It's "just a treaty"? You realize that it then has the power of law, and that treaties have resulted in all sorts of prohibitions worldwide, right?
Not that we haven't already lost the bulk of the Constitution to unconstitutional laws and presidential orders (which are themselves unconstitutional), but they could very easily put a treaty in place which requires something like, oh, cooperative occupation of each other's land: China sends troops over here, and we send troops over there. Or they could put "no firearms in civilian ownership" in, and there goes the 2nd Amendment. Or required digital monitoring of every citizen.
Treaties have worked extra-constitutional for some time. There's really nothing to stop them except for the court of popular opinion (eg. the Republic is dead, long live the Democracy).
Apparently you've never had to administer MS Dynamics GP 10. No matter of monkeying will make it run (properly) unless it's running as a system level administrator on the client. And the server is just as bad, IIRC.
Call it 17 and up, and you're correct. Kids don't have much memory of their toddler years.
My kids, 6 and 3, don't understand an unconnected world. They don't understand that a computer can't access any information you'd possibly want or know about at a couple key strokes. "Daddy, just type it in" - they don't understand it's not available or that there's no connectivity. It's kind of worrisome, actually.
Myself, I remember it from my teens and on, but I remember computers from a very young age. I do remember a time before the Internet, but I don't remember what societal impact the lack of the Internet had. The only world I know is the connected one, and I'll be 30 soon.
Eh, I've been using Ubuntu since April of '07 or so (from Debian). Even still, I've had quite a few "simply should not happen" agitations:
* A new USB 2.0 based card reader (USB, CF, SD, etc.) I bought in 4-09 worked (8.04), didn't work (8.04), worked(8.10), and then didn't work again (8.10), only to work again (9.04). It showed up in lsusb but wouldn't display/allow access to any plugged-in devices (via dmesg or otherwise). * A built-in riohs CF reader in my X30 Thinkpad would not work unless I booted with a card in the bay. If it worked, the built-in miniPCI card and the PCMCIA port would not work. This is something which worked for a long time back on Debian, and for a release or two of Ubuntu, and is no longer working last I tried with 8.10. Supposedly it's brokenness is due to a rebuild/restructure/rewrite of the PCMCIA subsystem, but it hasn't worked for well over a year. * pulse_audio has sucked and, for me, been completely unusable since its inception. I've disabled it and resorted to using something else. It appears to work fine on OpenSUSE (I think OS uses it as well, at least), so I don't know what Ubuntu's problem is. * I've been unable to put a non-system, non-mounted, IDE disk to sleep via hdparm since 8.10 (upgrading to 9.04 in the hopes that the new version would fix things). The hdparm -S, -y, and -Y options would spin down the disk only to spin it up immediately.
And that's the short list; there are other little agitations (somewhat related to the kernel itself, like no sensors support for K10 CPUs or the most common/popular early Asus Phenom II board yet).
I would not put Ubuntu's server release on my servers. Honestly, I'm hesitant to recommend or use debian for my servers these days, because many of the packages are transitory, with the same package maintainers who don't give a damn about bugs as in Ubuntu. (Note, I was an "all debian, all day" kind of guy since around early 2001.) Yes, some are good, but even debian's samba/cups integration (not sure what's the problem) has had a high-CPU-utilization bug for the better part of a year that isn't being fixed.
If Geist's blog is rarely wrong, that makes it many times more accurate than the corporate media sources have been for some time.
What makes this all the more believable is that this administration has done this exact same thing, several times, and that the whole unilateral internationalist agenda, circumventing or outright ignoring national interests, has been his modus operandi since election.
The corporate meaning of "open source" seems to be, as often as not, "we will not support it any longer, but we want a client on your platform and you can use it". Their support and implementation of the Linux client thus far has been, if anything, sub-par and fairly static in development changes.
Not a chance. We're 5 years from a decent production street vehicle capable of much more than daily commute. That's a long, long way from being able to drive a 2-ton tractor pulling a 2-ton farming implement with significant drag, all day long, day in and day out.
I don't really get why everyone is all "Ballmer sucks, Gates was a real geek" in this thread. WTF are you people smoking?
Gates was responsible for the Win9x OS releases, most notably including Windows ME, but also not excluding the poor hack jobs which were Win 3.1x and Windows 95 and (to a lesser degree, 98). Windows 2000 was arguably a misstep, as it was neither a thorough migration from the old NT4 and win32 'legacy' APIs/code bases, or a step forward.
Balmer has overseen the move from XP to Vista, which did have some problems... And yes, he did do 2k -> XP, which was arguably ME mk2, but it wasn't half the disaster that ME was, either.
But now we've got Win 7, and Ballmer (or those he supervises) are largely responsible for it not sucking. It is the first release of Windows I have used which I think is actually well-considered from a technical standpoint in most criteria (as opposed to a purely marketing/sales standpoint). It runs well on pretty much anything, including hardware which is well below the threshold of what it should run on.
This approach makes good sense ASSUMING that you are using a diesel tractor. I am guessing that this will be the norm in another 5 years.
Uh, what other kind of tractor is there? A farmer would be crazy to use gasoline powered tractors and machinery. For one, they'd have to start paying road tax (in the US, at least) for tractors which never see much more than the occasional gravel road crossing.
(Note: There's dyed diesel which is something like $.20/gal cheaper than normal gas station pump diesel, and has a red additive. This is what farmers and ranchers use.)
For the most part, they're not dumping that stuff on your food. What they're doing is they're letting it sit for some time (it varies on the quantity and type of manure), then they're diluting it with water (think: 1/50th manure) and spraying it on the fields after crops are harvested in the fall.
They couldn't just spray it on crops. Animal feces are high in nitrates: that makes them effective in helping plants grow, but in high concentrations (even in the diluted form) would burn the plants. This is why you can't just throw fresh chicken shit from the hen house on your garden - it will kill the plants. You've got to let it weather for a year and for the majority of the nitrates to be diluted. (If you've ever seen a coop shit pile that's in use, it's rarely got anything growing in it. Let it sit for a season or two unused, and it'll grow 3-4 times as quickly as anything around it, however.)
The end result isn't that much different than letting your livestock forage in the field after the crop is harvested (another method of nitrate reintroduction which has been done since farming began). Whereas animal feces would dry out on the surface fairly quickly and then seep into the soil as they break down and erode, spraying shit on with a machine allows farmers to not also raise livestock, or deal with putting them into their fields.
Along those lines, there's been a bit of a move towards using the animals themselves to do the job. They've found that with no-till farming, they need to till up the soil slightly in the fall anyway so as to introduce oxygen and whatnot to allow for better growth the next year. Livestock will do this while depositing nitrates. A side benefit is that it provides additional food for your livestock at little to no cost.
Oh yeah, forgot to add... and now we've got a President espousing an ideology more in common with Lenin than Regan, and the US economy is almost a complete bust. Not to mention all the "ex-Soviet" states are still being run by the same people as under the Soviet regime; they just rig the elections to stay in power, now.
What was the "real" cold war? Just because a politician said "we won" doesn't mean it was true. Apparently you haven't been paying attention.
Since we "won" the cold war, Russia has made an incredible resurgence economically, technologically, and militarily; invaded a country (or two?); has become increasingly emboldened politically; has been selling arms in increasing quantities to enemies of the West; has increasing influence over/in ex-Eastern Bloc states - and so on.
Wait for it, wait for it... $399 for one with a keyboard (twice the Mini-9), and I'm stuck with a "red backcover". And the Mini-9 appears to be getting phased out in preference for a Mini-10, at that.
Sorry, that's about $100 too expensive, even with a touchscreen. It's got a 1024x600 8.9" display (which is smaller than most netbooks now). What happened to "ARM processors are cheap"? (Oh, and 3lb?)
The only thing it really seems to offer is 10 hours of battery life. That's nice, but it's only marginally higher than most netbooks these days.
Don't get me wrong: I'm waiting with baited breath for one of these devices which is actually within the "I can justify" price range ($200 sounds about right, or even a little steep). They need an economy of scale to make these things go anywhere, and unfortunately there simply isn't enough large industry support to push them to the point of acceptance.
Put a user-friendly Linux distro on them and sell them at Best Buy for $189 as a portable multimedia internet device and they'll fly off the shelves.
But why, exactly, does a consumer want Windows? For Excel? Word?
For the same reason they need a Ford, Dremel, Dell, Whirlpool, Frigidaire, Coleman, and so on: because it's a known quantity (or so they think), or at least a quantity with a known name behind it which might have a reputation to uphold.
Oh, THAT kernel version! Yes, I know exactly what it means.
I mean, seriously folks. I've been using Linux regularly since '98, on servers since 2000, and almost exclusively for personal use since around 2001. WTF does that kernel version even mean?
Dollars to doughnuts, you can bet that Microsoft is working on porting Windows 7 and Office, as well as their various other software packages, to ARM processors. With ARM breeching the 1GHz mark and fully capable 3d acceleration, they're at least on par with an Intel chipseted Atom, and in many ways vastly superior. With most people preferring "as cheap as possible" computers - because they'll do the job just fine - things are sure to move towards ARM.
This may have escaped you, but if "the Internet" has been shut down, connecting to your neighbor's wireless router, or setting up a community wide wireless network for that matter, would be of comparably limited utility. You wouldn't have 99% of what the internet has to offer available to you - global information.
That's the whole point of the Internet in the first place: long-distance communications across a multitude of people, with large amounts of data. Your neighbor's data would be more easily acquired by walking over, talking with him, and possibly exchanging a flash drive.
As far is it "never happening": recall just a couple months ago when Iran did just this to their people (or foreign countries did it to them, whichever)? The Internet was "shut off" - internal and external routing was, essentially, not there. It only takes one squad of goons knocking down the door to the telco center and commanding them to cut the wires* for things to be very seriously disrupted.
It's not the "Internet" I'm addicted to. I'm a news/current events junkie. I don't exactly get them via an RSS feed or anything like that, but I spend over half an hour a day digging through news sites and various back channel sigint blogs and the like looking for information to better connect the dots.
Without the Internet, I highly suspect many people similar to myself - and there are quite a few - would be enraged. Hell, anyone paying attention to the media for the past years+ who believes in freedom of the press would. Contemporary media outlets are, simply, bullshit mouthpieces.
Freedom of the press would have all but been silenced if the Internet disappeared overnight; hundreds of thousands of IT types would be completely out of work (if not millions - who needs to update/upgrade their software if there is no network from which to get infected?); a better half of the visible public-facing software industry would likewise just go *poof* (google, facebook, youtube, hulu, yahoo, etc.). The economy would be -gone-, as all that's left in the US of "industry" is entertainment, service, and technology - and the Internet embodies all three. Countless Internet retailers would go belly up overnight - everything from Ebay to the guy selling custom aluminum cases for iPods from a free web site.
No app store, no open source, no porn, no warez, no IM or email, and (IMO most importantly) no independent, non-establishment media/reporting (manifested in many intelligently written individual and coop blogs). This last one is, in these times, absolutely essential. Without it, we're sunk. (Who'd have thought that 'blogs' would be anything more than a trivial agitation and trend?)
Without the Internet, we're back to CB and amateur radios, AM talk radio, the local news, and whatever the telco services push down the pipe to us via DSL/SAT/CATV/etc. Those are not enticing choices.
I do computer service/repair for a "living" right now. The average user - which, I take it, at least contains the subset of users who are my clients - are using less than 10Gb on average - with many using a couple dozen megabytes, and one or two using 20-30Gb. I've yet to run into a client where I could not simply back up their existing data + OEM install data on a 120G external disk array.
So, I'm wondering: what is it they're actually saying about the 'sustainability' of their current model? Is it that ads are not a sustainable revenue source for a medium which requires such large amounts of bandwidth?
First you fill out the short, 1 page initial form.
Then you need to present supporting documents in duplicate.
Then you need to fill out a 20-page background check.
Next you've got to provide health, housing, and bill records for the past 7 years.
Then you wait 6 months.
Next you've got to have an interview to "clear up" some problems.
Finally, you're unsure of the actual result of all your efforts. Did you reach the goal? Yes, no? You won't know until you try to gain access to whatever that paperwork is for, because the actual communication channel is misinformed.
I'm a casual gamer. I haven't owned a platform since the NES. My favorite games were Zelda, SMB3, Marble Madness, and Jackal (a top-down scroller, but with jeeps instead of planes and "mission objectives"). I didn't really get into most games.
The last game I bought was Fallout 3, but before that I think it was Max Payne II (which I regret spending money on), Max Payne, and Deus Ex before that. I split the cost of Warcraft 3 with my brother, as well as Half-Life 2. The list of games I've beaten is only slightly longer than the above list (Farcry makes that list, surprisingly). In the last 8-9 years, I remember playing (with some degree of interest) Black & White, Eve Online (for the free trial), and very briefly, Enemy Territory and Counter-Strike 2 (but those were mainly for the multiplayer w/ friends).
Deus Ex and Mechwarrior 2 are my favorite PC games. I'd hardly consider those, or Fallout 3, un-complex: they've got a steep learning curve. They also all have a fairly lengthy collection of cinematics to explain the game world.
Maybe I'm not a casual gamer. Personally, I don't find any of the dime a dozen FPS games out there fun or interesting. It's just another implementation of the same thing. There's no story, and there's no reason for me to be invested. With no character (a unique one, either of the player's character or the game's purpose) and a tacked-on story to support the new 'special effect' of the game, there's not much of a point.
The first time my brother and I beat SMB (we usually played together) was actually, more or less, an accident. We inadvertently discovered the "unlimited lives" cheat/bug in the game (which is much, much easier to trigger in SMB3) in (IIRC) the level 8 castle on my last life, and were able to beat Koopa as a result.
We didn't learn about the 2nd warp until years later, actually, so we had to beat the harder levels every time. Man, what hours spent...
These days, I'm still playing SMB and SMB3 with my eldest son on the same NES I had as a kid. They don't make 'em like they used to. And I've still yet to actually beat SMB3, even though I had (and essentially memorized, and remember to this day) the Nintendo Power for the game.
Gov't has say in trash collection for efficiency, you say?
I had city-run trash collection for a while. It was one of the options. It sucked: they wouldn't take the trash if it wasn't -exactly- where they needed it to be, and it cost $35/month on a bi-weekly pickup.
Fortunately, the rules changed and that market was opened up to 3rd parties (mainly, the companies that were currently running commercial dumpster pickups). Trash then cost $16/month, was a weekly pickup, and on a couple occasions the guys walked 20 feet to the back of the garage and -still- took the trash. And from what I recall, they weren't necessarily the cheapest game in town, either.
Slashdot Mirror
It's "just a treaty"? You realize that it then has the power of law, and that treaties have resulted in all sorts of prohibitions worldwide, right?
Not that we haven't already lost the bulk of the Constitution to unconstitutional laws and presidential orders (which are themselves unconstitutional), but they could very easily put a treaty in place which requires something like, oh, cooperative occupation of each other's land: China sends troops over here, and we send troops over there. Or they could put "no firearms in civilian ownership" in, and there goes the 2nd Amendment. Or required digital monitoring of every citizen.
Treaties have worked extra-constitutional for some time. There's really nothing to stop them except for the court of popular opinion (eg. the Republic is dead, long live the Democracy).
Apparently you've never had to administer MS Dynamics GP 10. No matter of monkeying will make it run (properly) unless it's running as a system level administrator on the client. And the server is just as bad, IIRC.
Call it 17 and up, and you're correct. Kids don't have much memory of their toddler years.
My kids, 6 and 3, don't understand an unconnected world. They don't understand that a computer can't access any information you'd possibly want or know about at a couple key strokes. "Daddy, just type it in" - they don't understand it's not available or that there's no connectivity. It's kind of worrisome, actually.
Myself, I remember it from my teens and on, but I remember computers from a very young age. I do remember a time before the Internet, but I don't remember what societal impact the lack of the Internet had. The only world I know is the connected one, and I'll be 30 soon.
Eh, I've been using Ubuntu since April of '07 or so (from Debian). Even still, I've had quite a few "simply should not happen" agitations:
* A new USB 2.0 based card reader (USB, CF, SD, etc.) I bought in 4-09 worked (8.04), didn't work (8.04), worked(8.10), and then didn't work again (8.10), only to work again (9.04). It showed up in lsusb but wouldn't display/allow access to any plugged-in devices (via dmesg or otherwise).
* A built-in riohs CF reader in my X30 Thinkpad would not work unless I booted with a card in the bay. If it worked, the built-in miniPCI card and the PCMCIA port would not work. This is something which worked for a long time back on Debian, and for a release or two of Ubuntu, and is no longer working last I tried with 8.10. Supposedly it's brokenness is due to a rebuild/restructure/rewrite of the PCMCIA subsystem, but it hasn't worked for well over a year.
* pulse_audio has sucked and, for me, been completely unusable since its inception. I've disabled it and resorted to using something else. It appears to work fine on OpenSUSE (I think OS uses it as well, at least), so I don't know what Ubuntu's problem is.
* I've been unable to put a non-system, non-mounted, IDE disk to sleep via hdparm since 8.10 (upgrading to 9.04 in the hopes that the new version would fix things). The hdparm -S, -y, and -Y options would spin down the disk only to spin it up immediately.
And that's the short list; there are other little agitations (somewhat related to the kernel itself, like no sensors support for K10 CPUs or the most common/popular early Asus Phenom II board yet).
I would not put Ubuntu's server release on my servers. Honestly, I'm hesitant to recommend or use debian for my servers these days, because many of the packages are transitory, with the same package maintainers who don't give a damn about bugs as in Ubuntu. (Note, I was an "all debian, all day" kind of guy since around early 2001.) Yes, some are good, but even debian's samba/cups integration (not sure what's the problem) has had a high-CPU-utilization bug for the better part of a year that isn't being fixed.
If Geist's blog is rarely wrong, that makes it many times more accurate than the corporate media sources have been for some time.
What makes this all the more believable is that this administration has done this exact same thing, several times, and that the whole unilateral internationalist agenda, circumventing or outright ignoring national interests, has been his modus operandi since election.
The corporate meaning of "open source" seems to be, as often as not, "we will not support it any longer, but we want a client on your platform and you can use it". Their support and implementation of the Linux client thus far has been, if anything, sub-par and fairly static in development changes.
Not a chance. We're 5 years from a decent production street vehicle capable of much more than daily commute. That's a long, long way from being able to drive a 2-ton tractor pulling a 2-ton farming implement with significant drag, all day long, day in and day out.
I don't really get why everyone is all "Ballmer sucks, Gates was a real geek" in this thread. WTF are you people smoking?
Gates was responsible for the Win9x OS releases, most notably including Windows ME, but also not excluding the poor hack jobs which were Win 3.1x and Windows 95 and (to a lesser degree, 98). Windows 2000 was arguably a misstep, as it was neither a thorough migration from the old NT4 and win32 'legacy' APIs/code bases, or a step forward.
Balmer has overseen the move from XP to Vista, which did have some problems... And yes, he did do 2k -> XP, which was arguably ME mk2, but it wasn't half the disaster that ME was, either.
But now we've got Win 7, and Ballmer (or those he supervises) are largely responsible for it not sucking. It is the first release of Windows I have used which I think is actually well-considered from a technical standpoint in most criteria (as opposed to a purely marketing/sales standpoint). It runs well on pretty much anything, including hardware which is well below the threshold of what it should run on.
This approach makes good sense ASSUMING that you are using a diesel tractor. I am guessing that this will be the norm in another 5 years.
Uh, what other kind of tractor is there? A farmer would be crazy to use gasoline powered tractors and machinery. For one, they'd have to start paying road tax (in the US, at least) for tractors which never see much more than the occasional gravel road crossing.
(Note: There's dyed diesel which is something like $.20/gal cheaper than normal gas station pump diesel, and has a red additive. This is what farmers and ranchers use.)
For the most part, they're not dumping that stuff on your food. What they're doing is they're letting it sit for some time (it varies on the quantity and type of manure), then they're diluting it with water (think: 1/50th manure) and spraying it on the fields after crops are harvested in the fall.
They couldn't just spray it on crops. Animal feces are high in nitrates: that makes them effective in helping plants grow, but in high concentrations (even in the diluted form) would burn the plants. This is why you can't just throw fresh chicken shit from the hen house on your garden - it will kill the plants. You've got to let it weather for a year and for the majority of the nitrates to be diluted. (If you've ever seen a coop shit pile that's in use, it's rarely got anything growing in it. Let it sit for a season or two unused, and it'll grow 3-4 times as quickly as anything around it, however.)
The end result isn't that much different than letting your livestock forage in the field after the crop is harvested (another method of nitrate reintroduction which has been done since farming began). Whereas animal feces would dry out on the surface fairly quickly and then seep into the soil as they break down and erode, spraying shit on with a machine allows farmers to not also raise livestock, or deal with putting them into their fields.
Along those lines, there's been a bit of a move towards using the animals themselves to do the job. They've found that with no-till farming, they need to till up the soil slightly in the fall anyway so as to introduce oxygen and whatnot to allow for better growth the next year. Livestock will do this while depositing nitrates. A side benefit is that it provides additional food for your livestock at little to no cost.
Oh yeah, forgot to add... and now we've got a President espousing an ideology more in common with Lenin than Regan, and the US economy is almost a complete bust. Not to mention all the "ex-Soviet" states are still being run by the same people as under the Soviet regime; they just rig the elections to stay in power, now.
What was the "real" cold war? Just because a politician said "we won" doesn't mean it was true. Apparently you haven't been paying attention.
Since we "won" the cold war, Russia has made an incredible resurgence economically, technologically, and militarily; invaded a country (or two?); has become increasingly emboldened politically; has been selling arms in increasing quantities to enemies of the West; has increasing influence over/in ex-Eastern Bloc states - and so on.
Wait for it, wait for it... $399 for one with a keyboard (twice the Mini-9), and I'm stuck with a "red backcover". And the Mini-9 appears to be getting phased out in preference for a Mini-10, at that.
Sorry, that's about $100 too expensive, even with a touchscreen. It's got a 1024x600 8.9" display (which is smaller than most netbooks now). What happened to "ARM processors are cheap"? (Oh, and 3lb?)
The only thing it really seems to offer is 10 hours of battery life. That's nice, but it's only marginally higher than most netbooks these days.
Don't get me wrong: I'm waiting with baited breath for one of these devices which is actually within the "I can justify" price range ($200 sounds about right, or even a little steep). They need an economy of scale to make these things go anywhere, and unfortunately there simply isn't enough large industry support to push them to the point of acceptance.
Put a user-friendly Linux distro on them and sell them at Best Buy for $189 as a portable multimedia internet device and they'll fly off the shelves.
But why, exactly, does a consumer want Windows? For Excel? Word?
For the same reason they need a Ford, Dremel, Dell, Whirlpool, Frigidaire, Coleman, and so on: because it's a known quantity (or so they think), or at least a quantity with a known name behind it which might have a reputation to uphold.
running Linux kernel 2.6.11.8-1.3.0.
Oh, THAT kernel version! Yes, I know exactly what it means.
I mean, seriously folks. I've been using Linux regularly since '98, on servers since 2000, and almost exclusively for personal use since around 2001. WTF does that kernel version even mean?
Dollars to doughnuts, you can bet that Microsoft is working on porting Windows 7 and Office, as well as their various other software packages, to ARM processors. With ARM breeching the 1GHz mark and fully capable 3d acceleration, they're at least on par with an Intel chipseted Atom, and in many ways vastly superior. With most people preferring "as cheap as possible" computers - because they'll do the job just fine - things are sure to move towards ARM.
This may have escaped you, but if "the Internet" has been shut down, connecting to your neighbor's wireless router, or setting up a community wide wireless network for that matter, would be of comparably limited utility. You wouldn't have 99% of what the internet has to offer available to you - global information.
That's the whole point of the Internet in the first place: long-distance communications across a multitude of people, with large amounts of data. Your neighbor's data would be more easily acquired by walking over, talking with him, and possibly exchanging a flash drive.
As far is it "never happening": recall just a couple months ago when Iran did just this to their people (or foreign countries did it to them, whichever)? The Internet was "shut off" - internal and external routing was, essentially, not there. It only takes one squad of goons knocking down the door to the telco center and commanding them to cut the wires* for things to be very seriously disrupted.
*metaphorically speaking
It's not the "Internet" I'm addicted to. I'm a news/current events junkie. I don't exactly get them via an RSS feed or anything like that, but I spend over half an hour a day digging through news sites and various back channel sigint blogs and the like looking for information to better connect the dots.
Without the Internet, I highly suspect many people similar to myself - and there are quite a few - would be enraged. Hell, anyone paying attention to the media for the past years+ who believes in freedom of the press would. Contemporary media outlets are, simply, bullshit mouthpieces.
Freedom of the press would have all but been silenced if the Internet disappeared overnight; hundreds of thousands of IT types would be completely out of work (if not millions - who needs to update/upgrade their software if there is no network from which to get infected?); a better half of the visible public-facing software industry would likewise just go *poof* (google, facebook, youtube, hulu, yahoo, etc.). The economy would be -gone-, as all that's left in the US of "industry" is entertainment, service, and technology - and the Internet embodies all three. Countless Internet retailers would go belly up overnight - everything from Ebay to the guy selling custom aluminum cases for iPods from a free web site.
No app store, no open source, no porn, no warez, no IM or email, and (IMO most importantly) no independent, non-establishment media/reporting (manifested in many intelligently written individual and coop blogs). This last one is, in these times, absolutely essential. Without it, we're sunk. (Who'd have thought that 'blogs' would be anything more than a trivial agitation and trend?)
Without the Internet, we're back to CB and amateur radios, AM talk radio, the local news, and whatever the telco services push down the pipe to us via DSL/SAT/CATV/etc. Those are not enticing choices.
I do computer service/repair for a "living" right now. The average user - which, I take it, at least contains the subset of users who are my clients - are using less than 10Gb on average - with many using a couple dozen megabytes, and one or two using 20-30Gb. I've yet to run into a client where I could not simply back up their existing data + OEM install data on a 120G external disk array.
So, I'm wondering: what is it they're actually saying about the 'sustainability' of their current model? Is it that ads are not a sustainable revenue source for a medium which requires such large amounts of bandwidth?
Sounds like dealing with the government.
First you fill out the short, 1 page initial form.
Then you need to present supporting documents in duplicate.
Then you need to fill out a 20-page background check.
Next you've got to provide health, housing, and bill records for the past 7 years.
Then you wait 6 months.
Next you've got to have an interview to "clear up" some problems.
Finally, you're unsure of the actual result of all your efforts. Did you reach the goal? Yes, no? You won't know until you try to gain access to whatever that paperwork is for, because the actual communication channel is misinformed.
Some might argue he already has.
Eh, I don't know about that.
I'm a casual gamer. I haven't owned a platform since the NES. My favorite games were Zelda, SMB3, Marble Madness, and Jackal (a top-down scroller, but with jeeps instead of planes and "mission objectives"). I didn't really get into most games.
The last game I bought was Fallout 3, but before that I think it was Max Payne II (which I regret spending money on), Max Payne, and Deus Ex before that. I split the cost of Warcraft 3 with my brother, as well as Half-Life 2. The list of games I've beaten is only slightly longer than the above list (Farcry makes that list, surprisingly). In the last 8-9 years, I remember playing (with some degree of interest) Black & White, Eve Online (for the free trial), and very briefly, Enemy Territory and Counter-Strike 2 (but those were mainly for the multiplayer w/ friends).
Deus Ex and Mechwarrior 2 are my favorite PC games. I'd hardly consider those, or Fallout 3, un-complex: they've got a steep learning curve. They also all have a fairly lengthy collection of cinematics to explain the game world.
Maybe I'm not a casual gamer. Personally, I don't find any of the dime a dozen FPS games out there fun or interesting. It's just another implementation of the same thing. There's no story, and there's no reason for me to be invested. With no character (a unique one, either of the player's character or the game's purpose) and a tacked-on story to support the new 'special effect' of the game, there's not much of a point.
The first time my brother and I beat SMB (we usually played together) was actually, more or less, an accident. We inadvertently discovered the "unlimited lives" cheat/bug in the game (which is much, much easier to trigger in SMB3) in (IIRC) the level 8 castle on my last life, and were able to beat Koopa as a result.
We didn't learn about the 2nd warp until years later, actually, so we had to beat the harder levels every time. Man, what hours spent...
These days, I'm still playing SMB and SMB3 with my eldest son on the same NES I had as a kid. They don't make 'em like they used to. And I've still yet to actually beat SMB3, even though I had (and essentially memorized, and remember to this day) the Nintendo Power for the game.
Gov't has say in trash collection for efficiency, you say?
I had city-run trash collection for a while. It was one of the options. It sucked: they wouldn't take the trash if it wasn't -exactly- where they needed it to be, and it cost $35/month on a bi-weekly pickup.
Fortunately, the rules changed and that market was opened up to 3rd parties (mainly, the companies that were currently running commercial dumpster pickups). Trash then cost $16/month, was a weekly pickup, and on a couple occasions the guys walked 20 feet to the back of the garage and -still- took the trash. And from what I recall, they weren't necessarily the cheapest game in town, either.