Taxes are law, insurance is a private transaction, and they must be held to different standards.
Sorta, don't forget that a certian level of liability insurance is required by law to legally drive in the US. Because the state mandates buying private insurance to drive, yet doesn't regulate the price of the mandated coverage there is very little price competition for liability only insurance. This makes it very easy for insurance companies to ream younger drivers.
I've been buying insurance for years and never used it once, despite a clean accident history, a state approved safe driving course etc... I still count as an inexerpianced dangerous drivers for three more years (when I turn 25) and get shafted on the insurance. It's not precisely like a tax but it's pretty damn close.
Not that it matters much but I have had the same feeling for some time now. It's scary but we seem to be in a vicous circle:
Business's abuse the public
Public complains, so government regulates
Corporations buy the government/regulators
Laws and regulations are twisted to support corporate status, and keep the public cow like.
The problem isn't corporations alone, or government alone it's the interaction between the two that has screwed us all. Capitalism and corporations aren't evil, they act in a very predictable manner in pursuing their own self interests. That's fine we can work with that. Democracy as a political system works OK, historically people have elected those who are the best speakers, and can present their parties position in a way that appeals to the masses or popular war heros. This is fine, great speakers and military commanders often make very good leaders, however since the widespread adoption of TV as a campaigning tool we tend to, with few exceptions, elect the man with the best hair. This is not good;->
Now the really scary trend in the last 40 years or so is that to win an election you need a massive war chest, hundreds of millions of dollars to be president. That kind of money does not come from small time supporters, it comes from special interest groups and corporations. Thus the government is bought, it happened slow but it did happen. The DMCA, WTO and all sorts of other acronyms are the results of us loosing control over our government.
I do not believe it is possible for us to break out of this cycle by working within the system. No real reformer will ever get elected by the masses (McCain was probably our last hope, I doubt anyone else who means to change the system at all will ever come as close to winning a major party nomination, and therefore get elected) because noone can get elected without cash from major corporations, and they sure as hell aren't going to fork over $$ to someone who plans on breaking their stranglehold on US politics.
No I'm afraid a revolution is brewing, the strong minority that cares about their rights will eventually be pushed too far in the next coupla decades and with any luck stage a successfull coup. The riots in Seattle, the DeCSS legal fights are all just the beginning. I really believe we will see a second American Revolution in this country in our lifetimes, and god help us all if it fails.
Please tell me you are not suggesting that violent video games are the cause of the Yugoslav wars or the dozen or wars activly being fought in Africa at the moment. I'd like for you to point out a single war caused by violent video games.
Or maybe you are suggesting that local communities should pass anti-war laws, making it illegal for anyone to wage war in their cities, so as not to expose kids to the kind of brutal violence that could really disrupt their lives and cause them to be deviant violent punks.
Ok maybe your not suggesting that violent games are causing these wars, but perhaps suggesting that the effects of violent video games has the same affect on children as growing up in an active war zone!?!?
Your comparison's have no absolutly no basis. Have you ever been in an actual war? Or even a riot like the above poster? Didn't think so. Neither have I. Games are just games and always will be. Every gamer knows that they always have an extra life and no matter how many times they frag their buddies they'll come back for more. On that same token the vast majority of humans know that death is final, and can seperate violence in games from violence in real life.
Well you're mostly right. All of Greece didn't exactly join forces to fend off Xerxes. Something like half of the Greek city-states sided with Persia. During the course of the Greaco-Persian wars Athens and Sparta were the most powerful of the Greek city-states and bickered alot about the best strategy for defending greece. Athens being a port city was in alot of danger of being invaded by sea, blockaded or backed up against the ocean by a land force (in fact Athens was evacuated, captured and burned twice during the persain wars) Sparta on the other hand was landlocked and pretty self reliant, lots of good farming land on the Peleponese (sp?). So they disagreed on the best strategy, Themisticles, leader of Athens for most of the period, wanted a united greek navy commanded by Athens. Sparta wanted a coalition army to hold up on the Pelelponese at the ithmus to wait for Xerxes to attack and defend from there. The Spartans also had a problem with slave revolts. They're slaves wern't happy, and in fact the only thing that kept them under control for the most part was the massive standing army Sparta kept at home. So for politcal reasons they didn't embrace the Athenian strategy. That is not to say that the Spartans didn't play a crucial role in the war. Their most famous battle is Thermopylae, a narrow passage near the sea where 3000 allied greek soliders (300 Spartan hoplites, 700 from other allies, and about 2000 support personal, archers ect...) held off Xerxe's entire army (over 100,000 men, 1,000,000 by some accounts) for 3 days. It could be thought of as the Alamo of ancient greece. Anyway the death toll was astounding, Xerxes lost something on the order of 10k men. Anyway that holding action disrupted Xerxes supply chain and ruined the tight integration between his land and naval forces (the navy could not operate with out the land forces) and likely supplied the edge Athens needed to spank the Persian navy soundly at Salamis and elsewhere. A couple of good books I recomend about the Persian wars are: The Greco-Persian Wars by Peter Green. and The Gates of Fire by Stephen Pressfeild.
The Gates of Fire is a fictional account of the Spartans involvment at Thermopylea, takes a few liberties but overall is a very good piece of historical fiction. I recomend reading Green's book first (it reads like a novel not a text book) for an overall picture of the war and then reading Gates of Fire for a first person perspective of warfare in ancient times. History was never more exciting;->
I should also note that shortly after the wars, Athens essentially started extracting protection money from her naval allies and sacked a few island cities that refused to pay dues to her defense coalition. This growing Athenian empire is what led to Sparta and Athens fighting (with Athens losing) about 100 yrs later.
I know open source get's brought up at every given opportunity around here but the "smart software" to control the helicopter seems like a good open source project to me. I'm thinking a Mozilla style effort? NASA still does alot of the work but releases all the code and includes bug fixes and improvements from the community at large. I know that if I could code worth a shit this is a project I'd like to be involved in. Besides with thousands of eyes reviewing the code you know they'd get their metric conversions right!!;->
The Mafia is not involved in businesses because they are illegal.
Actually they are, notice that since we repealed the Volstead act the Mob has almost no hand in the production or distribution of alchohol, they simply can't compete with legitiment businesses (at least not at the level of profit they are used to) The Mafia's business model has always been to use violence (or the threat of) to become the monopoly supplier of some illegal good that people still demmand.
Seriously, what's the big deal, why do authorities fear it so much? I can see regulating sports gambeling to prevent fixing games and what not, but beyond why restrict it? It's just another way for people to trade cash for entertainment. Asides from the stakes what's the moral difference between the state lottery and black jack,a church bingo match, or day trading? In all four your trading a small amount of cash for the chance to win a larger amount of cash (or some valuable prize). In all cases it comes down to luck and timing. And sometimes you win, and sometimes you loose.
I know two of the biggest reasons people demonize gambeling are because of 1) Mafia involvment 2) so called gambeling "addicts"
As far as #1 goes, would the mafia be involved if it was legal, NO. Now that booze is legal again is the mafia seriously involved, NO. They only provide services alot of people want that are for some bizzare reason illegal (hmm will the mob soon be distributing MP3's - mp3.mafia.com;-> )
And for the second, does anyone actually believe that gambeling is addictive in the clinical sense of the word? I thought to be truely addicted to something you had to have a chemical dependency of some kind. Wouldn't it be more accurate to call them gambeling obsessive? Anyway people that have these kinds of personalities will always find something to latch on to that will take over their lives. Hell I have one friend who has basically ruined his life because of Evercrack, he's broke, dropped (will been kicked out of) college and was fired from his tech job because of Evercrack. Does this mean we should outlaw massivley multiplayer games? No, just because a few people take an entertaining thing way too far (ever been to a bingo hall and seen the regulars, scary) doesn't mean we have to take it away from everyone else. People who have no self control or sense of proportion deserve what they get, if they ruin their lives in the process it's their own damn fault. I must admit that my experiance with gambeling of any kind has been limited to one trip to a bingo hall (there's two hours of my life i'll never get back) and a trip to a casino in the bahama's a couple months ago. I lost $100 playing blackjack inside of an hour. That was my gaming budget for the trip and I never went back. Quite frankly I don't see what the big deal is.
Anyway, the whole concept of a few self rightous hypocrits resticting the freedom of the rest of the country just pisses me off. I esp love that comment by Gore "...allows gambeling to invade the home" that statement makes it sound that if the US Government doesn't step in to protect us the online casino's are going to brainwash us with AOL spam and force our childern into a life of sin and indentured servitude, just like the pornographers. Why the hell does congress care how I spend my money, be it on computer parts, drugs, sex, 20 minutes of saying "hit me" "hold", or pulling the lever of a slot machine, or placing an internet bet that "lucky lady susie the swift" will place third in the first race tommorow ect... Hell it's not like they havn't already stolen their cut out of my pay before I even see it, shit they are more of a danger to my hard earned dollars than any casino, at least there I can choose what useless services to spend my money on, the Fed doesn't even give me that right.
Ok I'm done ranting now, must remember to breath.;-> But seriously does anyone know of a good legitiment reason to ban gambeling in the US? Or is congress just smoking crack again?
What your talking about is I believe called a mass driver, and it acts bascially like an electromagnetic catapult, and doesn't require several miles of flat space, in fact it works more like a cannon, firing the craft up at an angle, very very fast. The work on them I've seen is still on smaller scale versions but in a theory a full sized one could launch a small enough craft into orbit w/out any other stages. Other applications include what you just talked about, acting as the first booster stage for larger craft. The only problem with mass driver approach is that it would turn you into a pile of goo, the acceleration is way more than humans can handle, equipment used in a mass driver launch would of course have to be specially engineered to take the massive gee's generated and some sensetive equipment isn't up to the task. I don't know if it's possible to build a gentler version of a mass driver that covers more ground and allows people ride too. It'd be cool though.
I'd wager that one of the main culprits for the blurring between work and play for our little subculture is the fact that most of us enjoy our work, and probably have been using computers as a hobby longer than we have been working with them for a living. I know that's the case for me. I spend most of the day as a "swiss army knife" tech doing a little bit of everything from support to web development to playing nursemaid to the servers (we are way underfunded;-> ) and then when I get home, to unwind what do I do? I recompile the kernel on the three linux boxen in my house, read through my servers firewall logs, check for updates and security alerts, read any new bugtraq messages that have come in since I left work, and if I'm feeling up to it work on some personal project like setting up apache to do virtual hosting on my domain, (just got brothel.acerbic.org up;-> ) and maybe find time to work on my website (most all of these have been temporairly supplanted by Diablo II for the moment though) That's a good three hours of activities that are basically work, with the exception of diablo of course. The sick part is I enjoy doing these things so the line between what is work and what is leisure is very blurred for me. On the bright side I enjoy my job, only about 25% actually feels like work ("feels like work" being defined as something i'd rather not do) the downside is I don't get a real break, it's the same activities all day.
To keep from burning out I have to disconnect sometimes. For me it means staying away from the computers as much as possible on the weekends and (gasp!) making non-geek friends, so I have social activities that don't even allow me to "talk shop". My geek friends that also do this for a living are pretty much the same way and we make a point to do outside activities as often as possible and actually get exersize. I hate to say it but a few hours of physical exersize a week really burns away the stress. Oddly enough I've also noticed that nearly all of my geeks friends really enjoy shooting as well, must be because being good a shooting requires focus and concentration, something that seems to come natural to geeks. It's also a great way to relieve stress, esp when you take a bunch of crap hardware out to the range with your buddies and execute it.
Anyway, the point is Katz is right, the line between work and leisure is becoming and blurred, and we need to do something about it. Like I said I've found that the best way to do that is develope other interests outside of technology so I can unplug on a regular baisis, exotic vacations help too, I just got back from a week in Nassau, while I admit I did check and send some email I spent less than an hour in front of a computer while I was there compared to the 80 or so I do normally. And you know something, after the break both my work and leisure computer use was fun again.
No there are 24 distinct chromosomes, but we each only (normally) have 23 pairs, the X and Y sex chromosomes are counted differently. we either get an XX or XY combo, not XX and YY (in which case we would have 24 pairs). At least that's how I remember it from high school bio many moons ago. Anyone better informed in genetics than I am want to verify this?
on computers in school. I remember only one class (well a series of classes) in my time in public school that I took a computer class and actually learned something, by an amazing stroke of luck some computer classes I took in highschool were taught by an actual real life geek (he was a Mac geek but hey that's good enough) I had already been using computers for a few years (a Commodore 128 and later a 286 DOS box) by the time I took his first class, but this was my first exposer to a GUI and related software. In addition to being a full fledged geek, Mr. Tryon was also a very good teacher which meant that he was able to teach the norms the basics while not boring the real geeks in the class. I took two of his Mac classes my freshman and sophmore years and feel better for it, even though what I learned directly from his classes is no longer very signifigant the ideas he imparted are still with me. One saying in particular that I have always liked is something he called Tryons Maxim: "I don't mind typing anything once" this is of course in reference to saving your work and not trusting the computer to do the thinking for you. Anyway I was hoping to paint this as an example of how a highschool type computer class should be taught. I've also had some utterly useless "computer classes" in grade school that consisted entirely of playing Oregon Trail (BTW i really miss that game, does anyone know if there is a Linux port out there?)
I do think that computer classes can be very useful even in grade school if taught by someone who both understands computer and knows how to teach, sadly this seems to be a rare combination. Even worse good teachers in any subject seem to be a rarity, and perhaps that's the real root of the problems found in this study. Bad teachers misusing a potentially good tool. I'll agree completely that computers have no place in the classroom until 4th or 5th grade, however I think that if parents have a good understanding of computers exposing young childern to them (in small doses) is much better than sitting them in front of the TV or buying them Pokecrack cards. It all comes down to balance and proper use.
Basically if competent teachers can be found, and rational lesson plans devised I think computers in the classroom can be invaluable learning tools, but in absence of either of the above conditions computers will at the best have no benefit to learning and at worst actually cause harm to the learning process. I guess it's like that with any powerful tool though, if taught and used properly they are very good things, otherwise they are useless or even dangerous (can you imagine fleets of untrained bulldozer operators roaming the streets;-> ) Just my thoughts, if you have something to add, let me know.
Jeez some people are never happy:-) I know as described it's more of symbiotic relationship (esp for those with enough midichlorians to become Jedi's) but for starters I couldn't remeber how to spell "midichlorians" at the time and I already had enough questionable spelling in that post as it was, and you have to admit "space parasite" has a certian ring to it that "space-born symbiotic micro-organism" lacks, though I guess I could've used "space symbiant" but again I liked the sound of "space parasite" better. Besides for all we know the midiclorians really could be parasites and their high concentration in Jedi's could be a side effect of being stronger in the force than others, rather than the cause. If for example the midiclorians do not produce any "force energy" on their own but rather feed off other creatures "force energy" they would be parasites, and would be found in higher concentrations in Jedi's than in normal people. Or I could just be talking out of my ass;->
And a whole series about how great the kid who grew up to be Darth Vader, killer of the innocent, is - what the fuck is that about?
I don't know about you but personally I found young Annakin (sp?) to be almost as annoying as Jar-Jar, and was hoping against hope that he would crash and die in the stupid pod race scene. On top of that, I always found Vader to be a deep and fairly complex villian, and someone who would be a very shrewd and fierce opponent no matter what side he fought on. Annakin's role was written/acted so poorly in EP1 that I just can't visualize the transformation. Sure the story had some not so subtle foreshadowing about his eventual fall, but nothing about the character himself suggested anything more than an innocent, clever, and happy go lucky kid. I also think that Lucas made a big mistake in the way he explained the Force as being the result of some mystical space parasites that we all have, the notion of the Force as a mystical natural energy that flowed through all living things without explaining itself made for a much better story, the space parasites thing ruins it for me. It also opens up some holes in the story, notice how in the original SW flicks Obi Wan and Yoda always explian the force as well a mysterious force, but practically the first thing Qui Gon (sp?) tells young Vader is the space parasites line? It's obvious that the parasite idea was added just for EP1. Hmm I seem to have gone off on a tangent. Oh well.
Oh yea it kicks ass, if you really love your work. Alot of us here are "lifestyle geeks" we do this for fun as much as we do it for money. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who unwinds afterwork by reading through his home server log files or recompiling his kernel, or setting up a DHCP server just for fun in an apartment with only one workstation. The point is though managers shouldn't require it. Like I said earlier if you want to work from home or put 80 hrs in the office great go for it and fuck the unions, but that kind of overtime is only productive and efficient if people do it cuz they want to and they find their work rewarding.
If he trusts his own design with his life I say let him do it. As long as there is a pretty low probability of bits of his craft landing on peoples homes (and since he's launching from the middle of a big desert it's a pretty low chance) let him do it. If the FAA won't let him give it a shot I hope tells them to bugger off and just does it anyway. The government control of space exploration is the single biggest reason we havn't done a damn thing since the Apollo missions ended. If you look back in history all the major exploration and discovery was done by private citizens, maybe with the sacntion or finacial backing of a government but almost never was a successful or important discovery made by a voyage planned and staffed by a government committee. A government program may have very strict safety standards, and multiple failsafes which is all nice and stuff but people should be allowed to risk their own lives trying to push the envelope of human endevor and understanding. Some will fail and pay the price with their lives, and we will mourn (and perhaps mock) their deaths, learn from their mistakes and move on. When NASA fucks up they bury their heads in the sand for several years and stay on the ground. Now I'm not saying NASA should disband and leave US space exploration to guys in their backyard but the government shouldn't prevent citizens from trying. Ideally NASA should establish a private lauch area where private citizens can strap themselves to homebuilt rockets and try whatever they want.
Well cracking the whip and reducing headcount may be a great way to crank out some short term numbers that will get the investors rocks off. However it is hell on the employees, ever work in an understaffed IT dept? For a while after cuts picking up the slack and prodcutivity goes up but it doesn't take to long before moral really goes down, quality of work decreases and employees generally stop trusting and even begin resenting management.
In no other industry is a 55 hour week considered normal by anyone, much less mandatory. If your motivated and want to work 50, 60, 70 hours a week fine do that, but chastise those people with a LIFE outside of work who only put in 40 hours a week as not pulling their weight, that's bullshit and you know it. Remember you are NOT your job.
A little off topic but the C5 Galaxy is a Lockheed-Martin plane not a Boeing. Boeing was competing with Lockheed for that contract and lost IIRC they went on to develope the 747 and made immensely more money selling to the airlines than Lockheed has selling to Uncle Sam.
On the subject of laminar air flow, I remember seeing a thing on the history channel awhile back talking about some of the experimental planes built towards the end of WWII that were seeking to attain perfect laminar airflow, which IIRC is impossible. On of the tricks they tried was to make the wing surface porus (sp?) with some type of vacume device sucking air in through the holes to prevent the air flow from becoming turbulent. IIRC it worked very well on lab models in wind tunnels but when the tried it on a real airplane in the real world all the little holes got dirty and clogged up pretty quickly. Kinda interesting I thought.
I'm doing the same thing only I keep the mp3's on my main filesever and NFS mount the MP3 directory. Since I run it headless under the stereo I control via a real crappy cgi script I wrote, though i've been meaning to try out something like MP3 Server Box Anyway just thought I'd share the details of my little mp3 player.
Is it just me or does this seem like a relativly cheap way to deorbit critical military and communications satellites that are owned by unfreindly nations? I know that the US and the Soviets had both space based and air launched anti-satellite weapons, but IIRC they were very expensive and somewhat difficult to use (well at least ASROC the US air launched anti-sat missile required pretty precise ground/air coordination to get it right) These Snap satellites on the other hand are very cheap and in theory will work quite autonomosly of ground based control. It would be trivial to put a hand full of these in orbit near key military/comm sats of potential enemies and leave them dormat until the shooting starts, then right before you attack activate these "trash collectors" to deorbit the bad guys birds and well you get the idea.
On the other hand, &100,000 plus lauch fees seems like alot of money to deorbit one piece of space trash. If they can find some way for each one to deorbit more than one peice of junk in it's lifetime I could see this being a good solution to a growing problem, but a &100,000 suicide garbage collection mission seems a bit excessive to me.
Seriously how do companies come up with such inane ideas? I'm curious to know if someone at BT has been planning this for a few years now, waiting until the WWW was so big and hyperlinking so entrenched that they could make millions licencing or did some company lawyer stumble across an old patent and then hatch an evil scheme? Just based on what the painfully short "nothing-ventured" story had to say this scheme doesn't appear evil so much as it comes across as just plain stupid. I mean going after ISP's for hyperlink license fees doesn't even come close to making sense. I could see the logic, if not the ethics, behind pursueing web developers and web site owners for using hyperlinks but why ISPs? ISP's just move data, they don't have anything to do with the actual linking process.
After reading the patent abstract, and correct me if I'm wrong here, their version of hyperlinks rely on a central computer system to handle the linking and displaying of information, rather than the distributed free-for-all of links that we enjoy on the internet. Based on that it looks like someone was trolling through BT's patent portfolio and came across this little jewel, realized that it was remarkably similar to WWW hyperlinks, but was based on a the idea of a central server both creating the links and providing the information. Because of that they go after the ISP's which appear to the lay-person to fill that role (seriously how many people do you know that think of their ISP as the Internet). Or at least that's the only rational explanination I can imagine for this situation, based on the limited information available.
I'd like to on record again as saying that this is about the dumbest patent/license story I have heard to date. I hope someone with a clue over there realizes that not only is this action utterly deviod of anything resembling ethics, but is also pretty lame as far as evil schemes go...
Doesn't matter, Valenti works for the MPAA, which represents the movie studios including MGM, in essence the people who own the movie were the ones downloading it so it's not illegal it's their property. At any rate the evidence wasn't the actual content of the movie (as it would be with an illegally taped phone call) but the fact that a movie can be downloaded from the internet.
One more nail in their coffin...
on
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I know I'm not going to be the only or the first person to mention that moves like this can be a big boon to free software. Not neccesarily free as in beer, but RMS free as in speech software. This is exactly the type of abuse that Stallman has been preaching about for years. When you think about it free software isn't such a radical concecpt, it's simply extending rights that come naturualy with physical goods to software. When I buy a car I can pop the hood and do whatever I want, when I've gotten all the use I can out of that car I can sell it to someone else etc...
Ok so people are going to start to realize that they no longer have any rights whatsoever when they buy from MS, Adobe and whoever else begins raping customers in this fashion. IT professionals will of course be the first to realize this and will also be in a position to do something about it. IT managers who happen to be Linux advocates will have one more piece of ammunition to use when preaching to management about the benefits of implementing Linux wherever possible. No longer will our arguments be purely technical and philosophical, concepts management often fails to understand, now we can really talk about the bottem line and not just in terms of purchase price, but liscencing that so limits the maintainability of company assests (computers) as to make them nearly useless. Well that's an argument I believe most managers will listen to. Maybe VALinux will see a bump in their desktop orders because of this;->
Seriously though, the best way to stop this kind of corporate behavoir is to vote with your wallet, or department budget as the case may be. When purchacing new systems from an OEM make it a point to go over the new MS liscense details with management and explain how following the liscense to to the letter of the law would make even minor disaster recovery very costly in terms of downtime, and then suggest that it may be worth the time and effort for your company/department to switch OS's and retrain the staff. Have a plan with potentional training issues and cost estimates available, give them a demo of Linux running on your workstation (we've all smuggeled linux onto all of our desktops at work already, right?) create/convert some docs ect... Then let managment make a decision, many will probably bite the bullet and deal with being analy raped by big bill, after all staff retraining is a bitch, no matter what the result at least it was a good oppurtunity to responsibly advocate linux to management, and a few of us may get lucky and actually convince management to switch.
As free software keeps getting freindlier and as bloated^H^H^H^H^H^H feature rich as commercial software; and commercial software liscense agreements get worse and worse, it's going to be easier for us to get Linux and other Free Software products in trough the front door, where it belongs.
Oh of course if I want to eat/drink in the theater I tend to smuggle contraband snacks in whenever possible, me and a friend once snuck a pair of foot long subs into movie (trench coats are your friend;-) To further steer this off topic a new resteruant/movie theater just opened here that serves pizza and beer during the show, and I think that's just pretty damn cool, prices are pretty decent too.;->
Hmm this is just highlights to me how lucky I am to be in my present situation, this is slightly offtopic as it doesn't directly relate Excite but if you stick with me to the end I do have a relevent point, I promise:->
Before the telcos were deregulated in 96 we had one local monopoly (ATU) two competing LD carries (GCI and ATT/Alascom) and one second rate cable company. Service sucked, it was an exercise in pain to get an ISDN to your home or business. Since deregulation both LD's bought switches and entered the local market, ATU entered the LD market, was sold and changed it's name to ACS. GCI bought the cable company and about two years ago gave us cable modems. In the last year ACS has gotten it's act together and started offering DSL. GCI appears to be rolling out cable modems to any town with more than about 500 people everywhere in the state they have cable. They just laid a new fiber to Seatle, greatly improving latency (my ping time to/. as of this second is: about 140ms) Elsewhere in the state the other local services providers are rolling out DSL at about the same rate. I've got a cablemodem. I have no restrictions on the length of streaming video I can view at once, GCI is Linux friendly, doesn't care that I run a server out of my apartment (they will in fact lease a static IP for that reason for an extra $10/month if you like) talking with freinds who use DSL here it's pretty much the same way. GCI is on the local peering network (sonnetnet) along with my uni and most other ISP's but isn't doing any funky toll access crap. Oh yea and I now have digital cable thanks to GCI as well;->
The point that I promised is just around the corner. This seems to me to be the best way to run a broadband business, cable modems are already turning a profit for GCI, consumers are very happy and flocking to the new services in droves, and no one is getting censored or screwed in anyway. I don't know precisly how everything managed to come together in such an ideal libertarain way up here, but from my point of view the broadband situation in the "lower 48" is pretty broken and mired in troublesome politics.
Just thought I'd share one free market success story with everyone.
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Sorta, don't forget that a certian level of liability insurance is required by law to legally drive in the US. Because the state mandates buying private insurance to drive, yet doesn't regulate the price of the mandated coverage there is very little price competition for liability only insurance. This makes it very easy for insurance companies to ream younger drivers.
I've been buying insurance for years and never used it once, despite a clean accident history, a state approved safe driving course etc... I still count as an inexerpianced dangerous drivers for three more years (when I turn 25) and get shafted on the insurance. It's not precisely like a tax but it's pretty damn close.
Not that it matters much but I have had the same feeling for some time now. It's scary but we seem to be in a vicous circle:
;->
Business's abuse the public
Public complains, so government regulates
Corporations buy the government/regulators
Laws and regulations are twisted to support corporate status, and keep the public cow like.
The problem isn't corporations alone, or government alone it's the interaction between the two that has screwed us all. Capitalism and corporations aren't evil, they act in a very predictable manner in pursuing their own self interests. That's fine we can work with that. Democracy as a political system works OK, historically people have elected those who are the best speakers, and can present their parties position in a way that appeals to the masses or popular war heros. This is fine, great speakers and military commanders often make very good leaders, however since the widespread adoption of TV as a campaigning tool we tend to, with few exceptions, elect the man with the best hair. This is not good
Now the really scary trend in the last 40 years or so is that to win an election you need a massive war chest, hundreds of millions of dollars to be president. That kind of money does not come from small time supporters, it comes from special interest groups and corporations. Thus the government is bought, it happened slow but it did happen. The DMCA, WTO and all sorts of other acronyms are the results of us loosing control over our government.
I do not believe it is possible for us to break out of this cycle by working within the system. No real reformer will ever get elected by the masses (McCain was probably our last hope, I doubt anyone else who means to change the system at all will ever come as close to winning a major party nomination, and therefore get elected) because noone can get elected without cash from major corporations, and they sure as hell aren't going to fork over $$ to someone who plans on breaking their stranglehold on US politics.
No I'm afraid a revolution is brewing, the strong minority that cares about their rights will eventually be pushed too far in the next coupla decades and with any luck stage a successfull coup. The riots in Seattle, the DeCSS legal fights are all just the beginning. I really believe we will see a second American Revolution in this country in our lifetimes, and god help us all if it fails.
Please tell me you are not suggesting that violent video games are the cause of the Yugoslav wars or the dozen or wars activly being fought in Africa at the moment. I'd like for you to point out a single war caused by violent video games.
Or maybe you are suggesting that local communities should pass anti-war laws, making it illegal for anyone to wage war in their cities, so as not to expose kids to the kind of brutal violence that could really disrupt their lives and cause them to be deviant violent punks.
Ok maybe your not suggesting that violent games are causing these wars, but perhaps suggesting that the effects of violent video games has the same affect on children as growing up in an active war zone!?!?
Your comparison's have no absolutly no basis. Have you ever been in an actual war? Or even a riot like the above poster? Didn't think so. Neither have I. Games are just games and always will be. Every gamer knows that they always have an extra life and no matter how many times they frag their buddies they'll come back for more. On that same token the vast majority of humans know that death is final, and can seperate violence in games from violence in real life.
Well you're mostly right. All of Greece didn't exactly join forces to fend off Xerxes. Something like half of the Greek city-states sided with Persia. During the course of the Greaco-Persian wars Athens and Sparta were the most powerful of the Greek city-states and bickered alot about the best strategy for defending greece. Athens being a port city was in alot of danger of being invaded by sea, blockaded or backed up against the ocean by a land force (in fact Athens was evacuated, captured and burned twice during the persain wars) Sparta on the other hand was landlocked and pretty self reliant, lots of good farming land on the Peleponese (sp?). So they disagreed on the best strategy, Themisticles, leader of Athens for most of the period, wanted a united greek navy commanded by Athens. Sparta wanted a coalition army to hold up on the Pelelponese at the ithmus to wait for Xerxes to attack and defend from there.
;->
The Spartans also had a problem with slave revolts. They're slaves wern't happy, and in fact the only thing that kept them under control for the most part was the massive standing army Sparta kept at home. So for politcal reasons they didn't embrace the Athenian strategy. That is not to say that the Spartans didn't play a crucial role in the war. Their most famous battle is Thermopylae, a narrow passage near the sea where 3000 allied greek soliders (300 Spartan hoplites, 700 from other allies, and about 2000 support personal, archers ect...) held off Xerxe's entire army (over 100,000 men, 1,000,000 by some accounts) for 3 days. It could be thought of as the Alamo of ancient greece. Anyway the death toll was astounding, Xerxes lost something on the order of 10k men. Anyway that holding action disrupted Xerxes supply chain and ruined the tight integration between his land and naval forces (the navy could not operate with out the land forces) and likely supplied the edge Athens needed to spank the Persian navy soundly at Salamis and elsewhere.
A couple of good books I recomend about the Persian wars are:
The Greco-Persian Wars by Peter Green.
and
The Gates of Fire by Stephen Pressfeild.
The Gates of Fire is a fictional account of the Spartans involvment at Thermopylea, takes a few liberties but overall is a very good piece of historical fiction. I recomend reading Green's book first (it reads like a novel not a text book) for an overall picture of the war and then reading Gates of Fire for a first person perspective of warfare in ancient times. History was never more exciting
I should also note that shortly after the wars, Athens essentially started extracting protection money from her naval allies and sacked a few island cities that refused to pay dues to her defense coalition. This growing Athenian empire is what led to Sparta and Athens fighting (with Athens losing) about 100 yrs later.
I know open source get's brought up at every given opportunity around here but the "smart software" to control the helicopter seems like a good open source project to me. I'm thinking a Mozilla style effort? NASA still does alot of the work but releases all the code and includes bug fixes and improvements from the community at large. I know that if I could code worth a shit this is a project I'd like to be involved in. Besides with thousands of eyes reviewing the code you know they'd get their metric conversions right!! ;->
Actually they are, notice that since we repealed the Volstead act the Mob has almost no hand in the production or distribution of alchohol, they simply can't compete with legitiment businesses (at least not at the level of profit they are used to) The Mafia's business model has always been to use violence (or the threat of) to become the monopoly supplier of some illegal good that people still demmand.
Seriously, what's the big deal, why do authorities fear it so much? I can see regulating sports gambeling to prevent fixing games and what not, but beyond why restrict it? It's just another way for people to trade cash for entertainment. Asides from the stakes what's the moral difference between the state lottery and black jack,a church bingo match, or day trading? In all four your trading a small amount of cash for the chance to win a larger amount of cash (or some valuable prize). In all cases it comes down to luck and timing. And sometimes you win, and sometimes you loose.
;-> )
;-> But seriously does anyone know of a good legitiment reason to ban gambeling in the US? Or is congress just smoking crack again?
I know two of the biggest reasons people demonize gambeling are because of
1) Mafia involvment
2) so called gambeling "addicts"
As far as #1 goes, would the mafia be involved if it was legal, NO. Now that booze is legal again is the mafia seriously involved, NO. They only provide services alot of people want that are for some bizzare reason illegal (hmm will the mob soon be distributing MP3's - mp3.mafia.com
And for the second, does anyone actually believe that gambeling is addictive in the clinical sense of the word? I thought to be truely addicted to something you had to have a chemical dependency of some kind. Wouldn't it be more accurate to call them gambeling obsessive? Anyway people that have these kinds of personalities will always find something to latch on to that will take over their lives. Hell I have one friend who has basically ruined his life because of Evercrack, he's broke, dropped (will been kicked out of) college and was fired from his tech job because of Evercrack. Does this mean we should outlaw massivley multiplayer games? No, just because a few people take an entertaining thing way too far (ever been to a bingo hall and seen the regulars, scary) doesn't mean we have to take it away from everyone else. People who have no self control or sense of proportion deserve what they get, if they ruin their lives in the process it's their own damn fault.
I must admit that my experiance with gambeling of any kind has been limited to one trip to a bingo hall (there's two hours of my life i'll never get back) and a trip to a casino in the bahama's a couple months ago. I lost $100 playing blackjack inside of an hour. That was my gaming budget for the trip and I never went back. Quite frankly I don't see what the big deal is.
Anyway, the whole concept of a few self rightous hypocrits resticting the freedom of the rest of the country just pisses me off. I esp love that comment by Gore "...allows gambeling to invade the home" that statement makes it sound that if the US Government doesn't step in to protect us the online casino's are going to brainwash us with AOL spam and force our childern into a life of sin and indentured servitude, just like the pornographers. Why the hell does congress care how I spend my money, be it on computer parts, drugs, sex, 20 minutes of saying "hit me" "hold", or pulling the lever of a slot machine, or placing an internet bet that "lucky lady susie the swift" will place third in the first race tommorow ect... Hell it's not like they havn't already stolen their cut out of my pay before I even see it, shit they are more of a danger to my hard earned dollars than any casino, at least there I can choose what useless services to spend my money on, the Fed doesn't even give me that right.
Ok I'm done ranting now, must remember to breath.
What your talking about is I believe called a mass driver, and it acts bascially like an electromagnetic catapult, and doesn't require several miles of flat space, in fact it works more like a cannon, firing the craft up at an angle, very very fast. The work on them I've seen is still on smaller scale versions but in a theory a full sized one could launch a small enough craft into orbit w/out any other stages. Other applications include what you just talked about, acting as the first booster stage for larger craft. The only problem with mass driver approach is that it would turn you into a pile of goo, the acceleration is way more than humans can handle, equipment used in a mass driver launch would of course have to be specially engineered to take the massive gee's generated and some sensetive equipment isn't up to the task. I don't know if it's possible to build a gentler version of a mass driver that covers more ground and allows people ride too. It'd be cool though.
I'd wager that one of the main culprits for the blurring between work and play for our little subculture is the fact that most of us enjoy our work, and probably have been using computers as a hobby longer than we have been working with them for a living. I know that's the case for me. I spend most of the day as a "swiss army knife" tech doing a little bit of everything from support to web development to playing nursemaid to the servers (we are way underfunded
To keep from burning out I have to disconnect sometimes. For me it means staying away from the computers as much as possible on the weekends and (gasp!) making non-geek friends, so I have social activities that don't even allow me to "talk shop". My geek friends that also do this for a living are pretty much the same way and we make a point to do outside activities as often as possible and actually get exersize. I hate to say it but a few hours of physical exersize a week really burns away the stress. Oddly enough I've also noticed that nearly all of my geeks friends really enjoy shooting as well, must be because being good a shooting requires focus and concentration, something that seems to come natural to geeks. It's also a great way to relieve stress, esp when you take a bunch of crap hardware out to the range with your buddies and execute it.
Anyway, the point is Katz is right, the line between work and leisure is becoming and blurred, and we need to do something about it. Like I said I've found that the best way to do that is develope other interests outside of technology so I can unplug on a regular baisis, exotic vacations help too, I just got back from a week in Nassau, while I admit I did check and send some email I spent less than an hour in front of a computer while I was there compared to the 80 or so I do normally. And you know something, after the break both my work and leisure computer use was fun again.
No there are 24 distinct chromosomes, but we each only (normally) have 23 pairs, the X and Y sex chromosomes are counted differently. we either get an XX or XY combo, not XX and YY (in which case we would have 24 pairs). At least that's how I remember it from high school bio many moons ago. Anyone better informed in genetics than I am want to verify this?
on computers in school. I remember only one class (well a series of classes) in my time in public school that I took a computer class and actually learned something, by an amazing stroke of luck some computer classes I took in highschool were taught by an actual real life geek (he was a Mac geek but hey that's good enough) I had already been using computers for a few years (a Commodore 128 and later a 286 DOS box) by the time I took his first class, but this was my first exposer to a GUI and related software. In addition to being a full fledged geek, Mr. Tryon was also a very good teacher which meant that he was able to teach the norms the basics while not boring the real geeks in the class. I took two of his Mac classes my freshman and sophmore years and feel better for it, even though what I learned directly from his classes is no longer very signifigant the ideas he imparted are still with me. One saying in particular that I have always liked is something he called Tryons Maxim: "I don't mind typing anything once" this is of course in reference to saving your work and not trusting the computer to do the thinking for you. Anyway I was hoping to paint this as an example of how a highschool type computer class should be taught. I've also had some utterly useless "computer classes" in grade school that consisted entirely of playing Oregon Trail (BTW i really miss that game, does anyone know if there is a Linux port out there?)
;-> ) Just my thoughts, if you have something to add, let me know.
I do think that computer classes can be very useful even in grade school if taught by someone who both understands computer and knows how to teach, sadly this seems to be a rare combination. Even worse good teachers in any subject seem to be a rarity, and perhaps that's the real root of the problems found in this study. Bad teachers misusing a potentially good tool. I'll agree completely that computers have no place in the classroom until 4th or 5th grade, however I think that if parents have a good understanding of computers exposing young childern to them (in small doses) is much better than sitting them in front of the TV or buying them Pokecrack cards. It all comes down to balance and proper use.
Basically if competent teachers can be found, and rational lesson plans devised I think computers in the classroom can be invaluable learning tools, but in absence of either of the above conditions computers will at the best have no benefit to learning and at worst actually cause harm to the learning process. I guess it's like that with any powerful tool though, if taught and used properly they are very good things, otherwise they are useless or even dangerous (can you imagine fleets of untrained bulldozer operators roaming the streets
Jeez some people are never happy :-) ;->
I know as described it's more of symbiotic relationship (esp for those with enough midichlorians to become Jedi's) but for starters I couldn't remeber how to spell "midichlorians" at the time and I already had enough questionable spelling in that post as it was, and you have to admit "space parasite" has a certian ring to it that "space-born symbiotic micro-organism" lacks, though I guess I could've used "space symbiant" but again I liked the sound of "space parasite" better. Besides for all we know the midiclorians really could be parasites and their high concentration in Jedi's could be a side effect of being stronger in the force than others, rather than the cause. If for example the midiclorians do not produce any "force energy" on their own but rather feed off other creatures "force energy" they would be parasites, and would be found in higher concentrations in Jedi's than in normal people. Or I could just be talking out of my ass
I don't know about you but personally I found young Annakin (sp?) to be almost as annoying as Jar-Jar, and was hoping against hope that he would crash and die in the stupid pod race scene. On top of that, I always found Vader to be a deep and fairly complex villian, and someone who would be a very shrewd and fierce opponent no matter what side he fought on. Annakin's role was written/acted so poorly in EP1 that I just can't visualize the transformation. Sure the story had some not so subtle foreshadowing about his eventual fall, but nothing about the character himself suggested anything more than an innocent, clever, and happy go lucky kid. I also think that Lucas made a big mistake in the way he explained the Force as being the result of some mystical space parasites that we all have, the notion of the Force as a mystical natural energy that flowed through all living things without explaining itself made for a much better story, the space parasites thing ruins it for me. It also opens up some holes in the story, notice how in the original SW flicks Obi Wan and Yoda always explian the force as well a mysterious force, but practically the first thing Qui Gon (sp?) tells young Vader is the space parasites line? It's obvious that the parasite idea was added just for EP1. Hmm I seem to have gone off on a tangent. Oh well.
Oh yea it kicks ass, if you really love your work. Alot of us here are "lifestyle geeks" we do this for fun as much as we do it for money. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who unwinds afterwork by reading through his home server log files or recompiling his kernel, or setting up a DHCP server just for fun in an apartment with only one workstation.
The point is though managers shouldn't require it. Like I said earlier if you want to work from home or put 80 hrs in the office great go for it and fuck the unions, but that kind of overtime is only productive and efficient if people do it cuz they want to and they find their work rewarding.
If he trusts his own design with his life I say let him do it. As long as there is a pretty low probability of bits of his craft landing on peoples homes (and since he's launching from the middle of a big desert it's a pretty low chance) let him do it. If the FAA won't let him give it a shot I hope tells them to bugger off and just does it anyway. The government control of space exploration is the single biggest reason we havn't done a damn thing since the Apollo missions ended. If you look back in history all the major exploration and discovery was done by private citizens, maybe with the sacntion or finacial backing of a government but almost never was a successful or important discovery made by a voyage planned and staffed by a government committee. A government program may have very strict safety standards, and multiple failsafes which is all nice and stuff but people should be allowed to risk their own lives trying to push the envelope of human endevor and understanding. Some will fail and pay the price with their lives, and we will mourn (and perhaps mock) their deaths, learn from their mistakes and move on. When NASA fucks up they bury their heads in the sand for several years and stay on the ground.
Now I'm not saying NASA should disband and leave US space exploration to guys in their backyard but the government shouldn't prevent citizens from trying. Ideally NASA should establish a private lauch area where private citizens can strap themselves to homebuilt rockets and try whatever they want.
Well cracking the whip and reducing headcount may be a great way to crank out some short term numbers that will get the investors rocks off. However it is hell on the employees, ever work in an understaffed IT dept? For a while after cuts picking up the slack and prodcutivity goes up but it doesn't take to long before moral really goes down, quality of work decreases and employees generally stop trusting and even begin resenting management.
In no other industry is a 55 hour week considered normal by anyone, much less mandatory. If your motivated and want to work 50, 60, 70 hours a week fine do that, but chastise those people with a LIFE outside of work who only put in 40 hours a week as not pulling their weight, that's bullshit and you know it. Remember you are NOT your job.
A little off topic but the C5 Galaxy is a Lockheed-Martin plane not a Boeing. Boeing was competing with Lockheed for that contract and lost IIRC they went on to develope the 747 and made immensely more money selling to the airlines than Lockheed has selling to Uncle Sam.
On the subject of laminar air flow, I remember seeing a thing on the history channel awhile back talking about some of the experimental planes built towards the end of WWII that were seeking to attain perfect laminar airflow, which IIRC is impossible. On of the tricks they tried was to make the wing surface porus (sp?) with some type of vacume device sucking air in through the holes to prevent the air flow from becoming turbulent. IIRC it worked very well on lab models in wind tunnels but when the tried it on a real airplane in the real world all the little holes got dirty and clogged up pretty quickly. Kinda interesting I thought.
I'm doing the same thing only I keep the mp3's on my main filesever and NFS mount the MP3 directory. Since I run it headless under the stereo I control via a real crappy cgi script I wrote, though i've been meaning to try out something like MP3 Server Box Anyway just thought I'd share the details of my little mp3 player.
Is it just me or does this seem like a relativly cheap way to deorbit critical military and communications satellites that are owned by unfreindly nations? I know that the US and the Soviets had both space based and air launched anti-satellite weapons, but IIRC they were very expensive and somewhat difficult to use (well at least ASROC the US air launched anti-sat missile required pretty precise ground/air coordination to get it right) These Snap satellites on the other hand are very cheap and in theory will work quite autonomosly of ground based control. It would be trivial to put a hand full of these in orbit near key military/comm sats of potential enemies and leave them dormat until the shooting starts, then right before you attack activate these "trash collectors" to deorbit the bad guys birds and well you get the idea.
On the other hand, &100,000 plus lauch fees seems like alot of money to deorbit one piece of space trash. If they can find some way for each one to deorbit more than one peice of junk in it's lifetime I could see this being a good solution to a growing problem, but a &100,000 suicide garbage collection mission seems a bit excessive to me.
Seriously how do companies come up with such inane ideas? I'm curious to know if someone at BT has been planning this for a few years now, waiting until the WWW was so big and hyperlinking so entrenched that they could make millions licencing or did some company lawyer stumble across an old patent and then hatch an evil scheme? Just based on what the painfully short "nothing-ventured" story had to say this scheme doesn't appear evil so much as it comes across as just plain stupid. I mean going after ISP's for hyperlink license fees doesn't even come close to making sense. I could see the logic, if not the ethics, behind pursueing web developers and web site owners for using hyperlinks but why ISPs? ISP's just move data, they don't have anything to do with the actual linking process.
After reading the patent abstract, and correct me if I'm wrong here, their version of hyperlinks rely on a central computer system to handle the linking and displaying of information, rather than the distributed free-for-all of links that we enjoy on the internet. Based on that it looks like someone was trolling through BT's patent portfolio and came across this little jewel, realized that it was remarkably similar to WWW hyperlinks, but was based on a the idea of a central server both creating the links and providing the information. Because of that they go after the ISP's which appear to the lay-person to fill that role (seriously how many people do you know that think of their ISP as the Internet). Or at least that's the only rational explanination I can imagine for this situation, based on the limited information available.
I'd like to on record again as saying that this is about the dumbest patent/license story I have heard to date. I hope someone with a clue over there realizes that not only is this action utterly deviod of anything resembling ethics, but is also pretty lame as far as evil schemes go...
Doesn't matter, Valenti works for the MPAA, which represents the movie studios including MGM, in essence the people who own the movie were the ones downloading it so it's not illegal it's their property. At any rate the evidence wasn't the actual content of the movie (as it would be with an illegally taped phone call) but the fact that a movie can be downloaded from the internet.
Ok so people are going to start to realize that they no longer have any rights whatsoever when they buy from MS, Adobe and whoever else begins raping customers in this fashion. IT professionals will of course be the first to realize this and will also be in a position to do something about it. IT managers who happen to be Linux advocates will have one more piece of ammunition to use when preaching to management about the benefits of implementing Linux wherever possible. No longer will our arguments be purely technical and philosophical, concepts management often fails to understand, now we can really talk about the bottem line and not just in terms of purchase price, but liscencing that so limits the maintainability of company assests (computers) as to make them nearly useless. Well that's an argument I believe most managers will listen to. Maybe VALinux will see a bump in their desktop orders because of this
Seriously though, the best way to stop this kind of corporate behavoir is to vote with your wallet, or department budget as the case may be. When purchacing new systems from an OEM make it a point to go over the new MS liscense details with management and explain how following the liscense to to the letter of the law would make even minor disaster recovery very costly in terms of downtime, and then suggest that it may be worth the time and effort for your company/department to switch OS's and retrain the staff. Have a plan with potentional training issues and cost estimates available, give them a demo of Linux running on your workstation (we've all smuggeled linux onto all of our desktops at work already, right?) create/convert some docs ect... Then let managment make a decision, many will probably bite the bullet and deal with being analy raped by big bill, after all staff retraining is a bitch, no matter what the result at least it was a good oppurtunity to responsibly advocate linux to management, and a few of us may get lucky and actually convince management to switch.
As free software keeps getting freindlier and as bloated^H^H^H^H^H^H feature rich as commercial software; and commercial software liscense agreements get worse and worse, it's going to be easier for us to get Linux and other Free Software products in trough the front door, where it belongs.
Just my opinion, I could be wrong
Oh of course if I want to eat/drink in the theater I tend to smuggle contraband snacks in whenever possible, me and a friend once snuck a pair of foot long subs into movie (trench coats are your friend ;-) ;->
To further steer this off topic a new resteruant/movie theater just opened here that serves pizza and beer during the show, and I think that's just pretty damn cool, prices are pretty decent too.
Before the telcos were deregulated in 96 we had one local monopoly (ATU) two competing LD carries (GCI and ATT/Alascom) and one second rate cable company. Service sucked, it was an exercise in pain to get an ISDN to your home or business. Since deregulation both LD's bought switches and entered the local market, ATU entered the LD market, was sold and changed it's name to ACS. GCI bought the cable company and about two years ago gave us cable modems. In the last year ACS has gotten it's act together and started offering DSL. GCI appears to be rolling out cable modems to any town with more than about 500 people everywhere in the state they have cable. They just laid a new fiber to Seatle, greatly improving latency (my ping time to
The point that I promised is just around the corner. This seems to me to be the best way to run a broadband business, cable modems are already turning a profit for GCI, consumers are very happy and flocking to the new services in droves, and no one is getting censored or screwed in anyway. I don't know precisly how everything managed to come together in such an ideal libertarain way up here, but from my point of view the broadband situation in the "lower 48" is pretty broken and mired in troublesome politics.
Just thought I'd share one free market success story with everyone.