But if it were me taking the trip, I'd leave the tech behind. Route 66 is best travelled without it. Do take a camera, though. Turn off the AC in the car and open the windows. If the car isn't already taken care of, buy one for the trip. Pay no more than $500 for it. You aren't being cheap - the rest of the cash will go to mechanics on the way. A huge '70s machine, one that used to be green and has a suspension system in critical need of new parts, is best for this trip.
Stay in evil-looking motels as much as possible. If there isn't dead neon on the sign, keep going. Eat at places where the sign says EAT GAS NOW. Go to attractions involving reptiles live and extinct. Buy ugly souvenirs. Drink bad beer in dangerous looking bars.
Stop at public libraries and post your experiences to some free web server-Geocities or Tripod or Spaceports or whatever. Actualy, a Spaceports account where you get a tiny amount of money for each banner click-through would be very much in the spirit of Route 66. The road is a tau of desperate small-scale commercialism. I don't know if there is anything equivalent in the UK (I didn't find it when I was there) but we have public libraries in every town where anyone can just walk in and use the facilities free. These days, the facilities usualy include computers with web access.
Let me know the URL so I can follow your progress.
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Well, this is old news for those not having gone through the US education system. There is a large tendency to re-write history in the US "in the public interest" if the facts are not in favour of the US.
There is a large tendency to rewrite history in every collection of humans larger than zero.
This is not a special failing of the US educational system, but a general feature of the human condition. It is a credit to our culture (meaning the Western tradition, not the US in particular) that is is considered a failure, that truth is considered more important than the social benefits of a history full of heroes.
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With tooltips and a little care on the background colors, you can code a page that looks, well, less than completely stinky while the browser builds it.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
There are other reasons why ALT tags are a good idea.
One major one is that the net is sometimes slow. Even with the very fat pipes I use at work, there are times when I click navigation buttons before the graphics appear. Without ALT tags, that isn't a reasonable alternative.
Corporate sites tend to concentrate entirely on glitz. Many of them are stuck in a TV commercial mode.
I expect that to go away within the next five years, as the glamour of the web fades and Dot Com ceases to sound cool.
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Because the number of seconds since the epoch is in binary, and the next time those digits are all even will be when the Big Rollover makes all 32 bit 'nix's obsolete.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
People don't stay in dangerous areas just because they never thought of moving.
Last year, I moved out of a neighborhood that was becoming dangerous. I moved to a kind of nice, but nowhere near elite or even fancy area. And my house payments, for a smaller house, are triple what they were. I make a pretty good living, so I could (with some fairly major financial sacrifice) do that. My neighbors, solid hard-working and frugal, couldn't.
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There aren't any countries far ahead of us in post-secondary education.
The rest of the system may be a mess, but our colleges and universities are among the best.
I agree that the Lego test sounds like a bad idea. A creative challenge would be one thing, but copying an existing model from memory just doesn't demonstrate any personal trait that is of value in college or would be enhanced by college.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
The economics of fiction writing, particularly short stories, are very, very bad at this point.
Most of the Golden Age writers started in short fiction in pulp magazines. And at this point, that just isn't a viable market for a full-time writer.
The kind of science fiction that I think we are all missing here (I know I am) is very hard to sustain for a novel or a series. A quick, speculative story focused on a single idea. Not a big, profound idea that is fundimental to The Human Condition, but a little idea like how would someone use this particular gadget or power, if it existed.
Vogt's novels tend to be messy because he was a pulp writer. His ideas weren't novel-length, so he stapled them together.
He didn't write The Great American Novel. He wrote trashy little stories. Excellent trashy little stories. Stunning trashy little stories that I could read all night long and be disapointed to hit the back cover.
I need that.
Last time I read one of his, it started with the protagonist walking through a river, not remembering what water is and that it isn't breathable. That's fiction. Sometimes I need that more than I need a realistic reminder that life consists of self-conflict, imperfection, and mortality.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
But sometimes when I write a program for someone else, I cause the user's machine to do pretty much what I would do if I were there instead.
For example, I wrote a program a long time ago where some old lady at a Woolworth's would type information about the inventory into a PC and then, at a particular time, the information would get sent to the central office. Now, on one level, I thought of it as if I were taking down the information and sending it. I imagined what the old lady might do in this or that situation, and how best to handle what she might do. So for a few years, old ladies in the backs of Woolworth's had this "conversation" with "me" - an entity that embodied all I knew about dime-store inventory data entry and a certain degree of empathy for dime-store workers.
OK, low-res and limited scope.
Woody Allen said soemthing like "I don't want to be immortal through my work, I want to be immortal through not dying." Despite my opinion of the guy's personal life and his more recent movies, I agree. Even for very high-res work.
Oh, yeah - my duplicates (that generation, anyway) are all dead. Woolworths doesn't do that anymore...
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure Mitsubishi ad
We all need our dose of "dull jokes, bad acting, and silly melodrama". Part of the problem or delight of running an evolved OS instead of a designed one.
I've recently discovered that even in a city like Milwaukee, there are troups of people willing to provide the "dull jokes, bad acting, and silly melodrama" in person for about $15 US per performance. Probably less than the price of the worthless goods The Tube will program you to buy in a week.
The unregulated approach works for expensive skilled people like us. We can afford decent equipment and furnishings. And we tend not to work with things that are hard to make reasonably safe. Yeah, a computer with an open case can be a shock hazard, but that's our own problem.
But it doesn't work for the less expensively skilled people or those who work with things that are difficult to make safe. Ten hours a day of data entry on the kind of screen, keyboard, and mouse that you can afford on min. wage can cause you some rather serious problems. Without some rules, it's too cheap and easy to replace the wortkers. And I just bet it's both more convenient for the janitor, and way, way cheaper for the employer, if the janitor takes the elevator parts and cleaning fluids home and cleans the parts in his sink, rather than using the OSHA approved stuff, including toxic waste disposal services, at the job site.
Neither idea works. Non-regulation of work done at home is too easy to abuse, and applying current OSHA workplace regs to a home environment is, for the reasons so many have mentioned, intolerable. I don't have any other ideas ar this point, either.
And if that shell is a decent browser, that takes them right past "oh, God - what the hell is this?"
They never see anything but a boot-squence and the browser. No OS at all, as far as the user is concerned.
Now, Linux could do that very handily. Some guy at Dell sets up a Linux box just so, with exactly this harware, one user account, disables security so that account opens on boot, makes the browser the default shell, cuts a CD of all the config files, and that's it.
Down sides: 1) The big one - at the moment, there is no browser. Netscape will not do. It crashes too much. On a real setup, you just delete the lock file and fire Netscrape back up. I have a batch file to do that in four keystrokes and an annoyingly long wait. But when the browser is the shell, that looks like a sort of warm reboot to the naive user. Quite uncool. You need a rock-solid browser.
2) The licensing. This box doesn't provide real easy access to the source code. But maybe throwing in a CD that the user will probably never see is good enough, as long as there is also a CD with the standard config on it to recover from what the occasional curious user does to the system.
Sanity For Today Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
When I was a kid, there weren't (at least not in my neck of the woods) pre-built Lego computers.
At one point, I built myself a complete set of logic gates out of Technik parts. Unfortunately, accumulated friction prevented anything deeper than a two-level logic circuit, and even those often took such a hard push to operate that they broke under the strain.
Sanity For Today Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
The basic concepts of the classification system are open, but protected. We all pretty much know what "classified" means, and I bet if you called the front desk at the Pentagon and asked, they would tell you exactly what classifications there are and what each one means.
It would be security by obscurity if they deliberately used a bizarre filing system, such as alphabetical by middle initial.
The language used in most of the documents could qualify as security by obscurity, except that it is used without regard to security level.
--- I realize I'm a day late, but could you make sure that package from Isreal gets to Bagdad?
Sanity For Today Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
There are other countries that aren't allowed to spy on their own citizens either. The countries gather information on each other's citizens and then trade notes.
Sanity For Today Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
Why does there need to be control? Two messages in a row take it as obvious, and I have no clue why. Sure, free-flowing political discourse is dangerous, but that's what this country is all about.
Does the FEC filing cost anything beyond a stamp to send in the forms? Because otherwise, I think we should all file. As often as needed. And consider the possibility that any email with a vaguely political slant might be a contribution.
Please note that I am quoting, in my sig, Homer Simpson making a statement that is political in nature. In the episode, he is begging the art crowd to resume following him. This is a clearly political statement on his own behalf. And, by reference to a bit of pop culture that ridicules the art establishment, I am contributing to the Republican party. (Eew - time to change sigs...)
Sanity For Today Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
Slashdot Mirror
And with such force that the article jumped on my screen without my clicking the link and burned into my eyeballs before I could look away.
Oh, wait, there is that whole free will/responsibility for own acts thing.
Never mind.
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Mitsubishi ad
Sounds like a chance for a great trip.
But if it were me taking the trip, I'd leave the tech behind. Route 66 is best travelled without it. Do take a camera, though. Turn off the AC in the car and open the windows. If the car isn't already taken care of, buy one for the trip. Pay no more than $500 for it. You aren't being cheap - the rest of the cash will go to mechanics on the way. A huge '70s machine, one that used to be green and has a suspension system in critical need of new parts, is best for this trip.
Stay in evil-looking motels as much as possible. If there isn't dead neon on the sign, keep going. Eat at places where the sign says EAT GAS NOW.
Go to attractions involving reptiles live and extinct.
Buy ugly souvenirs.
Drink bad beer in dangerous looking bars.
Stop at public libraries and post your experiences to some free web server-Geocities or Tripod or Spaceports or whatever. Actualy, a Spaceports account where you get a tiny amount of money for each banner click-through would be very much in the spirit of Route 66. The road is a tau of desperate small-scale commercialism.
I don't know if there is anything equivalent in the UK (I didn't find it when I was there) but we have public libraries in every town where anyone can just walk in and use the facilities free. These days, the facilities usualy include computers with web access.
Let me know the URL so I can follow your progress.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
There is a large tendency to rewrite history in every collection of humans larger than zero.
This is not a special failing of the US educational system, but a general feature of the human condition. It is a credit to our culture (meaning the Western tradition, not the US in particular) that is is considered a failure, that truth is considered more important than the social benefits of a history full of heroes.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
What does the page look like while it downloads?
With tooltips and a little care on the background colors, you can code a page that looks, well, less than completely stinky while the browser builds it.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
There are other reasons why ALT tags are a good idea.
One major one is that the net is sometimes slow. Even with the very fat pipes I use at work, there are times when I click navigation buttons before the graphics appear. Without ALT tags, that isn't a reasonable alternative.
Corporate sites tend to concentrate entirely on glitz. Many of them are stuck in a TV commercial mode.
I expect that to go away within the next five years, as the glamour of the web fades and Dot Com ceases to sound cool.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
But at the time, the people using that calendar (yes, I realize it has been upgraded, but it was pretty much the same one) weren't using digits.
Roman numerals.
So yesterday was the first even day.
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Mitsubishi ad
Because the number of seconds since the epoch is in binary, and the next time those digits are all even will be when the Big Rollover makes all 32 bit 'nix's obsolete.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
Rock 1.0 - Igneous
Rock 1.1 - Sand
Rock 2.0 - Sedimentary
Rock 2.1 - Sand Plus
Rock 2.5 - Metamorphic
Rock 2.7 - Turbo Sand Plus 2000
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Mitsubishi ad
No kidding!
People don't stay in dangerous areas just because they never thought of moving.
Last year, I moved out of a neighborhood that was becoming dangerous. I moved to a kind of nice, but nowhere near elite or even fancy area. And my house payments, for a smaller house, are triple what they were. I make a pretty good living, so I could (with some fairly major financial sacrifice) do that. My neighbors, solid hard-working and frugal, couldn't.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
We lived on the road.
But I had SAT scores that got me admitted to college on the promise that I'd take a GED when I got around to it.
Homeschooled back when it was the liberal thing.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
There aren't any countries far ahead of us in post-secondary education.
The rest of the system may be a mess, but our colleges and universities are among the best.
I agree that the Lego test sounds like a bad idea. A creative challenge would be one thing, but copying an existing model from memory just doesn't demonstrate any personal trait that is of value in college or would be enhanced by college.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The economics of fiction writing, particularly short stories, are very, very bad at this point.
Most of the Golden Age writers started in short fiction in pulp magazines. And at this point, that just isn't a viable market for a full-time writer.
The kind of science fiction that I think we are all missing here (I know I am) is very hard to sustain for a novel or a series. A quick, speculative story focused on a single idea. Not a big, profound idea that is fundimental to The Human Condition, but a little idea like how would someone use this particular gadget or power, if it existed.
Vogt's novels tend to be messy because he was a pulp writer. His ideas weren't novel-length, so he stapled them together.
He didn't write The Great American Novel. He wrote trashy little stories. Excellent trashy little stories. Stunning trashy little stories that I could read all night long and be disapointed to hit the back cover.
I need that.
Last time I read one of his, it started with the protagonist walking through a river, not remembering what water is and that it isn't breathable. That's fiction. Sometimes I need that more than I need a realistic reminder that life consists of self-conflict, imperfection, and mortality.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
OK, it was low-res.
But sometimes when I write a program for someone else, I cause the user's machine to do pretty much what I would do if I were there instead.
For example, I wrote a program a long time ago where some old lady at a Woolworth's would type information about the inventory into a PC and then, at a particular time, the information would get sent to the central office. Now, on one level, I thought of it as if I were taking down the information and sending it. I imagined what the old lady might do in this or that situation, and how best to handle what she might do. So for a few years, old ladies in the backs of Woolworth's had this "conversation" with "me" - an entity that embodied all I knew about dime-store inventory data entry and a certain degree of empathy for dime-store workers.
OK, low-res and limited scope.
Woody Allen said soemthing like "I don't want to be immortal through my work, I want to be immortal through not dying." Despite my opinion of the guy's personal life and his more recent movies, I agree. Even for very high-res work.
Oh, yeah - my duplicates (that generation, anyway) are all dead. Woolworths doesn't do that anymore...
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
For authenticity, it should include an annoying sound plug-in.
)(:-)
Or, better yet, not.
Our secret is gamma-irradiated cow manure
Mitsubishi ad
The library that I go to has a very effective technological fix for the problem.
The monitors all face areas where there are lots of people.
try to relax...
We all need our dose of "dull jokes, bad acting, and silly melodrama". Part of the problem or delight of running an evolved OS instead of a designed one.
I've recently discovered that even in a city like Milwaukee, there are troups of people willing to provide the "dull jokes, bad acting, and silly melodrama" in person for about $15 US per performance. Probably less than the price of the worthless goods The Tube will program you to buy in a week.
try to relax...
The unregulated approach works for expensive skilled people like us. We can afford decent equipment and furnishings. And we tend not to work with things that are hard to make reasonably safe. Yeah, a computer with an open case can be a shock hazard, but that's our own problem.
But it doesn't work for the less expensively skilled people or those who work with things that are difficult to make safe. Ten hours a day of data entry on the kind of screen, keyboard, and mouse that you can afford on min. wage can cause you some rather serious problems. Without some rules, it's too cheap and easy to replace the wortkers. And I just bet it's both more convenient for the janitor, and way, way cheaper for the employer, if the janitor takes the elevator parts and cleaning fluids home and cleans the parts in his sink, rather than using the OSHA approved stuff, including toxic waste disposal services, at the job site.
Neither idea works. Non-regulation of work done at home is too easy to abuse, and applying current OSHA workplace regs to a home environment is, for the reasons so many have mentioned, intolerable. I don't have any other ideas ar this point, either.
try to relax...
OK, they are a bit modified, optimized for connectivity.
Does some things very well, but has about %30 downtime, during which the multimedia are a bit flakey.
I keep it in an enclosure at the end of my neck.
Sanity For Today
Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
Last time those people came up with something this disturbing, it involved feeding sheep brains to cows.
Something feels wrong here. Very cool, but wrong. And after the whole mad cow thing, I'm inclined to pay attention to the feeling.
On second thought, this isn't nearly as disturbing as the sheep brains, but let's think about the concept of tanks of fermenting slugs for a while.
Now there's a visual: Mr. Clueless Felon swipes one of these puppies, opens it up...
Sanity For Today
Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
for most people.
And if that shell is a decent browser, that takes them right past "oh, God - what the hell is this?"
They never see anything but a boot-squence and the browser. No OS at all, as far as the user is concerned.
Now, Linux could do that very handily. Some guy at Dell sets up a Linux box just so, with exactly this harware, one user account, disables security so that account opens on boot, makes the browser the default shell, cuts a CD of all the config files, and that's it.
Down sides:
1) The big one - at the moment, there is no browser. Netscape will not do. It crashes too much. On a real setup, you just delete the lock file and fire Netscrape back up. I have a batch file to do that in four keystrokes and an annoyingly long wait. But when the browser is the shell, that looks like a sort of warm reboot to the naive user. Quite uncool. You need a rock-solid browser.
2) The licensing. This box doesn't provide real easy access to the source code. But maybe throwing in a CD that the user will probably never see is good enough, as long as there is also a CD with the standard config on it to recover from what the occasional curious user does to the system.
Sanity For Today
Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
St. J. Wort, according to the bottle, is 1( or 2, depending on the strength, read your own bottle) three times a day with food.
But if I'm in a state where I'm eating three times a day and care enough about myself to bother taking the stuff, I don't really need it.
Sanity For Today
Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
When I was a kid, there weren't (at least not in my neck of the woods) pre-built Lego computers.
At one point, I built myself a complete set of logic gates out of Technik parts. Unfortunately, accumulated friction prevented anything deeper than a two-level logic circuit, and even those often took such a hard push to operate that they broke under the strain.
Sanity For Today
Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
The basic concepts of the classification system are open, but protected. We all pretty much know what "classified" means, and I bet if you called the front desk at the Pentagon and asked, they would tell you exactly what classifications there are and what each one means.
It would be security by obscurity if they deliberately used a bizarre filing system, such as alphabetical by middle initial.
The language used in most of the documents could qualify as security by obscurity, except that it is used without regard to security level.
---
I realize I'm a day late, but could you make sure that package from Isreal gets to Bagdad?
Sanity For Today
Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
There are other countries that aren't allowed to spy on their own citizens either. The countries gather information on each other's citizens and then trade notes.
Sanity For Today
Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
Why does there need to be control? Two messages in a row take it as obvious, and I have no clue why. Sure, free-flowing political discourse is dangerous, but that's what this country is all about.
Does the FEC filing cost anything beyond a stamp to send in the forms? Because otherwise, I think we should all file. As often as needed. And consider the possibility that any email with a vaguely political slant might be a contribution.
Please note that I am quoting, in my sig, Homer Simpson making a statement that is political in nature. In the episode, he is begging the art crowd to resume following him. This is a clearly political statement on his own behalf. And, by reference to a bit of pop culture that ridicules the art establishment, I am contributing to the Republican party. (Eew - time to change sigs...)
Sanity For Today
Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)