One light - You're afraid of pedos who fly planes?
One odd and a tad more serious - If pedos needed a license to use the tools they need to get their fix (I don't really see that, but just sayin'), then I imagine training and certification courses would see a substantial influx of massively motivated students. I can't figure if that would be good or bad.
Granted. However, they are a statistical anomaly sufficiently rare as to render trying to create a relationship with one a foolish goal. If you get very, very lucky, you may find a relationship with one. Congrats to you on your luck. 99 percent of us will meet at least one sane woman in our lives (so we know they are out there and we stupidly get our hopes up) but there's a 99 percent chance she'll already be attached to someone else. Our relationships will be with the other women in the world, the ones who come from the stone-cold crazy 99 percent of all women.
What do motorcycle cops do that those in cars can't?
Arrive first. There's really a big difference between the "get-there-ability" of motorcycle cops compared to four wheeled patrol units. In the time it takes a car to get turned around, a bike can be hundreds of yards down the road. Long before a cop can run in from the closest place he could stop his car, a motorcycle cop can be right on top of a crime scene. Seconds count. The maneuverability of bikes plus their smaller size and ability to get closer before a dismount means that motorcycle cops get there quicker.
That's really a big deal. I can see how, in a very crowded urban environment, a small scooter could be highly useful. It may not be macho but that's not my concern.
I don't know where you are, so this may not be applicable. I'm in Texas. We have Ace Cash Express stores (check cashing places, mostly) all over the place. You just walk up to the window and ask for a gift card and tell them how much money you want to put on it, up to $250. The cost is $5 over the amount on the card.
Here's a tip: If they start asking you for identity information (name, address, etc.) they've misunderstood your request and are trying to sell you a reloadable credit card. If you want an *untraceable* credit card for online purchases, you want the *gift* card, not the *reloadable* card. At least a third of the time, the clerk misunderstands my request and I have to correct him/her. I get the feeling they sell lots of reloadable cards and not very many gift cards.
...I read TFA. It says the payments are to be in the form of a flat fee, per station, per year. That means that if a radio station wants to be able to ever play any RIAA-artist music, even just once a year, they have to pay the same fee as a station that plays the stuff all the time. Given that circumstance, there's no special motivation to seek out non-RIAA artists.
Of course, the article is short. The actual text of the bill may include a pay-per-play option that would encourage stations to drop most RIAA-artist music while still retaining the ability to play a bit of it, on occasion. I don't know because I haven't read the bill so, as always, the devil's in the details.
Somehow, I doubt an RIAA-backed bill would include a sensible measure like this, though. Even they aren't stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot like that. Are they?
...just to cover how torqued people get about audio stuff. I figure there's blame to go all around. The rules of the James Randi Educational Foundation make it possible for them to dodge any challenge that looks like someone might rise to. Pear chickened out when they could have proven themselves by just doing a proper test and publishing the results (but that would have been awfully risky, eh?). Randi sure didn't help with the negotiations over the challenge; it is reasonable to say he pretty much torpedoed the whole Fremer deal and that his reasoning was gosh-darn opaque on the matter.
We need a new website just for high-priced audio issues. One one side, we can have know-it-all techno-geeks, the spritual descendants of those past scientific luminaries who proclaimed mono recording to be perfect because an audience couldn't tell the difference between Caruso and a recording of him, who proclaimed all solid state electronics to be perfect because the THD numbers were good, and who proclaimed CDs as perfect because of all that neat-o Nyhquist mathmatical stuff that they really don't understand but, hey, it's science and science can never be wrong, right?
On the other side, we'll have the graybeards and golden ears who can hear the vocals bouncing off the recording booth walls but only on certain pressings of certain LPs, who pay the price of a small house for their tube amps, and for whom the notion of paying USD$10,000 for a pair of speaker cables is perfectly reasonable because, hey, when it comes to audio playback, everything matters, right?
Toss into a posting forum, add a dash of weird, expensive new product, and shake. The resultant sniping, boasting, and prideful displays of ignorance and hubris should keep the rest of us amused for weeks at a time.
What would you like to know? Theoretically, the finer details of our security are "official use only" and I can be jailed for revealing them. Specifically, our security workflows are considered secret and can't be discussed. However, the broad strokes are already public knowledge.
With that in mind, I can go for the following: We use a standard WinXP image, BlackIce on every machine (this only pertains to user machines, not servers), Symantec AV, WinMagic for our full disk encryption, Cisco VPN client software, have a pretty big commitment to Tivoli for all the things it does,... The list is pretty long.
Really? Hmmm. My users could, conceivably, gat past the BIOS password to get their laptops to boot from CD. I'm not sure what good that would do them, since they'd lose time on the machine and the security software would lock it at the next hard drive boot, preventing a Windows logon. Of course, they could then use a bootable CD that doesn't care about the time but since their hard drive is fully encrypted, they wouldn't be able to see anything on it or make changes (unless they just wanted to wipe it clean after stealing the laptop). No, the only way they can get in is from a hard drive boot that requires their FDE login and password, so all the live CDs and bios tricks in the world don't help.
At that point, they can start trying passwords. Oh, wait, how are they going to do that? They can't install a cracker of any sort unless they have privileges, which they don't. Maybe they can get someone on the IT staff to accidently reveal the workstation admin password? OK, that gets them in but there's no useful data to be seen. All the data is stored under separate EFS-encrypted folders for each user who creates the files. However, they could install software. At that point, they have a standalone computer running some random software package. If they want to jeopardize their job so they can play Solitaire, then, well, big whoop to me.
The next time they plug in at the office, the software will be detected by our scans. I've seen unauthorized software plugged in by a user via a USB flash drive get detected, the account locked off the LAN, and the users manager contacted by Security in less than 10 minutes after the drive was plugged in. Running unauthorized software on our LAN isn't going to work for long.
Don't give privileges people don't need. Full disk encryption is your friend. Additional, per-user data encryption is still necessary. Scan what's on your network. Why not just pay some attention to basics instead of treating laptops as a problem? They aren't. They're just different.
I basically agree with all that. The thing is, if corps (and others) couldn't buy legislation, then the system would be working in the "one man, one vote" sense. If that were the case, selling my right to vote would make less economic sense since, individually, my right to vote becomes far more valuable. Instead of using money to influence big, national political issues, I could more profitably use my time, vote, and limited financial resources to influence something very important but closer to home. School board elections, for example, are hugely important. And those are the kinds of elections where, quite literally, a single person who actively goes out and talks to people (either to get elected or in support of a candidate) can sway enough votes to change the outcome of an election. That's amazing and wonderful. I'd love to do that and I would if I weren't so disenchanted with the whole process, if I weren't gripped by the paralyzing sense that no matter what I do at any political level, big moneyed interests on a national scale can sweep it all away after a single closed-door meeting to decide strategy.
As an aside, your observation about corps representing incorrectly the interests of their employees is off base. Corps, unions, special interest groups, and pretty much all large organizations lobby in favor of the interests of their investors. Supposedly, what's good for a big corp is good for their investors. It may be terrible for employees, but who gives a crap about them? (Unions, theoretically, but that's a whole 'nother discussion that could go on for pages.)
Voting is a precious right but it exists, in a practical sense, to give people influence over their government. Viewed that way, swapping the right to vote for anything that gives someone a better ability to influence the government is a smart trade.
How does this work in practice? Large corps have great political influence even though they have no right to vote. What they do have is money. In the real world, then, money applied to the political process is the equivalent of voting.
Given enough money that I am enabled to influence politics via means other than voting, I would consider selling my right to vote a perfectly rational, even patriotic thing to do.
In my case, I'm eligible for early retirement and could be politically active in a variety of ways post-retirement, but my pension wouldn't be big enough to give me enough free time to labor toward political goals. With just enough money to augment my pension I'd be free to pursue tasks other than eking out an existence.
I figure USD$1M would do it, barely. I'd certainly sell my right to vote for USD$5M.
You may have meant it as a joke, but the question is a good one. If you're using so much urine that you can smell it in the house, you're using way too much. We're talking, literally, just a few drops. This stuff is effective when applied a tad more liberally to the shoes of hunters who are pursuing their hobby *outdoors*. In the enclosed space of an attic, the amount you need is so small, a human shouldn't be able to smell it from more than three feet away.
That being said, here's another caution. Don't open the bottle and stick it under your nose to see what it smells like. Curiosity in unavoidable, but hold the thing away from you and fan the fumes toward you to satisfy that curiosity. A full-blast snort of this stuff will make you retch.
The sense of smell is a big deal in the way predator and prey interact. For example, without a doubt the best way to get rid of the squirrels in your attic is to squirt just a small amount of fox urine fox urine up there. Just a few drops around your attic ladder opening will have those little farts on the run and gone within a day. Then plug up whatever holes originally allowed them to get up there and the problem is solved.
One caution: I've found that it only works once. If you don't seal up those holes, the squirrels come back and the second application doesn't work. Maybe you just need fresh urine. But no matter the reason, don't put off the soffet repairs (or whatever work you need to do) after scaring them away.
When it comes to being disciplined around weapons, the principles apply broadly. Many decades ago, Jeff Cooper sponsored/ran a shooting instruction class for juvenile delinquents (as they were called in those days). The principle was simple. He felt that kids going bad needed to have at least one part of their lives where they are trained and responsible, where they can enjoy the rewards of their labor yet be instantly responsible for their screwups. He felt they needed one circumstance where they would succeed at having good self-discipline. He felt that a lack of self-discipline was a root cause of juvenile delinquency. The idea was that success in being self-disciplined under one limited set of circumstances could lead to them employing more self-discipline in other parts of their lives and, thus, screwing up less.
The drill was simple. On the firing range, the kids were told that they could have some good fun and learn something if they did what they were told and consistently maintained the self-discipline necessary to obey range rules. If they wanted to goof around, though, they were welcome to shoot themslves in the foot. (Not really, of course. The actual punishment was temporary or permanent banishment from the program and loss of an opportunity to play with the guns. To those kids, that was a serious consequence.)
There were some amazing success stories from that program. Oddly, nowadays the idea of reforming a kid gone bad by giving him a rifle or pistol and teaching him to use it seems unthinkable. Sad, really. There are some fine life lessons that can best be learned with a rifle in hand. Nowadays, people don't seem to remember that. Really, really sad.
I'm not a gamer, so I keep an old ThinkNIC around specifically for this purpose. On those rare couple of occasions when my ISP has insisted that someone must visit my house, the only computer they saw or touched was that ThinkNIC.
Aside: I know the reasons that crippled web terminals tend to fail in the marketplace. I'm obviously out of step with the norms of the computer-using public, though. I think the ThinkNIC was a great idea. I'd install one for my mom today if she had any desire to use a computer. I'm sure glad I got one before they went belly-up.
It has only been about 10 years since the distribution of major Hollywood films on 8mm stock pretty much dried up. A little over a decade ago, the small independent video rental shop near my home still advertised and would fill orders for 8mm prints. I have a few, but then again I still have a few 8mm "loops", as they were called in the trade. There's something cool about buying a film for roughly the same price as anyone pays for other media, then having giant screen playback (as big as the side of your house, if you wanted) for just the cost of a $200 projector. To me, films need to be shown on big screens. It's just part of the package. Along with popcorn. Oh, yeah, popcorn!
Films on film and sound recordings on reel-to-reel - two things I *really* miss.
You make a great point about how the design of uniforms can impress the public and alter behavior.
One thing that Nazi Germany undeniably got right was uniform design. Think what you will about the people in them and the things they did, most German uniforms of that era were brilliant, powerful designs of astounding beauty and (usually) high function. I know if my local cops dressed like the SS, I'd think twice about getting on their bad side.
Of course, my local cops tend to *act* like the SS, but that's another story.
Another poster has opined that Freenet is dead, with just a few users and almost no content. That mirrors my experience. Yet you seem knowledgeable and still include a link to it. Do you know something I don't? I'm serious about this; I'd really love Freenet to work. AFAIK, though, it just doesn't in any meaningful way.
If your experience is different, please take a moment to elaborate.
If *anyone* has any current, positive experience with Freenet, please jump in. I figure *somebody* is probably still using the thing. I'm just wondering who, why, and if they're actually getting anything done.
The problem I found with it is that most English students of foreign languages are humanity students which are heavily into memorising and not trying to use rules and logic. They can memorise any number of phrases, the most obscure lexics, etc but they cannot memorise and use formal grammar. At all. As a result they have no problem with French, Spanish, etc but with Russian they hit a wall and run away screaming that it is too hard
Now, that's informative. Thanks.
I've beaten my head against the wall numerous times in the past trying to learn a foreign language and always failed miserably. I'm a smart guy, but I've been told over and over that only an idiot can't learn Spanish. Well, then I guess I'm an idiot.
So what's the best way for a complete noob to start learning Russian, short of formal classes? At this stage of life, I'll need to be self-taught (at least for a while).
I've read a whole bunch of these back-and-forth fanboy posts and this is the first one that makes a fresh point.
As for myself, I go with Ubuntu. Compared to Vista, it's freer, higher-performance on a given level of hardware, better with malware (really important for those of use who visit dodgy, dark corners of the net) and easier to maintain. For video, VLC is generally good enough for me.
Now, if there was just a better newsreader than Pan ("better", in my mind, meaning lots of things that I won't go into here), I'd be 100% done and Wine could come off my machine.
Your point is well taken. Still, for a USD$5 tip, a dweller in such a place can skip the half-hour it would kill to pick out everything and lug it upstairs. Maybe they have something better to do.
Such a service would be a godsend if I were really sick. Back when I used a pharmacy that delivered, I tended to need them most when I was ill. My disabled mom could really use something like this.
Also, there's many a day that I'm simply not in a cheerful enough mood to subject the rest of society to my attitude. I'd be doing my neighbors a favor if I didn't come out of the apartment, taking a chance on running into that rude kid that lives down the hall, the surly teen stocker, and the annoying nosy neighbor, any one of whom might be treated to an unwanted bit of conflict when we came into contact. On those days when I'm not feeling particularly polite, I tend to stay in; I think it's the polite thing to do.
What I'm saying is that while I wouldn't use such a service very often, I can think of times when it would be appropriate. I can also think of lots of people who would make the world a better place if they'd just stay in their apartment and never come out.
I want an OS that lets me re-organize my pr0n anytime I want. I *need* to be able to select 50K-100K files at a time and move them from place to place without slowdowns. Ever try, in Windows, to search your network for all the *.jpg files, select a few hundred thousand of them in the search window, and drag them to the new firewire disk you just plugged in? It's painful, lemme tell ya.
Anybody want to suggest an OS that would work for me? I'm serious.
...we should have, using today's technology, 4.5TB... 3.5" HDDs.
I've always wondered why someone doesn't market drives with maxed out capacity, even if the performance is poor. A double-height drive with lots of platters, even if it had slow rotational speed and lousy seek times, would be a good secondary (non-boot) drive for someone who needed to store lots of large files.
Am I missing something about drive performance that would negate the usefulness of such a beast?
I've always dreamed of having enough money and spare time to pack a small suitcase, go to the airport, look at the departure boards, figure out what's leaving in the next couple of hours, and buy a first-class ticket to a destination I've never visited before.
What? I have to know three days in advance everywhere I want to go?
Shit.
I guess I'll just have to dream about having enough money to have my own Gulfstream, since once you get to that level of wealth, the rules that apply to the little people are no longer a problem.
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One light - You're afraid of pedos who fly planes?
One odd and a tad more serious - If pedos needed a license to use the tools they need to get their fix (I don't really see that, but just sayin'), then I imagine training and certification courses would see a substantial influx of massively motivated students. I can't figure if that would be good or bad.
Granted. However, they are a statistical anomaly sufficiently rare as to render trying to create a relationship with one a foolish goal. If you get very, very lucky, you may find a relationship with one. Congrats to you on your luck. 99 percent of us will meet at least one sane woman in our lives (so we know they are out there and we stupidly get our hopes up) but there's a 99 percent chance she'll already be attached to someone else. Our relationships will be with the other women in the world, the ones who come from the stone-cold crazy 99 percent of all women.
Arrive first. There's really a big difference between the "get-there-ability" of motorcycle cops compared to four wheeled patrol units. In the time it takes a car to get turned around, a bike can be hundreds of yards down the road. Long before a cop can run in from the closest place he could stop his car, a motorcycle cop can be right on top of a crime scene. Seconds count. The maneuverability of bikes plus their smaller size and ability to get closer before a dismount means that motorcycle cops get there quicker.
That's really a big deal. I can see how, in a very crowded urban environment, a small scooter could be highly useful. It may not be macho but that's not my concern.
I don't know where you are, so this may not be applicable. I'm in Texas. We have Ace Cash Express stores (check cashing places, mostly) all over the place. You just walk up to the window and ask for a gift card and tell them how much money you want to put on it, up to $250. The cost is $5 over the amount on the card.
Here's a tip: If they start asking you for identity information (name, address, etc.) they've misunderstood your request and are trying to sell you a reloadable credit card. If you want an *untraceable* credit card for online purchases, you want the *gift* card, not the *reloadable* card. At least a third of the time, the clerk misunderstands my request and I have to correct him/her. I get the feeling they sell lots of reloadable cards and not very many gift cards.
...I read TFA. It says the payments are to be in the form of a flat fee, per station, per year. That means that if a radio station wants to be able to ever play any RIAA-artist music, even just once a year, they have to pay the same fee as a station that plays the stuff all the time. Given that circumstance, there's no special motivation to seek out non-RIAA artists.
Of course, the article is short. The actual text of the bill may include a pay-per-play option that would encourage stations to drop most RIAA-artist music while still retaining the ability to play a bit of it, on occasion. I don't know because I haven't read the bill so, as always, the devil's in the details.
Somehow, I doubt an RIAA-backed bill would include a sensible measure like this, though. Even they aren't stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot like that. Are they?
Anybody got a link to the actual bill text?
...just to cover how torqued people get about audio stuff. I figure there's blame to go all around. The rules of the James Randi Educational Foundation make it possible for them to dodge any challenge that looks like someone might rise to. Pear chickened out when they could have proven themselves by just doing a proper test and publishing the results (but that would have been awfully risky, eh?). Randi sure didn't help with the negotiations over the challenge; it is reasonable to say he pretty much torpedoed the whole Fremer deal and that his reasoning was gosh-darn opaque on the matter.
We need a new website just for high-priced audio issues. One one side, we can have know-it-all techno-geeks, the spritual descendants of those past scientific luminaries who proclaimed mono recording to be perfect because an audience couldn't tell the difference between Caruso and a recording of him, who proclaimed all solid state electronics to be perfect because the THD numbers were good, and who proclaimed CDs as perfect because of all that neat-o Nyhquist mathmatical stuff that they really don't understand but, hey, it's science and science can never be wrong, right?
On the other side, we'll have the graybeards and golden ears who can hear the vocals bouncing off the recording booth walls but only on certain pressings of certain LPs, who pay the price of a small house for their tube amps, and for whom the notion of paying USD$10,000 for a pair of speaker cables is perfectly reasonable because, hey, when it comes to audio playback, everything matters, right?
Toss into a posting forum, add a dash of weird, expensive new product, and shake. The resultant sniping, boasting, and prideful displays of ignorance and hubris should keep the rest of us amused for weeks at a time.
The Giz has recently been on a tear about high-priced audio stuff. I wonder if as much ignorance will be displayed here as over there?
What would you like to know? Theoretically, the finer details of our security are "official use only" and I can be jailed for revealing them. Specifically, our security workflows are considered secret and can't be discussed. However, the broad strokes are already public knowledge.
With that in mind, I can go for the following: We use a standard WinXP image, BlackIce on every machine (this only pertains to user machines, not servers), Symantec AV, WinMagic for our full disk encryption, Cisco VPN client software, have a pretty big commitment to Tivoli for all the things it does, ... The list is pretty long.
Anything in particular interest you?
Really? Hmmm. My users could, conceivably, gat past the BIOS password to get their laptops to boot from CD. I'm not sure what good that would do them, since they'd lose time on the machine and the security software would lock it at the next hard drive boot, preventing a Windows logon. Of course, they could then use a bootable CD that doesn't care about the time but since their hard drive is fully encrypted, they wouldn't be able to see anything on it or make changes (unless they just wanted to wipe it clean after stealing the laptop). No, the only way they can get in is from a hard drive boot that requires their FDE login and password, so all the live CDs and bios tricks in the world don't help.
At that point, they can start trying passwords. Oh, wait, how are they going to do that? They can't install a cracker of any sort unless they have privileges, which they don't. Maybe they can get someone on the IT staff to accidently reveal the workstation admin password? OK, that gets them in but there's no useful data to be seen. All the data is stored under separate EFS-encrypted folders for each user who creates the files. However, they could install software. At that point, they have a standalone computer running some random software package. If they want to jeopardize their job so they can play Solitaire, then, well, big whoop to me.
The next time they plug in at the office, the software will be detected by our scans. I've seen unauthorized software plugged in by a user via a USB flash drive get detected, the account locked off the LAN, and the users manager contacted by Security in less than 10 minutes after the drive was plugged in. Running unauthorized software on our LAN isn't going to work for long.
Don't give privileges people don't need. Full disk encryption is your friend. Additional, per-user data encryption is still necessary. Scan what's on your network. Why not just pay some attention to basics instead of treating laptops as a problem? They aren't. They're just different.
I basically agree with all that. The thing is, if corps (and others) couldn't buy legislation, then the system would be working in the "one man, one vote" sense. If that were the case, selling my right to vote would make less economic sense since, individually, my right to vote becomes far more valuable. Instead of using money to influence big, national political issues, I could more profitably use my time, vote, and limited financial resources to influence something very important but closer to home. School board elections, for example, are hugely important. And those are the kinds of elections where, quite literally, a single person who actively goes out and talks to people (either to get elected or in support of a candidate) can sway enough votes to change the outcome of an election. That's amazing and wonderful. I'd love to do that and I would if I weren't so disenchanted with the whole process, if I weren't gripped by the paralyzing sense that no matter what I do at any political level, big moneyed interests on a national scale can sweep it all away after a single closed-door meeting to decide strategy.
As an aside, your observation about corps representing incorrectly the interests of their employees is off base. Corps, unions, special interest groups, and pretty much all large organizations lobby in favor of the interests of their investors. Supposedly, what's good for a big corp is good for their investors. It may be terrible for employees, but who gives a crap about them? (Unions, theoretically, but that's a whole 'nother discussion that could go on for pages.)
Voting is a precious right but it exists, in a practical sense, to give people influence over their government. Viewed that way, swapping the right to vote for anything that gives someone a better ability to influence the government is a smart trade.
How does this work in practice? Large corps have great political influence even though they have no right to vote. What they do have is money. In the real world, then, money applied to the political process is the equivalent of voting.
Given enough money that I am enabled to influence politics via means other than voting, I would consider selling my right to vote a perfectly rational, even patriotic thing to do.
In my case, I'm eligible for early retirement and could be politically active in a variety of ways post-retirement, but my pension wouldn't be big enough to give me enough free time to labor toward political goals. With just enough money to augment my pension I'd be free to pursue tasks other than eking out an existence.
I figure USD$1M would do it, barely. I'd certainly sell my right to vote for USD$5M.
You may have meant it as a joke, but the question is a good one. If you're using so much urine that you can smell it in the house, you're using way too much. We're talking, literally, just a few drops. This stuff is effective when applied a tad more liberally to the shoes of hunters who are pursuing their hobby *outdoors*. In the enclosed space of an attic, the amount you need is so small, a human shouldn't be able to smell it from more than three feet away.
That being said, here's another caution. Don't open the bottle and stick it under your nose to see what it smells like. Curiosity in unavoidable, but hold the thing away from you and fan the fumes toward you to satisfy that curiosity. A full-blast snort of this stuff will make you retch.
The sense of smell is a big deal in the way predator and prey interact. For example, without a doubt the best way to get rid of the squirrels in your attic is to squirt just a small amount of fox urine fox urine up there. Just a few drops around your attic ladder opening will have those little farts on the run and gone within a day. Then plug up whatever holes originally allowed them to get up there and the problem is solved.
One caution: I've found that it only works once. If you don't seal up those holes, the squirrels come back and the second application doesn't work. Maybe you just need fresh urine. But no matter the reason, don't put off the soffet repairs (or whatever work you need to do) after scaring them away.
When it comes to being disciplined around weapons, the principles apply broadly. Many decades ago, Jeff Cooper sponsored/ran a shooting instruction class for juvenile delinquents (as they were called in those days). The principle was simple. He felt that kids going bad needed to have at least one part of their lives where they are trained and responsible, where they can enjoy the rewards of their labor yet be instantly responsible for their screwups. He felt they needed one circumstance where they would succeed at having good self-discipline. He felt that a lack of self-discipline was a root cause of juvenile delinquency. The idea was that success in being self-disciplined under one limited set of circumstances could lead to them employing more self-discipline in other parts of their lives and, thus, screwing up less.
The drill was simple. On the firing range, the kids were told that they could have some good fun and learn something if they did what they were told and consistently maintained the self-discipline necessary to obey range rules. If they wanted to goof around, though, they were welcome to shoot themslves in the foot. (Not really, of course. The actual punishment was temporary or permanent banishment from the program and loss of an opportunity to play with the guns. To those kids, that was a serious consequence.)
There were some amazing success stories from that program. Oddly, nowadays the idea of reforming a kid gone bad by giving him a rifle or pistol and teaching him to use it seems unthinkable. Sad, really. There are some fine life lessons that can best be learned with a rifle in hand. Nowadays, people don't seem to remember that. Really, really sad.
I'm not a gamer, so I keep an old ThinkNIC around specifically for this purpose. On those rare couple of occasions when my ISP has insisted that someone must visit my house, the only computer they saw or touched was that ThinkNIC.
Aside: I know the reasons that crippled web terminals tend to fail in the marketplace. I'm obviously out of step with the norms of the computer-using public, though. I think the ThinkNIC was a great idea. I'd install one for my mom today if she had any desire to use a computer. I'm sure glad I got one before they went belly-up.
It has only been about 10 years since the distribution of major Hollywood films on 8mm stock pretty much dried up. A little over a decade ago, the small independent video rental shop near my home still advertised and would fill orders for 8mm prints. I have a few, but then again I still have a few 8mm "loops", as they were called in the trade. There's something cool about buying a film for roughly the same price as anyone pays for other media, then having giant screen playback (as big as the side of your house, if you wanted) for just the cost of a $200 projector. To me, films need to be shown on big screens. It's just part of the package. Along with popcorn. Oh, yeah, popcorn!
Films on film and sound recordings on reel-to-reel - two things I *really* miss.
You make a great point about how the design of uniforms can impress the public and alter behavior.
One thing that Nazi Germany undeniably got right was uniform design. Think what you will about the people in them and the things they did, most German uniforms of that era were brilliant, powerful designs of astounding beauty and (usually) high function. I know if my local cops dressed like the SS, I'd think twice about getting on their bad side.
Of course, my local cops tend to *act* like the SS, but that's another story.
Another poster has opined that Freenet is dead, with just a few users and almost no content. That mirrors my experience. Yet you seem knowledgeable and still include a link to it. Do you know something I don't? I'm serious about this; I'd really love Freenet to work. AFAIK, though, it just doesn't in any meaningful way.
If your experience is different, please take a moment to elaborate.
If *anyone* has any current, positive experience with Freenet, please jump in. I figure *somebody* is probably still using the thing. I'm just wondering who, why, and if they're actually getting anything done.
Now, that's informative. Thanks.
I've beaten my head against the wall numerous times in the past trying to learn a foreign language and always failed miserably. I'm a smart guy, but I've been told over and over that only an idiot can't learn Spanish. Well, then I guess I'm an idiot.
So what's the best way for a complete noob to start learning Russian, short of formal classes? At this stage of life, I'll need to be self-taught (at least for a while).
I've read a whole bunch of these back-and-forth fanboy posts and this is the first one that makes a fresh point.
As for myself, I go with Ubuntu. Compared to Vista, it's freer, higher-performance on a given level of hardware, better with malware (really important for those of use who visit dodgy, dark corners of the net) and easier to maintain. For video, VLC is generally good enough for me.
Now, if there was just a better newsreader than Pan ("better", in my mind, meaning lots of things that I won't go into here), I'd be 100% done and Wine could come off my machine.
Your point is well taken. Still, for a USD$5 tip, a dweller in such a place can skip the half-hour it would kill to pick out everything and lug it upstairs. Maybe they have something better to do.
Such a service would be a godsend if I were really sick. Back when I used a pharmacy that delivered, I tended to need them most when I was ill. My disabled mom could really use something like this.
Also, there's many a day that I'm simply not in a cheerful enough mood to subject the rest of society to my attitude. I'd be doing my neighbors a favor if I didn't come out of the apartment, taking a chance on running into that rude kid that lives down the hall, the surly teen stocker, and the annoying nosy neighbor, any one of whom might be treated to an unwanted bit of conflict when we came into contact. On those days when I'm not feeling particularly polite, I tend to stay in; I think it's the polite thing to do.
What I'm saying is that while I wouldn't use such a service very often, I can think of times when it would be appropriate. I can also think of lots of people who would make the world a better place if they'd just stay in their apartment and never come out.
Now, that was useful. Thanks.
I want an OS that lets me re-organize my pr0n anytime I want. I *need* to be able to select 50K-100K files at a time and move them from place to place without slowdowns. Ever try, in Windows, to search your network for all the *.jpg files, select a few hundred thousand of them in the search window, and drag them to the new firewire disk you just plugged in? It's painful, lemme tell ya.
Anybody want to suggest an OS that would work for me? I'm serious.
I've always wondered why someone doesn't market drives with maxed out capacity, even if the performance is poor. A double-height drive with lots of platters, even if it had slow rotational speed and lousy seek times, would be a good secondary (non-boot) drive for someone who needed to store lots of large files.
Am I missing something about drive performance that would negate the usefulness of such a beast?
I've always dreamed of having enough money and spare time to pack a small suitcase, go to the airport, look at the departure boards, figure out what's leaving in the next couple of hours, and buy a first-class ticket to a destination I've never visited before.
What? I have to know three days in advance everywhere I want to go?
Shit.
I guess I'll just have to dream about having enough money to have my own Gulfstream, since once you get to that level of wealth, the rules that apply to the little people are no longer a problem.