Has nobody said anything yet about the mention of AAC in the review? This is the first I've heard of any other device playing the same format that iPods play... Are there any other MP3 players that also play AAC? Will we see more AAC support cropping up, and faster than Ogg Vorbis support seems to be coming along? I hope so! (Well, I hope for more AAC support in other devices, I don't really care if it comes along faster than Vorbis support...)
I'm nowhere close to being super rich. Heck, I'm not even micro rich. But I'm also not agitated over the fact that these people are out there because I recognize that in a system such as ours, there will be pockets of concentrated wealth.
Yes, and in a system such as the one they had in England over 200 years ago, the King is able to do pretty much anything. That doesn't make it right.
Wealth is much less concentrated today than it was, say, 100 years ago, or maybe even 50 years ago.
That still doesn't make it right or OK that the few incredibly rich and powerful have sway over nations, or that they can get around laws and regulations to get even more rich and powerful, etc.
Just because Bush (or Clinton, or anybody) is President, and is therefore able to do what they do, this does not make the things they do right. Ability (or might) does not make right.
don't use the canard of "the rich man's got me down" to rationalize your inability to achieve your goals.
This has nothing to do with my own goals. Rather, I would say "The rich few have got everybody down, and it's not right, so I will work against it."
What does consumer spending have to do with CEO bonuses and accounting gymnastics? There are more ways for the wealthy to increase their wealth than simply selling things. And the wealthier and more powerful one gets, the more of those doors to even more wealth and more power one can open up.
Thanks for elucidating my point better than I did. I knew I shouldn't have tacked on that salary-scale idea at the end, no matter how much I think it could be a good idea... in a nationless world, not in this world where the rich people would just move to a scale-free country.
I see it as restoring freedom that was taken unjustly by them in the first place.
if a person's ambitions require getting rich, first, they should have every chance to make it work
At whose expense? Only their own? Don't kid yourself. We as a society have a right to decide together if a tiny fraction of us should be allowed unlimited power and wealth. We already place some limits on such people (theoretically, anyway - their already great power and wealth makes it incredibly easy for them to get around laws & regulations).
I'm only suggesting tighter limits, put in place by society (not by me alone, for the guy who immediately labelled me a dictator for even thinking of any limits), for the benefit of society. Sounds to me just like government of the people, by the people, for the people - the way it's supposed to be.
The American Dream is about freedom to pursue your own life, it's not about getting rich. Any given newborn in America has probably a better chance of winning their state lottery (when they're of age to participate of course) than of getting rich and/or famous through any of the means you mentioned.
The "you could do it too" dream is a lie we sell ourselves so we don't get all upset about all the rich who actually control things, who take our money and don't have to run because we all love them. The master/servant relationship is alive today in America. The middle class are the servants.
Each day we get one step closer to returning to out-and-out feudalism as those in power work to concentrate more and more power.
We have to work against them to get back to the REAL American Dream - freedom, democracy, and equal opportunities for all. The Ayn Randian everyone-for-herself, you-too-could-be-a-billionaire world view is not equal opportunity for everyone. There is no equality when you start from an immensely unbalanced power structure. We can build a better world, we just have expend some effort to get there. Effort we can't be bothered to spend if we're all deluding ourselves about our chances of one day being a master over our own little band of slaves.
(I would start by imposing percentage-based salary caps on the richest citizens - there's no conceivable way that any human can be worth as much as the super-rich make. It's ridiculous. And no, just because they can dupe others into allowing them to have that much is not an excuse. Just because a thief can grab somebody's wallet does not give him the right to that person's wallet.)
I know this is entirely off-topic, but I've always thought it would be great if our elected representatives and leaders would lose the businessman-suit-and-tie combo and dress like the people they represent. Jeans and a t-shirt would be nice, but heck, even just losing the tie and jacket would be a big improvement. There's no point to it. I would think they'd hate wearing all that heavy crap all the time. It's not like it's a mandated uniform.
The thing that defines sci-fi is not the fiction part. Anyone can make up any old story and it's fiction. What makes it science fiction is supposed to be when *science* plays a major role in the story. Mark Oakley makes a big to-do about how science and industry have given us just about all they're going to, and so that's why science fiction is diminishing.
He's wrong. Science will always be with us. The "industry" part may have played itself out (capitalism might be dying, too), but science won't go away. It was even around when we didn't know what to call it! Plato's Republic was science, perhaps even science fiction. Moore's Utopia was Science Fiction.
Look, we haven't discovered everything yet. Every civilization at its apex thinks it knows all, and perhaps we're at the height of ours, so we think we're masters of the universe.
I bet India or China would have something to say about that.
Science fiction as we knew it in the mid-20th century - that masturbatory festival of industry, power and teenaged wet dreams - that sci-fi is gone. Because the world that it imagined us developing from is gone. The future of that world *is* here, and Oakley is right in that respect.
But we, here and now, we still have a future, and there are many bright minds writing about it. It may seem hard to grasp who the bright minds are, because there aren't only one or two sources telling us who they are like in the 50s when you had a couple of well known sci-fi magazines. Now the soapboxes are everywhere, and so are the authors.
Modern scifi knows that the current questions about our unknown future are: what will the political human landscape be like (yes, that's a scientific question)? What will biological studies bring us? Will the economic world change? Will multinationals just grow and grow? (That question has been with us since Neuromancer, and probably before, and it hasn't yet gone away.)
Some questions are still unanswered. We still don't know enough about physics to truly state if we'll ever be able to travel from one point to another instantaneously, or develop artificial intelligence.
As long as there are still questions to be asked about the interconnect of science and society, there will be sci-fi. It's just that the questions change, and people still looking for stories about questions to which we already know the answer, or questions in which few today are interested (yes, fashion plays a role), will find few examples to satisfy them, and so they will proclaim the death of their genre.
Yet there are still great sci-fi authors out there right now, asking today's important questions. Ken MacLeod is one of my favorites, along with Kim Stanley Robinson. Robert Charles Wilson is good, too. And there are many more...
If you want to perform a playwrite's work, you have to get permission, which usually involves paying some fee. Sure, putting on a play is usually a much bigger effort than playing a song (unless you can't buy a guitar or something), so you're unlikely to even practice (rehearse) it if you can't get permission to eventually put up a production. But still, my point is that it's kind of unique in music that you can go around reproducing other people's work willy-nilly.
Seriously, though, if you were to record it or perform it for money, that's like doing a production, and you would need permission (license) for that. You wouldn't need permission to practice or rehearse a song or a play, I suppose.
No, it makes perfect sense. Most open source advocates are just tired of being involved with a system where the big players don't play fair. Microsoft routinely cheats and lies. They are a convicted monopolist. Perhaps Apple just hasn't had the opportunity yet, but they don't regularly cheat and lie. They sell proprietary software, but they are generally nice and fair in their business dealings. There's little (if any) reason to dislike them like Microsoft.
Just because Company A and Company B both sell proprietary software, this does not make them same in every respect.
Heck, Apple even makes use of open source software and plays fair with open source programmers.
I can't really comment on the lesbians you've been around, except to suggest that perhaps they weren't really lesbians, but instead "adult performers" only claiming to like other women to get you to pay them more.
Don't worry - not happy with the 21st century? You can start investing in the 22nd now! Just buy from major corps, and the promise to bring you the future!
Looking for an OS X z-machine interpreter? Maybe Zoom is what you want? I'm not sure since I don't have a Mac, but it seems like it's mroe mac-friendly and capable than Frotz compiled for OS X...
This is the fourth---and worst---completely unnecessary major blackout of the Northeast in forty years, dating back to 1965.
It's scope---from Detroit to Ottawa to New York and New Jersey---is absolutely awesome, especially since it's due to total stupidity and corruption.
This does not count the blackouts that raged through California in 2000-2001. Those were "blackmails," set by Enron and the other Bush gas cronies to rip $60 billion out of the state, leading to, among other things, the impending ouster of Gov. Gray Davis.
When the lights went out, Davis kissed the feet of Southern California Edison's John Bryson, who engineered a deregulation bill that gouged $30 billion out of the ratepayers for the state's failed nukes. That opened the gates for the gas pirates to steal yet another $60 billion. Davis got caught in the backdraft.
The culprits in this latest northeastern disaster are basically the same---the barons of fossil and nuclear power and their cronies in the electric utility business.
Their "weapon" is an ancient electric grid that's obsolete if not obscene. It is a massively fragile Rube Goldberg device that dangerously and inefficiently carts around electricity from expensive, polluting and extremely unsafe central generating plants to buildings that waste massive amounts of energy and generate none.
That the grid will crash again and again and yet again is absolutely certain. The only question is who are the real terrorists: errant crazies who blow things up, or entrenched interests that refuse to change?
The technology now exists to transcend this mess. In the mid 1990s California's green energy advocates proposed a 600-megawatt mosaic of solar, wind and other renewable generators that would have entirely prevented the fake deregulatory crisis of 2000-1. It was approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, but then killed by Southern California Edison and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Today, the Bush Administration wants to further subsidize its fossil/utility friends with a bad energy bill, and by pouring billions into "upgrading" the electric grid. The only thing certain is that every cent of that money will be wasted.
In 1952 a Blue Ribbon report to Harry Truman predicted that the future of America's energy rested with the sun. It predicted 13 million solar-powered homes here by 1975, and the promise of decentralized, off-grid self-sufficiency.
Instead, Dwight Eisenhower took us into the pit of the "Peaceful Atom". A trillion dollars later, we have a half-century of crashing grids and dangerous nukes that are vulnerable to terrorism and must shut down precisely when they're most needed, as they did during this latest blackout. The latest Bush energy bill only makes the situation worse, with more nuke subsidies and a powerful push for fossil fuels, especially coal.
The whole system demands a green deconstruction. Solar technologies are ready to make energy self-sufficiency a tangible reality. Photovoltaic cells on rooftops and embedded in windows can produce grid-free electricity, with battery or fuel-cell backups. Geothermal power can heat and cool with nothing but the power of the earth's crust. Methane digestion can turn waste into usable gas. Basement generators can use biomass fuels like ethanol and soy diesel for off-grid self-sufficiency.
These systems need not provide 100% of a building's energy, but can gradually make them increasingly self-sufficient. Meanwhile more efficient heating, lighting and cooling systems can reduce demand. Windows that actually open and close can balance usage, building by building.
Bush's "upgrading the grid" means a new money pit for the same old unsafe nukes, polluting coal burners and gas turbines whose prices are set to skyrocket... all looped together by danger
With all this concern over whether the "terrorists" should be allowed to know where all of our weak spots are, where is the concern for our real weak spot: creating more terrorists? If we could just figure out how to stop behaving so idiotically and stomping all over the world, we wouldn't have to worry quite so badly about being open with our information. Granted, there would still be people who want to do damage, but not nearly as many.
An open, friendly society breeds safety simply by virtue of not pissing so many people off to the point where they want to do unsafe things. On the other hand, greed, power-lust and secrecy just breeds more conflict. With less secrecy, greed and power-lust become a lot more difficult to hide, and therefore more difficult to perpetrate. This information, as well as so much more, should be out in the open.
Besides, if he got it, it already is, as has been pointed out.
B) you assume our present technology and knowledge about the universe will not progress.
I stand by my original post. We'll break out of this solar system within the next 1000 years, and when we do it will seem simpler to us than we can imagine now.
this is not a democracy, this is mob rule. democracy is one person, one vote, to elect a *ruling party* who then govern the country. under a democratic system, they do not need to consult the populace for every decision they need to take.
No, democracy *is* mob rule. More accurately, it is the mob ruling the mob. Which is as it should be. What you describe is not democracy, it is a republic, or at best a democratic republic.
Internet polls show how neurotic the masses in a republic can get. In a republic people behave differently because they don't have to make decisions - decisions are made for them. They tend to believe that is how things should be - that others should make decisions for them. People like that tend to share your misconception that a republic is democracy. Who's to say how people behave in a real democracy? Perhaps Switzerland?
Granted, Switzerland is small, and USA is very, very big. Democracy seems to work best in smaller populations... Like states, or even better, cities. Hmm, we have those here in the USA... if only they could get back a lot of power from the federal government. Perhaps that's something all the independent parties could unite on? I know it's something many Greens and Libertarians share.
I agree - first steps, not necessarily in this order, should be moon, mars, asteroids, and the moons of other worlds.
Once enough people get used to living in our solar system, all you gotta do is build a couple of big, honkin' ships to last ~ 20 years (that can travel at least 1/4 the speed of light) and carry enough supplies to start an asteroid colony or two. Then send a ship or two to the nearest star system (less than 20 years away at 1/4 the speed of light). There may not be habitable planets, but there's bound to be plenty of rocks to build into. Once begun, they can just use the resources in the system. By the time we can build such ships we'll certainly be adept at using interplanetary resources.
I think in a few more hundred years we could have human outposts in at least 1, if not 2 or 3 nearby solar systems. Those outposts will develop and branch out again after a while... We're still a young species, and we have the advantage of being able to plan ahead farther than any other species on Earth! I think we can forestall our extinction a bit, and without too much further advancement in our current technology, if we somehow become unable to advance far beyond where we ar now...
Re:Triple-clicking the location bar in Windows
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC3 Is Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Granted, I'm a bit behind (using Mozilla 1.4a here at work), but why not just click once? Clicking once selects everything in the location bar. Same as in IE. As I see it, double-clicking to get a word is an improvement - double-clicking in IE does nothing but the same as single-clicking, unless you pause long enough to have the second click just place the cursor. There are times when I just want to alter a small part of the address, and double-clicking allows me that option.
Anyway, as another poster noted, you can also use CTRL-L since you're about to type anyway. That's usually what I do.
As for Windows "fundamentals" - in MS Word, double-clicking selects a word, and triple-clicking selects a whole paragraph. How's that for consistency?
As others have pointed out, there are many short alternatives in Firebird. You can CTRL-K to the search field. Only two keys. You can CTRL-L to the location field and get an "I Feel Lucky" Google search. Only two keys, plus you go straight to what you want if you're lucky. You can add a special bookmark for keyword searches. You don't have to go to the mouse for any of these (and if you're leaving your hand on your mouse non-stop while reading web pages, I feel sorry for your wrist).
I felt similar to you until I learned all these other shortcuts. Now I can't live without it. The real seller for me was that the Firebird search field can gain more searches thanks to the Mycroft project at mozdev.org. Mine has searches for Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, eBay, PriceWatch and PriceGrabber, and a few others.
Berlin WWDC blog provides fresh experience
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 4, Funny
There's a blog from the Berlin conference at OnlineBlog, Guardian Online's Blog. It's kind of amusing (since I'm not there), as it seems a storm has knocked out the satellite feed, and they're watching the QuickTime stream, and alternately getting drunk...
Slashdot Mirror
Has nobody said anything yet about the mention of AAC in the review? This is the first I've heard of any other device playing the same format that iPods play... Are there any other MP3 players that also play AAC? Will we see more AAC support cropping up, and faster than Ogg Vorbis support seems to be coming along? I hope so! (Well, I hope for more AAC support in other devices, I don't really care if it comes along faster than Vorbis support...)
testing again, just ignore me...
ignore this, i'm just posting in a day-old thread to test my sig... sorry if you wasted time reading this! :D
I'm nowhere close to being super rich. Heck, I'm not even micro rich. But I'm also not agitated over the fact that these people are out there because I recognize that in a system such as ours, there will be pockets of concentrated wealth.
Yes, and in a system such as the one they had in England over 200 years ago, the King is able to do pretty much anything. That doesn't make it right.
Wealth is much less concentrated today than it was, say, 100 years ago, or maybe even 50 years ago.
That still doesn't make it right or OK that the few incredibly rich and powerful have sway over nations, or that they can get around laws and regulations to get even more rich and powerful, etc.
Just because Bush (or Clinton, or anybody) is President, and is therefore able to do what they do, this does not make the things they do right. Ability (or might) does not make right.
don't use the canard of "the rich man's got me down" to rationalize your inability to achieve your goals.
This has nothing to do with my own goals. Rather, I would say "The rich few have got everybody down, and it's not right, so I will work against it."
What does consumer spending have to do with CEO bonuses and accounting gymnastics? There are more ways for the wealthy to increase their wealth than simply selling things. And the wealthier and more powerful one gets, the more of those doors to even more wealth and more power one can open up.
Thanks for elucidating my point better than I did. I knew I shouldn't have tacked on that salary-scale idea at the end, no matter how much I think it could be a good idea ... in a nationless world, not in this world where the rich people would just move to a scale-free country.
You demand freedom by taking it away from others.
I see it as restoring freedom that was taken unjustly by them in the first place.
if a person's ambitions require getting rich, first, they should have every chance to make it work
At whose expense? Only their own? Don't kid yourself. We as a society have a right to decide together if a tiny fraction of us should be allowed unlimited power and wealth. We already place some limits on such people (theoretically, anyway - their already great power and wealth makes it incredibly easy for them to get around laws & regulations).
I'm only suggesting tighter limits, put in place by society (not by me alone, for the guy who immediately labelled me a dictator for even thinking of any limits), for the benefit of society. Sounds to me just like government of the people, by the people, for the people - the way it's supposed to be.
The American Dream is about freedom to pursue your own life, it's not about getting rich. Any given newborn in America has probably a better chance of winning their state lottery (when they're of age to participate of course) than of getting rich and/or famous through any of the means you mentioned.
The "you could do it too" dream is a lie we sell ourselves so we don't get all upset about all the rich who actually control things, who take our money and don't have to run because we all love them. The master/servant relationship is alive today in America. The middle class are the servants.
Each day we get one step closer to returning to out-and-out feudalism as those in power work to concentrate more and more power.
We have to work against them to get back to the REAL American Dream - freedom, democracy, and equal opportunities for all. The Ayn Randian everyone-for-herself, you-too-could-be-a-billionaire world view is not equal opportunity for everyone. There is no equality when you start from an immensely unbalanced power structure. We can build a better world, we just have expend some effort to get there. Effort we can't be bothered to spend if we're all deluding ourselves about our chances of one day being a master over our own little band of slaves.
(I would start by imposing percentage-based salary caps on the richest citizens - there's no conceivable way that any human can be worth as much as the super-rich make. It's ridiculous. And no, just because they can dupe others into allowing them to have that much is not an excuse. Just because a thief can grab somebody's wallet does not give him the right to that person's wallet.)
I'm well aware of that. Thanks for elucidating and reinforcing my point :)
I know this is entirely off-topic, but I've always thought it would be great if our elected representatives and leaders would lose the businessman-suit-and-tie combo and dress like the people they represent. Jeans and a t-shirt would be nice, but heck, even just losing the tie and jacket would be a big improvement. There's no point to it. I would think they'd hate wearing all that heavy crap all the time. It's not like it's a mandated uniform.
The thing that defines sci-fi is not the fiction part. Anyone can make up any old story and it's fiction. What makes it science fiction is supposed to be when *science* plays a major role in the story. Mark Oakley makes a big to-do about how science and industry have given us just about all they're going to, and so that's why science fiction is diminishing.
He's wrong. Science will always be with us. The "industry" part may have played itself out (capitalism might be dying, too), but science won't go away. It was even around when we didn't know what to call it! Plato's Republic was science, perhaps even science fiction. Moore's Utopia was Science Fiction.
Look, we haven't discovered everything yet. Every civilization at its apex thinks it knows all, and perhaps we're at the height of ours, so we think we're masters of the universe.
I bet India or China would have something to say about that.
Science fiction as we knew it in the mid-20th century - that masturbatory festival of industry, power and teenaged wet dreams - that sci-fi is gone. Because the world that it imagined us developing from is gone. The future of that world *is* here, and Oakley is right in that respect.
But we, here and now, we still have a future, and there are many bright minds writing about it. It may seem hard to grasp who the bright minds are, because there aren't only one or two sources telling us who they are like in the 50s when you had a couple of well known sci-fi magazines. Now the soapboxes are everywhere, and so are the authors.
Modern scifi knows that the current questions about our unknown future are: what will the political human landscape be like (yes, that's a scientific question)? What will biological studies bring us? Will the economic world change? Will multinationals just grow and grow? (That question has been with us since Neuromancer, and probably before, and it hasn't yet gone away.)
Some questions are still unanswered. We still don't know enough about physics to truly state if we'll ever be able to travel from one point to another instantaneously, or develop artificial intelligence.
As long as there are still questions to be asked about the interconnect of science and society, there will be sci-fi. It's just that the questions change, and people still looking for stories about questions to which we already know the answer, or questions in which few today are interested (yes, fashion plays a role), will find few examples to satisfy them, and so they will proclaim the death of their genre.
Yet there are still great sci-fi authors out there right now, asking today's important questions. Ken MacLeod is one of my favorites, along with Kim Stanley Robinson. Robert Charles Wilson is good, too. And there are many more...
If you want to perform a playwrite's work, you have to get permission, which usually involves paying some fee. Sure, putting on a play is usually a much bigger effort than playing a song (unless you can't buy a guitar or something), so you're unlikely to even practice (rehearse) it if you can't get permission to eventually put up a production. But still, my point is that it's kind of unique in music that you can go around reproducing other people's work willy-nilly.
Seriously, though, if you were to record it or perform it for money, that's like doing a production, and you would need permission (license) for that. You wouldn't need permission to practice or rehearse a song or a play, I suppose.
No, it makes perfect sense. Most open source advocates are just tired of being involved with a system where the big players don't play fair. Microsoft routinely cheats and lies. They are a convicted monopolist. Perhaps Apple just hasn't had the opportunity yet, but they don't regularly cheat and lie. They sell proprietary software, but they are generally nice and fair in their business dealings. There's little (if any) reason to dislike them like Microsoft.
Just because Company A and Company B both sell proprietary software, this does not make them same in every respect.
Heck, Apple even makes use of open source software and plays fair with open source programmers.
I can't really comment on the lesbians you've been around, except to suggest that perhaps they weren't really lesbians, but instead "adult performers" only claiming to like other women to get you to pay them more.
Don't worry - not happy with the 21st century? You can start investing in the 22nd now! Just buy from major corps, and the promise to bring you the future!
Perhaps XBolo is what you're looking for?
Looking for an OS X z-machine interpreter? Maybe Zoom is what you want? I'm not sure since I don't have a Mac, but it seems like it's mroe mac-friendly and capable than Frotz compiled for OS X...
The Latest Bogus Fossil-Nuke Blackout: This Grid Should Not Exist
by Harvey Wasserman
This is the fourth---and worst---completely unnecessary major blackout of the Northeast in forty years, dating back to 1965.
It's scope---from Detroit to Ottawa to New York and New Jersey---is absolutely awesome, especially since it's due to total stupidity and corruption.
This does not count the blackouts that raged through California in 2000-2001. Those were "blackmails," set by Enron and the other Bush gas cronies to rip $60 billion out of the state, leading to, among other things, the impending ouster of Gov. Gray Davis.
When the lights went out, Davis kissed the feet of Southern California Edison's John Bryson, who engineered a deregulation bill that gouged $30 billion out of the ratepayers for the state's failed nukes. That opened the gates for the gas pirates to steal yet another $60 billion. Davis got caught in the backdraft.
The culprits in this latest northeastern disaster are basically the same---the barons of fossil and nuclear power and their cronies in the electric utility business.
Their "weapon" is an ancient electric grid that's obsolete if not obscene. It is a massively fragile Rube Goldberg device that dangerously and inefficiently carts around electricity from expensive, polluting and extremely unsafe central generating plants to buildings that waste massive amounts of energy and generate none.
That the grid will crash again and again and yet again is absolutely certain. The only question is who are the real terrorists: errant crazies who blow things up, or entrenched interests that refuse to change?
The technology now exists to transcend this mess. In the mid 1990s California's green energy advocates proposed a 600-megawatt mosaic of solar, wind and other renewable generators that would have entirely prevented the fake deregulatory crisis of 2000-1. It was approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, but then killed by Southern California Edison and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Today, the Bush Administration wants to further subsidize its fossil/utility friends with a bad energy bill, and by pouring billions into "upgrading" the electric grid. The only thing certain is that every cent of that money will be wasted.
In 1952 a Blue Ribbon report to Harry Truman predicted that the future of America's energy rested with the sun. It predicted 13 million solar-powered homes here by 1975, and the promise of decentralized, off-grid self-sufficiency.
Instead, Dwight Eisenhower took us into the pit of the "Peaceful Atom". A trillion dollars later, we have a half-century of crashing grids and dangerous nukes that are vulnerable to terrorism and must shut down precisely when they're most needed, as they did during this latest blackout. The latest Bush energy bill only makes the situation worse, with more nuke subsidies and a powerful push for fossil fuels, especially coal.
The whole system demands a green deconstruction. Solar technologies are ready to make energy self-sufficiency a tangible reality. Photovoltaic cells on rooftops and embedded in windows can produce grid-free electricity, with battery or fuel-cell backups. Geothermal power can heat and cool with nothing but the power of the earth's crust. Methane digestion can turn waste into usable gas. Basement generators can use biomass fuels like ethanol and soy diesel for off-grid self-sufficiency.
These systems need not provide 100% of a building's energy, but can gradually make them increasingly self-sufficient. Meanwhile more efficient heating, lighting and cooling systems can reduce demand. Windows that actually open and close can balance usage, building by building.
Bush's "upgrading the grid" means a new money pit for the same old unsafe nukes, polluting coal burners and gas turbines whose prices are set to skyrocket... all looped together by danger
With all this concern over whether the "terrorists" should be allowed to know where all of our weak spots are, where is the concern for our real weak spot: creating more terrorists? If we could just figure out how to stop behaving so idiotically and stomping all over the world, we wouldn't have to worry quite so badly about being open with our information. Granted, there would still be people who want to do damage, but not nearly as many.
An open, friendly society breeds safety simply by virtue of not pissing so many people off to the point where they want to do unsafe things. On the other hand, greed, power-lust and secrecy just breeds more conflict. With less secrecy, greed and power-lust become a lot more difficult to hide, and therefore more difficult to perpetrate. This information, as well as so much more, should be out in the open.
Besides, if he got it, it already is, as has been pointed out.
Ah yes, the omnipresent evil hippies. God, no. Save us. Ahhhh.
A) you assume I'm being 100% serious.
B) you assume our present technology and knowledge about the universe will not progress.
I stand by my original post. We'll break out of this solar system within the next 1000 years, and when we do it will seem simpler to us than we can imagine now.
this is not a democracy, this is mob rule. democracy is one person, one vote, to elect a *ruling party* who then govern the country. under a democratic system, they do not need to consult the populace for every decision they need to take.
... Like states, or even better, cities. Hmm, we have those here in the USA... if only they could get back a lot of power from the federal government. Perhaps that's something all the independent parties could unite on? I know it's something many Greens and Libertarians share.
No, democracy *is* mob rule. More accurately, it is the mob ruling the mob. Which is as it should be. What you describe is not democracy, it is a republic, or at best a democratic republic.
Internet polls show how neurotic the masses in a republic can get. In a republic people behave differently because they don't have to make decisions - decisions are made for them. They tend to believe that is how things should be - that others should make decisions for them. People like that tend to share your misconception that a republic is democracy. Who's to say how people behave in a real democracy? Perhaps Switzerland?
Granted, Switzerland is small, and USA is very, very big. Democracy seems to work best in smaller populations
I agree - first steps, not necessarily in this order, should be moon, mars, asteroids, and the moons of other worlds.
Once enough people get used to living in our solar system, all you gotta do is build a couple of big, honkin' ships to last ~ 20 years (that can travel at least 1/4 the speed of light) and carry enough supplies to start an asteroid colony or two. Then send a ship or two to the nearest star system (less than 20 years away at 1/4 the speed of light). There may not be habitable planets, but there's bound to be plenty of rocks to build into. Once begun, they can just use the resources in the system. By the time we can build such ships we'll certainly be adept at using interplanetary resources.
I think in a few more hundred years we could have human outposts in at least 1, if not 2 or 3 nearby solar systems. Those outposts will develop and branch out again after a while... We're still a young species, and we have the advantage of being able to plan ahead farther than any other species on Earth! I think we can forestall our extinction a bit, and without too much further advancement in our current technology, if we somehow become unable to advance far beyond where we ar now...
Granted, I'm a bit behind (using Mozilla 1.4a here at work), but why not just click once? Clicking once selects everything in the location bar. Same as in IE. As I see it, double-clicking to get a word is an improvement - double-clicking in IE does nothing but the same as single-clicking, unless you pause long enough to have the second click just place the cursor. There are times when I just want to alter a small part of the address, and double-clicking allows me that option.
Anyway, as another poster noted, you can also use CTRL-L since you're about to type anyway. That's usually what I do.
As for Windows "fundamentals" - in MS Word, double-clicking selects a word, and triple-clicking selects a whole paragraph. How's that for consistency?
As others have pointed out, there are many short alternatives in Firebird. You can CTRL-K to the search field. Only two keys. You can CTRL-L to the location field and get an "I Feel Lucky" Google search. Only two keys, plus you go straight to what you want if you're lucky. You can add a special bookmark for keyword searches. You don't have to go to the mouse for any of these (and if you're leaving your hand on your mouse non-stop while reading web pages, I feel sorry for your wrist).
I felt similar to you until I learned all these other shortcuts. Now I can't live without it. The real seller for me was that the Firebird search field can gain more searches thanks to the Mycroft project at mozdev.org. Mine has searches for Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com, Wikipedia, IMDB, Amazon, eBay, PriceWatch and PriceGrabber, and a few others.
There's a blog from the Berlin conference at OnlineBlog, Guardian Online's Blog. It's kind of amusing (since I'm not there), as it seems a storm has knocked out the satellite feed, and they're watching the QuickTime stream, and alternately getting drunk...