I find it very humourous that one second you tell me to get some humanity... and then call me a 'stupid moron' and suggest that I should choke to death on a hamburger and fries.
I figured you'd respond to your own mode of communication a little more than were I to issue a modicum of... you know what this word means, right... respect. And, my definition of humanity includes the ability to call someone a moron if, in fact, I believe they are being a moron, and you sir are being a moron. Where in my original post did I say "truck all that valuable water across the planet to the starving villages"? I didn't. You set that up for the point of argument, and in my world, that is moronic. Where am I being 'New Age'-inclined? Eh?
Do yourself a favour, look up 'sequitur' some time... all I said was, that water may or may not be ecologically damaging, until you've done an assessment on where it goes and where it comes from, you can't say. More than likely, it could be used for better purposes than building frat-boys' plastic parts for their shiney CPU fans on computers that get rarely used for anything more than wanking and e-mail to Mom asking for more beer cash...
Of course, I don't agree with the economic policies that force pollution out to 3rd will countries- but there isnt' a damn thing that can be done to stop it until those countries force...
Wrong! What it takes is for Americans to start giving a damn about their runaway-train politicians and the special interests they serve, and stop supporting forced globalization in area's that don't even have a basic sanitation system for the indiginous population.
What it'll take is less SUV's, less American TV Dinners, fewer yearly Television Upgrades and more care from smart people who have a chance to actually make a difference. Maybe a Chemical Engineer Level IV (ooh, Level IV!!!) could make a difference, but then again... maybe not.
As for your sheep photo collection... I think there are newsgroups for that.
This new-age drivel is very annoying to listen to. You would have a better chance of relocating the affected individuals to a more 'rich' environment.
Shut the hell up, you stupid moron. There are plenty of starving poor-people villages within eyesight of the nearest MegaCorp Processing Plants' water intake facilities. You wanna talk about India some time, and the wonderful 'industrialization' thats occurring there? How about Mexico? No ox-laden transportation required in these countries, the water is there... only its being used to make consumer goods for fat-ass'ed Americans who think its their right to rule the Imperial Roost from afar, ignoring all the while the plight of their fellow human beings.
Continue justifying your pampered existence all you like, but its people like you, with knee-jerk reactionary thought processes you'd expect from sheep, who make the problems this world has to deal with sooner or later... Nobody said anything about putting water in tankers and transporting it to starving villages.
Personally, I'd find it interesting to watch you choke on your McBurger and Fries, but what that has to do with anything... like your jibe... I have no idea.
Then, based on your reasoning, noone is qualified to determine whether something is or isn't 'ecologically' sound.
I dare say that the ecologists who are studying these issues know about it and are qualified, since they do study things like water tables and flow records.
Look, that this much water is being used in its production is little surprise. That we all take for granted the -enormous- amounts of energy and resources that get consumed in the production of our $99 'convenience/decadence' consumer items, is also, little suprise.
The point of this/. article may very well be that we're all completely ignorant when it comes to the processes we've all taken for granted, and maybe we should think about these things and not take them for granted, so easily, in our fat-ass Western Comfort lifestyles...
How does your solution compare to a cheap computer collecting data from remote sensors, keeping in mind that the Cube is designed for living-room use only?
Where is the $99 computer that I can buy anywhere in the world? Please tell me.
I can put a Nintendo Gamecube in a bucket, seal it with a $2 tube of silicon sealant, bury it in the ground with some cables coming out of it, and walk away knowing that it will be okay. No 'special' hardware, no 'PC-104 formfactor', nothing. Just cheap, commodity game hardware, no big loss, nothing special.
Boot speed? Hassle booting? This is a trivial problem. FSO is required now, but it won't be long until a resilient solution is implemented by someone who actually cares enough to keep working on this issue... instead of sitting around complaining about how 'stupid' it is to do things like this.
You don't get it do you? You can get Nintendo-GC's *anywhere*. In India, if I buy enough of them, I can get them for as low as $30 a piece... and no, computer/electronics stores don't matter. If something goes wrong, just get another GC, put it in the bucket, bury it in the ground.
Sheesh. You are such an ass. Give up pretending you know what you're talking about already, this thread is over...
That is true. Saying that 1500 liters of water gets "used" in the process of making a PC is pretty useless as an indicator of ecological impact.
Where does that water come from? Where does it go?
If you don't understand why its important to answer these two questions, then you're not qualified to determine whether something is or isn't 'ecologically' sound.
That 1500 liters of water, in some places, could make a huge difference to the farming and agriculture of 100's of villages. If it is being diverted by a some Globalized Computer Manufacturer instead of going into a valley basin, like it has for 1000's of years, maybe the use of that water is having an ecological impact.
Of course, though, the modern world has been so used to doing whatever it wants with water over the years, that it forgets that it doesn't actually 'belong' to anyone... so its not surprising that its not obvious what the problem is with using 1500 litres of water to build an in-animate object useful to only a few small % of the worlds population in the effort of keeping themselves alive...
I never called you an asshole. It was you who told me to "fuck yourself, asshole". I guess you assumed I was referring to you, when in fact I wasn't, directly. All I did was make a general observation about how there's always an asshole who doesn't get it, who craps on the new progress, and tries to infect other people with his ignorance. I didn't, actually, get around to calling you an asshole until after you'd had a little temper tantrum in response.
I don't give a fuck if you've been 'hacking on console hardware'. I've been building computing systems since Carter was in office. And I do see the value of a cheap, ubiquitous computing platform designed for the masses having Postgres capabilities added to it, not to mention the Linux kernel in general... it may not play pretty with your idealized notions of what a 'computer' is, but it sure does allow people like me to take the ball, run with it, and do good things for a lot of people.
Really, a Nintendo game console, buried in a bucket in a field somewhere, powered by the village 20-year old deisel generator, watching crops, regulating water supply, and giving farmers good control over things such as fertilization, would do a loooot of good. I could buy 100 of these systems for the cost of one Microsft-based solution, and I could feel very comfortable burying them in buckets, hanging them from trees, putting one in the elders' ramshackle shack on the side of a rubbish dump somewhere. Why? Because it is commodity hardware; if something goes wrong, I can have my American friend, at a minimum, walk to his nearest Costco, buy a pallet of them, and ship them to me overnight. Or I could take a bus into Nephal, hit the tourist market, and buy myself a ton of cheap RAM cartridges, knowing full well that they're stable, they work, and they'll last better than the vanilla-box PC's my good friends like to think make a 'real computer'.
And yes, having Postgres online, slow as it is, would be a good thing. If I have 3,000 of these Nintendo's buried in fields somewhere, it sure would be nice to be able to treat them all as a large, query-able database system...
Just -think- a little more about things before you crap on them.
And yes, you did crap on this idea without thinking about it, just admit it. Your western ideals for what makes a 'useful computer' are pretty much driven by your own participation in a capitalist market designed to do everything it can to extract every little bit of cash from its players. You don't need 3ghz of computing power to do good work with computers. You don't -need- the latest and greatest RAM technology in order to provide 2 years of stable, resilient, reliable data logging services for water and irrigation control.
A Nintendo running Linux is a good thing.
Its the worst of Western decadence, combined with the best of Western philanthropy, and it could make a huge difference in the 3rd World, where computers, and computing systems in general, are not cost effective enough to really make a difference...
Um, you're the one who started calling people names...
Just face it, your life lacks inspiration. You probably watch too much television, you have no idea how big and wide and wonderful the world is... my advice to you: Kill your TV.
If I'm going to share data with the UN and other farmers in my valley, Postgres would be a nice way to do it. It could be a flat text file too, but the point is... now there's an option in case a flat text file isn't adequate...
Amazing how narrow-minded and limp-dicked the world has become.
A Nintendo GameCube, being pretty much currency for children all over the world is a commodity computer. It is available in China, in Taiwan, in England, in Austria, in Pakistan, in Iraq, in New Zealand, on the common market, everywhere.
Also, peripherals for this device are cheap, and usually well designed. Intended to be sucked on, chewed on by dogs, had juice spilled on it, dropped from TV-set heights to the floor, etc. and still keep functioning.
Give a poor farming village one of these computers, set it up with some other cheap peripherals for water and filtration control, and you could change the lives of 100's of people.
That it has been done by people who have no understanding, really, of the potential consequences of their actions, is of no consequences whatsoever.
There are plenty of people around who do 'get it' occasionally...
If you read the announcement you probably noticed that even the people who did the port aren't too serious about it, because it's just too damn slow. Right tools for the right job etc.
I've got $99 in my pocket, I'm in any one of about 15,000 different marketplaces in the world, and I need a computer I can stick in the middle of nowhere to watch my crops, keep track of temperature, and make sure I'm getting my quota of water from the local UN pump. I do not give a single damn fuck how 'slow' it is, I just want my crop to grow properly so I can feed my family.
You go fuck yourself, small, narrow-minded, box-dwelling purposeless cretin.
see... i was trying really hard not to do that... but yeah. super-groovy fun.
spent the last few hours of my sunday reading up on apples tcp-over-firewire implementation and catching up on the uclinux kernel, firewire'ish stuff... can't wait to telnet to ipod.home from sl5500.wlan, heh heh...;)
... and why wouldn't i store a database in RAM or on a memory card, if I can do it...
honestly, people are so stupidly negative at times. for every technological single step forward, there's some asshole saying it shouldn't be done, its not useful, it has no purpose.
so many things we have all come to take for granted now, started this way.
I once visited a friend on the Oracle campus in the 90's, and noticed that in a whole slew of cubicles, programmers had Nintendo 64 setups. It seems they were porting Netscape to N64 back then, and I always wondered how weird it was for Oracle to be involved in that at first.
I wonder whatever happened to that project. Clearly it never saw the light of day, but they did have Netscape up and running on those boxes.
Now it seems things have come full circle, in a sort of twisty klein bottle kind of way...
dude, the gamecube is a $99 computing device. it is about on par with the $20,000 computing device i once had to use, in the 80's, in terms of processing power and capabilities.
why -shouldn't- this be done?
i never had a reason to get into game consoles before, but now that i can build a $150 database server and stick it on my network, i've got a whole new platform for the home, knowing that the hardware is pretty much rock-solid, dependable.
PC's might be 'better', but you can't beat game-console economics when it comes to computing...
I mean that you're promoting an ideal of 'wider dataset reachable from disagreement', while ignoring that this is in fact a bias. And therefore, there is still yet a wider, widerer dataset to be observed.
You can't recognize or communicate about a condition, without some form of agreement. If I say 'cheese' and you say 'smelly stuff made out of old milk', thats agree'ing on the condition of cheese. Thats what 'cheese' is...
After reading this last, the only thing I can say is that you're sufficiently deranged as to make further discussion fruitless.
Thanks. Its nice to know about your interest in fruit.
But you're not criticizing. Criticizing requires an honest assessment of the issue from all sides, and then praising what is praiseworthy and deriding what merits
You're right, I'm not criticizing. This might upset you, but I'm beyond being 'critical' of Bush and the Republican Holy Order, and have moved way past that into "Accusal" territory. I believe Americans must face the fact that were all national secrets revealed, the existing administration would be facing criminal charges.
Whether they are going to do so remains to be seen. I'm hopeful at least for my American friends, they all seem to be pretty pissed as well. Its dis-heartening to imagine that the majority, however, seem to think Bush is doing a 'good job' in the face of all that American hardship...
You are not going to be able to remove war from the human psyche. It exists. It's the mad demon of human nature which haunts us for as long as human beings exist. The rational response to this is not to say "let's get rid of all weapons", because that only affects the people who are moral and civilized enough to not want to develop weapons in the first place. It does nothing to prevent madmen from attempting madness, or building new and evil ways to wreck lives and communities.
What the fuck does the human 'psyche' have to do with anything? Mankind willingly makes war. It doesn't "haunt" him, it is a categorical function of mans desires.
Which, he has proven again and again, countless thousands and hundreds and millions of times, that he is capable of free will in peace. Lots of great monuments, exchanges of goods, acts of courage and bravery; more than has ever been counted.
Do these count for nothing in any equation of the 'human psyche', or do you only take parts of the universe that happen to result in a complete lack of free will and control when someone talks psychology? I have no clue.
All I know is that if those hundreds of high-power cruise missiles, tanks, boats, helicopters and planes were taking food surplus, last years '.99c store leftovers' from Orange County, to Somalia or some such place, instead of bombing the absolute fuck out of an entire population already teetering on the edge of utter insanity at the hands of 'World Dictators', then maybe the world would be a more peaceful place.
But no. We have to have the Motherfucking Cowboys and their guns. Because you know, there's a baddie out there, a demon called the 'human psyche'.
What crap. I'm sick of people who make weapons, or excuses for weapons. That's all there is to it.
Make more things that keep people alive and happy and able to participate with each other in grand activities, maybe, for a change, eh smartie? More of that, less depleted uranium and projectile injuries in 4 year olds... please?
Call it pontificating if you want, but I'm not willing to live my life continually in pursuit or refinement of fault.
In my humble opinion, here among the crowd, there are far too many lazy reasons -not- to take responsibility instead of finding fault. Maybe, if Russia and the Soviet Union hadn't been brick-walled away from more significant participation in International Standards and reviews efforts among the nuclear engineering community, their reactor designs and facilities would've been a little bit better run.
But, as we well know, Russia was hamstrung, or so they say... how do you think a nuclear-capable nation gets that way?
There are many lessons to be learned from Chernobyl. Discussing, and observing the discussion here among a select demographic of the world populace, is a worthy effort.
This planet has a language problem. Jokes do not translate.
They should not be the -first- line of repair, as a way to handle and relate to 'things', because... as the Jews well know... it doesn't always go down so well with those you can't communicate with properly and honestly.
{Anonymity is another poor corrective approach...}
... the U.S. certainly is less likely to be ruled by a "mad man."...
Sorry, but no. The current evidence at hand is that Bush is completely insane on the subject of Iraq, hunting terrorists, and using American Military Might un-justly. Nobody has done anything to stop him, they are all living under shells. Americans don't even care that he's illiterate. He went to war on a bed of lies, and the American People let him. Will the American People ever accept responsibility for the actions of their mad-men elect, or will they simply just change the pitch to "prove he's not mad"?
As for whether the American People (I assume thats what you mean by 'we', and that you're not actually a member of an Electoral College, who does vote for the President) still 'elects their leaders', I think the jury is pretty hung on that point. Bush stole Florida. That should not have happened, and I know more Americans who rationally think that than I do who don't, and consider that it was 'the system, working properly, as the system was designed'.
Sorry. Your armour has chinks. An American is no greater in this regard than any other human being alive on this planet today, each as equally responsible for the conditions of their lives as any other...
Right. All we have to do is discover fusion first, and then we have to figure out an efficient and totally automated way of mining He-3 from lunar regolith (we're talking grams of He-3 per ton mined), then we have to build a very large base, then we have to... etc.
Umm, hello you idiot, I was talking about the Sun. You know, that big round glowy hurty thing that your Mom keeps telling you not to look at directly?
History also tells us that natural resources are always in contention. Or, put bluntly, people fight wars over natural resources. It's been this way from time immemorial. (And please stow any cheap responses about "yeah, Bush has proved this".)
Yeah, okay, so we've got this big planet, and it represents the sum total of all humanities resources, as well as all humanity. So, we're going to build a bloody big weapon and point it at this planet, and use it to threaten all the people on this planet with annihilation.
Yeah, thats smart. Has HISTORY TAUGHT YOU CLUELESS ROBOTS NOTHING?
I'll give you a clue: You cannot be responsible for the objects you build, today. They will be used in ways you did not intend, in the future, by future generations.
Just because you won't be there to witness it, does not mean that you need to contribute to the activity willingly.
Putting weapons in space DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT SOME FUTURE MAD SOCIETY WON'T USE THEM.
Today, its 12 suit-case nukes. In 100 years, it could very well be the keys to the microwave array, Moonbase Yankee Charlie Tango.
As for your fatalistic 'it must be done simply because it will be done', if things are so willingly done in this universe, why don't we willingly find a way to Make Peace without requiring the invention of weapons?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you fucking kidding me?
Here's a word, kid. Buy yourself some brain cells and read that post again...
I find it very humourous that one second you tell me to get some humanity... and then call me a 'stupid moron' and suggest that I should choke to death on a hamburger and fries.
... you know what this word means, right ... respect. And, my definition of humanity includes the ability to call someone a moron if, in fact, I believe they are being a moron, and you sir are being a moron. Where in my original post did I say "truck all that valuable water across the planet to the starving villages"? I didn't. You set that up for the point of argument, and in my world, that is moronic. Where am I being 'New Age'-inclined? Eh?
... all I said was, that water may or may not be ecologically damaging, until you've done an assessment on where it goes and where it comes from, you can't say. More than likely, it could be used for better purposes than building frat-boys' plastic parts for their shiney CPU fans on computers that get rarely used for anything more than wanking and e-mail to Mom asking for more beer cash ...
...
... maybe not.
... I think there are newsgroups for that.
I figured you'd respond to your own mode of communication a little more than were I to issue a modicum of
Do yourself a favour, look up 'sequitur' some time
Of course, I don't agree with the economic policies that force pollution out to 3rd will countries- but there isnt' a damn thing that can be done to stop it until those countries force
Wrong! What it takes is for Americans to start giving a damn about their runaway-train politicians and the special interests they serve, and stop supporting forced globalization in area's that don't even have a basic sanitation system for the indiginous population.
What it'll take is less SUV's, less American TV Dinners, fewer yearly Television Upgrades and more care from smart people who have a chance to actually make a difference. Maybe a Chemical Engineer Level IV (ooh, Level IV!!!) could make a difference, but then again
As for your sheep photo collection
This new-age drivel is very annoying to listen to. You would have a better chance of relocating the affected individuals to a more 'rich' environment.
... only its being used to make consumer goods for fat-ass'ed Americans who think its their right to rule the Imperial Roost from afar, ignoring all the while the plight of their fellow human beings.
... Nobody said anything about putting water in tankers and transporting it to starving villages.
... like your jibe ... I have no idea.
Shut the hell up, you stupid moron. There are plenty of starving poor-people villages within eyesight of the nearest MegaCorp Processing Plants' water intake facilities. You wanna talk about India some time, and the wonderful 'industrialization' thats occurring there? How about Mexico? No ox-laden transportation required in these countries, the water is there
Continue justifying your pampered existence all you like, but its people like you, with knee-jerk reactionary thought processes you'd expect from sheep, who make the problems this world has to deal with sooner or later
Personally, I'd find it interesting to watch you choke on your McBurger and Fries, but what that has to do with anything
Get some humanity. My sig applies to you.
Then, based on your reasoning, noone is qualified to determine whether something is or isn't 'ecologically' sound.
/. article may very well be that we're all completely ignorant when it comes to the processes we've all taken for granted, and maybe we should think about these things and not take them for granted, so easily, in our fat-ass Western Comfort lifestyles ...
I dare say that the ecologists who are studying these issues know about it and are qualified, since they do study things like water tables and flow records.
Look, that this much water is being used in its production is little surprise. That we all take for granted the -enormous- amounts of energy and resources that get consumed in the production of our $99 'convenience/decadence' consumer items, is also, little suprise.
The point of this
How does your solution compare to a cheap computer collecting data from remote sensors, keeping in mind that the Cube is designed for living-room use only?
... and no, computer/electronics stores don't matter. If something goes wrong, just get another GC, put it in the bucket, bury it in the ground.
...
Where is the $99 computer that I can buy anywhere in the world? Please tell me.
I can put a Nintendo Gamecube in a bucket, seal it with a $2 tube of silicon sealant, bury it in the ground with some cables coming out of it, and walk away knowing that it will be okay. No 'special' hardware, no 'PC-104 formfactor', nothing. Just cheap, commodity game hardware, no big loss, nothing special.
Boot speed? Hassle booting? This is a trivial problem. FSO is required now, but it won't be long until a resilient solution is implemented by someone who actually cares enough to keep working on this issue... instead of sitting around complaining about how 'stupid' it is to do things like this.
You don't get it do you? You can get Nintendo-GC's *anywhere*. In India, if I buy enough of them, I can get them for as low as $30 a piece
Sheesh. You are such an ass. Give up pretending you know what you're talking about already, this thread is over
That is true. Saying that 1500 liters of water gets "used" in the process of making a PC is pretty useless as an indicator of ecological impact.
... so its not surprising that its not obvious what the problem is with using 1500 litres of water to build an in-animate object useful to only a few small % of the worlds population in the effort of keeping themselves alive ...
Where does that water come from? Where does it go?
If you don't understand why its important to answer these two questions, then you're not qualified to determine whether something is or isn't 'ecologically' sound.
That 1500 liters of water, in some places, could make a huge difference to the farming and agriculture of 100's of villages. If it is being diverted by a some Globalized Computer Manufacturer instead of going into a valley basin, like it has for 1000's of years, maybe the use of that water is having an ecological impact.
Of course, though, the modern world has been so used to doing whatever it wants with water over the years, that it forgets that it doesn't actually 'belong' to anyone
I never called you an asshole. It was you who told me to "fuck yourself, asshole". I guess you assumed I was referring to you, when in fact I wasn't, directly. All I did was make a general observation about how there's always an asshole who doesn't get it, who craps on the new progress, and tries to infect other people with his ignorance. I didn't, actually, get around to calling you an asshole until after you'd had a little temper tantrum in response.
... it may not play pretty with your idealized notions of what a 'computer' is, but it sure does allow people like me to take the ball, run with it, and do good things for a lot of people.
...
I don't give a fuck if you've been 'hacking on console hardware'. I've been building computing systems since Carter was in office. And I do see the value of a cheap, ubiquitous computing platform designed for the masses having Postgres capabilities added to it, not to mention the Linux kernel in general
Really, a Nintendo game console, buried in a bucket in a field somewhere, powered by the village 20-year old deisel generator, watching crops, regulating water supply, and giving farmers good control over things such as fertilization, would do a loooot of good. I could buy 100 of these systems for the cost of one Microsft-based solution, and I could feel very comfortable burying them in buckets, hanging them from trees, putting one in the elders' ramshackle shack on the side of a rubbish dump somewhere. Why? Because it is commodity hardware; if something goes wrong, I can have my American friend, at a minimum, walk to his nearest Costco, buy a pallet of them, and ship them to me overnight. Or I could take a bus into Nephal, hit the tourist market, and buy myself a ton of cheap RAM cartridges, knowing full well that they're stable, they work, and they'll last better than the vanilla-box PC's my good friends like to think make a 'real computer'.
And yes, having Postgres online, slow as it is, would be a good thing. If I have 3,000 of these Nintendo's buried in fields somewhere, it sure would be nice to be able to treat them all as a large, query-able database system...
Just -think- a little more about things before you crap on them.
And yes, you did crap on this idea without thinking about it, just admit it. Your western ideals for what makes a 'useful computer' are pretty much driven by your own participation in a capitalist market designed to do everything it can to extract every little bit of cash from its players. You don't need 3ghz of computing power to do good work with computers. You don't -need- the latest and greatest RAM technology in order to provide 2 years of stable, resilient, reliable data logging services for water and irrigation control.
A Nintendo running Linux is a good thing.
Its the worst of Western decadence, combined with the best of Western philanthropy, and it could make a huge difference in the 3rd World, where computers, and computing systems in general, are not cost effective enough to really make a difference
Um, you're the one who started calling people names...
... my advice to you: Kill your TV.
Just face it, your life lacks inspiration. You probably watch too much television, you have no idea how big and wide and wonderful the world is
If I'm going to share data with the UN and other farmers in my valley, Postgres would be a nice way to do it. It could be a flat text file too, but the point is ... now there's an option in case a flat text file isn't adequate...
Amazing how narrow-minded and limp-dicked the world has become.
...
A Nintendo GameCube, being pretty much currency for children all over the world is a commodity computer. It is available in China, in Taiwan, in England, in Austria, in Pakistan, in Iraq, in New Zealand, on the common market, everywhere.
Also, peripherals for this device are cheap, and usually well designed. Intended to be sucked on, chewed on by dogs, had juice spilled on it, dropped from TV-set heights to the floor, etc. and still keep functioning.
Give a poor farming village one of these computers, set it up with some other cheap peripherals for water and filtration control, and you could change the lives of 100's of people.
That it has been done by people who have no understanding, really, of the potential consequences of their actions, is of no consequences whatsoever.
There are plenty of people around who do 'get it' occasionally
If you read the announcement you probably noticed that even the people who did the port aren't too serious about it, because it's just too damn slow. Right tools for the right job etc.
I've got $99 in my pocket, I'm in any one of about 15,000 different marketplaces in the world, and I need a computer I can stick in the middle of nowhere to watch my crops, keep track of temperature, and make sure I'm getting my quota of water from the local UN pump. I do not give a single damn fuck how 'slow' it is, I just want my crop to grow properly so I can feed my family.
You go fuck yourself, small, narrow-minded, box-dwelling purposeless cretin.
see ... i was trying really hard not to do that ... but yeah. super-groovy fun.
... can't wait to telnet to ipod.home from sl5500.wlan, heh heh ... ;)
spent the last few hours of my sunday reading up on apples tcp-over-firewire implementation and catching up on the uclinux kernel, firewire'ish stuff
... and why wouldn't i store a database in RAM or on a memory card, if I can do it ...
honestly, people are so stupidly negative at times. for every technological single step forward, there's some asshole saying it shouldn't be done, its not useful, it has no purpose.
so many things we have all come to take for granted now, started this way.
I once visited a friend on the Oracle campus in the 90's, and noticed that in a whole slew of cubicles, programmers had Nintendo 64 setups. It seems they were porting Netscape to N64 back then, and I always wondered how weird it was for Oracle to be involved in that at first.
...
I wonder whatever happened to that project. Clearly it never saw the light of day, but they did have Netscape up and running on those boxes.
Now it seems things have come full circle, in a sort of twisty klein bottle kind of way
dude, the gamecube is a $99 computing device. it is about on par with the $20,000 computing device i once had to use, in the 80's, in terms of processing power and capabilities.
...
why -shouldn't- this be done?
i never had a reason to get into game consoles before, but now that i can build a $150 database server and stick it on my network, i've got a whole new platform for the home, knowing that the hardware is pretty much rock-solid, dependable.
PC's might be 'better', but you can't beat game-console economics when it comes to computing
it works already. you boot gc-linux over nfs.
;)
i just found a reason, finally, to by myself a gamecube.
... i just spent my sunday morning putting it on my ipod, which now has a whole new lease on life.
I mean that you're promoting an ideal of 'wider dataset reachable from disagreement', while ignoring that this is in fact a bias. And therefore, there is still yet a wider, widerer dataset to be observed.
...
You can't recognize or communicate about a condition, without some form of agreement. If I say 'cheese' and you say 'smelly stuff made out of old milk', thats agree'ing on the condition of cheese. Thats what 'cheese' is
I prefer when people disagree with me
But the ludicrousy of the situation is that this is, then, a bias.
B -. Re-think it from your own point of view, that an opinion, religious or otherwise, should be evaluated carefully, by thinking and reading...
After reading this last, the only thing I can say is that you're sufficiently deranged as to make further discussion fruitless.
...
Thanks. Its nice to know about your interest in fruit.
But you're not criticizing. Criticizing requires an honest assessment of the issue from all sides, and then praising what is praiseworthy and deriding what merits
You're right, I'm not criticizing. This might upset you, but I'm beyond being 'critical' of Bush and the Republican Holy Order, and have moved way past that into "Accusal" territory. I believe Americans must face the fact that were all national secrets revealed, the existing administration would be facing criminal charges.
Whether they are going to do so remains to be seen. I'm hopeful at least for my American friends, they all seem to be pretty pissed as well. Its dis-heartening to imagine that the majority, however, seem to think Bush is doing a 'good job' in the face of all that American hardship
You are not going to be able to remove war from the human psyche. It exists. It's the mad demon of human nature which haunts us for as long as human beings exist. The rational response to this is not to say "let's get rid of all weapons", because that only affects the people who are moral and civilized enough to not want to develop weapons in the first place. It does nothing to prevent madmen from attempting madness, or building new and evil ways to wreck lives and communities.
... please?
What the fuck does the human 'psyche' have to do with anything? Mankind willingly makes war. It doesn't "haunt" him, it is a categorical function of mans desires.
Which, he has proven again and again, countless thousands and hundreds and millions of times, that he is capable of free will in peace. Lots of great monuments, exchanges of goods, acts of courage and bravery; more than has ever been counted.
Do these count for nothing in any equation of the 'human psyche', or do you only take parts of the universe that happen to result in a complete lack of free will and control when someone talks psychology? I have no clue.
All I know is that if those hundreds of high-power cruise missiles, tanks, boats, helicopters and planes were taking food surplus, last years '.99c store leftovers' from Orange County, to Somalia or some such place, instead of bombing the absolute fuck out of an entire population already teetering on the edge of utter insanity at the hands of 'World Dictators', then maybe the world would be a more peaceful place.
But no. We have to have the Motherfucking Cowboys and their guns. Because you know, there's a baddie out there, a demon called the 'human psyche'.
What crap. I'm sick of people who make weapons, or excuses for weapons. That's all there is to it.
Make more things that keep people alive and happy and able to participate with each other in grand activities, maybe, for a change, eh smartie? More of that, less depleted uranium and projectile injuries in 4 year olds
Call it pontificating if you want, but I'm not willing to live my life continually in pursuit or refinement of fault.
In my humble opinion, here among the crowd, there are far too many lazy reasons -not- to take responsibility instead of finding fault. Maybe, if Russia and the Soviet Union hadn't been brick-walled away from more significant participation in International Standards and reviews efforts among the nuclear engineering community, their reactor designs and facilities would've been a little bit better run.
But, as we well know, Russia was hamstrung, or so they say
There are many lessons to be learned from Chernobyl. Discussing, and observing the discussion here among a select demographic of the world populace, is a worthy effort.
Certainly better than TV anyway
This planet has a language problem. Jokes do not translate.
... as the Jews well know ... it doesn't always go down so well with those you can't communicate with properly and honestly.
...}
They should not be the -first- line of repair, as a way to handle and relate to 'things', because
{Anonymity is another poor corrective approach
Sorry, but no. The current evidence at hand is that Bush is completely insane on the subject of Iraq, hunting terrorists, and using American Military Might un-justly. Nobody has done anything to stop him, they are all living under shells. Americans don't even care that he's illiterate. He went to war on a bed of lies, and the American People let him. Will the American People ever accept responsibility for the actions of their mad-men elect, or will they simply just change the pitch to "prove he's not mad"?
As for whether the American People (I assume thats what you mean by 'we', and that you're not actually a member of an Electoral College, who does vote for the President) still 'elects their leaders', I think the jury is pretty hung on that point. Bush stole Florida. That should not have happened, and I know more Americans who rationally think that than I do who don't, and consider that it was 'the system, working properly, as the system was designed'.
Sorry. Your armour has chinks. An American is no greater in this regard than any other human being alive on this planet today, each as equally responsible for the conditions of their lives as any other...
Right. All we have to do is discover fusion first, and then we have to figure out an efficient and totally automated way of mining He-3 from lunar regolith (we're talking grams of He-3 per ton mined), then we have to build a very large base, then we have to... etc.
Umm, hello you idiot, I was talking about the Sun. You know, that big round glowy hurty thing that your Mom keeps telling you not to look at directly?
History also tells us that natural resources are always in contention. Or, put bluntly, people fight wars over natural resources. It's been this way from time immemorial. (And please stow any cheap responses about "yeah, Bush has proved this".)
Yeah, okay, so we've got this big planet, and it represents the sum total of all humanities resources, as well as all humanity. So, we're going to build a bloody big weapon and point it at this planet, and use it to threaten all the people on this planet with annihilation.
Yeah, thats smart. Has HISTORY TAUGHT YOU CLUELESS ROBOTS NOTHING?
I'll give you a clue: You cannot be responsible for the objects you build, today. They will be used in ways you did not intend, in the future, by future generations.
Just because you won't be there to witness it, does not mean that you need to contribute to the activity willingly.
Putting weapons in space DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT SOME FUTURE MAD SOCIETY WON'T USE THEM.
Today, its 12 suit-case nukes. In 100 years, it could very well be the keys to the microwave array, Moonbase Yankee Charlie Tango.
As for your fatalistic 'it must be done simply because it will be done', if things are so willingly done in this universe, why don't we willingly find a way to Make Peace without requiring the invention of weapons?