Diesel nanoparticles?? You mean as in common contaminants, or the longchain carbon molecules themselves? And what about fuel-oil home heating furnaces that use #2 diesel??
Whilst reading here, it did occur to me to wonder about "microfibre" fabrics that are now becoming more common (especially since the price has evidently now dropped to about the same as regular fabrics) -- do they pose broken-fibre inhalation hazards that ordinary fabrics don't?
Neither a failure nor an "awful businessman" -- but rather, one who is sadly true to the age he lives in, where CEOs gut companies and move on as a standard career move, and make a lot of money in the process.
That's often the case -- fame comes from just one loud incident, or a series of loud incidents -- while many others accomplish more over their lifetime, but do so in "insignificant" drips and drabs which the public never notices.
I'm reminded of something I once heard, to the effect of "Generals win wars, but grunts still have to fight in the trenches."
BTW, I'm one of those weirdoes who DOES stay to read the movie credits.:)
AFAIK there's no gap; however there've been several huge spasm of registered users that seem to have done nothing but register, post a few times, and vanish -- one such spasm was in the 100k range, and another in the 300k range. Doubtless the usual side effect of being mentioned in some mundane press. I suspect most of the 800k range will also be here today, gone tomorrow, as that also seems to be largely a "spasm".
I trust PayPal with my CC info, about as much as I do any online retailer -- which is to say, within limits: on a secure server and a per-transaction basis.
But I DON'T trust PayPal with my BANK ACCOUNT info, which they "require" if you want to spend over a certain amount (last I looked, the limit was $2000) or get paid by others. Paypal HAS been hacked in the past, and people's bank accounts pillaged thereby.
The solution is to have an isolated bank account (not connected to another account) that is used ONLY for Paypal stuff, has no overdrafts allowed, and is kept pretty much empty.
[laughing] I know what you mean. When I find myself sounding like some author who I *know* isn't very good, I go read some Cherryh. Knocks the verbiage right outta me.:)
Agreed re Card's HowTo books -- in fact, I think they're better than his fiction (which often violates his own HowTo advice, in ways that harm the story). And even if a writer already knows this material, it doesn't hurt to be reminded. Like yourself, I'd already taught myself "all that stuff", but even so it was useful to see it laid out in so many words.
However, I *would* deny him the right to *criminalize" those who disagree with HIM.
To quote from Card,
"The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly"
IOW, the goal is to make sure that if you're bold enough to come out of the closet, you also must be bold enough to face arrest.
But there's a bigger issue here -- and that is the root policy of making sure *everyone* can be found in violation of SOME law, so that if they want to arrest you, they can do so. In Card's case it's being applied only to homosexuals. But what if the old laws still applied to (another poster's example) racially-mixed marriages? should those laws remain on the books too, just because someone disagrees with the practice?
Point being, any law that is *designed* to be *selectively* enforced is wrong.
My 286 was acquired used and came with DOS6 and some other stuff. I never had any manuals while I was learning to use it (tho various retail-box editions fell on my head in later years), but I did have Buerg's LIST. To this day I think it's normal to peer at binaries with a hex viewer.:)
[laughing] Mine, a lowly 12MHz, didn't boot that fast, it took about two minutes -- but it had a slow HD (ST225), was DS'd (later Stac'd), and loaded a whole bunch of crap -- there were a number of TSRs I just HAD to have, like Snipper. Plus it had to prep the 2mb RAMdisk on a memory card. But after that... all the real work was done on the RAMdisk, so it was slick, and since it was rebooted seldom to never, how long that took didn't matter anyway.
And in a pinch, that 286 still does everything I absolutely can't live without. Ah, life was so simple then...:)
Yeah, Win2.0/3.0 wasn't any big improvement over the GEM desktop or various other task switchers, and I gather GeoWorks actually did for-really multitasking (I know a guy who used it to multitask with an XT -- he'd be surfing the net with a DOS client for AOL, while printing memos in the background.)
I never had any problem with Win3.1, but WFWG definitely was smoother/faster, and had some other nice improvements. I finally retired it, with reluctance, in 2001, mainly because Netscape had addicted me to right-click, and I thought everything ought to have a context menu.:) I still have the complete archive, tho, and one of these days may resurrect it onto one of the older systems. Mine ran atop NWDOS7, and DR/NWDOS's memory manager doesn't get along with newer chipsets (won't play nice with iBX440 at all).
Odd setups: my Win95 OSR2 box uses the default M$DOS7, but the DRDOS7 EMM386 and DMPI host. Works great!
Never cared for PC Towels, er, Tools myself. Or any of the 3rd party memory managers... I saw more trouble directly due to QEMM than any other single DOS era utility. Other folk would sing the praises of such stuff yet bitch about crashes, and here my 286 with its vanilla M$DOS5.00 had all of two reboots in 5 years, one due to HD needing a fresh LLF, the other due to a power outage beyond the UPS's capacity.
Speaking of power, think I'd best flee... we're having a whopping big lightning storm and the power keeps cutting out. I can feel a tingle in the keyboard through two layers of surge protection (surge unit and UPS).
That's not actually a DOS problem you're describing -- and before you lay too much blame on DOS6 vs DOS5, they are almost identical, the source base is the same (the source code IS, ah, "out there") -- so any major faults that are in DOS6, the OS itself, would also be in DOS5. They just aren't different enough for DOS6 have a core problem that DOS5 didn't also have.
But major data loss does sound exactly like what happened with Smartdrive when write-behind caching was active -- it could take up to 5 minutes to write data to disk, and meanwhile the files were open. If you turned off the system in the meantime -- well, all those files got toasted. Smartdrive first shipped with DOS6, and did install by default, with a default of write-behind caching active. There was a switch to disable write-behind, which cured the problem.
IIRC, the disk I/O stuff is actually IBM's code from DOS 3.1, not changed much. And your experience of poorer performance with DOS6 goes against all my experience with old hardware (I still have a working XT and 286, both with DOS6. The XT even has VGA!) -- I remember how back in the neolithic era, a lot of people insisted on using DOS3.x with XTs, because it was "faster" and "used less memory". Well, one day I grabbed the wrong boot disk and oops, here's an XT starting with DOS6. Man, what a difference. Almost twice as fast as DOS3.x, and wound up with about 50k more free conventional memory even prior to tweaking it. So much for popular wisdom!
(Then as now, popular wisdom often wasn't. Frex, there was the "different floppy drives can't read each other's disks" issue, much bewailed... turned out it wasn't due to any difference in floppy drives, but rather that DOS3.x could not read floppies formatted by DOS5/6, because the boot sector is different. However, DOS5/6 CAN read disks formatted on DOS3.x. Start the DOS3 box with a DOS5/6 boot disk, and all of a sudden it can magically read disks formatted on the DOS5/6 box. -- XTreeGold formats with a DOS3.x boot sector, which was how I twigged to the real issue.)
Have to wonder about your disasters with Win3.1 as well -- my WFWG ran for 7 years, doing all sorts of heavy lifting day in and day out, and I could count the total number of crashes on one hand. And this was typical for my clients as well (in fact I still have one person using Win3.1). Crashy behaviour in Windows, then as now, tended to be mainly due to hardware/driver bugs. Notably system and video BIOS bugs, but sometimes other stuff. -- Frex, Win3.1 did not get along with Rockwell modems; the swapfile would get corrupted and then Windows would refuse to start. You could either replace the modem, or delete the swapfile prior to starting Windows, and the problem would go away.
Borland-built apps stop being good the moment they start using 32RTM or its cousins... lordy, what a lot of weird behaviour...
Wow, didn't know there were good fossil fields near Glasgow, tho I do recall there are some out in the sticks beyond Billings somewhere. -- Given the area's economy, I doubt any serious budget went into digging up that triceratops, which in itself goes to show that it must have been relatively accessable. ("Hey, pa, look what Shep dug up from the south forty!!")
I was living near Bozeman (Belgrade actually) when Mt.St.Helens blew, so a couple hundred miles closer than you, if not significant in contintenal distance (or geography -- since it had to cross major mountain ranges to get to MT!) We got about a quarter inch of ash, mostly very fine powdery stuff, but with some sandy grit, about like medium sandpaper grit. Looked like it was snowing out for three days. -- My uncle's ranch is about 20 miles west of Ft.Benton, and they got a good enough ashing, loaded with mineral micronutrients, that the next year's wheat crop averaged 100 bushels/acre, and some spots hit 120 bu./acre!! (For the non-farmers here, 60 to 80 bu./acre is the average range for healthy cropland.)
Don't remember when Yellowstone last had a noteworthy fire (or if I was still in MT at the time -- I left in 1984) but I do remember the whopping sunsets we got after big fires in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
Now I'm in SoCal, and seems to me that here, the average person's ordinary state of mind is unreasoning panic over some disaster or other, often imaginary, and invariably blown all out of proportion (helped along by news media that have nothing better to suck eyeballs to ads with). You've heard of the four California seasons? Fire, Flood, Riot, and Earthquake!
And if the world ever does end due to something humanity does, well, it'll just be evolution in action.;)
IIRC, the T-Rex skeleton on display at Montana State University was dug up somewhere in the neighbourhood of Gallatin Gateway. Which is now one of the coldest winter spots on the planet, and hardly tropical in summer. Somehow I doubt humanity was around to cause "global cooling" back in ol' T-Rex's day, either;)
The last time we had major global warming, the Brits took to growing grapes. [It just occurred to me... that was also the heyday of many N.A. Indian tribes, and some of the pre-European-era die-off was probably due to failure to adapt when the climate cooled back down.] Presumably another such cycle will eventually come along without bothering to consult humanity's preferences, and large swaths of Canada will become good for something besides caribou and mosquitoes. For a few centuries or a few millennia, anyway. Then the sun cycle will swing back the other way, and there'll be wailing and gnashing of teeth about how [insert politically-incorrect human activity here] is causing global cooling.
I recall from the "humanity will destroy the world" models popular some decades back, that the big fear back-then was indeed global cooling due to industrial particulate matter. I want to see the factory that can compete with Krakatoa.;)
Regardless, the megaclimate will do whatever it damn pleases, and we'll just have to adapt -- after all, that's what humans are best at, and why we've become the dominant species on this planet.
"It will also provide a new source of tax revenue, which is the main reason the gov't wants it."
Exactly. North Dakota's state gov't is one of the most internet-savvy in the entire nation (there is almost no county, town, agency, or department, no matter how small, that doesn't have its own well-managed website). So I find it very hard to believe that this is being done from ignorance of what eBay IS, or how eBay differs from traditional meatspace auctions (which are still commonplace in ND).
Small businesses in ND just don't have the revenue base to shell out for this sort of thing, so what will happen is that 3rd party eBay consignments will simply go away.
BTW, Crosby ND is a farming town with a population of 1043 people, and is over 200 miles from the nearest city of any real size. I'm sure it must be a major hotbed of consignment sale fraud.;)
Yep. There's a website somewhere that has lists of who is on the Board of Directors for which companies, and considering how many megabillions of dollars they're ultimately in charge of, it's a VERY short list, with most of 'em sitting on the Board for a number of corporations, plus most are major shareholders. And the sad thing is, these aren't stupid people -- they know *exactly* where all this is headed, but they've already "got theirs", so who needs all those costly workers and annoying customers??!
Exactly. I ranted about this very thing up a ways, about how we are becoming a senile economy (and society) consisting of managers and labourers (illegal immigrants), with nothing inbetween.
The old guard that built their businesses from the ground up have mostly aged out and been replaced by bean counters who can't see further than next quarter's profits. The cost of doing business has skyrocketed, thanks to an overwhelming weight of regulations to comply with and fees to pay (workman's comp is a big cost issue here in Calif.) Between bean counters and gov't regs, there's no room left for regular folk to build a lifelong career with a solid business. Those jobs have all gone overseas, leaving only work that needs a strong back on the spot, and that work goes to the lowest bidder.
Or better yet, pay them by results -- after all, in other jobs you don't get paid for what you know, but rather for what you produce.
One of the better math teachers I had in high school wasn't a math dude at all, but rather was mostly a phys ed teacher. Should he be penalized because he lacked a math degree, even tho his students learned really their math well?
Conversely, the worst math teacher I've had was the math PhD who taught my college calculus course. He might have known the topic a lot more thoroughly, but he didn't have a clue how to convey that knowledge to his students.
It used to be that science-oriented students could get a scholarship from a corporation, and in return you agreed to do an internship for them after you graduated, with the expectation that this would lead to lifelong employment.
I expect this "needless expense" probably got killed by ruthless cost-cutting in the name of the almighty bottom line.
Actually, the notion that stuff must be "fun to learn" is where education went wrong in the first place. Instead of kids figuring out that by damn you WILL learn all this stuff, and whether you think it's fun or interesting is irrelevant -- now kids are taught that they only have to learn stuff they find entertaining (fun).
The moment you inject the idea of "education is fun" into the classroom, kids stop taking it seriously, and teachers stop teaching and become entertainers.
The younger generation likes to rail about the bad old days when public education was boring and mean, but back then we sure as hell had far better-educated crops of graduates.
In 1972, my public high school had a graduating class of about 570 students, NONE with below a "C" average (by real standards, no feelgood passes; and no curve grading either) -- and only TWO dropouts. How did YOUR high school do last year?
First post I've seen here today that got the issue. It's not that other countries are any more innovative than the U.S. in its heyday. Rather, that we've become a senile society that is more concerned about protecting this quarter's bottom line than making sure there will even BE a bottom line next year, and shouts the protectionist mantra "think of the children!" rather than just letting kids be kids, and do the innovative things kids do simply because they haven't yet been ingrained with the notions that everything is too dangerous or not worth doing for its own sake.
But the other major factor, that no one has mentioned, is that costs have gotten out of hand. In California, which used to be a hotbed of research, costs per employee have skyrocketed (only about 25% of the cost per worker is salary; the rest is workman's comp, liability insurance, and the like); this hardly encourages opening new facilities for any purpose, let alone for R&D that you KNOW will not immediately show a profit. And the cost of modern environmental regulation compliance is often more than keeping an industry alive is worth. So we've shut down all the steel mills -- so now there's no more incentive to do research involving steel, because the whole industry has gone overseas, where it need not deal with the EPA, OSHA, and the accelerating cost of workers' insurance. That's just one example, but the problem has proliferated throughout science and engineering.
The upshot is that we're becoming a nation of managers and labourers. Our own kids grow up to become managers, and the illegal immigrants' kids grow up to be labourers. Meanwhile, all the innovation and growth is taking place in countries that are still "young".
And "intelligent design" doesn't have to be the product of any religion's god(s). It could just as well be aliens, or nanoprobes, or cosmic viruses, or [insert crackpot theorum here].
Also, one has to wonder just how intelligent the designer was, when we lowly humans can build complex stuff that fails less often than our own bodies do. Unless, of course, the design specs were not "build it perfect" but rather "build it good enough".
Gee, isn't that exactly what evolution selects toward? Not what works perfect, but rather, what works good enough to survive and reproduce.
Or maybe the ID specs were perfect, but the implementation sucked (Zeus to Dionysus: "How many times have I told you not to play with the critter-assembly machinery while you're drunk?") or bureaucracy got in the way (Thor to Odin: "But I thought *you* were going to create that part!")
Fundamentalist foot-in-the-door issues aside, the whole ID concept needs, um, smarter design.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Diesel nanoparticles?? You mean as in common contaminants, or the longchain carbon molecules themselves? And what about fuel-oil home heating furnaces that use #2 diesel??
Whilst reading here, it did occur to me to wonder about "microfibre" fabrics that are now becoming more common (especially since the price has evidently now dropped to about the same as regular fabrics) -- do they pose broken-fibre inhalation hazards that ordinary fabrics don't?
Neither a failure nor an "awful businessman" -- but rather, one who is sadly true to the age he lives in, where CEOs gut companies and move on as a standard career move, and make a lot of money in the process.
That's often the case -- fame comes from just one loud incident, or a series of loud incidents -- while many others accomplish more over their lifetime, but do so in "insignificant" drips and drabs which the public never notices.
:)
I'm reminded of something I once heard, to the effect of "Generals win wars, but grunts still have to fight in the trenches."
BTW, I'm one of those weirdoes who DOES stay to read the movie credits.
The old farts are a'comin' for ya, sonny :)
:)
AFAIK there's no gap; however there've been several huge spasm of registered users that seem to have done nothing but register, post a few times, and vanish -- one such spasm was in the 100k range, and another in the 300k range. Doubtless the usual side effect of being mentioned in some mundane press. I suspect most of the 800k range will also be here today, gone tomorrow, as that also seems to be largely a "spasm".
That said, I want UID 1,000,000
I trust PayPal with my CC info, about as much as I do any online retailer -- which is to say, within limits: on a secure server and a per-transaction basis.
But I DON'T trust PayPal with my BANK ACCOUNT info, which they "require" if you want to spend over a certain amount (last I looked, the limit was $2000) or get paid by others. Paypal HAS been hacked in the past, and people's bank accounts pillaged thereby.
The solution is to have an isolated bank account (not connected to another account) that is used ONLY for Paypal stuff, has no overdrafts allowed, and is kept pretty much empty.
[laughing] I know what you mean. When I find myself sounding like some author who I *know* isn't very good, I go read some Cherryh. Knocks the verbiage right outta me. :)
Agreed re Card's HowTo books -- in fact, I think they're better than his fiction (which often violates his own HowTo advice, in ways that harm the story). And even if a writer already knows this material, it doesn't hurt to be reminded. Like yourself, I'd already taught myself "all that stuff", but even so it was useful to see it laid out in so many words.
No, I wouldn't deny him his right to disagree.
However, I *would* deny him the right to *criminalize" those who disagree with HIM.
To quote from Card,
"The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly"
IOW, the goal is to make sure that if you're bold enough to come out of the closet, you also must be bold enough to face arrest.
But there's a bigger issue here -- and that is the root policy of making sure *everyone* can be found in violation of SOME law, so that if they want to arrest you, they can do so. In Card's case it's being applied only to homosexuals. But what if the old laws still applied to (another poster's example) racially-mixed marriages? should those laws remain on the books too, just because someone disagrees with the practice?
Point being, any law that is *designed* to be *selectively* enforced is wrong.
My 286 was acquired used and came with DOS6 and some other stuff. I never had any manuals while I was learning to use it (tho various retail-box editions fell on my head in later years), but I did have Buerg's LIST. To this day I think it's normal to peer at binaries with a hex viewer. :)
[laughing] Mine, a lowly 12MHz, didn't boot that fast, it took about two minutes -- but it had a slow HD (ST225), was DS'd (later Stac'd), and loaded a whole bunch of crap -- there were a number of TSRs I just HAD to have, like Snipper. Plus it had to prep the 2mb RAMdisk on a memory card. But after that... all the real work was done on the RAMdisk, so it was slick, and since it was rebooted seldom to never, how long that took didn't matter anyway.
:)
And in a pinch, that 286 still does everything I absolutely can't live without. Ah, life was so simple then...
Er, typo dept, that 286 ran M$DOS 6.00. You've got me having 5's on the brain, or at least in the fingers :)
:)
Oh, and the current primary function of my Win95 box is to run... DOOM
Yeah, Win2.0/3.0 wasn't any big improvement over the GEM desktop or various other task switchers, and I gather GeoWorks actually did for-really multitasking (I know a guy who used it to multitask with an XT -- he'd be surfing the net with a DOS client for AOL, while printing memos in the background.)
:) I still have the complete archive, tho, and one of these days may resurrect it onto one of the older systems. Mine ran atop NWDOS7, and DR/NWDOS's memory manager doesn't get along with newer chipsets (won't play nice with iBX440 at all).
... I saw more trouble directly due to QEMM than any other single DOS era utility. Other folk would sing the praises of such stuff yet bitch about crashes, and here my 286 with its vanilla M$DOS5.00 had all of two reboots in 5 years, one due to HD needing a fresh LLF, the other due to a power outage beyond the UPS's capacity.
I never had any problem with Win3.1, but WFWG definitely was smoother/faster, and had some other nice improvements. I finally retired it, with reluctance, in 2001, mainly because Netscape had addicted me to right-click, and I thought everything ought to have a context menu.
Odd setups: my Win95 OSR2 box uses the default M$DOS7, but the DRDOS7 EMM386 and DMPI host. Works great!
Never cared for PC Towels, er, Tools myself. Or any of the 3rd party memory managers
Speaking of power, think I'd best flee... we're having a whopping big lightning storm and the power keeps cutting out. I can feel a tingle in the keyboard through two layers of surge protection (surge unit and UPS).
Finally found what I did with the reply notice :)
... turned out it wasn't due to any difference in floppy drives, but rather that DOS3.x could not read floppies formatted by DOS5/6, because the boot sector is different. However, DOS5/6 CAN read disks formatted on DOS3.x. Start the DOS3 box with a DOS5/6 boot disk, and all of a sudden it can magically read disks formatted on the DOS5/6 box. -- XTreeGold formats with a DOS3.x boot sector, which was how I twigged to the real issue.)
That's not actually a DOS problem you're describing -- and before you lay too much blame on DOS6 vs DOS5, they are almost identical, the source base is the same (the source code IS, ah, "out there") -- so any major faults that are in DOS6, the OS itself, would also be in DOS5. They just aren't different enough for DOS6 have a core problem that DOS5 didn't also have.
But major data loss does sound exactly like what happened with Smartdrive when write-behind caching was active -- it could take up to 5 minutes to write data to disk, and meanwhile the files were open. If you turned off the system in the meantime -- well, all those files got toasted. Smartdrive first shipped with DOS6, and did install by default, with a default of write-behind caching active. There was a switch to disable write-behind, which cured the problem.
IIRC, the disk I/O stuff is actually IBM's code from DOS 3.1, not changed much. And your experience of poorer performance with DOS6 goes against all my experience with old hardware (I still have a working XT and 286, both with DOS6. The XT even has VGA!) -- I remember how back in the neolithic era, a lot of people insisted on using DOS3.x with XTs, because it was "faster" and "used less memory". Well, one day I grabbed the wrong boot disk and oops, here's an XT starting with DOS6. Man, what a difference. Almost twice as fast as DOS3.x, and wound up with about 50k more free conventional memory even prior to tweaking it. So much for popular wisdom!
(Then as now, popular wisdom often wasn't. Frex, there was the "different floppy drives can't read each other's disks" issue, much bewailed
Have to wonder about your disasters with Win3.1 as well -- my WFWG ran for 7 years, doing all sorts of heavy lifting day in and day out, and I could count the total number of crashes on one hand. And this was typical for my clients as well (in fact I still have one person using Win3.1). Crashy behaviour in Windows, then as now, tended to be mainly due to hardware/driver bugs. Notably system and video BIOS bugs, but sometimes other stuff. -- Frex, Win3.1 did not get along with Rockwell modems; the swapfile would get corrupted and then Windows would refuse to start. You could either replace the modem, or delete the swapfile prior to starting Windows, and the problem would go away.
Borland-built apps stop being good the moment they start using 32RTM or its cousins... lordy, what a lot of weird behaviour...
Wow, didn't know there were good fossil fields near Glasgow, tho I do recall there are some out in the sticks beyond Billings somewhere. -- Given the area's economy, I doubt any serious budget went into digging up that triceratops, which in itself goes to show that it must have been relatively accessable. ("Hey, pa, look what Shep dug up from the south forty!!")
;)
I was living near Bozeman (Belgrade actually) when Mt.St.Helens blew, so a couple hundred miles closer than you, if not significant in contintenal distance (or geography -- since it had to cross major mountain ranges to get to MT!) We got about a quarter inch of ash, mostly very fine powdery stuff, but with some sandy grit, about like medium sandpaper grit. Looked like it was snowing out for three days. -- My uncle's ranch is about 20 miles west of Ft.Benton, and they got a good enough ashing, loaded with mineral micronutrients, that the next year's wheat crop averaged 100 bushels/acre, and some spots hit 120 bu./acre!! (For the non-farmers here, 60 to 80 bu./acre is the average range for healthy cropland.)
Don't remember when Yellowstone last had a noteworthy fire (or if I was still in MT at the time -- I left in 1984) but I do remember the whopping sunsets we got after big fires in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
Now I'm in SoCal, and seems to me that here, the average person's ordinary state of mind is unreasoning panic over some disaster or other, often imaginary, and invariably blown all out of proportion (helped along by news media that have nothing better to suck eyeballs to ads with). You've heard of the four California seasons? Fire, Flood, Riot, and Earthquake!
And if the world ever does end due to something humanity does, well, it'll just be evolution in action.
IIRC, the T-Rex skeleton on display at Montana State University was dug up somewhere in the neighbourhood of Gallatin Gateway. Which is now one of the coldest winter spots on the planet, and hardly tropical in summer. Somehow I doubt humanity was around to cause "global cooling" back in ol' T-Rex's day, either ;)
;)
The last time we had major global warming, the Brits took to growing grapes. [It just occurred to me... that was also the heyday of many N.A. Indian tribes, and some of the pre-European-era die-off was probably due to failure to adapt when the climate cooled back down.] Presumably another such cycle will eventually come along without bothering to consult humanity's preferences, and large swaths of Canada will become good for something besides caribou and mosquitoes. For a few centuries or a few millennia, anyway. Then the sun cycle will swing back the other way, and there'll be wailing and gnashing of teeth about how [insert politically-incorrect human activity here] is causing global cooling.
I recall from the "humanity will destroy the world" models popular some decades back, that the big fear back-then was indeed global cooling due to industrial particulate matter. I want to see the factory that can compete with Krakatoa.
Regardless, the megaclimate will do whatever it damn pleases, and we'll just have to adapt -- after all, that's what humans are best at, and why we've become the dominant species on this planet.
"It will also provide a new source of tax revenue, which is the main reason the gov't wants it."
Exactly. North Dakota's state gov't is one of the most internet-savvy in the entire nation (there is almost no county, town, agency, or department, no matter how small, that doesn't have its own well-managed website). So I find it very hard to believe that this is being done from ignorance of what eBay IS, or how eBay differs from traditional meatspace auctions (which are still commonplace in ND).
Small businesses in ND just don't have the revenue base to shell out for this sort of thing, so what will happen is that 3rd party eBay consignments will simply go away.
BTW, Crosby ND is a farming town with a population of 1043 people, and is over 200 miles from the nearest city of any real size. I'm sure it must be a major hotbed of consignment sale fraud.
http://www.city-data.com/city/Crosby-North-Dakota
Yep. There's a website somewhere that has lists of who is on the Board of Directors for which companies, and considering how many megabillions of dollars they're ultimately in charge of, it's a VERY short list, with most of 'em sitting on the Board for a number of corporations, plus most are major shareholders. And the sad thing is, these aren't stupid people -- they know *exactly* where all this is headed, but they've already "got theirs", so who needs all those costly workers and annoying customers??!
:/
Sadly relevant sig you've got there
Or to paraphrase the wise AC and the old dictum -- "Who creates the creators??"
;)
The wise AC also said, "You'll end up with an infinite number of creators in a finite universe and finite time. Something doesn't add up."
Nonsense! It's higher math, involving imaginary numbers. Haven't you seen the mathematical proof that 1 divided by zero equals infinity??
Exactly. I ranted about this very thing up a ways, about how we are becoming a senile economy (and society) consisting of managers and labourers (illegal immigrants), with nothing inbetween.
The old guard that built their businesses from the ground up have mostly aged out and been replaced by bean counters who can't see further than next quarter's profits. The cost of doing business has skyrocketed, thanks to an overwhelming weight of regulations to comply with and fees to pay (workman's comp is a big cost issue here in Calif.) Between bean counters and gov't regs, there's no room left for regular folk to build a lifelong career with a solid business. Those jobs have all gone overseas, leaving only work that needs a strong back on the spot, and that work goes to the lowest bidder.
Or better yet, pay them by results -- after all, in other jobs you don't get paid for what you know, but rather for what you produce.
One of the better math teachers I had in high school wasn't a math dude at all, but rather was mostly a phys ed teacher. Should he be penalized because he lacked a math degree, even tho his students learned really their math well?
Conversely, the worst math teacher I've had was the math PhD who taught my college calculus course. He might have known the topic a lot more thoroughly, but he didn't have a clue how to convey that knowledge to his students.
It used to be that science-oriented students could get a scholarship from a corporation, and in return you agreed to do an internship for them after you graduated, with the expectation that this would lead to lifelong employment.
I expect this "needless expense" probably got killed by ruthless cost-cutting in the name of the almighty bottom line.
Hmm, you're right. Score one for Intelligent Design... and subtract one for poor security:
Hera to Zeus: "I told you to change the password on the critter-assembler, but did you listen?? Men!!"
Actually, the notion that stuff must be "fun to learn" is where education went wrong in the first place. Instead of kids figuring out that by damn you WILL learn all this stuff, and whether you think it's fun or interesting is irrelevant -- now kids are taught that they only have to learn stuff they find entertaining (fun).
The moment you inject the idea of "education is fun" into the classroom, kids stop taking it seriously, and teachers stop teaching and become entertainers.
The younger generation likes to rail about the bad old days when public education was boring and mean, but back then we sure as hell had far better-educated crops of graduates.
In 1972, my public high school had a graduating class of about 570 students, NONE with below a "C" average (by real standards, no feelgood passes; and no curve grading either) -- and only TWO dropouts. How did YOUR high school do last year?
First post I've seen here today that got the issue. It's not that other countries are any more innovative than the U.S. in its heyday. Rather, that we've become a senile society that is more concerned about protecting this quarter's bottom line than making sure there will even BE a bottom line next year, and shouts the protectionist mantra "think of the children!" rather than just letting kids be kids, and do the innovative things kids do simply because they haven't yet been ingrained with the notions that everything is too dangerous or not worth doing for its own sake.
But the other major factor, that no one has mentioned, is that costs have gotten out of hand. In California, which used to be a hotbed of research, costs per employee have skyrocketed (only about 25% of the cost per worker is salary; the rest is workman's comp, liability insurance, and the like); this hardly encourages opening new facilities for any purpose, let alone for R&D that you KNOW will not immediately show a profit. And the cost of modern environmental regulation compliance is often more than keeping an industry alive is worth. So we've shut down all the steel mills -- so now there's no more incentive to do research involving steel, because the whole industry has gone overseas, where it need not deal with the EPA, OSHA, and the accelerating cost of workers' insurance. That's just one example, but the problem has proliferated throughout science and engineering.
The upshot is that we're becoming a nation of managers and labourers. Our own kids grow up to become managers, and the illegal immigrants' kids grow up to be labourers. Meanwhile, all the innovation and growth is taking place in countries that are still "young".
And "intelligent design" doesn't have to be the product of any religion's god(s). It could just as well be aliens, or nanoprobes, or cosmic viruses, or [insert crackpot theorum here].
;)
Also, one has to wonder just how intelligent the designer was, when we lowly humans can build complex stuff that fails less often than our own bodies do. Unless, of course, the design specs were not "build it perfect" but rather "build it good enough".
Gee, isn't that exactly what evolution selects toward? Not what works perfect, but rather, what works good enough to survive and reproduce.
Or maybe the ID specs were perfect, but the implementation sucked (Zeus to Dionysus: "How many times have I told you not to play with the critter-assembly machinery while you're drunk?") or bureaucracy got in the way (Thor to Odin: "But I thought *you* were going to create that part!")
Fundamentalist foot-in-the-door issues aside, the whole ID concept needs, um, smarter design.