Lucas wrote the Indiana Jones story and gave it to Spielburg...
Oh no! It just hit me. Self-important suburban weirdo starts out by doing semi "extreme" stuff on social themes that are at their brief height.
Then gets rich with crowd-pleasing pap with great production values.
Does key underacknowledged seminal work for other, more "normal" artists.
Builds his own studio with entire self-contained universe and proceeds to make worse and worse shlock for an ever more disappointed audience.
Studio becomes leading-edge presence as tool-creator due to work of others who are kept obscure as long as possible.
Makes key missteps on race issues and shows how out of touch he has become.
Puts out more product meant to show that he is into the latest trends and, as he goes back to being involved in every aspect of production, accomplishes just the opposite.
It wouln't surprise me if credits are shortened down and a web address is added to the end saying:
"for a full list see this web address: http://bigbuxmovie.com/credits
Cool! I'ld go! I was allegedly in the credits of some anime thing recently and didn't have the time to see the movie. I'ld LOVE to have a site like that. I might even pay for membership.
Anybody from iMDb on this thread?
Rustin
And besides, when was the last time you paid very close attention to the credits anyway?
Silly, silly person. Lots of us. Personally, like probably a third or more of the posters to this thread, I *always* stay to watch the credits. If I'm with friends it's even more self-evident as at least one of us is checking to see what computers were used, where they shot that scene, was a friend on the F/X team. etc.
Well.......
User groups. Bars (yes, there are tech bars), church or synagogue (if you are so inclined), political activism, volunteering, temping, getting a scut job (a.k.a. working in a bookstore, restaurant, or coffee house) that puts you in contact with good folks.
You have to be creative.
Of course, there's always that teeny leetle problem of making enough to pay rent and such while working the scut jobs and doing the volunteering and hanging out with the people who can get you the real jobs. Can't help ya there. Try putting fresh lime juice, peanut butter, bean sprouts, and scallions on your ramen. It'll taste better.
Anyway, you're in northern CA? Have you tried Craig's List?
Rustin
So, by your reasoning, they don't have a right to a "fair" profit for work that they don't do. Like the information published by the government. So, why does the governments gives them a monopoly for what they don't do?
Huh?
Ya know, if I could figure out what you're asking, I'ld respond.
Please reboot and try again. Rustin
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat.
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat.
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat.
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat
I'm sorry, I *know* that this isn't your intent, but that sounds like a perfect chorus for half the punk music I've heard over the years.
Can't you just hear it?
Heat the cheap, fatty meat. (badam, thump!)
Cool the cheap, fatty meat (kabam, bam!)
(wave of nasty guitars and energetic screaming)
As for kebob places, try Brooklyn or even MacDougal Street.
Oh, and btw, about the "foreigner" crack, even beyond what other have already pointed out about regulatory and training counters for that, bugger off.
In my experience "foreigners" are *more* willing then "real" "Americans" or "Britishers" to find out what the relevant procedure is and follow it. I believe the Snowcrash consult-the-binder scenes articulate this far better then I ever will.
Rustin
Re:Um, you've never lived in New York, have you?
on
Step 2, Groceries
·
· Score: 2
I have been wracking my brain, and I cannot think of a place in Manhattan where you are more than 4 blocks from a grocey store.
Well, if you include absurdly high-priced bodegas with terrible selection and no fresh stuff to speak of, then maybe. But otherwise . ..
-the entirety of Manhattan east of Avenue B
-most of Inwood (a few places here and there but terrible)
-parts of Harlem (even C-Town has areas they won't cover)
-the area around Wall Street (yep, quite a few people living there these days; they converted a bunch of old office buildings in the late 90's)
-all those huge housing projects along the edge of the Loisada (such as the eastern edge of Confucius Park or whatever they call it now) and otherwise most of the eastern edge of the city starting north of South Street Seaport and south of 11th.
-some stretches of Fifth Avenue (after all, 5th and Park forbid grocery stores and Madison is sketchy)
In other words, the poorest sections, those with huge housing complexes (some quite middle class now), and the wealthiest areas when "esthetics" have won out.
Of course with Chelsea Market, C-Town, and (ironically) the 131st Street Fairway, the blank spots have shrunk a lot but if you've got the flu, are older or infirm, or simply aren't up to a significant walk on a miserable winter/summer day, there are plenty of reasons that getting groceries could be a big deal.
Also, keep in mind that for a lot of us we may be getting home at 2:00 in the morning for days or even weeks at a time. If Gristedes, Food Emporium, and Associated end their price/feature war (which is quite likely given what's happening to New York's economy and what happened to the CVS/Rite Aide/DuaneReade/Love Stores price war) then all the stores that have started having late night hours will probably stop doing so and we'll be thoroughly screwed. Much easier to shop online and just answer the door for the delivery person while getting dressed in the morning then to have to find shopping time during conventional hours.
Frankly, for me, I'm all over the city anyway, always have a copious shoulder bag, and am used to carrying heavy loads. So I do my shopping mostly in Chinatown or on 32nd Street. But I remember my consulting days well and wish that this had been around then. I was very marginally involved in one of the online grocer attempts a while back (mostly not in the U.S.) and was very much hoping that they would get their act together. I'm thrilled to see the Fairway folk step in as (other than Western Beef) they are far and away the best at entering new markets with excellent quality, good prices, and superb selection. And, of course, how could I be unhappy to see somebody online actually turning a proper profit?
Sitting here looking out at the cold, windy, rainy, dark Manhattan weather (with, by the way, dangerous levels of traffic and high speed drivers even on this, a Sunday afternoon) and wondering why people are having so much trouble understanding the viability of this,
Rustin
Re:Um, you've never lived in New York, have you?
on
Step 2, Groceries
·
· Score: 2
Do us all a favor, Bop, LOOK at what Fairway offers and THEN bitch.
Speaking as somebody who has been paid for his knowledge about food AND somebody with regular access to restaurant supplies AND somebody who has GROWN significant parts of his food for over ten years IN A MANHATTAN APARTMENT AND somebody who almost certainly knows more then you do about where to get fresh produce in this city, Fairway and anything run by them is bound to have fresher, healthier options then anything near where most New Yorkers live, from veggie burgers to flash-frozen greens, to fresh fruits to soy milk to baked goods to olive oil to steak.
You wanna claim that Hain's is unacceptable? How about Health Valley? Ecover? Amy's? Seventh Generation? Artisanal bakeries? Fairway has all of them. With better variety then Healthy Pleasures (on average), Commodities, or whoever your local store may be.
Welcome to slashdot. Here we learn that you should have FACTS before you expect to be taken seriously.
Stop knee jerking and get a damned clue.
The battle is not between us and Al Queda, or us and the corporations, but between us and our managers.
Um. Not quite. Much though I understand your sentiment (look at my post above to see just how pissed I am), one problem does not simply cancel out the other. There are any number of foul and destructive things in the world. Our kleptocratic government/corporations are one problem.
Anti-progress violent reactionaries are another.
Just because there are dangerous sleaze here doesn't mean that the existence of dangerous sleaze elsewhere is somehow less real or urgent.
Yeah, it sucks. We're in a multifront war and we've handed the keys to our defense against one enemy to another enemy. Good thing the actual military is still on our side.
Oh, and by the way, simple answers like "just elect angry people with a grudge against the current power structure" is how the even worse tyrannies get created.
Look into the history of Nazi Germany. The Nazis said all sorts of things in the twenties and thirties that were very convincingly anti-corporate. Same for Mussolini and, *ahem*, Saddam Hussein.
No simple answers, folks. No quick fixes. You can't clean a two bedroom house in one step. We certainly can't clean up a three hundred person nation in one.
Rustin
A friend of mine recently pointed out that a staggering new doctrine has been slowly weaseling its way into American minds for decades now. That is the belief that businesses have a right to a "fair" profit for work that they do.
It's the spread of cost-plus contracting doctrine.
Think about it.
Increasingly companies have been getting away with portraying big business a some sort of glorious activity for the good of society (Think Chrysler bailout or protectionism for U.S. steel companies.)
Here in New York restaurants have gotten away with having almost all the street vendors shut down or regulated out of existence because it was "unfair" for some poverty income immigrant pooling the money of twenty relatives to sell tasty kebobs on a street corner and undercut the prices of snotty wealthy restaurants charging airport-style prices for food that customers (like me) didn't want anyway.
As far as I'm concerned our current regime is out of the closet by now. They are anti-capitalist and anti-productivity. True free market capitalism would take away their Microsoft-type profits and true productivity gains tend to come from the sorts of small companies that don't get favors from the Bushes and Cheneys and Powells.
Me? I'm the founder of a small business that sells formatted information to pay the bills. I'm well aware that to Reed-Elsevier, Time Warner, Westlaw, and their ilk I'm a street vendor cutting into their profits. In fact, if you take the story of the Steves offering their designs to Atari, that pretty well describes what happened to me with T/W and McGraw-Hill. They turned 'em down, now I'm doing it on my own. I plan to fight the dirty bastards right down to the goddamn wire.
Deal with it, people. The American public has elected a bunch of crooks who are systematically reshaping our country as their whore. Better get used to bending over and spreading wide.
Rustin H. Wright
Founder, Reed&Wright
Former techie/consultant to the publishing business (Harcourt-Brace, Houghton-Mifflin, Scholastic, J.Crew, Bantam Doubleday Dell, Gruener and Jahr, Capital Cities, etc. etc. etc.)
Even aside from how massively useful this project is (see my post above), if you *really* want to talk money then think of it this way. Honeybee Robotics is on Elizabeth street, south of Houston. Go to MapQuest and take a look. It's close enough to the WTC site to have been utterly shut off last year for the better part of two months. It's also rght across town from Hoberman (makers of the expanding sphere that ThinkGeek has featured) and a few blocks from Lafayette, which is home to a dying and desperate community of tech folks.
Less then ten years ago you could go to Canal Street (about ten blocks south of Honeybee) and find an amazing group of tech stores, with everything from circuit boards, occilliscopes, and soldering irons to rod and sheet stock to 1920's vacuum processing equipment and Bakelite insulators.
Almost all of that is gone now because New York's culture (and government) gives no support to real techies who use things like drill presses and assembler code. While they were feeding vast piles of money into Silicon Alley and calling people working in Flash and Visual Basic "engineers", people like Honeybee have been treated like shit.
Oh, and btw, when the WTC stuff happened and all the cash was being handed out, not a dollar went to a single techie I know, despite the fact that we were among the hardest hit. When I tried to explain this to people from FEMA and the Mayor's office all that I got were blank looks and *more* blather about dot.com jobs.
So I say hell yeah! Let's see some support for tech in New York for a change. We've earned it.
-Rustin
Robotic drills huh? looks like someone has once again "Bullshitted NASA"
You don't have to work with conduit, do you?
For those of us with a clue this is insanely great stuff. Think about it, take one of these, modify it to lay tape (that, btw, being the flat cord one pulls through conduit to later pull in the cable) and spray in a coat of high-strength concrete behind it, making instant channel and and for once putting a below-ground line across a corporate campus is no big deal.
I've been expecting these for years and will predict here that within ten years every major urban area will have places that rent these puppies by the day. It will be a hell of a lot cheaper then having to pay some crew of halfwits to dig a trench, pour concrete or lay pipe, put in the cable, put the dirt back, and then have to resod.
Guaranteed that within ten years every organization that does lots of suburban facilities work, from the telcos to McDonalds will be using these things as much as lawyers use Federal Express. Not only that, but like FedEx, they''ll wonder how they ever worked without them.
Oh, btw, have I mentioned what a HUGE difference this will make for techies building homes in out-of-the way places? Bought a chunk of land with no phone/cable/sewer for half a mile? If you can get the right of-way, it's just not gonna matter that much anymore.
Diesel engines stink, you say? Not if they're biodiesel!
What could be better than getting to drive an SUV *and* clean up McDonald's waste (using up their old fryer oil) at the same time? It's the ultimate in American!
Some of us have long since figured out that if your post is rejected, then turn it into a journal entry. If your ideas are good then people will come by, if they're bad, then they won't.
Based on your heds, if you were to post Not re-writing, but writing a NEW Constitution, We Know Where You Are and We Are Coming For You..., Where do you think you're going....citizen?, Architectural renaissance in Communities?, and maybe Heckle the (ex)-President, Lose your 1st Amendment as journal entries (and, btw, stopping doing your bitching as an AC) then maybe I'ld drop by and take a look.
Anyway, as people keep pointing out, big though it may seem,/. is still, basically a tiny little profitless forum run by the whims of a handful of Midwestern geekboys and they've never claimed any different. Traffic is vast, content is massive, but that's it. Don't like it? Start your own damn web site, see how easy it is. Rustin
So, I'm curious, have you ever considered getting a goat? I would love to see a time when there is a suburban goat population, with one for every, what, fifty people? You can be damned sure that the goat will handle your compound-breakdown needs. Maybe a few pigs too for the local schools and restaurants.
I'm not even going to get into the zoning problems here. Let's just say that I'me well aware of them.
Anyway, this gives me the FIRST EVER LEGITIMATE SLASHDOT REASON to mention goatsex. heh, heh, heh.
Who says that living in a townhouse precludes gardening? I ive in an apartment and do all sorts of stuff, even beyond the terrace garden. I've got three words for you:
-Grow lights (or blue and white LEDs if you're going high-tech and low-power usage)
-sweater boxes (they're cheap, watertight, big, and lightweight)
and . ..
-intense cultivation. It's amazing what you can grow in small spaces when you put your mind to it. Think of it as coding for a low-RAM environment.
If what you're worried about is weight then check out light-weight soils using stuff like shredded styrofoam.
If you mean the one that I think you do, it was caused by the LC having an '020 but no FPU. The problem was that ALL Microsoft software had an "optimization" routine that, if it detected an '020 on application launch configured to route to the FPU that they "knew" would be there. After all, on earlier Macs, if it had an '020 it was a Mac II or equiv. This routine was even in MS Word.
This code was written *after* Apple had very publicly and explicitly said that they were coming out with the LC line which would have the contrary setup. MS still considered it not their problem and tried to require a paid upgrade to fix it until they got caught and, sullenly, resentfully, made a patch.
It was this very incident, and the way that it utterly shut down my use of my brand-new beautiful little baby (I have always considered the LC line the VW Beetle of computers) that took my feelings about MS from vaguely formed annoyance and ill-ease to disgust and contempt.
And yeah, if you didn't know why it seemed insane that a machine with new software and no problems that any diagnostic could find would just crash, either on launch or shortly after launch of such basic, ubiquitious, and "trustworthy" software. I knew some people who refused to believe it, because why would a word processor or paint program (remember MSWorks?) refuse to work without an FPU?
Grumble, bitch, Redmond, lying, cheap shortcut making, mblgrmblshdldmbldmrmbl........ Rustin
I just want to make it clear that with this level of knowledge of ST stuff, you folks are beginning to scare me. And I thought *I* was bad having (and kinda reading) a copy of the Kinglon-English dictionary.
it's great to see our homeland defense money going towards counterterrorism. i think i've figured out their reasoning. since this monumental discovery can rid our society of warts, whenever we see some shady guy at the airport, all we have to do is check him for warts. from here on, having warts == terrorist (or shady tourist. eitherway, go home!)
No! No! No! You're not getting it *at all*! This is actually superb information and utterly crucial for fighting terrorists.
If you see (wart/shady guy at airport) then cover (wart/shady guy) in such a way as to prevent any air from reaching worrysome area. Leave (wart/shady guy) without oxygen for six days and clean off any dead residue. Repeat several times or until all signs of threat are gone.
See? Our military has come through again.
Rustin
You know. that's so *obviously* bogus that I stopped to define why and found that, hmmmmm, it might make sense at that. However, you'll have to work on your math a bit. The Beltway region is *way* too big for ten people and, after all, there are thousands of snipers who have spent months, if not, years, in the area already and wouldn't need any basic orientation.
So how about this: The local authorities agree to pay for a three day conference for *five hundred* snipers, including seminars, a mini-expo, chat groups, and a couple thousand dollars towards subsidised meals/drinks, whatever. They go to local hotels, conference centers, bars, gun stores, and restaurants and ask them to volunteer discounts and/or space.
Every military or police qualified sniper is invited, $50 (or $100, or whatever) stipend for attendance offered for any snipers currently employed as such in uniformed service or high-end training program.
Then . . . day two of the gathering has the attendees divided up into teams of, say, three, that then scour the entire area and determine optimum cache sites (don't assume that the slimebag isn't using any), vulnerable points, shooting spots, etc. and at the end of the day everybody hands in their data. Design it so that each team's search sector overlaps partially with adjacent sectors to maximize competitiveness.
When it's all over, some smaller number of snipers stay there, active but low-profile and smoke the disgusting coward out.
I'll betcha that given a staff of ten, twenty volunteers, twenty thousand dollars expense money, and the authority of the local police I could have the first attendees checking in by next Monday morning.
BTW, has *nobody* noticed that this whole things is gonna get hairy in a whole new way soon at this rate? Keep in mind that the 26th is scheduled to be a HUGE anti-war rally in DC. So, extra-twitchy cops, massive traffic snarls, an obstructive federal government, angry protesters, add media misinformation, stir, and get....? Guaranteed to be a circus indeed.
Rustin
Yeah, I've looked into that a bit already. I'm taking the field techie approach on that front. Specifically, people I respect are working on it so I'm flagging it as dealt with. I figure that with the sea launch platform people *and* the Tonga people *and* the (minor but still out there) Guyana people *and* the overall and very competent (and relentless) work of the private space community to get these regs publicized and changed this current annoyance is as likely to get dealt with as many other obstacles.
Yep, that's right. I've looked a major problem, decided that it's not in my field and that somebody's on it and concluded "not my job, buddy". Very unslashdot.
Rustin
The spinning and jumping is called the Leidenfrost (sp?) effect and will happen any time you've got little bits of something sitting on a plane of something else with a big enough temperature range between them to cause one to create a vapor barrier. It's pretty much the same thing you see with water on a hot skillet. In high school I used to work in a bio lab (at NYU, not at our high school) where the staff was mostly very young and we had lots of toys. So we used to cool our tea by pouring in little bits of liquid nitrogen. If you did it right the stuff twisted around in a very satisfactory way as both were liquids with a significant skin (i.e. decent surface tension) and each would deform the other. Much fun.
As for our local crazed science teacher he did his best demos with thermite. Wow. Only time I've ever seen something burn through asbestos. Also much fun.
All of this talk is making me want to start cooking up happy juice and join the purple finger brigade
Rustin
Back when I was a wee lad (well, a pyromaniacal wee lad) we kept sodium under a layer of oil. In other words, sodium metal can be stored and moved pretty effectively in a bottle of mineral oil. I seem to remember that the bottles were always the light-reducing brown ones but I remember not why.
Sooooo....... you mostly fill a large-mouthed container (let's say an empty food-service multi-gallon can) with oil and drop your bottle of sodium into that. Dip the end of your tools into the oil and leave them for a while so that they are free of bubbles and then use tools to open the bottle and release the sodium into the open but big can. Drop the can (carefully) into the lake, where the oil will rise, the sodium will drop and KERBLOOEY!
Slashdot Mirror
Lucas wrote the Indiana Jones story and gave it to Spielburg...
Oh no! It just hit me. Self-important suburban weirdo starts out by doing semi "extreme" stuff on social themes that are at their brief height.
Then gets rich with crowd-pleasing pap with great production values.
Does key underacknowledged seminal work for other, more "normal" artists.
Builds his own studio with entire self-contained universe and proceeds to make worse and worse shlock for an ever more disappointed audience.
Studio becomes leading-edge presence as tool-creator due to work of others who are kept obscure as long as possible.
Makes key missteps on race issues and shows how out of touch he has become.
Puts out more product meant to show that he is into the latest trends and, as he goes back to being involved in every aspect of production, accomplishes just the opposite.
OHMYGOD! George Lucas is Prince!
It wouln't surprise me if credits are shortened down and a web address is added to the end saying:
"for a full list see this web address: http://bigbuxmovie.com/credits
Cool! I'ld go! I was allegedly in the credits of some anime thing recently and didn't have the time to see the movie. I'ld LOVE to have a site like that. I might even pay for membership.
Anybody from iMDb on this thread?
Rustin
And besides, when was the last time you paid very close attention to the credits anyway?
Silly, silly person. Lots of us. Personally, like probably a third or more of the posters to this thread, I *always* stay to watch the credits. If I'm with friends it's even more self-evident as at least one of us is checking to see what computers were used, where they shot that scene, was a friend on the F/X team. etc.
Geeks. You're on a website for geeks.
Rustin
Well.......
User groups. Bars (yes, there are tech bars), church or synagogue (if you are so inclined), political activism, volunteering, temping, getting a scut job (a.k.a. working in a bookstore, restaurant, or coffee house) that puts you in contact with good folks.
You have to be creative.
Of course, there's always that teeny leetle problem of making enough to pay rent and such while working the scut jobs and doing the volunteering and hanging out with the people who can get you the real jobs. Can't help ya there. Try putting fresh lime juice, peanut butter, bean sprouts, and scallions on your ramen. It'll taste better.
Anyway, you're in northern CA? Have you tried Craig's List?
Rustin
So, by your reasoning, they don't have a right to a "fair" profit for work that they don't do. Like the information published by the government. So, why does the governments gives them a monopoly for what they don't do?
Huh?
Ya know, if I could figure out what you're asking, I'ld respond.
Please reboot and try again.
Rustin
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat.
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat.
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat.
Heat the cheap, fatty meat.
Cool the cheap, fatty meat
I'm sorry, I *know* that this isn't your intent, but that sounds like a perfect chorus for half the punk music I've heard over the years.
Can't you just hear it?
Heat the cheap, fatty meat. (badam, thump!)
Cool the cheap, fatty meat (kabam, bam!)
(wave of nasty guitars and energetic screaming)
As for kebob places, try Brooklyn or even MacDougal Street.
Oh, and btw, about the "foreigner" crack, even beyond what other have already pointed out about regulatory and training counters for that,
bugger off.
In my experience "foreigners" are *more* willing then "real" "Americans" or "Britishers" to find out what the relevant procedure is and follow it. I believe the Snowcrash consult-the-binder scenes articulate this far better then I ever will.
Rustin
I have been wracking my brain, and I cannot think of a place in Manhattan where you are more than 4 blocks from a grocey store. .
Well, if you include absurdly high-priced bodegas with terrible selection and no fresh stuff to speak of, then maybe. But otherwise . .
-the entirety of Manhattan east of Avenue B
-most of Inwood (a few places here and there but terrible)
-parts of Harlem (even C-Town has areas they won't cover)
-the area around Wall Street (yep, quite a few people living there these days; they converted a bunch of old office buildings in the late 90's)
-all those huge housing projects along the edge of the Loisada (such as the eastern edge of Confucius Park or whatever they call it now) and otherwise most of the eastern edge of the city starting north of South Street Seaport and south of 11th.
-some stretches of Fifth Avenue (after all, 5th and Park forbid grocery stores and Madison is sketchy)
In other words, the poorest sections, those with huge housing complexes (some quite middle class now), and the wealthiest areas when "esthetics" have won out.
Of course with Chelsea Market, C-Town, and (ironically) the 131st Street Fairway, the blank spots have shrunk a lot but if you've got the flu, are older or infirm, or simply aren't up to a significant walk on a miserable winter/summer day, there are plenty of reasons that getting groceries could be a big deal.
Also, keep in mind that for a lot of us we may be getting home at 2:00 in the morning for days or even weeks at a time. If Gristedes, Food Emporium, and Associated end their price/feature war (which is quite likely given what's happening to New York's economy and what happened to the CVS/Rite Aide/DuaneReade/Love Stores price war) then all the stores that have started having late night hours will probably stop doing so and we'll be thoroughly screwed. Much easier to shop online and just answer the door for the delivery person while getting dressed in the morning then to have to find shopping time during conventional hours.
Frankly, for me, I'm all over the city anyway, always have a copious shoulder bag, and am used to carrying heavy loads. So I do my shopping mostly in Chinatown or on 32nd Street. But I remember my consulting days well and wish that this had been around then. I was very marginally involved in one of the online grocer attempts a while back (mostly not in the U.S.) and was very much hoping that they would get their act together.
I'm thrilled to see the Fairway folk step in as (other than Western Beef) they are far and away the best at entering new markets with excellent quality, good prices, and superb selection. And, of course, how could I be unhappy to see somebody online actually turning a proper profit?
Sitting here looking out at the cold, windy, rainy, dark Manhattan weather (with, by the way, dangerous levels of traffic and high speed drivers even on this, a Sunday afternoon) and wondering why people are having so much trouble understanding the viability of this,
Rustin
Do us all a favor, Bop, LOOK at what Fairway offers and THEN bitch.
Speaking as somebody who has been paid for his knowledge about food AND somebody with regular access to restaurant supplies AND somebody who has GROWN significant parts of his food for over ten years IN A MANHATTAN APARTMENT AND somebody who almost certainly knows more then you do about where to get fresh produce in this city, Fairway and anything run by them is bound to have fresher, healthier options then anything near where most New Yorkers live, from veggie burgers to flash-frozen greens, to fresh fruits to soy milk to baked goods to olive oil to steak.
You wanna claim that Hain's is unacceptable? How about Health Valley? Ecover? Amy's? Seventh Generation? Artisanal bakeries? Fairway has all of them. With better variety then Healthy Pleasures (on average), Commodities, or whoever your local store may be.
Welcome to slashdot. Here we learn that you should have FACTS before you expect to be taken seriously.
Stop knee jerking and get a damned clue.
There. I feel much better now.
Rustin
That's because you're still busy talking to the frog.
The battle is not between us and Al Queda, or us and the corporations, but between us and our managers.
Um. Not quite. Much though I understand your sentiment (look at my post above to see just how pissed I am), one problem does not simply cancel out the other. There are any number of foul and destructive things in the world.
Our kleptocratic government/corporations are one problem.
Anti-progress violent reactionaries are another.
Just because there are dangerous sleaze here doesn't mean that the existence of dangerous sleaze elsewhere is somehow less real or urgent.
Yeah, it sucks. We're in a multifront war and we've handed the keys to our defense against one enemy to another enemy. Good thing the actual military is still on our side.
Oh, and by the way, simple answers like "just elect angry people with a grudge against the current power structure" is how the even worse tyrannies get created.
Look into the history of Nazi Germany. The Nazis said all sorts of things in the twenties and thirties that were very convincingly anti-corporate. Same for Mussolini and, *ahem*, Saddam Hussein.
No simple answers, folks. No quick fixes. You can't clean a two bedroom house in one step. We certainly can't clean up a three hundred person nation in one.
Rustin
A friend of mine recently pointed out that a staggering new doctrine has been slowly weaseling its way into American minds for decades now. That is the belief that businesses have a right to a "fair" profit for work that they do.
It's the spread of cost-plus contracting doctrine.
Think about it.
Increasingly companies have been getting away with portraying big business a some sort of glorious activity for the good of society (Think Chrysler bailout or protectionism for U.S. steel companies.)
Here in New York restaurants have gotten away with having almost all the street vendors shut down or regulated out of existence because it was "unfair" for some poverty income immigrant pooling the money of twenty relatives to sell tasty kebobs on a street corner and undercut the prices of snotty wealthy restaurants charging airport-style prices for food that customers (like me) didn't want anyway.
As far as I'm concerned our current regime is out of the closet by now. They are anti-capitalist and anti-productivity. True free market capitalism would take away their Microsoft-type profits and true productivity gains tend to come from the sorts of small companies that don't get favors from the Bushes and Cheneys and Powells.
Me? I'm the founder of a small business that sells formatted information to pay the bills. I'm well aware that to Reed-Elsevier, Time Warner, Westlaw, and their ilk I'm a street vendor cutting into their profits. In fact, if you take the story of the Steves offering their designs to Atari, that pretty well describes what happened to me with T/W and McGraw-Hill. They turned 'em down, now I'm doing it on my own. I plan to fight the dirty bastards right down to the goddamn wire.
Deal with it, people. The American public has elected a bunch of crooks who are systematically reshaping our country as their whore. Better get used to bending over and spreading wide.
Rustin H. Wright
Founder, Reed&Wright
Former techie/consultant to the publishing business (Harcourt-Brace, Houghton-Mifflin, Scholastic, J.Crew, Bantam Doubleday Dell, Gruener and Jahr, Capital Cities, etc. etc. etc.)
Even aside from how massively useful this project is (see my post above), if you *really* want to talk money then think of it this way. Honeybee Robotics is on Elizabeth street, south of Houston. Go to MapQuest and take a look. It's close enough to the WTC site to have been utterly shut off last year for the better part of two months. It's also rght across town from Hoberman (makers of the expanding sphere that ThinkGeek has featured) and a few blocks from Lafayette, which is home to a dying and desperate community of tech folks.
Less then ten years ago you could go to Canal Street (about ten blocks south of Honeybee) and find an amazing group of tech stores, with everything from circuit boards, occilliscopes, and soldering irons to rod and sheet stock to 1920's vacuum processing equipment and Bakelite insulators.
Almost all of that is gone now because New York's culture (and government) gives no support to real techies who use things like drill presses and assembler code. While they were feeding vast piles of money into Silicon Alley and calling people working in Flash and Visual Basic "engineers", people like Honeybee have been treated like shit.
Oh, and btw, when the WTC stuff happened and all the cash was being handed out, not a dollar went to a single techie I know, despite the fact that we were among the hardest hit. When I tried to explain this to people from FEMA and the Mayor's office all that I got were blank looks and *more* blather about dot.com jobs.
So I say hell yeah! Let's see some support for tech in New York for a change. We've earned it.
-Rustin
Robotic drills huh? looks like someone has once again "Bullshitted NASA"
You don't have to work with conduit, do you?
For those of us with a clue this is insanely great stuff. Think about it, take one of these, modify it to lay tape (that, btw, being the flat cord one pulls through conduit to later pull in the cable) and spray in a coat of high-strength concrete behind it, making instant channel and and for once putting a below-ground line across a corporate campus is no big deal.
I've been expecting these for years and will predict here that within ten years every major urban area will have places that rent these puppies by the day. It will be a hell of a lot cheaper then having to pay some crew of halfwits to dig a trench, pour concrete or lay pipe, put in the cable, put the dirt back, and then have to resod.
Guaranteed that within ten years every organization that does lots of suburban facilities work, from the telcos to McDonalds will be using these things as much as lawyers use Federal Express. Not only that, but like FedEx, they''ll wonder how they ever worked without them.
Oh, btw, have I mentioned what a HUGE difference this will make for techies building homes in out-of-the way places? Bought a chunk of land with no phone/cable/sewer for half a mile? If you can get the right of-way, it's just not gonna matter that much anymore.
NASA: 10
dimwitted, Proxmire-esque naysayers: zip.
Rustin
Diesel engines stink, you say? Not if they're biodiesel !
What could be better than getting to drive an SUV *and* clean up McDonald's waste (using up their old fryer oil) at the same time? It's the ultimate in American!
Some of us have long since figured out that if your post is rejected, then turn it into a journal entry. If your ideas are good then people will come by, if they're bad, then they won't. /. is still, basically a tiny little profitless forum run by the whims of a handful of Midwestern geekboys and they've never claimed any different. Traffic is vast, content is massive, but that's it.
Based on your heds, if you were to post Not re-writing, but writing a NEW Constitution, We Know Where You Are and We Are Coming For You..., Where do you think you're going....citizen?, Architectural renaissance in Communities?, and maybe Heckle the (ex)-President, Lose your 1st Amendment as journal entries (and, btw, stopping doing your bitching as an AC) then maybe I'ld drop by and take a look.
Anyway, as people keep pointing out, big though it may seem,
Don't like it? Start your own damn web site, see how easy it is.
Rustin
So, I'm curious, have you ever considered getting a goat? I would love to see a time when there is a suburban goat population, with one for every, what, fifty people? You can be damned sure that the goat will handle your compound-breakdown needs. Maybe a few pigs too for the local schools and restaurants.
I'm not even going to get into the zoning problems here. Let's just say that I'me well aware of them.
Anyway, this gives me the FIRST EVER LEGITIMATE SLASHDOT REASON to mention goatsex. heh, heh, heh.
hee he hee he hee heh hehehehehehehh
Rustin
Who says that living in a townhouse precludes gardening? I ive in an apartment and do all sorts of stuff, even beyond the terrace garden. I've got three words for you: .
-Grow lights (or blue and white LEDs if you're going high-tech and low-power usage)
-sweater boxes (they're cheap, watertight, big, and lightweight)
and . .
-intense cultivation. It's amazing what you can grow in small spaces when you put your mind to it. Think of it as coding for a low-RAM environment.
If what you're worried about is weight then check out light-weight soils using stuff like shredded styrofoam.
If you mean the one that I think you do, it was caused by the LC having an '020 but no FPU. The problem was that ALL Microsoft software had an "optimization" routine that, if it detected an '020 on application launch configured to route to the FPU that they "knew" would be there. After all, on earlier Macs, if it had an '020 it was a Mac II or equiv. This routine was even in MS Word.
This code was written *after* Apple had very publicly and explicitly said that they were coming out with the LC line which would have the contrary setup. MS still considered it not their problem and tried to require a paid upgrade to fix it until they got caught and, sullenly, resentfully, made a patch.
It was this very incident, and the way that it utterly shut down my use of my brand-new beautiful little baby (I have always considered the LC line the VW Beetle of computers) that took my feelings about MS from vaguely formed annoyance and ill-ease to disgust and contempt.
And yeah, if you didn't know why it seemed insane that a machine with new software and no problems that any diagnostic could find would just crash, either on launch or shortly after launch of such basic, ubiquitious, and "trustworthy" software. I knew some people who refused to believe it, because why would a word processor or paint program (remember MSWorks?) refuse to work without an FPU?
Grumble, bitch, Redmond, lying, cheap shortcut making, mblgrmblshdldmbldmrmbl........
Rustin
yes. It's you.
I just want to make it clear that with this level of knowledge of ST stuff, you folks are beginning to scare me. And I thought *I* was bad having (and kinda reading) a copy of the Kinglon-English dictionary.
it's great to see our homeland defense money going towards counterterrorism. i think i've figured out their reasoning. since this monumental discovery can rid our society of warts, whenever we see some shady guy at the airport, all we have to do is check him for warts. from here on, having warts == terrorist (or shady tourist. eitherway, go home!)
No! No! No! You're not getting it *at all*! This is actually superb information and utterly crucial for fighting terrorists.
If you see (wart/shady guy at airport) then cover (wart/shady guy) in such a way as to prevent any air from reaching worrysome area. Leave (wart/shady guy) without oxygen for six days and clean off any dead residue. Repeat several times or until all signs of threat are gone.
See? Our military has come through again.
Rustin
You know. that's so *obviously* bogus that I stopped to define why and found that, hmmmmm, it might make sense at that. ....? Guaranteed to be a circus indeed.
However, you'll have to work on your math a bit. The Beltway region is *way* too big for ten people and, after all, there are thousands of snipers who have spent months, if not, years, in the area already and wouldn't need any basic orientation.
So how about this: The local authorities agree to pay for a three day conference for *five hundred* snipers, including seminars, a mini-expo, chat groups, and a couple thousand dollars towards subsidised meals/drinks, whatever. They go to local hotels, conference centers, bars, gun stores, and restaurants and ask them to volunteer discounts and/or space.
Every military or police qualified sniper is invited, $50 (or $100, or whatever) stipend for attendance offered for any snipers currently employed as such in uniformed service or high-end training program.
Then . . . day two of the gathering has the attendees divided up into teams of, say, three, that then scour the entire area and determine optimum cache sites (don't assume that the slimebag isn't using any), vulnerable points, shooting spots, etc. and at the end of the day everybody hands in their data. Design it so that each team's search sector overlaps partially with adjacent sectors to maximize competitiveness.
When it's all over, some smaller number of snipers stay there, active but low-profile and smoke the disgusting coward out.
I'll betcha that given a staff of ten, twenty volunteers, twenty thousand dollars expense money, and the authority of the local police I could have the first attendees checking in by next Monday morning.
BTW, has *nobody* noticed that this whole things is gonna get hairy in a whole new way soon at this rate? Keep in mind that the 26th is scheduled to be a HUGE anti-war rally in DC. So, extra-twitchy cops, massive traffic snarls, an obstructive federal government, angry protesters, add media misinformation, stir, and get
Rustin
Yeah, I've looked into that a bit already. I'm taking the field techie approach on that front. Specifically, people I respect are working on it so I'm flagging it as dealt with. I figure that with the sea launch platform people *and* the Tonga people *and* the (minor but still out there) Guyana people *and* the overall and very competent (and relentless) work of the private space community to get these regs publicized and changed this current annoyance is as likely to get dealt with as many other obstacles.
Yep, that's right. I've looked a major problem, decided that it's not in my field and that somebody's on it and concluded "not my job, buddy". Very unslashdot.
Rustin
The spinning and jumping is called the Leidenfrost (sp?) effect and will happen any time you've got little bits of something sitting on a plane of something else with a big enough temperature range between them to cause one to create a vapor barrier. It's pretty much the same thing you see with water on a hot skillet.
In high school I used to work in a bio lab (at NYU, not at our high school) where the staff was mostly very young and we had lots of toys. So we used to cool our tea by pouring in little bits of liquid nitrogen. If you did it right the stuff twisted around in a very satisfactory way as both were liquids with a significant skin (i.e. decent surface tension) and each would deform the other. Much fun.
As for our local crazed science teacher he did his best demos with thermite. Wow. Only time I've ever seen something burn through asbestos. Also much fun.
All of this talk is making me want to start cooking up happy juice and join the purple finger brigade
Rustin
Back when I was a wee lad (well, a pyromaniacal wee lad) we kept sodium under a layer of oil. In other words, sodium metal can be stored and moved pretty effectively in a bottle of mineral oil. I seem to remember that the bottles were always the light-reducing brown ones but I remember not why.
Sooooo....... you mostly fill a large-mouthed container (let's say an empty food-service multi-gallon can) with oil and drop your bottle of sodium into that. Dip the end of your tools into the oil and leave them for a while so that they are free of bubbles and then use tools to open the bottle and release the sodium into the open but big can. Drop the can (carefully) into the lake, where the oil will rise, the sodium will drop and KERBLOOEY!