Do me a favor and call me when someone posts a home-made movie on YouTube that is, I dunno, let's say 10% as well-made, written, and acted as Star Trek.
You mean the recent Star Trek movie? Star Wreck: The Pirkinning. Far lower budget but far more watchable cuz they weren't shaking the camera like an elephant was trying to mount the cameraman. Better script, too.
There was an HD 'tv' show, a couple years ago, called MariposaHD. The producers of the show distribute it exclusively by BitTorrent (it's still available if you care to check it out - it's mostly eye candy - some guys going to different South/Central American countries and taking HD footage of scenery and chicks - lots of chicks lol). The reason I mention it, is that I think there is real potential, in the future, for using P2P technologies to legally distribute HD content. I'd like to see more online video services perhaps adopt more P2P technologies - there's no reason a for-profit company couldn't potentially use P2P to increase their market reach and profitability.
The Miro player is great for downloading HD content over connections that might not be able to handle it as a live stream. Torrent support is built in. While you can download movies and TV shows, you can also get net-only content like techzilla, geekbrief, nasa tv, rocketboom, all sorts of amateur content. This is what the big boys are scared of. This sort of delivery system rapidly marginalizes them. Best to declare it responsible for terrorism and pedophilia and get it banned.
Can someone explain to me the benefit to society of this kind of activity? I get how the stock market is beneficial, generally allocating resources according to the merit of the business ventures involved, investing capital where it will produce goods/services/jobs, and so on. So despite being a social lefty, I'm not anti-capitalism or anti-stock-market; it has risks and flaws but it works. But how does this kind of stock trading benefit anyone other than the traders themselves?
The theoretical benefit of having a stock market is that it allows small amounts of capital from many people to be pooled into larger amounts to undertake business ventures. In private ventures between gentlemen, there wasn't much liquidity (ability to sell stock for cash in an emergency) so there was an understandable reticence to invest too much money in any given scheme. There's also the issue of liability and so forth and how the maximum risk borne by the investor could include his entire fortune.
So you get the idea of a corporation and the investor's maximum loss is the amount he invested. Put up $10k and it goes tits up, you're only out $10k. Of course, you try setting up a corporation or LLC yourself and get a bank loan and the bank is going to demand you sign a personal letter of credit thus you're back on the hook.
But let's say you have your corporation, it's not privately held but open for the public to buy shares. You still need the market. This provides a means for the investor to buy shares in your company and an ability to sell them for whatever reason when cash is required. The market for issuing new shares of stock is the primary market; the market for selling outstanding shares is the secondary market. So you feel comfortable buying $10k of Red Hat stock because you know if you ever need access to that money, you can liquidate your position. Your investment strategy would try and anticipate what your cash needs will be -- if you think you'll need it in six months, you're probably in commercial paper, if you need it sooner than that, you might just keep it in the bank.
All of what I've said above can be good and noble. The problem is that you can end up with people playing with the rules to rig the game. For starters, the stock market was never intended to be the domain of the average citizen. Wealthy individuals and bankers bought and sold stocks, not Joe Public. But Wall Street needs a constant stream of new suckers to take the losing side in bets and so companies started doing the whole 401k thing to get fresh streams of capital to fuck and despoil. And you get the game players who try all sorts of tricks to fuck people out of their positions. Let's also not forget that there are speculators, gamblers, and unsavory business criminals running their little cons.
It's the same basic human nature that ruins things like insurance. Insurance is a great idea -- you give up a portion of your money and in return you know your ass is covered if the worst possible thing happens. The idea is that only a handful of all the policy holders could suffer at any one time. If you were in an Amish community you could rely on barn raisings and the like and for a business this is the same idea. But then greedy fucks got involved. All the basic scams and cons that could be run against the industry were figured out hundreds of years ago. Buying insurance against something you did not own and did not have an interest in seeing preserved was outlawed by Parliament in what was it, 1790 something? But that's basically what the derivatives crisis is about and it's still legal in America to this day.
To get wealthy honestly can sometimes come quickly but for most it takes time and effort; to get wealthy quickly usually requires crime and if the crime isn't even against the law, so much the better. Note how the regulations put in place after the Great Depression were lobbied against and removed, thus paving the way for our current mess.
The whole needing F-22s if we ever get into a conventional war with a Great Power thing is a canard. Great Powers have nuclear weapons, so conventional wars aren't possible; we send in F-22s and 8 hours later half the planet is glass.
Conventional fighting these days is done against guys hiding in caves in third-world countries, and the F-22 does precisely nothing to help in those scenarios.
Actually, that was the thinking after WWII, armies would not be needed because of nukes, navies would no longer be needed, etc. But the way it worked out, nobody wanted to risk all out nuclear warfare so we saw proxy wars fought all over the place, Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan and the like. The presence of nukes means that conventional wars probably won't become all-out world wars for risk of someone popping a nuke but it won't push all warfare out of consideration.
I'm extremely hard-pressed to imagine a scenario where we would be in an all-out technology war, the kind that Tom Clancy wetdreams about. As you said, they're all brush-fire wars right now with our opponents being decidedly low-tech. China's about the only scenario I can imagine with a high-tech war breaking out and that's still unlikely because we wouldn't dare risk fighting the guys who hold all our debt and sell us all our cheap plastic shit.
History is replete with examples of nations not properly assessing their threats and getting blindsided. But usually not everyone is surprised. A good example is with Japan. Pearl Harbor was a bolt from the blue for people who weren't paying attention to foreign affairs. It was not a surprise to the Navy who had been conducting exercises against mock Japanese forces for years, aka the "orange" navy. The Navy's only surprise was that the attack happened at Pearl and not in the Philippines. Congress had authorized more war spending in the period leading up to WWII but were slow about it because they still believed that Isolationism might still work.
But seriously, the F-22 is a cold war vestige and simply does not accurately reflect the current state of the battlefield. Shit, they were conducting the fly-off back when I was in jr. high! I think it was around '90 or so that they picked the 22 over the 23. I know this is some complex shit we're talking about but it still shouldn't take this long and cost this much.
These programs have become unsustainable. There's no reason for the F-22 to cost what it does. We're talking about runaway projects with padding to line the pockets of the military-industrial complex. This isn't about protecting the nation, this is about extracting wealth from the treasury. Defense contractors are doing more to harm the safety and security of this country than the long-haired hippies ever did.
The F-15 is still a world-beater. Why not just upgrade the avionics and fire up the assembly lines again? Retire the old airframes, field new ones.
You don't build them to use them, you build them so you don't have to use them. You also force anyone who thinks they need to counter them to spend resources on developing and deploying the countermeasures.
They've already got countermeasures for F-22 stealth so no need to bother now. Remember how that F-117 got shot down?
There's so many damn versions out there, not just of major number releases like GH5 but spin-offs and other crap.
Frankly, I'm astounded at the level of popularity and dumbfounded by the success of something like Rock Band with all those expensive peripherals. I would have pointed to that sniper game on that Sega system, the one with the $200 gun accessory with the TV built into the scope and said it would be another failure like that. Looks like I was wrong but it also looks like they're going to run the genre into the ground until people are sick of it.
Suddenly the whole tone of the conversation changed, and I was immediately transfered to a supervisor. I went through about 10 minutes answering a series of questions off a script. "Did the Fire cause any property damage?" "Was there any bodily injury caused by the fire?" "Have you suffered any loss of income due to this problem?" etc etc etc.
I answered no to everything, but simply mentioning "Fire" got me a new power brick, when no other method did. It is something Apple is clearly concerned about.
"Hi, Applecare. I bought a mac mini and a month later you released a better one with more specs. I'd like to return and upgrade."
"No."
"Did I mention it, ah, burst into flames?"
"Fire?"
"Fire fire fire!"
"Holy fuck, we'll get a new one out immediately, just promise not to talk to the press!"
I don't like playing cultural imperialist, but something about current Asian cultures seems to me to be broken: this isn't exactly the first suicide of its sort, or even an uncommon phenomenon, just one of the more high-profile cases (since it's Apple, and a senior guy). Western culture isn't immune to these effects either (cf. high-profile financial advisors committing suicide in 2008-2009), but I understand that it's significantly more of an issue in Asia. I'd hazard that it's something in the common implementation of 'honor' and self-value that predisposes people towards a massive breakdown in the face of 'public disgrace'.
I consider that to be a feature of the culture, not a bug. I'd like to see a lot more politicians and government officials embrace suicide as a way of atoning for their dishonor. In America fucking up earns you a raise and a promotion. Getting caught with your pants down and dick out is just something to brazen out and hope the public attention fades. Senator Toe Tapper got to finish out his term instead of resigning in disgrace. Sen. Vitter the Shitter, he of the prostitutes and adult baby diaper fetish is still in his high chair in Congress. Ensign is unashamed, same with Sanford and Gingrich. And I've yet to hear of a finance company CEO eating a gun for sheer shame of public infamy.
The adage isn't an admonition not to use hard drives as a means of backing up data. Rather, it is concerned with the fact that any change to your data is committed to each duplicate volume in a RAID, so if you delete an important file, for example, it's just as gone as if you weren't running a RAID.
That's completely different from mirroring your drive onto an external hard drive and putting it on a shelf somewhere. If you delete a file on your live system, you can restore from that backup.
OP here. The way I meant it was "You don't stick your files on a RAID and consider that a backup." Theoretically, a RAID in your office and a RAID across town that are syched would be good backup. But in a single RAID, you could have two drive failures at once, a power surge, card failure, gremlins, whatever. It appears many people use a Drobo as a file server and so the question becomes "How do you backup the Drobo?" Because this goes back to point 1, RAID is not a backup.
I've been waiting for something like this for a while. When I first got into web stuff I was struck by the vast difference between web layout and print layout. Yes, I understand the point about pixel-perfect control being a shackle and how web is supposed to have the flexibility of displaying on different hardware, different browsers, anything from a PDA to a 24" graphic designer screen. I've been bitten by websites that were so strickly formatted that they were unusable outside of their expected use. That being said, I still wanted embeddable fonts. Nice to see we have them now.
Sure, just about anybody could live with this kind of stress for a while, but we're not talking about a while, we're talking about MONTHS of this kind of pressure. Many perfectly healthy, strong, capable people would crack under this kind of pressure. And even our best and brightest crack under the pressure [foxnews.com] of living here on Earth, with lots of air, beer, and pretty babes!
Put on a bigger engine, make the trip shorter. How is left as an exercise to the reader.:)
Re:sounds like a great book!
on
Hello World!
·
· Score: 1
The main difference between science and religion is not that one is true and the other is false. It's that one is falsifiable and the other is not.
To put it more bluntly, when the scientist tells you water is hydrogen and oxygen and you say "prove it," there's an experiment to do just that. And for as many claims that science makes that you ask for proof of, it will be provided, until you're absolutely sick of it. There's a great book called a Short History of Nearly Everything that takes the great claims of science you learn in school and walks you back to how they were discovered and who did the work.
The priest shows you bread and wine and tells you it's the body and blood of christ and you ask him to prove it, you get your ears boxed and sent to the nuns.
I use my family members to track public awareness -- my mom listens to safe, comfy nutritionless mainstream media products from NBC, my dad listens to right wing hate radio, and my sister tries to avoid hearing anything about anything but leans progressive.
My dad is marginally better informed than my sister if only because they can't lie about everything and some nuggets of truth slip through. If you assign a negative weight to all the stuff he knows that just isn't so, he's far less informed.
My mom only knows what the MSM wants to cover but has gradually come to distrust it. Over the eight years of Boosh, I would keep bringing up things she had not heard of only to hear then six to twelve months later on the news. It's not that this stuff wasn't out there to be discovered, it's just that nobody was talking about it. Say a bit of news gets flushed out on an Infodump Friday, the blogs would pick it up and talk about it even as the talking heads ignored it. Enough blog interest could eventually make the story big enough for the MSM to start covering it again. What finally convinced her that NBC is morally bankrupt was seeing that insidious little investment gnome Cramer go on Jon Stewart, get his ass handed to him, then show up on the Today show a few days later doing his same old schtick. This was a man revealed to the world as a fraud and yet there were no consequences. "Of course there aren't. Morning shows like this are one big commercial. There's the little 30 second ones and then there's the longer ones with the hosts. They put Cramer on to drum up interest for his CNBC show."
A really telling figure is that the ratings for the various professional news outlets are very, very minuscule compared to the size of the nation. A top-rated cable news show will have a million viewers and that's compared to a nation of 300 million?
I think a better study would be trying to figure out the permeation level of the news sources through the society at large. It seems like most people are completely disconnected like my sister and only find out things through hearsay. So if Rush Limbaugh puts out the idea that Obama has a fake birth certificate, if that little meme goes beyond his shows and people who never listen to him start believing it, that's an influence far beyond his nominal audience. Second-hand disinformation? Goebbels called this sort of thing the Big Lie but I call it the "big penis stunt." I start talking about having a 12-inch dick. At first, the response will be "no, you don't" and "perv!" But if I keep talking about it, eventually the comments will shift from challenging the existence of my 12-inch dick to my talking about it. This presupposes the existence of the prodigious prong and now the debate is over whether it's appropriate to discuss in public. Doesn't matter if I'm actually hung like a Ken doll, everyone else knows I'm not.
Still, it's nice to have 32GB on the USB stick in my pocket for when I need something. I never thought I'd say this because I've been rather insatisfiable when it comes to computers, but things are starting to bottom out. Even a pack rat like me is starting to wonder what I need all this space for, it's moving past nice-to-have into cool-but-why territory.
Something will come up to eat the space.
CD-ROM's could store more text than you could ever need. Then came multimedia content. CD's suddenly felt cramped.
Time was when computer music meant mod files. Who had the space to devote to encoding real live music? Now we have mp3 players in our pockets.
We'll come up with more and more stuff to eat up the space. Video is the biggest driver right now but even the most hardcore downloader will need some time to fill up a 1.5tb drive. Hardcore geeks who keep the last ten iso's of every software distribution out there are having trouble filling up that space. But we'll come up with something else. I don't do video editing but by all accounts you eat up hard drive space like candy.
The next revolution we desperately need is reliable archival storage. Tapes tend to suck and backing up to a second external drive just makes me think of the RAID admonishment -- "RAID is not backup." It feels safer to have something like a DVD with no electronic parts to go bad, something you can stick in a new drive whenever you want. Except wait a minute, how good are the discs? When will the dye start to fade, the backing peel off? No, DVD's are worrisome when talking about really important data.
So the current best advice out there is to backup your data multiple times with different technology so it would take a truly awful combination of failures to fuck 'em all. But there needs to be a better way than this.
Slashdot Mirror
Do me a favor and call me when someone posts a home-made movie on YouTube that is, I dunno, let's say 10% as well-made, written, and acted as Star Trek.
You mean the recent Star Trek movie? Star Wreck: The Pirkinning. Far lower budget but far more watchable cuz they weren't shaking the camera like an elephant was trying to mount the cameraman. Better script, too.
Jobs: You synced my flagship product!
There was an HD 'tv' show, a couple years ago, called MariposaHD. The producers of the show distribute it exclusively by BitTorrent (it's still available if you care to check it out - it's mostly eye candy - some guys going to different South/Central American countries and taking HD footage of scenery and chicks - lots of chicks lol). The reason I mention it, is that I think there is real potential, in the future, for using P2P technologies to legally distribute HD content. I'd like to see more online video services perhaps adopt more P2P technologies - there's no reason a for-profit company couldn't potentially use P2P to increase their market reach and profitability.
The Miro player is great for downloading HD content over connections that might not be able to handle it as a live stream. Torrent support is built in. While you can download movies and TV shows, you can also get net-only content like techzilla, geekbrief, nasa tv, rocketboom, all sorts of amateur content. This is what the big boys are scared of. This sort of delivery system rapidly marginalizes them. Best to declare it responsible for terrorism and pedophilia and get it banned.
Can someone explain to me the benefit to society of this kind of activity? I get how the stock market is beneficial, generally allocating resources according to the merit of the business ventures involved, investing capital where it will produce goods/services/jobs, and so on. So despite being a social lefty, I'm not anti-capitalism or anti-stock-market; it has risks and flaws but it works. But how does this kind of stock trading benefit anyone other than the traders themselves?
The theoretical benefit of having a stock market is that it allows small amounts of capital from many people to be pooled into larger amounts to undertake business ventures. In private ventures between gentlemen, there wasn't much liquidity (ability to sell stock for cash in an emergency) so there was an understandable reticence to invest too much money in any given scheme. There's also the issue of liability and so forth and how the maximum risk borne by the investor could include his entire fortune.
So you get the idea of a corporation and the investor's maximum loss is the amount he invested. Put up $10k and it goes tits up, you're only out $10k. Of course, you try setting up a corporation or LLC yourself and get a bank loan and the bank is going to demand you sign a personal letter of credit thus you're back on the hook.
But let's say you have your corporation, it's not privately held but open for the public to buy shares. You still need the market. This provides a means for the investor to buy shares in your company and an ability to sell them for whatever reason when cash is required. The market for issuing new shares of stock is the primary market; the market for selling outstanding shares is the secondary market. So you feel comfortable buying $10k of Red Hat stock because you know if you ever need access to that money, you can liquidate your position. Your investment strategy would try and anticipate what your cash needs will be -- if you think you'll need it in six months, you're probably in commercial paper, if you need it sooner than that, you might just keep it in the bank.
All of what I've said above can be good and noble. The problem is that you can end up with people playing with the rules to rig the game. For starters, the stock market was never intended to be the domain of the average citizen. Wealthy individuals and bankers bought and sold stocks, not Joe Public. But Wall Street needs a constant stream of new suckers to take the losing side in bets and so companies started doing the whole 401k thing to get fresh streams of capital to fuck and despoil. And you get the game players who try all sorts of tricks to fuck people out of their positions. Let's also not forget that there are speculators, gamblers, and unsavory business criminals running their little cons.
It's the same basic human nature that ruins things like insurance. Insurance is a great idea -- you give up a portion of your money and in return you know your ass is covered if the worst possible thing happens. The idea is that only a handful of all the policy holders could suffer at any one time. If you were in an Amish community you could rely on barn raisings and the like and for a business this is the same idea. But then greedy fucks got involved. All the basic scams and cons that could be run against the industry were figured out hundreds of years ago. Buying insurance against something you did not own and did not have an interest in seeing preserved was outlawed by Parliament in what was it, 1790 something? But that's basically what the derivatives crisis is about and it's still legal in America to this day.
To get wealthy honestly can sometimes come quickly but for most it takes time and effort; to get wealthy quickly usually requires crime and if the crime isn't even against the law, so much the better. Note how the regulations put in place after the Great Depression were lobbied against and removed, thus paving the way for our current mess.
Rifftrax Transformers, after Bumblebee changes from old camaro look to new camaro look
"Soundtrack direct to you from Kill Bill"
"Wow, it's the 2007 Camaro which is crappier and worth less than the old one!"
The whole needing F-22s if we ever get into a conventional war with a Great Power thing is a canard. Great Powers have nuclear weapons, so conventional wars aren't possible; we send in F-22s and 8 hours later half the planet is glass.
Conventional fighting these days is done against guys hiding in caves in third-world countries, and the F-22 does precisely nothing to help in those scenarios.
Actually, that was the thinking after WWII, armies would not be needed because of nukes, navies would no longer be needed, etc. But the way it worked out, nobody wanted to risk all out nuclear warfare so we saw proxy wars fought all over the place, Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan and the like. The presence of nukes means that conventional wars probably won't become all-out world wars for risk of someone popping a nuke but it won't push all warfare out of consideration.
I'm extremely hard-pressed to imagine a scenario where we would be in an all-out technology war, the kind that Tom Clancy wetdreams about. As you said, they're all brush-fire wars right now with our opponents being decidedly low-tech. China's about the only scenario I can imagine with a high-tech war breaking out and that's still unlikely because we wouldn't dare risk fighting the guys who hold all our debt and sell us all our cheap plastic shit.
History is replete with examples of nations not properly assessing their threats and getting blindsided. But usually not everyone is surprised. A good example is with Japan. Pearl Harbor was a bolt from the blue for people who weren't paying attention to foreign affairs. It was not a surprise to the Navy who had been conducting exercises against mock Japanese forces for years, aka the "orange" navy. The Navy's only surprise was that the attack happened at Pearl and not in the Philippines. Congress had authorized more war spending in the period leading up to WWII but were slow about it because they still believed that Isolationism might still work.
But seriously, the F-22 is a cold war vestige and simply does not accurately reflect the current state of the battlefield. Shit, they were conducting the fly-off back when I was in jr. high! I think it was around '90 or so that they picked the 22 over the 23. I know this is some complex shit we're talking about but it still shouldn't take this long and cost this much.
These programs have become unsustainable. There's no reason for the F-22 to cost what it does. We're talking about runaway projects with padding to line the pockets of the military-industrial complex. This isn't about protecting the nation, this is about extracting wealth from the treasury. Defense contractors are doing more to harm the safety and security of this country than the long-haired hippies ever did.
The F-15 is still a world-beater. Why not just upgrade the avionics and fire up the assembly lines again? Retire the old airframes, field new ones.
You don't build them to use them, you build them so you don't have to use them. You also force anyone who thinks they need to counter them to spend resources on developing and deploying the countermeasures.
They've already got countermeasures for F-22 stealth so no need to bother now. Remember how that F-117 got shot down?
There's so many damn versions out there, not just of major number releases like GH5 but spin-offs and other crap.
Frankly, I'm astounded at the level of popularity and dumbfounded by the success of something like Rock Band with all those expensive peripherals. I would have pointed to that sniper game on that Sega system, the one with the $200 gun accessory with the TV built into the scope and said it would be another failure like that. Looks like I was wrong but it also looks like they're going to run the genre into the ground until people are sick of it.
They had to get the computer working to rummage through the private stuff, right?
(yeah, I know they could yank the drive and put it in another machine but run with it for a minute here...)
Suddenly the whole tone of the conversation changed, and I was immediately transfered to a supervisor. I went through about 10 minutes answering a series of questions off a script. "Did the Fire cause any property damage?" "Was there any bodily injury caused by the fire?" "Have you suffered any loss of income due to this problem?" etc etc etc.
I answered no to everything, but simply mentioning "Fire" got me a new power brick, when no other method did. It is something Apple is clearly concerned about.
"Hi, Applecare. I bought a mac mini and a month later you released a better one with more specs. I'd like to return and upgrade."
"No."
"Did I mention it, ah, burst into flames?"
"Fire?"
"Fire fire fire!"
"Holy fuck, we'll get a new one out immediately, just promise not to talk to the press!"
I don't like playing cultural imperialist, but something about current Asian cultures seems to me to be broken: this isn't exactly the first suicide of its sort, or even an uncommon phenomenon, just one of the more high-profile cases (since it's Apple, and a senior guy). Western culture isn't immune to these effects either (cf. high-profile financial advisors committing suicide in 2008-2009), but I understand that it's significantly more of an issue in Asia. I'd hazard that it's something in the common implementation of 'honor' and self-value that predisposes people towards a massive breakdown in the face of 'public disgrace'.
I consider that to be a feature of the culture, not a bug. I'd like to see a lot more politicians and government officials embrace suicide as a way of atoning for their dishonor. In America fucking up earns you a raise and a promotion. Getting caught with your pants down and dick out is just something to brazen out and hope the public attention fades. Senator Toe Tapper got to finish out his term instead of resigning in disgrace. Sen. Vitter the Shitter, he of the prostitutes and adult baby diaper fetish is still in his high chair in Congress. Ensign is unashamed, same with Sanford and Gingrich. And I've yet to hear of a finance company CEO eating a gun for sheer shame of public infamy.
Dope Dog, an undercover narc with a bark, genetically engineered etc.
The adage isn't an admonition not to use hard drives as a means of backing up data. Rather, it is concerned with the fact that any change to your data is committed to each duplicate volume in a RAID, so if you delete an important file, for example, it's just as gone as if you weren't running a RAID.
That's completely different from mirroring your drive onto an external hard drive and putting it on a shelf somewhere. If you delete a file on your live system, you can restore from that backup.
OP here. The way I meant it was "You don't stick your files on a RAID and consider that a backup." Theoretically, a RAID in your office and a RAID across town that are syched would be good backup. But in a single RAID, you could have two drive failures at once, a power surge, card failure, gremlins, whatever. It appears many people use a Drobo as a file server and so the question becomes "How do you backup the Drobo?" Because this goes back to point 1, RAID is not a backup.
A public restroom is the only place where a flush beats a full house.
Too obvious?
I've been waiting for something like this for a while. When I first got into web stuff I was struck by the vast difference between web layout and print layout. Yes, I understand the point about pixel-perfect control being a shackle and how web is supposed to have the flexibility of displaying on different hardware, different browsers, anything from a PDA to a 24" graphic designer screen. I've been bitten by websites that were so strickly formatted that they were unusable outside of their expected use. That being said, I still wanted embeddable fonts. Nice to see we have them now.
Sure, just about anybody could live with this kind of stress for a while, but we're not talking about a while, we're talking about MONTHS of this kind of pressure. Many perfectly healthy, strong, capable people would crack under this kind of pressure. And even our best and brightest crack under the pressure [foxnews.com] of living here on Earth, with lots of air, beer, and pretty babes!
Put on a bigger engine, make the trip shorter. How is left as an exercise to the reader. :)
It was actually a groucho marx ref.
The main difference between science and religion is not that one is true and the other is false. It's that one is falsifiable and the other is not.
To put it more bluntly, when the scientist tells you water is hydrogen and oxygen and you say "prove it," there's an experiment to do just that. And for as many claims that science makes that you ask for proof of, it will be provided, until you're absolutely sick of it. There's a great book called a Short History of Nearly Everything that takes the great claims of science you learn in school and walks you back to how they were discovered and who did the work.
The priest shows you bread and wine and tells you it's the body and blood of christ and you ask him to prove it, you get your ears boxed and sent to the nuns.
If it means that in the future our government will employ cyber-babes in ridiculous fuck-me outfits to fight crime.
(Still finding it ridiculous that the Major was essentially wearing a one-piece bathing suit and leather jacket as her uniform in the GITS tv series.)
Going to be very disappointed if I get stuck. "This is so simple, even a child can do it! Someone get me a child, I can't make heads nor tails of it!"
ISS Launches First Permanent Node of "Interplanetary Internet"
Not so much.
I use my family members to track public awareness -- my mom listens to safe, comfy nutritionless mainstream media products from NBC, my dad listens to right wing hate radio, and my sister tries to avoid hearing anything about anything but leans progressive.
My dad is marginally better informed than my sister if only because they can't lie about everything and some nuggets of truth slip through. If you assign a negative weight to all the stuff he knows that just isn't so, he's far less informed.
My mom only knows what the MSM wants to cover but has gradually come to distrust it. Over the eight years of Boosh, I would keep bringing up things she had not heard of only to hear then six to twelve months later on the news. It's not that this stuff wasn't out there to be discovered, it's just that nobody was talking about it. Say a bit of news gets flushed out on an Infodump Friday, the blogs would pick it up and talk about it even as the talking heads ignored it. Enough blog interest could eventually make the story big enough for the MSM to start covering it again. What finally convinced her that NBC is morally bankrupt was seeing that insidious little investment gnome Cramer go on Jon Stewart, get his ass handed to him, then show up on the Today show a few days later doing his same old schtick. This was a man revealed to the world as a fraud and yet there were no consequences. "Of course there aren't. Morning shows like this are one big commercial. There's the little 30 second ones and then there's the longer ones with the hosts. They put Cramer on to drum up interest for his CNBC show."
A really telling figure is that the ratings for the various professional news outlets are very, very minuscule compared to the size of the nation. A top-rated cable news show will have a million viewers and that's compared to a nation of 300 million?
I think a better study would be trying to figure out the permeation level of the news sources through the society at large. It seems like most people are completely disconnected like my sister and only find out things through hearsay. So if Rush Limbaugh puts out the idea that Obama has a fake birth certificate, if that little meme goes beyond his shows and people who never listen to him start believing it, that's an influence far beyond his nominal audience. Second-hand disinformation? Goebbels called this sort of thing the Big Lie but I call it the "big penis stunt." I start talking about having a 12-inch dick. At first, the response will be "no, you don't" and "perv!" But if I keep talking about it, eventually the comments will shift from challenging the existence of my 12-inch dick to my talking about it. This presupposes the existence of the prodigious prong and now the debate is over whether it's appropriate to discuss in public. Doesn't matter if I'm actually hung like a Ken doll, everyone else knows I'm not.
Still, it's nice to have 32GB on the USB stick in my pocket for when I need something. I never thought I'd say this because I've been rather insatisfiable when it comes to computers, but things are starting to bottom out. Even a pack rat like me is starting to wonder what I need all this space for, it's moving past nice-to-have into cool-but-why territory.
Something will come up to eat the space.
CD-ROM's could store more text than you could ever need. Then came multimedia content. CD's suddenly felt cramped.
Time was when computer music meant mod files. Who had the space to devote to encoding real live music? Now we have mp3 players in our pockets.
We'll come up with more and more stuff to eat up the space. Video is the biggest driver right now but even the most hardcore downloader will need some time to fill up a 1.5tb drive. Hardcore geeks who keep the last ten iso's of every software distribution out there are having trouble filling up that space. But we'll come up with something else. I don't do video editing but by all accounts you eat up hard drive space like candy.
The next revolution we desperately need is reliable archival storage. Tapes tend to suck and backing up to a second external drive just makes me think of the RAID admonishment -- "RAID is not backup." It feels safer to have something like a DVD with no electronic parts to go bad, something you can stick in a new drive whenever you want. Except wait a minute, how good are the discs? When will the dye start to fade, the backing peel off? No, DVD's are worrisome when talking about really important data.
So the current best advice out there is to backup your data multiple times with different technology so it would take a truly awful combination of failures to fuck 'em all. But there needs to be a better way than this.