Actually, you can still get a toaster that will last you for decades. It just cost three times as much as the cheap, mostly-plastic thing you got from target.
"Back in the day" everything cost this much (in adjusted dollars) people owned many fewer appliances, but those that they did owned were built to last.
You can still live like this, of course, but unless you've got mad $$$, it requires that you give up some excess.
Anyone who engineers anything as critical as the controls to a pacemaker or a traffic light to be remotely configurable or writable is just asking for trouble.
Just because something has an IP adress and can be remotely monitored, does not mean that it needs to have ANY remote access to any functionality that could cause a problem.
Yes, we can (and will) design things stupidly enough so that this will be a problem, but that's more our fault than anything else. Like leaving your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition at 3 AM downtown. It's just not smart.
Now the more serious issue here, though, is that an uninformed government employee is scaremongering for power. Nothing new. But with the stock market doing as it is (buy at 6000, I say) this kind of talk is doing direct harm to the country.
At this point in time, the only files that 99 out of 100 college students use that take up enough space to justify this kind of throughput are illegal.
I know that they're installing this to be ready for future needs when they happen, but all they're doing for the near future is insuring that the kids won't have to pay for Warcraft 3.
The problem with Amtrak is pseudo Nationalization.
Europes trains are run by the government and are the envy of the world.
Amtrak is a private corporation with a government granted monopoly, fed by taxpayer dollars. It combines the greed of the private sector with the laziness of the public sector. Something should be changed.
Dry heat isn't too much of a problem as long as you keep drinking water. When the humidity approaches saturation, you can't sweat, and your body creates an insulating film of perspiration. It's much easier to have a heat related health crises in 90 degree weather in the swamp than in 105 degree weather in the desert.
Yes, the Civil War, and more to the point, the period of reconstruction afterwards crushed the south's economy. AC and the economic migration after WW2 (another big factor) made the economy un-depressed.
Prior to the influx of new people, businesses, and capital, the south was completely unfit for any sort of post-agrarian economy.
Re:Pretty good articles, but some info problems...
on
Forbes on Linux
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· Score: 2
my point was really that GNU is many things: a set of excellent utilities, a revolutionary form of public licensing, a religion, etc. but it isn't really a variant of Unix.
And as far as recursive acronyms go, I think Dilbert's "The TTP Project" is about as good as they come.
Pretty good articles, but some info problems...
on
Forbes on Linux
·
· Score: 2
from the web browser article:
Galeon is the Web browser created by Gnome, a part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Project, which is a free variant of Unix. (In a bit of a joke, GNU stands for "Gnu's Not Unix. It is pronounced "Guh-New.")
The air conditioner completely changed the south every bit as much as the cotton gin did 100 years prior.
Before AC the only people who could tolerate southern weather were those unfortunate enough to have been born there. It's only after AC that you see the large migrations from the north that enabled large cities such as Atlanta to develop. Only after AC does the south start to economically resemble the rest of the country.
In turn, AC also helped destroy the south as a region. That migration of money and people from other places fueled the suburbanization of the region, all but wiping out its regional identity in a sea of highways and Burger Kings.
Just reflecting on this as I sit in a 65 degree room in the middle of a 95 degree summer.
I'm not saying that big government is Pure and Good. the most horrible crimes in the history of humanity have been committed by governments and organized religions acting as such.
but in a democracy, a nationalized industry has more accountability than a "natural" monopoly.
if the government runs the phones, you have more options than just "put up with our crap or don't use the phone." you can vote for someone who will install a new head of the federal phone comission or whatever.
For fans and skeptics of concept albums, I'd like to make a reccomendation:
1997's "In The Aeroplane over the Sea" by indie/folk art rockers Neutral Milk Hotel
it isn't exactly a concept album. concept albums were made by 70s bands and marilyn manson, and they're all thinnly veiled allegorical stories about rock star christ figgures (Tommy and Ziggy being the most blatantly obvious example) except for the Kinks, who made concept albums about urban renewal.
Aeroplane is more a theme album, dealing with recurring images of life and death, loss of innocence and an intense organic sexuality, using the Anne Frank story as it's central narrative focus (I'm not making this up, and it actually works and doesn't come off as pretentious nonsense. well it's more pretentious than Louie Louie, but far less than say... Tales from Topographic Oceans, or any later Pink Floyd album)
It should also be noted that just about any popular album from the 70s can be found in a $1 vinyl bin. Of course this requires you venturing beyond Sam Goody for music.
There is so much AOR floating around out there, it isn't even funny.
The New York Dolls were using glitter by the pound before other people. Marc Bolan of T-Rex is probably the best person to claim actual invention of the glam rock style and sound, though you could say that it really begins with the sex-rock androgeny of Mick Jagger. But like anything else in music, glam evolved and wasn't really invented by any one person at any one time.
David of course was Glam's biggest icon and most public face. He also wrote some *damn* fine music.
Agreed. I'm reminded of that classic SNL sketch "We're the PHONE company, we don't have to care."
Free market zealots crack me up, because their philosophy is based on the mistaken idea that free markets even exist.
In the ideal free market, I want to do task X, company A produces widget A to do task X, company B produces widget B to do task X, company C etc. etc. etc. If one company bothers me, overcharges me, abuses my privacy etc. I just take my business elsewhere. This is a fine model for TVs, cars, etc. etc. but there are many sectors of the economy where this is an entirely false model.
As a most eggregious example, take the California energy crisis. People (or perhaps, if you're bitter politicians paid off by energy companies) were fed up with the innefficiency of the California public utilities. So they privatized the whole thing. Theoretically this was supposed to create a handful of competing companies all trying to undercut each other to provide service X (here, electricity) to as many people as possible. This didn't happen. They got together and fixed prices and engineered a shortage to create demand. Blackouts started, and people's power bills went up. Enron had a big hand in this. Someone tell me, at any point in that company's entire history did they do anything that helped anyone other than a small group of principle shareholders?
The record industry works in the same way. Label A and label B don't compete with each other for customers. They have carefully carved out territories and their prices are fixed by a trade organization (RIAA)
I used to really believe in total free-market capitalism, it's a beautiful theory. But like communism, it fails miserably in practice. You need a strong regulatory government to preserve free trade and competition, because the market naturally tends toward consolidation. Unfortunately, we don't have that. We have a strong government that is more often than not, working to HELP the price fixers and tycoons. There are times when I think our current system is actually worse than total deregulation.
Wow... that went on for too long.
Anyway, back to phone companies. These are companies operating in a government sanctioned monopoly (as the parent post mentioned) in such situations, I think nationalization is the only intellegent way to go, since there is at least some accountability. Wheras in a monopoly, people have no option other than to do without a needed public service. We should have had nationalized railroads years ago, as well, but the democratic party was too addicted to the money that labor unions gave them to support trucks on interstates to bother with it.
because one of your friends tells you "hey, I think you'd like snoozerland"
or you hear one of their songs on college radio
before Audiogalaxy (which was better than Napster for indie music) shut down, I almost only downloaded music that I'd only been told "I think you should check them out"
Now I would never pay $18 for a CD just because I hear one song on the radio, or a friend thinks I might like them. But I'll sure as hell download some MP3s.
Everyone talks about buying CDs because of MP3 downloads. I don't know about anyone else, but I can look through my CDs and out of the over 150 CDs I purchased last year, over 100 were directly because of MP3 download, and the rest were because people made me mix-tapes etc.
The bottom line is, if you don't like the crap that Clearchannel/MTV/RIAA shoves down our throats, then illegal sharing is just about the only way to hear about new music.
OK... get a grip, it's scifi, a step below "what-if" history on the scale of things you should take seriously.
Here's what the Matrix guys were thinking "OK, we want humans living in a giant computer-controled virtual universe, enslaved for some reason. Now why would humans be enslaved? Any ideas?"
Now really, there aren't a whole lot of reasons for an ascendant group of AI-super-robots or whatever to not kill us off if we put up resistance. So the battery thing works pretty well, given the context. And if you don't think about thermodynamics, it kinda sorta makes sense.
I always thought a better plotline would be: they're using us for spare cycles. The 90% of the human brain that isn't used (OK that's not true either, but it works better than pink naked duracels) is a wonderful computing resource and surprisingly energy effecient. It turns out we don't make good computers if our conciousness isn't engaged somehow... thus the virtual world.
Makes you wonder how long they worked on an acronym that (kinda) spells "Minuteman"
Re:"just a computer programmer"
on
The Chronoliths
·
· Score: 2
right... that's what we're quoting, Geddy Lee...
and what about the voice of Geddy Lee how did it get so high? I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy I know him and he does And you're my fact-checking cuz...
Re:OT re: unrelated not about karma
on
The Chronoliths
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you can still get a toaster that will last you for decades. It just cost three times as much as the cheap, mostly-plastic thing you got from target.
"Back in the day" everything cost this much (in adjusted dollars) people owned many fewer appliances, but those that they did owned were built to last.
You can still live like this, of course, but unless you've got mad $$$, it requires that you give up some excess.
Anyone who engineers anything as critical as the controls to a pacemaker or a traffic light to be remotely configurable or writable is just asking for trouble.
Just because something has an IP adress and can be remotely monitored, does not mean that it needs to have ANY remote access to any functionality that could cause a problem.
Yes, we can (and will) design things stupidly enough so that this will be a problem, but that's more our fault than anything else. Like leaving your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition at 3 AM downtown. It's just not smart.
Now the more serious issue here, though, is that an uninformed government employee is scaremongering for power. Nothing new. But with the stock market doing as it is (buy at 6000, I say) this kind of talk is doing direct harm to the country.
This guy needs to shut the hell up.
Quake on megabit ethernet and gigabit ethernet are indistinguishable.
You'll notice when you send a DivX movie over AIM file transfer, though.
At this point in time, the only files that 99 out of 100 college students use that take up enough space to justify this kind of throughput are illegal.
I know that they're installing this to be ready for future needs when they happen, but all they're doing for the near future is insuring that the kids won't have to pay for Warcraft 3.
The problem with Amtrak is pseudo Nationalization.
Europes trains are run by the government and are the envy of the world.
Amtrak is a private corporation with a government granted monopoly, fed by taxpayer dollars. It combines the greed of the private sector with the laziness of the public sector. Something should be changed.
I know this. But a lot of government "security" is handled through microsoft products.
And if we ever did have a mark of the beast... er, Homeland Security ID, you can bet MS products would be running a lot of the system.
I was just trying to make a point in a somewhat quippy manner.
I've been to the southwest, it isn't so bad.
I grew up in Louisiana, it's nightmareish.
Dry heat isn't too much of a problem as long as you keep drinking water. When the humidity approaches saturation, you can't sweat, and your body creates an insulating film of perspiration. It's much easier to have a heat related health crises in 90 degree weather in the swamp than in 105 degree weather in the desert.
Yes, the Civil War, and more to the point, the period of reconstruction afterwards crushed the south's economy. AC and the economic migration after WW2 (another big factor) made the economy un-depressed.
Prior to the influx of new people, businesses, and capital, the south was completely unfit for any sort of post-agrarian economy.
my point was really that GNU is many things: a set of excellent utilities, a revolutionary form of public licensing, a religion, etc. but it isn't really a variant of Unix.
And as far as recursive acronyms go, I think Dilbert's "The TTP Project" is about as good as they come.
from the web browser article:
Galeon is the Web browser created by Gnome, a part of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Project, which is a free variant of Unix. (In a bit of a joke, GNU stands for "Gnu's Not Unix. It is pronounced "Guh-New.")
Didn't get the joke, did you?
The air conditioner completely changed the south every bit as much as the cotton gin did 100 years prior.
Before AC the only people who could tolerate southern weather were those unfortunate enough to have been born there. It's only after AC that you see the large migrations from the north that enabled large cities such as Atlanta to develop. Only after AC does the south start to economically resemble the rest of the country.
In turn, AC also helped destroy the south as a region. That migration of money and people from other places fueled the suburbanization of the region, all but wiping out its regional identity in a sea of highways and Burger Kings.
Just reflecting on this as I sit in a 65 degree room in the middle of a 95 degree summer.
Don't worry about Code Red and related problems. I'm sure Microsoft will fix everything before they start storing our National ID information.
I'm not saying that big government is Pure and Good. the most horrible crimes in the history of humanity have been committed by governments and organized religions acting as such.
but in a democracy, a nationalized industry has more accountability than a "natural" monopoly.
if the government runs the phones, you have more options than just "put up with our crap or don't use the phone." you can vote for someone who will install a new head of the federal phone comission or whatever.
For fans and skeptics of concept albums, I'd like to make a reccomendation:
1997's "In The Aeroplane over the Sea" by indie/folk art rockers Neutral Milk Hotel
it isn't exactly a concept album. concept albums were made by 70s bands and marilyn manson, and they're all thinnly veiled allegorical stories about rock star christ figgures (Tommy and Ziggy being the most blatantly obvious example) except for the Kinks, who made concept albums about urban renewal.
Aeroplane is more a theme album, dealing with recurring images of life and death, loss of innocence and an intense organic sexuality, using the Anne Frank story as it's central narrative focus (I'm not making this up, and it actually works and doesn't come off as pretentious nonsense. well it's more pretentious than Louie Louie, but far less than say... Tales from Topographic Oceans, or any later Pink Floyd album)
download "Two Headed Boy" to start yourself off.
It should also be noted that just about any popular album from the 70s can be found in a $1 vinyl bin. Of course this requires you venturing beyond Sam Goody for music.
There is so much AOR floating around out there, it isn't even funny.
David didn't exactly invent glam rock...
The New York Dolls were using glitter by the pound before other people. Marc Bolan of T-Rex is probably the best person to claim actual invention of the glam rock style and sound, though you could say that it really begins with the sex-rock androgeny of Mick Jagger. But like anything else in music, glam evolved and wasn't really invented by any one person at any one time.
David of course was Glam's biggest icon and most public face. He also wrote some *damn* fine music.
(retreats to music-nerd hole)
Agreed. I'm reminded of that classic SNL sketch "We're the PHONE company, we don't have to care."
Free market zealots crack me up, because their philosophy is based on the mistaken idea that free markets even exist.
In the ideal free market, I want to do task X, company A produces widget A to do task X, company B produces widget B to do task X, company C etc. etc. etc. If one company bothers me, overcharges me, abuses my privacy etc. I just take my business elsewhere. This is a fine model for TVs, cars, etc. etc. but there are many sectors of the economy where this is an entirely false model.
As a most eggregious example, take the California energy crisis. People (or perhaps, if you're bitter politicians paid off by energy companies) were fed up with the innefficiency of the California public utilities. So they privatized the whole thing. Theoretically this was supposed to create a handful of competing companies all trying to undercut each other to provide service X (here, electricity) to as many people as possible. This didn't happen. They got together and fixed prices and engineered a shortage to create demand. Blackouts started, and people's power bills went up. Enron had a big hand in this. Someone tell me, at any point in that company's entire history did they do anything that helped anyone other than a small group of principle shareholders?
The record industry works in the same way. Label A and label B don't compete with each other for customers. They have carefully carved out territories and their prices are fixed by a trade organization (RIAA)
I used to really believe in total free-market capitalism, it's a beautiful theory. But like communism, it fails miserably in practice. You need a strong regulatory government to preserve free trade and competition, because the market naturally tends toward consolidation. Unfortunately, we don't have that. We have a strong government that is more often than not, working to HELP the price fixers and tycoons. There are times when I think our current system is actually worse than total deregulation.
Wow... that went on for too long.
Anyway, back to phone companies. These are companies operating in a government sanctioned monopoly (as the parent post mentioned) in such situations, I think nationalization is the only intellegent way to go, since there is at least some accountability. Wheras in a monopoly, people have no option other than to do without a needed public service. We should have had nationalized railroads years ago, as well, but the democratic party was too addicted to the money that labor unions gave them to support trucks on interstates to bother with it.
Hey, someone snuck in your house last night and wrote "gullible" behind your monitor. You'd better check on that.
presenting.... MARIO 3!!!
a new game, they can't do that!!!
because one of your friends tells you "hey, I think you'd like snoozerland"
or you hear one of their songs on college radio
before Audiogalaxy (which was better than Napster for indie music) shut down, I almost only downloaded music that I'd only been told "I think you should check them out"
Now I would never pay $18 for a CD just because I hear one song on the radio, or a friend thinks I might like them. But I'll sure as hell download some MP3s.
Everyone talks about buying CDs because of MP3 downloads. I don't know about anyone else, but I can look through my CDs and out of the over 150 CDs I purchased last year, over 100 were directly because of MP3 download, and the rest were because people made me mix-tapes etc.
The bottom line is, if you don't like the crap that Clearchannel/MTV/RIAA shoves down our throats, then illegal sharing is just about the only way to hear about new music.
Putting dirty words into that is waaaaay more fun than it should be.
OK... get a grip, it's scifi, a step below "what-if" history on the scale of things you should take seriously.
Here's what the Matrix guys were thinking "OK, we want humans living in a giant computer-controled virtual universe, enslaved for some reason. Now why would humans be enslaved? Any ideas?"
Now really, there aren't a whole lot of reasons for an ascendant group of AI-super-robots or whatever to not kill us off if we put up resistance. So the battery thing works pretty well, given the context. And if you don't think about thermodynamics, it kinda sorta makes sense.
I always thought a better plotline would be: they're using us for spare cycles. The 90% of the human brain that isn't used (OK that's not true either, but it works better than pink naked duracels) is a wonderful computing resource and surprisingly energy effecient. It turns out we don't make good computers if our conciousness isn't engaged somehow... thus the virtual world.
Makes you wonder how long they worked on an acronym that (kinda) spells "Minuteman"
right... that's what we're quoting, Geddy Lee...
and what about the voice of Geddy Lee
how did it get so high?
I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy
I know him and he does
And you're my fact-checking cuz...
party on Garth
party on Wayne