I love how people tend to forget that the Colonial militias were getting their asses kicked by the redcoats until a bunch of Germans and -- yes -- Frenchmen came over and taught us how to fight as an actual army.
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The sniper's weapon of choice was the Kentucky long rifle.
Range about 300 yards.
The most common weapon was the smooth bore musket and bayonet - next to worthless in civilian hands unless backed up by the mass fire of a full company of militia. You might on your own hit the broad side of a barn.
I call BS! Columbus was backed by a government and made several trips back and forth. It was only after he went that settlers followed.
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It didn't happen over-night.
John Smith had a checklist for the prospective colonist: a minimum one year's supply of everything. The winters will be hard, much harder than you have known or imagined. your first plantings will fail. You need to get that house up now.
The coldly realistic budget he had in mind was far beyond anything a farmer or skilled craftsmen could afford - and these were the men he wanted. Settlement on his terms would have to financed privately or through the government.
Designed by Takayuki Ohira, [credited] by the Guinness Book of World Records as the builder of the "world's most advanced planetarium" for exhibitions and museums, it projects a realistic image of the heavens--over 10,000 stars--as they appear without light pollution. It can accept one of two high-resolution image disks that are illuminated by a bright LED built into the globe and projected onto walls or ceilings by an optical-quality adjustable focus lens, providing a completely accurate view of the visible band of the Milky Way galaxy seen from the Northern hemis phere. The planetarium has a whisper-quiet motor that slowly simulates the turning of the earth by making the image projected move across a wall or ceiling. It can also randomly generate a simulated meteor that streaks across the ceiling. Includes AC adapter. Ages 10 and up, meets U.S. Federal toy safety standards for lead. 6 1/2" Diam. globe with stand. (3 1/2 lbs.)
The embedded device - the Loran or Sonar you buy for your boat - is more or less single function and frozen in time. In designing a general-purpose OSX or Windows you have to project yourself into the future, make educated guesses about what hardware and software will be entering the market somewhere down the road.
The only reason all these tiring Vista jokes keep being repeated is that these idiots that think you can run the latest game or operating system on their 4 year old 512MB PC. .
I think the reason the jokes persist is less innocent.
The $1500 HP 64 Bit Vista HDTV/Blu-Ray Pavilion Desktop at Walmart.com is quad core with 8 GB RAM.
1 TB of hard disk storage, and a muscular NVIDIA DX10 card with 1 GB RAM.
You can look at lower price points - much lower price points - and still see specs that ridiculously out class the big box retailer's lone OEM Linux PC.
Aero is not going to be a problem even at entry level.
Vista's MINIMUM memory requirement is 512 megs.
Windows 2000's recommended minimum was 64 megs.
.
The real-world hardware requirements for a Windows OS have always been those of a mid-priced system at the time of its release.
Tell me why an OS shouldn't be making use of resources as they become available and cheap.
I have never understood the Geek's obsession with RAM.
You would think he had been raised under the warm glow of a vacuum tube and threaded core for his Mom as a child.
The 8 GB 64 Bit Vista Premium Quad Core PC at Walmart.com starts at $1000.
For $1500 you can have it all: 64-Bit Vista, 8 GB RAM, the quad core CPU, Blu-Ray, HDTV, the 1 GB NVIDIA DX10 card, 1 TB of storage, etc, etc, etc.
Tech that was no more available in W2k's prime than a flying car - except perhaps to the Dot.com billionaire who sold out before the bust.
with all the sloppy inefficient programming, feature bloat, and generally craptastic work that goes into the ongoing, illogical, disuseful, nightmare that is MS Word
Current versions of MS Office and Office components hold 8 of the top 25 Business Software slots at Amazon.com.
Office Home & Student for Windows and the Mac are 1 & 2 overall.
It has become a geek mob sport to flood Amazon.com with negative reviews - to no effect whatever on sales.
And this is at a time when Linux is at a historic "high" while Microsoft is in a pretty firm slump... .
Microsoft is the only US industrial company to be given a AAA rating by S&P and Moody's in ten years.
It's a damn short list:
In addition to Microsoft: ADP, Exxon Mobil, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson. Rounding out the list for S&P is Pfizer; for Moody's, it's Toyota.Microsoft mint [Sept 27]
Given the Conservative Party's historic disregard of public opinion, however, the efforts of the copyright-pledge MPs will have to rally the full opposition across three major parties in order to defeat the bill. A mere 12 MPs now stand between the Canadian public and the MAFIAA's hungry maw. .
In a parliamentary system, party discipline is strong.
In a minority government you do not undermine the unity of your party and you do not work behind the leader's back.
Unless you are prepared to face an artic chill from the party regulars that amount of global warming will ever touch.
There is no Mac Book backlash. Not in the Mac Book's target market. The external drive, the HD Camcorder, that drives after-market sales at that price point is USB not Firewire.
This, btw, is exactly the reason Apple won't displace Microsoft and remain the niche player they are now. A lot more people might run OS-X if they could run it on the hardware of their choice. .
You buy a Mac because you are trying to simplify your life.
There aren't 1,000 configuration options in hardware or software.
That is a geek thing - something that appeals to the technical hobbyist or the pro - and one of the fundamental reasons why Linux on the desktop has less than a 1% share.
As main user or tool responsible person of some of those applications, I never encountered a Problem that I couldn't find quality problem solving information for. .
This works fine so long as everyone using these apps has the same DIY support skills. If the in-house guru is out of town is out of town or down with the flu, not so much.
If you think that anybody can change the source code, then just try it. Get a line or two of your code into Linux, Firefox and Openoffice. .
But that is precisely the point.
The top-line open source projects evolve under as formal and rigorous a corporate discipline as anything from Microsoft. Participation is - for all practical purposes - by invitation only.
But a few flights down the stairs takes you into a much more uncertain and chaotic world.
It strikes me that ham radio operators world-wide have lived with citizenship requirements from day one. I suspect that would be true of a great many other fixed and mobile services. Why should cell phones be any different?
Something I've never understood is how the government got the money to pay for the war machines, bombs, and bullets. I mean, you hear all the time how that got us out of the depression, but it just doesn't add up. .
You have a gas ration of four gallons a week and tires with no tread.
Production of automobiles, radios, and other non-essential consumer goods has been suspended for the duration.
The labor and materials you might have used to build a house are being employed elsewhere.
You are looking at a very healthy paycheck and everyone in your family is employable. The spare bedroom you have for rental is a gold mine.
Your kids are buying stamps that can be traded in for war bonds.
You are buying bonds too. What else are you going to do with all that money coming in, stuff it under your mattress?
Sure about that? If Obama were to order the Army to go in and pacify Central PA, there would at least be desertions and possibly mutiny. .
That is what western Pennsylvanians thought before Washington ordered in 12,000 troops during the Whiskey Rebellion.
It didn't take long for the Old South to discover that Lincoln was not Buchanan - that whatever the costs and whatever the difficulties he would find the forces he needed to get the job done.
In 1957 Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne to Little Rock.
You enter a minefield when you quote from sacred texts out of context.
If you are doing so simply for the dramatic effect - it is a pretty good bet that you will find yourself on the defensive - if only because of your adolescent arrogance and stupidity.
If you intended to pour gasoline on the fire, there is really no more to be said.
The problem is that we're tired of producers confusing "scaring" us with "startling" us. How many times did something jump out of the dark at you in Doom 3? .
H.P. Lovecraft at his best could chill you to the bone with nothing more explicit than an overwhelming sense of age and power:
That the closer you came to the heart of things, the more likely you were to go utterly and irretrievably mad.
Hitchcock, working in another genre, always knew that the fuse hits the audience harder than the bang - which, in the end, is just another special effect.
The shower scene in Psycho works because the audience is as keyed up and helpless in his hands as the girl.
1 The plural of anecdote isn't data. I'll believe that there are some nasty guys on sex offender lists, but I suspect there are also kids who had sex with their childhood sweetheart when they were underage, urinated in the park, etc. .
So you will simply go on believing what you want to believe?
Each entry on the New York State registry includes a detailed summary of the offender's record and an assessment of the risk he presents.
The database can be searched by county and zip code. Why not open up a page and put your theory to the test?
Why oh why are they doing a remake of the old generation? I would much rather see something fresh and new .
1 The successors to the ST:TOS [with rhe exception of DS9] present humans without flaws and tech without limits.
It makes for a very dull world.
You need a Loki, a Joker, a Q to give it any vitality at all.
2 Humility is often a disguise for a subtle and corrupting arrogance of power. The Prime Directive is as easy a path to damnation as any other.
It sure makes life hell on earth for a writer, a storyteller.
How often does Picard invoke the Prime Directive where there is no intelligible reason why it should be invoked - only to luck out and be spared standing mutely by as a witness to a Holocaust he could have trivially prevented?
The "races" in Star Trek are so obviously and closely related that any notion of preventing "cross-cultural contamination is utterly ludicrous.
..or were you expecting something closer to the series insofar as ship design is concerned?
.
ST:TOS was produced for the 21 inch screen and the 21 inch budget - using sets and props designed and constructed pretty much as they would have been for 1950's Space Patrol.
The Enterprise itself is nothing more than the flying saucer from Forbidden Planet thinly disguised by [structurally implausible and rather awkward] external elements added for visual appeal.
Slashdot Mirror
.
The sniper's weapon of choice was the Kentucky long rifle.
Range about 300 yards.
The most common weapon was the smooth bore musket and bayonet - next to worthless in civilian hands unless backed up by the mass fire of a full company of militia. You might on your own hit the broad side of a barn.
The French would supply 100,000 by war's end. Tactics and Weapons of the Revolutionary War, Musketfire
.
It didn't happen over-night.
John Smith had a checklist for the prospective colonist: a minimum one year's supply of everything. The winters will be hard, much harder than you have known or imagined. your first plantings will fail. You need to get that house up now.
The coldly realistic budget he had in mind was far beyond anything a farmer or skilled craftsmen could afford - and these were the men he wanted. Settlement on his terms would have to financed privately or through the government.
.
There are no complications for anyone but the geek who can see no value in the "imaginary" property of others.
.
Farm Time was local solar time.
You adjusted your watch about every 25 miles or so - once a day.
The railroad and the telegraph demanded standard time: 25 miles a day becomes 25 miles an hour as early as 1840.
There is - or soon will be - "instant messaging" on a continental scale.
That changes the way you think about markets, shipping, the entire structure of trade, banking and industry.
.
This delightful "toy" planetarium sells for $130-$170.
$325 for the Homestar Pro. Moon Disk and three white LEDs for projection.
Homestar Optical System, Sega Homestar Pro Home Planetarium
Designed by Takayuki Ohira, [credited] by the Guinness Book of World Records as the builder of the "world's most advanced planetarium" for exhibitions and museums, it projects a realistic image of the heavens--over 10,000 stars--as they appear without light pollution. It can accept one of two high-resolution image disks that are illuminated by a bright LED built into the globe and projected onto walls or ceilings by an optical-quality adjustable focus lens, providing a completely accurate view of the visible band of the Milky Way galaxy seen from the Northern hemis phere. The planetarium has a whisper-quiet motor that slowly simulates the turning of the earth by making the image projected move across a wall or ceiling. It can also randomly generate a simulated meteor that streaks across the ceiling. Includes AC adapter. Ages 10 and up, meets U.S. Federal toy safety standards for lead. 6 1/2" Diam. globe with stand. (3 1/2 lbs.)
.
The embedded device - the Loran or Sonar you buy for your boat - is more or less single function and frozen in time. In designing a general-purpose OSX or Windows you have to project yourself into the future, make educated guesses about what hardware and software will be entering the market somewhere down the road.
.
I think the reason the jokes persist is less innocent.
The $1500 HP 64 Bit Vista HDTV/Blu-Ray Pavilion Desktop at Walmart.com is quad core with 8 GB RAM.
1 TB of hard disk storage, and a muscular NVIDIA DX10 card with 1 GB RAM.
You can look at lower price points - much lower price points - and still see specs that ridiculously out class the big box retailer's lone OEM Linux PC.
Aero is not going to be a problem even at entry level.
The netbook is no longer safely Linux. XP is there in the middle and Vista at the high end. Atom-powered 'netbook' runs Vista, Call of Duty 4 [Sept 29]
Windows 2000's recommended minimum was 64 megs.
.
The real-world hardware requirements for a Windows OS have always been those of a mid-priced system at the time of its release.
Tell me why an OS shouldn't be making use of resources as they become available and cheap.
I have never understood the Geek's obsession with RAM.
You would think he had been raised under the warm glow of a vacuum tube and threaded core for his Mom as a child.
The 8 GB 64 Bit Vista Premium Quad Core PC at Walmart.com starts at $1000.
For $1500 you can have it all: 64-Bit Vista, 8 GB RAM, the quad core CPU, Blu-Ray, HDTV, the 1 GB NVIDIA DX10 card, 1 TB of storage, etc, etc, etc.
Tech that was no more available in W2k's prime than a flying car - except perhaps to the Dot.com billionaire who sold out before the bust.
with all the sloppy inefficient programming, feature bloat, and generally craptastic work that goes into the ongoing, illogical, disuseful, nightmare that is MS Word
Current versions of MS Office and Office components hold 8 of the top 25 Business Software slots at Amazon.com.
Office Home & Student for Windows and the Mac are 1 & 2 overall.
It has become a geek mob sport to flood Amazon.com with negative reviews - to no effect whatever on sales.
.
Microsoft is the only US industrial company to be given a AAA rating by S&P and Moody's in ten years.
It's a damn short list:
In addition to Microsoft: ADP, Exxon Mobil, General Electric and Johnson & Johnson. Rounding out the list for S&P is Pfizer; for Moody's, it's Toyota. Microsoft mint [Sept 27]
This is a slump? Operating System Market Share, Top Operating System Share Trend
.
In a parliamentary system, party discipline is strong.
In a minority government you do not undermine the unity of your party and you do not work behind the leader's back.
Unless you are prepared to face an artic chill from the party regulars that amount of global warming will ever touch.
.
There is no Mac Book backlash. Not in the Mac Book's target market. The external drive, the HD Camcorder, that drives after-market sales at that price point is USB not Firewire.
.
You buy a Mac because you are trying to simplify your life.
There aren't 1,000 configuration options in hardware or software.
That is a geek thing - something that appeals to the technical hobbyist or the pro - and one of the fundamental reasons why Linux on the desktop has less than a 1% share.
.
This works fine so long as everyone using these apps has the same DIY support skills. If the in-house guru is out of town is out of town or down with the flu, not so much.
.
But that is precisely the point.
The top-line open source projects evolve under as formal and rigorous a corporate discipline as anything from Microsoft. Participation is - for all practical purposes - by invitation only.
But a few flights down the stairs takes you into a much more uncertain and chaotic world.
It strikes me that ham radio operators world-wide have lived with citizenship requirements from day one. I suspect that would be true of a great many other fixed and mobile services. Why should cell phones be any different?
.
That the "live mike" is dangerous is a lesson broadcasters have had to learn and re-learn since KDKA went on the air in 1920.
Self-Censorship is intelligent and responsible:
There will always be some damn fool on the line waiting for his chance to say that "The President has been shot!"
.
The judge and the jury haven't been assembled to admire your elite - "leet" - skills.
They have been assembled to decide whether you are guilty of a felony as defined by the law.
"Totally not fair," I know.
But that is what makes this particular sort of social encounter something most of us learn to avoid.
.
You have a gas ration of four gallons a week and tires with no tread.
Production of automobiles, radios, and other non-essential consumer goods has been suspended for the duration.
The labor and materials you might have used to build a house are being employed elsewhere.
You are looking at a very healthy paycheck and everyone in your family is employable. The spare bedroom you have for rental is a gold mine.
Your kids are buying stamps that can be traded in for war bonds.
You are buying bonds too. What else are you going to do with all that money coming in, stuff it under your mattress?
.
That is what western Pennsylvanians thought before Washington ordered in 12,000 troops during the Whiskey Rebellion.
It didn't take long for the Old South to discover that Lincoln was not Buchanan - that whatever the costs and whatever the difficulties he would find the forces he needed to get the job done.
In 1957 Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st Airborne to Little Rock.
.
You enter a minefield when you quote from sacred texts out of context.
If you are doing so simply for the dramatic effect - it is a pretty good bet that you will find yourself on the defensive - if only because of your adolescent arrogance and stupidity.
If you intended to pour gasoline on the fire, there is really no more to be said.
.
H.P. Lovecraft at his best could chill you to the bone with nothing more explicit than an overwhelming sense of age and power:
That the closer you came to the heart of things, the more likely you were to go utterly and irretrievably mad.
Hitchcock, working in another genre, always knew that the fuse hits the audience harder than the bang - which, in the end, is just another special effect.
The shower scene in Psycho works because the audience is as keyed up and helpless in his hands as the girl.
.
So you will simply go on believing what you want to believe?
Each entry on the New York State registry includes a detailed summary of the offender's record and an assessment of the risk he presents.
The database can be searched by county and zip code. Why not open up a page and put your theory to the test?
.
1 The successors to the ST:TOS [with rhe exception of DS9] present humans without flaws and tech without limits.
It makes for a very dull world.
You need a Loki, a Joker, a Q to give it any vitality at all.
2 Humility is often a disguise for a subtle and corrupting arrogance of power. The Prime Directive is as easy a path to damnation as any other.
It sure makes life hell on earth for a writer, a storyteller.
How often does Picard invoke the Prime Directive where there is no intelligible reason why it should be invoked - only to luck out and be spared standing mutely by as a witness to a Holocaust he could have trivially prevented?
The "races" in Star Trek are so obviously and closely related that any notion of preventing "cross-cultural contamination is utterly ludicrous.
.
ST:TOS was produced for the 21 inch screen and the 21 inch budget - using sets and props designed and constructed pretty much as they would have been for 1950's Space Patrol.
The Enterprise itself is nothing more than the flying saucer from Forbidden Planet thinly disguised by [structurally implausible and rather awkward] external elements added for visual appeal.
.
It's a lovely ideal. But you code for IE or you learn to live on a diet of Ramen Noodles and Jolt Cola.