I've already got multiple monitors. What I've been thinking of doing was getting a stand-up rig in place with tiered keyboards, the way rock band keyboardists do it on stage. Then I can be typing on the upper keyboard, then switch to the lower one a few lines, then back up to the top. Of course, they'd all be plugged into the same machine so there's no real need to switch keyboards but it would look great so that's the important thing.
(Wait, did I just say that? I know I shouldn't be sitting so close to Marketing, I'm picking up second-hand stupid).
The issue is that any piece of random data can be turned into copyrighted data. With the right key, you can turn John Smith's holiday photo's into copyrighted MP3's. But you can't sue John Smith because someone uploaded a key that can turn his photo's in copyrighted data. OFF stores random blocks of data, which can be used by multiple files. It doesn't store any information in particular, just random blocks. Random blocks that can be used for anything. It is the URL that turnes those random blocks into something.
Hey, this isn't a binary nerve agent, it's just two harmless little chemicals sitting in my artillery shell. If I happen to fire it at a bunch of enemy soldiers standing over there and the two chemicals happen to mix and form a nerve agent, well gee, that sure is unfortunate but it couldn't be my fault!
I agree with what the colour guy said above, the lawyers aren't going to see any difference here. In a courtroom, it doesn't matter who is right, all that matters is who knows the law the best, who can bullshit the most brilliantly, and who has the money to buy the judgment they want. Trying to out-lawyer a lawyer in a courtroom is like playing Starcraft against Korean high-schoolers except you stand to lose a lot more money when you get pwn3d.
Provided you have a flat-rate data plan with a price tag small enough to actually make your scenario work. Which will not be all that common for the iPhone 2. Telcos are not stupid. They will identify the exact amount of data transfer which is precisely enough for "regular" customers to never actually reach it, but no where near enough to use the device for streaming, VoIP, or similar services/technologies.
No flat rate? ARGH! On my current phone, I doubt I use more than 10kb a month since I just call on it, no web-browsing, no texting, etc. How typical of these companies to sell you a phone that will make heavy demands on the network and only sell you enough bandwidth to meet a small fraction of your total demand.
How long are we going to have to wait for these carriers to give us a proper flat rate for mobile internet devices? How are the carriers charging for it in Japan?
[quote]Oh yeah... remember the 'Ring Zero' contentiousness, it was incredible red herring. I remember the paperless office, and as Adam Osborne once said, it'll happen when the paperless bathroom does.[/quote]
There are such things as bidets. Just because American don't like them doesn't mean they're impractical solutions.
The machine asks the customer to hold up a newspaper with the publication date clearly visible. Anyone can find a picture of an old person but an old person with today's newspaper? Far less likely.
Wow, if Charles Dickens were writing today, he'd be all over that name.
Adam Dicker, quicker with the clicker than the clients he dicks o'er Mr. Pinchloaf, known as a tight-ass most horribly, whose pucker snaps shut audibly Nadia Rotchacokoff, who gives her love freely and her diseases venerally Steve Ballmer, a rabid wombat would be much calmer, screaming, hurling chairs against the wallmer President Bush and Vice President Dick, with names like that, someone's getting fucked right quick
First PDA was an M130, amazing piece of hardware with an amazing price point for the mobile market. I was sorely disappointed when it went tits up. Bought another, died again for unspecified reasons. But I was hooked at that point and got a Tungsten E. Far more durable, in part I attribute this to the optional clamshell protective case. Pretty screen, interesting software options, but doomed due to Palm's lackluster embrace of the wireless world. The whole Palm/PalmOne branding fiasco, lack of focus on product lines that actually fit market needs, and other douchebaggery ceded too much market share to other smartphones. Palm should have beaten Apple to the iPhone years ago, PDA's are supposed to be their fucking core competency! Blackberry beat them to it even earlier.
I got a Berry 7250 with my last job and the PDA became sorely neglected. The office integration was slick and I did all of my contact management/scheduling/note crap in there, plus email, etc. For casual entertainment, the internet was more than sufficient for browsing news sites, message boards, etc. The PDA was relegated to ebook reader. I like the idea of carrying reading material with me for whenever there's unanticipated downtime.
Lost the Berry when I switched jobs. Don't really feel the lack of the berry since the new position has different responsibilities, less mobile tech support and stuff, more desk-bound. PDA is back doing service as primary downtime reading device. The iPhone has a certain lure, especially with the big price break/performance increase, but I'm trying to avoid picking one up just on gee-whiz factor alone.
What I really liked about Palm and PalmOS is that there was a real PC mentality. "Hey, it's your hardware, do whatever the hell you want with it." Early palm adopters were very hacking-oriented and they came up with uses for the device the designers never anticipated. I loved the docs2go program with the ability to sync down a copy of a word doc and edit it on the palm. The IR keyboard turned it into a proper cheap-ass laptop and was pretty much in a class of its own until the ultra-lowend laptops started coming out recently. The thing that pissed me off about all the other portable devices, even the berry, is that they're less hacker-friendly. I've yet to see a berry ebook reader or even a means of uploading a text file to it. Emails truncate anything too large, same goes for putting large amounts of text in outlook notes. Adobe never wrote an acrobat reader for it like they did with palm.
I'm still not sure how much of a walled garden the iPhone is going to be. From the sounds of it, it'll be more open than typical American cell phones but less open than the pc's we've all come to know and love. I'm interested in seeing how it develops. I'm just very sad that Palm so thoroughly suicided itself. We'd probably be five years ahead of where we are know if they had their shit together.
P2P, how can I explain it I'll take you packet by packet To have y'all nattin' while we be seedin' it P is for peer, 2 is l33t for "to" The last P...well...that's kinda simple It's sorta like another way to call a client an equal It's the server that be missin' here You get on a torrent and be leechin' from the swarm And your movies and shows appear gotta start to explainin' Bust it Hosting movies direct will get the feds to say hello They get your IP and address and your knees fee like jello And if not for feds, the hosting costs will eatcha alive There's gotta be a better way to distribute and survive Imagine there's no hardware, hosting or bandwith fees just a torrent to download and and trackers to see Every peer has a piece to share with every other peer Reducing the burden and increasing redundancy without fear Who thinks it's wrong 'cos I'm downloadin' and uploadin' at Well if you do, that's P2P and you're not down with it But if you don't, here's your membership
Chorus: You down with P2P (Yeah you know me) 3X Who's down with P2P (Every last IP) You down with P2P (Yeah you know me) 3X Who's down with P2P (All the IP's)
For a brick and mortar store, concentrating on the sure hits makes a lot of sense. Funny story, my dad had to pick up a new alternator for a 30-year old truck. The local parts store had one in stock. The parts man looks the box over and says "Yep, had this one on the shelf for about 18 years." That's a bit longer on turnover than most businesses would shoot for. But when you're talking about cheap warehouses in the bad part of town doing all of their selling and shipping online... this whole argument could probably be solved with access to Netflix's database and a few queries. My hypothesis:
1. A huge percentage (35%?) of their business will be new releases. 2. The next biggest percentage would fall into the "perennial classics" category, i.e. the kind of movies that aren't new releases that a Blockbuster would have, movies that do a steady, dependable business. 3. Everything else would fall into the "obscure shit" category, the stuff that Blockbuster does not carry because it's too infrequently rented.
I will wager that the revenue from #3 more than pays for itself AND serves as a draw for customers who rent across all three categories. Joe Customer chose Netflix because they carry obscure Asian chop-chop flicks but will also rent Cloverfield from them since hey, he has an account.
As another example, say I want to pick up some obscure, out of print book. I hit Amazon first out of force of habit. Good news, they have it. That makes it all the more likely for me to type in Amazon when I want to buy the next top-seller I saw on the Daily Show. If Amazon didn't have the obscure books I want, I might go to some other site by default, and then they'll be getting all of my New York Times Bestseller business.
If we're talking about a brick and mortar store, the carrying cost of the truly obscure could well be too high to justify itself. With online stores, there's no excuse not to carry the obscure.
Impossible. Perhaps you've forgotten, but the Constitution enumerates what can be considered treason, and this isn't it.
From Article III, Section 3: [cornell.edu]
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
Semantics. I can argue that people who cause harm to the United States are thus enemies. Taking their bribes and working their agenda against America thus constitutes treason.
But to be less sneaky, I'd rather just pass an amendment that elevates bribery to the same level of infamy as treason.
Meet me at the Capitol. I'll bring the torches, you bring the pitchforks.
We'd be going after corrupt politicians who control the nation's military, not Frankenstein's monster. Realistically, there's no way to compete against that kind of firepower without defections from army and guard units in the region.
I'm only half kidding.
Same here. The last traditional coup attempt in this country was during the 30's, the robber-barons wanted to oust FDR but were ratted on by the man they tapped to lead their forces. http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/030928warracket.htm
Since then, the last effective coup we had was when the Supreme Court intervened and declared Bush the victor. Many people argued that this is just hyperbole from the Left and we need to cut back on the sugar and crack. I don't think so. We're in the midst of a gradual erosion of civilian control over this government, dying by inches over decades. The change is so slow it's hard to even point to where it began and the degrees by which it changes. But just look at how both the left and right are howling over issues that are ramrodded through Congress without any input from the people they allegedly represent. I'm bitching about FISA. My dad, a total right wing radio winger, is bitching about the new Dubai ports deal that's working it's way back into Congress. He's bitching about Bush and giving amnesty to illegals. The truth is that the parties aren't listening to any of us, they're just doing whatever the hell they want.
When neither party will represent the will of the people, we no longer have a representative government.
No thanks. Maybe somewhere in between, but I think this is a BAD idea - we'd get way too many people involved who would just see running for office as a free paycheck. Plus, there are plenty of business interests which would be shut out of the political process who should have genuine reason to be involved because they would be affected by taxation and regulation.
We've had how many years of over-representation of business interests in government? Forgive my lack of sympathy and concern if we were to actually redress this issue.
Public financing would also likely reduce much voting to the lowest common denominator and result in stupid people voting for stupid things. We need to re-work some of the way lobbying and influence peddling is done in politics, but we need to be careful we don't reduce everything to mob rule.
How could we be any more LCD and stupid than we are right now? At least with 100% public financing, those people we do send to Washington will be able to do as they see fit without having to be concerned with whoring to big pocket donors for reelection capital. The only people they have to worry about satisfying are their constituents. And when it comes to that, the competing interests of all the other interests demanding a piece of the pie should result in compromises that harm the least, or at least that was the theory the Founding Fathers operated under.
This Congress is probably the best reason we should throw EVERYONE who is an incumbent out the door, particularly those who have been in place more than 1-2 terms - from BOTH sides of the aisle. Republicans are holding to big-government ideals rather than conservative ones, and haven't been worth much since Gingrich left; and Dems haven't done much of anything but posture and "investigate" with committees that have done nothing but waste taxpayers time (suing OPEC? WTF?), and NO ONE is working together well. The ONE argument that Obama has going for him, in my mind (being a conservative) is that he's relatively inexperienced.
One way to avoid the corruption problem: 100% public financing of ALL campaigns for elected office with the provision of equitable free air-time from all media outlets. Any sort of contribution or gift to a politician, monetary or otherwise, will be seen as a bribe and prosecuted as high treason.
I had really high hopes for Obama since, with the bulk of his donations coming from average joe Americans, he had no big business interests to be beholden to. that's the biggest flaw for conventional campaigns, the new pols come in already owing favors.
The Internet allows us to track these offenses and organize against the offenders far better than ever before. We need to start funding challengers against every Vichy Democrat who voted for this bill and against every Republican on general principle. And if Obama really goes along with this shit, if he really proves himself to be just another politician, well fuck him, too.
"Reform the system from within," we're told. "Be part of the solution, not part of the problem." At what point do we decide that the system cannot be reformed from within, cannot be reformed from without, and must be overthrown in its entirety? That'll make for some nasty times to be sure but will such measures be forced upon us by necessity?
The unofficial/official line was that the government DID have something better - satellites with resolution much better than previously available.
Satellites are still predictable objects following precisely known orbits. There's only so much maneuvering fuel onboard to change up the orbits and surprise the bad guys. The advantage of the sat/plane approach is the satellite would give you routine, daily coverage and cause the enemy to have to bundle up as much as possible whenever the bird made it's overflight, a real pain in the ass. Then you have the spyplane come zipping across at unpredictable times and can catch the baddies with their evidence out in the open. Or if it isn't a matter of that but needing closer to real-time intelligence over an area, again, planes can loiter, just like satellites can't.
When it comes to the whole Area 51 thing with governments reverse-engineering alien technology, the question I have to ask is "Where is it?" If the military has combat flying saucers, why are they using boring old jet planes to bomb shit? The same argument holds if we're supposed to be talking about non-alien but super-duper aircraft, something impossibly cool like Airwolf. Ok, so we're supposed to imagine that it takes $200 billion and an army of engineers to make an F-22 but the Air Force already has something better sitting at Area 51 and were able to do it for less money than that? Highly unlikely.
I really do wonder what they're dicking around with out there. The two bits of evidence I heard of supporting the idea of a fancy post-SR-71 wonderplane were the donuts-on-a-rope contrails (which the link says can be produced by conventional aircraft under the right conditions) and linear earthquakes picked up on seismographs that do not follow any existing fault line that seemingly originate in the atmosphere. I've seen that "fact" mentioned before but have no idea how accurate it is.
I have no proof one way or the other, I just think it would be surprising for the government to retire something as valuable as the Blackbird without having an even better replacement in the works. Then again, using logic to explain government decisions is often a losing proposition.
What about the time I went with my gay friend to the gay bar to show I was cool and not prejudiced against homos and made the mistake of wearing my AC/DC t-shirt. Acronym malfunction doesn't even begin to describe it.
I keep thinking of a cellphone with a visor output to overlay text, graphics, google maps, or what not. It doesn't even have to be a military app. I read alittle about google's software plans for cellphones in Wired. What if some one decided to use a cell phone as an interface for a FPS MMO that's GPS enabled and is designed to form flash mobs? If something like that was the next WOW, then maybe in 5-10 years you could have something that the military would find useful.
Assume you could use blue tooth to tie in your real-life military hardware like guns or some medical monitoring and upload video, and if you suddenly have a medical alert or start shooting your weapon, then everyone on your local team could have a mini clip of what you were looking at/shooting at, and exactly where you were and maybe a mini map so that they could find you in an urban environment that they've never actually visited before.
In the original Commanche Overkill game, a chopper flight sim, you had a weapon called "artillery." You target a large formation of enemy units and "fire" this weapon, what you actually did was bounce a laser off the target, do some math based on your GPS coordinates, and sent a fire mission off to the local fire-base all with the pull of a trigger.
So, what would it be like if mortar crews could get fire missions from the field like this? Private Pyle is on patrol, his fire support has already been configured to with with the mortar crews in the area. He encounters an area of stiff resistance, he can aim his rifle at the target, bounce a laser off it and have coordinates to relay to the mortar crew. For safety, maybe he has to be in voice contact with them and say "sending coordinates" and a soldier at the mortar has to press the red button to fire, just so we don't get automated mistakes.
Consider how this would be for air support. Instead of trying to describe targets or popping smoke, soldiers can get the exact GPS coordinates and relay them to the pilot. The pilot, if he has an augmented reality helmet, will see enemy and friendly positions overlaid on his field of view in real-time, just like with the graphics they're putting on the football fields today. And in a few more years, those requests will be relayed to drones.
We've been seeing technology used to make war more precise, less messy. Instead of carpet-bombing, we can take out just the buildings we have to. (of course, shitty intelligence will still see us precisely targeting the wrong buildings.) The brits pioneered a technique in the Balkan war of tank-plinking with dummy bombs. Instead of high-explosives, the bomb casing is filled with cement. The laser-guidance package is so precise, the target is always hit with the bomb so there's no need for a blast effect, 500lbs of anything dropping from 10k feet will ruin a tank's day. This way, a tank sitting in the courtyard of a building may be destroyed without even breaking the windows.
But I have to agree with the other poster here who said it was very worrisome that US military scenarios for the near future are anticipating irregular, guerrilla-style warfare with fighters drawn from the local population. To put it another way, "we're in countries where the locals don't want us and we're doing shit they don't want us to do. In other words, we're invaders." Defending democracy my white ass, that's fucking imperialism through and through.
I've always been a little wary of this whole "networked future force warrior" thing. I think it smacks more of hollywood sci-fi than real warfare, sometimes. I can definitely see the advantages of getting more information to your troops, but turning them into walking blackberries may not be the best way to do it in combat. There are some parts of soldiering that just aren't going to change no matter how much technology you throw at it, and the need for your troops on the ground to make quick, independent decisions is a good example. You don't want them constantly emailing/texting/radioing back and forth during a firefight for instructions. That's what unit leadership is for. Too much of this stuff is more bad cyberpunk novel than George Patton. I agree with you with all this networked warrior bs but I'll be the devil's advocate. Look at your WWII dogface. He's a future warrior, at least compared to the WWI doughboy. And he's futuristic compared to what they had in the Crimean War and futuristic to the Roman legionnaire all the way back to the first monkey who hit another monkey with a bone after a visit from the Monolith. And using a bone was pretty high-tech compared to nails and teeth.
Now if we look back, a lot of tech we take for granted as good, solid, traditional equipment had some serious teething problems. Guns were notoriously fickle and unreliable hundreds of years ago, why not trust in arrows and true steel instead? And you could also complain about the trend towards wearing heavier and heavier armor, it slows a warrior down! Why, without armor I can move fast enough I don't have to worry about taking the hit in the first place. Then there was the matter of the crossbow allowing a rude peasant to have the killing power of a proper archer with a longbow, the kind of fine soldier who had to train his whole life to use the weapon well. What's worse, the man with the crossbow could kill a godly knight with the flick of his finger. Contemptible! Unchristian!
In more recent times, tanks were belching, breakdown-prone monstrosities as much a danger to their occupants as the enemy. But we saw there was a good idea there and continued to develop them. Airplanes were primitive, crude, and ultimately were seen as having a negligible effect in WWI but gee, they sure were flashy. And they became invaluable by WWII. Then there's the matter of adopting steam propulsion in a naval warship, that's just not the way things were done! A proper seaman fights under sail. And the first steamships did suck a great deal. But gradually the technology was improved to the point that no captain would dream of doing without it.
The Germans were the first to use radios in their tanks. That was seen as likely to cause great confusion and no other military really considered it until the Germans kicked a whole lot of ass. Then it seemed like a good idea.
I think that the current land warrior concept is probably an awful, terrible, no good idea. But I also think in twenty or thirty years, we're going to be seeing a lot of stuff on the battlefield that soldiers will consider absolutely valuable, cannot do without but we'll still be able to trace the design lineage back to the useless crap they were twiddling around with today.
It's an oversight vice insight dilemma. While insight into tactical actions may be valuable for battle planners, their requests for information rapidly degenerate into oversight. Tactical commanders, understanding this, reduce upward information flow to formal language and CYA reports sabotaging the intent of modern battlefield comm. The quote of the day appearing below your comment is very appropriate.
If I can have honesty, it's easier to overlook mistakes. -- Kirk, "Space Seed", stardate 3141.9
On a ship at sea, the captain was God for two reasons. First and foremost, the ship is beyond all the normal structures and civilization. If a majority of the crew decided to ignore the captain, mutiny would be uncontainable. Punishments were so harsh that individual crewmen would be in terror of bringing it upon their heads and the thought of getting enough together that punishment could be defied, victory attained, would seem impossible. And captains absolutely required such authority to be supported once they returned to civilization so the Boards of Admiralty of the various navies would seldom ever overrule or censure them.
What's also fascinating is that the captains also had great latitude in exercising their orders generally. The last history I read was specifically concerning the British military and the American Revolution. There was a common sentiment of not wanting to second-guess the man in the field thousands of miles away. Now either this is true wisdom or looking for a scapegoat, I'm not entirely sure of which and possibly they weren't either. In hindsight, there's also a bit of making a virtue out of necessity because the tools for micro-management from such a distance had not yet been invented and twats like MacNamara had not yet been born.
There's a maxim that goes along the lines of "If a person is granted responsibility of accomplishing a great task, by extension he is granted the authority required to make that task happen." When a leader finds himself in such a situation of responsibility with no authority, he should tell his superiors to kindly go fuck themselves and continue to do so until they've worked their heads out of their own asses.
If he was using, say, Windows, he'd most likely download an install file, run it through a virus scanner, execute it, click 15 different buttons, have his personal information sent to some corporate server, get nagged to buy the upgraded version, download a crack, run it through a virus scanner, execute it, have a rootkit installed, have 10 different pieces of spyware installed, have his personal information sent to some criminals server, be bombarded with pornographic popups, throw his computer out the window, go outside for a cigarette with hands shaking in rage and smash his head off the nearest wall until the endorphins cause him to forget why he was so upset. And we liked it! That was back in my day.
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I've already got multiple monitors. What I've been thinking of doing was getting a stand-up rig in place with tiered keyboards, the way rock band keyboardists do it on stage. Then I can be typing on the upper keyboard, then switch to the lower one a few lines, then back up to the top. Of course, they'd all be plugged into the same machine so there's no real need to switch keyboards but it would look great so that's the important thing.
(Wait, did I just say that? I know I shouldn't be sitting so close to Marketing, I'm picking up second-hand stupid).
The issue is that any piece of random data can be turned into copyrighted data. With the right key, you can turn John Smith's holiday photo's into copyrighted MP3's. But you can't sue John Smith because someone uploaded a key that can turn his photo's in copyrighted data. OFF stores random blocks of data, which can be used by multiple files. It doesn't store any information in particular, just random blocks. Random blocks that can be used for anything. It is the URL that turnes those random blocks into something.
Hey, this isn't a binary nerve agent, it's just two harmless little chemicals sitting in my artillery shell. If I happen to fire it at a bunch of enemy soldiers standing over there and the two chemicals happen to mix and form a nerve agent, well gee, that sure is unfortunate but it couldn't be my fault!
I agree with what the colour guy said above, the lawyers aren't going to see any difference here. In a courtroom, it doesn't matter who is right, all that matters is who knows the law the best, who can bullshit the most brilliantly, and who has the money to buy the judgment they want. Trying to out-lawyer a lawyer in a courtroom is like playing Starcraft against Korean high-schoolers except you stand to lose a lot more money when you get pwn3d.
Provided you have a flat-rate data plan with a price tag small enough to actually make your scenario work. Which will not be all that common for the iPhone 2. Telcos are not stupid. They will identify the exact amount of data transfer which is precisely enough for "regular" customers to never actually reach it, but no where near enough to use the device for streaming, VoIP, or similar services/technologies.
No flat rate? ARGH! On my current phone, I doubt I use more than 10kb a month since I just call on it, no web-browsing, no texting, etc. How typical of these companies to sell you a phone that will make heavy demands on the network and only sell you enough bandwidth to meet a small fraction of your total demand.
How long are we going to have to wait for these carriers to give us a proper flat rate for mobile internet devices? How are the carriers charging for it in Japan?
[quote]Oh yeah... remember the 'Ring Zero' contentiousness, it was incredible red herring. I remember the paperless office, and as Adam Osborne once said, it'll happen when the paperless bathroom does.[/quote]
There are such things as bidets. Just because American don't like them doesn't mean they're impractical solutions.
The machine asks the customer to hold up a newspaper with the publication date clearly visible. Anyone can find a picture of an old person but an old person with today's newspaper? Far less likely.
I await my royalty check.
Wow, if Charles Dickens were writing today, he'd be all over that name.
Adam Dicker, quicker with the clicker than the clients he dicks o'er
Mr. Pinchloaf, known as a tight-ass most horribly, whose pucker snaps shut audibly
Nadia Rotchacokoff, who gives her love freely and her diseases venerally
Steve Ballmer, a rabid wombat would be much calmer, screaming, hurling chairs against the wallmer
President Bush and Vice President Dick, with names like that, someone's getting fucked right quick
I hear Ballmer is really into poniez.
First PDA was an M130, amazing piece of hardware with an amazing price point for the mobile market. I was sorely disappointed when it went tits up. Bought another, died again for unspecified reasons. But I was hooked at that point and got a Tungsten E. Far more durable, in part I attribute this to the optional clamshell protective case. Pretty screen, interesting software options, but doomed due to Palm's lackluster embrace of the wireless world. The whole Palm/PalmOne branding fiasco, lack of focus on product lines that actually fit market needs, and other douchebaggery ceded too much market share to other smartphones. Palm should have beaten Apple to the iPhone years ago, PDA's are supposed to be their fucking core competency! Blackberry beat them to it even earlier.
I got a Berry 7250 with my last job and the PDA became sorely neglected. The office integration was slick and I did all of my contact management/scheduling/note crap in there, plus email, etc. For casual entertainment, the internet was more than sufficient for browsing news sites, message boards, etc. The PDA was relegated to ebook reader. I like the idea of carrying reading material with me for whenever there's unanticipated downtime.
Lost the Berry when I switched jobs. Don't really feel the lack of the berry since the new position has different responsibilities, less mobile tech support and stuff, more desk-bound. PDA is back doing service as primary downtime reading device. The iPhone has a certain lure, especially with the big price break/performance increase, but I'm trying to avoid picking one up just on gee-whiz factor alone.
What I really liked about Palm and PalmOS is that there was a real PC mentality. "Hey, it's your hardware, do whatever the hell you want with it." Early palm adopters were very hacking-oriented and they came up with uses for the device the designers never anticipated. I loved the docs2go program with the ability to sync down a copy of a word doc and edit it on the palm. The IR keyboard turned it into a proper cheap-ass laptop and was pretty much in a class of its own until the ultra-lowend laptops started coming out recently. The thing that pissed me off about all the other portable devices, even the berry, is that they're less hacker-friendly. I've yet to see a berry ebook reader or even a means of uploading a text file to it. Emails truncate anything too large, same goes for putting large amounts of text in outlook notes. Adobe never wrote an acrobat reader for it like they did with palm.
I'm still not sure how much of a walled garden the iPhone is going to be. From the sounds of it, it'll be more open than typical American cell phones but less open than the pc's we've all come to know and love. I'm interested in seeing how it develops. I'm just very sad that Palm so thoroughly suicided itself. We'd probably be five years ahead of where we are know if they had their shit together.
The sounds you hear are college careers ending before they've even begun.
banner ads from eharmony
Dave drop a load on 'em
P2P, how can I explain it
I'll take you packet by packet
To have y'all nattin' while we be seedin' it
P is for peer, 2 is l33t for "to"
The last P...well...that's kinda simple
It's sorta like another way to call a client an equal
It's the server that be missin' here
You get on a torrent and be leechin' from the swarm
And your movies and shows appear gotta start to explainin'
Bust it
Hosting movies direct will get the feds to say hello
They get your IP and address and your knees fee like jello
And if not for feds, the hosting costs will eatcha alive
There's gotta be a better way to distribute and survive
Imagine there's no hardware, hosting or bandwith fees
just a torrent to download and and trackers to see
Every peer has a piece to share with every other peer
Reducing the burden and increasing redundancy without fear
Who thinks it's wrong 'cos I'm downloadin' and uploadin' at
Well if you do, that's P2P and you're not down with it
But if you don't, here's your membership
Chorus:
You down with P2P (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who's down with P2P (Every last IP)
You down with P2P (Yeah you know me) 3X
Who's down with P2P (All the IP's)
For a brick and mortar store, concentrating on the sure hits makes a lot of sense. Funny story, my dad had to pick up a new alternator for a 30-year old truck. The local parts store had one in stock. The parts man looks the box over and says "Yep, had this one on the shelf for about 18 years." That's a bit longer on turnover than most businesses would shoot for. But when you're talking about cheap warehouses in the bad part of town doing all of their selling and shipping online... this whole argument could probably be solved with access to Netflix's database and a few queries. My hypothesis:
1. A huge percentage (35%?) of their business will be new releases.
2. The next biggest percentage would fall into the "perennial classics" category, i.e. the kind of movies that aren't new releases that a Blockbuster would have, movies that do a steady, dependable business.
3. Everything else would fall into the "obscure shit" category, the stuff that Blockbuster does not carry because it's too infrequently rented.
I will wager that the revenue from #3 more than pays for itself AND serves as a draw for customers who rent across all three categories. Joe Customer chose Netflix because they carry obscure Asian chop-chop flicks but will also rent Cloverfield from them since hey, he has an account.
As another example, say I want to pick up some obscure, out of print book. I hit Amazon first out of force of habit. Good news, they have it. That makes it all the more likely for me to type in Amazon when I want to buy the next top-seller I saw on the Daily Show. If Amazon didn't have the obscure books I want, I might go to some other site by default, and then they'll be getting all of my New York Times Bestseller business.
If we're talking about a brick and mortar store, the carrying cost of the truly obscure could well be too high to justify itself. With online stores, there's no excuse not to carry the obscure.
Can we get back our Vitamin C gene again? I would love being able to eat less fruit... Scurvy sucks.
Have you ever tried coconut rum and fresh OJ? You'll never bitch about drinking your fruits again.
Impossible. Perhaps you've forgotten, but the Constitution enumerates what can be considered treason, and this isn't it.
From Article III, Section 3: [cornell.edu]
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
Semantics. I can argue that people who cause harm to the United States are thus enemies. Taking their bribes and working their agenda against America thus constitutes treason.
But to be less sneaky, I'd rather just pass an amendment that elevates bribery to the same level of infamy as treason.
Meet me at the Capitol. I'll bring the torches, you bring the pitchforks.
We'd be going after corrupt politicians who control the nation's military, not Frankenstein's monster. Realistically, there's no way to compete against that kind of firepower without defections from army and guard units in the region.
I'm only half kidding.
Same here. The last traditional coup attempt in this country was during the 30's, the robber-barons wanted to oust FDR but were ratted on by the man they tapped to lead their forces.
http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories/030928warracket.htm
Since then, the last effective coup we had was when the Supreme Court intervened and declared Bush the victor. Many people argued that this is just hyperbole from the Left and we need to cut back on the sugar and crack. I don't think so. We're in the midst of a gradual erosion of civilian control over this government, dying by inches over decades. The change is so slow it's hard to even point to where it began and the degrees by which it changes. But just look at how both the left and right are howling over issues that are ramrodded through Congress without any input from the people they allegedly represent. I'm bitching about FISA. My dad, a total right wing radio winger, is bitching about the new Dubai ports deal that's working it's way back into Congress. He's bitching about Bush and giving amnesty to illegals. The truth is that the parties aren't listening to any of us, they're just doing whatever the hell they want.
When neither party will represent the will of the people, we no longer have a representative government.
No thanks. Maybe somewhere in between, but I think this is a BAD idea - we'd get way too many people involved who would just see running for office as a free paycheck. Plus, there are plenty of business interests which would be shut out of the political process who should have genuine reason to be involved because they would be affected by taxation and regulation.
We've had how many years of over-representation of business interests in government? Forgive my lack of sympathy and concern if we were to actually redress this issue.
Public financing would also likely reduce much voting to the lowest common denominator and result in stupid people voting for stupid things. We need to re-work some of the way lobbying and influence peddling is done in politics, but we need to be careful we don't reduce everything to mob rule.
How could we be any more LCD and stupid than we are right now? At least with 100% public financing, those people we do send to Washington will be able to do as they see fit without having to be concerned with whoring to big pocket donors for reelection capital. The only people they have to worry about satisfying are their constituents. And when it comes to that, the competing interests of all the other interests demanding a piece of the pie should result in compromises that harm the least, or at least that was the theory the Founding Fathers operated under.
This Congress is probably the best reason we should throw EVERYONE who is an incumbent out the door, particularly those who have been in place more than 1-2 terms - from BOTH sides of the aisle. Republicans are holding to big-government ideals rather than conservative ones, and haven't been worth much since Gingrich left; and Dems haven't done much of anything but posture and "investigate" with committees that have done nothing but waste taxpayers time (suing OPEC? WTF?), and NO ONE is working together well. The ONE argument that Obama has going for him, in my mind (being a conservative) is that he's relatively inexperienced.
One way to avoid the corruption problem: 100% public financing of ALL campaigns for elected office with the provision of equitable free air-time from all media outlets. Any sort of contribution or gift to a politician, monetary or otherwise, will be seen as a bribe and prosecuted as high treason.
I had really high hopes for Obama since, with the bulk of his donations coming from average joe Americans, he had no big business interests to be beholden to. that's the biggest flaw for conventional campaigns, the new pols come in already owing favors.
The Internet allows us to track these offenses and organize against the offenders far better than ever before. We need to start funding challengers against every Vichy Democrat who voted for this bill and against every Republican on general principle. And if Obama really goes along with this shit, if he really proves himself to be just another politician, well fuck him, too.
"Reform the system from within," we're told. "Be part of the solution, not part of the problem." At what point do we decide that the system cannot be reformed from within, cannot be reformed from without, and must be overthrown in its entirety? That'll make for some nasty times to be sure but will such measures be forced upon us by necessity?
The unofficial/official line was that the government DID have something better - satellites with resolution much better than previously available.
Satellites are still predictable objects following precisely known orbits. There's only so much maneuvering fuel onboard to change up the orbits and surprise the bad guys. The advantage of the sat/plane approach is the satellite would give you routine, daily coverage and cause the enemy to have to bundle up as much as possible whenever the bird made it's overflight, a real pain in the ass. Then you have the spyplane come zipping across at unpredictable times and can catch the baddies with their evidence out in the open. Or if it isn't a matter of that but needing closer to real-time intelligence over an area, again, planes can loiter, just like satellites can't.
When it comes to the whole Area 51 thing with governments reverse-engineering alien technology, the question I have to ask is "Where is it?" If the military has combat flying saucers, why are they using boring old jet planes to bomb shit? The same argument holds if we're supposed to be talking about non-alien but super-duper aircraft, something impossibly cool like Airwolf. Ok, so we're supposed to imagine that it takes $200 billion and an army of engineers to make an F-22 but the Air Force already has something better sitting at Area 51 and were able to do it for less money than that? Highly unlikely.
I really do wonder what they're dicking around with out there. The two bits of evidence I heard of supporting the idea of a fancy post-SR-71 wonderplane were the donuts-on-a-rope contrails (which the link says can be produced by conventional aircraft under the right conditions) and linear earthquakes picked up on seismographs that do not follow any existing fault line that seemingly originate in the atmosphere. I've seen that "fact" mentioned before but have no idea how accurate it is.
http://tinwiki.org/wiki/Aurora#Contrail
I have no proof one way or the other, I just think it would be surprising for the government to retire something as valuable as the Blackbird without having an even better replacement in the works. Then again, using logic to explain government decisions is often a losing proposition.
What about the time I went with my gay friend to the gay bar to show I was cool and not prejudiced against homos and made the mistake of wearing my AC/DC t-shirt. Acronym malfunction doesn't even begin to describe it.
Assume you could use blue tooth to tie in your real-life military hardware like guns or some medical monitoring and upload video, and if you suddenly have a medical alert or start shooting your weapon, then everyone on your local team could have a mini clip of what you were looking at/shooting at, and exactly where you were and maybe a mini map so that they could find you in an urban environment that they've never actually visited before.
In the original Commanche Overkill game, a chopper flight sim, you had a weapon called "artillery." You target a large formation of enemy units and "fire" this weapon, what you actually did was bounce a laser off the target, do some math based on your GPS coordinates, and sent a fire mission off to the local fire-base all with the pull of a trigger.So, what would it be like if mortar crews could get fire missions from the field like this? Private Pyle is on patrol, his fire support has already been configured to with with the mortar crews in the area. He encounters an area of stiff resistance, he can aim his rifle at the target, bounce a laser off it and have coordinates to relay to the mortar crew. For safety, maybe he has to be in voice contact with them and say "sending coordinates" and a soldier at the mortar has to press the red button to fire, just so we don't get automated mistakes.
Consider how this would be for air support. Instead of trying to describe targets or popping smoke, soldiers can get the exact GPS coordinates and relay them to the pilot. The pilot, if he has an augmented reality helmet, will see enemy and friendly positions overlaid on his field of view in real-time, just like with the graphics they're putting on the football fields today. And in a few more years, those requests will be relayed to drones.
We've been seeing technology used to make war more precise, less messy. Instead of carpet-bombing, we can take out just the buildings we have to. (of course, shitty intelligence will still see us precisely targeting the wrong buildings.) The brits pioneered a technique in the Balkan war of tank-plinking with dummy bombs. Instead of high-explosives, the bomb casing is filled with cement. The laser-guidance package is so precise, the target is always hit with the bomb so there's no need for a blast effect, 500lbs of anything dropping from 10k feet will ruin a tank's day. This way, a tank sitting in the courtyard of a building may be destroyed without even breaking the windows.
But I have to agree with the other poster here who said it was very worrisome that US military scenarios for the near future are anticipating irregular, guerrilla-style warfare with fighters drawn from the local population. To put it another way, "we're in countries where the locals don't want us and we're doing shit they don't want us to do. In other words, we're invaders." Defending democracy my white ass, that's fucking imperialism through and through.
Now if we look back, a lot of tech we take for granted as good, solid, traditional equipment had some serious teething problems. Guns were notoriously fickle and unreliable hundreds of years ago, why not trust in arrows and true steel instead? And you could also complain about the trend towards wearing heavier and heavier armor, it slows a warrior down! Why, without armor I can move fast enough I don't have to worry about taking the hit in the first place. Then there was the matter of the crossbow allowing a rude peasant to have the killing power of a proper archer with a longbow, the kind of fine soldier who had to train his whole life to use the weapon well. What's worse, the man with the crossbow could kill a godly knight with the flick of his finger. Contemptible! Unchristian!
In more recent times, tanks were belching, breakdown-prone monstrosities as much a danger to their occupants as the enemy. But we saw there was a good idea there and continued to develop them. Airplanes were primitive, crude, and ultimately were seen as having a negligible effect in WWI but gee, they sure were flashy. And they became invaluable by WWII. Then there's the matter of adopting steam propulsion in a naval warship, that's just not the way things were done! A proper seaman fights under sail. And the first steamships did suck a great deal. But gradually the technology was improved to the point that no captain would dream of doing without it.
The Germans were the first to use radios in their tanks. That was seen as likely to cause great confusion and no other military really considered it until the Germans kicked a whole lot of ass. Then it seemed like a good idea.
I think that the current land warrior concept is probably an awful, terrible, no good idea. But I also think in twenty or thirty years, we're going to be seeing a lot of stuff on the battlefield that soldiers will consider absolutely valuable, cannot do without but we'll still be able to trace the design lineage back to the useless crap they were twiddling around with today.
On a ship at sea, the captain was God for two reasons. First and foremost, the ship is beyond all the normal structures and civilization. If a majority of the crew decided to ignore the captain, mutiny would be uncontainable. Punishments were so harsh that individual crewmen would be in terror of bringing it upon their heads and the thought of getting enough together that punishment could be defied, victory attained, would seem impossible. And captains absolutely required such authority to be supported once they returned to civilization so the Boards of Admiralty of the various navies would seldom ever overrule or censure them.
What's also fascinating is that the captains also had great latitude in exercising their orders generally. The last history I read was specifically concerning the British military and the American Revolution. There was a common sentiment of not wanting to second-guess the man in the field thousands of miles away. Now either this is true wisdom or looking for a scapegoat, I'm not entirely sure of which and possibly they weren't either. In hindsight, there's also a bit of making a virtue out of necessity because the tools for micro-management from such a distance had not yet been invented and twats like MacNamara had not yet been born.
There's a maxim that goes along the lines of "If a person is granted responsibility of accomplishing a great task, by extension he is granted the authority required to make that task happen." When a leader finds himself in such a situation of responsibility with no authority, he should tell his superiors to kindly go fuck themselves and continue to do so until they've worked their heads out of their own asses.