Most of the southern, western and mid western US states have a lot of dead pixels, Kansas for instance is eat up with them. I am not sure it is display problem though, I suspect it is a memory or cpu problem that simply shows up as dead pixels.
I could not help but to wonder if the unexpectedly huge success of the Rover program might be an issue. In all projects there is a bell curve of funding requirements low during conceptual trending to high during build and implementation and tapering off as the project is completed. I imagine that with budgets as tight as they are they would have to take from another project in order to continued unexpected levels of staffing, power and services for the Rover project. What do they cut, the potential cash cow of the 20 year Mars plan still in the conceptual stages? The space station? The Shuttle replacement program? Satellite programs? Military related programs would of course be off the table as they would funded differently. Unless they can find something to sell to the military on this the only other option is to ask congress for more money.
The political timing is rotten for such a request. Things like the quivering mess of the banking and trading sectors, $100+ oil, so many middle class people facing the eminent prospect of becoming homeless. Add in the frackin quagmire in Iraq, the inflation dragon, and a presidential election year and the option of hibernating looks pretty dang good to me. If I could freeze the entire state of my life and hibernate for a year or two I would consider it a possible positive thing at least well worth looking into.
The definition of just who is a terrorist is relative to ones perspective. For instance King George considered Samuel Adams an agent of terror. In offers of pardon for the cease and desist of rebellion there were a few colonials that were excepted from pardon. Sam Adams and his cousin John were at or near the top of the list of those who would hang no matter what.
Pewfff.. butterflies are for wussies, bumblebees, hornets and etc are much faster and far more challenging than butterflies. And if you screwup in your data handling calculations you may very well get stung... a lot. I have heard of some really serious basement freaks that "deposit" certain body fluids on a seriously overclocked CPU. The pheromones released attracts swams of horny killer honeybees which generate huge vivid displays the the data sets.
Personally I prefer dragonflies, mainly because they don't sting me. They are very challenging to observe, are several orders of magnitude faster than butterflies, capable of near zero time reference for directional flight vector changes thus providing awesome data display switching time, can fly with stability in multiples thus allowing for larger data sets, often fly in formation allowing for data stream pipe lining and kewlest of all they can hover which provides for very accurate data snapshots. Actually the kewlest thing is that they can mate while flying, of course butterflies can do that as well but not quite as vigorously. This is kinda like decoding and displaying encrypted porn on the "fly".
If you had any meta physical coding skills the next step in data display and analysis would be fairies. The data density of fairy grouping is unmatched, do you have any idea how many of these fit on the head of a pin? The resolution they are capable of rendering is far greater than the human eye can process. As entities of a higher dimensional state they are capable of making state transitions via quantum tunneling thus the effective display pixel flip is zero, faster even than the light they emit, chew on that for an while. They are capable of representing data from a quantum flux or entanglement, thus they can transmit and display data from anywhere or anytime and have perfect peer to peer data sharing abilities. Best of all some of the female fairies I have seen artwork renderings of are really really hot!
Right, despite what many seem to believe the Constitution is not simply some "god damned piece of paper" that was thrown together by a bunch of people to avoid paying taxes to the King. The Constitution is the result of millennium of human co-survival strategy called civilization. It has its roots in the Code of Hammurabi, The Torah, the Greeks, the Romans, the Charter of Liberties, the Magna Carta, and even Native American influences.
My understanding of it is that at its heart it is about establishing a social structure (a democratically elected republic) that supports the right of free existence and self determination for the individual and the right of individuals to collectively take measures to enable and defend such rights for themselves.
That an oligarchic kleptocracy has perverted its meaning and intent to the point that so many people have such basic mis-perceptions about its purpose is a testament to how bad things have become.
A lot of folks like to pick on Ted Kennedy. However if you care about issues of your civil rights and the living conditions of the poor and working folks you will find he has one the best voting records in the Senate. Of course his record is not perfect I for one would prefer he better support our 2nd amendment rights and quit doling out money to the storm troopers , excuse me I mean law enforcement. But he generally does not deserve the level of flack he gets. As for the State Of the Union propaganda, hell I gave my wife the remote about half way through Bush's bull and went off to read the stuff here on/. amazingly enough the bull here was no where as deep.
"It's also important to note that the VAST majority of our petroleum imports don't actually come from the Middle East! The DOE says so itself. Our top two petroleum importing countries are... Canada and Mexico!"
The argument about dependence on Middle Eastern oil fields is based on world supply. This area of the world still provides a considerable percentage of the total volume. If this volume is reduced then the products in Mexico and Canada will become more attractive to other buyers in the world, like say China, Europe or Japan, and thus more expensive for us all.
I can see where this could be a reasonably valid argument. However I tend to think the root issue is what the root issue always is, ie: WGTMTM or Who Gets To Make The Money. There has been considerable investment in this part of the worlds oil fields by a few really big players that intend to extract every $ they can from said investment. Generally I don't blame them for the base premise, I just have a problem with the ethics and corresponding social fallout of the methods they often employ.
It seems to me that this is a excellent argument against a unilateral approach in dealing with this area of the world. Despite what they are willing to pay in taxes I doubt the Europeans or Japanese want to pay a higher base price. I doubt the traditionally frugal Chinese would be fond of it either. Then again considering these players military history in the last century or two maybe we don't want them any more involved than absolutely necessary. See I can examine and see the good and bad of more than one view point, at least I can, unfortunately some it seems can't manage such.
A brain washed ignorant populance, the dip shits that see it as "just a god damned piece of paper" and those who out of political fear or idealogical intent refuse to apply the law, these are the three biggest threats to our freedom, not terrorism. To me the terrorist mongers are simply providing exactly what the terrorists want and need the most. The Bushies got "rope a doped", first they had problems realizing it, now they can't lose face on it. In the end though these anti liberty agendas are simply an opportunistic grab for control and resources by super rich control freaks.
"What reason does a seller have for charging more than the actual shipping costs, other than making up for the too small selling price? (And therefore showing up more positively in the search results)"
One other reason is to avoid some of the costs from eBays/Paypals final sales price percentage calculation. I would agree with many that this practice is disingenuous though the steady route of increases in the costs to sellers by eBay/Paypal is not exactly a positive practice either. Many of the sellers already work on a low margin and there are a finite number of sales possible for a item class, so increases in the percentage costs either have to be passed on or circumvented somehow if they are to simply maintain income. I think the levels of this, especially from SE Asia sellers, that I see on eBay are indicative of a very basic problem that eBay is going to have to fix before someone else replaces them in this market.
The combination of upfront store/listing fees and final sales costs also inhibit the hobbiest/casual seller like myself. I recently closed my eBay store as my sales volume/profit was just enough that I was essentially doing it for nothing after all the fees were totaled. I never expected to make more than chump change for the junk I had laying around. I just hate to see neat stuff go to the dump when someone somewhere can make use of it. Indeed my prime motive for the store was to get rid of this stuff without sending it to the landfill. However it sure would have been nice if I could have kept some loose change for the effort, money that I would have likely spent on eBay anyway. I am not a eBay hater, I still love the concept. In fact it is one I had about the same time as the founders of eBay, I just failed to implement my version it in a timely manner. Still I had a lot of fun writing the perl cgi scripts for my Or Best Offer Classifieds. You know I have as of yet to see where eBay or anyone else is implementing a true "Yankee" type of auction, it beats the dickens out of "Dutch" auctions.
I would generally agree though I can see where there may be occasion to fund a project with borrowed money. If our debt load wasn't in such dire straits I could see where the amortization of a projects cost over time could be helpful with larger endeavors. This is capitalism and there is no reason that our government could not make it work as well as a private entity. The main qualification I would require is that it have a well hashed and logical plan that projects a ROI.
As an example a few years back I noted the repair and fuel costs of my truck(78 Jeep Cherokee), a little calculation proved to me that I could drive a new more fuel efficient truck (89 F-150) for a 25% increase in current expenditures. The difference of value between the new truck and the old one at the end of the 5 year loan would further raise the advantage and put me at better than 25% ahead in total expenses. So even with interest accounted for I saved money via the investment in a new truck. Of course I did have the ability to pay the loan without rolling the interest forward forever.
Guess what I drove that truck for over 15 years and had minimal repair costs in over 300,000 miles. By my calculations I saved over 100% of what it would have cost me to keep driving the old one, or over $10,000. More than twice enough to pay for the replacement (a cherry 94 F-150). What with technological improvements stalled and times as they are I could not get the same level of return on another new one even if I could afford the payments, which I would be afraid of in these times. Besides I like this style of Ford and the 94 is as I said cherry, it should be good for a quarter million miles more easy. The old F-150 looks like hell, a few to many deer, but still runs pretty good so I just gave it to my son a few days ago.
"What happens now if someone doesn't buy health insurance? They go to the emergency room and get treated anyway. Other people end up paying for it in the form of higher hospital costs.
Obviously, the pure capitalist solution would be for hospitals to just refuse people who don't have money. I'm not necessarily against that idea either, but I doubt it'd ever fly."
I am going to be kind in my response and simply say that it is obvious to me that you are not aware of what the situation actually is. What with the amount of cash being siphoned form the people, the tellers of these lies are, and will continue to be, bold and relentless.
As someone who has had personal experience in these matters I can give you some clues. My experience includes being a health care worker for over twenty years, and as a patient who has had to decide against treatment for serious maladies, even though I have insurance simply due to deductible/copayment cost issues. Worse of all I have had close friends DIE from chronic diseases that had received the legally required minimum but no more.
#1 Remember this!!! People are routinely refused treatment or medication because they cannot pay for it. I guess you are referring to the legally required MINIMUM treatment at CERTAIN qualification level emergency rooms. Such treatment options suck because:
A: If your symptoms do not meet the definition of immediately life threating or subject to causing severe permanent disability you can and most likely will be refused treatment.
B: In the case of conditions that are immediately life threating or subject to causing severe permanent disability the law ONLY requires a MINIMAL level of treatment, mostly focused on stabilization.
C: Emergency rooms are horrendously expensive to us all due to the 24/7/365 staffing requirements and since only the worst cases go through them, cases that often could have been managed at much lower cost in a normal and comparatively cheap clinical setting.
#2 Last but not least, if you are very lucky then you or someone you care very much for will never have to settle for the legally required minimum. Oh and by the way sometimes those you care for do not tell you of their situation, you learn about after they DIE. You see we have all been conditioned to be ashamed of our inability to pay for a horribly and artificially inflated health care and pharmaceutical expenses. Hell of a way to go huh? Instead of trying to find a safe little personal niche in a cruel and unjust world, how about the idea of working to create the world in which you wish to live?
Wabi-Sabi matthew
Now that you know better, please quit contributing to the spread of these lies and misinformation. These lies are bankrupting or killing good folks every day.
You probably have already thought of this or it may not even apply to your problem. But, have you checked to be sure your hardware (BIOS) and Vista are both using the same time reference. If one is using universal (UTC or Greenwich based time) and the other is using local hardware you will have exactly this type of problem, especially between boots. I'll probably get some static from this but I would try setting them both to local hardware time as I have had problems with UTC in the past.
I had a similar problems with several Linux distros and my current box. I am not sure if Linux or my BIOS are the responsible party but even when I set both to UTC the time was erratic with the shift being 4-6hrs. It happens that 6hrs is the diff between my local time, US Central time and Greenwich time. With both set to local time I do get drift of a few minutes a year but I can live with that. As it stands I have not even bothered to setup NTP (Network Time Protocol) with my latest installs even though the current generation of it might fix the UTC issue. I think I may revisit this issue at some time, but not today:).
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." Benjamin Franklin
Ben was right in his observation but I doubt he had any personal disrespect for the power of the pen and impassioned discourse. There are good arguments that an intellectual agent provocateur can massively affect the direction of society.
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." Samuel Adams
The route to an world turning event from a public protest/political rally is long and dangerous. The event would not be the real source of the idea or challenge it is merely the flashpoint or the point where a critical mass gets wide public notice.
This route requires that the starter of these "brush fires" act so relentlessly and boldly that they expose themselves to considerable risk. I seem to remember King George defining Sam Adams as a "terrorist".
I have used some of the magnets for various tasks like a retrieval tool, stud finder, paper holder, etc. Most magnets are in a randomly assembled pile on a self, it actually makes a really interesting piece of modern art. The screws, jumpers and such all hit a hardware bin, the aluminum hits the salvage bin. I have found several handy uses for the isolation bushings found on some drives. The nicest looking parts of all, the motors, spacers and platters I have not found a good general use for yet but I am working on it. Maybe another art project, or a lamp. I did use some of the platters as reflectors for a halogen track lighting system, made for a nice golden light, but they were a pain to match up to the fixtures. The platters do make a heck of a semaphore mirror, try one out in bright sunlight, please do not look into the focus cone with your remaining eye. If one could manage to evenly distort the platter a slight bit without breaking it they might make a heck of a parabolic cooker or fire starter. I keep wanting to play with using the motors as a mini generator but have not had the time to check out the feasibility of such.
And if you decide you are in dire need of cash, tired of this genre or whatever and wish to sell your collection? Or as you mentioned, how about if someone steals your computer or just the storage media and subsequently releases this watermarked content into the wild? Even worse what if you get hacked and only the music is simply stolen and made public before your hd is erased? The whole copyright holders rights versus purchasers personal property rights issue is a quagmire. It was bad enough before the digital age, and it is gonna get even harder to manage. It is a shame that greedy corp types, irresponsible yahoos and a few odd perverts may very destroy P2P. Emerging P2P technology could evolve into one of the best tools we have to ensure the accuracy of information like news and the free discussion between individuals. And so it goes...
Exactly, that did it for me as well. I work as a alarm/controls system technician in a hospital. I still have to deal with Windows related problems, yes XP and 2000 systems as well, on an all together to frequent a basis at work. I simply got sick of the constant fight with it at work AND at home. I picked up OS/2 in the mid nineties then moved to Linux in the late nineties when IBM seemed ready to abandon OS/2. Other than an occasional 98 session via VMWare or with Wine for a couple old Windows apps like 3DHome MSWindows has not existed on my home PC for over ten years. I did keep several Windows boxes around for a while for testing when I was doing some development work. But that got to be too much trouble as well. I have not bothered to do much Windows specific platform work in the last few years, mainly because maintaining the test boxes is such a friggin' pain, well than and the moving target of the API, the costs of runtime licenses, etc.
I just tossed together a box from my old parts bin and a $13.25 eBay acquired ASUS P3PB-F with a 450mhz PIII. The old parts include a 15"Samsung LCD, a nVidia TNT32, 512mb PC2700 SDRAM, a SB64, a Intel NIC, a 60gb Seagate and a Sony 20x CD. I put this together in an old server case for a email/internet/movie/music/photo viewer station in the family room to keep guests off my main P4 box. This critter kicks hiney with several 2005 thru 2007 Linux/KDE distros. It even supports some lower overhead compositing effects like transparency without so much as a hickup. I haven't tried Beryl or Fusion on it and I don't think it would handle them too well, but there is no reason to anyway. Firefox, Thunderbird, Amarok, Gwenview, Gimp, Kaffeine and Open Office all run great. This box would be plenty enough for the use many people buy a PC for. About all that is left missing right now is a DVD player and a PCI-USB2 card.
I once knew a girl named Jackie. One dark night I plugged the wrong socket. I thought it was kinda funny at the time. Like I said, I once knew a girl named Jackie.
Why, cyber-terrorism of course. The chance of a serious attack on our digital infrastructure in the next ten years is 100%.A successful one could be devastating to the wealth or security of the nation. The NSA has been developing for/with FOSS for years now. Ever hear of SELinux ( www.nsa.gov/selinux/ )? I think they have determined that FOSS is the at least one of the best chances we have to protect ourselves. At the very least they are being very responsible in that they are taking a good look at the software that runs the vast majority of the internets infrastructure.
Hey look I am not the biggest fan of the department of duct tape, color coded FUD and katrinagate, but they should be looking at this issue very close. I just hope they don't manage to anal-ize some critical code themselves. Given the nature of the organization I think they would like to, but given the nature of the problem I doubt that they could pull it off. I can see a reason to get verrryyy wairyyy of binary blobs, like say video card drivers or codec paks, in the near future though.
"Maybe our piddly little brains just aren't capable of comprehending whatever it is that created God, so we can physically never know."
The true definition of an agnostic. Which applies to the vast majority of people, if that is they are really honest in their introspection they have to end up saying "I don't know". There in lies the root question in the God debate. Did God create our piddly little brains or did our piddly little brains create God? But the real root question for us all as individuals is "Will the me that I know and those I have become attached to simply cease to exist when we die?". I think all philosophical inquires and religious propositions have this at the root. Everything else like issues of free will, ultimate justice, heaven, hell and all such depend upon the root question. Alas as you noted it is unlikely we will ever be able to answer this question in the only mode or existence we do know.
Made me think of some sensors I installed a while back that shipped with what looked like "The Worlds Smallest (Penis) Protector" rolled onto the inlet ports(about.25in). I had a bit of fun with them at work for a day or two. What is really sad is what I saw first was "The Worlds Smallest Protractor", "huh?" I said, to myself of course. Damn I can be such a frackin' geek, damn I did it again. I'll just shut up now...
Non fiction technical reference books of course I find it handy to keep. Certain works of non fiction like a history exploration, futurist essay or occasionally fiction I find so insightful that I keep it like a reference. Most other books of reasonable worth I like to give to others. I would say lend but they rarely come back anyway, so often I just say keep it. A few I consider absolute canonical collectibles and thus I keep them in the hope that my children, future grandchildren and close friends will gain as much from them as I have.
There is a big difference in telling a ten year old "you really should check out this book at the library" and having them wander through your study with you on a lazy weekend morning. I cannot tell you how good it feels to watch a child wander through the books, try them out one here and there and them find them later looking for more by the same author. To find them deep into a book and ask them "what ya readin'today" and get an answer like "For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1984, Slaughterhouse-Five or Steppenwolf", just something else that they dug out of my canonical set. It is also nice to be able to pull a book from the shelf, open it to a selected passage at an opportune time. I might see it different if I lived a few blocks away from a big city library. However I live seven miles from anywhere in the woods, and I like it here, a lot.
Well about the only things I get to slobbering about these days are a good steak, beer or intrusions on my liberty so I may not be who you were trolling for. I do try most every major distro every version or two, at least as a Live or VM installed test, and I try a full install of the more promising ones. I also try or regularly make use of quite a few specialty distros.
As of today I still find openSuse continues the tradition of being the most stable and best polished Linux distro for general use and I still use it as my primary OS as I have for a long while now. I use 10.2 on a daily basis, I have installed 10.3 but have not had the time to tweak it out and migrate to it.
This could change as I see a lot improvement in most distro's in the last few years and I did not care for the smell of the M$ deal at all. I do think that Novell has been far from a parasite, they have made quite a few very valuable contributions since they purchased SuSe, free as in beer openSuse being one of my favorites. I worry more about their long term survival in the tank with a shark than I do about them intentionally contaminating the source code base, which I suspect could get them and Microsoft sued or possibly even prosecuted. But again as of today openSuse still hits a sweet spot for me.
Slashdot Mirror
"There's a dead pixel in Iowa."
Most of the southern, western and mid western US states have a lot of dead pixels, Kansas for instance is eat up with them. I am not sure it is display problem though, I suspect it is a memory or cpu problem that simply shows up as dead pixels.
wabi-sabi
matthew
Hey you left out Cayman Island and Swiss bank accounts!
I could not help but to wonder if the unexpectedly huge success of the Rover program might be an issue. In all projects there is a bell curve of funding requirements low during conceptual trending to high during build and implementation and tapering off as the project is completed. I imagine that with budgets as tight as they are they would have to take from another project in order to continued unexpected levels of staffing, power and services for the Rover project. What do they cut, the potential cash cow of the 20 year Mars plan still in the conceptual stages? The space station? The Shuttle replacement program? Satellite programs? Military related programs would of course be off the table as they would funded differently. Unless they can find something to sell to the military on this the only other option is to ask congress for more money.
The political timing is rotten for such a request. Things like the quivering mess of the banking and trading sectors, $100+ oil, so many middle class people facing the eminent prospect of becoming homeless. Add in the frackin quagmire in Iraq, the inflation dragon, and a presidential election year and the option of hibernating looks pretty dang good to me. If I could freeze the entire state of my life and hibernate for a year or two I would consider it a possible positive thing at least well worth looking into.
wabi-sabi
matthew
The definition of just who is a terrorist is relative to ones perspective. For instance King George considered Samuel Adams an agent of terror. In offers of pardon for the cease and desist of rebellion there were a few colonials that were excepted from pardon. Sam Adams and his cousin John were at or near the top of the list of those who would hang no matter what.
Wabi Sabi
Matthew
Pewfff.. butterflies are for wussies, bumblebees, hornets and etc are much faster and far more challenging than butterflies. And if you screwup in your data handling calculations you may very well get stung... a lot. I have heard of some really serious basement freaks that "deposit" certain body fluids on a seriously overclocked CPU. The pheromones released attracts swams of horny killer honeybees which generate huge vivid displays the the data sets.
Personally I prefer dragonflies, mainly because they don't sting me. They are very challenging to observe, are several orders of magnitude faster than butterflies, capable of near zero time reference for directional flight vector changes thus providing awesome data display switching time, can fly with stability in multiples thus allowing for larger data sets, often fly in formation allowing for data stream pipe lining and kewlest of all they can hover which provides for very accurate data snapshots. Actually the kewlest thing is that they can mate while flying, of course butterflies can do that as well but not quite as vigorously. This is kinda like decoding and displaying encrypted porn on the "fly".
If you had any meta physical coding skills the next step in data display and analysis would be fairies. The data density of fairy grouping is unmatched, do you have any idea how many of these fit on the head of a pin? The resolution they are capable of rendering is far greater than the human eye can process. As entities of a higher dimensional state they are capable of making state transitions via quantum tunneling thus the effective display pixel flip is zero, faster even than the light they emit, chew on that for an while. They are capable of representing data from a quantum flux or entanglement, thus they can transmit and display data from anywhere or anytime and have perfect peer to peer data sharing abilities. Best of all some of the female fairies I have seen artwork renderings of are really really hot!
Wabi Sabi
Matthew
Right, despite what many seem to believe the Constitution is not simply some "god damned piece of paper" that was thrown together by a bunch of people to avoid paying taxes to the King. The Constitution is the result of millennium of human co-survival strategy called civilization. It has its roots in the Code of Hammurabi, The Torah, the Greeks, the Romans, the Charter of Liberties, the Magna Carta, and even Native American influences.
My understanding of it is that at its heart it is about establishing a social structure (a democratically elected republic) that supports the right of free existence and self determination for the individual and the right of individuals to collectively take measures to enable and defend such rights for themselves.
That an oligarchic kleptocracy has perverted its meaning and intent to the point that so many people have such basic mis-perceptions about its purpose is a testament to how bad things have become.
wabi-sabi
matthew
A lot of folks like to pick on Ted Kennedy. However if you care about issues of your civil rights and the living conditions of the poor and working folks you will find he has one the best voting records in the Senate. Of course his record is not perfect I for one would prefer he better support our 2nd amendment rights and quit doling out money to the storm troopers , excuse me I mean law enforcement. But he generally does not deserve the level of flack he gets. As for the State Of the Union propaganda, hell I gave my wife the remote about half way through Bush's bull and went off to read the stuff here on /. amazingly enough the bull here was no where as deep.
wabi-sabi
matthew
Obama just made serious points with me.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
"It's also important to note that the VAST majority of our petroleum imports don't actually come from the Middle East! The DOE says so itself. Our top two petroleum importing countries are... Canada and Mexico!"
The argument about dependence on Middle Eastern oil fields is based on world supply. This area of the world still provides a considerable percentage of the total volume. If this volume is reduced then the products in Mexico and Canada will become more attractive to other buyers in the world, like say China, Europe or Japan, and thus more expensive for us all.
I can see where this could be a reasonably valid argument. However I tend to think the root issue is what the root issue always is, ie: WGTMTM or Who Gets To Make The Money. There has been considerable investment in this part of the worlds oil fields by a few really big players that intend to extract every $ they can from said investment. Generally I don't blame them for the base premise, I just have a problem with the ethics and corresponding social fallout of the methods they often employ.
It seems to me that this is a excellent argument against a unilateral approach in dealing with this area of the world. Despite what they are willing to pay in taxes I doubt the Europeans or Japanese want to pay a higher base price. I doubt the traditionally frugal Chinese would be fond of it either. Then again considering these players military history in the last century or two maybe we don't want them any more involved than absolutely necessary. See I can examine and see the good and bad of more than one view point, at least I can, unfortunately some it seems can't manage such.
wabi-sabi
matthew
"But then, no one actually reads it any more."
A brain washed ignorant populance, the dip shits that see it as "just a god damned piece of paper" and those who out of political fear or idealogical intent refuse to apply the law, these are the three biggest threats to our freedom, not terrorism. To me the terrorist mongers are simply providing exactly what the terrorists want and need the most. The Bushies got "rope a doped", first they had problems realizing it, now they can't lose face on it. In the end though these anti liberty agendas are simply an opportunistic grab for control and resources by super rich control freaks.
Wabi-Sabi
matthew
"What reason does a seller have for charging more than the actual shipping costs, other than making up for the too small selling price? (And therefore showing up more positively in the search results)"
One other reason is to avoid some of the costs from eBays/Paypals final sales price percentage calculation. I would agree with many that this practice is disingenuous though the steady route of increases in the costs to sellers by eBay/Paypal is not exactly a positive practice either. Many of the sellers already work on a low margin and there are a finite number of sales possible for a item class, so increases in the percentage costs either have to be passed on or circumvented somehow if they are to simply maintain income. I think the levels of this, especially from SE Asia sellers, that I see on eBay are indicative of a very basic problem that eBay is going to have to fix before someone else replaces them in this market.
The combination of upfront store/listing fees and final sales costs also inhibit the hobbiest/casual seller like myself. I recently closed my eBay store as my sales volume/profit was just enough that I was essentially doing it for nothing after all the fees were totaled. I never expected to make more than chump change for the junk I had laying around. I just hate to see neat stuff go to the dump when someone somewhere can make use of it. Indeed my prime motive for the store was to get rid of this stuff without sending it to the landfill. However it sure would have been nice if I could have kept some loose change for the effort, money that I would have likely spent on eBay anyway. I am not a eBay hater, I still love the concept. In fact it is one I had about the same time as the founders of eBay, I just failed to implement my version it in a timely manner. Still I had a lot of fun writing the perl cgi scripts for my Or Best Offer Classifieds. You know I have as of yet to see where eBay or anyone else is implementing a true "Yankee" type of auction, it beats the dickens out of "Dutch" auctions.
Wabi-Sabi
matthew
I would generally agree though I can see where there may be occasion to fund a project with borrowed money. If our debt load wasn't in such dire straits I could see where the amortization of a projects cost over time could be helpful with larger endeavors. This is capitalism and there is no reason that our government could not make it work as well as a private entity. The main qualification I would require is that it have a well hashed and logical plan that projects a ROI.
As an example a few years back I noted the repair and fuel costs of my truck(78 Jeep Cherokee), a little calculation proved to me that I could drive a new more fuel efficient truck (89 F-150) for a 25% increase in current expenditures. The difference of value between the new truck and the old one at the end of the 5 year loan would further raise the advantage and put me at better than 25% ahead in total expenses. So even with interest accounted for I saved money via the investment in a new truck. Of course I did have the ability to pay the loan without rolling the interest forward forever.
Guess what I drove that truck for over 15 years and had minimal repair costs in over 300,000 miles. By my calculations I saved over 100% of what it would have cost me to keep driving the old one, or over $10,000. More than twice enough to pay for the replacement (a cherry 94 F-150). What with technological improvements stalled and times as they are I could not get the same level of return on another new one even if I could afford the payments, which I would be afraid of in these times. Besides I like this style of Ford and the 94 is as I said cherry, it should be good for a quarter million miles more easy. The old F-150 looks like hell, a few to many deer, but still runs pretty good so I just gave it to my son a few days ago.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
"What happens now if someone doesn't buy health insurance? They go to the emergency room and get treated anyway. Other people end up paying for it in the form of higher hospital costs.
Obviously, the pure capitalist solution would be for hospitals to just refuse people who don't have money. I'm not necessarily against that idea either, but I doubt it'd ever fly."
I am going to be kind in my response and simply say that it is obvious to me that you are not aware of what the situation actually is. What with the amount of cash being siphoned form the people, the tellers of these lies are, and will continue to be, bold and relentless.
As someone who has had personal experience in these matters I can give you some clues. My experience includes being a health care worker for over twenty years, and as a patient who has had to decide against treatment for serious maladies, even though I have insurance simply due to deductible/copayment cost issues. Worse of all I have had close friends DIE from chronic diseases that had received the legally required minimum but no more.
#1 Remember this!!! People are routinely refused treatment or medication because they cannot pay for it. I guess you are referring to the legally required MINIMUM treatment at CERTAIN qualification level emergency rooms. Such treatment options suck because:
A: If your symptoms do not meet the definition of immediately life threating or subject to causing severe permanent disability you can and most likely will be refused treatment.
B: In the case of conditions that are immediately life threating or subject to causing severe permanent disability the law ONLY requires a MINIMAL level of treatment, mostly focused on stabilization.
C: Emergency rooms are horrendously expensive to us all due to the 24/7/365 staffing requirements and since only the worst cases go through them, cases that often could have been managed at much lower cost in a normal and comparatively cheap clinical setting.
#2 Last but not least, if you are very lucky then you or someone you care very much for will never have to settle for the legally required minimum. Oh and by the way sometimes those you care for do not tell you of their situation, you learn about after they DIE. You see we have all been conditioned to be ashamed of our inability to pay for a horribly and artificially inflated health care and pharmaceutical expenses. Hell of a way to go huh? Instead of trying to find a safe little personal niche in a cruel and unjust world, how about the idea of working to create the world in which you wish to live?
Wabi-Sabi
matthew
Now that you know better, please quit contributing to the spread of these lies and misinformation. These lies are bankrupting or killing good folks every day.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
You probably have already thought of this or it may not even apply to your problem. But, have you checked to be sure your hardware (BIOS) and Vista are both using the same time reference. If one is using universal (UTC or Greenwich based time) and the other is using local hardware you will have exactly this type of problem, especially between boots. I'll probably get some static from this but I would try setting them both to local hardware time as I have had problems with UTC in the past.
:).
I had a similar problems with several Linux distros and my current box. I am not sure if Linux or my BIOS are the responsible party but even when I set both to UTC the time was erratic with the shift being 4-6hrs. It happens that 6hrs is the diff between my local time, US Central time and Greenwich time. With both set to local time I do get drift of a few minutes a year but I can live with that. As it stands I have not even bothered to setup NTP (Network Time Protocol) with my latest installs even though the current generation of it might fix the UTC issue. I think I may revisit this issue at some time, but not today
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." Benjamin Franklin
Ben was right in his observation but I doubt he had any personal disrespect for the power of the pen and impassioned discourse. There are good arguments that an intellectual agent provocateur can massively affect the direction of society.
"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.." Samuel Adams
The route to an world turning event from a public protest/political rally is long and dangerous. The event would not be the real source of the idea or challenge it is merely the flashpoint or the point where a critical mass gets wide public notice.
This route requires that the starter of these "brush fires" act so relentlessly and boldly that they expose themselves to considerable risk. I seem to remember King George defining Sam Adams as a "terrorist".
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
I have used some of the magnets for various tasks like a retrieval tool, stud finder, paper holder, etc. Most magnets are in a randomly assembled pile on a self, it actually makes a really interesting piece of modern art. The screws, jumpers and such all hit a hardware bin, the aluminum hits the salvage bin. I have found several handy uses for the isolation bushings found on some drives. The nicest looking parts of all, the motors, spacers and platters I have not found a good general use for yet but I am working on it. Maybe another art project, or a lamp. I did use some of the platters as reflectors for a halogen track lighting system, made for a nice golden light, but they were a pain to match up to the fixtures. The platters do make a heck of a semaphore mirror, try one out in bright sunlight, please do not look into the focus cone with your remaining eye. If one could manage to evenly distort the platter a slight bit without breaking it they might make a heck of a parabolic cooker or fire starter. I keep wanting to play with using the motors as a mini generator but have not had the time to check out the feasibility of such.
wabi-sabi
matthew
And if you decide you are in dire need of cash, tired of this genre or whatever and wish to sell your collection? Or as you mentioned, how about if someone steals your computer or just the storage media and subsequently releases this watermarked content into the wild? Even worse what if you get hacked and only the music is simply stolen and made public before your hd is erased? The whole copyright holders rights versus purchasers personal property rights issue is a quagmire. It was bad enough before the digital age, and it is gonna get even harder to manage. It is a shame that greedy corp types, irresponsible yahoos and a few odd perverts may very destroy P2P. Emerging P2P technology could evolve into one of the best tools we have to ensure the accuracy of information like news and the free discussion between individuals. And so it goes...
wabi-sabi
matthew
Exactly, that did it for me as well. I work as a alarm/controls system technician in a hospital. I still have to deal with Windows related problems, yes XP and 2000 systems as well, on an all together to frequent a basis at work. I simply got sick of the constant fight with it at work AND at home. I picked up OS/2 in the mid nineties then moved to Linux in the late nineties when IBM seemed ready to abandon OS/2. Other than an occasional 98 session via VMWare or with Wine for a couple old Windows apps like 3DHome MSWindows has not existed on my home PC for over ten years. I did keep several Windows boxes around for a while for testing when I was doing some development work. But that got to be too much trouble as well. I have not bothered to do much Windows specific platform work in the last few years, mainly because maintaining the test boxes is such a friggin' pain, well than and the moving target of the API, the costs of runtime licenses, etc.
wabi-sabi
matthew
I just tossed together a box from my old parts bin and a $13.25 eBay acquired ASUS P3PB-F with a 450mhz PIII. The old parts include a 15"Samsung LCD, a nVidia TNT32, 512mb PC2700 SDRAM, a SB64, a Intel NIC, a 60gb Seagate and a Sony 20x CD. I put this together in an old server case for a email/internet/movie/music/photo viewer station in the family room to keep guests off my main P4 box. This critter kicks hiney with several 2005 thru 2007 Linux/KDE distros. It even supports some lower overhead compositing effects like transparency without so much as a hickup. I haven't tried Beryl or Fusion on it and I don't think it would handle them too well, but there is no reason to anyway. Firefox, Thunderbird, Amarok, Gwenview, Gimp, Kaffeine and Open Office all run great. This box would be plenty enough for the use many people buy a PC for. About all that is left missing right now is a DVD player and a PCI-USB2 card.
wabi-sabi
matthew
I once knew a girl named Jackie. One dark night I plugged the wrong socket. I thought it was kinda funny at the time. Like I said, I once knew a girl named Jackie.
wabi-sabi
matthew
Why, cyber-terrorism of course. The chance of a serious attack on our digital infrastructure in the next ten years is 100%.A successful one could be devastating to the wealth or security of the nation. The NSA has been developing for/with FOSS for years now. Ever hear of SELinux ( www.nsa.gov/selinux/ )? I think they have determined that FOSS is the at least one of the best chances we have to protect ourselves. At the very least they are being very responsible in that they are taking a good look at the software that runs the vast majority of the internets infrastructure.
Hey look I am not the biggest fan of the department of duct tape, color coded FUD and katrinagate, but they should be looking at this issue very close. I just hope they don't manage to anal-ize some critical code themselves. Given the nature of the organization I think they would like to, but given the nature of the problem I doubt that they could pull it off. I can see a reason to get verrryyy wairyyy of binary blobs, like say video card drivers or codec paks, in the near future though.
wabi-sabi
matthew
"Maybe our piddly little brains just aren't capable of comprehending whatever it is that created God, so we can physically never know."
The true definition of an agnostic. Which applies to the vast majority of people, if that is they are really honest in their introspection they have to end up saying "I don't know". There in lies the root question in the God debate. Did God create our piddly little brains or did our piddly little brains create God? But the real root question for us all as individuals is "Will the me that I know and those I have become attached to simply cease to exist when we die?". I think all philosophical inquires and religious propositions have this at the root. Everything else like issues of free will, ultimate justice, heaven, hell and all such depend upon the root question. Alas as you noted it is unlikely we will ever be able to answer this question in the only mode or existence we do know.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
Made me think of some sensors I installed a while back that shipped with what looked like "The Worlds Smallest (Penis) Protector" rolled onto the inlet ports(about .25in). I had a bit of fun with them at work for a day or two. What is really sad is what I saw first was "The Worlds Smallest Protractor", "huh?" I said, to myself of course. Damn I can be such a frackin' geek, damn I did it again. I'll just shut up now...
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
Non fiction technical reference books of course I find it handy to keep. Certain works of non fiction like a history exploration, futurist essay or occasionally fiction I find so insightful that I keep it like a reference. Most other books of reasonable worth I like to give to others. I would say lend but they rarely come back anyway, so often I just say keep it. A few I consider absolute canonical collectibles and thus I keep them in the hope that my children, future grandchildren and close friends will gain as much from them as I have.
There is a big difference in telling a ten year old "you really should check out this book at the library" and having them wander through your study with you on a lazy weekend morning. I cannot tell you how good it feels to watch a child wander through the books, try them out one here and there and them find them later looking for more by the same author. To find them deep into a book and ask them "what ya readin'today" and get an answer like "For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1984, Slaughterhouse-Five or Steppenwolf", just something else that they dug out of my canonical set. It is also nice to be able to pull a book from the shelf, open it to a selected passage at an opportune time. I might see it different if I lived a few blocks away from a big city library. However I live seven miles from anywhere in the woods, and I like it here, a lot.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
Well about the only things I get to slobbering about these days are a good steak, beer or intrusions on my liberty so I may not be who you were trolling for. I do try most every major distro every version or two, at least as a Live or VM installed test, and I try a full install of the more promising ones. I also try or regularly make use of quite a few specialty distros.
As of today I still find openSuse continues the tradition of being the most stable and best polished Linux distro for general use and I still use it as my primary OS as I have for a long while now. I use 10.2 on a daily basis, I have installed 10.3 but have not had the time to tweak it out and migrate to it.
This could change as I see a lot improvement in most distro's in the last few years and I did not care for the smell of the M$ deal at all. I do think that Novell has been far from a parasite, they have made quite a few very valuable contributions since they purchased SuSe, free as in beer openSuse being one of my favorites. I worry more about their long term survival in the tank with a shark than I do about them intentionally contaminating the source code base, which I suspect could get them and Microsoft sued or possibly even prosecuted. But again as of today openSuse still hits a sweet spot for me.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew