remain in the system and provide power to the craft. The light pressure pushes the sail at a reasonable speed to wherever.
Eventually when you need to switch from accelleration to decelleration (so as to remain in the destination system), the main body of the sail detaches from the payload (which retains a smaller sail, pointing in the opposite direction). The main sail then deforms just enough to focus a lot of light at the small sail. This slows down the ship for an insertion orbit into the system.
It's interesting, but would require a hell of a lot of engineering work to build. On the plus side that laser would probably keep alien invasions at bay.
Then you should get X-Kryptonite, which will give you super powers (assuming you're an ordinary human being). Then you can either use your new powers to get rid of nosy cops, or build a Fortress of Solitude(TM) in some desolate area. Perhaps New Jersey.
It's true though. And since we're talking about a planet-wide issue, should the US government have to get the permission of every one of the approx. 6 billion people that live here? Does this apply to private entities (individuals and corporations) which are conducting risky work?
The airplane argument I mentioned earlier is this: I hate to fly. I'm absolutely terrified of flying. Really. So I don't fly unless I absolutely have to; it's a stressful experience that I would be all too happy to not have to deal with. However, given that I am strongly concerned about planes dropping out of the sky on a more or less random basis, why should I be put at risk of having planes that I'm not even in falling on _me_? There's no reason for pilots et al to risk my safety by flying planes at all, even if I'm on the ground.
The answer of course, is that if something is not immediately dangerous and extremely risky, it can be done without having to get approval from the people who may be effected. The Cassini probe was determined to not be likely to endanger people, and thus, it was approved. Had it not been considered to be sufficiently safe, it would never have gone ahead at all.
Well of course that was all just a hoax. Nothing ever happened at Grovers' Mill, NJ in 1938. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to work here at Yoyodyne.
--John Parrot (forgot my passwd)
I concur. Although I wimped out and ended up in the English department, I was originally a Physics major (going from one of the hardest to one of the easiest majors, if you must know). I can't stand people disguising their opinions as fact.
I did very poorly in that class, primarily IMHO because I disagreed with him all the time, and on a number of occassions pointed out that he was provably wrong on something, and corrected him. It's all in the past now, so I don't really care much anymore, but he certainly made me realize that a lot of crap that I had tacitly supported or accepted was in fact, crap. That's good anyway.
Now, while I like the Cassini mission, and I'm willing to defend it from people with a science background of 'Plutonium is pure evil,' I don't really like NASA all that much.
I would have preferred that the USAF had been given more opportunities to research spaceflight. Between Von Braun's ultimately stupid utter reliance on rocketry and NASA's unwillingness to conduct the Apollo mission gradually (with a permanent Skylab-type installation in the mid-60's) we're really not at all as far ahead in space as we should be. About the only good thing there is regarding NASA, IMHO is that they are basically a civilian agency. It would have been crappy to let the military dominate space, but I could accept joint programs.
Well, one of the reasons for the selection of Cape Canaveral (or whatever they're calling it these days) as a launch site was that rockets which had problems shortly after launch would end up in the Atlantic Ocean. It's not as though that part of Florida is a particularly nice place to live. And I know, I'm from Florida.
However, given that the Pu is encased in an extremely durable salt/ceramic mix, it's not nearly so dangerous as a hunk of raw Pu would be.
Okay. How about (although we couldn't have known this for a fact then) that it really did work ;)
;) I'd like to say that you can go to dejanews and read through the posts, but since the group was specific to the school, it's not archived there, or anywhere in fact. Pity.
Most of my arguments for were rebuttals towards their arguments against.
People complained that NASA had no right to risk everyone. I replied that NASA does not really need to ask, that it is impractical at best to require everyone to ask for consent to risk (including the airplane thing, which I'll skip for brevity), and that the risk is quite low due to a number of factors. They include the precision of orbital mechanics, the success of previous RTG-equipped craft, the sturdiness of the RTG and the likely effects that the RTG could have in a worst case scenario.
Another person had asked why an alternative power source was not used (i.e. photovoltaic cells). I pointed out the low efficiency of said cells and that there is very little light from the Sun at the distance of Saturn's orbit and the dangers that the large number of objects in the Saturnian system pose to big ass solar panels.
Sadly, the class shifted to a mailing list, rather than continue to use the newsgroup (which was specific to that class!) for some reason after this whole thing wrapped up. Personally, I would have liked to rekindle it.
I think I'll always have fond memories of the Cassini mission. Back a couple of years ago when debates were running rampant before NASA launched it, I got involved in a really enjoyable debate with some Sociology students at school.
The teacher in that class, who IMHO would ban himself if he realized that upon death he'll undergo radioactive decay, was always saying to his students 'Subvert the dominant paridigm.' And whenever he told his students to jump, every single one of the bozos asked how high.
I bashed through their anti-Cassini arguments like a knife through vaporized butter. My shining moment was when one of them complimented me for having subverted the dominant paridigm of the class. That was cool.
The moral is: stay far away from Gordy Fellman.
So my phased plasma pulse-laser (in the 40 watt range) wouldn't be okay either. Damn!
Well I don't have personal experience with what each of those companies uses internally, but most large businesses in my experience, use Office pretty extensively. YMMV.
For various computer manufacturers, I'd expect that they would normally use their own hardware, and in Sun's case, this would make using Office pretty hard. However, software houses and businesses in areas MS is still moving into (telecommunications, journalism, etc.) are likely to use Office.
That's interesting about Sun, though.
The Libyan hit teams are not compatible with Win32. So MS purchased Syrian hit teams, slapped on a better looking interface, and called it MS ActiveSyrian HitTeam 95.
Sadly, Libyasoft lost a lot of their customers because of this.
He's pretty clearly against censorship, but I think that some of the details of this bear a little more looking into. The way I see it (and to his credit, Katz does touch on this), there are basically two forms of censorship. A general form, and a specific form.
The general form simply censors objectionable material from everybody. The CDA, while claiming to have been specific censorship (since that's less objectionable in this day and age), was actually general censorship. The Hays office (the persecuor to the MPAA) censored movies for everyone. Various governments and religions have done the same, all throughout history.
General censorship doesn't work so well here and now, though, mostly because of various benefits acquired by the people who'd like not to be censored, or have things which interest them censored. Of late, the courts have ruled that while some material may not be appropriate for some, or even most people, no one is forcing that material down everyone's throat. If you have to make an effort to get this month's copy of Ass Freaks, then there's no particular reason to prevent it from being kept out of the hands of those people that want it, and who can (presumably) handle it. (Don't start thinking dirty just yet)
The sucessful cases of general censorship tend to occur at a fine level, I think, rather than a broad one. I'd blame that on peer pressure. A small bunch of moral zealots can usually get large indifferent groups of people to follow them, by implying that to do otherwise would be immoral. There's a good example here. ;) 'Course, a Supreme Court justice really couldn't care less about what someone in East Fooville thinks about him, so a more objective, and I'd say rational mindset tends to prevail.
Specific censorship, which Katz gets oh so riled up about, is more along the lines of censoring material from some specific group who just can't handle it. This could be an ethnic minority, it could be based on gender, or religion, or income, and lately is based on age. The age basis is more difficult to fight because there really are good reasons for minors to minors in a lot of cases. This isn't necessarily fair, but let's assume that we're all okay with that for now.
Anyway, what's happening is that our pals the moral zealots (it may be a different bunch of moral zealots, but for purposes of this argument moral zealotry is a black box) cannot prevent American Pie (for example) from reaching a broad audience. Nor can people who wish that it wasn't associated with Don McLean, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. What can be done is to prevent it from reaching a specific audience. Minors are an easy target as they don't have complete freedom and it's easy to claim that you're doing things 'to protect the children.'
This is a pretty weak excuse of course, and should carry as little weight as the also oft-abused 'in God's name.' Both could be accurate and fair, but so many people claim to do so many contradictory things for the same reasons that it's difficult not to find them distasteful now.
This could all be okay, potentially. But it's not, because censorship is usually a lousy practice. In most cases it's just a grab for power by some group. Should it succeed, further censorings will be more likely to be accepted. Failure is generally ignored, making it a very easy game if you're patient. Worse yet, by censoring things based on the agenda of one or more groups of zealots, they can manipulate how people think in order to propigate their particular meme.
To limit the number of voices, the individual freedoms and the number of ideas in a society has much the same effect as standing on a garden hose. It cripples society as a whole, even if the one segment of it that's standing on the hose attains a higher position than it had before. Although I run the risk of Godwin's law being invoked, Germany had a really thriving culture for some time. WW1 and the penalties imposed upon Germany had deleterious effects, and of course Nazi Germany had a pretty wretched culture, even before WW2.
However wrongheaded the zealots usually are though, they may have stumbled upon an interesting idea. What if there is a problem with morals in today's society?
In the case of America, a lot of the specific censorship aimed at minors can be traced back to the failure of the prohibition effort in '33 and the rise of the baby boomers (as a generation x'er it's almost too easy for me to blame everything on my parents, but that's not my goal here). The former was a resounding defeat to the general censorship movement - even though in this case it was a prohibition against a tangible good and not on information. The latter was like seeing a hunted animal stand in front of a brick wall and hold up a sign that said 'Shoot here'; a generation known for rebelliousness made an easy target.
But a significant part of this wave of censorship, which I think we're still in*, is that there are some valid causes behind it. That's not to endorse censorship, but merely to say that the reasons that are being invoked to censor people may be symptoms of an actual problem, and that it's not _entirely_ an exertion of power.
* Although now it's often conducted by people who didn't like being censored themselves, yet can act hypocritically without blinking.**
** So I'm not perfect.
So the question comes up, are we less moral now than we used to be? Honestly, I think that we are, or at least, that it's changed from being an unspoken thing to something that's at the forefront of our society. Certainly things have, and continue to change a lot. Perhaps this churn is being mistaken for an overall lapse in morals.
My personal hypothesis is that around, and for quite a while after WW2, America was at the top of the heap as far as the world goes. However, in that fairly complacent environment, sprung up the rebellious baby boomer generation, who presented themselves as an easy target, as already pointed out. More importantly though, what we had was a situation in which the people who would, just as a side-effect of the passage of time, end up running things and raising their successors actively pushing away from the zenith of their society. And a good number of the people at that zenith were helping, by attempting to cause a sort of counter-reformation. So if we hit a peak for society as a whole during the reign of our (assuming /. readers are approx. my age) grandparents, we're dropping now.
Now, this doesn't mean that we'll all end up like rejects from some Gibson novel in twenty years. But if you're familiar with the confucian concept of the mandate of heaven, we are probably in the process of losing it in a general sense, even though we're doing great in some specific areas (e.g. computing). This is okay in a general sense, since there is something of a cycle in which various cultures are really on top of things for a while, with each successor usually improving upon the last like something out of Asimov.
We took over from the British. They took over from, I'd say, France (and to an extent, China, which was having dynastic problems anyway, which is pretty crappy timing). France, from Italy. Italy from the Arab world. Arabs from the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire from the cohesive Roman Empire, from the Hellenistic Greeks, from Egyptians & Mesopotamians, at which point things get a bit murky. Am I too focused on western civilization? Probably, but feel free to add data to this idea, or tear it down entirely if you've got something better. This is still quite a chain, and we're not done being the king of the hill for some time, I'd say.
Unfortunately, this is not so hot for those of us who do have a good sense of morals and all the other junk that I've been lumping in with it which combine to make a really badass culture. Our solutions are limited.
Give up, let each succeeding generation be worse off and give someone else a chance to be the best culture around. We ourselves will still have a good time of it, since it takes a while for the decay process to work, and as a part of it much of our culture will get assimilated into others, so there's no great loss.
There's the option of attempting to revitalize our culture, but I don't think that this has worked in the past, nor do I think it's especially healthy. It would represent a longing for a culture that's died naturally instead of trying to just go the hell forward with whatever you've got (the Japanese did have a good run at this in many ways from the Meiji restoration through WW2, although they still had plenty of problems that screwed them later on).
For long-term planners, there's the pilgrimesque option of migrating in order to hitch up with a rising culture (consider it first round VC) or starting your own. Insofar as the puritans (not the same group of people, as pilgrims, btw) go, this was really unsuccessful as seen from their point of view. Their descendants were did not adhere to the morality they grew up in, probably because it was sterile, as well as a hard act to follow. They, along with a wide assortment of other immigrants to the new world (convicts, traders, etc.) managed to put something really badass together, but it took over a hundred years just to get the basics down, and another hundred and fifty or so to begin aiming for the top of the hill. So this approach may work well as a seed for a totally different, successful culture, but it is unlikely to work on it's own. (based on a very small sample group ;)
I'm afraid that I can't see any especially good way to get out of this and still have a functioning, good society which outlives the people that want a functioning, good society (good morally, not good as in okay; a lot of this presupposes that a moral, yet flexible society will automagically do well as opposed to a moral, rigid one or an immoral one of any kind). Certainly it would involve a major shift in the way that people think and act.
Getting back to this specific article (what a hike that is), I think that yes, it's very important for parents to personally raise their kids. TV is not only a poor substitute for parenting, but the culture distributed across TV is pretty poor as well. Myself, I watch some of the better cartoons (Simpsons, Reboot, Family Guy) and sometimes the Weather Channel. But banning TV is probably not a good solution.
What I'd like to see (and this probably is unrealistic, but I'm no expert on the subject) is for businesses et al to arrange either for their workers to work half days, or for a shorter part of the week so that two parents working 20 hours can support a family OR to pay one parent enough to support his family (in exchange for a full work week) so that the other parent can stay at home. Unfortunately, many businesses are short sighted and ignore the effects that they have on society. Ultimately we get treated as the 'commons' (as in the tragedy of) and everyone, even businesses, suffer.
And now we get an announcement that they're considering application rentals. This does not come as a suprise to me. In December, I started to put together the pieces, based on some comments made by Ballmer and Gates, and determined that MS was planning to move towards a subscription model. That is, you get Office2002, but it expires in 2003, and you are forced to buy the new one. This would also help drive sales of the OS and of new boxes, due to the aforementioned document issue.
The other really interesting thing I noticed though, was that they were working on a system by which Office would not be a set of applications at all. Instead, they would be subscription-model web sites. Login to www.word.com, write a document, and it's saved as a web page somewhere on the site. You can email it to people through a connection to hotmail. Access it from any place. And pay through the nose, since there won't be any other choice.
Now, that's the next step. First they need to get people to become used to the subscription model and wait a bit for bandwidth to improve.
There is a great side effect too. Since everyone already uses Windows & Office, and they'll have prevented anyone from keeping old copies of the software around (by expiring it & by preventing them from reading new files), everyone, even MS's competetors will be stuck with the web version of Office. Now who here believes that confidential files by Oracle, Sun, Apple, AOL, or whomever, will stay that way while on MS's web site?
At that time, yes there were ROM issues. The current ROM is mostly implimented in software now. There's a small ROM left, and I'm pretty sure that it is mostly just open firmware.
However, the OS is pretty closely tied to the hardware in a lot of other respects, so I still would like to see a legal, working clone (with MacOS on it - any modern version) before I buy it. A PPC running Linux is not special though; there are PPCs running AIX, BeOS and some even had NT and OS/2.
$500? The regular OS retails for about $100. Consumer OS X will pretty certainly be the same. The cloners were licensing the OS for less than $100/copy. If it had gone too high, they could have switched to buying it retail and reselling it, but their margins were too tight to make it effective for them.
More likely you'll see clones with just LinuxPPC but that may (a PPC mb != Mac mb) also support various MacOSes.
Well, I don't play quake at all (it's ugly), but when I do play 1st person shooters (Marathon, Doom, Unreal) I keep my right hand on the keypad and left hand on the w/a/s/d keys (thumb on space). Since I put movement, sidestep, weapon selects and both triggers on the keypad, I'm just busy.
Once in a while I switch to the mouse (for sniping) but never in the thick of things. The mouse is too inaccurate for my tastes, unless I carefully aim. The keypad is great, OTOH. Since I've got aiming also mapped to left hand keys, I usually don't play with the mouse at all. And I play real good.
Final Mortal QuakePong Brothers III-D
You're not from the South, are you? _Historically_, ever since the end of the War Between the States, Southerners have voted Democratic. Hell, there usually weren't even Republicans on the ballots in most places. Lincoln was a Republican, and a Republican-strong North moved in on us, and this caused about a hundred years' worth of resentment down here. Back then, the Republicans were more of a liberal party and the Democrats were more conservative. They've since flip-flopped.
The South finally began to vote Republican when Nixon was campaigning in the late 60's. The civil rights movement, which was also not all that popular among a goodly number of Southerners (and very popular among others) had some strong ties to the Democrats. Nixon realized that Southern voters were being ignored, and engineered an amazing Republican turnout down here. So your 'history' only seems to go back about thirty years, IMHO.