What I meant was that I don't believe that the US government could put a man on the moon now. I suspect that, inevitably as a nation ages, bureaucracy increases to the point where no matter how rich the nation is, the cost of large undertakings balloons out of control until the project can't be done anymore. I suspect that a nation can do big projects -- the national electrical power infrastructure, building a comprehensive, integrated road system over almost 4 million square miles, and putting a man on the moon and bringing him back, can only be done during a "sweet spot" in a government's history. And we are past that point now.
Test by: In the 1960's, we built the largest, most complicated machine ever built by man (the Saturn V stack) and sent a payload to the moon and back. In the 1980's, we just barely, at tremendous cost, created a cargo plane that could make it into LEO and most of the time return safely to Earth. In the three decades since then, there's been a few attempts to recreate the heavy lifting and spacecraft capabilities we had in the 60's, but costs became too great and they were canceled. My point is, I don't think the US government could do it anymore.
Maybe private companies could, but the danger there is government over-regulation making it too costly. And then, with what are we left? Bond villains?
*Can* we? We could at one time. I have wondered for awhile if projects like putting a living person on another planet and returning them safely to earth is something that a nation can do only at a certain stage of development, when the thirst for adventure is greater than the perceived need for safety, and bureaucracy has not yet quite managed to strangle large undertakings.
> not really noticing that the future is already here
We should put this on a t-shirt so we don't forget it. The future? The good parts, flying cars, colonies on other planets, still a long way off. The bad parts -- surveillance state, punishment for potential crimes, autonomous robot weapons, that's already here. Also (from another article) artificially created alien organisms. (Because in SF, that always ends well...)
One might argue that the "cost effective" part is the stickler. The more cost effective the mayhem and the less chance of constituents' sons and daughters at risk, the easier it is to make a decision to use aggression. Cost effective, non of our people get hurt, win!
Of course, there's a flaw in the argument, but I don't expect the average politician to see it.
I'm not sure I agree. I think building an OS with virus checking incorporated into the design, for instance, would be a form of "self preservation". Or a computer/robotic arm combination that recognizes a screwdriver and will not let one get near. Moreover, I could point out humans that don't appear to have any concept of self-preservation, which calls into question whether this would be a rigorous requirement for a "truly human computer".
Likewise, a robot that nudged you and said "let's play catch. Please please please" until you wanted to unplug it, would be a pretty good facsimile of a typical five year old kid.
I agree. I wonder if its truly 17 channels or if its 17+ shows. I don't really care about channels as much as I do about specific shows (of which personally I watch less than 17 shows).
That's brilliant. That's an absolutely brilliant point. It's not the channels, it's the shows. If a family as a whole collectively watches 20 shows (say) and those 20 shows are spread across four networks, skiffy and Showtime and Disney and Nick and six or seven other specialized channels, it could easily approach 17 channels, which may give an erroneous impression of how much TV is actually watched.
I recently binge-watched The Green Lantern Animated Series on Netflix. (It's really good -- they delve into the mythos more than I've seen before, and the scripting, dialog and voice acting are excellent. Highly recommended.) It only ran one season on (I believe) Cartoon Network, and was killed really most sincerely dead by the debacle that was the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie. (Nobody wanted to buy the toys after that, and CN canceled the series. On a cliffhanger.) Anyway, point being, had we cable TV still, that would have been (probably) the only show we would have watched on CN, and that would have counted as another channel.
Back when we had cable, we acquired Starz briefly to watch Torchwood. After about three episodes, we change our account to drop the package that included that channel. Wow, what a disappointment.
I wonder how many people have HBO solely to watch Game of Thrones?
Wife is a sports fanatic, and I have absolutely no interest. (I know, that's backwards. I also do laundry. Do I have to turn in my man card?) She'll watch anything, including arena football and -- I'm not making this up -- *golf*. (At least golf is quiet.) One of the advantages, for me, of dumping the cable is that wife now hangs out at sports bars to watch games rather than having the volume up at home. Makes things a lot more peaceful.
I would think that the average would be lower, especially in this economy. The "network" channels plus a few of the basic cable channels. Maybe eight or nine total for the most part, with very rare ventures into maybe two or three more. Do people really sign up for "pay" channels anymore?
I think that if people could really buy ala carte instead of having to buy nearly 200 channels or nothing, the numbers might be different.
We dumped cable during dot com bust (I was out of work at the time) and went to Netflix. You can't imagine what reducing your TV budget from $120 a month to $6 a month does to your budget. We also invested in this think called an Antenna, which was surprisingly cheap. Our homeowner's association did not allow antennas (thereby handing a monopoly to a local really terrible cable company) but the communications act of 1996 invalidated that.
We had cable again for a short time in 2006 to try out the latest crop of DVRs, and they stink. Sluggish response and not enough disk space. (I think I calculated once that DVR disk space costs 12 times as much as the same space purchased at Best Buy.) Dumped all of that at the beginning of the current recession, got a roku instead. (A one time cost that was less than one month in cable TV fees.) Wife and child watch shows a year or so out of date, but they have gotten used to it, and they can binge watch. (Which isn't necessarily a good thing....)
I need internet as I work from home, but fortunately fiber is available in my area, so I don't have to deal with comcrap. Now we have two Rokus, one upstairs and one downstairs, wife has a Hulu account and daughter has her own Netflix account, and all I'm paying for is the network.
The cable TV model is obsolete for several reasons -- real time vs demand, package vs ala carte, and unreasonable cost. But I think it will take an older generation (what I call the "tv tray generation") dying out before the cable companies finally go under. But it's inevitable.
Me? I really don't have much time for TV. Fridays is "pizza and movie night", and we take turns picking the movie, but other than that and The Big Bang Theory, I'm largely ignorant of what's on the tube. And -- a little insight -- you'd be astonished at how much productive time that frees up.
yes, except most universities will go along with it and force would be students to buy the books under those conditions or not go into law. This requires more than just voting with wallets.
Photocopier. And yes it may be technically illegal. But sometimes a little civil disobedience is necessary. In fact, as a law student, you could make that your thesis.
Unbind the book, it saves time. Then re-bind the book or just hand back a stack of loose-leaf -- your choice.
The way I've explained it is thus -- it's not "another system". The motherboard blew out in this computer and I had to replace it. Since that particular model is not made anymore, I put in as close as I could find. The rest of the system remains the same.
I mean really, regardless of what the wording says, Microsoft is not going to make you buy another license after fixing your computer. Were that so, we wouldn't fix them, we'd just replace them with Macs.
...and the moment the Adobe suite is ported to Linux, I will do that. I do run Linux (CentOS for server and Ubuntu for desktop) for any application that doesn't need Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere. When those become available (and I know of Gimp, I use it, it's great, but it's still not quite Photoshop) I'll dump Windows without a second thought. (I mean ARE YOU KIDDING? In Windows 8 I have seen the future of Microsoft, and I want to stay as far away from that as possible.)
Because (and this is important), what OS you run doesn't matter, what work you get done with the computer is what matters. We sometimes lose sight of that.
So why am I not on a Mac? Because Macs are expensive, have their own eccentricities, and I prefer to build my own systems.
As a system builder, I haven't had any problems moving XP and 7 licenses to other systems in the (rare) event of complete system failure. (As opposed to incremental upgrades, which sometimes require re-authenticating but do not require re-licensing.) You have to, you know, call and talk to a real person, but in my direct experience it can be done. This assumes you have media and a real, valid license key for each system, which is true for all the systems I build.
You might be referring to systems that are purchased with the software installed, no media and no license key. I can't answer for those.
But more to the point, it has also been my experience that systems last longer than versions of Windows. Having to regularly move a Windows license between multiple machines is not something regular users would need to do.
I haven't tried Mint. It does sound interesting. I was running Fedora on a laptop for awhile, and it did ok if all you need is the basics -- mail, chat, browser, etc. The only reason I still use Windows is because I use the Adobe Creative Suite extensively, the only choices are Windows and Mac, and since I build my own systems, the only choice is Windows. The day Adobe ports to Linux will be the last day I use Windows. That will be a very happy day.
> Or would you really drop nearly $250 on an operating system?
Oh c'mon, that's FUD and you know it. I build systems as a sideline, and I can buy locally Windows 7 Home Premium for $129 and Windows 7 64 Pro for $159. Amazon has Win 7 64 pro for $138.98. Amazon sells Windows 8 64 Pro for $129.99. For less than $10 more, you can get an operating system that actually works and results in fewer tech support calls to me. It's a good investment.
Mind you, as an early adopter of Win8, I bought it for $59 when they were trying to promote it, but after upgrading to 8.1 and seeing no relief, I finally system restored my own system back to 7, because I use my computer to do stuff, not to wrestle with operating systems. And there it sits until Microsoft gets their act together. In the meantime, the systems I build still have Windows 7.
I used to have a little fob on my keychain that when pressed would say "yes dear" in a cloying voice. (I'm not kidding. It finally failed and I've been looking for a replacement.) Wife would say something to me in a shrill nagging voice and then have to say "DON'T you reach for your keys!".
Exactly. The actual situation isn't as important as the users' perception, and currently that's pretty bad. I would submit that Windows 8 deserves every complaint, but then again, I'm a user. Someone who's.... I dunno, not a user? Works in Microsoft? Goes off bullet points instead of usage in the field?...may have a different opinion.
I see where you're going. I have a side business supporting regular non-corporate users, and when Win8 was introduced, business really picked up. There's a lot of user frustration out there.
Especially since, in most cases people did this to themselves. Never ever buy the first version of a Windows release. And if the first version looks Vista-level problematic, approach even the first update cautiously. Everyone knows that by now.
Do regular users even know what and where the "update log" is?
I don't blame Microsoft for orphaning 8.1 early -- it's a mess and a corporate embarrassment, and the sooner they get people off it the better. My copy of 8 went back on the shelf, and it'll stay there until I'm comfortable that Microsoft understands that most of their customers don't have touch screens and they have to provide for that.
Geekly early adopters will figure out how to upgrade. Although they may be more vocal, they'll be less affected than the regular users, the people who buy computers to do stuff and not to manage operating systems, will be.
From a marketing standpoint, Microsoft really needs to get the name "windows 8" out of the public mindshare. It tastes like failure.
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What I meant was that I don't believe that the US government could put a man on the moon now. I suspect that, inevitably as a nation ages, bureaucracy increases to the point where no matter how rich the nation is, the cost of large undertakings balloons out of control until the project can't be done anymore. I suspect that a nation can do big projects -- the national electrical power infrastructure, building a comprehensive, integrated road system over almost 4 million square miles, and putting a man on the moon and bringing him back, can only be done during a "sweet spot" in a government's history. And we are past that point now.
Test by: In the 1960's, we built the largest, most complicated machine ever built by man (the Saturn V stack) and sent a payload to the moon and back. In the 1980's, we just barely, at tremendous cost, created a cargo plane that could make it into LEO and most of the time return safely to Earth. In the three decades since then, there's been a few attempts to recreate the heavy lifting and spacecraft capabilities we had in the 60's, but costs became too great and they were canceled. My point is, I don't think the US government could do it anymore.
Maybe private companies could, but the danger there is government over-regulation making it too costly. And then, with what are we left? Bond villains?
we can put a man on the moon, so...
*Can* we? We could at one time. I have wondered for awhile if projects like putting a living person on another planet and returning them safely to earth is something that a nation can do only at a certain stage of development, when the thirst for adventure is greater than the perceived need for safety, and bureaucracy has not yet quite managed to strangle large undertakings.
That assumes that we know as much physics as they do. They might be using some medium to communicate that we haven't even discovered yet.
Certainly possible. But then, who of us could receive it?
> not really noticing that the future is already here
We should put this on a t-shirt so we don't forget it. The future? The good parts, flying cars, colonies on other planets, still a long way off. The bad parts -- surveillance state, punishment for potential crimes, autonomous robot weapons, that's already here. Also (from another article) artificially created alien organisms. (Because in SF, that always ends well...)
One might argue that the "cost effective" part is the stickler. The more cost effective the mayhem and the less chance of constituents' sons and daughters at risk, the easier it is to make a decision to use aggression. Cost effective, non of our people get hurt, win!
Of course, there's a flaw in the argument, but I don't expect the average politician to see it.
But seriously, the flaw is that there may be other valid mathematical models of a way that memories could work.
I'm not sure I agree. I think building an OS with virus checking incorporated into the design, for instance, would be a form of "self preservation". Or a computer/robotic arm combination that recognizes a screwdriver and will not let one get near. Moreover, I could point out humans that don't appear to have any concept of self-preservation, which calls into question whether this would be a rigorous requirement for a "truly human computer".
Likewise, a robot that nudged you and said "let's play catch. Please please please" until you wanted to unplug it, would be a pretty good facsimile of a typical five year old kid.
I agree. I wonder if its truly 17 channels or if its 17+ shows. I don't really care about channels as much as I do about specific shows (of which personally I watch less than 17 shows).
That's brilliant. That's an absolutely brilliant point. It's not the channels, it's the shows. If a family as a whole collectively watches 20 shows (say) and those 20 shows are spread across four networks, skiffy and Showtime and Disney and Nick and six or seven other specialized channels, it could easily approach 17 channels, which may give an erroneous impression of how much TV is actually watched.
I recently binge-watched The Green Lantern Animated Series on Netflix. (It's really good -- they delve into the mythos more than I've seen before, and the scripting, dialog and voice acting are excellent. Highly recommended.) It only ran one season on (I believe) Cartoon Network, and was killed really most sincerely dead by the debacle that was the Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie. (Nobody wanted to buy the toys after that, and CN canceled the series. On a cliffhanger.) Anyway, point being, had we cable TV still, that would have been (probably) the only show we would have watched on CN, and that would have counted as another channel.
Back when we had cable, we acquired Starz briefly to watch Torchwood. After about three episodes, we change our account to drop the package that included that channel. Wow, what a disappointment.
I wonder how many people have HBO solely to watch Game of Thrones?
Wife is a sports fanatic, and I have absolutely no interest. (I know, that's backwards. I also do laundry. Do I have to turn in my man card?) She'll watch anything, including arena football and -- I'm not making this up -- *golf*. (At least golf is quiet.) One of the advantages, for me, of dumping the cable is that wife now hangs out at sports bars to watch games rather than having the volume up at home. Makes things a lot more peaceful.
I would think that the average would be lower, especially in this economy. The "network" channels plus a few of the basic cable channels. Maybe eight or nine total for the most part, with very rare ventures into maybe two or three more. Do people really sign up for "pay" channels anymore?
I think that if people could really buy ala carte instead of having to buy nearly 200 channels or nothing, the numbers might be different.
We dumped cable during dot com bust (I was out of work at the time) and went to Netflix. You can't imagine what reducing your TV budget from $120 a month to $6 a month does to your budget. We also invested in this think called an Antenna, which was surprisingly cheap. Our homeowner's association did not allow antennas (thereby handing a monopoly to a local really terrible cable company) but the communications act of 1996 invalidated that.
We had cable again for a short time in 2006 to try out the latest crop of DVRs, and they stink. Sluggish response and not enough disk space. (I think I calculated once that DVR disk space costs 12 times as much as the same space purchased at Best Buy.) Dumped all of that at the beginning of the current recession, got a roku instead. (A one time cost that was less than one month in cable TV fees.) Wife and child watch shows a year or so out of date, but they have gotten used to it, and they can binge watch. (Which isn't necessarily a good thing....)
I need internet as I work from home, but fortunately fiber is available in my area, so I don't have to deal with comcrap. Now we have two Rokus, one upstairs and one downstairs, wife has a Hulu account and daughter has her own Netflix account, and all I'm paying for is the network.
The cable TV model is obsolete for several reasons -- real time vs demand, package vs ala carte, and unreasonable cost. But I think it will take an older generation (what I call the "tv tray generation") dying out before the cable companies finally go under. But it's inevitable.
Me? I really don't have much time for TV. Fridays is "pizza and movie night", and we take turns picking the movie, but other than that and The Big Bang Theory, I'm largely ignorant of what's on the tube. And -- a little insight -- you'd be astonished at how much productive time that frees up.
I understand -- you don't fix Macs. But if it's not practical to fix PCs either, why bother with them?
yes, except most universities will go along with it and force would be students to buy the books under those conditions or not go into law. This requires more than just voting with wallets.
Photocopier. And yes it may be technically illegal. But sometimes a little civil disobedience is necessary. In fact, as a law student, you could make that your thesis.
Unbind the book, it saves time. Then re-bind the book or just hand back a stack of loose-leaf -- your choice.
The way I've explained it is thus -- it's not "another system". The motherboard blew out in this computer and I had to replace it. Since that particular model is not made anymore, I put in as close as I could find. The rest of the system remains the same.
I mean really, regardless of what the wording says, Microsoft is not going to make you buy another license after fixing your computer. Were that so, we wouldn't fix them, we'd just replace them with Macs.
Because (and this is important), what OS you run doesn't matter, what work you get done with the computer is what matters. We sometimes lose sight of that.
So why am I not on a Mac? Because Macs are expensive, have their own eccentricities, and I prefer to build my own systems.
I don't play games. I have a real life.
As a system builder, I haven't had any problems moving XP and 7 licenses to other systems in the (rare) event of complete system failure. (As opposed to incremental upgrades, which sometimes require re-authenticating but do not require re-licensing.) You have to, you know, call and talk to a real person, but in my direct experience it can be done. This assumes you have media and a real, valid license key for each system, which is true for all the systems I build.
You might be referring to systems that are purchased with the software installed, no media and no license key. I can't answer for those.
But more to the point, it has also been my experience that systems last longer than versions of Windows. Having to regularly move a Windows license between multiple machines is not something regular users would need to do.
I haven't tried Mint. It does sound interesting. I was running Fedora on a laptop for awhile, and it did ok if all you need is the basics -- mail, chat, browser, etc. The only reason I still use Windows is because I use the Adobe Creative Suite extensively, the only choices are Windows and Mac, and since I build my own systems, the only choice is Windows. The day Adobe ports to Linux will be the last day I use Windows. That will be a very happy day.
We finally came to an agreement. She nags me less and in return I actually pay attention to what she's saying.
> Or would you really drop nearly $250 on an operating system?
Oh c'mon, that's FUD and you know it. I build systems as a sideline, and I can buy locally Windows 7 Home Premium for $129 and Windows 7 64 Pro for $159. Amazon has Win 7 64 pro for $138.98. Amazon sells Windows 8 64 Pro for $129.99. For less than $10 more, you can get an operating system that actually works and results in fewer tech support calls to me. It's a good investment.
Mind you, as an early adopter of Win8, I bought it for $59 when they were trying to promote it, but after upgrading to 8.1 and seeing no relief, I finally system restored my own system back to 7, because I use my computer to do stuff, not to wrestle with operating systems. And there it sits until Microsoft gets their act together. In the meantime, the systems I build still have Windows 7.
I used to have a little fob on my keychain that when pressed would say "yes dear" in a cloying voice. (I'm not kidding. It finally failed and I've been looking for a replacement.) Wife would say something to me in a shrill nagging voice and then have to say "DON'T you reach for your keys!".
Exactly. The actual situation isn't as important as the users' perception, and currently that's pretty bad. I would submit that Windows 8 deserves every complaint, but then again, I'm a user. Someone who's.... I dunno, not a user? Works in Microsoft? Goes off bullet points instead of usage in the field? ...may have a different opinion.
I see where you're going. I have a side business supporting regular non-corporate users, and when Win8 was introduced, business really picked up. There's a lot of user frustration out there.
Especially since, in most cases people did this to themselves. Never ever buy the first version of a Windows release. And if the first version looks Vista-level problematic, approach even the first update cautiously. Everyone knows that by now.
Do regular users even know what and where the "update log" is?
I don't blame Microsoft for orphaning 8.1 early -- it's a mess and a corporate embarrassment, and the sooner they get people off it the better. My copy of 8 went back on the shelf, and it'll stay there until I'm comfortable that Microsoft understands that most of their customers don't have touch screens and they have to provide for that.
Geekly early adopters will figure out how to upgrade. Although they may be more vocal, they'll be less affected than the regular users, the people who buy computers to do stuff and not to manage operating systems, will be.
From a marketing standpoint, Microsoft really needs to get the name "windows 8" out of the public mindshare. It tastes like failure.