Excellent post! I learned a couple new things today...
One question: Wouldn't a fire-rated safe that doesn't let flame or high-temp vapor past it's door seals also essentially be waterproof/submersion(to normal pressures) proof?
Um, no. If the papers inside that safe are that important, they'd just hire a competent locksmith. It *might* take a few hours (doubt it) but spending a couple hundred bucks for those important papers would be worth it - and a good locksmith would not have to cut the safe open to get inside.
I'd be curious to know why the parents of that kid didn't press for assault charges against those assholes. I would have. If they beat him that badly they could just as easily have killed him - and they seriously needed to be slapped, hard.
Should perhaps mention that wrt to flash mobs, Larry Niven AFAIK was conceptual inventor. Although his mobs were more ordinary communications, and relied on teleporation transportation, the concept really isn't that different from what's happening now.
I haven't seen any quotes from Mr. Niven about it (yet) but I do know that several people who know him are quite amused...
Iron can't be mined "economically" in N. MN anymore either, because it's actually *cheaper* to ship it across the Pacific. I know, I lived there and watched the mines die.
Give me a break.
The whole point of mining resources in space is to use them there, so we don't have to ship them up from the surface. Not that shipping them down to the surface is all that hard - enclose your refinery products in an ablative shell and kick them out of orbit. But that's not the point.
I'd recommend that you find and read a copy of Pournelle's "A Step Farther Out" - written back in the 70s.
A-fucking-men. I'm getting a bit old, and out of shape, but if the chance was offered, I'd be gone as soon as I could find a home for the cats and get rid of my junk. Ziiiinngg......take me! Take me! At least the risks I take every day would be fucking *worth* something!:)
Nice comment at the end: So where's the fucking problem? We have become a world which knows the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.
That's the best way to put it that I've ever seen (tho I'd use "country" in place of "world" - at least right now)
In college I had the fortune of making an acquaintence with a pair of Russian emigrees, and they bear this out.
Even at that time (quite a few years ago) I was not a lightweight; but these guys could easily drink me under the table. It's not just being Russian, it's exposure that induces tolerance (in most, not all) - and as they said, if you *don't* drink in Russia, you are considered strange. (well, didn't - this was a while ago)
The most hilarious thing I ever witnessed was a bartender bitching because between them and a few of us other students we had depleted his vodka stores in one night, and we had driven most of the other customers out with the singing. I think he was secretly pleased however:) even when Alex told him he thought his vodka was shit...
Some people are just incapable of detecting subtle humor.
I think I would have said it more thus:
But...but....but "We've done enough damage here on earth. I don't think it would be right to fill space with the radiative effects of nuclear reactions. Think of the future children!"
Might have twigged a few of the idiots to the fact it was humor.
(Yeah, I know. But the idiot ratio holds true on slashdot as well as everywhere:)
I thought it was hilarious (but I know you fairly well, having followed your posts). The mods didn't.
Seems the average density (pun) of the mods is about 70% at this point....wish I had mod points, I'd correct that. Flamebait....sheeze.
At least it seems that in the last year or so most of the idiots who post stuff like that meaning it seriously have more or less dropped off the radar.:)
It makes me want to drop to my knees on the beach and scream "Damn you! God damn you all to hell!"
*grin*
I've actually done more than a few times!:) but as I've got older, I decided it was redundant...and I'm an athiest. But that's not important.
The greatest time in history, the time when a whole new and essentially infinite frontier has opened up and the capabilities to go there are within our grasp, and we spend a thousand times more a year in this country on fucking cosmetics alone.
Sigh. No wonder I'm occasionally found outside, drunk, howling obscenities in the general direction of the moon....:)
Many minerals and other resources can be obtained from the soil of Phobos directly, and the ability to achieve escape veolcity of Phobos is relatively trivial compared to trying to get away from Mars.
Leaving Phobos is even easier than that; it's small enough that a sufficiently athletic person could jump off. But that's not the important part - what's more important is that low orbit around Mars is more than halfway to *anywhere* in the solar system, including Earth. You don't have to do the hardest part, which is getting off the surface of Mars - and you already have a nice orbital velocity component. Building an exploration base there makes an incredible amount of sense; we could even manufacture fuel there, and could do a helluva lot of good science from there.
I've always thought that one of the smartest things we could do right now would be to design and launch robot missions that are dedicated to building waypoint bases on NEA's and places like Phobos. Put some serious work into that effort and in ten years we could have an infrastructure in place that would greatly ease exploration. That *should* have been the primary purpose of the ISS, but the place where waybases are really hard is Earth orbit. We don't have resources to exploit there, we have to ship them up. That could be remedied with a simple unmanned mission to bring a small NEA into an L-point, which would give us the resources to use to build a *real* waystation.
I'm still running the Gentoo install I did more than a year ago. Other than kernel experimentation, I've never had a bellyup Gentoo install (and even with kernel experiments, I've left a lilo option for going back to the old kernel, so it's simply a matter of rebooting).
I've run -u system and -u world, etc, out of a cron job every week for the past 8 months, and the only breakage I've experienced has been in a couple of applications (xmms and xine, particularly). No system breakage, and I've there's only been a couple times that I've spent more than an hour or so fixing anything serious (not since September, IIRC)
I also have a lot (!! grass and a lot of wine/win app installs on this system) of stuff installed that can "break" things. About 18 GB of system + software, AMAF.
That contrasts, to me, with the 8 years I ran windows (3 years on this same box) and the frequent breakage I encountered there. Hell, I spent a couple hundred hours just fucking with SBLive windows drivers a few years ago. I've not spent anywhere near that time diagnosing *all* the problems on my Gentoo box.
Well, yes; but - working one's way thru college has gotten a helluva lot more difficult than it was when I did it twenty years ago. Tuition rates, housing costs, and the other associated costs have risen a lot faster than wages have.
It's not "class warfare" it's the fact that university costs have risen so fast that it's hard for anyone but the rich or extremely determined to make their way thru to a degree. I can't argue against determination; but I am and will always be opposed to money being a factor in achieving an education. It leaves too many otherwise brilliant people out of the equation - and a lot of "poor" people also have a lot to teach others. (scholarships and other help for brilliant yet poor students have been slashed to the bone over the last few decades - Good SAT scores, grades, etc do not guarantee you a college education!
I can't help but think of how potential is being destroyed that way.
"For example, a Datamonitor study found that global call-center operations are being outsourced at a slower rate than previously thought -- only five percent are expected to be located offshore by 2007."
Dude, "global call-center" being outsourced would have to go to MARS. We're looking at US jobs here.
I for one welcome our new Martian tech support personnel.:D
Hey, they can't be any worse than most of the scriptdrones answering the phones now, can they?:)
Excellent rebuttal. You made my friends list for that one (a dubious distinction, but ah well:)
I especially liked this:
2) What is better for the global economy is better for the American economy.
Let's say that China becomes even more of an economic powerhouse, the world economy becomes more efficent, and America gets beat out of many major corporate and employment deals to EU companies. America will go into decline. This is neither good for American business nor is it good for American workers.
To which I'll say; Diluting and destroying the most powerful economy in the world does not better the world as a whole. What it does do is reduce the intellectual advance of human knowledge by turning the fastest advancing (in technological terms) country on the planet into just another service economy.
What we are really doing is outsourcing the standard of living for most of the people in the US, for the benefit of a few of them (corporate management).
It's been going on for so long now that it's probably unstoppable, no matter what the public thinks or does. There's not enough cohesion among the 'mass' of people to change things anymore.
As you've said in a couple other posts above; most people simply do not understand history; and most people do not understand what "Bread and Circuses" mean, nor what happens when they vote that for themselves.
I, for one, want to emigrate. Straight up, a couple hundred million kilometers at least:) I've always lived Under the Radar, so to speak; not for any concern about global impact, but because I simply don't need more than I can use. That's the lesson of WWII+- that too many B-Boomers never understood. (guess that's what happens when people don't listen to their Depression era parents *grin* )
Cheers SB
Re:Richter's Domains and the Ukranian Connection
on
Spammer Sues SpamCop
·
· Score: 1
If you're interested in seeing Richter squirm, check out this thread at Abestweb where Richter and one of his sidekicks desperately try to convince affiliate marketers that OptInMyArse.com is a legit business operation. An amusing read.
Especially when you note the registration date of "CpaEmpire1". Pretty obvious spin control there - and he gets slapped for it in the comments.
Similar here. Some time back I helped a local motel owner get things cleared up with his ISP after they shut off his email because he was getting more than a thousand spams a day - a large portion of them coming from or, as I found out, related to Richter's domains and efforts. He was extremely pissed off when I told him that it wasn't likely that any lawsuit against this fucker would succeed without him going thru a lot of legal effort.
After a lot of work me & his ISP managed to more or less spam proof his business addresses. The worst part of it was that he tried to contact me originally by email about the problem, but couldn't read my replies because they were buried in the crap he was receiving.
Richter should be glad that this particular business owner doesn't live near him, otherwise Richter would have had a ex-Nam/biker/business owner showing up on his front door with a shotgun. He was that pissed off...
and win a Nobel Peace Prize for shortcircuiting the homicidal impulses of hundreds of millions of people toward spammers!:)
Retire at thirty, do the talk show circuit, write a few books while fending off the many hatemails/assassins, and move to the Carribean...
SB
Re:This one makes me laugh and cry at the same tim
on
Spammer Sues SpamCop
·
· Score: 1
To play Devil's Advocate; somewhere out there, there's evidence that links Richter to at least some of the spams. All they need is one example that was spread around, and his case is toast.
When it comes to SCO, the onus is on *them* to produce the evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent post! I learned a couple new things today...
One question: Wouldn't a fire-rated safe that doesn't let flame or high-temp vapor past it's door seals also essentially be waterproof/submersion(to normal pressures) proof?
SB
Only fits a hundred DVDs? What are you storing in there, every porn movie ever made in divx format?
SB
Um, no. If the papers inside that safe are that important, they'd just hire a competent locksmith. It *might* take a few hours (doubt it) but spending a couple hundred bucks for those important papers would be worth it - and a good locksmith would not have to cut the safe open to get inside.
SB
I'd be curious to know why the parents of that kid didn't press for assault charges against those assholes. I would have. If they beat him that badly they could just as easily have killed him - and they seriously needed to be slapped, hard.
SB
Yes, I know. That's why it's so damned funny :)
SB
Should perhaps mention that wrt to flash mobs, Larry Niven AFAIK was conceptual inventor. Although his mobs were more ordinary communications, and relied on teleporation transportation, the concept really isn't that different from what's happening now.
I haven't seen any quotes from Mr. Niven about it (yet) but I do know that several people who know him are quite amused...
Cheers!
SB
Priceless! I'm gonna post that site at work
Visions of goats, indeed.
ROFL
SB
Iron can't be mined "economically" in N. MN anymore either, because it's actually *cheaper* to ship it across the Pacific. I know, I lived there and watched the mines die.
Give me a break.
The whole point of mining resources in space is to use them there, so we don't have to ship them up from the surface. Not that shipping them down to the surface is all that hard - enclose your refinery products in an ablative shell and kick them out of orbit. But that's not the point.
I'd recommend that you find and read a copy of Pournelle's "A Step Farther Out" - written back in the 70s.
SB
Damn straight, my friend. Damn straight.
SB
A-fucking-men. I'm getting a bit old, and out of shape, but if the chance was offered, I'd be gone as soon as I could find a home for the cats and get rid of my junk. Ziiiinngg......take me! Take me! At least the risks I take every day would be fucking *worth* something!
Nice comment at the end: So where's the fucking problem? We have become a world which knows the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.
That's the best way to put it that I've ever seen (tho I'd use "country" in place of "world" - at least right now)
Mind if I use it as a sig?
SB
In college I had the fortune of making an acquaintence with a pair of Russian emigrees, and they bear this out.
Even at that time (quite a few years ago) I was not a lightweight; but these guys could easily drink me under the table. It's not just being Russian, it's exposure that induces tolerance (in most, not all) - and as they said, if you *don't* drink in Russia, you are considered strange. (well, didn't - this was a while ago)
The most hilarious thing I ever witnessed was a bartender bitching because between them and a few of us other students we had depleted his vodka stores in one night, and we had driven most of the other customers out with the singing. I think he was secretly pleased however
(it's a miracle any of us made it home
SB
Some people are just incapable of detecting subtle humor.
I think I would have said it more thus:
But...but....but "We've done enough damage here on earth. I don't think it would be right to fill space with the radiative effects of nuclear reactions. Think of the future children!"
Might have twigged a few of the idiots to the fact it was humor.
(Yeah, I know. But the idiot ratio holds true on slashdot as well as everywhere
SB
I thought it was hilarious (but I know you fairly well, having followed your posts). The mods didn't.
Seems the average density (pun) of the mods is about 70% at this point....wish I had mod points, I'd correct that. Flamebait....sheeze.
At least it seems that in the last year or so most of the idiots who post stuff like that meaning it seriously have more or less dropped off the radar.
Cheers!
SB
It makes me want to drop to my knees on the beach and scream "Damn you! God damn you all to hell!"
:) but as I've got older, I decided it was redundant...and I'm an athiest. But that's not important.
:)
*grin*
I've actually done more than a few times!
The greatest time in history, the time when a whole new and essentially infinite frontier has opened up and the capabilities to go there are within our grasp, and we spend a thousand times more a year in this country on fucking cosmetics alone.
Sigh. No wonder I'm occasionally found outside, drunk, howling obscenities in the general direction of the moon....
SB
Many minerals and other resources can be obtained from the soil of Phobos directly, and the ability to achieve escape veolcity of Phobos is relatively trivial compared to trying to get away from Mars.
Leaving Phobos is even easier than that; it's small enough that a sufficiently athletic person could jump off. But that's not the important part - what's more important is that low orbit around Mars is more than halfway to *anywhere* in the solar system, including Earth. You don't have to do the hardest part, which is getting off the surface of Mars - and you already have a nice orbital velocity component. Building an exploration base there makes an incredible amount of sense; we could even manufacture fuel there, and could do a helluva lot of good science from there.
I've always thought that one of the smartest things we could do right now would be to design and launch robot missions that are dedicated to building waypoint bases on NEA's and places like Phobos. Put some serious work into that effort and in ten years we could have an infrastructure in place that would greatly ease exploration. That *should* have been the primary purpose of the ISS, but the place where waybases are really hard is Earth orbit. We don't have resources to exploit there, we have to ship them up. That could be remedied with a simple unmanned mission to bring a small NEA into an L-point, which would give us the resources to use to build a *real* waystation.
I could go on and on about this...
Like Sagan said in Contact; small steps.....
SB
YMMV, indeed.
I'm still running the Gentoo install I did more than a year ago. Other than kernel experimentation, I've never had a bellyup Gentoo install (and even with kernel experiments, I've left a lilo option for going back to the old kernel, so it's simply a matter of rebooting).
I've run -u system and -u world, etc, out of a cron job every week for the past 8 months, and the only breakage I've experienced has been in a couple of applications (xmms and xine, particularly). No system breakage, and I've there's only been a couple times that I've spent more than an hour or so fixing anything serious (not since September, IIRC)
I also have a lot (!! grass and a lot of wine/win app installs on this system) of stuff installed that can "break" things. About 18 GB of system + software, AMAF.
That contrasts, to me, with the 8 years I ran windows (3 years on this same box) and the frequent breakage I encountered there. Hell, I spent a couple hundred hours just fucking with SBLive windows drivers a few years ago. I've not spent anywhere near that time diagnosing *all* the problems on my Gentoo box.
So, YMMV, oh, yes. Need some help with Gentoo?
SB
Well, yes; but - working one's way thru college has gotten a helluva lot more difficult than it was when I did it twenty years ago. Tuition rates, housing costs, and the other associated costs have risen a lot faster than wages have.
It's not "class warfare" it's the fact that university costs have risen so fast that it's hard for anyone but the rich or extremely determined to make their way thru to a degree. I can't argue against determination; but I am and will always be opposed to money being a factor in achieving an education. It leaves too many otherwise brilliant people out of the equation - and a lot of "poor" people also have a lot to teach others. (scholarships and other help for brilliant yet poor students have been slashed to the bone over the last few decades - Good SAT scores, grades, etc do not guarantee you a college education!
I can't help but think of how potential is being destroyed that way.
SB
"For example, a Datamonitor study found that global call-center operations are being outsourced at a slower rate than previously thought -- only five percent are expected to be located offshore by 2007."
:D
:)
Dude, "global call-center" being outsourced would have to go to MARS. We're looking at US jobs here.
I for one welcome our new Martian tech support personnel.
Hey, they can't be any worse than most of the scriptdrones answering the phones now, can they?
Argh...
SB
Excellent rebuttal. You made my friends list for that one (a dubious distinction, but ah well
I especially liked this:
2) What is better for the global economy is better for the American economy.
Let's say that China becomes even more of an economic powerhouse, the world economy becomes more efficent, and America gets beat out of many major corporate and employment deals to EU companies. America will go into decline. This is neither good for American business nor is it good for American workers.
To which I'll say; Diluting and destroying the most powerful economy in the world does not better the world as a whole. What it does do is reduce the intellectual advance of human knowledge by turning the fastest advancing (in technological terms) country on the planet into just another service economy.
Salut!
SB
What we are really doing is outsourcing the standard of living for most of the people in the US, for the benefit of a few of them (corporate management).
It's been going on for so long now that it's probably unstoppable, no matter what the public thinks or does. There's not enough cohesion among the 'mass' of people to change things anymore.
As you've said in a couple other posts above; most people simply do not understand history; and most people do not understand what "Bread and Circuses" mean, nor what happens when they vote that for themselves.
I, for one, want to emigrate. Straight up, a couple hundred million kilometers at least
Cheers
SB
If you're interested in seeing Richter squirm, check out this thread at Abestweb where Richter and one of his sidekicks desperately try to convince affiliate marketers that OptInMyArse.com is a legit business operation. An amusing read.
Especially when you note the registration date of "CpaEmpire1". Pretty obvious spin control there - and he gets slapped for it in the comments.
Thanks. I hadn't seen that link.
SB
Similar here. Some time back I helped a local motel owner get things cleared up with his ISP after they shut off his email because he was getting more than a thousand spams a day - a large portion of them coming from or, as I found out, related to Richter's domains and efforts. He was extremely pissed off when I told him that it wasn't likely that any lawsuit against this fucker would succeed without him going thru a lot of legal effort.
After a lot of work me & his ISP managed to more or less spam proof his business addresses. The worst part of it was that he tried to contact me originally by email about the problem, but couldn't read my replies because they were buried in the crap he was receiving.
Richter should be glad that this particular business owner doesn't live near him, otherwise Richter would have had a ex-Nam/biker/business owner showing up on his front door with a shotgun. He was that pissed off...
SB
and win a Nobel Peace Prize for shortcircuiting the homicidal impulses of hundreds of millions of people toward spammers!
Retire at thirty, do the talk show circuit, write a few books while fending off the many hatemails/assassins, and move to the Carribean...
SB
To play Devil's Advocate; somewhere out there, there's evidence that links Richter to at least some of the spams. All they need is one example that was spread around, and his case is toast.
When it comes to SCO, the onus is on *them* to produce the evidence.
IANAL, etc...
SB
The law flat out says that he CAN SPAM. Say what you want about the guy, he's a big follower of truth in labeling....
Well, Microsoft doesn't think so.
SB