The supreme irony of all of this is that 'global warming' became 'global cooling' became 'climate change' became 'global warming'... and I think we're back to global warming again, on account of the mild Winter throughout most of the US.
This is political and economic system abuse. So-called 'clean' companies use it to push their competitors out of the market; people in power use it to funnel public funds to the pet 'green' project of the year (which they or their friends just happen to have a vested interest in seeing succeed); anti-capitalists use it as a political axe against the so-called 'Establishment' (unless the Establishment just happens to be felating them that given moment).
Look, people: weather systems have been changing (eg. El Nina and El Nino) for as long as we've kept records of such things, and they're not always consistent. The sun has, likewise, been having ebb and flux for as long as we can go back. Climates have been doing the same.
It's pretty straight forward, but people seem to ignore all the independent factors which make "more CO2" a non-problem. So, suppose more CO2 does make it warmer (globally or locally). More warmth (and CO2) means more plant growth season-long. This consumes more CO2, instead of the plants going into dormancy. Additionally, the increased warmth means there is more evaporation, and thus potential for precipitation. More precipitation means that, yes, there may be more flooding and (in combination with increased warmth) more violent storms. It also means that water is going to get to drought-stricken parts of the globe (either directly or indirectly).
Those water wars and worldwide drought predictions made when I was in grade school in the early 90s, (and how the world's population was going to be 12 trillion by now)? Agriprop at the best; calloused and degenerate misanthropy at its worst. We were fed this nonsense in grade school (and, if my kids' Scholastic News is any indication today) for over 20 years! The crystal ball nuttery continues, but, of course, it has nothing in common with their predictions from years past.
The people who push these things are masturbatory assholes, so full of themselves, their models, and supposed superiority (for seeing 'the truth') that they're little different than crazed witch doctors. Just so we're clear: what they preach isn't science: it's a religion of political change through subterfuge. It's no different than an unethical salesman selling someone something "they need" based on questionable studies.
Carriers aren't trying to prevent people from using the bandwidth. If they did that, they'd cut people off. (Though I suppose T-Moble does this, but we're talking about the iPhone...)
What they're trying to do is drive your data costs through the roof. Verizon and ATT do this: the 'cheap' data plans are not enough for actual general use of the phones, as most people will use them. 50MB/month? You'll go over that in the first day (since surely you'll be using it heavily, having just gotten it).
I don't do much with my (Android) phone. I listen to music (as I did with my MP3 player, previously), I navigate on occasion, I SMS, and I check email. I hit 500Mb of data use on a weekly basis, I'd wager - but it all goes over Wifi, thank god. The common user doesn't know to enable these things, in most cases. They don't have ubiquitous wireless available to them like most technical people probably do.
10MPG for an H1? If that's all you're getting, you're doing something wrong. (Probably not running the turbo Detroit, I imagine, and driving poorly.)
Look folks. I'm tired of the "big gas guzzling beasts" argument being made, particularly where people are supposed to be educated.
The H1 was primarily offered in 6.5 and 6.2 liter Detroit diesel packages, both with and without a turbo. It weighs around 6500lb-7000lb and came with a 3 or 4 speed transmission. The vehicle has 4 wheel drive. These specifications are almost identical (both in actual parts used and how they're paired up) to every single diesel truck Chevy/GM made for 20 years (albeit about 1000-1500lb heavier).
A full-size 1 ton early 80s 6.2 aspirated Detroit with a 3 speed transmission and a curb weight of 5200lb. gets about 15-18mpg highway and about 13-14mpg city. The vehicle has the 'tow package' and a low geared real differential very similar to the H1. These are my numbers and have been roughly consistent at different altitudes (sea level to 5,000 feet). I drive like a maniac (accelerate quickly). I got slightly worse mileage with about 1100-1300lb in the rear end going over the Sierra Nevadas last summer - about 13.5mpg. I was driving well above the 'optimal' band for fuel economy at the time.
A M1009 Blazer (also 4wd), which I also know the numbers on, with the exact same drive train and weighing 1200lb more, gets 16-18mpg highway and around 12 city (more inclines where this one drives, as well as slightly higher gearing).
In contrast for gas engines: a 4wd 1 ton mid-90s Suburban will get right around 13/16 mpg with the 'normal' 350/5.7 small block and a 4 speed transmission. There are very, very few "gas guzzlers" out there which are anywhere near that 10mpg mark.
I realize there's a lot of appeal to Prius type vehicles here, but let me ask you, Slashdotters... let's be a little more intelligent about our stereotypes and digs. Keep this up and it won't be long until we start seeing stupidity like "brown people don't work hard".
She could probably also get on with one of the shady web scraping/placement operation/SEO, if she knew of any. I've met people with hardly any skill who make a fair amount of money doing this.
At that point, pornography is more ethical.
If you have scruples, you have a very linear, hard road to climb. Pay is proportional to skill and ability. The only time that seems to deviate is when gross ethical/moral misconduct is involved (whether the participants realize it or not).
For the most part, I agree. However, I can think of three things which can be done well, from home (possibly with a little training) in the tech/industry fields with which I've seen done.
* Documentation writer. You mentioned you don't write well, but consider how poorly most documentation is written. I'm not talking about product sleeve documentation or anything like that, but more in the systems/development realm. Granted, you'd have to find an employer who is open to this non-traditional approach. This one has quite a few caveats, though: are you technically inclined? Can you read code well enough to tell what it does (having someone go through and double-check code for stupid mistakes while documenting is often useful, and doesn't necessarily take a lot of skill)?
* Video production tasks - editing, conversion, and encoding. I have roughly 20 hours of video which I need to have taken from a raw DV format, edited, and converted into H264, and posted onto a public site roughly twice a month. We've got someone who does this on the side for us, at home. The video is for archival/educational/historic purposes. The only caveat is that you'd have to be able to be in close proximity to an operation similar to this and be able to follow detailed instructions on what needs to be done.
* Medical coding/transcriptionist. I know this is a very common work-from-home job, though it requires a fair amount of relatively expensive training. It pays roughly as well as a junior level sysadmin job in many areas, I've noticed. You can work from home, usually at odd hours (doctors need their notes transcribed at all hours of the day), with a fair amount of flexibility for things like "the kids need dinner". You'd have to be able to type fairly quickly, know the coding of medications, and things like that. I'm not sure about the costs or time requirements associated with the training, however. Anywhere with a regional hospital nearby is going to need quite a few people to do this (a 100-workstation private practice I'm familiar with had 6+ doing this).
Strap a battery on it and they can drop it inside a rugged plastic case some unobtrusive solar collectors and it'd have days+ of runtime, capable of sitting in a field or roadside w/o anyone noticing.
You can not expect everything to be secure. You have to pick and choose your battles.
Yet, if you do not pick and win all the battles, it's quite likely you'll lose your job when (not if) there is an intrusion.
I've yet to meet an employer who is forgiving about a person leaving the doors unlocked, resulting in a burglary. It doesn't matter if there are 2,000 doors which need to be checked/audited on a daily basis next to the First International Burglary Institute - your (and my) employers are otherwise ignorant to all of this. They live in tiny, simple worlds where "due diligence" means using the electronic locks on their cars and double-checking their front door when they go to work in the morning.
Cases in point: * Mint Linux * lighttpd * memtest86+ * KVM * OpenNebula * Android
And lest we not forget: * Linux * FreeBSD
And so on and so forth. Options are good. If nobody stepped out into the street, sure - nobody would get hit by the a bus. But then, nobody would cross the street, either (except at approved crosswalks).
I remember in Boy Scouts spending some time at the rifle range and they were very particular about you returning with the same number of cases as you bought. If you didn't then they'd have to shut the range down and climb down under the platform and find those extra cases.
I'm not sure if they ever had to do so as we all knew to not screw around with the ammo and to just put it in the cup when we were done, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had to do so at some point. In retrospect it's somewhat surprising that the platform had cracks through which cases could fall.
They did it to help instill respect for the potency that firearms possess, not due to any actual danger resulting from losing a cartridge. Those boards probably had tens or hundreds of thousands of spent cartridges underneath, routinely collected for their metal value.
Then you're the exception. The number of times I've found.22 cartridges in the bottom of the washer after a trip to the range - days or weeks later - is fairly high.
The last time I visited my parents, i went through a box of my stuff from childhood. I found an unspent.22 cartridge in it, at the very bottom, floating around with dirt and fur from the cat that liked to sleep on the boxes.
I have a friend who took meticulous care of his car. Vaccuumed it religiously, etc. He almost got 'permanently' detained while entering Mexico because they found a single.22 cartridge underneath one of the seats..22 cartridges, in particular, seem easy to lose. They cost a couple cents each so aren't really missed, come in packs of 500+, drop easily due to their size, and so on.
What does the 2nd Amendment have to do with health, or inner city shitholes with high felony crime rates which encourage illegal firearms? Places like Baltimore.
You realize that if Baltimore (and Maryland) didn't make it illegal for law abiding citizens to own firearms, there'd probably be a markedly lower murder rate there, right? (Also consider that the majority of murders in the US - over 50%, I think it was 54% - are direct gang on gang related. So, don't be in a gang...)
Otherwise, who gives a fuck if thugs are killing each other in the streets?
No doubt. Imagine my disappointment when I realized I'd not be able to detect energy signature anomolies or approaching weather patterns in real-time, nevermind being able to find things like rare-earth deposits or the massive diamond ring dropped during a bonfire in the back lot last fall.
You're more correct than you may think. What you're describing is neofeudalism, or corporate feudalism. As a concept, it's taken off like wildfire in the past decade.
It's running rampant in Russia, the US, and most of Europe. It's starting to take shape in China, as their corporations become larger and more powerful (FOXCONN, for instance). It wasn't all that long ago when it was just a whimsical reference to companies like Walmart. "One day we'll all live in Walmart, and we'll never have to leave. We'll do war with the people in the Target a mile away," a friend used to joke. That's a reality in many parts of the world now in all but fact, and it's surely a wet dream for those who run large corporations.
I doubt things would've been able to get this far if it wasn't for the false value placed in such organizations through the stock market.
The audacity of claiming that iOS or Android lack streaming and local video support, or mapping/GPS software options is stupid silly.
There were multiple programs available for WinCE which did "Google Maps" type stuff in a more usable, featureful fashion than what Google's Navigation does.
Apple's mapping software? It's a joke. It's frequently wrong, and you've got to enter the address precisely, starting from state/zip and working backwards.
Android is better than that by a lot, but it's also horribly unstable on most of the Android devices I've used, with different ROMs. (At least there's ndrive.)
Hell, until recently, even VZ Navigator was better than most of what's available on Android and iPhone.
I have no disagreement about WinCE blowing it's load prematurely and ineffectively. The core technology sucked, but for many things, if you wanted to do it on your mobile device, your only option was WinCE until fairly recently (about 2 years ago).
Of course there are several challenges in this approach: you need the capital investment to build the automated factory;
China gives huge sums of money to 'companies' as capital investment to build up factories and facilities. In the US, this only seems to happen with WalMart and Pizza Hut, in my recent recollection.
you need the education levels to train your population for a world where half the jobs are sophisticated technical problem-solving jobs;
As in most things, Americans aren't being challenged enough. This is why we fail in this regard. We've been encouraged to be mediocre.
you need a LOT of factories like this to keep your whole population employed; and, for now, you need to compete with countries still developing who have workers willing to work for a few bowls of rice per hour. This last problem will go away in due course.
They're doing the same foolish things to their economy that we did to our own. Unfortunately for them, it's not going to run full circle due to how quickly and utterly they're moving in that direction, and the damage they're doing to their lands.
What if I can't do any work that's worth more than $24,000 a year? What does "want" have to do with it then? People with very low skills, and people who have very little value to offer anyone, can't expect to always get what they want.
That's bullshit. I don't care if you dropped out of high school and never went to class while you were there, but if you've got an IQ over 80 and haven't smoked it away, chances are you're smart enough to figure out how to pull levers, lift objects, push buttons, while not damaging yourself or equipment. This is not rocket science, it's assembly line work.
If the makers of Dr. Bronner's "Magic Soaps" can manage to not only employ people at a generous living wage, successfully, with good benefits while making millions in profits, I find it hard to believe a manufacturing plant couldn't do the same for similar levels of experience while making drastically more expensive products. (Again: SOAP.)
Another good example: Lee Precision. They make ammunition presses and misc. similar machinery for consumer purchase. Manufactured in the US. They are inexpensive compared to the Chinese-built variants (RCBS, for instance), and their quality and engineering is still progressive and superior. (I suspect they probably pay their engineers and machinists pretty well, because their products are known for being consistently well made and designed.)
If you're able to work at McDonalds, chances are any other average assembly line job is well within your grasp.
The bottom line is that the USA used to do this. Old school Americans who still posess the American spirit do things bigger, better, faster, stronger. There is no room here for "work life balance", there is no room for a giant party at every turn. Do that on your own time, when you're not on contract, and your life is yours.
Some of us still do work this way. We get in, get shit done, and get out and work 60-80 work weeks. Most of us are not from the West Coast, though: we're from small towns in "flyover" country. We grew up working hard, and for those who didn't, we had plenty of examples around us of people who were. Importantly, you don't want to be the lazy, ineffectual guy. There are still a lot of us from the non-urban parts of the northeast and southeast as well.
It doesn't matter in America if you get things done anymore, not normally. What matters is if you "work well with others". You are considered a bad employee if you're making your "peers" look poorly, and you're "unprofessional" if you say it like it is (even if it's polite).
What has to happen to make this change? Drastic, unsavory things, for most people. People have to embrace being 'geeky' again. No more stupid jock films, no "go to business school" recommendations to your kids. Have a lot of kids and don't feed them things from bags. Get rid of golden parachutes. Stop selling shitty glamour magazines in check-out isles. Don't structure school around passing the majority, structure it to make 10% excellent and damn the rest (because they'll be damned anyway, particularly if things continue apace). People need to stop being looked down upon for "starting life early" and accepting responsibility. Employees need to be rewarded for doing the best job, not for billing the most, answering the most calls, or fucking the most customers for services they don't need. Not everyone should go to college, and in fact, they should not be allowed to if they don't have intellectual potential. Trade schools need to come back into vogue and intellectually weak 4-year degrees (business, humanities, etc.) should simply be done away with outright at most institutions.
People need to forget about the NIMBY mentality. Nuclear power needs to be accepted, and suburban sprawl should be abandoned in preference for many smaller cities.
You do realize that "its first iteration" has come and gone already, right? This is "Mk 2", anyway. They wet their toe with the Atom, which was massively, massively successful, being used in everything from netbooks to desktops and even low-end servers (it is, by far, the most common CPU in my house right now: a low-end pfsense machine, a Logitech Revue, an Asus Eee, and a file server).
This thing is going to be pure Evil to ARM, particularly if it can handle things like different radio versions better than ARM does (via UEFI, maybe). If it does that, it's going to completely explode in the XDA/homebrew segment, and geeks everywhere will adore it (likely running Windows XP on it at some point, Because They Can).
There were resistive-capacitive screens around at the time, as well. Many of the resistive screens weren't all that bad, either - I had an NEC MobilePro 780 and its screen did not require that much pressure to activate at all (arguably being more accurate than most capacitive screens I've seen since, even while using just a finger). It all depended on the display in use, I suppose.
On the contrary, it took me weeks to get accustomed to the capacitive-only screen on my first smartphone. Talk about irritating...
I don't know about that. WinCE was way, way ahead of competitors for some time in many ways, right up until they abandoned Windows CE in preference for "Windows Phone". Things like:
* Mobile access to commonly emailed documents * A good integrated mail client * Thorough integrated contact management * Excellent 3rd party mapping/GPS software * Streaming and local video support
These are things Apple still lacks, and which Android devices are just now coming around to doing well. WinCE's biggest shortcomings were that:
* From a technical perspective, it had horrible support (for multitasking). Loading things was slow. This was probably due to its flash memory support and multiprocessing model, I suppose. * Vendors fucked up the installs. Third party ROMs were usually much, much better - stable, fast - than what shipped on them. Think of the slowest, most hideously unstable Android device you've seen so far: that was a good day for a WinCE phone, and it was almost invariably the fault of the carrier. * It was physically ugly compared to wiz-bang products like a Blackberry * Microsoft didn't know what to do with it or how to control their IP (as with pretty much every 'mobile' venture they've made before or since).
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The supreme irony of all of this is that 'global warming' became 'global cooling' became 'climate change' became 'global warming'... and I think we're back to global warming again, on account of the mild Winter throughout most of the US.
This is political and economic system abuse. So-called 'clean' companies use it to push their competitors out of the market; people in power use it to funnel public funds to the pet 'green' project of the year (which they or their friends just happen to have a vested interest in seeing succeed); anti-capitalists use it as a political axe against the so-called 'Establishment' (unless the Establishment just happens to be felating them that given moment).
Look, people: weather systems have been changing (eg. El Nina and El Nino) for as long as we've kept records of such things, and they're not always consistent. The sun has, likewise, been having ebb and flux for as long as we can go back. Climates have been doing the same.
It's pretty straight forward, but people seem to ignore all the independent factors which make "more CO2" a non-problem. So, suppose more CO2 does make it warmer (globally or locally). More warmth (and CO2) means more plant growth season-long. This consumes more CO2, instead of the plants going into dormancy. Additionally, the increased warmth means there is more evaporation, and thus potential for precipitation. More precipitation means that, yes, there may be more flooding and (in combination with increased warmth) more violent storms. It also means that water is going to get to drought-stricken parts of the globe (either directly or indirectly).
Those water wars and worldwide drought predictions made when I was in grade school in the early 90s, (and how the world's population was going to be 12 trillion by now)? Agriprop at the best; calloused and degenerate misanthropy at its worst. We were fed this nonsense in grade school (and, if my kids' Scholastic News is any indication today) for over 20 years! The crystal ball nuttery continues, but, of course, it has nothing in common with their predictions from years past.
The people who push these things are masturbatory assholes, so full of themselves, their models, and supposed superiority (for seeing 'the truth') that they're little different than crazed witch doctors. Just so we're clear: what they preach isn't science: it's a religion of political change through subterfuge. It's no different than an unethical salesman selling someone something "they need" based on questionable studies.
Carriers aren't trying to prevent people from using the bandwidth. If they did that, they'd cut people off. (Though I suppose T-Moble does this, but we're talking about the iPhone...)
What they're trying to do is drive your data costs through the roof. Verizon and ATT do this: the 'cheap' data plans are not enough for actual general use of the phones, as most people will use them. 50MB/month? You'll go over that in the first day (since surely you'll be using it heavily, having just gotten it).
I don't do much with my (Android) phone. I listen to music (as I did with my MP3 player, previously), I navigate on occasion, I SMS, and I check email. I hit 500Mb of data use on a weekly basis, I'd wager - but it all goes over Wifi, thank god. The common user doesn't know to enable these things, in most cases. They don't have ubiquitous wireless available to them like most technical people probably do.
At first I thought, "yeah, so?" and then I realized that people born in 1990 are no longer 13, they're 22 now.
God, I feel old.
10MPG for an H1? If that's all you're getting, you're doing something wrong. (Probably not running the turbo Detroit, I imagine, and driving poorly.)
Look folks. I'm tired of the "big gas guzzling beasts" argument being made, particularly where people are supposed to be educated.
The H1 was primarily offered in 6.5 and 6.2 liter Detroit diesel packages, both with and without a turbo. It weighs around 6500lb-7000lb and came with a 3 or 4 speed transmission. The vehicle has 4 wheel drive. These specifications are almost identical (both in actual parts used and how they're paired up) to every single diesel truck Chevy/GM made for 20 years (albeit about 1000-1500lb heavier).
A full-size 1 ton early 80s 6.2 aspirated Detroit with a 3 speed transmission and a curb weight of 5200lb. gets about 15-18mpg highway and about 13-14mpg city. The vehicle has the 'tow package' and a low geared real differential very similar to the H1. These are my numbers and have been roughly consistent at different altitudes (sea level to 5,000 feet). I drive like a maniac (accelerate quickly). I got slightly worse mileage with about 1100-1300lb in the rear end going over the Sierra Nevadas last summer - about 13.5mpg. I was driving well above the 'optimal' band for fuel economy at the time.
A M1009 Blazer (also 4wd), which I also know the numbers on, with the exact same drive train and weighing 1200lb more, gets 16-18mpg highway and around 12 city (more inclines where this one drives, as well as slightly higher gearing).
In contrast for gas engines: a 4wd 1 ton mid-90s Suburban will get right around 13/16 mpg with the 'normal' 350/5.7 small block and a 4 speed transmission.
There are very, very few "gas guzzlers" out there which are anywhere near that 10mpg mark.
I realize there's a lot of appeal to Prius type vehicles here, but let me ask you, Slashdotters... let's be a little more intelligent about our stereotypes and digs. Keep this up and it won't be long until we start seeing stupidity like "brown people don't work hard".
She could probably also get on with one of the shady web scraping/placement operation/SEO, if she knew of any. I've met people with hardly any skill who make a fair amount of money doing this.
At that point, pornography is more ethical.
If you have scruples, you have a very linear, hard road to climb. Pay is proportional to skill and ability. The only time that seems to deviate is when gross ethical/moral misconduct is involved (whether the participants realize it or not).
For the most part, I agree. However, I can think of three things which can be done well, from home (possibly with a little training) in the tech/industry fields with which I've seen done.
* Documentation writer. You mentioned you don't write well, but consider how poorly most documentation is written. I'm not talking about product sleeve documentation or anything like that, but more in the systems/development realm. Granted, you'd have to find an employer who is open to this non-traditional approach. This one has quite a few caveats, though: are you technically inclined? Can you read code well enough to tell what it does (having someone go through and double-check code for stupid mistakes while documenting is often useful, and doesn't necessarily take a lot of skill)?
* Video production tasks - editing, conversion, and encoding. I have roughly 20 hours of video which I need to have taken from a raw DV format, edited, and converted into H264, and posted onto a public site roughly twice a month. We've got someone who does this on the side for us, at home. The video is for archival/educational/historic purposes. The only caveat is that you'd have to be able to be in close proximity to an operation similar to this and be able to follow detailed instructions on what needs to be done.
* Medical coding/transcriptionist. I know this is a very common work-from-home job, though it requires a fair amount of relatively expensive training. It pays roughly as well as a junior level sysadmin job in many areas, I've noticed. You can work from home, usually at odd hours (doctors need their notes transcribed at all hours of the day), with a fair amount of flexibility for things like "the kids need dinner". You'd have to be able to type fairly quickly, know the coding of medications, and things like that. I'm not sure about the costs or time requirements associated with the training, however. Anywhere with a regional hospital nearby is going to need quite a few people to do this (a 100-workstation private practice I'm familiar with had 6+ doing this).
Strap a battery on it and they can drop it inside a rugged plastic case some unobtrusive solar collectors and it'd have days+ of runtime, capable of sitting in a field or roadside w/o anyone noticing.
You can not expect everything to be secure. You have to pick and choose your battles.
Yet, if you do not pick and win all the battles, it's quite likely you'll lose your job when (not if) there is an intrusion.
I've yet to meet an employer who is forgiving about a person leaving the doors unlocked, resulting in a burglary. It doesn't matter if there are 2,000 doors which need to be checked/audited on a daily basis next to the First International Burglary Institute - your (and my) employers are otherwise ignorant to all of this. They live in tiny, simple worlds where "due diligence" means using the electronic locks on their cars and double-checking their front door when they go to work in the morning.
Yeah, but Symantec is still the undisputed champion in that regard.
Why not?
Cases in point:
* Mint Linux
* lighttpd
* memtest86+
* KVM
* OpenNebula
* Android
And lest we not forget:
* Linux
* FreeBSD
And so on and so forth. Options are good. If nobody stepped out into the street, sure - nobody would get hit by the a bus. But then, nobody would cross the street, either (except at approved crosswalks).
I remember in Boy Scouts spending some time at the rifle range and they were very particular about you returning with the same number of cases as you bought. If you didn't then they'd have to shut the range down and climb down under the platform and find those extra cases.
I'm not sure if they ever had to do so as we all knew to not screw around with the ammo and to just put it in the cup when we were done, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had to do so at some point. In retrospect it's somewhat surprising that the platform had cracks through which cases could fall.
They did it to help instill respect for the potency that firearms possess, not due to any actual danger resulting from losing a cartridge. Those boards probably had tens or hundreds of thousands of spent cartridges underneath, routinely collected for their metal value.
A gross amount of stupidity, like leaving a penny in your pocket when being screened, or a Federal Marshall carrying a firearm onto a plane?
Then you're the exception. The number of times I've found .22 cartridges in the bottom of the washer after a trip to the range - days or weeks later - is fairly high.
The last time I visited my parents, i went through a box of my stuff from childhood. I found an unspent .22 cartridge in it, at the very bottom, floating around with dirt and fur from the cat that liked to sleep on the boxes.
I have a friend who took meticulous care of his car. Vaccuumed it religiously, etc. He almost got 'permanently' detained while entering Mexico because they found a single .22 cartridge underneath one of the seats. .22 cartridges, in particular, seem easy to lose. They cost a couple cents each so aren't really missed, come in packs of 500+, drop easily due to their size, and so on.
What does the 2nd Amendment have to do with health, or inner city shitholes with high felony crime rates which encourage illegal firearms? Places like Baltimore.
You realize that if Baltimore (and Maryland) didn't make it illegal for law abiding citizens to own firearms, there'd probably be a markedly lower murder rate there, right? (Also consider that the majority of murders in the US - over 50%, I think it was 54% - are direct gang on gang related. So, don't be in a gang...)
Otherwise, who gives a fuck if thugs are killing each other in the streets?
No doubt. Imagine my disappointment when I realized I'd not be able to detect energy signature anomolies or approaching weather patterns in real-time, nevermind being able to find things like rare-earth deposits or the massive diamond ring dropped during a bonfire in the back lot last fall.
You're more correct than you may think. What you're describing is neofeudalism, or corporate feudalism. As a concept, it's taken off like wildfire in the past decade.
It's running rampant in Russia, the US, and most of Europe. It's starting to take shape in China, as their corporations become larger and more powerful (FOXCONN, for instance). It wasn't all that long ago when it was just a whimsical reference to companies like Walmart. "One day we'll all live in Walmart, and we'll never have to leave. We'll do war with the people in the Target a mile away," a friend used to joke. That's a reality in many parts of the world now in all but fact, and it's surely a wet dream for those who run large corporations.
I doubt things would've been able to get this far if it wasn't for the false value placed in such organizations through the stock market.
The audacity of claiming that iOS or Android lack streaming and local video support, or mapping/GPS software options is stupid silly.
There were multiple programs available for WinCE which did "Google Maps" type stuff in a more usable, featureful fashion than what Google's Navigation does.
Apple's mapping software? It's a joke. It's frequently wrong, and you've got to enter the address precisely, starting from state/zip and working backwards.
Android is better than that by a lot, but it's also horribly unstable on most of the Android devices I've used, with different ROMs. (At least there's ndrive.)
Hell, until recently, even VZ Navigator was better than most of what's available on Android and iPhone.
I have no disagreement about WinCE blowing it's load prematurely and ineffectively. The core technology sucked, but for many things, if you wanted to do it on your mobile device, your only option was WinCE until fairly recently (about 2 years ago).
Of course there are several challenges in this approach: you need the capital investment to build the automated factory;
China gives huge sums of money to 'companies' as capital investment to build up factories and facilities. In the US, this only seems to happen with WalMart and Pizza Hut, in my recent recollection.
you need the education levels to train your population for a world where half the jobs are sophisticated technical problem-solving jobs;
As in most things, Americans aren't being challenged enough. This is why we fail in this regard. We've been encouraged to be mediocre.
you need a LOT of factories like this to keep your whole population employed; and, for now, you need to compete with countries still developing who have workers willing to work for a few bowls of rice per hour. This last problem will go away in due course.
They're doing the same foolish things to their economy that we did to our own. Unfortunately for them, it's not going to run full circle due to how quickly and utterly they're moving in that direction, and the damage they're doing to their lands.
And, as soon as those Easterners start getting a little money (because there's a call center in town, maybe), they get their own apartment.
You may want to look up the housing boom in China, for instance.
What if I can't do any work that's worth more than $24,000 a year? What does "want" have to do with it then? People with very low skills, and people who have very little value to offer anyone, can't expect to always get what they want.
That's bullshit. I don't care if you dropped out of high school and never went to class while you were there, but if you've got an IQ over 80 and haven't smoked it away, chances are you're smart enough to figure out how to pull levers, lift objects, push buttons, while not damaging yourself or equipment. This is not rocket science, it's assembly line work.
If the makers of Dr. Bronner's "Magic Soaps" can manage to not only employ people at a generous living wage, successfully, with good benefits while making millions in profits, I find it hard to believe a manufacturing plant couldn't do the same for similar levels of experience while making drastically more expensive products. (Again: SOAP.)
Another good example: Lee Precision. They make ammunition presses and misc. similar machinery for consumer purchase. Manufactured in the US. They are inexpensive compared to the Chinese-built variants (RCBS, for instance), and their quality and engineering is still progressive and superior. (I suspect they probably pay their engineers and machinists pretty well, because their products are known for being consistently well made and designed.)
If you're able to work at McDonalds, chances are any other average assembly line job is well within your grasp.
The bottom line is that the USA used to do this. Old school Americans who still posess the American spirit do things bigger, better, faster, stronger. There is no room here for "work life balance", there is no room for a giant party at every turn. Do that on your own time, when you're not on contract, and your life is yours.
Some of us still do work this way. We get in, get shit done, and get out and work 60-80 work weeks. Most of us are not from the West Coast, though: we're from small towns in "flyover" country. We grew up working hard, and for those who didn't, we had plenty of examples around us of people who were. Importantly, you don't want to be the lazy, ineffectual guy. There are still a lot of us from the non-urban parts of the northeast and southeast as well.
It doesn't matter in America if you get things done anymore, not normally. What matters is if you "work well with others". You are considered a bad employee if you're making your "peers" look poorly, and you're "unprofessional" if you say it like it is (even if it's polite).
What has to happen to make this change? Drastic, unsavory things, for most people. People have to embrace being 'geeky' again. No more stupid jock films, no "go to business school" recommendations to your kids. Have a lot of kids and don't feed them things from bags. Get rid of golden parachutes. Stop selling shitty glamour magazines in check-out isles. Don't structure school around passing the majority, structure it to make 10% excellent and damn the rest (because they'll be damned anyway, particularly if things continue apace). People need to stop being looked down upon for "starting life early" and accepting responsibility. Employees need to be rewarded for doing the best job, not for billing the most, answering the most calls, or fucking the most customers for services they don't need. Not everyone should go to college, and in fact, they should not be allowed to if they don't have intellectual potential. Trade schools need to come back into vogue and intellectually weak 4-year degrees (business, humanities, etc.) should simply be done away with outright at most institutions.
People need to forget about the NIMBY mentality. Nuclear power needs to be accepted, and suburban sprawl should be abandoned in preference for many smaller cities.
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Apparently I'm not the only /. who doesn't trust the government enough to "Create an Account" at this point.
Intel won't succeed with its first iteration
Based on what? This isn't Microsoft software.
You do realize that "its first iteration" has come and gone already, right? This is "Mk 2", anyway. They wet their toe with the Atom, which was massively, massively successful, being used in everything from netbooks to desktops and even low-end servers (it is, by far, the most common CPU in my house right now: a low-end pfsense machine, a Logitech Revue, an Asus Eee, and a file server).
This thing is going to be pure Evil to ARM, particularly if it can handle things like different radio versions better than ARM does (via UEFI, maybe). If it does that, it's going to completely explode in the XDA/homebrew segment, and geeks everywhere will adore it (likely running Windows XP on it at some point, Because They Can).
There were resistive-capacitive screens around at the time, as well. Many of the resistive screens weren't all that bad, either - I had an NEC MobilePro 780 and its screen did not require that much pressure to activate at all (arguably being more accurate than most capacitive screens I've seen since, even while using just a finger). It all depended on the display in use, I suppose.
On the contrary, it took me weeks to get accustomed to the capacitive-only screen on my first smartphone. Talk about irritating...
I don't know about that. WinCE was way, way ahead of competitors for some time in many ways, right up until they abandoned Windows CE in preference for "Windows Phone". Things like:
* Mobile access to commonly emailed documents
* A good integrated mail client
* Thorough integrated contact management
* Excellent 3rd party mapping/GPS software
* Streaming and local video support
These are things Apple still lacks, and which Android devices are just now coming around to doing well. WinCE's biggest shortcomings were that:
* From a technical perspective, it had horrible support (for multitasking). Loading things was slow. This was probably due to its flash memory support and multiprocessing model, I suppose.
* Vendors fucked up the installs. Third party ROMs were usually much, much better - stable, fast - than what shipped on them. Think of the slowest, most hideously unstable Android device you've seen so far: that was a good day for a WinCE phone, and it was almost invariably the fault of the carrier.
* It was physically ugly compared to wiz-bang products like a Blackberry
* Microsoft didn't know what to do with it or how to control their IP (as with pretty much every 'mobile' venture they've made before or since).