A friend of mine always asks the same thing about Linux guys. Here is my theory:
Once upon a time (any time within the 20th century before the 1960s in the United States), men only had short conservative hair cuts and women had hair like Donna Reed. During these times, all dissent on any front was not only frowned upon but wound up getting you investigated as a "dirty red". But, as is wont to happen, the conservatives became more and more corrupt and the average person began seeing through their illusion of morality. More and more of those "beatniks" and their kind started to become prevalent in society and the conservatives lost their grip.
In the 60s, the counterculturalists morphed into hippies and one of the symbols of the males of their rebellion was to grow long hair as a reaction against the crew cut. This trend spread until not only hippies had long hair, but even college professors, detectives, doctors and even lawyers (by the 80s)! What was once a symbol of rebellion had become a weakened style statement with no real substance. By the 90s you were seeing a mixture of men sporting both crew cuts and pony tails.
Finally, sometime between the 70s and now, geeks (who are woefully behind the times in terms of style and counterculture) caught onto the concept of the male pony tail. This seemed to spread throughout several of the geek subcultures such as the Linux community, gamers, sci-fi fans and the like. The meaning of the pony tail amongst these folk is somewhat of a mystery because it's likely to be both a symbol of some kind of rebellion (akin to, "I shake my fist at thee") and an awkward fashion statement. So it's safe to say that the reason these folks have pony tails is probably because they want them. But it's also safe to say that they probably haven't a clue in the world WHY they want them. Except maybe because "so and so has one and he's super cool".;P
A. I would propose that it is presented to allow the content distributor strong control over access to content. If someone gets a hold of content through improper channels (not approved by the distributor) that person should not be able to access the content. This implies that there must identification of a user's credentials to access the content. And THAT implies a centralized clearinghouse for access.
Q. What is the goal of Open Source DRM?
A. Ostensibly, the goal is to provide everything listed above, but in an environment where the mechanisms that perform the DRM are exposed and can be modified or duplicated. I would have to assume that this holds true up to and excluding the authentication data held at the central clearing house. However, it still implies control over what content can be accessed. This implies that some users are more equal than others which is counter to the Open Source ideal (and especially the GNU GPL ideals).
Is it possible that people are beginning to confuse DRM with security? Imagine a world where there was a centralized NIS for every person on the planet. Imagine all binaries being held on one gigantic super powerful cluster of machines to which every person on earth had controlled access. Imagine that bandwidth is not a limitation and everyone had 10 gigs to the desktop anywhere all the time. You could then set user and group rights to control access to data and applications. DRM is just a band-aid fix for a problem that was already solved a long time ago.
I love Google and all of the really cool things they've come up with. I love the fact that they've been able to make such intricate web applications and use very little bandwidth to present users with decent interfaces. But, I think the Google Desktop might be the wrong direction with it's toolbar. Part of the problem that I see with it is that it presents information to the user by default. This is a BAD thing. Users don't typically want or care for information unless they are interested in it right at the moment. By presenting it to them automatically, you make it invisible. Since they see it often enough to annoy them, they wind up ignoring (then worse) and forgetting that it's there.
If you think about it, how many times do you know users who actually use the clock that is displayed on their task bar? I've seen many people at various places I've worked, completely ignore their own PC and look at the clock on the wall. Or, they might even ask someone, "do you know what time it is"? when it's right there in front of them. It's not that they're stupid or that they don't understand what that clock does. It's that they've been OVEREXPOSED to it. This holds true for weather, and headlines as well. Rather than bombarding the user with information, let it agreggate the info in a hidden area with constant updates. Then (much like the Dashboard in Mac OS X) using a special key combo, function key or maybe a clickable area, present the information as a translucent area over the existing desktop. This will then force the user to focus on the new information without being able to interact or be distracted by what is now backgrounded.
My other concern is that by Google designing a full application that rests on top of Windows, they are putting themselves in two unenviable positions:
1. Due to the various interactions between programs from multiple vendors, they may get blamed for system instability if there is a negative interaction with another app that a user has installed. Where I work there is an app that users love that shifts their desktop background randomly and puts a "neat" calendar on their desktop. However, it's blamed for instability frequently. Maybe it is unstable, or maybe it's interacting poorly with another app. Who knows? But that's the problem with utilities that run in the background vs. apps that the user is focused on 100% when running.
2. Microsoft, since they percieve Google to be a threat are very likely going to make this Dekstop thing break. It's happened many times before and you know it will happen again. This tried and true Microsoft Tactic(tm) could result in extra work for the Google programmers who wrote this app.
Finally, they'd be better off designing a replacement shell for Windows if they really want to have a "Google Desktop". They would still be at the mercy of item two above, but item one would apply less since the Google Desktop would now be the shell that the user interacts with all the time. If it's well written, the user should only notice the benefits of an alternative shell to Microsoft's Explorer shell (which is pretty ugly and clunky). If they did this, they might be able to port to other OSes and possibly provide an avenue for people to exit the Windows fold and go with a GNU/Linux/Google Desktop distribution.
Check out one of my latest JEs and you'll see that Windows offers people like me very little. I'm willing to be that MOST Slashdotters are people like me. The only thing I need it for at this point (speaking of home use only) is video editing. I still have yet to find a suitable video editor in Linux that handles MPEG2 (*.mpg) files and will save out with no loss in quality. But that's it. Check out my latest journal folks and you'll see that Windows really doesn't offer people like us much.
GNU is not Unix. Linux is not an OS. GNU/Linux is an OS distribution comprised of the GNU project and the Linux kernel. Therefore, GNU/Linux is also not Unix. But it IS Unix-like. Glad to have cleared all that up for the trogs.:)
A guy who goes by the user ID 'eno2001' on/. plans to build a time machine. This device will be able to travel backwards and forwards in time. It will also protect the person being transported from the time changes so that he or she won't age beyond normal time. How he plans to do it is... well... wait and see.
Congratulations to/. on having at least three meaningless claims posted in a single day.
All of these people are putting up free WiFi access with different levels of service. Some only allow web and mail, others are wide open and still others only provide custom content with no access to outside resources. Individually this is all fine and dandy. But, if WiFi is slated to be the "next internet" as a lot of people like to claim that it is, we need a lot more standardization than we have. Not to mention that there are a lot of people who are working very hard to try and stamp out these initiatives because it hurts or could hurt their businesses (telcos, cell phone providers, cable and satellite operators).
It's nice to see the free hotspots popping up here and there, but other than checking mail and looking at some web content, how useful is it? Why isn't there a national or global cooperative that would define the services that hotspots should offer in order to create a truly national or global network that parallels the internet? How do we keep the telcos and their ilk from ruining this? It's not like they're going to die overnight because landlines are still going to be necessary for several reasons, with bandwidth and reliability being the most important.
Keep the free WiFi coming, but really what does it all mean? It's not like this is becoming anything particularly useful yet.
You're all fired for posting on Slashdot on company time. Next time your try something like that again, I'll fire you again because I am the metaboss. My horns of hair know no limits!
Spammers cause so much grief for so many people (users and techs), that at the very least anal rape is mild. Frankly I'd want the perps sent to Iraq to do the missing step since they want to "PROFIT!!".
The maximum carrying capacity of the earth is accepted by most ecologists to be 11,000,000,000 people. Once you go beyond that, there is no way to sustain human life as it is now. A lot of things would have to change to allow more than 11,000,000,000 people to live sustainably.
Early in this comment thread some people have mentioned the possibilities of human deaths. That is EXACTLY the point. We are quickly approaching Earth's maximum estimated carrying capacity (think of it as the biological equivalent of how many amps an electrical circuit can carry before the breaker shuts off) for human living conditions in it's current form. What happens after that? Mass famine. Die offs. Wars. We're already seeing some of this but it only affect those who are further down the socioeconomic ladder so many of us don't think it's an issue.
However, there are some people way up high on the socioeconomic ladder who are well aware of this and have created think tanks (Project for the New American Century, for example) that ARE addressing this issue. However, they aren't addressing it in the most humanitarian way. They are taking the pragmatic route that a good chunk of the human population needs to die in order to restore some balance and protect their own interests. This is why wars are being encouraged, and people are being recruited from the poorest neighborhoods in America. What easier way to rid the planet of extra people than throwing them into the meat grinder? More to the point, who better to get rid of than those who are a burden on society rather than contributors? Will you ever hear this outright? No. It's too awful to comprehend, but it's their view.
The humanitarian view would be this: Establish worldwide controls to cut down on excessive use of resources for everyone. This means that YOU would have to give up your car, your computer, your cell phone, all of your electronic entertainment. It would mean that YOU would have to use mass transit if you live more than ten miles away from where you work. It would mean that YOU have to WALK to work if you live within ten miles of your job. It would mean that the internet would have to be pared down greatly in terms of bandwidth, processing power and electricity usage. It would mean that we would have to audit all natural resource usage to verify that it is, in fact, justified and heavily tax anything that isn't. It would mean that we would have to pack more people into living spaces than we currently do, likely in communal fashion.
Based on those two approaches being the only options, the people who currently stand to lose a lot are more likely to be in favor of the approach that impacts them the least, and so war it is. In large part, YOU did this. And so did I. It doesn't matter if you are pro-war or pro-peace, if you drive a car, YOU did this. If you use more electrical appliances than you really should or even most electrical appliances, YOU did this. If you eat out at big box restaurants, YOU did this. If you pay more than $2.00 a month on your electric bill, YOU did this. So where do we go from here? There is already one group who has decided what to do to solve this problem. What do we do on our part?
One can of soft drink can contain up to 14 tablespoons of sugar in it.
Yes, and something "natural" like Orange Juice has FAR more sugar than that. So what's the problem?
Again. You are as ill informed as others in this thread. There might be natural fruit sugars in Orange juice in excess of 14 tablespoons, but that's not white processed sugar. Unless the sugar refineries have found a way to pump table sugar into fruit on the vine? I'd be interested in anything you could point to to prove that assertion.
Actually, where I live (Northeastern Ohio) we had our choice of SBC or a lesser known option Corecomm. Corecomm provided wired phone service and I actually had it for a while. It was about $4.00 cheaper than SBC. However, they also were my ISP and they stole my e-mail address and gave it to another customer. The phone service wasn't any better than SBC and I just didn't see the value in saving $4.00 a month only as long as I subscribed to their dial up ISP service. Their normal prices were only $1.00 cheaper. So where is the value in that?
Long distance is a huge mess in the US. You have so many choices that complicate matters when trying to make a selection. The prices vary by just a few cents a minute here or there. The service quality ranges from total shit to mediocre. They pretty much rape you just as badly as the Bell monopoly did but in different ways. The customer service across the board is horrible. The games they play to get you to switch not to mention the obnoxious telemarketing that they engage in is outrageous. Fortunately I have very little need for long distance, so I don't have any. It makes my phone bill just as cheap as some of the VoIP offerings to leave off LD access. But when I do need it, I have to go through the thoroughly annoying 1010xxx crap. I don't like paying fees for things I don't use, so I can't justify ANY LD service being on my line since they all bite you in the ass. I don't think deregulation helped. It just took a stable system that would have eventually have come down in price and replaced it with a totally unstable system that forces people to know things they shouldn't have to know in order to shop around. If you want long distance, it should be part of your telephone service with no charge unless you use it. Even $.01 a month is too expensive for LD if you don't use it.
It cannot reproduce by itself. Some viruses can lie dormant for decades and not change in any way until they meet some suitable living cells to invade. They're a lot more like the cell world's version of Borg. That's not life.
I changed my diet mate! I'm also encouraging others to do the same. It's worked wonders for me, and I can't help but want to share the knowledge with others. I wrote two long journal entries on it a long time ago as well. However, my "one person is one too many" approach specifically refers to artificial and heavily chemically processed foods. Food allergies don't fall into the same category because they aren't caused by ingesting artificial food stuff. Not to mention there is more and more evidence indicating that many food allergies may be caused by the same food processing chemicals that I'm complaining about.
You're one misinformed motherfucker aren't you? Sugar is overused. It's NOT needed in everything that the food industry shoves it into. Go look at a can of black beans in the grocery. You'd think a can of black beans wouldn't need sugar or corn syrup right? Well you'd be wrong. I've only been able to find one brand of canned black beans that doesn't have sugar in it and it's the only one I'll buy. You also have the option of using something like stevia leaf extract when you drop sugar from your diet. It's safe and it's been in use in Japan for over 100 years. It's basically a tea leaf that has the interesting property of tasting very sweet. Stevia is what I use to cut sugar intake.
Stevia also has the added benefit of not being a simple carbohydrate (the most evil of all food substances). Eating fruit and ingesting those sugars is fine because it requires your body to work in order to get the energy out of the carbs. This means a much slower release of sugars into your body. Simple carbs (sugar, honey, corn syrup) just about go straight into your body and produce... fat stores which make people fat.
Before I shifted away from sugar, I was a vegetarian. I've never had a weight problem. In fact, I only gained about 15 lbs after high school and lost that weight when I dropped sugar. So at 35, I'm still at my high school weight. So again, you're a misinformed little turd. Why don't you pull Bill Gates vienna sausage out of your mouth and Ballmer's 2x4 out of your ass before you speculate about things you don't know? Sugar in the quantities that most Americans consume it is evil and dangerous. It used to be a rarity in the diet but the 20th century changed all that and that's why we've got a morbidly obese population now. (Of which I'm pretty sure you are one) Nice meeting you.
ETEQ "Space.com new data reports from the Spitzer Space Telescope showing that the Milky Way a barred spiral is in fact! All our old astronomy textbooks thrown away will have to be looks like..." writes.
...there are no pictures of the Milky Way from space? Whenever I've Googled for pictures of the Milky Way, I either get artist renderings or these stupid pictures of a strip of the night sky. Since we've supposedly went into space a lot of time, we should have good photos of the Milky Way from space. Even moreso since the Voyager spacecraft left the universe a year or so ago. When the voyager left our universe, it should have had a great shot of the entire galaxy and all it's planets. I mean, the universe is what... like ten million miles wide or something, right?
Whether you believe it or not, you are being poisoned. It may or may not be intentional, and I don't care if it is or isn't. But the fact of the matter is that the food production chain in most western nations is destroying the health of the consumers. There are a high number of chemicals that have found their way into the food supply due to their inexpensive provision of preservative, aesthetic and texture properties. Many of these chemicals may be the underlying cause of various chronic illnesses that are becoming epidemics in the western world. But we will never know because to compound the problem we are also being overmedicated.
One of the worst ingredients that has found it's way into too much of the food supply is white processed sugar. One can of soft drink can contain up to 14 tablespoons of sugar in it. Sugar also has some light preservative qualities and tends to make everything taste better. In small quantities, sugar is mildly harmful. But at the rate that we ingest sugar, it is downright dangerous. Don't believe me? Next time you are at the grocery, pick up most prepared foods and look at the ingredients. You'll find that sugar or high fructose corn syrup is in nearly everything. It's a bit frightening especially since I had a personal health issue that no doctor could solve until I cut food with sugar out of my diet. Compounded with the medications that doctors tried to give me to cure my sinus infections, I continued to get more and more ill rather than get better. But once I stopped taking the antibiotics and the prevacid and dumped white sugar, white rice, white flour, corn syrup and honey ouf of my diet, my various illnesses went away. It's been about three years now and my health is better than ever.
So now I read this story about "space meat" and it makes me cringe. I can only imagine what kinds of horrible effects this artificial food stuff is going to have on some people. (remember even if one person gets sick because of a chemical reaction it's one person too many) I have this feeling that if this becomes standard "food" for anyone they will need a whole slew of drugs to combat various ill effects caused by this new toxin. I don't call that living, I call it chemical bondage. Why can't we just start to work on improving organic farming???
Australians should be very concerned about what's going to happen to their phone service. Back in the 80s, we had the Bell Telephone company split up into RBOCs (regional bell operating companies). What used to be the Bell Telephone Service became Ohio Bell where I lived. That eventually became Ameritech and then SBC. Through all of these changes, the quality of service continued to drop. The territorial wars increased between RBOCs and newer upstarts trying to get into the telco biz. Where we used to have a national business with shining R&D output (Thank Bell for Unix and Plan 9), and impecable quality of both product and service, we now have a bunch of useless small companies that refuse to cooperate with each other to server customers properly. We have mildly varying rates (save $1.00 or $2.00 a month by "chosing" your telco) with very few options for alternative services because of the territory wars.
In the house I bought last year, I found a tag on the ground strap for the phone line that was probably put there in the 50s. It harkened back to a day when things were more organized and orderly because there was little room for doing things differently. The tag was essentially a threat that said you MUST NOT remove the ground strap and if it is accidentally cut or loosened, you MUST call the phone company to get it replaced or reattached. Those were the good old days. The problem today is one of "too many chefs". The chefs need to be sent back to R&D where they belong and only the best ideas should be put forward for production. This is why Bell Telephone service was exccelent compared to the mire of crappy phone companies we have now. Not to mention the addition of people who know nothing about phone service providing phone service thanks to VoIP. Deregulation is a bad thing. It destroys carefully controlled systems that MUST be carefully controlled. Just because there is a new or cool idea out there doesn't mean it should make it to production in a short period of time. That's why phone service in the U.S. is so friggin bad. Our entire infrastructure is essentially partially in beta. The only things that do work properly and reliably are the older systems that were put in place before the deregulation.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because there's no Abacus interface on these babies. ;P
A friend of mine always asks the same thing about Linux guys. Here is my theory:
;P
Once upon a time (any time within the 20th century before the 1960s in the United States), men only had short conservative hair cuts and women had hair like Donna Reed. During these times, all dissent on any front was not only frowned upon but wound up getting you investigated as a "dirty red". But, as is wont to happen, the conservatives became more and more corrupt and the average person began seeing through their illusion of morality. More and more of those "beatniks" and their kind started to become prevalent in society and the conservatives lost their grip.
In the 60s, the counterculturalists morphed into hippies and one of the symbols of the males of their rebellion was to grow long hair as a reaction against the crew cut. This trend spread until not only hippies had long hair, but even college professors, detectives, doctors and even lawyers (by the 80s)! What was once a symbol of rebellion had become a weakened style statement with no real substance. By the 90s you were seeing a mixture of men sporting both crew cuts and pony tails.
Finally, sometime between the 70s and now, geeks (who are woefully behind the times in terms of style and counterculture) caught onto the concept of the male pony tail. This seemed to spread throughout several of the geek subcultures such as the Linux community, gamers, sci-fi fans and the like. The meaning of the pony tail amongst these folk is somewhat of a mystery because it's likely to be both a symbol of some kind of rebellion (akin to, "I shake my fist at thee") and an awkward fashion statement. So it's safe to say that the reason these folks have pony tails is probably because they want them. But it's also safe to say that they probably haven't a clue in the world WHY they want them. Except maybe because "so and so has one and he's super cool".
Did that clear things up?
Q. What is the goal of DRM?
A. I would propose that it is presented to allow the content distributor strong control over access to content. If someone gets a hold of content through improper channels (not approved by the distributor) that person should not be able to access the content. This implies that there must identification of a user's credentials to access the content. And THAT implies a centralized clearinghouse for access.
Q. What is the goal of Open Source DRM?
A. Ostensibly, the goal is to provide everything listed above, but in an environment where the mechanisms that perform the DRM are exposed and can be modified or duplicated. I would have to assume that this holds true up to and excluding the authentication data held at the central clearing house. However, it still implies control over what content can be accessed. This implies that some users are more equal than others which is counter to the Open Source ideal (and especially the GNU GPL ideals).
Is it possible that people are beginning to confuse DRM with security? Imagine a world where there was a centralized NIS for every person on the planet. Imagine all binaries being held on one gigantic super powerful cluster of machines to which every person on earth had controlled access. Imagine that bandwidth is not a limitation and everyone had 10 gigs to the desktop anywhere all the time. You could then set user and group rights to control access to data and applications. DRM is just a band-aid fix for a problem that was already solved a long time ago.
I love Google and all of the really cool things they've come up with. I love the fact that they've been able to make such intricate web applications and use very little bandwidth to present users with decent interfaces. But, I think the Google Desktop might be the wrong direction with it's toolbar. Part of the problem that I see with it is that it presents information to the user by default. This is a BAD thing. Users don't typically want or care for information unless they are interested in it right at the moment. By presenting it to them automatically, you make it invisible. Since they see it often enough to annoy them, they wind up ignoring (then worse) and forgetting that it's there.
If you think about it, how many times do you know users who actually use the clock that is displayed on their task bar? I've seen many people at various places I've worked, completely ignore their own PC and look at the clock on the wall. Or, they might even ask someone, "do you know what time it is"? when it's right there in front of them. It's not that they're stupid or that they don't understand what that clock does. It's that they've been OVEREXPOSED to it. This holds true for weather, and headlines as well. Rather than bombarding the user with information, let it agreggate the info in a hidden area with constant updates. Then (much like the Dashboard in Mac OS X) using a special key combo, function key or maybe a clickable area, present the information as a translucent area over the existing desktop. This will then force the user to focus on the new information without being able to interact or be distracted by what is now backgrounded.
My other concern is that by Google designing a full application that rests on top of Windows, they are putting themselves in two unenviable positions:
1. Due to the various interactions between programs from multiple vendors, they may get blamed for system instability if there is a negative interaction with another app that a user has installed. Where I work there is an app that users love that shifts their desktop background randomly and puts a "neat" calendar on their desktop. However, it's blamed for instability frequently. Maybe it is unstable, or maybe it's interacting poorly with another app. Who knows? But that's the problem with utilities that run in the background vs. apps that the user is focused on 100% when running.
2. Microsoft, since they percieve Google to be a threat are very likely going to make this Dekstop thing break. It's happened many times before and you know it will happen again. This tried and true Microsoft Tactic(tm) could result in extra work for the Google programmers who wrote this app.
Finally, they'd be better off designing a replacement shell for Windows if they really want to have a "Google Desktop". They would still be at the mercy of item two above, but item one would apply less since the Google Desktop would now be the shell that the user interacts with all the time. If it's well written, the user should only notice the benefits of an alternative shell to Microsoft's Explorer shell (which is pretty ugly and clunky). If they did this, they might be able to port to other OSes and possibly provide an avenue for people to exit the Windows fold and go with a GNU/Linux/Google Desktop distribution.
Check out one of my latest JEs and you'll see that Windows offers people like me very little. I'm willing to be that MOST Slashdotters are people like me. The only thing I need it for at this point (speaking of home use only) is video editing. I still have yet to find a suitable video editor in Linux that handles MPEG2 (*.mpg) files and will save out with no loss in quality. But that's it. Check out my latest journal folks and you'll see that Windows really doesn't offer people like us much.
GNU is not Unix. Linux is not an OS. GNU/Linux is an OS distribution comprised of the GNU project and the Linux kernel. Therefore, GNU/Linux is also not Unix. But it IS Unix-like. Glad to have cleared all that up for the trogs. :)
A guy who goes by the user ID 'eno2001' on /. plans to build a time machine. This device will be able to travel backwards and forwards in time. It will also protect the person being transported from the time changes so that he or she won't age beyond normal time. How he plans to do it is... well... wait and see.
/. on having at least three meaningless claims posted in a single day.
Congratulations to
Lunchtime, doubly so. ;P
All of these people are putting up free WiFi access with different levels of service. Some only allow web and mail, others are wide open and still others only provide custom content with no access to outside resources. Individually this is all fine and dandy. But, if WiFi is slated to be the "next internet" as a lot of people like to claim that it is, we need a lot more standardization than we have. Not to mention that there are a lot of people who are working very hard to try and stamp out these initiatives because it hurts or could hurt their businesses (telcos, cell phone providers, cable and satellite operators).
It's nice to see the free hotspots popping up here and there, but other than checking mail and looking at some web content, how useful is it? Why isn't there a national or global cooperative that would define the services that hotspots should offer in order to create a truly national or global network that parallels the internet? How do we keep the telcos and their ilk from ruining this? It's not like they're going to die overnight because landlines are still going to be necessary for several reasons, with bandwidth and reliability being the most important.
Keep the free WiFi coming, but really what does it all mean? It's not like this is becoming anything particularly useful yet.
You're all fired for posting on Slashdot on company time. Next time your try something like that again, I'll fire you again because I am the metaboss. My horns of hair know no limits!
Spammers cause so much grief for so many people (users and techs), that at the very least anal rape is mild. Frankly I'd want the perps sent to Iraq to do the missing step since they want to "PROFIT!!".
Hey sizzlechest. Are you fucking high?
...let the ass raping begin. ;P
If you are a spammer, let that be a warning.
The maximum carrying capacity of the earth is accepted by most ecologists to be 11,000,000,000 people. Once you go beyond that, there is no way to sustain human life as it is now. A lot of things would have to change to allow more than 11,000,000,000 people to live sustainably.
Early in this comment thread some people have mentioned the possibilities of human deaths. That is EXACTLY the point. We are quickly approaching Earth's maximum estimated carrying capacity (think of it as the biological equivalent of how many amps an electrical circuit can carry before the breaker shuts off) for human living conditions in it's current form. What happens after that? Mass famine. Die offs. Wars. We're already seeing some of this but it only affect those who are further down the socioeconomic ladder so many of us don't think it's an issue.
However, there are some people way up high on the socioeconomic ladder who are well aware of this and have created think tanks (Project for the New American Century, for example) that ARE addressing this issue. However, they aren't addressing it in the most humanitarian way. They are taking the pragmatic route that a good chunk of the human population needs to die in order to restore some balance and protect their own interests. This is why wars are being encouraged, and people are being recruited from the poorest neighborhoods in America. What easier way to rid the planet of extra people than throwing them into the meat grinder? More to the point, who better to get rid of than those who are a burden on society rather than contributors? Will you ever hear this outright? No. It's too awful to comprehend, but it's their view.
The humanitarian view would be this: Establish worldwide controls to cut down on excessive use of resources for everyone. This means that YOU would have to give up your car, your computer, your cell phone, all of your electronic entertainment. It would mean that YOU would have to use mass transit if you live more than ten miles away from where you work. It would mean that YOU have to WALK to work if you live within ten miles of your job. It would mean that the internet would have to be pared down greatly in terms of bandwidth, processing power and electricity usage. It would mean that we would have to audit all natural resource usage to verify that it is, in fact, justified and heavily tax anything that isn't. It would mean that we would have to pack more people into living spaces than we currently do, likely in communal fashion.
Based on those two approaches being the only options, the people who currently stand to lose a lot are more likely to be in favor of the approach that impacts them the least, and so war it is. In large part, YOU did this. And so did I. It doesn't matter if you are pro-war or pro-peace, if you drive a car, YOU did this. If you use more electrical appliances than you really should or even most electrical appliances, YOU did this. If you eat out at big box restaurants, YOU did this. If you pay more than $2.00 a month on your electric bill, YOU did this. So where do we go from here? There is already one group who has decided what to do to solve this problem. What do we do on our part?
Yes, and something "natural" like Orange Juice has FAR more sugar than that. So what's the problem?
Again. You are as ill informed as others in this thread. There might be natural fruit sugars in Orange juice in excess of 14 tablespoons, but that's not white processed sugar. Unless the sugar refineries have found a way to pump table sugar into fruit on the vine? I'd be interested in anything you could point to to prove that assertion.
Actually, where I live (Northeastern Ohio) we had our choice of SBC or a lesser known option Corecomm. Corecomm provided wired phone service and I actually had it for a while. It was about $4.00 cheaper than SBC. However, they also were my ISP and they stole my e-mail address and gave it to another customer. The phone service wasn't any better than SBC and I just didn't see the value in saving $4.00 a month only as long as I subscribed to their dial up ISP service. Their normal prices were only $1.00 cheaper. So where is the value in that?
Long distance is a huge mess in the US. You have so many choices that complicate matters when trying to make a selection. The prices vary by just a few cents a minute here or there. The service quality ranges from total shit to mediocre. They pretty much rape you just as badly as the Bell monopoly did but in different ways. The customer service across the board is horrible. The games they play to get you to switch not to mention the obnoxious telemarketing that they engage in is outrageous. Fortunately I have very little need for long distance, so I don't have any. It makes my phone bill just as cheap as some of the VoIP offerings to leave off LD access. But when I do need it, I have to go through the thoroughly annoying 1010xxx crap. I don't like paying fees for things I don't use, so I can't justify ANY LD service being on my line since they all bite you in the ass. I don't think deregulation helped. It just took a stable system that would have eventually have come down in price and replaced it with a totally unstable system that forces people to know things they shouldn't have to know in order to shop around. If you want long distance, it should be part of your telephone service with no charge unless you use it. Even $.01 a month is too expensive for LD if you don't use it.
It cannot reproduce by itself. Some viruses can lie dormant for decades and not change in any way until they meet some suitable living cells to invade. They're a lot more like the cell world's version of Borg. That's not life.
So what do they mean "kill" a virus?
I changed my diet mate! I'm also encouraging others to do the same. It's worked wonders for me, and I can't help but want to share the knowledge with others. I wrote two long journal entries on it a long time ago as well. However, my "one person is one too many" approach specifically refers to artificial and heavily chemically processed foods. Food allergies don't fall into the same category because they aren't caused by ingesting artificial food stuff. Not to mention there is more and more evidence indicating that many food allergies may be caused by the same food processing chemicals that I'm complaining about.
You're one misinformed motherfucker aren't you? Sugar is overused. It's NOT needed in everything that the food industry shoves it into. Go look at a can of black beans in the grocery. You'd think a can of black beans wouldn't need sugar or corn syrup right? Well you'd be wrong. I've only been able to find one brand of canned black beans that doesn't have sugar in it and it's the only one I'll buy. You also have the option of using something like stevia leaf extract when you drop sugar from your diet. It's safe and it's been in use in Japan for over 100 years. It's basically a tea leaf that has the interesting property of tasting very sweet. Stevia is what I use to cut sugar intake.
Stevia also has the added benefit of not being a simple carbohydrate (the most evil of all food substances). Eating fruit and ingesting those sugars is fine because it requires your body to work in order to get the energy out of the carbs. This means a much slower release of sugars into your body. Simple carbs (sugar, honey, corn syrup) just about go straight into your body and produce... fat stores which make people fat.
Before I shifted away from sugar, I was a vegetarian. I've never had a weight problem. In fact, I only gained about 15 lbs after high school and lost that weight when I dropped sugar. So at 35, I'm still at my high school weight. So again, you're a misinformed little turd. Why don't you pull Bill Gates vienna sausage out of your mouth and Ballmer's 2x4 out of your ass before you speculate about things you don't know? Sugar in the quantities that most Americans consume it is evil and dangerous. It used to be a rarity in the diet but the 20th century changed all that and that's why we've got a morbidly obese population now. (Of which I'm pretty sure you are one) Nice meeting you.
The Milky Way a Spiral is Not
ETEQ "Space.com new data reports from the Spitzer Space Telescope showing that the Milky Way a barred spiral is in fact! All our old astronomy textbooks thrown away will have to be looks like..." writes.
Yodafier
...there are no pictures of the Milky Way from space? Whenever I've Googled for pictures of the Milky Way, I either get artist renderings or these stupid pictures of a strip of the night sky. Since we've supposedly went into space a lot of time, we should have good photos of the Milky Way from space. Even moreso since the Voyager spacecraft left the universe a year or so ago. When the voyager left our universe, it should have had a great shot of the entire galaxy and all it's planets. I mean, the universe is what... like ten million miles wide or something, right?
Whether you believe it or not, you are being poisoned. It may or may not be intentional, and I don't care if it is or isn't. But the fact of the matter is that the food production chain in most western nations is destroying the health of the consumers. There are a high number of chemicals that have found their way into the food supply due to their inexpensive provision of preservative, aesthetic and texture properties. Many of these chemicals may be the underlying cause of various chronic illnesses that are becoming epidemics in the western world. But we will never know because to compound the problem we are also being overmedicated.
One of the worst ingredients that has found it's way into too much of the food supply is white processed sugar. One can of soft drink can contain up to 14 tablespoons of sugar in it. Sugar also has some light preservative qualities and tends to make everything taste better. In small quantities, sugar is mildly harmful. But at the rate that we ingest sugar, it is downright dangerous. Don't believe me? Next time you are at the grocery, pick up most prepared foods and look at the ingredients. You'll find that sugar or high fructose corn syrup is in nearly everything. It's a bit frightening especially since I had a personal health issue that no doctor could solve until I cut food with sugar out of my diet. Compounded with the medications that doctors tried to give me to cure my sinus infections, I continued to get more and more ill rather than get better. But once I stopped taking the antibiotics and the prevacid and dumped white sugar, white rice, white flour, corn syrup and honey ouf of my diet, my various illnesses went away. It's been about three years now and my health is better than ever.
So now I read this story about "space meat" and it makes me cringe. I can only imagine what kinds of horrible effects this artificial food stuff is going to have on some people. (remember even if one person gets sick because of a chemical reaction it's one person too many) I have this feeling that if this becomes standard "food" for anyone they will need a whole slew of drugs to combat various ill effects caused by this new toxin. I don't call that living, I call it chemical bondage. Why can't we just start to work on improving organic farming???
Australians should be very concerned about what's going to happen to their phone service. Back in the 80s, we had the Bell Telephone company split up into RBOCs (regional bell operating companies). What used to be the Bell Telephone Service became Ohio Bell where I lived. That eventually became Ameritech and then SBC. Through all of these changes, the quality of service continued to drop. The territorial wars increased between RBOCs and newer upstarts trying to get into the telco biz. Where we used to have a national business with shining R&D output (Thank Bell for Unix and Plan 9), and impecable quality of both product and service, we now have a bunch of useless small companies that refuse to cooperate with each other to server customers properly. We have mildly varying rates (save $1.00 or $2.00 a month by "chosing" your telco) with very few options for alternative services because of the territory wars.
In the house I bought last year, I found a tag on the ground strap for the phone line that was probably put there in the 50s. It harkened back to a day when things were more organized and orderly because there was little room for doing things differently. The tag was essentially a threat that said you MUST NOT remove the ground strap and if it is accidentally cut or loosened, you MUST call the phone company to get it replaced or reattached. Those were the good old days. The problem today is one of "too many chefs". The chefs need to be sent back to R&D where they belong and only the best ideas should be put forward for production. This is why Bell Telephone service was exccelent compared to the mire of crappy phone companies we have now. Not to mention the addition of people who know nothing about phone service providing phone service thanks to VoIP. Deregulation is a bad thing. It destroys carefully controlled systems that MUST be carefully controlled. Just because there is a new or cool idea out there doesn't mean it should make it to production in a short period of time. That's why phone service in the U.S. is so friggin bad. Our entire infrastructure is essentially partially in beta. The only things that do work properly and reliably are the older systems that were put in place before the deregulation.
Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.