> Growing up in the late 70s/early 80s there wasn't much to do besides a) get drunk b) get high c) to to a movie.
I could list reading, woodworking, gardening, playing a musical instrument, riding a bike, skiing, swimming, stargazing, painting, and billiards. Camping, fishing, hiking, metal detecting, maple syrup tapping, and chess in the park. Jogging, flying a kite, building a robot, volunteering for Big Brothers & Sisters, building a brick BBQ off of your porch, or training your dog to play dead. Skateboarding, sidewalk chalk art, building a bat house, sending away for Uncle Milton's Ant Farm, or taking up photography. The list is literally ENDLESS no matter what age you are.
That huge room with the bright blue ceiling has been around forever, you should check it out.
And in the late 70's/ early 80's when you were feeling lazy and the weather sucked there was always the Atari 2600! So exactly what new entertainments are you inferring are available now?
The last place I worked for (and left) has a zero-tolerance policy towards anything not Microsoft. Not too long after I left orders came down that anyone who had FF was to remove it. Immediately. Or else.
Ironic, funny, sad, etc... IE has historically been a nightmare for corporate IT for all the reasons that have been beaten to death here on slashdot. In order to remedy this most companies' IT departments have long since used windows group policies, or policies for domains, or whatever they're calling it these days (yes it's been awhile, go ahead and slam me), in order to lock down IE. The way I remember it you would log into the network and your windows registry would be immediately "owned" by the policies. Where I worked you couldn't even add a site to the trusted list. Heck even the IE logo got replaced with a corporate one, just to remind you where you worked.
This all makes decent sense if you have to use IE, especially the older versions. Now along comes Firefox, which would obviate much of the need for locking the browser down to thin-client levels. But who's going to give up all that control? Certainly not the MCPs or PHBs.
Sure there are exceptions and complexities to this oversimplification, but much of it is just a case of the bigger monkeys in the cage trying to protect their positions of power.
Caring could be put back into the equation... Just outlaw all misleading marketing.
If you can't totally BS your customer all the time then there's no alternative left but to care about them.
e.g. - Light beer will NOT make my muscles bigger or hot chicks fawn over me. So it better be cheap and tasty.
Capitalism isn't the problem, corporate political power and lack of public oversite is the problem.
Corporations in the U.S. have the legal rights of individuals without even a fraction of the responsibility and accountability demanded of individuals.
How can the days be literal at first? There is no literal earth revolving on it's axis over a period of 24 hours as the sun lights half of it.
The heavens haven't even been created yet. On the first "day" God said let there be light and he separated the light from the darkness. That was the first day. How long was it? 24 hours? What's an hour? To go even further, if the heavens haven't even been created yet (that's on the 2nd "day"), does time even exist on the first "day" ?
This whole conversation is like arguing over the strength of Spider-Man's webs, or whether Santa should waste fossil fuels by leaving coal in naughty kids' stockings.
First we need to know if those figures you give are for a Fuel crop of for Food vegetables. The price of making ugly dense tasteless "veggies" which be can planted and harvested in a process that would be destructive to food makes a fuel crop less expensive to produce.
Then we need to know how many gallons of fuel per acre and how many dollars of food per acre for each type of crop.
From there we could figure out which crop gives us a greater ROI per acre.
Then we might try to make various historical charts to aid in predicting (Speculating) on the Growth and volatility (Risk) for each crop. Due to Supply and Demand, what looks best today may be more of a roller-coaster ride (more Risk) than another over time.
Crudely stated, that's how the Market continually sets a price for each Commodity involved, and it's how you try to guess the best way to apportion your acreage come planting time each year.
Interesting link. Thanks. I actually looked for that but not hard enough.
I find it almost impossible to believe. I'd like to see how they arrived at those figures.
We did very rough math for a couple of the exits around here, busy days, slow nights, etc. and going by a figure of 50K for easy math on what it takes to retain and provide bene's for a toll monkey we came up with about 8 months of collecting tolls at one booth. The only answer I can think of is that a lot more people are coming from FAR away, therefore paying a much higher toll, than I ever would have suspected. Scores of people every day arriving from across the state, at each booth!? Who knew?
As for Route 30, well, you can do that trick with almost any road in the US.
There are roads everywhere, whether they carry the same name or number the whole way is not the issue. The issue.. Is it a competing road, is it a viable option? You can't compare a 4-6 lane highway to a long street with stop signs and Wal-Marts on it. That's like trying to tell me a Tablet PC is a viable option to an Apache server. My point stands just fine there.
Many places do not have public transportation. Or if they do it's such a poor example of public transportation that the only people who use it are so poor they can't afford soap or the laundromat. Thus making it that much worse for "regular folk". (Yes, I mean the bus doors open and a wall of stink hits you in the face.)
And by poor example I mean.. takes 15 minutes by car, 70 minutes by bus. To most people time is more valuable than just about anything. So when public transportation is that bad, the only people who take it do so because they have absolutely no choice or no sense.
Are you really willing to make a moral judgment against a mom or dad who spends extra and takes a car so they can spend an extra 5-10 hours a week with their kids??
How about using taxes to pay for roads because they are part of the public infrastructure?!
Using the PA turnpike as an example, almost all of the tolls go to pay for the state employees and their benefits, heated booths, etc, and very little if any goes back into the road. The toll system is in place to pay for itself and not the road. It's a sham. If they got rid of all the zombies in the toll booths and put up those buckets that you toss change into they could charge a fraction and have more money to put toward the road, but still... that's what taxes are for.
As a result the PA turnpike is the worst highway in PA to drive on, full of potholes, poorly maintained, half finished construction sitting empty and idle most of the time.
The other huge reason toll roads are a BAD IDEA is that there is no competition, no other option. There's almost never a parallel highway going the same place, and who would really want that anyway. So you have to pay the toll or not go at all, or spend hours and gas $$ going around. It's taking a critical public resource and using it for legal extortion. Imagine if you had to pay a sidewalk toll to walk to lunch every day.
This idea of congestion tolls seems to have yet another bad idea behind it... Most people aren't on the roads for fun. They're on the roads because they need to get somewhere. If skyrocketing gas prices aren't thinning out the traffic why would congestion tolls thin it out?
> a perfectly clean source of infinite energy was readily, cheaply available
The problem is what comes with the limitless growth and consumption that "free energy for all" would produce.
I don't know where I stand or what shade of green I am, but there has to be a middle ground between turning the earth into a giant Borg sphere and regressing to Survivalism.
It also doesn't take religious moral zealotry or a chicken-little mindset to think that the World Population Curve is something to at least think seriously about.
The problem is simply this: There is only one planet available to us. Everyone is trying to make sure we don't fsck it up. We don't get a do-over. With respect to that, even the Deep Greens have their place. It's the kind of issue that rightly generates a lot of passion. What we really need is far more dispassionate inquiry and concern. We can't afford to be dismissive of that curve.
This will really come in handy!
This means I'm much more prepared for a ménage à trois with 2 playboy models in which I look like Brad Pitt in Troy.
On the flip side, I'm also prepared to have psychedelic encounters with random grade school classmates I haven't seen in 25 years and would never think of outside of a dream.
Sure I might buy something in Apple's lossless format from iTunes, but
A - If I'm going to pay extra for DRM'd lossless, I better get the cheap lossy version for free (for my phone, wife's iPod, whatever) because paying them to compress a song for me is ridiculous,and B - It will be a moot point if the player won't play all the FLAC I already have, because I won't own the player. It's why I don't own one now.
> What would you like to see in the next generation of laptop computers?"
One thing I'd love to see is a little modularity and separation between the computer and the screen.
I want a strong hinge that can be disconnected with a simple everyday tool.
And at least within the same manufacturer, make it standard, the only variables being the size and resolution of the screen.
What a great idea to be able to replace only the half of the laptop that is broken or upgrade only the half that needs to be upgraded.
Reduce waste, reduce downtime, save money.
Is there something intrinsically magical about the screen hinge and graphics connection of a laptop that keeps them forever joined lest ye ship them back to the vendor?
Yes, I recall the days of 320x240 and 640x480. Great times I'm sure.
NEXT-->
As a digital photographer, I've come to appreciate the people behind the physical camera. Both technological and artistic.
NEXT-->
As for future cameras, I think we'll see initially, 3x sensors allowing for on the fly HDR images. After that we'll go to static video where a framed shot can be spun around to see all the out of frame info.
NEXT-->
After that, I suppose we'll get selective depth of field, on the fly image editing, blemish correction and on the fly multi-image splicing allowing for a static family photo to be created via sliced video.
NEXT-->
Of course we'll have meta data including temperature, GPS, wind speed, angle, height, surrounding buildings, photographer's personal ID#, satellite upload, etc.
NEXT-->
Film will die in the same way that pinhole cameras are dead. Sure, it's around and you can use it but what's the point? The medium isn't the art. It's the person behind the camera.
No matter the material, body armor only works when you wear enough of it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/politics/07armor.html
Almost from the beginning, some soldiers asked for additional protection to stop bullets from slicing through their sides. In the fall of 2003, when troops began hanging their crotch protectors under their arms, the Army's Rapid Equipping Force shipped several hundred plates to protect their sides and shoulders. Individual soldiers and units continued to buy their own sets.
It might take 10 more years, but as computers evolve into things we can't even imagine (wearable? pervasive and ubiquitos with a universal network maybe?) that Windows will take it's place in the history books as will Linux.
Kleenex, Band-aid, Xerox, Coke, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile. No Joke... There will always be no more than 3, even though our market's "free".
Of Windows, Linux, OSX, No magic regulation hex, will make the market truly right. With corporate size completely unchecked, smaller competitors are totally wrecked. Wal-Mart, Walgreen's, Home Depot, Lowe's, Where it stops, nobody knows!
Wearable, ubiquitous, pervasive OS, "All your base are belong to us!"
"You're either with us, or against us! Do you agree, to limit the size of companies?"
Your irritation and dismissal seems very familiar.
Ever read Darwin's "Origin of the Species" ?
It was full of observations, theories, and propositions. Decades later the Great White Hunter bone safaris lead by the Leakys were still not providing good answers, just more questions and dubious science, not to mention bones that would have been better left lie for awhile than torn out of the ground and waved around for the media.
When it comes to cognitive science, we're in a pre-Darwinian age. We know so little. Be careful when you dismiss critical thought or even attempts at such, as handwavy bullshit. You don't want to be those guys who rush in to loot the ground for quick "answers". Or how about Jane Goodall, mowing down the underbrush and dumping truck-loads of bananas to start chimpanzee food riots, and then calling it anthropology. I'm sure at the time they would have dismissed much of today's meticulous methodology as self-indulgent baloney. It's the same phenomenon that makes us so annoyed when a doctor says "laceration" instead of "cut" or "larynx" instead of "throat". You can just imagine doctors from 1607 dismissing all that terminology as self-congratulatory vocabulary that doesn't provide any answers.
The main theory in "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is compelling. To butcher it more than a bit... Just as walking is a long series of pushing yourself off-balance and then catching yourself, cognition is a long series of "strange loopiness" being knocked "out of loop" by "spontaneous activity" and trying to right itself again. Don't dismiss the theory just because the new words and entertaining examples rub you the wrong way.
Actually if you know anything at all about chaos theory or the book in question it's quite fascinating. And there are answers. Just maybe not the easy ones we would like.
From Wikipedia: [Hofstadter] is a College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science; Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition.
Also he won the Pulitzer for Gödel, Escher, Bach. So dismissing it all as handwavy bullshit, while a bit funny, might be considered the height of hubris.
That map of the night is crazy. I mean most of it looks spot on to me. Except for the part where most of Canada is using night goggles instead of lamps.
Slashdot Mirror
> Growing up in the late 70s/early 80s there wasn't much to do besides a) get drunk b) get high c) to to a movie.
I could list reading, woodworking, gardening, playing a musical instrument, riding a bike, skiing, swimming, stargazing, painting, and billiards. Camping, fishing, hiking, metal detecting, maple syrup tapping, and chess in the park. Jogging, flying a kite, building a robot, volunteering for Big Brothers & Sisters, building a brick BBQ off of your porch, or training your dog to play dead. Skateboarding, sidewalk chalk art, building a bat house, sending away for Uncle Milton's Ant Farm, or taking up photography. The list is literally ENDLESS no matter what age you are.
That huge room with the bright blue ceiling has been around forever, you should check it out.
And in the late 70's/ early 80's when you were feeling lazy and the weather sucked there was always the Atari 2600!
So exactly what new entertainments are you inferring are available now?
The last place I worked for (and left) has a zero-tolerance policy towards anything not Microsoft. Not too long after I left orders came down that anyone who had FF was to remove it. Immediately. Or else.
Ironic, funny, sad, etc... IE has historically been a nightmare for corporate IT for all the reasons that have been beaten to death here on slashdot. In order to remedy this most companies' IT departments have long since used windows group policies, or policies for domains, or whatever they're calling it these days (yes it's been awhile, go ahead and slam me), in order to lock down IE. The way I remember it you would log into the network and your windows registry would be immediately "owned" by the policies. Where I worked you couldn't even add a site to the trusted list. Heck even the IE logo got replaced with a corporate one, just to remind you where you worked.
This all makes decent sense if you have to use IE, especially the older versions. Now along comes Firefox, which would obviate much of the need for locking the browser down to thin-client levels. But who's going to give up all that control? Certainly not the MCPs or PHBs.
Sure there are exceptions and complexities to this oversimplification, but much of it is just a case of the bigger monkeys in the cage trying to protect their positions of power.
Caring could be put back into the equation... Just outlaw all misleading marketing.
If you can't totally BS your customer all the time then there's no alternative left but to care about them.
e.g. - Light beer will NOT make my muscles bigger or hot chicks fawn over me. So it better be cheap and tasty.
Capitalism isn't the problem, corporate political power and lack of public oversite is the problem.
Corporations in the U.S. have the legal rights of individuals without even a fraction of the responsibility and accountability demanded of individuals.
How can the days be literal at first? There is no literal earth revolving on it's axis over a period of 24 hours as the sun lights half of it.
The heavens haven't even been created yet. On the first "day" God said let there be light and he separated the light from the darkness. That was the first day. How long was it? 24 hours? What's an hour?
To go even further, if the heavens haven't even been created yet (that's on the 2nd "day"), does time even exist on the first "day" ?
This whole conversation is like arguing over the strength of Spider-Man's webs, or whether Santa should waste fossil fuels by leaving coal in naughty kids' stockings.
After the sperm penetrates the ovum, a zygote is formed. After which, chaos ensues.
Growth and development of one copy != growth and development of the other.
First we need to know if those figures you give are for a Fuel crop of for Food vegetables. The price of making ugly dense tasteless "veggies" which be can planted and harvested in a process that would be destructive to food makes a fuel crop less expensive to produce.
Then we need to know how many gallons of fuel per acre and how many dollars of food per acre for each type of crop.
From there we could figure out which crop gives us a greater ROI per acre.
Then we might try to make various historical charts to aid in predicting (Speculating) on the Growth and volatility (Risk) for each crop. Due to Supply and Demand, what looks best today may be more of a roller-coaster ride (more Risk) than another over time.
Crudely stated, that's how the Market continually sets a price for each Commodity involved, and it's how you try to guess the best way to apportion your acreage come planting time each year.
> You get worse mileage and spend even more on fuel. Who wants that?
Everyone if we put an import tax on petroleum for fuel.
Interesting link. Thanks. I actually looked for that but not hard enough.
I find it almost impossible to believe. I'd like to see how they arrived at those figures.
We did very rough math for a couple of the exits around here, busy days, slow nights, etc. and going by a figure of 50K for easy math on what it takes to retain and provide bene's for a toll monkey we came up with about 8 months of collecting tolls at one booth. The only answer I can think of is that a lot more people are coming from FAR away, therefore paying a much higher toll, than I ever would have suspected. Scores of people every day arriving from across the state, at each booth!? Who knew?
As for Route 30, well, you can do that trick with almost any road in the US. There are roads everywhere, whether they carry the same name or number the whole way is not the issue. The issue.. Is it a competing road, is it a viable option? You can't compare a 4-6 lane highway to a long street with stop signs and Wal-Marts on it. That's like trying to tell me a Tablet PC is a viable option to an Apache server. My point stands just fine there.
Many places do not have public transportation. Or if they do it's such a poor example of public transportation that the only people who use it are so poor they can't afford soap or the laundromat. Thus making it that much worse for "regular folk". (Yes, I mean the bus doors open and a wall of stink hits you in the face.)
And by poor example I mean.. takes 15 minutes by car, 70 minutes by bus. To most people time is more valuable than just about anything. So when public transportation is that bad, the only people who take it do so because they have absolutely no choice or no sense.
Are you really willing to make a moral judgment against a mom or dad who spends extra and takes a car so they can spend an extra 5-10 hours a week with their kids??
How about using taxes to pay for roads because they are part of the public infrastructure?!
Using the PA turnpike as an example, almost all of the tolls go to pay for the state employees and their benefits, heated booths, etc, and very little if any goes back into the road. The toll system is in place to pay for itself and not the road. It's a sham. If they got rid of all the zombies in the toll booths and put up those buckets that you toss change into they could charge a fraction and have more money to put toward the road, but still... that's what taxes are for.
As a result the PA turnpike is the worst highway in PA to drive on, full of potholes, poorly maintained, half finished construction sitting empty and idle most of the time.
The other huge reason toll roads are a BAD IDEA is that there is no competition, no other option. There's almost never a parallel highway going the same place, and who would really want that anyway. So you have to pay the toll or not go at all, or spend hours and gas $$ going around. It's taking a critical public resource and using it for legal extortion. Imagine if you had to pay a sidewalk toll to walk to lunch every day.
This idea of congestion tolls seems to have yet another bad idea behind it... Most people aren't on the roads for fun. They're on the roads because they need to get somewhere.
If skyrocketing gas prices aren't thinning out the traffic why would congestion tolls thin it out?
> a perfectly clean source of infinite energy was readily, cheaply available
The problem is what comes with the limitless growth and consumption that "free energy for all" would produce.
I don't know where I stand or what shade of green I am, but there has to be a middle ground between turning the earth into a giant Borg sphere and regressing to Survivalism.
It also doesn't take religious moral zealotry or a chicken-little mindset to think that the World Population Curve is something to at least think seriously about.
The problem is simply this: There is only one planet available to us. Everyone is trying to make sure we don't fsck it up. We don't get a do-over.
With respect to that, even the Deep Greens have their place. It's the kind of issue that rightly generates a lot of passion.
What we really need is far more dispassionate inquiry and concern. We can't afford to be dismissive of that curve.
This will really come in handy!
This means I'm much more prepared for a ménage à trois with 2 playboy models in which I look like Brad Pitt in Troy.
On the flip side, I'm also prepared to have psychedelic encounters with random grade school classmates I haven't seen in 25 years and would never think of outside of a dream.
Go dreams go!!
Worked out great!! But my very pregnant wife snores like Cujo.
Finding an attractive girl with a brain in her head was always a top reason for visiting the library.
Sure I might buy something in Apple's lossless format from iTunes, but
A - If I'm going to pay extra for DRM'd lossless, I better get the cheap lossy version for free (for my phone, wife's iPod, whatever) because paying them to compress a song for me is ridiculous,and
B - It will be a moot point if the player won't play all the FLAC I already have, because I won't own the player. It's why I don't own one now.
Oh wait... karma burn.. I get it now!
I did ask for it. Thanks so much!!
Where the heck is my brain hammer?
Troll?! How about Funny?? It's karma!?! Sheesh.
Informative??
Please mod me to hell so I can rid myself of this dirty karma.
I need soap and hot water.
> What would you like to see in the next generation of laptop computers?"
One thing I'd love to see is a little modularity and separation between the computer and the screen.
I want a strong hinge that can be disconnected with a simple everyday tool.
And at least within the same manufacturer, make it standard, the only variables being the size and resolution of the screen.
What a great idea to be able to replace only the half of the laptop that is broken or upgrade only the half that needs to be upgraded.
Reduce waste, reduce downtime, save money.
Is there something intrinsically magical about the screen hinge and graphics connection of a laptop that keeps them forever joined lest ye ship them back to the vendor?
Yes, I recall the days of 320x240 and 640x480. Great times I'm sure.
NEXT-->
As a digital photographer, I've come to appreciate the people behind the physical camera. Both technological and artistic.
NEXT-->
As for future cameras, I think we'll see initially, 3x sensors allowing for on the fly HDR images. After that we'll go to static video where a framed shot can be spun around to see all the out of frame info.
NEXT-->
After that, I suppose we'll get selective depth of field, on the fly image editing, blemish correction and on the fly multi-image splicing allowing for a static family photo to be created via sliced video.
NEXT-->
Of course we'll have meta data including temperature, GPS, wind speed, angle, height, surrounding buildings, photographer's personal ID#, satellite upload, etc.
NEXT-->
Film will die in the same way that pinhole cameras are dead. Sure, it's around and you can use it but what's the point? The medium isn't the art. It's the person behind the camera.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/politics/07armor.html Almost from the beginning, some soldiers asked for additional protection to stop bullets from slicing through their sides. In the fall of 2003, when troops began hanging their crotch protectors under their arms, the Army's Rapid Equipping Force shipped several hundred plates to protect their sides and shoulders. Individual soldiers and units continued to buy their own sets.
And a year and a half later (after above article):
http://www.bakesalesforbodyarmor.org/
It might take 10 more years, but as computers evolve into things we can't even imagine (wearable? pervasive and ubiquitos with a universal network maybe?) that Windows will take it's place in the history books as will Linux.
Kleenex, Band-aid, Xerox, Coke,
Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile.
No Joke...
There will always be no more than 3,
even though our market's "free".
Of Windows, Linux, OSX,
No magic regulation hex,
will make the market truly right.
With corporate size completely unchecked,
smaller competitors are totally wrecked.
Wal-Mart, Walgreen's, Home Depot, Lowe's,
Where it stops, nobody knows!
Wearable, ubiquitous, pervasive OS,
"All your base are belong to us!"
"You're either with us, or against us!
Do you agree, to limit the size of companies?"
Your irritation and dismissal seems very familiar.
Ever read Darwin's "Origin of the Species" ? It was full of observations, theories, and propositions. Decades later the Great White Hunter bone safaris lead by the Leakys were still not providing good answers, just more questions and dubious science, not to mention bones that would have been better left lie for awhile than torn out of the ground and waved around for the media.
When it comes to cognitive science, we're in a pre-Darwinian age. We know so little. Be careful when you dismiss critical thought or even attempts at such, as handwavy bullshit. You don't want to be those guys who rush in to loot the ground for quick "answers". Or how about Jane Goodall, mowing down the underbrush and dumping truck-loads of bananas to start chimpanzee food riots, and then calling it anthropology. I'm sure at the time they would have dismissed much of today's meticulous methodology as self-indulgent baloney. It's the same phenomenon that makes us so annoyed when a doctor says "laceration" instead of "cut" or "larynx" instead of "throat". You can just imagine doctors from 1607 dismissing all that terminology as self-congratulatory vocabulary that doesn't provide any answers.
The main theory in "Gödel, Escher, Bach" is compelling. To butcher it more than a bit... Just as walking is a long series of pushing yourself off-balance and then catching yourself, cognition is a long series of "strange loopiness" being knocked "out of loop" by "spontaneous activity" and trying to right itself again. Don't dismiss the theory just because the new words and entertaining examples rub you the wrong way.
Actually if you know anything at all about chaos theory or the book in question it's quite fascinating.
And there are answers. Just maybe not the easy ones we would like.
From Wikipedia: [Hofstadter] is a College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science; Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition.
Also he won the Pulitzer for Gödel, Escher, Bach.
So dismissing it all as handwavy bullshit, while a bit funny, might be considered the height of hubris.
That map of the night is crazy.
I mean most of it looks spot on to me.
Except for the part where most of Canada is using night goggles instead of lamps.