Seriously, go over to www.growbiointensive.org, and buy their book. Use it to learn how to grow your own food. Then LEASE -- don't buy -- a 5-acre piece of farmland for 50 years. (50 years x 5 acres x $30/acre = $7500). Get it going with biointensive farming, and feed yourself.
Forget working for others, until you get a decent offer. Forget about buying all of the latest and greatest, and keeping up with the Joneses and helping the economy.
If our country's shakers and movers (both economic and government) do not see fit to pay a family wage, then they shouldn't expect to do business with the rest of us. Working for a wage is like any other business transaction: if the transaction is not profitable to all involved, it shouldn't happen.
I'm really serious. Besides that, you can take your farming skills with you wherever you go, and really supplement your lifestyle.
Gold is backed by lots of uses. It is valuable for use in photographic film chemicals; for its low resistance (in computer chip wires); for its low melting temperature (in jewelry); for its chemical properties (to stimulate some reactions).
And yes, the (asian) Indians do eat it. They pound either Gold or Silver into an extremely thin foil, then wrap their medicines in it, and swallow it. Likewise, in the Bible the children of Israel had to eat their golden false god calf.
Gold is also especially useful as a retirement and security account for Indian women. Their jewelry doubles as cash, if need be.
Gold is still valuable. On the other hand, one might ask what the US dollar is backed by. Some would say "the US economy". More knowledgable people might perhaps say "the fact that OPEC takes dollars". Yet others would say "the Japanese economy, which buys up dollars to obtain a favorable balance of trade." My brother would say "the requirement by the US government for us to pay our taxes in dollars." I'm not sure... but I'd bet that Gold has more inherent value than US dollars.
A patent is a gun that costs $10000 to buy, and a million dollars to shoot. You've just solved the $10k problem -- for New Zealand only. If you want a worldwide patent, you still have to pay out that $10k.
Kindof reminds me of the lightbulb. According to Scientific American, Edison's notebook includes a cutout article about Swan's use of a carbon filament. On the next page, "It works!"
http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/SWAN_BIO.html
Anyhow, Swan managed to maintain his patents in England, but Edison essentially won for the rest of the world. So I guess that a NZ patent would be okay in NZ.
Except that to reasonably defend a NZ patent, you probably have to be a NZ resident...
Let's face it. The powerless are not going to use power to steal power from the powerful. It just ain't gonna happen.
Yeah, this is a nice, really nice start.
However, what would you get from an asteroid impact in the Persian Gulf?
What I'd really like, would be to put in different parameters, and then see what the radial blast effects would be.
And include in that, what you get in terms of thermal warming of the water, and the resulting storm?
With the flirst glow of dawn,
A black cloud rose up from the horizon.
Inside it Adad (god of storm and rain) thunders,
While Shallat and Hanish (Heralds of Adad) go in front,
Moving as heralds over hill and plain.
Erragal (Nergal, the god of the netherworld) tears out the posts (out of the dam);
Forth comes Ninurta and causes the dikes to follow.
The Anunnaki lift up the torches,
Setting the land ablaze with their glare.
Consternation over Adad reaches to the heavens,
Turning to blackness all that had been light.
The wide land was shattered like a pot!
For one day the south-storm blew,
Gathering speed as it blew, submerging the mountains,
Overtaking the people like a battle.
No one can see his fellow,
Nor can the people be recognized from heaven.
The gods were frightened by the deluge,
Well, let's just suppose we have a 1.5 km asteroid of ice, impacting at 27 km/s, 60 degrees, into saturated land (that is, Persian gulf). So that yields 6x10^20 Joules.
Now, let's guess that half of that energy goes into heating the water, and that the area of heating is over 3 times the initial crater diameter (so a diameter of 50 km, average depth 50 m). So that's 9x10^10 cubic m, or 9x10^19 ml, and the water heats about 3 degrees celsius, average.
Of course, in the direct area of the blast, it heats a lot more.
Come to think of it, yeah, that probably could create a pretty good sized hurricane.
... bomb.
I wonder if they are recasting a bug as a feature.
It would be oh, so appropriate on Windows machines, I think.
Actually, I'd like replacement harnesses.
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Quite simply, a while back I had an older car. It developed an electrical problem, and when I went in to get it fixed, they told me they'd have to start working through the whole electrical harness to find it. In the end, I decided to live with the problem.
Now, these guys weren't great, I'm sure, but there is something fundamentally flawed with the current system of electrical harness. Ideally, the harness should be easy to maintain, not requiring you to rip out molding everywhere.
So let's try some standards: First, let's have color coded wires. We need black for ground, pink for 5 V, red for 12 V, and Orange for anything higher. Negative voltages have a single black stripe along them. Positive are unstriped.
Periodically, on the insulation wires, are resistor type markings that name the voltage.
So that handles all the power. Next, there's data. Data doesn't travel in wires per se, so much as in shielded ribbon cable.
Now, there's the switching. Get a simple chip like the 8051XA, program it to handle simple switching, pop on some Power Mosfets, and remanufacture the whole thing into a single thin, strong, electrically shielded box with a number of jacks for power and data. At about $20 per box, you could have 20 of them in and around the car.
Now, data and power can route from any of them to any other, along the existing lines. Want to buy more? Fine. Hook it up to a few others, program your onboard computer to tell the others to recognize it, and you're in.
Make it all easily user-programmable. You want to tie in some mega speakers into the back of your car? Fine. Hook them into the nearest switchbox, inform your car that they're there, and instantly you have Dolby BLAST(TM) Surround Sound. Or whatever.
Suppose two wires short out? The nearest boxes figure it out, isolate the short, and inform you of the short, the location, and what needs to be replaced. You can then go in and fix it yourself, replacing either the wires, or the box.
Anyhow, that's my basic idea.
There'd be a wonderful market for these things as aftermarket items, too. If your current electrical system goes bad, it might be cheaper just to replace the whole harness, replace your radio with a onboard computer, insert a CD to program it to your used car, and go digital.
So far, no one has found a road-and wheel combination in which the road has the same shape as the wheel. That's an intriguing challenge for mathematicians.
Hmmm... Suppose I propose a flat teflon road, and flat teflon wheels. Taking it a step farther, I might suggest an air cushion vehicle if you want a more *efficient* ride...
Mod me up for interesting, or down for stupid. Or both.
... that if you wanted a convincing response, you'd need several elements.
But first a caveat: I know nothing about this.
First, for questions that have no known answer, you'd have to run the questions by ASKJEEVES, or Google, almost as is.
Then, you'd have to analyze the respondant pages for the most commonly used words, and then see which words best correllate with the operative interrogative adverb (when? Summer, fly, geese).
That would yield a one word reply, which you could then couch in a "hint" kindof answer.
"Well, I'm not sure, but it might be sometime like the Summer"
Aside from that, to see normal chat responses, I think you'd want to simply catalogue and correllate tons of chat, google style. Then, when you get a question, feed it into a search for "best results". Then, turn around and correllate the answerer for each of these results for keywords that describe your robot. For example, if your robot is supposed to be a 27-year-old man who is a plumber by trade, then you'll have a bunch of keywords "NFL plumbing toilet tall late-twenties two-kids wife union wage". All other things being equal, you'll use a response from someone who matches more of those keywords in the rest of their conversations.
Here's what I'd like: link-back rating, and cross rating.
Essentially, with link-back rating, I hit the Google Cache. However, at the top of the page, is a link "This is appropriate" / "This is inappropriate" / "Never show me anything on this domain [enter domain]."
Now, that gives me my own rating system. But my ratings are stored along with a public ID. If I want, though, I can also say "Include my friend's ratings at [60%][50%][...] strength, along with mine."
So now, the ratings come back with not only my own limitations, but the limitations of those I trust.
Of course, this might be too processor - intensive for even Google. But it might, alternatively, work with something that was locally based, and internet-sync'ed.
As noted in another comment below, this M$ document was produced with QuarkXpress, and PDF'd from the output.
Now, QuarkXpress, by my experience, *does* have good user support. When I've had problems, they've typically been able to tell me how to solve them.
So when you're preparing a complicated document like the one we see M$ is distributing, Quark is not that bad a choice. I have to say that it's likely that Microsoft's contractor got all the tech support he needed, at a relatively low cost.
Kudos.
MS Word format is closed, and nothing successfully handles batch import/export, especially with equations, tables, and text.
Can it be done with a typewriter? Older books were.
Nowadays, books have to look like they were prepared on a computer, in order to sell. So the effort goes into the looks, instead of the content. But it's a major waste of money.
2. Yes and no. If typewriters were developed that jammed on every third key, and people everywhere were demanding "It's gotta be done on this typewriter", then yes, I would partly blame the typewriters.
But your statement leads to the very point that underlies my statement: that when your systems are wrong, introducing (more/new) technology only empowers the disasters. See my sig, and it kindof ties in.
But our current society does have major systemic problems, which most people are only beginning to notice. So the systems *are* wrong. Which means that, considering how badly we are hurting at the moment, we probably couldn't afford another major jump in technology -- it would destroy us.
If it will handle PDF and text, then already you can get all the Project Gutenberg texts, and a lot of online texts.
That alone would make it worthwhile -- but upload/download has got to be easier. USB might be good for that.
Actually, one of the things I've been doing for the last 10 years is book prepress. We started with MS Word 5.1a for Mac (pretty good for that job), but when we migrated to Word 98 as per contract requirements, document corruption tripled our time per page.
The total costs for that one problem came to $7000 in immediate expenses, $11k-$15k for lost contracts, and net damages probably totaling $30k-$45k.
Nowadays, we try to push Quark and Adobe Acrobat, but the contracts still stipulate that at least pieces of the book must be prepared in Word 98.
Now, arguably, using Word 98 at all is an incorrect use of computers. However, an awful large fraction of the population demands that exact incorrect usage.
Now, if we go on to the next phase, the time wasted making things look attractive -- I should point out that even in our best days, with Word 5.1a, we still took 30 minutes per page, total time. Of course, that includes drawing figures, page layout, and all -- but I can honestly type up a letter on a typewriter, in 5 minutes (estimate 60 wpm, 100 characters per line, 20 lines per page, 25% whitespace for a letter.) So the difference, between 5 minutes and 30 minutes, is the time wastage due to overhead involved with computers. Some of that will be bootup times; some will be system maintenance, some will be time spent with page layout -- but it all adds up.
Just out of wondering, has anybody totted up the cost of desktop computers, to the business sector alone?
The document that used to take a secretary 5 minutes to type and 1 minute to correct with white-out, now takes 25 minutes (bootup, multiple printings to make sure it's attractive, distraction of Solitaire, Network administrator's time, etc) or more.
That's just the letter.
Now consider all the time wasted by people surfing the net for useful sites like slashdot. Or blogs. Or checking email. Or logging on to the modem, for that matter. Or clearing spam.
My goodness -- how much time do we waste each day, just clearing spam? That wasn't a part of our lives before.
I think that if you tott up the cost to business of having desktop computers available, you will find that the moon program easily cost over $1 trillion dollars.
I'm going to rely on extremely faulty memory, but it seems to me it went something like this:
Regarding the war with Japan, Japan and Germany had a treaty : at war with one, at war with both. The president of the US had promised Churchill to enter the war, but had promised the citizens we'd stay out.
Regarding the cultural misunderstandings: Yamamoto specifically said how the US would react to a sneak attack. "I can give you the ocean for a year, but after that, if we have not already marched into Washington and signed an armistace, they will conquer us." So there was no misunderstanding there, anyhow.
Hmmm... Did the seller by any chance ship from Tbilisi, Georgian Republic? Did he also misrepresent where he was from, saying he was from another country entirely?
If so, he's the same guy who scammed me in the same way. I purchased a copy of Mac Quark Passport at a reasonable price, and got a OEM Windows Installation CD/Manual/hologram certification instead.
The return address was made up, but it definitely came from Tbilisi. Anyhow, I contacted paypal, and essentially they said that since he committed 5 actions that were clearly fraud, and one action which was not covered by their insurance, then therefore the fraud was not covered, and they were not going to pay anything.
Paypal itself commits fraud.
I thought it might change when Ebay bought them out, but it didn't change significantly, it seems.
According to something I read by the Libertarian Party ~1 year ago, at least some evidence released by the FOIA indicates that it wasn't so much a sneak attack, as that Roosevelt deliberately pushed Japan into it, with economic sanctions ("We are at war with Japan; we now need to convince them to fire the first shot"), and was aware of when and where the attack would come.
Whether that account is true or not, I cannot be sure.
However, I have to say that I find it very believable. About as believable, say, as Rumsfield explaining on 9/11 "We have to go after Iraq, because Afghanistan has no real targets".
Again, I don't know whether that account is true, either -- though I heard it on ABC News today. I just find it quite believable, given all the evidence I've seen.
The moon's orbit is everywhere concave towards the Sun. Therefore, the moon is a satellite of the Sun, and not a satellite of the earth. As such, perhaps it should be called a member of a binary planetary system.
Okay, imagine a TIVO that could store multiple copies of the same movie, identify them as the same movie, and then during its spare time compare and edit them to get (1) better resolution and rendering, (2) compress and eliminate the ads more accurately, for play at the end or beginning of the show (or all at once in the middle, as an intermission). (3) record the number of copies that it has so that the machine is never in violation of copyright.
(I'm sure this could already be done with music from the radio.)
If you can't give a pen, it would seem to me that the proper "gift" would be a magnetic business card with your business' product and contact info on it.
Such a thing is useless for anything except reminding them of whom you are. If they don't want it, they can and will throw it away. If they do want it, it's your advertisement, and nothing more.
Re:No infringement required; allegations are enoug
on
EU Passes Nasty IP Law
·
· Score: 1
Relax. Learn to garden. Stay out of the cities.
These companies are full of managers who think that they are able to circumvent natural law. Like the person who is conviced they can fly, and jumps off a cliff, they can circumvent natural law.
But in the end, things are going to fall apart. Meanwhile, that's a good time to know how to garden, for two reasons: (1) you can stop using the companies' products when it seems advisable to do so, because gardening can be quite entertaining in and of itself, and (2) you don't depend on the companies to live.
Meanwhile, aside from that, do your best to live as justly and peacably as you can, both with your neighbors and with strangers. You never know when the dividends will pay off.
Quite simply, the government is a battleground for different powers, be they the populace, wealthy individuals, wise counsel, charismatic leaders, or whatnot.
Traditionally, each of these powers has created its own government, which lasted for a short while. When recognized by a government, the power is controlled, and you don't have illegitimate control over the government by that power.
However, when a power isn't recognized, then it can overwhelm the government, and cause it to fall in a characteristic fashion.
Ignore the populace, and you get a French-style revolution. (We have Congress).
Ignore the charismatic leader, and you get a coup. (We have the President).
Ignore the wise counsel, and you get civil disorder (we have the supreme court).
Ignore the press, and you get a government that loses its grip on reality. (We have a press).
Ignore groups of like-thinking individuals, and you get balkanization (we have the Senate, though it used to function better when economic interest varied more by state than by profession).
Ignore money, and you get essentially bribery undermining every part of the government.
We have nothing to recognize money.
Thus, money is undermining our government.
The solution, perhaps, is to have a 3rd house of Congress, one in which the seats are auctioned off, one per year for a full year, to be filled by a citizen of the choice of the winner, and which has its own power of veto.
But until you have something like that, yes, money is going to undermine your government.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, go over to www.growbiointensive.org, and buy their book. Use it to learn how to grow your own food. Then LEASE -- don't buy -- a 5-acre piece of farmland for 50 years. (50 years x 5 acres x $30/acre = $7500). Get it going with biointensive farming, and feed yourself.
Forget working for others, until you get a decent offer. Forget about buying all of the latest and greatest, and keeping up with the Joneses and helping the economy.
If our country's shakers and movers (both economic and government) do not see fit to pay a family wage, then they shouldn't expect to do business with the rest of us. Working for a wage is like any other business transaction: if the transaction is not profitable to all involved, it shouldn't happen.
I'm really serious. Besides that, you can take your farming skills with you wherever you go, and really supplement your lifestyle.
Gold is backed by lots of uses. It is valuable for use in photographic film chemicals; for its low resistance (in computer chip wires); for its low melting temperature (in jewelry); for its chemical properties (to stimulate some reactions).
And yes, the (asian) Indians do eat it. They pound either Gold or Silver into an extremely thin foil, then wrap their medicines in it, and swallow it. Likewise, in the Bible the children of Israel had to eat their golden false god calf.
Gold is also especially useful as a retirement and security account for Indian women. Their jewelry doubles as cash, if need be.
Gold is still valuable. On the other hand, one might ask what the US dollar is backed by. Some would say "the US economy". More knowledgable people might perhaps say "the fact that OPEC takes dollars". Yet others would say "the Japanese economy, which buys up dollars to obtain a favorable balance of trade." My brother would say "the requirement by the US government for us to pay our taxes in dollars." I'm not sure... but I'd bet that Gold has more inherent value than US dollars.
A patent is a gun that costs $10000 to buy, and a million dollars to shoot. You've just solved the $10k problem -- for New Zealand only. If you want a worldwide patent, you still have to pay out that $10k.
Kindof reminds me of the lightbulb. According to Scientific American, Edison's notebook includes a cutout article about Swan's use of a carbon filament. On the next page, "It works!"
http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/SWAN_BIO.html
Anyhow, Swan managed to maintain his patents in England, but Edison essentially won for the rest of the world. So I guess that a NZ patent would be okay in NZ.
Except that to reasonably defend a NZ patent, you probably have to be a NZ resident...
Let's face it. The powerless are not going to use power to steal power from the powerful. It just ain't gonna happen.
Merchant has got to be for Venus (Merchant of Venus, 5 players, no worms, anyone?)
Yeah, this is a nice, really nice start. However, what would you get from an asteroid impact in the Persian Gulf? What I'd really like, would be to put in different parameters, and then see what the radial blast effects would be. And include in that, what you get in terms of thermal warming of the water, and the resulting storm? With the flirst glow of dawn, A black cloud rose up from the horizon. Inside it Adad (god of storm and rain) thunders, While Shallat and Hanish (Heralds of Adad) go in front, Moving as heralds over hill and plain. Erragal (Nergal, the god of the netherworld) tears out the posts (out of the dam); Forth comes Ninurta and causes the dikes to follow. The Anunnaki lift up the torches, Setting the land ablaze with their glare. Consternation over Adad reaches to the heavens, Turning to blackness all that had been light. The wide land was shattered like a pot! For one day the south-storm blew, Gathering speed as it blew, submerging the mountains, Overtaking the people like a battle. No one can see his fellow, Nor can the people be recognized from heaven. The gods were frightened by the deluge, Well, let's just suppose we have a 1.5 km asteroid of ice, impacting at 27 km/s, 60 degrees, into saturated land (that is, Persian gulf). So that yields 6x10^20 Joules. Now, let's guess that half of that energy goes into heating the water, and that the area of heating is over 3 times the initial crater diameter (so a diameter of 50 km, average depth 50 m). So that's 9x10^10 cubic m, or 9x10^19 ml, and the water heats about 3 degrees celsius, average. Of course, in the direct area of the blast, it heats a lot more. Come to think of it, yeah, that probably could create a pretty good sized hurricane.
... bomb. I wonder if they are recasting a bug as a feature. It would be oh, so appropriate on Windows machines, I think.
Quite simply, a while back I had an older car. It developed an electrical problem, and when I went in to get it fixed, they told me they'd have to start working through the whole electrical harness to find it. In the end, I decided to live with the problem.
Now, these guys weren't great, I'm sure, but there is something fundamentally flawed with the current system of electrical harness. Ideally, the harness should be easy to maintain, not requiring you to rip out molding everywhere.
So let's try some standards: First, let's have color coded wires. We need black for ground, pink for 5 V, red for 12 V, and Orange for anything higher. Negative voltages have a single black stripe along them. Positive are unstriped.
Periodically, on the insulation wires, are resistor type markings that name the voltage.
So that handles all the power. Next, there's data. Data doesn't travel in wires per se, so much as in shielded ribbon cable.
Now, there's the switching. Get a simple chip like the 8051XA, program it to handle simple switching, pop on some Power Mosfets, and remanufacture the whole thing into a single thin, strong, electrically shielded box with a number of jacks for power and data. At about $20 per box, you could have 20 of them in and around the car.
Now, data and power can route from any of them to any other, along the existing lines. Want to buy more? Fine. Hook it up to a few others, program your onboard computer to tell the others to recognize it, and you're in.
Make it all easily user-programmable. You want to tie in some mega speakers into the back of your car? Fine. Hook them into the nearest switchbox, inform your car that they're there, and instantly you have Dolby BLAST(TM) Surround Sound. Or whatever.
Suppose two wires short out? The nearest boxes figure it out, isolate the short, and inform you of the short, the location, and what needs to be replaced. You can then go in and fix it yourself, replacing either the wires, or the box.
Anyhow, that's my basic idea.
There'd be a wonderful market for these things as aftermarket items, too. If your current electrical system goes bad, it might be cheaper just to replace the whole harness, replace your radio with a onboard computer, insert a CD to program it to your used car, and go digital.
Hmmm... Suppose I propose a flat teflon road, and flat teflon wheels. Taking it a step farther, I might suggest an air cushion vehicle if you want a more *efficient* ride... Mod me up for interesting, or down for stupid. Or both.
... that if you wanted a convincing response, you'd need several elements. But first a caveat: I know nothing about this. First, for questions that have no known answer, you'd have to run the questions by ASKJEEVES, or Google, almost as is. Then, you'd have to analyze the respondant pages for the most commonly used words, and then see which words best correllate with the operative interrogative adverb (when? Summer, fly, geese). That would yield a one word reply, which you could then couch in a "hint" kindof answer. "Well, I'm not sure, but it might be sometime like the Summer" Aside from that, to see normal chat responses, I think you'd want to simply catalogue and correllate tons of chat, google style. Then, when you get a question, feed it into a search for "best results". Then, turn around and correllate the answerer for each of these results for keywords that describe your robot. For example, if your robot is supposed to be a 27-year-old man who is a plumber by trade, then you'll have a bunch of keywords "NFL plumbing toilet tall late-twenties two-kids wife union wage". All other things being equal, you'll use a response from someone who matches more of those keywords in the rest of their conversations.
Here's what I'd like: link-back rating, and cross rating.
Essentially, with link-back rating, I hit the Google Cache. However, at the top of the page, is a link "This is appropriate" / "This is inappropriate" / "Never show me anything on this domain [enter domain]."
Now, that gives me my own rating system. But my ratings are stored along with a public ID. If I want, though, I can also say "Include my friend's ratings at [60%][50%][...] strength, along with mine."
So now, the ratings come back with not only my own limitations, but the limitations of those I trust.
Of course, this might be too processor - intensive for even Google. But it might, alternatively, work with something that was locally based, and internet-sync'ed.
As noted in another comment below, this M$ document was produced with QuarkXpress, and PDF'd from the output. Now, QuarkXpress, by my experience, *does* have good user support. When I've had problems, they've typically been able to tell me how to solve them. So when you're preparing a complicated document like the one we see M$ is distributing, Quark is not that bad a choice. I have to say that it's likely that Microsoft's contractor got all the tech support he needed, at a relatively low cost. Kudos.
The last one, "Transfer to another university". Aaah. Now we don't have to deal with that open-office guy anymore....
I'm sure you meant it that way...
MS Word format is closed, and nothing successfully handles batch import/export, especially with equations, tables, and text.
Can it be done with a typewriter? Older books were.
Nowadays, books have to look like they were prepared on a computer, in order to sell. So the effort goes into the looks, instead of the content. But it's a major waste of money.
2. Yes and no. If typewriters were developed that jammed on every third key, and people everywhere were demanding "It's gotta be done on this typewriter", then yes, I would partly blame the typewriters.
But your statement leads to the very point that underlies my statement: that when your systems are wrong, introducing (more/new) technology only empowers the disasters. See my sig, and it kindof ties in.
But our current society does have major systemic problems, which most people are only beginning to notice. So the systems *are* wrong. Which means that, considering how badly we are hurting at the moment, we probably couldn't afford another major jump in technology -- it would destroy us.
If it will handle PDF and text, then already you can get all the Project Gutenberg texts, and a lot of online texts. That alone would make it worthwhile -- but upload/download has got to be easier. USB might be good for that.
Actually, one of the things I've been doing for the last 10 years is book prepress. We started with MS Word 5.1a for Mac (pretty good for that job), but when we migrated to Word 98 as per contract requirements, document corruption tripled our time per page.
The total costs for that one problem came to $7000 in immediate expenses, $11k-$15k for lost contracts, and net damages probably totaling $30k-$45k.
Nowadays, we try to push Quark and Adobe Acrobat, but the contracts still stipulate that at least pieces of the book must be prepared in Word 98.
Now, arguably, using Word 98 at all is an incorrect use of computers. However, an awful large fraction of the population demands that exact incorrect usage.
Now, if we go on to the next phase, the time wasted making things look attractive -- I should point out that even in our best days, with Word 5.1a, we still took 30 minutes per page, total time. Of course, that includes drawing figures, page layout, and all -- but I can honestly type up a letter on a typewriter, in 5 minutes (estimate 60 wpm, 100 characters per line, 20 lines per page, 25% whitespace for a letter.) So the difference, between 5 minutes and 30 minutes, is the time wastage due to overhead involved with computers. Some of that will be bootup times; some will be system maintenance, some will be time spent with page layout -- but it all adds up.
Just out of wondering, has anybody totted up the cost of desktop computers, to the business sector alone?
The document that used to take a secretary 5 minutes to type and 1 minute to correct with white-out, now takes 25 minutes (bootup, multiple printings to make sure it's attractive, distraction of Solitaire, Network administrator's time, etc) or more.
That's just the letter.
Now consider all the time wasted by people surfing the net for useful sites like slashdot. Or blogs. Or checking email. Or logging on to the modem, for that matter. Or clearing spam.
My goodness -- how much time do we waste each day, just clearing spam? That wasn't a part of our lives before.
I think that if you tott up the cost to business of having desktop computers available, you will find that the moon program easily cost over $1 trillion dollars.
I'm going to rely on extremely faulty memory, but it seems to me it went something like this: Regarding the war with Japan, Japan and Germany had a treaty : at war with one, at war with both. The president of the US had promised Churchill to enter the war, but had promised the citizens we'd stay out. Regarding the cultural misunderstandings: Yamamoto specifically said how the US would react to a sneak attack. "I can give you the ocean for a year, but after that, if we have not already marched into Washington and signed an armistace, they will conquer us." So there was no misunderstanding there, anyhow.
Hmmm... Did the seller by any chance ship from Tbilisi, Georgian Republic? Did he also misrepresent where he was from, saying he was from another country entirely?
If so, he's the same guy who scammed me in the same way. I purchased a copy of Mac Quark Passport at a reasonable price, and got a OEM Windows Installation CD/Manual/hologram certification instead.
The return address was made up, but it definitely came from Tbilisi. Anyhow, I contacted paypal, and essentially they said that since he committed 5 actions that were clearly fraud, and one action which was not covered by their insurance, then therefore the fraud was not covered, and they were not going to pay anything.
Paypal itself commits fraud.
I thought it might change when Ebay bought them out, but it didn't change significantly, it seems.
I was waiting for a new Stable version after Woody, I guess, 2 years ago. Eventually, I sortof gave up.
This article seems to imply that such a release is actually going to happen.
Is it?
According to something I read by the Libertarian Party ~1 year ago, at least some evidence released by the FOIA indicates that it wasn't so much a sneak attack, as that Roosevelt deliberately pushed Japan into it, with economic sanctions ("We are at war with Japan; we now need to convince them to fire the first shot"), and was aware of when and where the attack would come.
Whether that account is true or not, I cannot be sure.
However, I have to say that I find it very believable. About as believable, say, as Rumsfield explaining on 9/11 "We have to go after Iraq, because Afghanistan has no real targets".
Again, I don't know whether that account is true, either -- though I heard it on ABC News today. I just find it quite believable, given all the evidence I've seen.
The moon's orbit is everywhere concave towards the Sun. Therefore, the moon is a satellite of the Sun, and not a satellite of the earth. As such, perhaps it should be called a member of a binary planetary system.
Okay, imagine a TIVO that could store multiple copies of the same movie, identify them as the same movie, and then during its spare time compare and edit them to get (1) better resolution and rendering, (2) compress and eliminate the ads more accurately, for play at the end or beginning of the show (or all at once in the middle, as an intermission). (3) record the number of copies that it has so that the machine is never in violation of copyright.
(I'm sure this could already be done with music from the radio.)
There are always applications.
If you can't give a pen, it would seem to me that the proper "gift" would be a magnetic business card with your business' product and contact info on it. Such a thing is useless for anything except reminding them of whom you are. If they don't want it, they can and will throw it away. If they do want it, it's your advertisement, and nothing more.
Relax. Learn to garden. Stay out of the cities.
These companies are full of managers who think that they are able to circumvent natural law. Like the person who is conviced they can fly, and jumps off a cliff, they can circumvent natural law.
But in the end, things are going to fall apart. Meanwhile, that's a good time to know how to garden, for two reasons: (1) you can stop using the companies' products when it seems advisable to do so, because gardening can be quite entertaining in and of itself, and (2) you don't depend on the companies to live.
Meanwhile, aside from that, do your best to live as justly and peacably as you can, both with your neighbors and with strangers. You never know when the dividends will pay off.
Quite simply, the government is a battleground for different powers, be they the populace, wealthy individuals, wise counsel, charismatic leaders, or whatnot.
Traditionally, each of these powers has created its own government, which lasted for a short while. When recognized by a government, the power is controlled, and you don't have illegitimate control over the government by that power.
However, when a power isn't recognized, then it can overwhelm the government, and cause it to fall in a characteristic fashion.
Ignore the populace, and you get a French-style revolution. (We have Congress).
Ignore the charismatic leader, and you get a coup. (We have the President).
Ignore the wise counsel, and you get civil disorder (we have the supreme court).
Ignore the press, and you get a government that loses its grip on reality. (We have a press).
Ignore groups of like-thinking individuals, and you get balkanization (we have the Senate, though it used to function better when economic interest varied more by state than by profession).
Ignore money, and you get essentially bribery undermining every part of the government.
We have nothing to recognize money.
Thus, money is undermining our government.
The solution, perhaps, is to have a 3rd house of Congress, one in which the seats are auctioned off, one per year for a full year, to be filled by a citizen of the choice of the winner, and which has its own power of veto.
But until you have something like that, yes, money is going to undermine your government.