It is common for businesses to be required to pay at least part of the cost of regulation.
If you think seven thousand and change is expensive, try selling medication. Most small businesses are unlikely to need to pay at all: 5 area codes covers a substantial territory. Companies that need more that that - mail order houses, for example - are probably paying well over that every month in long distance charges.
That part doesn't mean much, it's a pretty standard disclaimer. Technically (well, a bit more than technically - there have been cases of very solid, or apparently very solid, companies crashing) true no matter how good the stock is.
That doesn't mean that all OS are equally insecure.
Obviously, the dominant OS will be the prime target. The question is how soft that target is. Windows is the prime target because it is dominant. It is an easy target for other reasons.
The stupid user can always be hit, the security obsessed will always be hard to hit. But there are a lot of people in the middle, and Windows security does not serve them well.
Bad idea for the kids. In some schools, attempts that are blocked are logged and can get the kid in trouble. Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
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If people adhered to those lessons, we'd all be frollicking happily in green meadows under a smiling sun and watching nice videos on each others tummies.
Life has complications, though. And when you actualy open that Bible, instead of just waving it at people, you see it has a bit more depth and substance than that.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
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I very, very rarely point out spelling problems. But the words "troup" and "troop" mean quite different things.
A troup is a group of performers. A troop is a group of soldiers or scouts. I hang out with both, and they get real upset when you get them confused. There was a pretty good movie made about confusing the two - A Bug's Life.
If you were making a point, it was a bit subtle for this forum.
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Well, yeah, when only half the people vote, my vote counts double.
Remember the conventions, with all those people having orgasms at every stupid catch-phrase the candidate mouthed? Each of those people counts way more than even my low-turnout-enhanced vote.
And the smaller the turnout, the greater the influence of the party loons.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
It will be picked by school boards, mostly on the basis of how slick the brochure is.
The content will be chosen by the company, and there will be no oversight by anybody, because the filtering algorithms and lists are closely protected IP.
So either way, the Republican view that corporations can do no wrong will prevail. Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
As the webmaster for the Shepherd-Express-Metro and a guy who is active in theater (I build sets, my wife makes costumes) I find Milwaukee very exciting.
But you have to make it exciting. If you just wait for the excitement, it won't ever come to you.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Through various web and email list situations, I've found myself in contact with people in a variety of places, Russia being a pretty common one.
I've wondered, from time to time, how practical it is to follow up on conversations with contacts in places like Russia by sending stuff. In fact, through a mailing list, I have a guy in Russia making me a set of carving tools. I have somebody handling the shipment for me, so I don't have anything to add about the mechanics.
Anyway, this is definitely news for the nerd in me.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Nobody can sustain the contemplative life any more
The contemplative life has always been lived by personal initiative, almost always against the trend of the current culture. Nothing new here.
I sustain a life that is as contemplative as I want, thank you very much. I do that by not paying attention to those parts of the information barrage that neither inform nor entertain. I do that by taking it upon myself to contemplate what I feel is worth contemplating.
No, I'm not some kind of a monk. I just know where the OFF switches are on my home electronics. Including the computer that I enjoy the occasional Quake session on.
I read a book called The Illiad recently. Man, if you think this is a death-culture, and the worship of the gun is a problem, you just aren't familiar with the power of the bronze-tipped spear.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
There are documents out there that are in old formats. Regular historians and archivists are going to need a computer guy who knows how to get information off (for example) an 8" CP/M floppy.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
I met some Russian capitalists this spring. One lived at my house for a month. They were business owners here to learn from American companies.
I was more than surprised to hear what a positive view they had towards Stalin. They credit him with making Russia a world power, and moving into the industrial age in a single generation.
Now, I see the guy as a complete moral failure who killed by the tens of thousands for quite selfish reasons and led Russia into a mess that will take them even more decades to find a way out of. But apparently opinions differ.
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The feeble minded and weak willed are two that without some sort of crutch would not be able to stand. Some might argue that society would be better if we just removed them, but at this point it is not our decision to weed from the gene pool unnaturally.
I've encountered quite a few people of faith who are far from "feeble minded" or "weak willed". And I've encountered some people who are "feeble minded" or "weak willed" who are nevertheless very worthwhile people. Styopa is right in saying that it is not our decision to weed them out.
Faith is a crutch, but so is an operating system. I could be posting this from a wire-wrapped board connected to an oscilloscope. I've coded low-level (even hand-assembled code when the assembler wouldn't do exactly the bit pattern I needed) and I know enough hardware theory that I could build a computer without even using chips. I don't need an operating system. I can do this all by myself. But I don't want to. For one thing, just weaving a K of core RAM would take me a week, and I don't have 8192 little donut magnets handy...
Similarly, I could probably cope with Self-and-Other and Mortality and Randomness and Man's Inhumanity to Man (and let's not even get into what, if anything, it all means) without resorting to the mythic structures that humans have apparently used for the entire time that we've been thinking, except for the very recent times (what is it, 3, 4 centuries out of the last however many thousand (the number keeps getting bigger as we learn more about the past) centuries?) when the idea that there might not be any gods was considered. But I see little value in the exercise.
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Posers, idiots, and other creatures are thrown to the side, because difficult as though it may be to grasp, this culture is a meritocracy. You get what you work for. If you don't know squat, this is easily demonstrable (even by others, to you).
I spent two years programming under a coke-head lead programmer. Man, could he crank out the specs and header files and build those complicated object oriented (this was in C, not C++) designs. Actualy sit down and write a damned line of working code? Something that a compiler could turn into OBJ? Hah. No, this wasn't a management position where he was supposed to plan and me code. He bullshat management for two freaking years, and I destroyed myself trying to make his crap work. I haven't programmed for money since that. I moved into tech writing and then web stuff.
In the same company, a couple of years later, a woman came to me and asked for advice. She's absolutely brilliant at coding device drivers for pretty much anything. Her lead programmer was a rocket scientist. Literaly - NASA dropout. He'd written a multitasking OS, and it had been blown out of the water by Windows. He hadn't worked a day in the last five years, convinced my friend to do his work as well as hers while he played Quake and whined about Microsoft. He could talk a good game to management, though. Her question: management was investigating, and she was wondering how to continue to cover for him, or whether she could just let him fall.
Two years. Five years. Yeah, eventualy they got found out. By one company. I'm sure they went on to other companies. But try slacking off that long as a truck driver.
I wonder what percentage of IT projects fail because the people involved are complete bullshit artists?
All those Dot Coms hitting the wall? Mostly because the business models were bullshit, but how many never made what they set out to make because they relied on "geeks" who only know how to hack the soggy gray (pink, really, when it's on) CPU?
IT is packed with posers and idiots. How do you think Microsoft sells CDs? And sometimes damned good people, smart and hard working, get tossed aside.
Software is a great industry, and I love it. But it is not some kind of paradise where smart people who work hard always win and bullshit is always exposed. This is part of the real world.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Your viewing of X-Men would have cost you not just $8.00, but a night of hockey.
That night of hockey, I'm guessing, provided at least one or two minor stories or events that will become part of the shared mythology in your circle of friends.
You spent an evening building your own authentic culture through unmediated shared experience. You lost out on participating in a mediated shared experience of the larger culture.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
Firstly, there is a bit of a counter-example: Kim's Costumes, Limited. This is a corporation that my wife started. It is very much under her control. When KCL makes a donation to a school, which happens more often than I approve of, it is for the purpose of helping that school, because Kim does, in fact, care. Sure, the company stands to, possibly benefit from the exposure and improved image, and from the way the kids get their standards for costuming raised (the basic printed plastic bag and mask doesn't seem so cool after wearing theater-grade costumes). But that isn't why that company does that.
Secondly, even if it [b]is[/b] (and the "if" is rhetorical, not conditional) a polite fiction that a company that cares about justice and morality and all that, the end result is that justice and morality get brought foreward and argued about and thought about, and money goes to charities. I'm well aware of the crude greed that powers the engine. I'm also aware that the sailboats on Lake Michigan are powered by a long-term thermonuclear blast that can, and does, kill people. [b]Pretend[/b] that corporations that make the right donations and noises and have the right policies care, if only to keep the right noises and donations and policies profitable. Yes, it is BS. I've lived on a farm, I've seen what BS can do when spread correctly.
Adam Smith pointed out that the profit motive gets lots of good things done. That's something both the Capitalist Pigs and the Commies forget: profit is not the goal of a society. (It [b]is[/b] the goal of a company.) Profit is the engine that makes a Capitalist society work, and in most ways, work very very well.
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I'm not sure if I made it up or heard it somewhere. I don't care. People make up words all the time. Old tradition. There are words in Shakespear's plays that are not found in any prior documents. Most tech words are of very recent origin. As far as I can tell, the only non-made-up word is "Ma", which appears to be hard-wired.
Gerentocracy isn't exactly the right word, though, because age isn't what counts, seniority is. By the time a Senator is a senior Senator, he (yeah, senior Senators are all men, at this point) tends to be an old man, but it isn't the age, it's the layers of legislative and organizational sediment.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
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It is common for businesses to be required to pay at least part of the cost of regulation.
If you think seven thousand and change is expensive, try selling medication. Most small businesses are unlikely to need to pay at all: 5 area codes covers a substantial territory. Companies that need more that that - mail order houses, for example - are probably paying well over that every month in long distance charges.
That part doesn't mean much, it's a pretty standard disclaimer. Technically (well, a bit more than technically - there have been cases of very solid, or apparently very solid, companies crashing) true no matter how good the stock is.
Any OS is NO MORE secure than the user.
That doesn't mean that all OS are equally insecure.
Obviously, the dominant OS will be the prime target. The question is how soft that target is. Windows is the prime target because it is dominant. It is an easy target for other reasons.
The stupid user can always be hit, the security obsessed will always be hard to hit. But there are a lot of people in the middle, and Windows security does not serve them well.
Bad idea for the kids. In some schools, attempts that are blocked are logged and can get the kid in trouble.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
If people adhered to those lessons, we'd all be frollicking happily in green meadows under a smiling sun and watching nice videos on each others tummies.
Life has complications, though. And when you actualy open that Bible, instead of just waving it at people, you see it has a bit more depth and substance than that.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
I very, very rarely point out spelling problems. But the words "troup" and "troop" mean quite different things.
A troup is a group of performers. A troop is a group of soldiers or scouts. I hang out with both, and they get real upset when you get them confused. There was a pretty good movie made about confusing the two - A Bug's Life.
If you were making a point, it was a bit subtle for this forum.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Well, yeah, when only half the people vote, my vote counts double.
Remember the conventions, with all those people having orgasms at every stupid catch-phrase the candidate mouthed? Each of those people counts way more than even my low-turnout-enhanced vote.
And the smaller the turnout, the greater the influence of the party loons.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Neither the Feds nor the States.
It will be picked by school boards, mostly on the basis of how slick the brochure is.
The content will be chosen by the company, and there will be no oversight by anybody, because the filtering algorithms and lists are closely protected IP.
So either way, the Republican view that corporations can do no wrong will prevail.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
But you have to make it exciting. If you just wait for the excitement, it won't ever come to you.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Through various web and email list situations, I've found myself in contact with people in a variety of places, Russia being a pretty common one.
I've wondered, from time to time, how practical it is to follow up on conversations with contacts in places like Russia by sending stuff. In fact, through a mailing list, I have a guy in Russia making me a set of carving tools. I have somebody handling the shipment for me, so I don't have anything to add about the mechanics.
Anyway, this is definitely news for the nerd in me.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
That whole hemishphere thing is so confusing...
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The contemplative life has always been lived by personal initiative, almost always against the trend of the current culture. Nothing new here.
I sustain a life that is as contemplative as I want, thank you very much. I do that by not paying attention to those parts of the information barrage that neither inform nor entertain. I do that by taking it upon myself to contemplate what I feel is worth contemplating.
No, I'm not some kind of a monk. I just know where the OFF switches are on my home electronics. Including the computer that I enjoy the occasional Quake session on.
I read a book called The Illiad recently. Man, if you think this is a death-culture, and the worship of the gun is a problem, you just aren't familiar with the power of the bronze-tipped spear.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
There are documents out there that are in old formats. Regular historians and archivists are going to need a computer guy who knows how to get information off (for example) an 8" CP/M floppy.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Why?
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
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Notice some details.
They are excited about location-specific e-commerce potential.
They are scheduled to have a prototype ready by the end of the year, and planning a big demo in October.
Can you say "burn rate above predictions?"
I don't think we need to worry a lot. I see dot-com crash here.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
You know, back when I was 15, 20, 25, I longed for the end of the dominion of the nation state.
The nation state sucks, no way around it.
But now I'm 40, and the nation state is well on the road to obsolescence and abdication. And that's turning out not to be a good thing.
Bummer.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
I met some Russian capitalists this spring. One lived at my house for a month. They were business owners here to learn from American companies.
I was more than surprised to hear what a positive view they had towards Stalin. They credit him with making Russia a world power, and moving into the industrial age in a single generation.
Now, I see the guy as a complete moral failure who killed by the tens of thousands for quite selfish reasons and led Russia into a mess that will take them even more decades to find a way out of. But apparently opinions differ.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
One more thing: Creationism is not science and should not be presented as such is schools.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
I've encountered quite a few people of faith who are far from "feeble minded" or "weak willed". And I've encountered some people who are "feeble minded" or "weak willed" who are nevertheless very worthwhile people. Styopa is right in saying that it is not our decision to weed them out.
Faith is a crutch, but so is an operating system. I could be posting this from a wire-wrapped board connected to an oscilloscope. I've coded low-level (even hand-assembled code when the assembler wouldn't do exactly the bit pattern I needed) and I know enough hardware theory that I could build a computer without even using chips. I don't need an operating system. I can do this all by myself. But I don't want to. For one thing, just weaving a K of core RAM would take me a week, and I don't have 8192 little donut magnets handy...
Similarly, I could probably cope with Self-and-Other and Mortality and Randomness and Man's Inhumanity to Man (and let's not even get into what, if anything, it all means) without resorting to the mythic structures that humans have apparently used for the entire time that we've been thinking, except for the very recent times (what is it, 3, 4 centuries out of the last however many thousand (the number keeps getting bigger as we learn more about the past) centuries?) when the idea that there might not be any gods was considered. But I see little value in the exercise.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
In the same company, a couple of years later, a woman came to me and asked for advice. She's absolutely brilliant at coding device drivers for pretty much anything. Her lead programmer was a rocket scientist. Literaly - NASA dropout. He'd written a multitasking OS, and it had been blown out of the water by Windows. He hadn't worked a day in the last five years, convinced my friend to do his work as well as hers while he played Quake and whined about Microsoft. He could talk a good game to management, though. Her question: management was investigating, and she was wondering how to continue to cover for him, or whether she could just let him fall.
Two years. Five years. Yeah, eventualy they got found out. By one company. I'm sure they went on to other companies. But try slacking off that long as a truck driver.
I wonder what percentage of IT projects fail because the people involved are complete bullshit artists?
All those Dot Coms hitting the wall? Mostly because the business models were bullshit, but how many never made what they set out to make because they relied on "geeks" who only know how to hack the soggy gray (pink, really, when it's on) CPU?
IT is packed with posers and idiots. How do you think Microsoft sells CDs? And sometimes damned good people, smart and hard working, get tossed aside.
Software is a great industry, and I love it. But it is not some kind of paradise where smart people who work hard always win and bullshit is always exposed. This is part of the real world.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
And so is the tech culture.
If soylent green involved live people, it would also be selfish and self-centered.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Your viewing of X-Men would have cost you not just $8.00, but a night of hockey.
That night of hockey, I'm guessing, provided at least one or two minor stories or events that will become part of the shared mythology in your circle of friends.
You spent an evening building your own authentic culture through unmediated shared experience. You lost out on participating in a mediated shared experience of the larger culture.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Firstly, there is a bit of a counter-example: Kim's Costumes, Limited. This is a corporation that my wife started. It is very much under her control. When KCL makes a donation to a school, which happens more often than I approve of, it is for the purpose of helping that school, because Kim does, in fact, care. Sure, the company stands to, possibly benefit from the exposure and improved image, and from the way the kids get their standards for costuming raised (the basic printed plastic bag and mask doesn't seem so cool after wearing theater-grade costumes). But that isn't why that company does that.
Secondly, even if it [b]is[/b] (and the "if" is rhetorical, not conditional) a polite fiction that a company that cares about justice and morality and all that, the end result is that justice and morality get brought foreward and argued about and thought about, and money goes to charities. I'm well aware of the crude greed that powers the engine. I'm also aware that the sailboats on Lake Michigan are powered by a long-term thermonuclear blast that can, and does, kill people. [b]Pretend[/b] that corporations that make the right donations and noises and have the right policies care, if only to keep the right noises and donations and policies profitable. Yes, it is BS. I've lived on a farm, I've seen what BS can do when spread correctly.
Adam Smith pointed out that the profit motive gets lots of good things done. That's something both the Capitalist Pigs and the Commies forget: profit is not the goal of a society. (It [b]is[/b] the goal of a company.) Profit is the engine that makes a Capitalist society work, and in most ways, work very very well.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
It doesn't surprise me to hear that the best 3D animators come from a 2D background.
The end product (regardless of technique - pen and ink, CGI, clay, live action, whatever) is a 2D moving image that (one would hope) tells a story.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
I'm not sure if I made it up or heard it somewhere. I don't care. People make up words all the time. Old tradition. There are words in Shakespear's plays that are not found in any prior documents. Most tech words are of very recent origin. As far as I can tell, the only non-made-up word is "Ma", which appears to be hard-wired.
Gerentocracy isn't exactly the right word, though, because age isn't what counts, seniority is. By the time a Senator is a senior Senator, he (yeah, senior Senators are all men, at this point) tends to be an old man, but it isn't the age, it's the layers of legislative and organizational sediment.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad