I used to work for "Big Solar" (well, the third-largest PV maker on the planet). Trust me, if you had any idea how much energy is required to run a single CZ crystal furnace (let alone nearly 100 of them at just one site), or even one semi-tractor-sized wire saw (let alone nearly 50 of them), the last friggin' thing you'd think about solar panel production is "energy efficient", or "zero carbon footprint". And don't get me started on the chemicals required... they can be deadly as hell for crystal PV production if they ever leaked out, but are still rather tame compared to the chemicals a thin-film cell requires.
As for the rest, the climate has been hotter, and it has been colder. I'm not going to ring the alarms until we start seeing something that breaks an actual geological record.
Fortunately, birthrates are either stable or declining in most First-World countries when you discount immigration... due to a higher standard of living.
Now, how exactly do you propose to get the Third World to cut back on births without also promoting them to the same (energy-consuming) standard of living? Yep, that's what I thought.
Tell you what - take a tour of what used to be the USSR some time... the vast majority of the ecological damage there (esp. what used to be the Aral Sea) was done by a decidedly non-capitalistic government, hell-bent on a 'glorious revolutionary future'.
Or, you can drop the sophomoric and faux-intelligent 'OAMG teh capitalizm is teh nexus of 3vilz!' act.
Personally, I got a lot more radical and left-leaning after I retired in 2007, because with the pressure to have to go out and earn a living every day lifted from me at age 50, I could really view the system more objectively..
Don't know how to say it without sounding trollish, but honestly, I daresay that you've only swapped your old fears for new ones, and the new ones happen to be left-leaning.
Now, instead of worrying about a job, you have to worry about healthcare (as older folks tend to be far more frequent consumers of it). It also comes up that any means to avoid having to pay outrageous amounts to get that healthcare (even if the government pays it on your behalf) is probably going to sound a lot more appealing to you now that, if you're looking down the barrel of geriatric and long-term care, you likely will be in a decade or two, and you most likely know it. Other considerations, such as Social Security and most other AARP talking points, are going to be ones that you can now sympathize with... and most of them tend to lean leftward in their stances.
Besides, you also made the mistake of generalizing those who work. Some among us are entrepreneurs and/or otherwise own our own businesses. Where is the fear and abuse that they see? Their only real fears involve exactly two: lack of sales and excess of governmental intrusion (taxes, regulation, laws, etc). Are you saying that these folks also "required to be afraid" of the same things that most other conservatives fear?
I can also make one more argument: Those who are younger and working are more confident in their ability to be independent. OTOH, folks who are older and retired are less confident, to the point of knowing that someday, dependency on others for their care will be something that they have to deal with, and not everyone has kids who will happily take them in once they reach the point of non-independence. This tends to introduce yet another fear, and one far more visceral and personal than merely being over-taxed or over-regulated. That fear usually tends to want someone, anyone, and everyone to jump in and care for you as you age.
Not saying it's perfectly your case or anything, but I am saying that retirement doesn;t necessarily mean that you've suddenly become an objective judge of the world. It only trades old fears for new ones.
Originally, sure - but $billions in the hole with only a (very) slim hope of eventual ROI isn't much the way to do it. Then again, to be fair, maybe they think (hope/project/predict?) that their next console version will be the one that rakes in enough profit to pay all that off?
TFA does have it right though - we're already seeing XBoxes that do movies, music, online social bits, and the like.
I get the feeling that, come your next server RFP, your HP and Dell sales reps are going to ask you which secure boot version you want - Windows, ESXi, RedHat, or SuSE (maybe, but only because Intel has a hard-on for it as their own preferred server distro). You really won't have any other alternative.
'course, that's going to limit the flexibility, and require you to buy a new server (or buy some sort of firmware/EFI flash utility) whenever you put another OS on it. Then again, considering that you'll be buying something from the vendor, it's not like they're going to lose that much sleep over it...
Yep... you get used to glazing past anything with Ed Bott's tagline in it. He's notorious for being a better Microsoft mouthpiece than Microsoft's PR department.
I just have a hard time deciding if it's because he loves Microsoft that damned much, or if he's just doing it to generate eyeballs and clicks.
Doing that would crowd the store with a metric ton of garbage apps.
In the 3D/CG hobbyist realm, I see it all the time. Let me explain... -- There are 'stores' where the site takes 50% (yes, you read that right) of a given CG product's sales. "Exclusive" (that is, sold at that site only) may get you the "merchant" 60% of the take. Most sites have at least a rudimentary form of product testing.
The problem? You have to wade through a whole lot of sheer garbage items, useless items, items with obvious defects (where the testing is either nonexistent or done by volunteers), and 50 bajillion varieties (of varying quality) of whatever the latest, hottest-selling item happens to be that week. --
I consider Apple's $99 fee to be at least one way of keeping the worst of the absolute crap out of the App Store. I wish the CG hobbyist realm would do that - it would force folks to really stop and think before they upload, at the very least.
I've blown nearly $1000 this year on CG hobbyist software and low-end tools, and just over $1000 on a new laptop to play with it all on.
I don't expect to become the next Pixar or Dreamworks anytime soon, as I just have fun with it.
I figure the same would apply to writing code (which is occasionally fun to do, especially if it fills a need that I would stumble across in my own little hobby). $99 is a pittance compared to what most folks spend for things they find to be fun.
Don't believe me? Ask a hunter how much his firearms, tags/licenses, RV, quad-runner, etc cost him. Ask some soccer mom who is into scrapbooking(!?) how much dosh she can throw out on her little hobby. Hell, I watched friends toss obscene amounts of money into all the 'ghost hunting' BS (night vision video cameras, "EMF" detectors, and the like), then go traipse around cemeteries and old houses at night - yet I don't see any of them going on the SyFy or Travel channels anytime soon.*
* me, I just walk around with 'em and have fun debunking all the little bumps in the night. The funniest one was the EMF meters going nuts near a wall on an upper floor of an old Mason Lodge; a quick peek out the window revealed 4.8kV neighborhood feeder lines on poles, running along that side of the building. I almost didn't have the heart to show 'em that...:)
(insert Bill Gates being inexplicably elected President here)
Personally, it has bupkis to do with "votes" these days anyway. You vote for who you're told to; the only real difference is the "D" or "R" on the TV or newspaper tagline next to their names.
Now if you want *real* power to pick who gets elected to a federal office, then go build a huge corporation or a national-sized bank.
So, err, how would they give him time in jail for parking on a handicapped spot... on restricted private property?
I can paint a pair of lines in my driveway and a big handicapped symbol between them, and park there all I want to. It would make me appear to be a dick for doing it (then again, some neighbors might get a laugh out of it), but it's perfectly legal for me to do that. Same with any other private property that isn't an obvious publicly-'open' store or retail outlet.
It would depend on California laws, but I'm certain there are going to be some pretty obvious exceptions for what kind of private property you can enforce the rules on.
Agreed. I've always seen it as less an attempt at a clinical dating system, and more of an attempt to sound arrogant (in spite of best intentions).
There are still alternate calendars out there, based on Chinese, Jewish, Muslim, and various other religions. Not too many calendars out there that aren't.
It does make an interesting thought exercise, though... If you're going to make it non-religious, from which point do you start counting up the years? Picking the absolute oldest city in existence won't do it, because you'd have to change it all when an even older city was found. Picking an astronomical event might be easier, but, well, which one? Since we can't estimate the actual to-the-year age of the Earth, doing that is a no-go (and the coins wouldn't have enough room for "4,589,932,016" to be stamped on 'em).
Not a trekkie (or at least not enough of one to really know), but what was the whole Star Trek "Stardate" based on, anyway? It's the closest thing I've seen to any sort of universal and neutral calendar system.
Like sibling said - AD stands for the Latin Anno Domini, which in English comes out to: "In the Year of Our Lord"
That's also why AD goes in front of the date in traditional year designation (so that AD 2011 reads out: "In the Year of Our Lord, Two-Thousand Eleven" )
While perfectly logical and laudable, your suggestion has exactly two insurmountable problems:
1) Land prices in Japan are insanely expensive. We're talking expensive as in:, it's cheaper to make your own land just offshore. The inland acreage required to park a power plant would have likely cost enough to kill any idea of building one in the first place.
2) The same problem we have here in the US, namely, the little social problem known by the acronym of NIMBY. Except that instead of letters to the editor and rich folks paying politicians and/or lawyers to block it, you get all of that and violent demonstrations.
LOL! I was referring to that sudden $140m "UNIX IP licensing fee" Microsoft paid SCO directly not even six months after the whole brouhaha started... so unless you can show me some SysV code in Windows XP, 2k3, 2k8, Vista, 7...
As for the rest, someone was kind enough to record the various ways that Microsoft has snuck money into SCO the whole time.
It also helps that this time they're using the much more vague patent angle, and not the more-easily-discredited copyright one.
When SCO was dumb enough to chase IBM over copyright, they forgot that they had to prove copyright was actually violated (something that's 2x as impossible to do considering the whole BSD/SysV wars)
With patents, and the habit of chasing smaller companies (or those with no dog in the IT fights) Microsoft doesn't really have to prove much of anything - just whip out a ton of broadly-worded vague-but-registered patents, and even if you win the lawsuit, it'll either leave you dead broke, or your shareholders demanding your head on a platter for getting distracted.
This is also why you'll never see them go against Google directly - Google will fight back with everything they have; they would have to.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work for "Big Solar" (well, the third-largest PV maker on the planet). Trust me, if you had any idea how much energy is required to run a single CZ crystal furnace (let alone nearly 100 of them at just one site), or even one semi-tractor-sized wire saw (let alone nearly 50 of them), the last friggin' thing you'd think about solar panel production is "energy efficient", or "zero carbon footprint". And don't get me started on the chemicals required... they can be deadly as hell for crystal PV production if they ever leaked out, but are still rather tame compared to the chemicals a thin-film cell requires.
As for the rest, the climate has been hotter, and it has been colder. I'm not going to ring the alarms until we start seeing something that breaks an actual geological record.
Fortunately, birthrates are either stable or declining in most First-World countries when you discount immigration... due to a higher standard of living.
Now, how exactly do you propose to get the Third World to cut back on births without also promoting them to the same (energy-consuming) standard of living? Yep, that's what I thought.
Tell you what - take a tour of what used to be the USSR some time... the vast majority of the ecological damage there (esp. what used to be the Aral Sea) was done by a decidedly non-capitalistic government, hell-bent on a 'glorious revolutionary future'.
Or, you can drop the sophomoric and faux-intelligent 'OAMG teh capitalizm is teh nexus of 3vilz!' act.
Perhaps the Occupy Goatse movement is clogging the works?
Personally, I got a lot more radical and left-leaning after I retired in 2007, because with the pressure to have to go out and earn a living every day lifted from me at age 50, I could really view the system more objectively..
Don't know how to say it without sounding trollish, but honestly, I daresay that you've only swapped your old fears for new ones, and the new ones happen to be left-leaning.
Now, instead of worrying about a job, you have to worry about healthcare (as older folks tend to be far more frequent consumers of it). It also comes up that any means to avoid having to pay outrageous amounts to get that healthcare (even if the government pays it on your behalf) is probably going to sound a lot more appealing to you now that, if you're looking down the barrel of geriatric and long-term care, you likely will be in a decade or two, and you most likely know it. Other considerations, such as Social Security and most other AARP talking points, are going to be ones that you can now sympathize with... and most of them tend to lean leftward in their stances.
Besides, you also made the mistake of generalizing those who work. Some among us are entrepreneurs and/or otherwise own our own businesses. Where is the fear and abuse that they see? Their only real fears involve exactly two: lack of sales and excess of governmental intrusion (taxes, regulation, laws, etc). Are you saying that these folks also "required to be afraid" of the same things that most other conservatives fear?
I can also make one more argument: Those who are younger and working are more confident in their ability to be independent. OTOH, folks who are older and retired are less confident, to the point of knowing that someday, dependency on others for their care will be something that they have to deal with, and not everyone has kids who will happily take them in once they reach the point of non-independence. This tends to introduce yet another fear, and one far more visceral and personal than merely being over-taxed or over-regulated. That fear usually tends to want someone, anyone, and everyone to jump in and care for you as you age.
Not saying it's perfectly your case or anything, but I am saying that retirement doesn;t necessarily mean that you've suddenly become an objective judge of the world. It only trades old fears for new ones.
You'll have to get the Japanese going with their space program first before you'd see that. ;)
Originally, sure - but $billions in the hole with only a (very) slim hope of eventual ROI isn't much the way to do it. Then again, to be fair, maybe they think (hope/project/predict?) that their next console version will be the one that rakes in enough profit to pay all that off?
TFA does have it right though - we're already seeing XBoxes that do movies, music, online social bits, and the like.
Gaming consoles for starters. Used to be you could mod the unholy crap out of 'em, mod others' boxes, and nobody would care.
Do it now and you're screwed for most online uses of the device. Pass it around, and you're under arrest.
I get the feeling that, come your next server RFP, your HP and Dell sales reps are going to ask you which secure boot version you want - Windows, ESXi, RedHat, or SuSE (maybe, but only because Intel has a hard-on for it as their own preferred server distro). You really won't have any other alternative.
'course, that's going to limit the flexibility, and require you to buy a new server (or buy some sort of firmware/EFI flash utility) whenever you put another OS on it. Then again, considering that you'll be buying something from the vendor, it's not like they're going to lose that much sleep over it...
Yep... you get used to glazing past anything with Ed Bott's tagline in it. He's notorious for being a better Microsoft mouthpiece than Microsoft's PR department.
I just have a hard time deciding if it's because he loves Microsoft that damned much, or if he's just doing it to generate eyeballs and clicks.
True, but how much profit and lock-in can you get from that?
Doing that would crowd the store with a metric ton of garbage apps.
In the 3D/CG hobbyist realm, I see it all the time. Let me explain...
--
There are 'stores' where the site takes 50% (yes, you read that right) of a given CG product's sales. "Exclusive" (that is, sold at that site only) may get you the "merchant" 60% of the take. Most sites have at least a rudimentary form of product testing.
The problem? You have to wade through a whole lot of sheer garbage items, useless items, items with obvious defects (where the testing is either nonexistent or done by volunteers), and 50 bajillion varieties (of varying quality) of whatever the latest, hottest-selling item happens to be that week.
--
I consider Apple's $99 fee to be at least one way of keeping the worst of the absolute crap out of the App Store. I wish the CG hobbyist realm would do that - it would force folks to really stop and think before they upload, at the very least.
Agreed...
I've blown nearly $1000 this year on CG hobbyist software and low-end tools, and just over $1000 on a new laptop to play with it all on.
I don't expect to become the next Pixar or Dreamworks anytime soon, as I just have fun with it.
I figure the same would apply to writing code (which is occasionally fun to do, especially if it fills a need that I would stumble across in my own little hobby). $99 is a pittance compared to what most folks spend for things they find to be fun.
Don't believe me? Ask a hunter how much his firearms, tags/licenses, RV, quad-runner, etc cost him. Ask some soccer mom who is into scrapbooking(!?) how much dosh she can throw out on her little hobby. Hell, I watched friends toss obscene amounts of money into all the 'ghost hunting' BS (night vision video cameras, "EMF" detectors, and the like), then go traipse around cemeteries and old houses at night - yet I don't see any of them going on the SyFy or Travel channels anytime soon.*
* me, I just walk around with 'em and have fun debunking all the little bumps in the night. The funniest one was the EMF meters going nuts near a wall on an upper floor of an old Mason Lodge; a quick peek out the window revealed 4.8kV neighborhood feeder lines on poles, running along that side of the building. I almost didn't have the heart to show 'em that... :)
(insert Bill Gates being inexplicably elected President here)
Personally, it has bupkis to do with "votes" these days anyway. You vote for who you're told to; the only real difference is the "D" or "R" on the TV or newspaper tagline next to their names.
Now if you want *real* power to pick who gets elected to a federal office, then go build a huge corporation or a national-sized bank.
(The sad part is, I'm not really trolling...)
So, err, how would they give him time in jail for parking on a handicapped spot... on restricted private property?
I can paint a pair of lines in my driveway and a big handicapped symbol between them, and park there all I want to. It would make me appear to be a dick for doing it (then again, some neighbors might get a laugh out of it), but it's perfectly legal for me to do that. Same with any other private property that isn't an obvious publicly-'open' store or retail outlet.
It would depend on California laws, but I'm certain there are going to be some pretty obvious exceptions for what kind of private property you can enforce the rules on.
Some folks are trying to do just that.
Agreed. I've always seen it as less an attempt at a clinical dating system, and more of an attempt to sound arrogant (in spite of best intentions).
There are still alternate calendars out there, based on Chinese, Jewish, Muslim, and various other religions. Not too many calendars out there that aren't.
It does make an interesting thought exercise, though... If you're going to make it non-religious, from which point do you start counting up the years? Picking the absolute oldest city in existence won't do it, because you'd have to change it all when an even older city was found. Picking an astronomical event might be easier, but, well, which one? Since we can't estimate the actual to-the-year age of the Earth, doing that is a no-go (and the coins wouldn't have enough room for "4,589,932,016" to be stamped on 'em).
Not a trekkie (or at least not enough of one to really know), but what was the whole Star Trek "Stardate" based on, anyway? It's the closest thing I've seen to any sort of universal and neutral calendar system.
Like sibling said - AD stands for the Latin Anno Domini, which in English comes out to: "In the Year of Our Lord"
That's also why AD goes in front of the date in traditional year designation (so that AD 2011 reads out: "In the Year of Our Lord, Two-Thousand Eleven" )
While perfectly logical and laudable, your suggestion has exactly two insurmountable problems:
1) Land prices in Japan are insanely expensive. We're talking expensive as in:, it's cheaper to make your own land just offshore. The inland acreage required to park a power plant would have likely cost enough to kill any idea of building one in the first place.
2) The same problem we have here in the US, namely, the little social problem known by the acronym of NIMBY. Except that instead of letters to the editor and rich folks paying politicians and/or lawyers to block it, you get all of that and violent demonstrations.
LOL! I was referring to that sudden $140m "UNIX IP licensing fee" Microsoft paid SCO directly not even six months after the whole brouhaha started... so unless you can show me some SysV code in Windows XP, 2k3, 2k8, Vista, 7...
As for the rest, someone was kind enough to record the various ways that Microsoft has snuck money into SCO the whole time.
LOL, I love the idea of MS offsets. We should trade them on a central exchange.
They have one, sort of... I think they call it "eBay". :)
(...at least that's where I used to sell all the Windows install disks I never used a long time back).
It also helps that this time they're using the much more vague patent angle, and not the more-easily-discredited copyright one.
When SCO was dumb enough to chase IBM over copyright, they forgot that they had to prove copyright was actually violated (something that's 2x as impossible to do considering the whole BSD/SysV wars)
With patents, and the habit of chasing smaller companies (or those with no dog in the IT fights) Microsoft doesn't really have to prove much of anything - just whip out a ton of broadly-worded vague-but-registered patents, and even if you win the lawsuit, it'll either leave you dead broke, or your shareholders demanding your head on a platter for getting distracted.
This is also why you'll never see them go against Google directly - Google will fight back with everything they have; they would have to.
It's not like he missed much, from the looks of it.
...let's just call the results 'adult marital aids' and leave it at that.
Metro Interface.
(*snort*)