Pac bell aquires SBC who aquires ATT who aquires cingular who aquires Sprint who aquires nextel who aquires Verizon who aquires MCI who aquires vonage.
Bell labs quires pac bell.
Ma Bell rises like the phoenix from the ashes to dominion all feeble earthly communications
Skynet is brought online.
Anti-Monopoly Trust Busters Break up Ma Bell into baby bells
While im normaly quite impressed by case mods and so on, this thing is little more than a very large steel suitcase with an average machine in it.
I would have been more impressed were it a dual xeon with yada yada yada.... but this thing is hardly anythinbg to gawk at... or care for.
Hell my laptop is a development server... surely it coudltn stand a slashdotting, but neither could this pathetic mod.
Bottom line, Grab any off the shelf 1U rackmount server (HP,DELL, IBM, VISIONMAN, etc)... attach a handle.... and youve got the same thing, but probably at half the cost and better hardware.
This is a terrible decision with far reaching implications. It is increasingly apparent that users and even service companies have no rights whatsoever in regards to free exchange of information, even if it is competitive information.
Here is my main issue with this judgement.
I, as a consumer frequently SERACH FOR competitors of known brands. Often i am looking to see what the market is because i am dis-satisfied with the brand i am familiar with. Putting in search terms such as "geico competitors" you will not get any relevant listings.
I found the most effective means of finding other product offerings in a related market is by simply looking through the ad placements on google when searching simply for the brand name i recognize.
By ordering google to stop disaplying compeitotrs ads, they have effectivly denied me any solid capability to find out about what competing products there are in the marketplace, hence hindering compitition, and promoting monopolistic control.
It is a terrible day when trademark protection extends as far as information services. Will they make it illegal to place ads for comepting companies next to each other in newspapers? Will they make it illegal to place gap ads next to macys ads on Television?
This is a ridulous abuse of governance that only hinders the tax-paying public, and stifles economic growth through compitiion, as well as inovation amogst service providers.
Amazing. Whats next.... patents on 1's and 0's ??!!
I have all three burnout games, and am a big fan of the series.
However, i see burnout 3 as a perfect exmaple of what happens when an awesome idea gets subverted by a marketing team gone wrong, and a loss of focus on actual GAME PLAY.
While the many new game modes are fun and worthwhile, this game makes four egregious errors that are so bad as to cause me not to play it as much as its prior two iterations.
1 load, load, load, load.
The single greatest fault of the game is the continual loading... unlike the prior two this third burnout likes loading everywhere, with an interface that requires more menus and pointless confirmation screens than a instalation of windows, expecialy nice is how a song loads up to show you the race results, gets about 10 seconds into the song, before loading a nother song for the menu screen. This is greatly affected by the very very short race times, in combination with the even shorter times for the other modes.... which means, a lot of loading, a lot of intermissions.
2 music for teenagers
While the previous two games have excelent sound tracks derived directly from a more ubiquotous racing sorta trancy background sound with special boost music for each track (boosting gets the heartbeat and running out of time gets a modified music track)... this new version comes prepackaged with the most irritating marketting music package ever, can you say PUNK ROCK. cause theres a ton of the cheesiest, mill factory bands pumping through this game, complete with your own.... PUNK ROCK jukebox.... i hope you like circa 2003 punk rock people, cause thats all your gonna get. I can somewhat respect the idea of making a whole theme out of the game, but in all honesty.... its terrible, at first it was cool... i like punk, but then after about... oh twenty minutes, its gets real lame, and you start to feel like the game was designed for twelve year olds who wanna rebel against their parents.
3 online too short
as if the continual loading times werent bad enough, playing online is just an exercise in excrutiating pain. EVERYTHING takes forever, to be rewarded with a race that barely lasts a minute or two... now wait to find a new race to join, now wait for the players to fill in, now wait for the game to start, now race!!!, now wait.... you get the picture.
Totaly not worth the online play unless you have a serious hard-on that can withstand the long delays enough to put a short 2 minute bruising on someone.
4 racing blur
Why? gofds almighty why? who came up with the idea of making things HARDER to see, when they are already fucking hard to see on a TV's pitiful resolution?
The previous games have their own racing blur, which is hard enough to deal with, but well done enough not to screw the game entirely, but Burnout 3 doesnt just blur your vision, they fish-eye you too while moving at ridiculous speeds. I found this added "effect" to be totally and irrevocably one of the dumbest ideas to hit a racing game in a long time. Its like saying your game designers couldnt figure out how to make a game more challenging without hindering the players already impaired vision.
The underpinnings of this game were astoundingly well done, the new game modes ingenious, the overall quality would have been excelent. But some middle manager got their hands on some BS market analysis and decided to cheese the game out with punk rock, and add a "cool" fish eye effect, and someone in the interface department was sleeping at the wheel when the decision to load anything anywhere and everywhere somehow slipped through.
As a major fan of the series, id say this game is a perfect exmaple of how to ruin a great game by forgetting that if its not about the gameplay, then it aint worth shit.
If you dont need to do major upgrades that require internal space in your PC, a Small Form Factor PC is hands down the best solution.
Mainly due to their low price (can be had for about 400$), and their much smoother exteriors (less cracks for dust to find its way into).
Grab yourself a shuttle or jetway, if you dont need a cd-rom/floppy you can leave the sealing front plates on them, having only the rear fan's outake as an open oriface, and pushing your price down to nearly 300$ (www.zipzoomfly.com).
after that your pretty much home free, every few months you can slide the cover back (three thumb-screws or less) and give the interior a quick air-dusting...
Since the size is small, it can be safely tucked away somewhere more secure than a full fledged tower might go, and can be kept all the more less exposed to dust and other harmfull airborne materials.
Heat is rarely a problem with all but the oldest and newest models, so as long as you keep the arc weilder away from the power cables you should be fine!!
Invest in a wireless keyboard/mouse, and youve reduced your clutter/liabilities that much more.
From the soon to be inoperable website.... Ursala's very own words on the mini-series remake of her books.
"Earthsea"
11/13/2004
"Miss Le Guin was not involved in the development of the material or the making of the film, but we've been very, very honest to the books," explains director Rob Lieberman. "We've tried to capture all the levels of spiritualism, emotional content and metaphorical messages. Throughout the whole piece, I saw it as having a great duality of spirituality versus paganism and wizardry, male and female duality. The final moments of the film culminate in the union of all that and represent two different belief systems in this world, and that's what Ursula intended to make a statement about. The only thing that saves this Earthsea universe is the union of those two beliefs."
Sci Fi Magazine
December 2004
I've tried very hard to keep from saying anything at all about this production, being well aware that movies must differ in many ways from the books they're based on, and feeling that I really had no business talking about it, since I was not included in planning it and was given no part in discussions or decisions.
That makes it particularly galling of the director to put words in my mouth.
Mr Lieberman has every right to say what his intentions were in making the film he directed, called "Earthsea." He has no right at all to state what I intended in writing the Earthsea books.
Had "Miss Le Guin" been honestly asked to be involved in the planning of the film, she might have discussed with the film-makers what the books are about.
When I tried to suggest the unwisdom of making radical changes to characters, events, and relationships which have been familiar to hundreds of thousands of readers all over the world for over thirty years, I was sent a copy of the script and informed that production was already under way.
So, for the record: there is no statement in the books, nor did I ever intend to make a statement, about "the union of two belief systems." There's nothing at all about the "duality of spirituality and paganism," whatever that means, either.
Earlier in the article, Robert Halmi is quoted as saying that Earthsea "has people who believe and people who do not believe." I can only admire Mr Halmi's imagination, but I wish he'd left mine alone.
In the books, the wizardry of the Archipelago and the ritualism of the Kargs are opposed and united, like the yang and yin. The rejoining of the broken arm-ring is a symbol of the restoration of an unresting, active balance, offering a risky chance of peace.
This has absolutely nothing to do with "people who believe and people who do not believe." That terrible division into Believers and Unbelievers (itself a matter not of reason but of belief) is one which bedevils Christianity and Islam and drives their wars.
But the wizards of Earthsea would look on such wars as madness, and the dragons of Earthsea would laugh at them and fly away...
Toto, something tells me Earthsea isn't Iraq.
I wonder if the people who made the film of The Lord of the Rings had ended it with Frodo putting on the Ring and ruling happily ever after, and then claimed that that was what Tolkien "intended..." would people think they'd been "very, very honest to the books"?
As apple has said time and time again, they had hopes of the Ipod's influence leading towards more PC to Mac converts.
While initialy this hardly proved true, it's a very strong sales pitch to have a constant companion with an apple logo on it.
The near ubiquity, and total inunduation of ipods being everywhere also goes a long way towards making apple look like a damn good brand (if they do the ipods so well, the must be good at computers)
I think if apple keeps hammering away at highly tailored and very well-made digital appliances, there computer market share will continue to grow as people put trust in their products.
Though id rather see the specifics of this data to see whether it has any real merit.
Probably a much more intresting question is how apple is going to be able to increase their market share outside the US/japan. While your typical developed high GDP citizen can afford apple's products, getting apple products into the hands of less wealthy countries is a big stumbling block that needs to be addressed if they want to get their hands on the largest emerging computing markets.
Atlantis is the Voyager/Enterprise of Stargate, The show is really terrible. And this isnt even the fourth iteratin of the stargate universe (if you disclude the cartoon and movie).
Dont get me wrong, i dont expect stars and accolades out of a series which barely discerns itself from the likes of zena/hurcules/Beastmaster in some of its episodes (did these guys share their prop guys/ set designers or what?)
But for me, the most endearing part of the Stargate series has for themost part been McGyv..Richard's humorfull character. Without Dean, the show just becomes just another crappy lets fight aliens in fantasy planets with cool ancient civilizations based on old earth.
And Atlantis is pure poo, the characters are all cookie cutter type-casts to the point of stereotyping your viewer audience fan-service, maybe this is what happens when sci-fi channel does..... well just about anything.... but that show is terrible.
Stargate itself has been pretty damn good (with some notable exceptions... ergo anyone?) and im glad to see it continue on, but atlantis is in dire need of a total abortion or a complete re-write with some more serious characters who actualy act like a military operation.
Anyone remember space above and beyond?
This is why im really happy about the Battlestar galactica series comming this new year... Gritty, realistic, and hopefully... above all else... not more episodal space opera campy bullsh*t.
Hardly a surprise here, Microsoft is gearing up to compete directly with the TIVO DVR market with a product that will have a huge market penetration, that onboard harddrive isnt for nothing.
Combine that with their online music offerings, and even a subscription service such as an enhanced XBOX live and DVD playback, and youve got the Windows Media Center in homes all across the world on an infrastructure that's already highly controlled.
While Nintendo and Sony have been banking hard on cell technology and other gamer focused add-ons, MS is covering the do it all, in every home aspect, and they will win if allowed to do so.
one of Sony's main driving forces for playstation adoption (1 and 2)... was the inclusion of a cd player or dvd player... an unecesary add-on as far as games go, but a strikingly powerfull one as far as extra features go.
If nintendo/sony dont come up with their own media center functions, they will find themselves eclipised by MS very quickly despite their better game focus.
The REAL question is, which i don't hear anybody asking...
How many MORE of these damn things have been "lost", and are f**king lying around somewhere in easy grasp of anyone with a dive team and a geiger counter?
If that doesnt scare you shitless, i dont know what else should. If we can't even hold onto our OWN nukes, what have the former soviet russians done with theirs?
Bottom line, a porcessor essentialy comes down to several basic comparisons and read/write add/subtract operations.
so it is technicaly feasible that if you map out a fair amount of the pipelines of most of the popular chip sets, you could technicaly have a command chain to allow binaries the same calls through a sudo-emulation layer of the software.
fundamentaly possible, and even do-able.... but without a performance hit? no way. Each processor is geared towards a particular way of solving a physcial and mathmatical set of problems... some processors are designed for massive loads of database driven calculations (XEONs)... some for multimedia (G5)... some for science (PPC, Sparc?)... some for power savings (ARM)....
depedning on which archetecture your using, the performance will be greatly hindered if your trying to do something designed for a radicaly different chip. Such as trying to run some expansive G5 optimizied photoshop plug on a ARM chip.
population exponentiation recovery from the black death took a whole of.....
13 years
The devastation wrought by the black death which killed a third of europe's population was recovered within twenty years.
Population statisitcs over a span of time greater than 8 or so generations are frighteningly acurate even given the smaller spikes and plummets in shorter time ranges.
in a predator vs pray scenario, the predator popualtion reaches an critical near apex point where-in either the predator finds a natural balenced level in regards to its prey and tapers off to a stable maintence mode, or spikes high and returns in an inverse parabola as the predator dies off exponentialy due to lack of resources (pray) and over-population.
if you map the human growth rate over the last 40,000 years or so you will see that our population curve hasnt deviated from standard predator vs pray algorithms. Even with contraceptives, population control and so on, the growth curve is still extremely accurate... luckily with these new controls somewhat in place, our growth curve is begining to resemle the predator balenced with his reseources curve, as opposed to the mass plumet in population.
We will see humanity's growth defy some aspects of the laws of P vs P algorithms when humanity expands off of the planet... creating the first population explosion after a taper (double peak).
As to the parent posters belief in galaxial exponentiation, including seti's own misguided reasoning there-in... there are far to many indeterminates involved to asses wether or not we wil find life or not, and whther or not there is a mathmatical proof that WE know of that can say if it should exist or not.
For instance... FTL communication and transportation is still an open question. Exponential growth cannot sustain itself with a light speed limitation, at some point that barrier would hinder the growth curve vs its own size.
While our mathmatics based upon growth rates of living and inanimate environments have strong backgrounds, we have no proof that all life must adhere to these common rules, it may be that life in other forms and planets moves too slow or too fast to grow beyond it's originating solar system, or is too encumbered by it's own physical form to adequatly manipulate it's environment for inter-stellar travel (or even inter-planatary travel). This is greatly evidenced by dolphins, who are highly inteligent (though in a different manner), but with opposable thumbs and in a incongrous environment for building things (the ocean) are greatly less likely to ever go down the path of being able to modify their environment for space travel (how would a dolphin build a space ship?).
Evolution of course allows for nearly any species or creature to eventualy change to a point wherin space travel is technicaly possible for them.... but the time it takes for that species and its host environment to provide such results is a HUGE variable... additionaly one must take into account devastation, and divergent evolution. Just because we evolved towards rockets and the moon, doesnt necesarily mean another species in another habitat will... our space bound endeavors are greatly a result of us having full control of the earth without any predators or serious obstacles to our survival... essentialy... space... has been a hobby for humanity... an off-shoot, or bi-product of our existance.
then there is time dialation and so on, depending on the mass of your solar system and it's proximity to the outer edges or inner sphere of the galaxy.... time may pass relativly fast or incredibly slow compared to the rest of the galaxy, humanity may go through its entire existance from mesopatamia to star trek within the span of time it takes an alien to blink an eye.
I could go on, but im certain you guys can think of a million different reasons why fractalish growth patterns may not apply on a universal scale.
not this particular model, which seems a bit cheap, and wholely underpowered to do anything usefull....
But it wouldnt take to much extra engineering to turn such miniturized robots into battery powered metal go-to bots.
Certainly the complexities in getting these machines to take out the garbage or wash the windows may be out of the consumer markets range for some years....
but how difficult would it be to use such machines in a more remote control Wi-Fi sense? put a little webcam on its head, give him an 802.11 chip.... and youve got a bipedal real life avatar of sorts... or a neat spy who (with some better engineering) can cover some seriously troublesome terrain.
at the price point this machine comes at.... it seems iRobot and more this decade level of affordable domestic machinery are much closer than we may have thought.... ASIMO and honda's works seemed to be extrobantly expensive toys, not of the commodity variety.
And im not speaking of the more automaton variety of home appliance bots in semi-fashion at the moment (the "robot" vacum, and now a grass cutting one of the same genre), for the most part i feel any robot with wheels isnt a REAL robot in the multipurpose ambiguous sort of role most consumers imagine. Mainly.... people dont want to buy a different robot for the many redundant tasks we have in a houshold (literally hundreds of daffy duck and tom and jerry cartoons with all the robots for the "automated household" comming out of every crevice), so our real hopes lie in a bipedal robot who can be trained (programmed) to do a variety of tasks.
security aside.... how long till it's a commercialy viable consumer level industry? Seems closer than i thought.
while the golden rule of 640k certainly does apply.
who the hell is going to need a terrabyte of storage two years from now? It used to be pretty easy for joe shmoe to tap out his HD with avi's and mp3's...
but nowadays even large media files dont fill up hardcore downloaders drives so quickly... your average 250gb drive will take joe shmoe a year or more of serious file swapping to come even CLOSE to filling, much less the fact that most people stop file jacking when the get over 10 to 20 gigs worth of stuff.
While the rest of the specs seem reasonably on point... a terrabyte is WAY over the top... i mean average systems today ship with 40 - 80 gb on them... i doubt two years will cause the average to jump twelve fold.... more like 250 to 500 gb.
unless there is a SERIOUSLY HUGE revolution of people recording (home movies) their day to day lives to HD (read apple), there just isnt a need.
Ok, as a starter let me just say that in IT and most buisness, you have to be able to sell yourself in order to get good jobs and advance.
while my degree has been of great assitance, more than anything my experience has been the real bargain maker. Questions about degree's last less then a minute in your average interview, do you have one or not is all they want to know most of the time.
But job and real world experience are the goods employers will really ask you about, this is where youve got to be able to say youve done good work in the trenches. Working for smaller companies in IT/IS will give you great experience, even if its for less pay.
lots of guys take grunt jobs with "impresive" big companies and end up with resumes that are less impresive... can you say you designed, implemented and supported a new and growing network? or did you just keep the system running?
Have you designed, and built applications or key components of them? or did you just fill in code?
Youll tend to get stronger experience working in less attractive jobs but demanding jobs.
While many people will say a jack of all trades resume is bad, the skillset can be quite usefull in creating a new company or helping one start, which may be a better option for you. The main problem with just "learning" skills without truly using them in a real world application is that your unproven.
Stay up with your education, and use what you learn to make real programs, shareware and so on, create a full-fledged (ecommerce,security,flash,CMS, etc...) web site for a small company who may not be able to pay you.
If you take the risk, and the lower paying jobs (or even charity cases!!).. youll find your work oportunities increasing quite quickly.
P.S...... go to night school... get the degree... its definitly worth it...
One.. voter verification: the overwhelming majority of voters must present picture ID and face to face with a pollster at their DESISGNATED district for voting.
Two, DDOS and many other types/styles of web attacks, which dont need to break security can easily be driected at say the midwestern states, or the liberal states... rendering their sum vote count down, thus allowing the other states a greater showing.
Three, hard break security, with a physical seperation from any public network, it becomes much more difficult for hackers and RICH politcal powers to corrupt the system. With even polling sites seperated by hard breaks it becomes a decentralized and distributed system that is much more difficult to compromise even if a few nodes are compromised.
Four, anonymity, passwords, and human ID. While we currently have mail-in voting, it is a small portion of our voting poulace, and still reuires a signature far more of a proof that it was cast by said person. With online voting, we would have difficulties verifying voters across disparete hardware, as well as their passwords can be much more easily compromised than a signature for a mail-in. anonymity should only extend as far as the VOTE, not the proof of the existance of the voter.
finaly... id like to say this idea isnt without merit... there are existing security solutions that are very powerfull... i would suggest using them in a CLOSED network entirely physicaly seperete from any public network, with the nodes also seperated.
Some of you techno-toads need to get your head out of the web and realize that technology isnt the solution to EVERYTHING.. Not only does john law have the capability of breaking a lot of VPN's, but he doesnt really need to.
these guys storm offices and houses, they pull you from your keyboard before you can lock it out, they have "agents" work the chat networks and so on, becoming "friends" and insiders of these "syndicates".
Its very difficult to carry on this type of illegal activity through a structured or organized manner against the deep deep deep resources of both the sowftare industry and the goverment. The only way to battle them is for hugely distributed and un-localized distribution....
basicly P2P... now P2P with strong encryption and trace-blocking, along with various other privacy protections distributed across enough users is a much more difficult thing to kill. These pirate groups are asking for trouble by making themselves targets.
number one... considering the astronaunts and their environs will be closed off by cold hard steel, the amount of contamination will be minimal at the least... expecialy after launch.. space and re-entry.
Number two... whatever microbes we bring with us.. expecialy planet level ones... wont have much of a chance surviving in mars's near lack of an atmoshphere... much less it's totaly different environment.
number three... even if we do contaminate the planet somehow... six people... ona PLANET... not gonna do any damage... and the knowledge they reap in turn for that contamination i think far outweighs the risk.
number four... who gives a sh**, our destiny is to colinate and grow as a succesfull species, at the expense of dead, and/or near-dead planets. Our expansiona and colonization, and security by not putting all our eggs in one basket (earth).. is far more important than any stinking microbes on mars... which brings me to point four
we should get to the buisness of terra-forming mars ASAP anyways... with current technology we could terraform mars into an inhabitable planet (at least atmosphere wise) within 4 to 5 hundred years... this is a time-consumptive process, and given the balence between scientific advances and set-backs... we may as well get cracking as soon as we can.
while i think martian life is a great thing to study, i think our life should take precedence... at all costs.
also i dont see why the two cant be done simultaneously... honestly...
the sooner we get off this planet and having living humans on another.... the sooner we'll see a huge jump in space exploration and technical advancements. Maybe even real space ships that can cover our solar-system in our life time.
and MAYBE... even space-ships capable of reaching the nearest stars within our life-times... though that is much less-likely.
in either case, we need to spark the fire.... and i for one am illing to sacrafice martian microbes for it.
While many of you are bashing the poor author, i have a personal story to relate unto the subject.
A very short story
I just bought a Small Form Factor PC.
It has a Blue Power Led button on the front
The PC looks cool, and is usefull ON TOP of my desk
The PC is in my room, no other or better place for it
The power light is VERY VERY bright at night
My fiance hates it, she cant sleep with it on
I agree
the PC is a server, i cannot turn it off at night
A post-it now covers that damn blue light
The light still shines thorugh, though yellow and blue make green
and green is less piercingly obnoxious
Bottom line, those lights which are most notable in key chain flashlights, cellphone number panels, and my PC's powerlight are really really really bright and very annoying. I hate the number panels cell phone lights the most... if youve ever been in a dark bar when someone gets a call on one of those things you know what i mean. And the power light can by itself light my entire room at night.... NO JOKE, it's that bright.
TITLE: Trust solves many problems yea, because as history has shown us, humans are by default an extremely trusting species, they would never do under-handed, sneaky, or other-wise shady actions unto each other, expecialy not their friends.... no... this "un" trustfullness is the work of... the russians!!
Governments need to decide whether they want to be trusted. If they want trust, then they should avoid any hint of sneakiness. Trust cannot be ascertained by "not" being sneaky. Trust is for the most part about image and public knowledge, look at how any country or organization is viewed and youll see that your trust comes straight down to how people around you feel about that company/country, and what youve "heard" about them... which leads STRAIGHT into dis/mis-information. For 50 years the US and the USSR have been writing propraganda manipulating the image of the opposing super-power to look as grotesque and evil as possible within the tolerence of their respective populaces. If one friend tells you coca-cola sucks, you might try it anyway, but if 20 friends say they "heard" it sucked... you wont touch it.
The U.S. government secretly overthrew a democratically elected president of Iran, President Mossadegh. That started a chain of events that eventually continued with retaliation: The destruction of the World Trade Center. Defending the actions of any of the world players (US, former USSR, china, France, UK, india, etc...) is an act in futility, every one of them has been acting in their best intrests for years... hell.. hundreds of years. Even the smaller countries without much power have been (iraq, syria, lebanon, israel, libya, cuba, etc..). It is the legacy of man to do so, its the same legacy that prompts us to form companies, and to compete against rivals in our industries... which causes some companies to "cross the line" with corporate espianage... but bottom line... the only point that youve "gone too far" is when you've broken an arbitrary law. I dont condone these actions... but if humans were "trusting" by nature... we wouldnt need laws.
Osama bin Laden cannot be effective in being violent if he does not have support. He is far less likely to have support for his violent schemes if people generally trust the U.S. government. This is Partialy True, without a moral ground-swell of a great and fearsome foe who is out to "get you"... osama wouldnt have the human resources to draw upon. This is an old tactic we have used along with any other war machine. Osama makes us look bad by pointing at our actions, and HIS OWN bombings... and saying "look what those americans cause by being here". He scapegoats us for all the ills in the middle-east, some of it our doing, and much of it not. Effectivly creating hatred for us amongst a people who dont know our populace. The US has made a regular routine out of demonifying our "enemies"... weve made china and russia look evil for long terms of time, we made fidel look like a monster, and osama out to be nothing more than a rabid american hating killer when he's really a freedom-fighter we trained.... provided freedom means no communism.
The U.S. government has bombed 24 countries since the Second World War. That has lowered the level of trust. Those who live in countries that have been bombed do not always think that the violence was "justified". I shudder to think how many countries might have been A-bombed had we not taken some of the actions we did. Without a "super-power" or a couple of balenced super-powers in the world, we would have seen many horrendous wars do a lot more damage. Order at the edge of a sword isnt to be applauded, but it better than mayhem and the chaos that comes from a power vacum.
Old idea: "You shall not kill." New clauses: a) Unless you need to create a distraction to further your political purposes, b) Unless you think it would help you be reelected. c) Except if you fear something that someone might do in the f
How To Quiet The Sound Out
on
Quieting Your G5?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Ive been using Macs and protools for ten years now, and empathize with your situation. I will give you several suggestions, the last one being a direct answer to your particular problem.
1: ideal siuation
If in any way possible AT ALL... i would either place your computing station , or your vocal area in a seperate room (a closet will do just fine), this is by far the best solution for a multitude of reasons... in all honesty you want a recording booth (large closet) with padding (bubble wrap works well, foam, etc...). If that isnt possible, you can do the inverse (a very small computing room with the main room being the recording environment.
2: A strong possibility
Place the machine in a closet or place a large and strong divider in your main room... extend a KVM... or an extension to your monitor cable from behind the closet/divider to a monitor on the other side (in the main room)... wireless keyboards and mice are very helpfull for this.
3: Remote access
extend only the audio cables needed from the box behind a closet/divider... and use a seperete computer (a laptop is best) to remotly access your G5... since wireless will work with this connection... your laptop can roam wherever you want, and you can control your session as if connected localy. (apples RDP... or you can use open source VNC to remotly connect).
4: if there is no other way
If you cannot in any way place the box into a closet or a seperete room, then you can build a computer box. I dont recomend this because it can be dangerous to your computer. Basicly create or buy a large box big enough to fit your G5 inside. Create TWO large holes in it (2 inch diameter). Before placing the computer inside, youll want to pad the walls of your new case with carpetting, foam, bubble wrap, cloth or some other sound absorbant material... once complete use one hole to route all your cables through minding the power cable not to be to close to any aound cables (with the mbox, the mbox should be OUTSIDE of the box, connected by the USB cable), once your cables are routed... seal the hole as best as you can with more cloth if possible. For the second hole you can leave it as is... however it's purpose as a ventilation is not well suited to the G5 and should truly be accompanied by a Fan (on the inside of the case) blowing out air through a tube.... which most people fit to go out of their window.
Many tweaks on this setup have been done depending on the needs of the environment... some people put a real AC inside their computer-box, others simply run their machines in the box, but when not recording, open the front of it. I personaly recomend getting the computer into a seperete room somehow. even if its just a small closet.
Slashdot Mirror
Bell labs quires pac bell.
Ma Bell rises like the phoenix from the ashes to dominion all feeble earthly communications
Skynet is brought online.
Anti-Monopoly Trust Busters Break up Ma Bell into baby bells
Lather
Wash
Rinse
Repeat
Mua ha ha ha hh ah aha ha a ha ha aha hha ha ah
While im normaly quite impressed by case mods and so on, this thing is little more than a very large steel suitcase with an average machine in it.
I would have been more impressed were it a dual xeon with yada yada yada.... but this thing is hardly anythinbg to gawk at... or care for.
Hell my laptop is a development server... surely it coudltn stand a slashdotting, but neither could this pathetic mod.
Bottom line, Grab any off the shelf 1U rackmount server (HP,DELL, IBM, VISIONMAN, etc) ... attach a handle.... and youve got the same thing, but probably at half the cost and better hardware.
dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb.
Here is my main issue with this judgement.
I, as a consumer frequently SERACH FOR competitors of known brands. Often i am looking to see what the market is because i am dis-satisfied with the brand i am familiar with. Putting in search terms such as "geico competitors" you will not get any relevant listings.
I found the most effective means of finding other product offerings in a related market is by simply looking through the ad placements on google when searching simply for the brand name i recognize.
By ordering google to stop disaplying compeitotrs ads, they have effectivly denied me any solid capability to find out about what competing products there are in the marketplace, hence hindering compitition, and promoting monopolistic control.
It is a terrible day when trademark protection extends as far as information services. Will they make it illegal to place ads for comepting companies next to each other in newspapers? Will they make it illegal to place gap ads next to macys ads on Television?
This is a ridulous abuse of governance that only hinders the tax-paying public, and stifles economic growth through compitiion, as well as inovation amogst service providers.
Amazing. Whats next.... patents on 1's and 0's ??!!
However, i see burnout 3 as a perfect exmaple of what happens when an awesome idea gets subverted by a marketing team gone wrong, and a loss of focus on actual GAME PLAY.
While the many new game modes are fun and worthwhile, this game makes four egregious errors that are so bad as to cause me not to play it as much as its prior two iterations.
1 load, load, load, load.
The single greatest fault of the game is the continual loading... unlike the prior two this third burnout likes loading everywhere, with an interface that requires more menus and pointless confirmation screens than a instalation of windows, expecialy nice is how a song loads up to show you the race results, gets about 10 seconds into the song, before loading a nother song for the menu screen. This is greatly affected by the very very short race times, in combination with the even shorter times for the other modes.... which means, a lot of loading, a lot of intermissions.
2 music for teenagers .... PUNK ROCK jukebox.... i hope you like circa 2003 punk rock people, cause thats all your gonna get. I can somewhat respect the idea of making a whole theme out of the game, but in all honesty.... its terrible, at first it was cool... i like punk, but then after about... oh twenty minutes, its gets real lame, and you start to feel like the game was designed for twelve year olds who wanna rebel against their parents.
While the previous two games have excelent sound tracks derived directly from a more ubiquotous racing sorta trancy background sound with special boost music for each track (boosting gets the heartbeat and running out of time gets a modified music track)... this new version comes prepackaged with the most irritating marketting music package ever, can you say PUNK ROCK. cause theres a ton of the cheesiest, mill factory bands pumping through this game, complete with your own
3 online too short
as if the continual loading times werent bad enough, playing online is just an exercise in excrutiating pain. EVERYTHING takes forever, to be rewarded with a race that barely lasts a minute or two... now wait to find a new race to join, now wait for the players to fill in, now wait for the game to start, now race!!!, now wait.... you get the picture.
Totaly not worth the online play unless you have a serious hard-on that can withstand the long delays enough to put a short 2 minute bruising on someone.
4 racing blur
Why? gofds almighty why? who came up with the idea of making things HARDER to see, when they are already fucking hard to see on a TV's pitiful resolution?
The previous games have their own racing blur, which is hard enough to deal with, but well done enough not to screw the game entirely, but Burnout 3 doesnt just blur your vision, they fish-eye you too while moving at ridiculous speeds. I found this added "effect" to be totally and irrevocably one of the dumbest ideas to hit a racing game in a long time. Its like saying your game designers couldnt figure out how to make a game more challenging without hindering the players already impaired vision.
The underpinnings of this game were astoundingly well done, the new game modes ingenious, the overall quality would have been excelent. But some middle manager got their hands on some BS market analysis and decided to cheese the game out with punk rock, and add a "cool" fish eye effect, and someone in the interface department was sleeping at the wheel when the decision to load anything anywhere and everywhere somehow slipped through.
As a major fan of the series, id say this game is a perfect exmaple of how to ruin a great game by forgetting that if its not about the gameplay, then it aint worth shit.
--VISION
Mainly due to their low price (can be had for about 400$), and their much smoother exteriors (less cracks for dust to find its way into).
Grab yourself a shuttle or jetway, if you dont need a cd-rom/floppy you can leave the sealing front plates on them, having only the rear fan's outake as an open oriface, and pushing your price down to nearly 300$ (www.zipzoomfly.com).
after that your pretty much home free, every few months you can slide the cover back (three thumb-screws or less) and give the interior a quick air-dusting...
Since the size is small, it can be safely tucked away somewhere more secure than a full fledged tower might go, and can be kept all the more less exposed to dust and other harmfull airborne materials.
Heat is rarely a problem with all but the oldest and newest models, so as long as you keep the arc weilder away from the power cables you should be fine!!
Invest in a wireless keyboard/mouse, and youve reduced your clutter/liabilities that much more.
From the soon to be inoperable website.... Ursala's very own words on the mini-series remake of her books.
"Earthsea"
11/13/2004
"Miss Le Guin was not involved in the development of the material or the making of the film, but we've been very, very honest to the books," explains director Rob Lieberman. "We've tried to capture all the levels of spiritualism, emotional content and metaphorical messages. Throughout the whole piece, I saw it as having a great duality of spirituality versus paganism and wizardry, male and female duality. The final moments of the film culminate in the union of all that and represent two different belief systems in this world, and that's what Ursula intended to make a statement about. The only thing that saves this Earthsea universe is the union of those two beliefs."
Sci Fi Magazine
December 2004
I've tried very hard to keep from saying anything at all about this production, being well aware that movies must differ in many ways from the books they're based on, and feeling that I really had no business talking about it, since I was not included in planning it and was given no part in discussions or decisions.
That makes it particularly galling of the director to put words in my mouth.
Mr Lieberman has every right to say what his intentions were in making the film he directed, called "Earthsea." He has no right at all to state what I intended in writing the Earthsea books.
Had "Miss Le Guin" been honestly asked to be involved in the planning of the film, she might have discussed with the film-makers what the books are about.
When I tried to suggest the unwisdom of making radical changes to characters, events, and relationships which have been familiar to hundreds of thousands of readers all over the world for over thirty years, I was sent a copy of the script and informed that production was already under way.
So, for the record: there is no statement in the books, nor did I ever intend to make a statement, about "the union of two belief systems." There's nothing at all about the "duality of spirituality and paganism," whatever that means, either.
Earlier in the article, Robert Halmi is quoted as saying that Earthsea "has people who believe and people who do not believe." I can only admire Mr Halmi's imagination, but I wish he'd left mine alone.
In the books, the wizardry of the Archipelago and the ritualism of the Kargs are opposed and united, like the yang and yin. The rejoining of the broken arm-ring is a symbol of the restoration of an unresting, active balance, offering a risky chance of peace.
This has absolutely nothing to do with "people who believe and people who do not believe." That terrible division into Believers and Unbelievers (itself a matter not of reason but of belief) is one which bedevils Christianity and Islam and drives their wars.
But the wizards of Earthsea would look on such wars as madness, and the dragons of Earthsea would laugh at them and fly away...
Toto, something tells me Earthsea isn't Iraq.
I wonder if the people who made the film of The Lord of the Rings had ended it with Frodo putting on the Ring and ruling happily ever after, and then claimed that that was what Tolkien "intended..." would people think they'd been "very, very honest to the books"?
Ursula K. Le Guin
While initialy this hardly proved true, it's a very strong sales pitch to have a constant companion with an apple logo on it.
The near ubiquity, and total inunduation of ipods being everywhere also goes a long way towards making apple look like a damn good brand (if they do the ipods so well, the must be good at computers)
I think if apple keeps hammering away at highly tailored and very well-made digital appliances, there computer market share will continue to grow as people put trust in their products.
Though id rather see the specifics of this data to see whether it has any real merit.
Probably a much more intresting question is how apple is going to be able to increase their market share outside the US/japan. While your typical developed high GDP citizen can afford apple's products, getting apple products into the hands of less wealthy countries is a big stumbling block that needs to be addressed if they want to get their hands on the largest emerging computing markets.
we shall see
Dont get me wrong, i dont expect stars and accolades out of a series which barely discerns itself from the likes of zena/hurcules/Beastmaster in some of its episodes (did these guys share their prop guys/ set designers or what?)
But for me, the most endearing part of the Stargate series has for themost part been McGyv..Richard's humorfull character. Without Dean, the show just becomes just another crappy lets fight aliens in fantasy planets with cool ancient civilizations based on old earth.
And Atlantis is pure poo, the characters are all cookie cutter type-casts to the point of stereotyping your viewer audience fan-service, maybe this is what happens when sci-fi channel does..... well just about anything.... but that show is terrible.
Stargate itself has been pretty damn good (with some notable exceptions ... ergo anyone?) and im glad to see it continue on, but atlantis is in dire need of a total abortion or a complete re-write with some more serious characters who actualy act like a military operation.
Anyone remember space above and beyond?
This is why im really happy about the Battlestar galactica series comming this new year... Gritty, realistic, and hopefully... above all else... not more episodal space opera campy bullsh*t.
Combine that with their online music offerings, and even a subscription service such as an enhanced XBOX live and DVD playback, and youve got the Windows Media Center in homes all across the world on an infrastructure that's already highly controlled.
While Nintendo and Sony have been banking hard on cell technology and other gamer focused add-ons, MS is covering the do it all, in every home aspect, and they will win if allowed to do so.
one of Sony's main driving forces for playstation adoption (1 and 2)... was the inclusion of a cd player or dvd player... an unecesary add-on as far as games go, but a strikingly powerfull one as far as extra features go.
If nintendo/sony dont come up with their own media center functions, they will find themselves eclipised by MS very quickly despite their better game focus.
four dupes and a giganto post woohooo!!!!
How many MORE of these damn things have been "lost", and are f**king lying around somewhere in easy grasp of anyone with a dive team and a geiger counter?
If that doesnt scare you shitless, i dont know what else should. If we can't even hold onto our OWN nukes, what have the former soviet russians done with theirs?
so it is technicaly feasible that if you map out a fair amount of the pipelines of most of the popular chip sets, you could technicaly have a command chain to allow binaries the same calls through a sudo-emulation layer of the software.
fundamentaly possible, and even do-able.... but without a performance hit? no way. Each processor is geared towards a particular way of solving a physcial and mathmatical set of problems... some processors are designed for massive loads of database driven calculations (XEONs)... some for multimedia (G5)... some for science (PPC, Sparc?)... some for power savings (ARM)....
depedning on which archetecture your using, the performance will be greatly hindered if your trying to do something designed for a radicaly different chip. Such as trying to run some expansive G5 optimizied photoshop plug on a ARM chip.
"no performance hit" = total bullshit
13 years
The devastation wrought by the black death which killed a third of europe's population was recovered within twenty years.
Population statisitcs over a span of time greater than 8 or so generations are frighteningly acurate even given the smaller spikes and plummets in shorter time ranges.
in a predator vs pray scenario, the predator popualtion reaches an critical near apex point where-in either the predator finds a natural balenced level in regards to its prey and tapers off to a stable maintence mode, or spikes high and returns in an inverse parabola as the predator dies off exponentialy due to lack of resources (pray) and over-population.
if you map the human growth rate over the last 40,000 years or so you will see that our population curve hasnt deviated from standard predator vs pray algorithms. Even with contraceptives, population control and so on, the growth curve is still extremely accurate... luckily with these new controls somewhat in place, our growth curve is begining to resemle the predator balenced with his reseources curve, as opposed to the mass plumet in population.
We will see humanity's growth defy some aspects of the laws of P vs P algorithms when humanity expands off of the planet... creating the first population explosion after a taper (double peak).
As to the parent posters belief in galaxial exponentiation, including seti's own misguided reasoning there-in... there are far to many indeterminates involved to asses wether or not we wil find life or not, and whther or not there is a mathmatical proof that WE know of that can say if it should exist or not.
For instance... FTL communication and transportation is still an open question. Exponential growth cannot sustain itself with a light speed limitation, at some point that barrier would hinder the growth curve vs its own size.
While our mathmatics based upon growth rates of living and inanimate environments have strong backgrounds, we have no proof that all life must adhere to these common rules, it may be that life in other forms and planets moves too slow or too fast to grow beyond it's originating solar system, or is too encumbered by it's own physical form to adequatly manipulate it's environment for inter-stellar travel (or even inter-planatary travel). This is greatly evidenced by dolphins, who are highly inteligent (though in a different manner), but with opposable thumbs and in a incongrous environment for building things (the ocean) are greatly less likely to ever go down the path of being able to modify their environment for space travel (how would a dolphin build a space ship?).
Evolution of course allows for nearly any species or creature to eventualy change to a point wherin space travel is technicaly possible for them.... but the time it takes for that species and its host environment to provide such results is a HUGE variable... additionaly one must take into account devastation, and divergent evolution. Just because we evolved towards rockets and the moon, doesnt necesarily mean another species in another habitat will... our space bound endeavors are greatly a result of us having full control of the earth without any predators or serious obstacles to our survival... essentialy... space... has been a hobby for humanity... an off-shoot, or bi-product of our existance.
then there is time dialation and so on, depending on the mass of your solar system and it's proximity to the outer edges or inner sphere of the galaxy.... time may pass relativly fast or incredibly slow compared to the rest of the galaxy, humanity may go through its entire existance from mesopatamia to star trek within the span of time it takes an alien to blink an eye.
I could go on, but im certain you guys can think of a million different reasons why fractalish growth patterns may not apply on a universal scale.
food for thought, thought for food.... --VISION
and why on gods green earth would i spend the time to SEND you NOTARIZED ($$) copies of my UBER-private documents (step #3 on his page)...
For....
a "free trial" or "free registration"?
through a third-party.
no way... im too lazy to give my lawyer those documents in an orderly fashion... much less for a free trial to mens life online magazine.
But it wouldnt take to much extra engineering to turn such miniturized robots into battery powered metal go-to bots.
Certainly the complexities in getting these machines to take out the garbage or wash the windows may be out of the consumer markets range for some years....
but how difficult would it be to use such machines in a more remote control Wi-Fi sense? put a little webcam on its head, give him an 802.11 chip.... and youve got a bipedal real life avatar of sorts... or a neat spy who (with some better engineering) can cover some seriously troublesome terrain.
at the price point this machine comes at.... it seems iRobot and more this decade level of affordable domestic machinery are much closer than we may have thought.... ASIMO and honda's works seemed to be extrobantly expensive toys, not of the commodity variety.
And im not speaking of the more automaton variety of home appliance bots in semi-fashion at the moment (the "robot" vacum, and now a grass cutting one of the same genre), for the most part i feel any robot with wheels isnt a REAL robot in the multipurpose ambiguous sort of role most consumers imagine. Mainly.... people dont want to buy a different robot for the many redundant tasks we have in a houshold (literally hundreds of daffy duck and tom and jerry cartoons with all the robots for the "automated household" comming out of every crevice), so our real hopes lie in a bipedal robot who can be trained (programmed) to do a variety of tasks.
security aside.... how long till it's a commercialy viable consumer level industry? Seems closer than i thought.
who the hell is going to need a terrabyte of storage two years from now? It used to be pretty easy for joe shmoe to tap out his HD with avi's and mp3's...
but nowadays even large media files dont fill up hardcore downloaders drives so quickly... your average 250gb drive will take joe shmoe a year or more of serious file swapping to come even CLOSE to filling, much less the fact that most people stop file jacking when the get over 10 to 20 gigs worth of stuff.
While the rest of the specs seem reasonably on point... a terrabyte is WAY over the top... i mean average systems today ship with 40 - 80 gb on them... i doubt two years will cause the average to jump twelve fold. ... more like 250 to 500 gb.
unless there is a SERIOUSLY HUGE revolution of people recording (home movies) their day to day lives to HD (read apple), there just isnt a need.
while my degree has been of great assitance, more than anything my experience has been the real bargain maker. Questions about degree's last less then a minute in your average interview, do you have one or not is all they want to know most of the time.
But job and real world experience are the goods employers will really ask you about, this is where youve got to be able to say youve done good work in the trenches. Working for smaller companies in IT/IS will give you great experience, even if its for less pay.
lots of guys take grunt jobs with "impresive" big companies and end up with resumes that are less impresive... can you say you designed, implemented and supported a new and growing network? or did you just keep the system running? Have you designed, and built applications or key components of them? or did you just fill in code?
Youll tend to get stronger experience working in less attractive jobs but demanding jobs.
While many people will say a jack of all trades resume is bad, the skillset can be quite usefull in creating a new company or helping one start, which may be a better option for you. The main problem with just "learning" skills without truly using them in a real world application is that your unproven.
Stay up with your education, and use what you learn to make real programs, shareware and so on, create a full-fledged (ecommerce,security,flash,CMS, etc...) web site for a small company who may not be able to pay you.
If you take the risk, and the lower paying jobs (or even charity cases!!).. youll find your work oportunities increasing quite quickly.
P.S. ..... go to night school... get the degree... its definitly worth it...
One.. voter verification: the overwhelming majority of voters must present picture ID and face to face with a pollster at their DESISGNATED district for voting.
Two, DDOS and many other types/styles of web attacks, which dont need to break security can easily be driected at say the midwestern states, or the liberal states... rendering their sum vote count down, thus allowing the other states a greater showing.
Three, hard break security, with a physical seperation from any public network, it becomes much more difficult for hackers and RICH politcal powers to corrupt the system. With even polling sites seperated by hard breaks it becomes a decentralized and distributed system that is much more difficult to compromise even if a few nodes are compromised.
Four, anonymity, passwords, and human ID. While we currently have mail-in voting, it is a small portion of our voting poulace, and still reuires a signature far more of a proof that it was cast by said person. With online voting, we would have difficulties verifying voters across disparete hardware, as well as their passwords can be much more easily compromised than a signature for a mail-in. anonymity should only extend as far as the VOTE, not the proof of the existance of the voter.
finaly... id like to say this idea isnt without merit... there are existing security solutions that are very powerfull... i would suggest using them in a CLOSED network entirely physicaly seperete from any public network, with the nodes also seperated.
just my thirty three cents worth
Some of you techno-toads need to get your head out of the web and realize that technology isnt the solution to EVERYTHING.. Not only does john law have the capability of breaking a lot of VPN's, but he doesnt really need to.
these guys storm offices and houses, they pull you from your keyboard before you can lock it out, they have "agents" work the chat networks and so on, becoming "friends" and insiders of these "syndicates".
Its very difficult to carry on this type of illegal activity through a structured or organized manner against the deep deep deep resources of both the sowftare industry and the goverment. The only way to battle them is for hugely distributed and un-localized distribution....
basicly P2P... now P2P with strong encryption and trace-blocking, along with various other privacy protections distributed across enough users is a much more difficult thing to kill. These pirate groups are asking for trouble by making themselves targets.
thats like saying your moving from california to idaho for a better selection of produce.
number one... considering the astronaunts and their environs will be closed off by cold hard steel, the amount of contamination will be minimal at the least... expecialy after launch.. space and re-entry.
Number two... whatever microbes we bring with us .. expecialy planet level ones... wont have much of a chance surviving in mars's near lack of an atmoshphere... much less it's totaly different environment.
number three... even if we do contaminate the planet somehow... six people... ona PLANET... not gonna do any damage... and the knowledge they reap in turn for that contamination i think far outweighs the risk.
number four... who gives a sh**, our destiny is to colinate and grow as a succesfull species, at the expense of dead, and/or near-dead planets. Our expansiona and colonization, and security by not putting all our eggs in one basket (earth).. is far more important than any stinking microbes on mars... which brings me to point four
we should get to the buisness of terra-forming mars ASAP anyways... with current technology we could terraform mars into an inhabitable planet (at least atmosphere wise) within 4 to 5 hundred years... this is a time-consumptive process, and given the balence between scientific advances and set-backs... we may as well get cracking as soon as we can.
while i think martian life is a great thing to study, i think our life should take precedence... at all costs.
also i dont see why the two cant be done simultaneously... honestly...
the sooner we get off this planet and having living humans on another.... the sooner we'll see a huge jump in space exploration and technical advancements. Maybe even real space ships that can cover our solar-system in our life time.
and MAYBE... even space-ships capable of reaching the nearest stars within our life-times... though that is much less-likely.
in either case, we need to spark the fire.... and i for one am illing to sacrafice martian microbes for it.
A very short story
I just bought a Small Form Factor PC.
It has a Blue Power Led button on the front
The PC looks cool, and is usefull ON TOP of my desk
The PC is in my room, no other or better place for it
The power light is VERY VERY bright at night
My fiance hates it, she cant sleep with it on
I agree
the PC is a server, i cannot turn it off at night
A post-it now covers that damn blue light
The light still shines thorugh, though yellow and blue make green
and green is less piercingly obnoxious
Bottom line, those lights which are most notable in key chain flashlights, cellphone number panels, and my PC's powerlight are really really really bright and very annoying. I hate the number panels cell phone lights the most... if youve ever been in a dark bar when someone gets a call on one of those things you know what i mean. And the power light can by itself light my entire room at night.... NO JOKE, it's that bright.
US: our base is protected
translate
UK : Your Base is under control
translate
Pol : Your Base Is Inside our control
translate
Jap: All Your Base Are Belong To Us
translate
Iraq : Well No Sh!t sherlock.
END TRANSMISSION
yea, because as history has shown us, humans are by default an extremely trusting species, they would never do under-handed, sneaky, or other-wise shady actions unto each other, expecialy not their friends.... no... this "un" trustfullness is the work of... the russians!!
Governments need to decide whether they want to be trusted. If they want trust, then they should avoid any hint of sneakiness.
Trust cannot be ascertained by "not" being sneaky. Trust is for the most part about image and public knowledge, look at how any country or organization is viewed and youll see that your trust comes straight down to how people around you feel about that company/country, and what youve "heard" about them... which leads STRAIGHT into dis/mis-information. For 50 years the US and the USSR have been writing propraganda manipulating the image of the opposing super-power to look as grotesque and evil as possible within the tolerence of their respective populaces. If one friend tells you coca-cola sucks, you might try it anyway, but if 20 friends say they "heard" it sucked... you wont touch it.
The U.S. government secretly overthrew a democratically elected president of Iran, President Mossadegh. That started a chain of events that eventually continued with retaliation: The destruction of the World Trade Center.
Defending the actions of any of the world players (US, former USSR, china, France, UK, india, etc...) is an act in futility, every one of them has been acting in their best intrests for years... hell.. hundreds of years. Even the smaller countries without much power have been (iraq, syria, lebanon, israel, libya, cuba, etc..). It is the legacy of man to do so, its the same legacy that prompts us to form companies, and to compete against rivals in our industries... which causes some companies to "cross the line" with corporate espianage... but bottom line... the only point that youve "gone too far" is when you've broken an arbitrary law. I dont condone these actions... but if humans were "trusting" by nature... we wouldnt need laws.
Osama bin Laden cannot be effective in being violent if he does not have support. He is far less likely to have support for his violent schemes if people generally trust the U.S. government.
This is Partialy True, without a moral ground-swell of a great and fearsome foe who is out to "get you"... osama wouldnt have the human resources to draw upon. This is an old tactic we have used along with any other war machine. Osama makes us look bad by pointing at our actions, and HIS OWN bombings... and saying "look what those americans cause by being here". He scapegoats us for all the ills in the middle-east, some of it our doing, and much of it not. Effectivly creating hatred for us amongst a people who dont know our populace. The US has made a regular routine out of demonifying our "enemies"... weve made china and russia look evil for long terms of time, we made fidel look like a monster, and osama out to be nothing more than a rabid american hating killer when he's really a freedom-fighter we trained.... provided freedom means no communism.
The U.S. government has bombed 24 countries since the Second World War. That has lowered the level of trust. Those who live in countries that have been bombed do not always think that the violence was "justified".
I shudder to think how many countries might have been A-bombed had we not taken some of the actions we did. Without a "super-power" or a couple of balenced super-powers in the world, we would have seen many horrendous wars do a lot more damage. Order at the edge of a sword isnt to be applauded, but it better than mayhem and the chaos that comes from a power vacum.
Old idea: "You shall not kill." New clauses: a) Unless you need to create a distraction to further your political purposes, b) Unless you think it would help you be reelected. c) Except if you fear something that someone might do in the f
1: ideal siuation
If in any way possible AT ALL... i would either place your computing station , or your vocal area in a seperate room (a closet will do just fine), this is by far the best solution for a multitude of reasons... in all honesty you want a recording booth (large closet) with padding (bubble wrap works well, foam, etc...). If that isnt possible, you can do the inverse (a very small computing room with the main room being the recording environment.
2: A strong possibility ... or an extension to your monitor cable from behind the closet/divider to a monitor on the other side (in the main room)... wireless keyboards and mice are very helpfull for this.
Place the machine in a closet or place a large and strong divider in your main room... extend a KVM
3: Remote access ... or you can use open source VNC to remotly connect).
extend only the audio cables needed from the box behind a closet/divider... and use a seperete computer (a laptop is best) to remotly access your G5... since wireless will work with this connection... your laptop can roam wherever you want, and you can control your session as if connected localy. (apples RDP
4: if there is no other way
If you cannot in any way place the box into a closet or a seperete room, then you can build a computer box. I dont recomend this because it can be dangerous to your computer. Basicly create or buy a large box big enough to fit your G5 inside. Create TWO large holes in it (2 inch diameter). Before placing the computer inside, youll want to pad the walls of your new case with carpetting, foam, bubble wrap, cloth or some other sound absorbant material... once complete use one hole to route all your cables through minding the power cable not to be to close to any aound cables (with the mbox, the mbox should be OUTSIDE of the box, connected by the USB cable), once your cables are routed... seal the hole as best as you can with more cloth if possible. For the second hole you can leave it as is... however it's purpose as a ventilation is not well suited to the G5 and should truly be accompanied by a Fan (on the inside of the case) blowing out air through a tube.... which most people fit to go out of their window.
Many tweaks on this setup have been done depending on the needs of the environment... some people put a real AC inside their computer-box, others simply run their machines in the box, but when not recording, open the front of it. I personaly recomend getting the computer into a seperete room somehow. even if its just a small closet.
YMMV