Second the microscope. Even the el cheapos encourage exploration.
A whole collection of observation instruments would be good: microscope, good hand-held magnifying glass, good pair of binoculars, and a decent telescope.
Oh, and a nice notebook to keep notes in. I love the one with squared pages.
MicroSky is okay, but what I really want is Planetarium. That program alone is why I keep my TE2 charged. It's good enough to buy an old Palm just to run it.
Hell, they're worse than that. They sold me a used and returned TV as new. When it stopped working within minutes of taking it home they offered to sell me the display unit for 10% off. I got a refund on my card and never darkened their door again. I hope everybody in the entire company, from CEO down to stockboy, gets cancer of the face and dies alone and cold on their birthday.
(Okay, maybe that's too harsh, but damn, the utter lack of anything like customer care was staggering.)
I'd say radio myself, in which I'm including talk radio, public radio and satellite radio. NPR had good election coverage, perhaps with a slight bias towards Obama, but largely because Obama simply had a better campaign. Satellite radio you can pick out Fox, BBC, CNN, whatever you want and get much longer coverage and better discussions. Talk radio is largely right wing, but you do get a feel for what a significant chunk of the population is thinking. The give-and-take nature of talk radio is very enlightening.
There was stuff to like about both candidates and stuff to dislike, but where the media fell down is they quite simply did not press either of them sufficiently to squeeze out something approaching a real answer. Too much of both their economic plans require fairy dust to make work. Nothing--or not much--was said about our hideous debt and how to pay that down while adding all the goodies they promised.
Not that you can entirely blame the media. If a reporter starts doing his actual job he's likely to get kicked off the campaign bus and maybe sent to the international desk in Manitoba. Mediocrity reigns in our highly consolidated mainstream media outlets.
Democrats have their crazies too. Sometimes they end up voting for Lyndon LaRouche, though.
There's a video on YouTube of a well-munted redneck woman trashing "Barack 'Hussein' Obama". You'd think that would make her a McCain fan, but she supported Hillary.
Tape isn't better than optical, necessarily. All backup mediums require testing to ensure reliability, which generally means restoring from backup.
If your data is critical, keep it in several places at the same time, and as closely synced as you can manage. Hard drive, mirrored to another hard drive, backed up to an external hard drive, swap out external drive for another every week (stored off-site), run incremental backups to tape nightly, use an online backup service like rsync.net or Carbonite. Even then you're not assured of complete data integrity, but it's not too shabby and not horrifically expensive.
If your jobs can be archived onto CD/DVDs, then doing that is one more safety net. If you don't want to go through a long, drawn-out process of running CRC checks or whatever on the optical media, simply burning it twice on two different computers is an option. If that's not possible, burning it twice on two different known-good brands is better than nothing.
Why the heck do/.ers get all gung-ho about "creationism" vs. "evolution" when that doesn't really matter.
Because "creationism is sutpid!!!1" is a passphrase that means "See, I'm just as cool as you are, we should hang out." The real issues affecting the state of public education are hard. Sloganeering is easy. Most people--being lazy themselves--will go the easy route.
But if Ron Paul had show up against Obama, he would have been crushed.
I doubt it. Ron Paul could say, "I voted against the war in Iraq; how about you?"
He could also claim to have predicted the current financial meltdown mess.
If Ron Paul has a weakness it's an inability to condescend. He tends to speak to things assuming the listener is as well informed and well read as he is, which is a mistake. If instead he only talked about "change" he'd have an easier time of it than yammering on about the Federal Reserve.
Yeah, were I looking at replacing my 1st gen Macbook, I'd go for the new one without that much heartache. I'd like a Firewire port, but it's not a deal-killer. And yes, I do have a DV camcorder. It has a USB port as well as Firewire.
Not that I'd get rid of the old Macbook anyway. It would upgrade the wife's G4 PowerBook, so no big deal for us.
I don't even know what that means, "64bit is the way of the future". I'd say that 256bit is the way of the future, because who wants to be the guy who said "2^64 should be enough for everybody!"
I would suggest that, perhaps, the reason that Adobe hasn't ported Flash to 64bit is because there's no pressing reason to do so. Not because they're "incompetent" as you suggest. You may return to Slashdot and make such pompous declarations once you are running a billion dollar software firm.
It is extremely difficult for a private enterprise to compete with a government providing the same service. The local government will simply have better access, as they already control the easements. Plus they have access to tax-free municipal bonds to raise capital, whereas a private enterprise would have to sell stocks or bonds without such perks.
That said, the telco was awarded a protected monopoly (or so I assume) and didn't perform so well. In such cases municipal competition becomes less crazy. Here's hoping it works out for the best for the citizens.
1. i think we should abolish the electoral college, since, as 2000 demonstrates, you can lose the popular vote and still win the election (and hasn't the last 8 years proven that to be a mistake)
As I recall, the conventional wisdom held that Gore would likely be the one to have garnered the most electoral votes and that Bush would win the popular vote. It nearly happened again in 2004. Just a handful of votes in various States would have tipped the election to Kerry when Bush had a commanding lead in the popular vote.
Bet you wouldn't think the Electoral College was a mistake had that happened.
Even gold, the standard that everybody loves to hold up as being "intrinsically valuable" is just a soft, visually pleasing metal with no inherent worth outside of certain industrial processes. If it weren't so rare people wouldn't even care about it.
And that is why you fail.
A pile of beans is wealth. A unique counter can be a stand-in for wealth, i.e. money. A promise to provide future beans of a fixed amount is an IOU, worth exactly as much as the paper and the entity which backs it. This is why government IOUs are relatively stable. They have some degree of worth, with an entire nation behind it. The paper is still worth the same, though.
You know that phrase you hear, "past performance is no guarantee of future results"? You should study long and hard on why they say that.
There's a convenience factor as well. There aren't really that many big corporations who can afford all the overhead of an overseas incorporation. But if the difference between making a profit and not making a profit lies in incorporating overseas, you'll see more smaller corporations take advantage of it. You see this in Nevada/Delaware incorporations to a certain extent. Being incorporated in Delaware makes things a bit more complicated than if you incorporated in your State, but it's often worth it because some States have byzantine incorporation rules and requirements.
Make it simple, make it clear, make it reasonably complete. And then try hard to not get incensed when one or two big corporations make rapacious profits. The desire to fiddle in order to bring one or two companies back in line is one of the major reasons it's such a pain.
Yeah. One of the most reliable and ethical operators in the business.
This should be emphasized. DynDNS is both reliable and ethical, and have been for a long time. Indeed, since before they went commercial. When they were non-com, you could get unlimited custom DNS services for a $30 donation. Guess what? When they went commercial they honored that pledge. I still have a number of "never expires" services because of this.
Seriously, it's not worth dicking around with DNS. Get it done right the first time.
I built that antenna. It didn't work any better than the $25 Philips/Magnavox rabbit ears/loop with amplifier that I already had, and was hideously ugly. *plonk*
There is the converter box coupon program that lowered the cost of the boxes and with the lower end units some of them became free.
That is not true. You might find one or two places that will approach the $40 of the coupon, but when I bought ours I could only find them from really dodgy looking online retailers. And the brands offered tended to also garner the worst reviews WRT reliability and quality. Plus we haven't even talked about "shipping and handling" charges yet.
In effect, you're looking at around $60 per box. I went to RadioShack, as they had a brand that seemed reasonable and I didn't have to pay shipping. It was about $60 per box, so $20 per after the coupon. All in all, it was a good buy as we can now receive Clifford the Big Red Dog complete snow-free.
Like the previous posts, I too plan to run my current set into the ground. It's a good JVC unit, maybe a bit small for our living room, but adequate.
Slashdot Mirror
Second the microscope. Even the el cheapos encourage exploration.
A whole collection of observation instruments would be good: microscope, good hand-held magnifying glass, good pair of binoculars, and a decent telescope.
Oh, and a nice notebook to keep notes in. I love the one with squared pages.
MicroSky is okay, but what I really want is Planetarium. That program alone is why I keep my TE2 charged. It's good enough to buy an old Palm just to run it.
Hell, they're worse than that. They sold me a used and returned TV as new. When it stopped working within minutes of taking it home they offered to sell me the display unit for 10% off. I got a refund on my card and never darkened their door again. I hope everybody in the entire company, from CEO down to stockboy, gets cancer of the face and dies alone and cold on their birthday.
(Okay, maybe that's too harsh, but damn, the utter lack of anything like customer care was staggering.)
I'd say radio myself, in which I'm including talk radio, public radio and satellite radio. NPR had good election coverage, perhaps with a slight bias towards Obama, but largely because Obama simply had a better campaign. Satellite radio you can pick out Fox, BBC, CNN, whatever you want and get much longer coverage and better discussions. Talk radio is largely right wing, but you do get a feel for what a significant chunk of the population is thinking. The give-and-take nature of talk radio is very enlightening.
I second this post.
There was stuff to like about both candidates and stuff to dislike, but where the media fell down is they quite simply did not press either of them sufficiently to squeeze out something approaching a real answer. Too much of both their economic plans require fairy dust to make work. Nothing--or not much--was said about our hideous debt and how to pay that down while adding all the goodies they promised.
Not that you can entirely blame the media. If a reporter starts doing his actual job he's likely to get kicked off the campaign bus and maybe sent to the international desk in Manitoba. Mediocrity reigns in our highly consolidated mainstream media outlets.
Democrats have their crazies too. Sometimes they end up voting for Lyndon LaRouche, though.
There's a video on YouTube of a well-munted redneck woman trashing "Barack 'Hussein' Obama". You'd think that would make her a McCain fan, but she supported Hillary.
I have an ancient Colorado QIC that doesn't work compared to an ancient 1x CDR that does work to dispute that assertion.
If you noticed the "necessarily" part you wouldn't have stepped in it.
Tape isn't better than optical, necessarily. All backup mediums require testing to ensure reliability, which generally means restoring from backup.
If your data is critical, keep it in several places at the same time, and as closely synced as you can manage. Hard drive, mirrored to another hard drive, backed up to an external hard drive, swap out external drive for another every week (stored off-site), run incremental backups to tape nightly, use an online backup service like rsync.net or Carbonite. Even then you're not assured of complete data integrity, but it's not too shabby and not horrifically expensive.
If your jobs can be archived onto CD/DVDs, then doing that is one more safety net. If you don't want to go through a long, drawn-out process of running CRC checks or whatever on the optical media, simply burning it twice on two different computers is an option. If that's not possible, burning it twice on two different known-good brands is better than nothing.
Because "creationism is sutpid!!!1" is a passphrase that means "See, I'm just as cool as you are, we should hang out." The real issues affecting the state of public education are hard. Sloganeering is easy. Most people--being lazy themselves--will go the easy route.
Did evolutionary theory teach you to misrepresent others' positions? Or are you just naturally dishonest?
I doubt it. Ron Paul could say, "I voted against the war in Iraq; how about you?"
He could also claim to have predicted the current financial meltdown mess.
If Ron Paul has a weakness it's an inability to condescend. He tends to speak to things assuming the listener is as well informed and well read as he is, which is a mistake. If instead he only talked about "change" he'd have an easier time of it than yammering on about the Federal Reserve.
Yeah, were I looking at replacing my 1st gen Macbook, I'd go for the new one without that much heartache. I'd like a Firewire port, but it's not a deal-killer. And yes, I do have a DV camcorder. It has a USB port as well as Firewire.
Not that I'd get rid of the old Macbook anyway. It would upgrade the wife's G4 PowerBook, so no big deal for us.
I don't even know what that means, "64bit is the way of the future". I'd say that 256bit is the way of the future, because who wants to be the guy who said "2^64 should be enough for everybody!"
I would suggest that, perhaps, the reason that Adobe hasn't ported Flash to 64bit is because there's no pressing reason to do so. Not because they're "incompetent" as you suggest. You may return to Slashdot and make such pompous declarations once you are running a billion dollar software firm.
I like how you have no direct knowledge or experience, yet you can rant and get modded "Interesting".
Since it's so trivial you should volunteer to fix it. I bet Adobe has been looking for a guy just like you.
It is extremely difficult for a private enterprise to compete with a government providing the same service. The local government will simply have better access, as they already control the easements. Plus they have access to tax-free municipal bonds to raise capital, whereas a private enterprise would have to sell stocks or bonds without such perks.
That said, the telco was awarded a protected monopoly (or so I assume) and didn't perform so well. In such cases municipal competition becomes less crazy. Here's hoping it works out for the best for the citizens.
As I recall, the conventional wisdom held that Gore would likely be the one to have garnered the most electoral votes and that Bush would win the popular vote. It nearly happened again in 2004. Just a handful of votes in various States would have tipped the election to Kerry when Bush had a commanding lead in the popular vote.
Bet you wouldn't think the Electoral College was a mistake had that happened.
You don't have any kids, do you?
I've no doubt that is exactly the case.
And that is why you fail.
A pile of beans is wealth. A unique counter can be a stand-in for wealth, i.e. money. A promise to provide future beans of a fixed amount is an IOU, worth exactly as much as the paper and the entity which backs it. This is why government IOUs are relatively stable. They have some degree of worth, with an entire nation behind it. The paper is still worth the same, though.
You know that phrase you hear, "past performance is no guarantee of future results"? You should study long and hard on why they say that.
There's a convenience factor as well. There aren't really that many big corporations who can afford all the overhead of an overseas incorporation. But if the difference between making a profit and not making a profit lies in incorporating overseas, you'll see more smaller corporations take advantage of it. You see this in Nevada/Delaware incorporations to a certain extent. Being incorporated in Delaware makes things a bit more complicated than if you incorporated in your State, but it's often worth it because some States have byzantine incorporation rules and requirements.
Make it simple, make it clear, make it reasonably complete. And then try hard to not get incensed when one or two big corporations make rapacious profits. The desire to fiddle in order to bring one or two companies back in line is one of the major reasons it's such a pain.
You just quoted Wikipedia to make your point.
Fail.
This should be emphasized. DynDNS is both reliable and ethical, and have been for a long time. Indeed, since before they went commercial. When they were non-com, you could get unlimited custom DNS services for a $30 donation. Guess what? When they went commercial they honored that pledge. I still have a number of "never expires" services because of this.
Seriously, it's not worth dicking around with DNS. Get it done right the first time.
DynDNS.
That was easy.
I built that antenna. It didn't work any better than the $25 Philips/Magnavox rabbit ears/loop with amplifier that I already had, and was hideously ugly. *plonk*
That is not true. You might find one or two places that will approach the $40 of the coupon, but when I bought ours I could only find them from really dodgy looking online retailers. And the brands offered tended to also garner the worst reviews WRT reliability and quality. Plus we haven't even talked about "shipping and handling" charges yet.
In effect, you're looking at around $60 per box. I went to RadioShack, as they had a brand that seemed reasonable and I didn't have to pay shipping. It was about $60 per box, so $20 per after the coupon. All in all, it was a good buy as we can now receive Clifford the Big Red Dog complete snow-free.
Like the previous posts, I too plan to run my current set into the ground. It's a good JVC unit, maybe a bit small for our living room, but adequate.