Doesn't even sound good compared to my fullsized pickup, which got 20mpg when it was new (not so new now, 33 years and 208,000 miles) and probably weighs double what this newfangled car does.
The nanny government doesn't want you to think, and people learn to say "Let the police handle it" about everything. The consequence of treating the populace like children is that they learn to react like children -- let mommy take care of it.
And if you take care of your own affairs, or suffer your own consequences, you're labeled a bully or a victim, respectively, and find yourself regulated or cushioned by that nanny system. Only nonthinking persons are left alone to live as "free" individuals.
And it's a bigger problem than just "for the children". Laws and regulations are being proliferated under a "stop *potential* abuse of [cause of the day]" all across the U.S., and apparently across the entire modern democratic world. Yet these attempts to halt or regulate corner cases primarily hit the innocent.
So I've come to your view across the board -- it's better that a few individuals (human, animal, environment, whatever) suffer, than that all of us be constantly under Big Brother's thumb.
Conversely, I look at the relative stability of Libya before and with Gaddafi, and I wonder if his removal is really such a good thing, especially for the average Libyan. Seems to me Libya is more likely to descend back into perpetual civil war than to become a "democratic" state.
And if you want to see what a relatively uneducated voting populace spits up for leaders, look no further than California. Name recognition trumped a 13% approval rate -- 100% were nonetheless re-elected last time around. Tell me how Libya will do better??
I love good umpiring. And most of it IS good. But even when it's not...
Baseball is often called "a game of inches". It's not about the perfect plays, nor the perfect calls. If all was perfection we could just run the stats and go home. What makes baseball unique is that those tiny flaws, those mere *inches*, determine everything. And to my mind thats not only the pitching and hitting and running and fielding, it's also the umpiring. The half-inch off the plate one allows as a strike and the next doesn't. The tiny human variances that impact everything about baseball and make every play an exercise in anticipation of how it might *diverge* from perfection.
So to my mind... replacing any part of the umpire's job brings an unbalancing mechanical aspect to this most human of games. I would rather the umpire made the occasional mistake, and keep the game human. Human error is part of the game, perhaps the most essential part.
My provider is a one-man band and he likes to talk about his business. He told me flat out that he asks customers to be reasonable about uploading because uploading costs him money, but downloading is free.
The cost? He told me it was about 5 cents per GB. (Bandwidth bought directly from AT&T.)
The "start button, then just type" works fine so long as you don't have any categories/programs that use a Winkey-letter. Frex, I had to name my utilities section "Tools" because Winkey-U is the start menu shortcut for Shut Down.
An AC says, ===== There's an EXCELLENT tool for managing the start menu. Just open Windows Explorer and navigate to the directory that contains your start menu shortcuts. By default this will be something like "C:\Documents and Settings\%YOUR_USER_NAME%\Start Menu". Once there you can simply create, delete. cut, copy and paste shortcuts around to your hearts content. Simple, fast and effective. After ten minutes work you'll have all your shortcuts arranged just how you like them. ====
Yes indeed, this is precisely what I do, and I try to teach this method to others, but have found for the less-tech-savvy, it's a losing battle. They really don't and can't see the relationship, and are deathly afraid of messing with it from behind, so to speak. They need a tool that they can directly relate to the start menu, see it as it visually applies to the menu layout.
The wise AC continues, ==== Why oh why has computer user interface design suddenly gone down the toilet on all platforms ? Who are the imbeciles who have suddenly decided that we should throw away 30 years worth or design paradigms just for the sake of some new shiny, unusable, cumbersome, inefficient , graphically intensive SHITE. ====
Couldn't have said it better. Tho I think this is what happens when management sees "SHINY!" as a marketing tool, and lets the marketing dept. convince them SHINY will outsell USEFUL (which sadly, is often true).
The AC continues, === Oh well looks like my "trusty" XP machine will still be going strong for another decade or two (or at least until 2038 when I'll be dead anyway;) ===
Same here... fact is, I still have a Win98 machine in everyday use, because the durn thing still Just Works. Well, maybe by 2038 there will finally be a linux desktop I can love (I keep hoping) but if Gnome-the-latest and the-daily-Firefox-version are any indication, FOSS is hellbent on copying the madness.
An AC says, ===== No need to manage one more thing on your computer (not everybody is an enthusiast computer mechanic) just use categories to automatically group things together like debian's been doing for years... =====
And isn't that a category manager? But doing it automatically presupposes the OS recognises every program and its function(s). I think better would be to let the user point at it and put it into the desired category. Could be integrated into the start menu -- rightclick on an item, select "Categorize", pick or add a category, move item and all associated shortcuts (whatever installed with the program, since some have a bunch).
And the problem fundamentally isn't that the Start Menu is too complicated. It's that they've never provided a good tool for *managing* it. So the average person, being unaware that it's just a bunch of directories and shortcut files, suffered with the floor-to-ceiling scrolling menu from hell. M$, on noting their complaints, responded by taking away most of the menu. This led to a different set of complaints, since now no one can find anything and the reaction is to give up on the start menu entirely.
But it still didn't solve the real problem, which as I said is still that there's no good tool that average non-savvy users can turn to for *managing* the Start Menu. How hard could it be to make a nice little interface (not relying on drag-and-drop in the live menu, which in my observation is usually a disaster) geared toward letting average folks sort out their programs into reasonable hierarchies, so the Start Menu isn't always One Huge Mess??
Spare machines aren't a problem, I have plenty of carcasses that can be made to earn their keep:) Tho scrounging 'em AGP cards, that's been unexpectedly thin pickings!
Those are small enough words, but my brain still hurts.:)
I've held onto a couple really nice boards with bad caps too, having a fantasy that someday I'll fix 'em, or try to anyway. Or at least get some soldering practice. Not terribly motivated so long as I've got a stack of good boards of similar qualities, but the day may come when you can't find a board that works with your legacy whatever that you can't live without... so I'm reluctant to throw 'em out.
Would I have to run my own proxy server with this Squid thing? Use small words, my network-fu is lacking, or possibly negative.:(
I nurse "old" systems along too, partly for thrift, but largely because yeah, I hate to see a functional box go to the dump, it's a waste. Everything I have here is salvage, other than the odd part bought when I couldn't scrounge it. Unfortunately the bad-capacitors era took out a lot of otherwise perfectly-functional P4s (and my soldering-fu ain't that great either). Conversely most Slot1 era systems are stable as bedrock. Those, and Socket7, are what I see the most of still alive and kicking even when nearly old enough to vote.
I recently replaced the PSU in this old P3... turns out TOPower still makes an AT unit that's every bit as good as the one I bought from 'em 15 years before (killed by a lightning strike -- ate the surge unit, the UPS, and the PSU), and reasonably priced!!
I also support a bunch of sight-impaired folks, and every one of 'em has an old but *reliable* box -- to them, reliable and stable and not having to learn new when they can barely see the old is critical, and even if they can afford new, the learning curve is like adding a handicap to what they already have. Another reason to appreciate repairing rather than replacing!
Yeah, and my internet box is still a lowly P3-550 with a mere 1GB RAM. It's outlived all the P4s and keeps on chuggin' along. You'd think that would suffice to do what amounts to rearranging text on the screen via a simple interpreted script, but apparently not. The whole Moz family has dreadful programming Zen.:( Good example of why coders should be forced to work on the minimum hardware, not the very best -- make 'em realize what they're doing to anyone who is behind the bleeding edge.
Whatever major "upgrade" was done to JS over the past year or so has made things dramatically worse; now it's near-sure to stall if it has to do anything complex. Used to at least run, if not well.
Anyway, I think the original question has merit -- wouldn't it be nice to be able to run cranky sites through a junk-stripping proxy, rather than have to fuck with or change our browsers to make the results halfway readable??!
Yeah, but that still doesn't get past Mozilla's gawdawful slow rendering engine. NS3 renders at 10-20x the speed, no shit. Having no patience with the World Wide Wait as it is, I prefer having it sped up to somewhere near 1998 levels whenever possible. I swear, 1998 and dialup (rendered on a 486 to boot) was faster than today's bloated pages on broadband!
I still use good old Netscape 3 on some sites, including Slashdot. No styles, no javascript, no images. I couldn't read/. at all without it, the default look makes my aging eyes bleed and it's so slow you have to drive stakes to see if it's moving. With NS3 it's essentially plain text, and very fast.
As an experienced livestock producer, I know the value of being able to eyeball-judge the situation and cut to the chase. Treat the obvious before spending a fortune on tests. But insurance won't pay for that; insurance wants everything itemized and justified. (I've watched that force veterinary charges up by a factor of 10 or more in just ten years, despite only 1% of pets being insured.) You can't itemize a "tap on the chest" on an insurance form.:(
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't even sound good compared to my fullsized pickup, which got 20mpg when it was new (not so new now, 33 years and 208,000 miles) and probably weighs double what this newfangled car does.
Compared to what's been going on in say, Sudan or the central Sahara??
I dunno, but that sounds like a levothyroxin dosage, and turns out they're all over the map, both namebrand and generic. :(
[eyeing computer graveyard] I'm gonna be rich!!
Seriously, I'd rather be unconnected than support such a scheme.
However... when they realise that simply tapping the ISPs will cover the same ground, with far fewer to coerce into cooperation...
The nanny government doesn't want you to think, and people learn to say "Let the police handle it" about everything. The consequence of treating the populace like children is that they learn to react like children -- let mommy take care of it.
And if you take care of your own affairs, or suffer your own consequences, you're labeled a bully or a victim, respectively, and find yourself regulated or cushioned by that nanny system. Only nonthinking persons are left alone to live as "free" individuals.
And it's a bigger problem than just "for the children". Laws and regulations are being proliferated under a "stop *potential* abuse of [cause of the day]" all across the U.S., and apparently across the entire modern democratic world. Yet these attempts to halt or regulate corner cases primarily hit the innocent.
So I've come to your view across the board -- it's better that a few individuals (human, animal, environment, whatever) suffer, than that all of us be constantly under Big Brother's thumb.
Conversely, I look at the relative stability of Libya before and with Gaddafi, and I wonder if his removal is really such a good thing, especially for the average Libyan. Seems to me Libya is more likely to descend back into perpetual civil war than to become a "democratic" state.
And if you want to see what a relatively uneducated voting populace spits up for leaders, look no further than California. Name recognition trumped a 13% approval rate -- 100% were nonetheless re-elected last time around. Tell me how Libya will do better??
I love good umpiring. And most of it IS good. But even when it's not...
Baseball is often called "a game of inches". It's not about the perfect plays, nor the perfect calls. If all was perfection we could just run the stats and go home. What makes baseball unique is that those tiny flaws, those mere *inches*, determine everything. And to my mind thats not only the pitching and hitting and running and fielding, it's also the umpiring. The half-inch off the plate one allows as a strike and the next doesn't. The tiny human variances that impact everything about baseball and make every play an exercise in anticipation of how it might *diverge* from perfection.
So to my mind... replacing any part of the umpire's job brings an unbalancing mechanical aspect to this most human of games. I would rather the umpire made the occasional mistake, and keep the game human. Human error is part of the game, perhaps the most essential part.
My provider is a one-man band and he likes to talk about his business. He told me flat out that he asks customers to be reasonable about uploading because uploading costs him money, but downloading is free.
The cost? He told me it was about 5 cents per GB. (Bandwidth bought directly from AT&T.)
The "start button, then just type" works fine so long as you don't have any categories/programs that use a Winkey-letter. Frex, I had to name my utilities section "Tools" because Winkey-U is the start menu shortcut for Shut Down.
An AC says,
=====
There's an EXCELLENT tool for managing the start menu. Just open Windows Explorer and navigate to the directory that contains your start menu shortcuts. By default this will be something like "C:\Documents and Settings\%YOUR_USER_NAME%\Start Menu". Once there you can simply create, delete. cut, copy and paste shortcuts around to your hearts content. Simple, fast and effective. After ten minutes work you'll have all your shortcuts arranged just how you like them.
====
Yes indeed, this is precisely what I do, and I try to teach this method to others, but have found for the less-tech-savvy, it's a losing battle. They really don't and can't see the relationship, and are deathly afraid of messing with it from behind, so to speak. They need a tool that they can directly relate to the start menu, see it as it visually applies to the menu layout.
The wise AC continues,
====
Why oh why has computer user interface design suddenly gone down the toilet on all platforms ? Who are the imbeciles who have suddenly decided that we should throw away 30 years worth or design paradigms just for the sake of some new shiny, unusable, cumbersome, inefficient , graphically intensive SHITE.
====
Couldn't have said it better. Tho I think this is what happens when management sees "SHINY!" as a marketing tool, and lets the marketing dept. convince them SHINY will outsell USEFUL (which sadly, is often true).
The AC continues, ;)
===
Oh well looks like my "trusty" XP machine will still be going strong for another decade or two (or at least until 2038 when I'll be dead anyway
===
Same here... fact is, I still have a Win98 machine in everyday use, because the durn thing still Just Works. Well, maybe by 2038 there will finally be a linux desktop I can love (I keep hoping) but if Gnome-the-latest and the-daily-Firefox-version are any indication, FOSS is hellbent on copying the madness.
An AC says,
=====
No need to manage one more thing on your computer (not everybody is an enthusiast computer mechanic) just use categories to automatically group things together like debian's been doing for years...
=====
And isn't that a category manager? But doing it automatically presupposes the OS recognises every program and its function(s). I think better would be to let the user point at it and put it into the desired category. Could be integrated into the start menu -- rightclick on an item, select "Categorize", pick or add a category, move item and all associated shortcuts (whatever installed with the program, since some have a bunch).
And the problem fundamentally isn't that the Start Menu is too complicated. It's that they've never provided a good tool for *managing* it. So the average person, being unaware that it's just a bunch of directories and shortcut files, suffered with the floor-to-ceiling scrolling menu from hell. M$, on noting their complaints, responded by taking away most of the menu. This led to a different set of complaints, since now no one can find anything and the reaction is to give up on the start menu entirely.
But it still didn't solve the real problem, which as I said is still that there's no good tool that average non-savvy users can turn to for *managing* the Start Menu. How hard could it be to make a nice little interface (not relying on drag-and-drop in the live menu, which in my observation is usually a disaster) geared toward letting average folks sort out their programs into reasonable hierarchies, so the Start Menu isn't always One Huge Mess??
Spare machines aren't a problem, I have plenty of carcasses that can be made to earn their keep :) Tho scrounging 'em AGP cards, that's been unexpectedly thin pickings!
I've always seen "black lights" as an eye-searing light-purple, so bright I can't be near 'em.
Ah, thanks, saved for reference. My brain is now working again, the instructions being simple enough to untangle its two left f/e/e/t/ halves. :)
Those are small enough words, but my brain still hurts. :)
I've held onto a couple really nice boards with bad caps too, having a fantasy that someday I'll fix 'em, or try to anyway. Or at least get some soldering practice. Not terribly motivated so long as I've got a stack of good boards of similar qualities, but the day may come when you can't find a board that works with your legacy whatever that you can't live without... so I'm reluctant to throw 'em out.
Would I have to run my own proxy server with this Squid thing? Use small words, my network-fu is lacking, or possibly negative. :(
I nurse "old" systems along too, partly for thrift, but largely because yeah, I hate to see a functional box go to the dump, it's a waste. Everything I have here is salvage, other than the odd part bought when I couldn't scrounge it. Unfortunately the bad-capacitors era took out a lot of otherwise perfectly-functional P4s (and my soldering-fu ain't that great either). Conversely most Slot1 era systems are stable as bedrock. Those, and Socket7, are what I see the most of still alive and kicking even when nearly old enough to vote.
I recently replaced the PSU in this old P3... turns out TOPower still makes an AT unit that's every bit as good as the one I bought from 'em 15 years before (killed by a lightning strike -- ate the surge unit, the UPS, and the PSU), and reasonably priced!!
I also support a bunch of sight-impaired folks, and every one of 'em has an old but *reliable* box -- to them, reliable and stable and not having to learn new when they can barely see the old is critical, and even if they can afford new, the learning curve is like adding a handicap to what they already have. Another reason to appreciate repairing rather than replacing!
Yeah, and my internet box is still a lowly P3-550 with a mere 1GB RAM. It's outlived all the P4s and keeps on chuggin' along. You'd think that would suffice to do what amounts to rearranging text on the screen via a simple interpreted script, but apparently not. The whole Moz family has dreadful programming Zen. :( Good example of why coders should be forced to work on the minimum hardware, not the very best -- make 'em realize what they're doing to anyone who is behind the bleeding edge.
Whatever major "upgrade" was done to JS over the past year or so has made things dramatically worse; now it's near-sure to stall if it has to do anything complex. Used to at least run, if not well.
Anyway, I think the original question has merit -- wouldn't it be nice to be able to run cranky sites through a junk-stripping proxy, rather than have to fuck with or change our browsers to make the results halfway readable??!
Yeah, but that still doesn't get past Mozilla's gawdawful slow rendering engine. NS3 renders at 10-20x the speed, no shit. Having no patience with the World Wide Wait as it is, I prefer having it sped up to somewhere near 1998 levels whenever possible. I swear, 1998 and dialup (rendered on a 486 to boot) was faster than today's bloated pages on broadband!
I still use good old Netscape 3 on some sites, including Slashdot. No styles, no javascript, no images. I couldn't read /. at all without it, the default look makes my aging eyes bleed and it's so slow you have to drive stakes to see if it's moving. With NS3 it's essentially plain text, and very fast.
Ha, I have a very nice P4 server board that has *ISA* slots. Mine has an AGP slot, but the standard version only has ISA and PCI.
http://www.ibase.com.tw/mb800.htm
To summarize what you're pointing out -- censorship is at root about keeping people in a juvenile (ignorant, dependent) state.
[skims here and there, trying to remind self from a reading of 4 decades ago]
Lordy, is that the *original* tinfoil hat??
As an experienced livestock producer, I know the value of being able to eyeball-judge the situation and cut to the chase. Treat the obvious before spending a fortune on tests. But insurance won't pay for that; insurance wants everything itemized and justified. (I've watched that force veterinary charges up by a factor of 10 or more in just ten years, despite only 1% of pets being insured.) You can't itemize a "tap on the chest" on an insurance form. :(