"I'm sorry to inform you, but YES blinding you with a headlight is the way to keep you from hitting us, since by your own admission, you SEE us."
No, I see a bright light (when I'm not blinking). A bright light that may or may not be coming straight towards me. I don't even see the road ahead of me, or any potential obstacles. Is that really all that much safer for either of us?
"Their data shows that states WITH mandatory helmet laws have a HIGHER motorcycle fatality rate than states without such laws."
Interesting. Any links? More importantly, is there anything showing that this is cause/effect and not just circumstancial?
"When is the last time you saw a fatal motorcycle wreck at 12mph?"
Forward velocity of motorcycle at time of impact != downward velocity of head towards ground after impact.
"But take a 400 pound motorcycle and put it on an interstate highway where a sleepy trucker veers his 18 ton semi into the oncoming lane, and I will guarantee you, helmet or no helmet, the motorcycle will lose that dogfight."
But that neither means that the helmet will help you "win" in your earlier example nor that it's a hinderance in this example.
"Check your statistics before you go off on a diatribe on something you obviously know nothing about."
I'm assuming that now you're going to try to tell me about how you're safest riding your bike in shorts and a t-shirt?
"So, the high beam isn't bad at all if you want to ride a motorcycle and avoid premature death."
Note I said "blinded." The instance that comes to mind happened late at night on a very empty and very dark road. When all you see is a very bright light in your face that makes you squint, it's kinda hard to tell if I'm going to pass by it or hit it.
"What really gets me is the truck / sport utility drivers who put in extra special high & bright beams..."
Some have an excuse: They go off-road. What amazes me is that, even sitting in the cab of a Dodge Ram 1500, I still find motorcycle headlights pointed at my face...
Will the people who buy this bike still be the stupid idiots that ride around on motorcycles without a helmet, leather, or even denim? If it can do the quarter-mile in oh-point-nothing, imagine how long a red smear you'll make on the highway. Or how quickly the asphault will flay off your skin as you bounce along at 250 MPH.
Speaking of idiots on motorcycles, why the heck do they insist on having their headlights pointed high enough to blind just about anybody? Blinding me with your headlight isn't the way to keep me from hitting you. But I digress...
Tauzin: Louisiana at its "best"
on
Congress@Work
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· Score: 2
If I had known about this last November, and I had noticed the Congresscritter section in the voting booth (it was off to the right, while Pres and 3-4 other questions and such was on the left), I would have voted against him.
For those curious about his constituancy, he represents pretty much the heart of the SE Louisiana swamps. I'm living in a decent neighborhood where most of the people around have decent/cushy jobs at the Lockheed's Avondale shipyard and Shell's Norco refinery, but the only real thing of interest around here other than swamp, swamp, and more swamp is the new Super Wal-Mart, complete with the 9% sales tax our state and parish are kind enough to impose on us. (With taxes that high, you think the roads and such would be in better condition. One has to wonder where all that money goes...)
For an idea of what kind of guy Tauzin is, a few months ago around tax time, ABC's nightly news had a bit about the various scams people use to get around paying for them. They mentioned that even one Congressman is known to be using one. Now, out of the 535 members of this current Congress, can you guess which one it was?
Unfortunately, that's the way Louisiana politics and politicians work. Whoever ran against him last year probably wouldn't be all that much better.
And finally, he seems to be one of the many Congressmen that don't read their e-mail, even from constituants like me.
I can't speak for Keith's situation or his personal feelings or financial situation, but, in general, he's done pretty much exactly what the Scientologists wanted him to do: Go away and shut up.
I would hope that, sooner or later, somebody that the Scientologists try to be heavy-handed with will be able to stick it out in the court system (perhaps with help from the ACLU or other such groups) and/or inform the local media of their plight and cause exactly what the Scientologists DON'T want: Publicity. I doubt they'd be all that happy about this story appearing on, say, CNN.
Speaking of ACLU-like organizations, are there any specificly anti-Scientologist lawyer groups?
Simple: The folks at NASA (other than the astronauts) took their job because they couldn't get a better-paying job with their degree (we're talking government wages here, people). At least here they have a chance of finding somebody that might know.:)
"NT is 90% secure right out of the box. The other %10 is easy becuase the admins all use windows95 on their system at home and can figure it out. You have a complete integrated envirnoment.....".
OK, but by that same argument, MS-DOS is more secure than either one of them hands-down right out of the box. If you don't want to have to work to maintain your network and its software, maybe you shouldn't have a network to begin with...
Also, 95 is not 2000. There are no MMCs (or any real administrative tools, for that matter) in 95 for you to practice with at home. You need to sit down with a book to figure out how those work.
"Because of the out of the box securness, Los Alamos national labatories trust NT with all their secret data,"
They also trust communist Chinese spies. Are you saying that NT/2000 can be trusted as much as Wen Ho Lee? In that, I'd agree with you.
"also the NSA uses NT quite heavily and may even use it solely for storing highly classified secrets."
Doubtful. The only reason NT 3.51 got its Red Book security classification it got (C-3? I forget) was that the machines used to test it were heavily modified from their original install and not connected to any network. If you want network certification, you need to work with the Orange Book, and no MS OS has ever been submitted for testing by the NSA, let alone certified.
Besides, the NSA's work with SELinux gives credibility to the argument that there's a more secure groundwork to work with in Linux than in Windows.
"However, the truth is that a properly configured unix box can be very secure. You just need to find someone who can do it and there is a shortage of qualified unix admins who are good enough."
If you intend to put a NIC into your NT/2000 machine, you'll need an MCSE to do all that configuration as well. The only difference here is that MCSEs are a little more common. However, if the company is smart, they'll hire IT people that can learn new skills and not slaves to one piece of software.
"Anyway the article does not talk about stability. NT is pretty secure. However its not that stable. Go to www.bugtrack.com or cern's website and compare the unix bugs to NT one's."
If parts of the OS aren't stable, how can it be said to be secure? If there's a bug in a security feature (especially if it's a well-documented one MS is slow on the uptake to fix), then it isn't secure.
"Isn't that a reasonable if simplified description of how fluorescent and neon lights work? "
Perhaps, but neon lighting was far from new, even in the 1950's.
At any rate, he just explained how ALL light sources work. Energy of some form or another excites the electrons in an atom, and then the electrons give off photons.
Of course, he got a good deal of it wrong since he wasn't taking into account politics. However he's also got a few inconsistancies wholly within his train of thought.
"But the process of generating the light is more like that which occurs in the sun. Atoms are bombarded by electrons and other minute projectiles, electrically excited in this way and made to glow."
This could be taken in two ways. Either he's saying the nuclear power that he later goes on to say won't pan out is generating the light, OR he just described the electric light bulb.
"Engineers can do no more than utilize the heat generated by converting uranium into plutonium."
First off, that's not the nuclear process. Secondly, most of the feasable large-scale solar power plant ideas I've seen are also steam plants.
"It was known as early as 1950 that an atomic power plant would have to be larger and much more expensive than a fuel-burning plant to be efficient."
While the fossil fuel power plants of his day may have been "smaller" and "cheaper" than the nuclear power plants, he failed to take into account all the extra stuff you'd need to put into that fossil fuel power plant to clean up the pollution, which he mentioned earlier in the paragraph.
"Because they sprawl over large surfaces, solar engines are profitable in 2000 only where land is cheap."
Why is having a larger power plant such a bad thing for nuclear energy, but not for solar?
After all, by his own words:
"Theoretically, 5000 horsepower in terms of solar heat fall on an acre of the earth's surface every day."
Aside from the fact that he's confusing power and energy, just how many of the coal-burning steam locomotives of his day would be required to match that power output? Do you really think they'd take up anywhere near an acre?
"Many farmhouses in the United States, are heated by solar rays"
And when did farm land become cheap? When it's competing for space with your corn and soy crops, it ain't cheap.
But the really confusing part, though, after dogging on nuclear power, stating that it is both inefficient and expensive...
"The first successful atomically driven liners began to run in 1970 after the U. S. Navy had carried on many expensive, large-scale secret experiments."
Sounds like a total about-face to me. I'm not gonna rag on him for not realizing that it's not all that easy to hide the fact that a ship is nuclear powered (nearly no stacks, no fuel stops, new shore-based infrastructure), but after going on and on about how solar and fossil fuel power is better, why go nuclear for shipping?
Besides, why worry about passenger liners when the suburb of the future is built around an airport?
"The Dobson house has light-metal walls only four inches thick."
I have two words for this: Thermal expansion. Sure, you could air-condition the heck out of the interior of that tin box, but you're not going to stop the house from digging divots in the lawn as it expands in the summer heat.
"Though it is galeproof and weatherproof, it is built to last only about 25 years. Nobody in 2000 sees any sense in building a house that will last a century."
If it will only last 25 years, how can you say it's weather-proof? Houses that last centuries do so because they are weatherproof.
... and the "disposable house" philosophy doesn't sit well with his earlier "illegal polution" statements.
"Jane Dobson throws soiled "linen" in the incinerator."
That will really help the air pollution problem...
"In eight seconds a half-grilled frozen steak is thawed;"
I thought we were talking about miracles of technology here, not physics.:)
"In the middle of the 20th century statisticians were predicting that the world would starve to death because the population was increasing more rapidly than the food supply."
I'm curious about these numbers, because as it stands now, we have more than enough food to feed everybody. The trick is getting it from point A to point B.
"Thus sawdust and wood pulp are converted into sugary foods."
Ready for the $50,000 question? If everything is made out of paper, and homes are made out of metal and plastic... where's all this sawdust coming from? Wood pulp in this futuristic vision would be too valuable to the paper industry (for cloths and computer punch-cards) that sawdust probably wouldn't be quite so available for other things.
"Before (the hurricane) has a chance to gather much strength and speed as it travels westward toward Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited. There is an updraft. Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that some of the water in the whirling mass falls as rain."
Aside from the pollution issues, if you have oil that burns that hot, who needs nuclear power? Or is this the same "unobtanium" that's used to thaw those steaks earlier?
Besides, he seems to have forgotten that the gulf stream that pulls the hurricane towards North America would also pull the flaming oil slick as well. In order to get it to work, you'd pretty much have to put the oil down while the hurricane is raging overhead. Playing with extremely flammable oil in the middle of a tropical depression at best. Any volunteers?
And another hole in his idea, what would an up-draft do to stop a hurricane? It's already a gigantic vacuum cleaner (where do you think storm swells come from?). Sure, if the oil burns hot enough, the air directly over the oil will expand to help fill up the low-pressure system, but to get it to expand enough to stop that hurricane, you'll still need oil that violates a thermodynamic law or two.
"Nobody has yet circumnavigated the moon in a rocket space ship, but the idea is not laughed down."
I dunno, maybe it's the whole "hindsight is 20/20" thing, but how could anybody that's seen what a V-2 could do in WWII not believe that it would be possible to get to the moon by the end of the century?
"Instead of taking electrocardiographs, doctors place heart patients in front of a fluoroscopic screen, turn on the X-rays and then, with the aid of a photoelectric cell, examine every section of the heart"
Aside from the fact that their patients would glow in the dark in no time flat, why does he think that X-rays would go through some soft tissue (skin), but not others (heart)? X-rays are only reflected by bone, just like we've known about for over a century.
"Any marked departure from what Joe Dobson and his fellow citizens wear and eat and how they amuse themselves will arouse comment."
... and here I though he wasn't going into politics...
"If old Mrs. Underwood, who lives around the corner from the Dobsons and who was born in 1920 insists on sleeping under an old-fashioned comforter instead of an aerogel blanket of glass puffed with air so that it is as light as thistledown she must expect people to talk about her "queerness.""
I guess they didn't know just how itchy fiberglass was back then.
"And after all, is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe Dobson's, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments,"
Now I'm wondering if this guy ever had to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Comittee. "Everybody has exactly the same things" sounds an awful lot like the ol' "worker's paradise."
"and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?"
Of course not, he was only predicting up to the year 2000. In case you haven't noticed, it's 2001. If he had extended it one more year, he might have gotten it.
"Guess what? Many cars come "bundled" with car stereos. You can't get the car for less money if you don't want the stereo. Guess what else? That stereo was probably built by the car manufacturer under a different name."
That's nice, but with a car you have the option not to buy the stereo, or to at least remove the stereo. The car will still operate fine if you remove the stereo and don't replace it with something else. You even have the option turn off the stereo if you don't want to listen to it at that particular point in time. No car manufacturer will try to tell you that the stereo is vital to the operation of the car. None of these statements if you change "car" to "Windows" and "stereo" to "IE."
Bundled value is nice, but not as nice as options.
"Yet, somehow aftermarket car stereo manufacturers manage to survive."
That's because no EULA is violated when you try to figure out how to remove your old stereo. If you end up removing the old stereo and see that the car still works, you know that the stereo is not vital to the internal combustion process. In essence you are "disassembling" the car. Extremely not legal with Windows.
"I don't here (sic) them whining about "monopolistic" policies of the car manufacturers, even that clearly costs them huge amounts of market."
That's because your Ford will still work even if you change the brand of fuel, oil, oil filter, radiator, anti-freeze, wiper fluid, wiper blades, tires, stereo, sparkplugs, fuses, rims, paint, beaded seat covers, etc... Your car manufacturer may make reccomendations, and they may have their own choices about who to use when they park it on the car lot, but you are free to modify your car as you wish when you purchase it it. It is YOUR car.
However, you are NOT free to modify your Windows installation, because you do not own Windows. Any real modification of your Windows installation beyond changing the resolution and the window color violates the EULA. You are not free to modify the GUI in any meaningful way, you are not free to easily shut down the GUI if you do not want to use it, you sure as hell can't replace the GUI without a serious overhaul, the OS is not modular so you cannot get rid of major "features" you don't want very easily... all in all, you have little to no choice but to use what Microsoft bundles for you.
Sure, in the car of Microsoft, you may be able to use a different stereo, but you will have to rip out your environmental controls to make room to put in the new stereo and cut new holes in your panels for the new speakers, because the car won't run without the old ones.
That's all well and good, but FireWire ports aren't anywhere near as universal on computers as CD-ROM drives (or USB for that matter or DVD-ROM drives, for that matter). While it'd be useful for the latest and greatest in computing, it's not going to work on the 6-year-old P-90 I plan on putting in my a/v setup, and it's not going to work on 4-year-old 233 MMX I intend to turn into a proxy server.
There's an awful lot of "just buy a new HDD" posts here, and I'm failing to see why they're so much better. Sure, they're faster. Sure, they're pretty darned cheap, and will only get cheaper. However, unless you spend some more money on a removable HDD setup, the disk will be something you want to archive, not something you want to archive with (unless you intend to set up a RAID scheme). Your new hard disk will be just as vulnerable as your old one.
And even if you do intend to use removable HDDs as your archiving system, they're still a bit more fragile than optical disks. If you drop a CD off of a two story building, unless you're dropping it onto shear granite in Point Barrow, Alaska in the middle of February, odds are it will still work. CDs aren't anywhere near as sensitive to static discharge or EM, either. And even if the info on the platters are still OK, you could still fry a chip on the controller.
Continuing along that thread, hard drives by defintion have more points of failure. It is both the medium and the mechanism to read it; CD and CD-ROM drive in one. Not only do you have to worry about how volatile the information is on the platters, but the fact that every time you power it up, it spins itself closer to mechanical failure. If it moves, it WILL break. The more it moves, the sooner it will break. So sayeth the second law of thermodynamics. If your CD-ROM drive dies, you can get a new one, borrow a friend's, scavenge an old one, et cetera. Your CDs will be fine. If your HDD dies, you're stuck with paying out the ass to a manufacturer or a specialist to get your data out of the drive.
Yes, CD-Rs write a heck of a lot slower than an HDD, but it's not meant to be anywhere near as dynamic as an HDD. The concept is to know what you want to hang on to beforehand, and then put it on the CD where you'll have it for a decade or two. You may change hard drives, you may change computers, but you'll still have the information.
And last but not least, when was the last time you tried moving a hard disk from one computer to another?
At any rate, I think CD-Rs are probably the best option for archiving/backing-up data among all the options available. Everything else you might use (be it magnetic tape, proprieatary magnetic media, or DVD-RAM) require a proprietary drive to read and write. Odds are, you'll be out of luck hardware-wise if you want to read it from another computer. A CD-R, on the other hand, can be read by just about any computer manufactured in the past decade or so. It might as well be a floppy disk it's so universal.
Instead of just trying to convince you to upgrade to the latest and greatest every three years, now they're trying to force you legally. Beyond that, I don't see anything new here that they aren't already doing.
The big question is whether important customers will sign on to this (especially in the light of an expanding Linux base), go to the competition, or just keep on using the older versions that let them do what they will.
I remember way back when in the early 90's, when OEM liscences weren't tied to a particular machine... and we didn't even have these new-fangled 28.8 modems, either!
"(Gives you a pretty good idea of what OS M$ uses for testing/development, eh)"
You'd think it'd run better in 9x, since they're trying to hammer NT into something that can run 9x code, not the other way around. Or maybe starting from scratch instead of building on top of 3.11 is an advantage (oh my God...).:)
"It's not that bad of a solution, either, since those OSs are so easy to pirate."
Personally, I find it annoying having to find/remember a valid CD key. Besides, using things like Windows Update with a pirated MS OS gives me the heebie-jeebies. They SAY they aren't collecting personal information, but they don't have much of a track record for personal privacy.
"Even in the US a lot of people don't bother to pay : )"
It wasn't all that long ago that MS auditing a corp's liscencing was rare or unheard of. If they can maintain their monopoly, I give them five years tops before they start cracking down on individual users.
"Rate me on picture-rate.com
(the link actualy points to me now)"
... riiiiiight... and I'm the next Dennis Tito. Nice eye candy, though.
Perhaps, but then there are those of us who hate our cable providers (Cox, you bastards!) and don't want to give them one cent more than absolutely nessecary.
Besides, I can watch streaming NASA TV just fine through ADSL, and that's good enough for me.
"If you've got a TV tuner (either separately or one of the ATI All-In-Wonder cards), you can split your cable and plug one end into the modem and one into your TV card. Voila! High speed internet access and the ability to watch TV at the same time!"
Why you'd want to do both on one screen is beyond me...
Darwin awards are for those people who kill themselves for no good reason (other than raising the IQ of the gene pool). Like people who rock a Coke machine to get a free soda and get crushed to death, or people who sit in front of microwave power transmitters to get warm. I could see how getting into space is a fair trade for one's life.
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No, I see a bright light (when I'm not blinking). A bright light that may or may not be coming straight towards me. I don't even see the road ahead of me, or any potential obstacles. Is that really all that much safer for either of us?
"Their data shows that states WITH mandatory helmet laws have a HIGHER motorcycle fatality rate than states without such laws."
Interesting. Any links? More importantly, is there anything showing that this is cause/effect and not just circumstancial?
"When is the last time you saw a fatal motorcycle wreck at 12mph?"
Forward velocity of motorcycle at time of impact != downward velocity of head towards ground after impact.
"But take a 400 pound motorcycle and put it on an interstate highway where a sleepy trucker veers his 18 ton semi into the oncoming lane, and I will guarantee you, helmet or no helmet, the motorcycle will lose that dogfight."
But that neither means that the helmet will help you "win" in your earlier example nor that it's a hinderance in this example.
"Check your statistics before you go off on a diatribe on something you obviously know nothing about."
I'm assuming that now you're going to try to tell me about how you're safest riding your bike in shorts and a t-shirt?
Note I said "blinded." The instance that comes to mind happened late at night on a very empty and very dark road. When all you see is a very bright light in your face that makes you squint, it's kinda hard to tell if I'm going to pass by it or hit it.
"What really gets me is the truck / sport utility drivers who put in extra special high & bright beams..."
Some have an excuse: They go off-road. What amazes me is that, even sitting in the cab of a Dodge Ram 1500, I still find motorcycle headlights pointed at my face...
Speaking of idiots on motorcycles, why the heck do they insist on having their headlights pointed high enough to blind just about anybody? Blinding me with your headlight isn't the way to keep me from hitting you. But I digress...
For those curious about his constituancy, he represents pretty much the heart of the SE Louisiana swamps. I'm living in a decent neighborhood where most of the people around have decent/cushy jobs at the Lockheed's Avondale shipyard and Shell's Norco refinery, but the only real thing of interest around here other than swamp, swamp, and more swamp is the new Super Wal-Mart, complete with the 9% sales tax our state and parish are kind enough to impose on us. (With taxes that high, you think the roads and such would be in better condition. One has to wonder where all that money goes...)
For an idea of what kind of guy Tauzin is, a few months ago around tax time, ABC's nightly news had a bit about the various scams people use to get around paying for them. They mentioned that even one Congressman is known to be using one. Now, out of the 535 members of this current Congress, can you guess which one it was?
Unfortunately, that's the way Louisiana politics and politicians work. Whoever ran against him last year probably wouldn't be all that much better.
And finally, he seems to be one of the many Congressmen that don't read their e-mail, even from constituants like me.
I would hope that, sooner or later, somebody that the Scientologists try to be heavy-handed with will be able to stick it out in the court system (perhaps with help from the ACLU or other such groups) and/or inform the local media of their plight and cause exactly what the Scientologists DON'T want: Publicity. I doubt they'd be all that happy about this story appearing on, say, CNN.
Speaking of ACLU-like organizations, are there any specificly anti-Scientologist lawyer groups?
Gimme Mandrake and Nintendo, and I'll be happy.
*cough*Scientology*cough*
Simple: The folks at NASA (other than the astronauts) took their job because they couldn't get a better-paying job with their degree (we're talking government wages here, people). At least here they have a chance of finding somebody that might know. :)
OK, but by that same argument, MS-DOS is more secure than either one of them hands-down right out of the box. If you don't want to have to work to maintain your network and its software, maybe you shouldn't have a network to begin with...
Also, 95 is not 2000. There are no MMCs (or any real administrative tools, for that matter) in 95 for you to practice with at home. You need to sit down with a book to figure out how those work.
"Because of the out of the box securness, Los Alamos national labatories trust NT with all their secret data,"
They also trust communist Chinese spies. Are you saying that NT/2000 can be trusted as much as Wen Ho Lee? In that, I'd agree with you.
"also the NSA uses NT quite heavily and may even use it solely for storing highly classified secrets."
Doubtful. The only reason NT 3.51 got its Red Book security classification it got (C-3? I forget) was that the machines used to test it were heavily modified from their original install and not connected to any network. If you want network certification, you need to work with the Orange Book, and no MS OS has ever been submitted for testing by the NSA, let alone certified.
Besides, the NSA's work with SELinux gives credibility to the argument that there's a more secure groundwork to work with in Linux than in Windows.
"However, the truth is that a properly configured unix box can be very secure. You just need to find someone who can do it and there is a shortage of qualified unix admins who are good enough."
If you intend to put a NIC into your NT/2000 machine, you'll need an MCSE to do all that configuration as well. The only difference here is that MCSEs are a little more common. However, if the company is smart, they'll hire IT people that can learn new skills and not slaves to one piece of software.
"Anyway the article does not talk about stability. NT is pretty secure. However its not that stable. Go to www.bugtrack.com or cern's website and compare the unix bugs to NT one's."
If parts of the OS aren't stable, how can it be said to be secure? If there's a bug in a security feature (especially if it's a well-documented one MS is slow on the uptake to fix), then it isn't secure.
Perhaps, but neon lighting was far from new, even in the 1950's.
At any rate, he just explained how ALL light sources work. Energy of some form or another excites the electrons in an atom, and then the electrons give off photons.
Maybe the Professor is going to use it to finally patch that hole in the SS Minnow...
No, wait, I saw the insides of one once sitting on a shelf at one of my old jobs... complete with 486 add-on board...
"I'm not dead yet! I don't want to go in the cart! I feel happy!"
"But the process of generating the light is more like that which occurs in the sun. Atoms are bombarded by electrons and other minute projectiles, electrically excited in this way and made to glow."
This could be taken in two ways. Either he's saying the nuclear power that he later goes on to say won't pan out is generating the light, OR he just described the electric light bulb.
"Engineers can do no more than utilize the heat generated by converting uranium into plutonium."
First off, that's not the nuclear process. Secondly, most of the feasable large-scale solar power plant ideas I've seen are also steam plants.
"It was known as early as 1950 that an atomic power plant would have to be larger and much more expensive than a fuel-burning plant to be efficient."
While the fossil fuel power plants of his day may have been "smaller" and "cheaper" than the nuclear power plants, he failed to take into account all the extra stuff you'd need to put into that fossil fuel power plant to clean up the pollution, which he mentioned earlier in the paragraph.
"Because they sprawl over large surfaces, solar engines are profitable in 2000 only where land is cheap."
Why is having a larger power plant such a bad thing for nuclear energy, but not for solar?
After all, by his own words:
"Theoretically, 5000 horsepower in terms of solar heat fall on an acre of the earth's surface every day."
Aside from the fact that he's confusing power and energy, just how many of the coal-burning steam locomotives of his day would be required to match that power output? Do you really think they'd take up anywhere near an acre?
"Many farmhouses in the United States, are heated by solar rays"
And when did farm land become cheap? When it's competing for space with your corn and soy crops, it ain't cheap.
But the really confusing part, though, after dogging on nuclear power, stating that it is both inefficient and expensive...
"The first successful atomically driven liners began to run in 1970 after the U. S. Navy had carried on many expensive, large-scale secret experiments."
Sounds like a total about-face to me. I'm not gonna rag on him for not realizing that it's not all that easy to hide the fact that a ship is nuclear powered (nearly no stacks, no fuel stops, new shore-based infrastructure), but after going on and on about how solar and fossil fuel power is better, why go nuclear for shipping?
Besides, why worry about passenger liners when the suburb of the future is built around an airport?
"The Dobson house has light-metal walls only four inches thick."
I have two words for this: Thermal expansion. Sure, you could air-condition the heck out of the interior of that tin box, but you're not going to stop the house from digging divots in the lawn as it expands in the summer heat.
"Though it is galeproof and weatherproof, it is built to last only about 25 years. Nobody in 2000 sees any sense in building a house that will last a century."
If it will only last 25 years, how can you say it's weather-proof? Houses that last centuries do so because they are weatherproof.
"Jane Dobson throws soiled "linen" in the incinerator."
That will really help the air pollution problem...
"In eight seconds a half-grilled frozen steak is thawed;"
I thought we were talking about miracles of technology here, not physics. :)
"In the middle of the 20th century statisticians were predicting that the world would starve to death because the population was increasing more rapidly than the food supply."
I'm curious about these numbers, because as it stands now, we have more than enough food to feed everybody. The trick is getting it from point A to point B.
"Thus sawdust and wood pulp are converted into sugary foods."
Ready for the $50,000 question? If everything is made out of paper, and homes are made out of metal and plastic... where's all this sawdust coming from? Wood pulp in this futuristic vision would be too valuable to the paper industry (for cloths and computer punch-cards) that sawdust probably wouldn't be quite so available for other things.
"Before (the hurricane) has a chance to gather much strength and speed as it travels westward toward Florida, oil is spread over the sea and ignited. There is an updraft. Air from the surrounding region, which includes the developing hurricane, rushes in to fill the void. The rising air condenses so that some of the water in the whirling mass falls as rain."
Aside from the pollution issues, if you have oil that burns that hot, who needs nuclear power? Or is this the same "unobtanium" that's used to thaw those steaks earlier?
Besides, he seems to have forgotten that the gulf stream that pulls the hurricane towards North America would also pull the flaming oil slick as well. In order to get it to work, you'd pretty much have to put the oil down while the hurricane is raging overhead. Playing with extremely flammable oil in the middle of a tropical depression at best. Any volunteers?
And another hole in his idea, what would an up-draft do to stop a hurricane? It's already a gigantic vacuum cleaner (where do you think storm swells come from?). Sure, if the oil burns hot enough, the air directly over the oil will expand to help fill up the low-pressure system, but to get it to expand enough to stop that hurricane, you'll still need oil that violates a thermodynamic law or two.
"Nobody has yet circumnavigated the moon in a rocket space ship, but the idea is not laughed down."
I dunno, maybe it's the whole "hindsight is 20/20" thing, but how could anybody that's seen what a V-2 could do in WWII not believe that it would be possible to get to the moon by the end of the century?
"Instead of taking electrocardiographs, doctors place heart patients in front of a fluoroscopic screen, turn on the X-rays and then, with the aid of a photoelectric cell, examine every section of the heart"
Aside from the fact that their patients would glow in the dark in no time flat, why does he think that X-rays would go through some soft tissue (skin), but not others (heart)? X-rays are only reflected by bone, just like we've known about for over a century.
"Any marked departure from what Joe Dobson and his fellow citizens wear and eat and how they amuse themselves will arouse comment."
"If old Mrs. Underwood, who lives around the corner from the Dobsons and who was born in 1920 insists on sleeping under an old-fashioned comforter instead of an aerogel blanket of glass puffed with air so that it is as light as thistledown she must expect people to talk about her "queerness.""
I guess they didn't know just how itchy fiberglass was back then.
"And after all, is the standardization of life to be deplored if we can have a house like Joe Dobson's, a standardized helicopter, luxurious standardized household appointments,"
Now I'm wondering if this guy ever had to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Comittee. "Everybody has exactly the same things" sounds an awful lot like the ol' "worker's paradise."
"and food that was out of the reach of any Roman emperor?"
Ancient Rome didn't have sawdust?
... so instead of using the wrong word, I spelled the right word incorrectly... gee, how could I have not noticed that it's the same thing?
Of course not, he was only predicting up to the year 2000. In case you haven't noticed, it's 2001. If he had extended it one more year, he might have gotten it.
That's nice, but with a car you have the option not to buy the stereo, or to at least remove the stereo. The car will still operate fine if you remove the stereo and don't replace it with something else. You even have the option turn off the stereo if you don't want to listen to it at that particular point in time. No car manufacturer will try to tell you that the stereo is vital to the operation of the car. None of these statements if you change "car" to "Windows" and "stereo" to "IE."
Bundled value is nice, but not as nice as options.
"Yet, somehow aftermarket car stereo manufacturers manage to survive."
That's because no EULA is violated when you try to figure out how to remove your old stereo. If you end up removing the old stereo and see that the car still works, you know that the stereo is not vital to the internal combustion process. In essence you are "disassembling" the car. Extremely not legal with Windows.
"I don't here (sic) them whining about "monopolistic" policies of the car manufacturers, even that clearly costs them huge amounts of market."
That's because your Ford will still work even if you change the brand of fuel, oil, oil filter, radiator, anti-freeze, wiper fluid, wiper blades, tires, stereo, sparkplugs, fuses, rims, paint, beaded seat covers, etc... Your car manufacturer may make reccomendations, and they may have their own choices about who to use when they park it on the car lot, but you are free to modify your car as you wish when you purchase it it. It is YOUR car.
However, you are NOT free to modify your Windows installation, because you do not own Windows. Any real modification of your Windows installation beyond changing the resolution and the window color violates the EULA. You are not free to modify the GUI in any meaningful way, you are not free to easily shut down the GUI if you do not want to use it, you sure as hell can't replace the GUI without a serious overhaul, the OS is not modular so you cannot get rid of major "features" you don't want very easily... all in all, you have little to no choice but to use what Microsoft bundles for you.
Sure, in the car of Microsoft, you may be able to use a different stereo, but you will have to rip out your environmental controls to make room to put in the new stereo and cut new holes in your panels for the new speakers, because the car won't run without the old ones.
That's all well and good, but FireWire ports aren't anywhere near as universal on computers as CD-ROM drives (or USB for that matter or DVD-ROM drives, for that matter). While it'd be useful for the latest and greatest in computing, it's not going to work on the 6-year-old P-90 I plan on putting in my a/v setup, and it's not going to work on 4-year-old 233 MMX I intend to turn into a proxy server.
And even if you do intend to use removable HDDs as your archiving system, they're still a bit more fragile than optical disks. If you drop a CD off of a two story building, unless you're dropping it onto shear granite in Point Barrow, Alaska in the middle of February, odds are it will still work. CDs aren't anywhere near as sensitive to static discharge or EM, either. And even if the info on the platters are still OK, you could still fry a chip on the controller.
Continuing along that thread, hard drives by defintion have more points of failure. It is both the medium and the mechanism to read it; CD and CD-ROM drive in one. Not only do you have to worry about how volatile the information is on the platters, but the fact that every time you power it up, it spins itself closer to mechanical failure. If it moves, it WILL break. The more it moves, the sooner it will break. So sayeth the second law of thermodynamics. If your CD-ROM drive dies, you can get a new one, borrow a friend's, scavenge an old one, et cetera. Your CDs will be fine. If your HDD dies, you're stuck with paying out the ass to a manufacturer or a specialist to get your data out of the drive.
Yes, CD-Rs write a heck of a lot slower than an HDD, but it's not meant to be anywhere near as dynamic as an HDD. The concept is to know what you want to hang on to beforehand, and then put it on the CD where you'll have it for a decade or two. You may change hard drives, you may change computers, but you'll still have the information.
And last but not least, when was the last time you tried moving a hard disk from one computer to another?
At any rate, I think CD-Rs are probably the best option for archiving/backing-up data among all the options available. Everything else you might use (be it magnetic tape, proprieatary magnetic media, or DVD-RAM) require a proprietary drive to read and write. Odds are, you'll be out of luck hardware-wise if you want to read it from another computer. A CD-R, on the other hand, can be read by just about any computer manufactured in the past decade or so. It might as well be a floppy disk it's so universal.
Well, as history as shown us, gas prices are always easy to solve: Bomb Iraq. But who do you beat up to improve CD-R prices? Malaysia?
The big question is whether important customers will sign on to this (especially in the light of an expanding Linux base), go to the competition, or just keep on using the older versions that let them do what they will.
I remember way back when in the early 90's, when OEM liscences weren't tied to a particular machine... and we didn't even have these new-fangled 28.8 modems, either!
You'd think it'd run better in 9x, since they're trying to hammer NT into something that can run 9x code, not the other way around. Or maybe starting from scratch instead of building on top of 3.11 is an advantage (oh my God...). :)
"It's not that bad of a solution, either, since those OSs are so easy to pirate."
Personally, I find it annoying having to find/remember a valid CD key. Besides, using things like Windows Update with a pirated MS OS gives me the heebie-jeebies. They SAY they aren't collecting personal information, but they don't have much of a track record for personal privacy.
"Even in the US a lot of people don't bother to pay : )"
It wasn't all that long ago that MS auditing a corp's liscencing was rare or unheard of. If they can maintain their monopoly, I give them five years tops before they start cracking down on individual users.
"Rate me on picture-rate.com
(the link actualy points to me now)"
There already is a product. The "silly name" is to try to get other people to realize that.
Such a merger would mean that Microsoft's software will have a little demon for a logo. How fitting...
Perhaps, but then there are those of us who hate our cable providers (Cox, you bastards!) and don't want to give them one cent more than absolutely nessecary.
Besides, I can watch streaming NASA TV just fine through ADSL, and that's good enough for me.
"If you've got a TV tuner (either separately or one of the ATI All-In-Wonder cards), you can split your cable and plug one end into the modem and one into your TV card. Voila! High speed internet access and the ability to watch TV at the same time!"
Why you'd want to do both on one screen is beyond me...
Darwin awards are for those people who kill themselves for no good reason (other than raising the IQ of the gene pool). Like people who rock a Coke machine to get a free soda and get crushed to death, or people who sit in front of microwave power transmitters to get warm. I could see how getting into space is a fair trade for one's life.