A few years back I flew from Oregon to California, over some mountain passes to Texas, and from there to South Carolina in an L-3 Aeronca. (Piper Cub- 75mph on a good day) Believe, there is a whole lot of nothing out there. There are huge chunks of the south western United States that are bone dry and sunny almost every day.
I doubt a lot of it will be usable because of logistical factors. From what I remember, the ground was either flat, hard, and dry, or it wasbroken and impassable to non-donkey based transports.
Getting people to Chile via commercial airlines and then flying them out to the Atacama can't be much more expensive than flying them to Reno and then using a truck or an expensive helicopter to get them on site.
I'm not sure about shipping the big components during construction. One way or the other you're gonna probably have to use heavy lift helicopters to finish the job either way. Those are seriously expensive.
Anyway, there is a lot of worthless land in the u.s., but 10 miles of the Sierra Nevadas is harder to deal with than hundreds of mile sof high plains. Distance != Difficulty
Yes, I can count, especially when I'm not tired. Sorry.
First, it could be implemented without government intervention and could start out relatively small. Second, it doesn't require any physical changes to the internet. Second it is somewhat self correcting. Third, and perhaps most important, it motivates sending mail gateways to ride close herd on their senders but allows those that don't to still halfway function.
First of all, a group of large, influential ISPs get together and decide to make their users do something irritating, like solving a puzzle or computing a hash, on the sending machine before it gets sent out by the ISPs mail gateway.
At the receiving gateway a machine could look for the solved puzzle, hash, token or whatever. The mail gateway could assign different modifies to an arbitrary but agreed on scale to indicate it's opinion on the goodness of that email.
For instance mail.***.net gets an email from a domain in Taiwan that it thinks it not a part of this proposed system. The email would get -1 Taiwan and a -1 Outsider modifiers. The administrator of the receiving gateway could either throw it in the bit bucket or bounce it back. Maybe something that is really annoying to the originator's ISP, who knows.
Let's say that mail.***.net gets an email from a domain that it thinks is part of the system. The email might be assigned a +1 Insider and a +1 Not above 200KB modifier. It could then be passed on to the user without futher delay.
If the end recipient, using Bayesian or whatever other filtering system thinks that the email is spam, it could then tell the receiving gateway. If the receiving gateway got enough of this it could then start assigning a -1 Jackass, -10 Ralsky, or whatever other modifier to the sending domain's reputation.
Basically, in order to participate with the least hassle, a domain would have to be known, participate in the system and behave itself. The system would accept email from outsiders, but extract a price. If implementing the system isn't too much of a pain, good admins everywhere will jump at it. Unknown servers, good or bad, will have a hard time, but they won't be totally shut out.
Obviously servers get hijacked or unfairly labled as spammers. If an automatic decay over time is applied to good reputations and bad reputations problems will slowly correct themselves. Those that can't wait could talk to a trusted third partywhich could then be automatically asked by mail gateways about their opinion.
For example, Jim Bob's Bait & Computer Consulting has their own DSL mail server that gets hijacked by a spammer. All of a sudden bunches of their emails are being bounced back and their mail gateway's reputation is in the toilet. Let's say they fix the rogue email issue, but that still leaves them with a problem. The administrator of Jim Bob's Bait could call up another trusted party, Spamhaus or a paid arbitrator, and tell them what happened. The arbitrator could set a + 1 Contrite flag on a public list that could be consulted periodically by mail gateways. This would speed up overcoming a bad reputation.
Quite obviously I am not a much of a programmer and am light on the details, the core of this solution is not mine. But this solution could avoide some of the major objections of other plans.
First, it could be implemented without government intervention and could start out relatively small. Second, it doesn't require any physical changes to the internet. Second it is somewhat self correcting. Third, and perhaps most important, it motivates sending mail gateways to ride close herd on their senders but allows those that don't to still halfway function.
This systems still leaves a lot of useless bits coming down the major backbones, but it's a start.
where does the Swiss military store their important records?
It couldn't cost them that much to put in some fiber and some extra racks alongside and separate from their servers, and having an army guarding your stuff has to be hell of a selling point.
If I recall correctly, Fort Knox is right next to the main armored warfare training center for the U.S. Army. Even if you could get enough dynamite and dump trucks on site, getting away from a bunch of 20 year olds that have these nice new toys can't be that easy.
My personal records are not that important. I don't really care that much. But, if it is really important, you need something more than what this company is offering.
Let's face it, these guys would quit if it wasn't profitable to run their business. I want my important stuff to be guarded by an institution that will be around for it's own non-profit reasons.
The Swiss army or a U.S. armored division will do nicely.
Their both stinking fast. I'll take either one as long as it runs my app of choice.
Please santa, can't something fall off the back of the sleigh? I've been really good!
These days, when people say video editing they mean video editing, compositing, sound sweetening, re-recording and a bunch of other fun stuff.
In my end of the market, mid-low end, nobody hires a second person to do the extra jobs. Once you get the raw goodness, that's it. You get to do it all, and then do it over when the producer changes his mind.
That being said, horsepower is very important in video editing. It seems that everybody wants multi-layer titles, stuff flying around the screen, translucent layers, and then we get into color correcting. Tonight for instance, I will probably give my Dual 500mhz G4 two or three hours of tendering to do, and this is just for a couple of dozen titles on two half hour programs! I could very easily keep two computers busy with work.
Graspee Leemoor was talking about the home user, not the pro, but the difference is narrowing. The full version of Final Cut Pro is not that expensive, and Final Cut Express is only $300! With signifigant editing goodness being that cheap, people are starting to do more than just chopping together their clips. Once they get a tast of all the fancy crap that these programs can do, they start loading up their video with all kinds of stuff, and that's what will perk up their appetite for computing power.
I'm not saying that this is a good thing, by the way. Most people would be better served by getting a decent tripod, spending some bucks on microphones and recording equipment, and spending time thinking about whether they really need that fourth shot of little Jim-Bob playing in the mud. Quality production is never easy or cheap, and people think post can fix anything, damn it.
Basically, the DV video format has broken the prosumer market wide open. This will introduce people to decent video editing that wouldn't have had a chance before. Some of those people will start playing around and feel the need for more power.
When a post production facility is paying editors big bucks per hour, ten grand for a machine that saves just a little time per day is nothing. This is good for everybody downstream. Sadly I don't get paid much so the bosses don't see the need for anything faster than what we have..
Ithink that the "invitation only" part of this might be a bit deceptive. How do you ignore somebody that works a couple of cubes down? God knows you have to ignore most people in chat rooms and nearly all of them on usenet.
Maybe if Microsoft built a user adjustable moderation system, with some meta-supervision built in it would be easier to gracefully ignore the office yahoo. Something tells me that they may have to spend a couple of bucks for a license to this, I think I've seen it before.
Some kind of control is essential, I think. I half remember a.sig somewhere about usenet being in aspect and product like a panicked herd of circus elephants.
I think this could be great, but I hope they think about it before they do it. Having most of the world's emailers with acess to a slashdot would be a freaking disaster.
A few of them live in that area, right? With local connections and a slightly different slant on things you all could come up with deeper articles that compliment each other.
Just a passing idea, really.
"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia.' But only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against Slashdot when bandwidth is on the line. Ha ha ha ha..."
PFFT....
host not found...
What can they do about this? It seems to me that they would be nicely positioned to take over telecommunications for huge chunks of the U.S. population.
Obvious problems might include language issues, and a funky regulatory climate, but that isn't any big deal.
I'd really like to know, if screw it up here in the U.S. what will Mexico do?
I have no experience, but let's talk logic here...
on
Web 'Rules' Changing?
·
· Score: 1
The energy of the flying bullet must equal the energy of the rifle as it recoils, right?
Ignoring things like air resistance, surface area, and the "oh my god I just got shot" factor, the person being shot should barely stagger.
For anecdotal evidence, I seem to remember the video of a couple of heavily armored bank robbers in Los Angeles getting shot. You could see the puffs of dust from the bullets bouncing off of their leg armor and they were barely stumbling. Now, this was probably just pistol rounds, but still! If you want to move up to the.50 BMG, body armor is pretty much irrelevant.
I could be way off base, but a person might be bowled over by pain, fear, and shock, but not by the kinetic energy of the bullet.
And before some knucklehead asks, no, I don't wanna prove it!
I worked in a cube farm for Sykes, which had a contract with e-machines at the time. Clover Kicker is right, the script monkey has procedures and scripts.
My evaluations were only 30% technical, the rest was procedure and being halfway nice. It truly was a nightmare for me and my customer-victims when I first started out because I was way undertrained and way overworked. Once I did get a clue, the requirement for following a script didn't go away. Nobody ever told me to use my brain, or gave me signifigant power to skip steps, so I never did. Sorry e-whores, I'm loyal to whoever signs my check.
Occasionally I did get someone who knew what they were doing, and was willing to play the game. I always cut the procedures to the bone for them. The tech-gods who tried to play games and fake that they were following along were made to follow every last trick. I know it is kind of juvenile, but it was protection for me.
Remember folks, when you (thru the manufacturer of your machine) hire someone for low wages, put them in a cage, and hit them with a stick every 12 minutes, you get incompetent, angry, dung-flinging techno-monkeys. The really smart ones insist on being transfered to a more interesting account or quit. BTW, don't talk to a call center drone after their shift for about an hour. Don't touch them, don't even look at them wrong if you want to live.
e-machines/Sykes Rant Follows
They both suck.
e-machines is possibly the most incompetent company I have been involved with. Some of the early e-machines 200 & 300 models were solid little performers, they hardly ever broke down. It all went to hell after that. We would learn about new models of computers from the customers.
They ran out of power supplies at the fulfillment center because the only factory that made them was in Bangladesh and it flooded. One third of the country is below sea level, duh! Instead of pulling power supplies out of the machines in the fulfillment center, we had to tell customers to send their whole machines in and that they would be sent a replacement machine. I'm serious.
One of the supervisors thought it was a good idea to walk up and down the cube aisles complaining about her PMS issues, and how tense she was. An overstressed cube dweller does not need to be hearing these things.
e-machines finally took the support account away from Sykes and gave it to another company, Stream something, I think. The rub is that they didnt' tell the customers or Sykes. In effect, you had two companies working in parallel whithout communicating and without the customers knowing. That period was one of the few times I tolerated swearing from my customers, I was barely not doing it myself.
I ain't even gonna start about the wisdom of calling a person with two days of training a "Qwest Internet Support" person.
I know this is seriously off the original topic, but do you see how this could beat down a person's will? All I had left was the pride that I did my job exactly as specified and lived thru the day. That's a pretty small thing to hold on to, but there it is.
One of the few times I was proud of my company was when a storm went thru the state of Georgia, wiping out modems by the thousands. The line supervisors came by and told us to just get on with giving out replacements. The script went something like "So, you can't dial out? From Georgia? Hold on I'll get you an RMA." It was one of the few times things made sense and a genuine thrill.
I'm glad to see that Microsoft is diversifying. They are very slightly losing their grip on the crash prone operating system market, so it is a good idea to come up with innovative and novel services.
Maybe I'm going nuts, but this is really cool and I don't like it.
I like to show off and it looks like Epson likes to show off. Who doesn't? And any advance in technology or science is to be respected. Some of this stuff should bring out pure geek joy.
I just can't get the feeling out of my head that this crap belonged in the late 90s. Is our economy doing so well that companies can spare time and talent to show off, to make the share holders and others think they are so cool that they don't have to devote everything to killing their competitors and making their stuff better?
There was a lot of cool stuff produced in the bubble that didn't have any direct profit motive. Any self respecting geek would think this is the greatest thing. A lot of suffering and broken budgets came out of the bubble's excesses, and I'm not sure where the border between cool and hubris is to be found.
Finally, I must say "good going guys, I hope you are around next year."
IMO if the CEO of is basically a vote counter, the company is one step away from Chapter 7. I take it as axiomatic that democracy is inefficient and slow. In a corporation that is death-on-a-stick.
There is one reason why I will probably never be a CEO. That is my inability to get people to do what I want, because they want to do that.
Sure, if you can make someone rich, or threaten them, leadership isn't any big deal. But you have to be able to make them very, very rich, and cut out a few tongues once in awhile, just for fun. Someone that can lead without that is rare and valuable
One, this is a world class recreational troll, and who here hasn't fallen off the topical wagon now and then? I think he has done a great job.
Two, this guy is just a flaming idiot. My week has sucked and I needed the laugh anyway. I should send him a thank you card. Then bill him for looking at my artwork.
Either way, he should be treasured. I wonder how he would react to a flaming dog poo attack on his asteroidal property?
Dirt bike Trial racing is done at just a few mph and having an extra powered wheel could be great. But trials bikes are specialized and of next to no use to an ordinary rider.
Most people are after good suspension and a good power/weight ratio. This technology would have to be really something to avoid contradicting those goals.
if the guy that made the machines was a partisan crook as long as the system was secure.
By secure I mean that system can't be cheated even if the people that run it have unlimited money and very good motivation.
Failing that, I'll accept a system that makes it very hard with severe penalties for even trying to cheat me out of my democracy. Life in FPMITA prison or death. It's that important.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years back I flew from Oregon to California, over some mountain passes to Texas, and from there to South Carolina in an L-3 Aeronca. (Piper Cub- 75mph on a good day) Believe, there is a whole lot of nothing out there. There are huge chunks of the south western United States that are bone dry and sunny almost every day.
I doubt a lot of it will be usable because of logistical factors. From what I remember, the ground was either flat, hard, and dry, or it wasbroken and impassable to non-donkey based transports.
Getting people to Chile via commercial airlines and then flying them out to the Atacama can't be much more expensive than flying them to Reno and then using a truck or an expensive helicopter to get them on site.
I'm not sure about shipping the big components during construction. One way or the other you're gonna probably have to use heavy lift helicopters to finish the job either way. Those are seriously expensive.
Anyway, there is a lot of worthless land in the u.s., but 10 miles of the Sierra Nevadas is harder to deal with than hundreds of mile sof high plains. Distance != Difficulty
Oh, you said "interview." Sorry.
5.) water tank that can be refilled externally
This quality in a case freaks me out a bit for some reason. I like the case though
Yes, I can count, especially when I'm not tired. Sorry.
First, it could be implemented without government intervention and could start out relatively small. Second, it doesn't require any physical changes to the internet. Second it is somewhat self correcting. Third, and perhaps most important, it motivates sending mail gateways to ride close herd on their senders but allows those that don't to still halfway function.
Huh? Ok, here it goes...
First of all, a group of large, influential ISPs get together and decide to make their users do something irritating, like solving a puzzle or computing a hash, on the sending machine before it gets sent out by the ISPs mail gateway.
At the receiving gateway a machine could look for the solved puzzle, hash, token or whatever. The mail gateway could assign different modifies to an arbitrary but agreed on scale to indicate it's opinion on the goodness of that email.
For instance mail.***.net gets an email from a domain in Taiwan that it thinks it not a part of this proposed system. The email would get -1 Taiwan and a -1 Outsider modifiers. The administrator of the receiving gateway could either throw it in the bit bucket or bounce it back. Maybe something that is really annoying to the originator's ISP, who knows.
Let's say that mail.***.net gets an email from a domain that it thinks is part of the system. The email might be assigned a +1 Insider and a +1 Not above 200KB modifier. It could then be passed on to the user without futher delay.
If the end recipient, using Bayesian or whatever other filtering system thinks that the email is spam, it could then tell the receiving gateway. If the receiving gateway got enough of this it could then start assigning a -1 Jackass, -10 Ralsky, or whatever other modifier to the sending domain's reputation.
Basically, in order to participate with the least hassle, a domain would have to be known, participate in the system and behave itself. The system would accept email from outsiders, but extract a price. If implementing the system isn't too much of a pain, good admins everywhere will jump at it. Unknown servers, good or bad, will have a hard time, but they won't be totally shut out.
Obviously servers get hijacked or unfairly labled as spammers. If an automatic decay over time is applied to good reputations and bad reputations problems will slowly correct themselves. Those that can't wait could talk to a trusted third partywhich could then be automatically asked by mail gateways about their opinion.
For example, Jim Bob's Bait & Computer Consulting has their own DSL mail server that gets hijacked by a spammer. All of a sudden bunches of their emails are being bounced back and their mail gateway's reputation is in the toilet. Let's say they fix the rogue email issue, but that still leaves them with a problem. The administrator of Jim Bob's Bait could call up another trusted party, Spamhaus or a paid arbitrator, and tell them what happened. The arbitrator could set a + 1 Contrite flag on a public list that could be consulted periodically by mail gateways. This would speed up overcoming a bad reputation.
Quite obviously I am not a much of a programmer and am light on the details, the core of this solution is not mine. But this solution could avoide some of the major objections of other plans.
First, it could be implemented without government intervention and could start out relatively small. Second, it doesn't require any physical changes to the internet. Second it is somewhat self correcting. Third, and perhaps most important, it motivates sending mail gateways to ride close herd on their senders but allows those that don't to still halfway function.
This systems still leaves a lot of useless bits coming down the major backbones, but it's a start.
Ok, what do you all think?
where does the Swiss military store their important records?
It couldn't cost them that much to put in some fiber and some extra racks alongside and separate from their servers, and having an army guarding your stuff has to be hell of a selling point.
If I recall correctly, Fort Knox is right next to the main armored warfare training center for the U.S. Army. Even if you could get enough dynamite and dump trucks on site, getting away from a bunch of 20 year olds that have these nice new toys can't be that easy.
My personal records are not that important. I don't really care that much. But, if it is really important, you need something more than what this company is offering.
Let's face it, these guys would quit if it wasn't profitable to run their business. I want my important stuff to be guarded by an institution that will be around for it's own non-profit reasons.
The Swiss army or a U.S. armored division will do nicely.
Their both stinking fast. I'll take either one as long as it runs my app of choice. Please santa, can't something fall off the back of the sleigh? I've been really good!
but I've been hearing good things from people about the new version. I can't say much, but it is exciting alternative for the prosumer these days.
These days, when people say video editing they mean video editing, compositing, sound sweetening, re-recording and a bunch of other fun stuff.
In my end of the market, mid-low end, nobody hires a second person to do the extra jobs. Once you get the raw goodness, that's it. You get to do it all, and then do it over when the producer changes his mind.
That being said, horsepower is very important in video editing. It seems that everybody wants multi-layer titles, stuff flying around the screen, translucent layers, and then we get into color correcting. Tonight for instance, I will probably give my Dual 500mhz G4 two or three hours of tendering to do, and this is just for a couple of dozen titles on two half hour programs! I could very easily keep two computers busy with work.
Graspee Leemoor was talking about the home user, not the pro, but the difference is narrowing. The full version of Final Cut Pro is not that expensive, and Final Cut Express is only $300! With signifigant editing goodness being that cheap, people are starting to do more than just chopping together their clips. Once they get a tast of all the fancy crap that these programs can do, they start loading up their video with all kinds of stuff, and that's what will perk up their appetite for computing power.
I'm not saying that this is a good thing, by the way. Most people would be better served by getting a decent tripod, spending some bucks on microphones and recording equipment, and spending time thinking about whether they really need that fourth shot of little Jim-Bob playing in the mud. Quality production is never easy or cheap, and people think post can fix anything, damn it.
Basically, the DV video format has broken the prosumer market wide open. This will introduce people to decent video editing that wouldn't have had a chance before. Some of those people will start playing around and feel the need for more power.
When a post production facility is paying editors big bucks per hour, ten grand for a machine that saves just a little time per day is nothing. This is good for everybody downstream. Sadly I don't get paid much so the bosses don't see the need for anything faster than what we have..
Need some video help?
Ithink that the "invitation only" part of this might be a bit deceptive. How do you ignore somebody that works a couple of cubes down? God knows you have to ignore most people in chat rooms and nearly all of them on usenet.
.sig somewhere about usenet being in aspect and product like a panicked herd of circus elephants.
Maybe if Microsoft built a user adjustable moderation system, with some meta-supervision built in it would be easier to gracefully ignore the office yahoo. Something tells me that they may have to spend a couple of bucks for a license to this, I think I've seen it before.
Some kind of control is essential, I think. I half remember a
I think this could be great, but I hope they think about it before they do it. Having most of the world's emailers with acess to a slashdot would be a freaking disaster.
A few of them live in that area, right? With local connections and a slightly different slant on things you all could come up with deeper articles that compliment each other. Just a passing idea, really.
"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia.' But only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against Slashdot when bandwidth is on the line. Ha ha ha ha..." PFFT.... host not found...
Anybody want a peanut?
Yeah, you've screwed up, but i've done the same thing on an very much smaller scale.
Anyone that makes jet engines, makes a good faith effort to pay his obligations and manage to piss off the man that badly is all right by me!
I know that this doesn't mean much, but you and yours will never have to buy their own beer if they are in my town. Good luck friend.
What can they do about this? It seems to me that they would be nicely positioned to take over telecommunications for huge chunks of the U.S. population.
Obvious problems might include language issues, and a funky regulatory climate, but that isn't any big deal.
I'd really like to know, if screw it up here in the U.S. what will Mexico do?
if God likes me even a little bit!
The energy of the flying bullet must equal the energy of the rifle as it recoils, right?
.50 BMG, body armor is pretty much irrelevant.
Ignoring things like air resistance, surface area, and the "oh my god I just got shot" factor, the person being shot should barely stagger.
For anecdotal evidence, I seem to remember the video of a couple of heavily armored bank robbers in Los Angeles getting shot. You could see the puffs of dust from the bullets bouncing off of their leg armor and they were barely stumbling. Now, this was probably just pistol rounds, but still! If you want to move up to the
I could be way off base, but a person might be bowled over by pain, fear, and shock, but not by the kinetic energy of the bullet.
And before some knucklehead asks, no, I don't wanna prove it!
I worked in a cube farm for Sykes, which had a contract with e-machines at the time. Clover Kicker is right, the script monkey has procedures and scripts.
My evaluations were only 30% technical, the rest was procedure and being halfway nice. It truly was a nightmare for me and my customer-victims when I first started out because I was way undertrained and way overworked. Once I did get a clue, the requirement for following a script didn't go away. Nobody ever told me to use my brain, or gave me signifigant power to skip steps, so I never did. Sorry e-whores, I'm loyal to whoever signs my check.
Occasionally I did get someone who knew what they were doing, and was willing to play the game. I always cut the procedures to the bone for them. The tech-gods who tried to play games and fake that they were following along were made to follow every last trick. I know it is kind of juvenile, but it was protection for me.
Remember folks, when you (thru the manufacturer of your machine) hire someone for low wages, put them in a cage, and hit them with a stick every 12 minutes, you get incompetent, angry, dung-flinging techno-monkeys. The really smart ones insist on being transfered to a more interesting account or quit. BTW, don't talk to a call center drone after their shift for about an hour. Don't touch them, don't even look at them wrong if you want to live.
e-machines/Sykes Rant Follows
They both suck.
e-machines is possibly the most incompetent company I have been involved with. Some of the early e-machines 200 & 300 models were solid little performers, they hardly ever broke down. It all went to hell after that. We would learn about new models of computers from the customers.
They ran out of power supplies at the fulfillment center because the only factory that made them was in Bangladesh and it flooded. One third of the country is below sea level, duh! Instead of pulling power supplies out of the machines in the fulfillment center, we had to tell customers to send their whole machines in and that they would be sent a replacement machine. I'm serious.
One of the supervisors thought it was a good idea to walk up and down the cube aisles complaining about her PMS issues, and how tense she was. An overstressed cube dweller does not need to be hearing these things.
e-machines finally took the support account away from Sykes and gave it to another company, Stream something, I think. The rub is that they didnt' tell the customers or Sykes. In effect, you had two companies working in parallel whithout communicating and without the customers knowing. That period was one of the few times I tolerated swearing from my customers, I was barely not doing it myself.
I ain't even gonna start about the wisdom of calling a person with two days of training a "Qwest Internet Support" person.
I know this is seriously off the original topic, but do you see how this could beat down a person's will? All I had left was the pride that I did my job exactly as specified and lived thru the day. That's a pretty small thing to hold on to, but there it is.
One of the few times I was proud of my company was when a storm went thru the state of Georgia, wiping out modems by the thousands. The line supervisors came by and told us to just get on with giving out replacements. The script went something like "So, you can't dial out? From Georgia? Hold on I'll get you an RMA." It was one of the few times things made sense and a genuine thrill.
Just a bit bitter, ain't I?
I'm glad to see that Microsoft is diversifying. They are very slightly losing their grip on the crash prone operating system market, so it is a good idea to come up with innovative and novel services.
Maybe I'm going nuts, but this is really cool and I don't like it.
I like to show off and it looks like Epson likes to show off. Who doesn't? And any advance in technology or science is to be respected. Some of this stuff should bring out pure geek joy.
I just can't get the feeling out of my head that this crap belonged in the late 90s. Is our economy doing so well that companies can spare time and talent to show off, to make the share holders and others think they are so cool that they don't have to devote everything to killing their competitors and making their stuff better?
There was a lot of cool stuff produced in the bubble that didn't have any direct profit motive. Any self respecting geek would think this is the greatest thing. A lot of suffering and broken budgets came out of the bubble's excesses, and I'm not sure where the border between cool and hubris is to be found.
Finally, I must say "good going guys, I hope you are around next year."
Depressing, or am I an idiot?
11. Profit ?
IMO if the CEO of is basically a vote counter, the company is one step away from Chapter 7. I take it as axiomatic that democracy is inefficient and slow. In a corporation that is death-on-a-stick.
There is one reason why I will probably never be a CEO. That is my inability to get people to do what I want, because they want to do that.
Sure, if you can make someone rich, or threaten them, leadership isn't any big deal. But you have to be able to make them very, very rich, and cut out a few tongues once in awhile, just for fun. Someone that can lead without that is rare and valuable
But 531x(average worker's pay)? Good Lord...
I see two possibilities here.
One, this is a world class recreational troll, and who here hasn't fallen off the topical wagon now and then? I think he has done a great job.
Two, this guy is just a flaming idiot. My week has sucked and I needed the laugh anyway. I should send him a thank you card. Then bill him for looking at my artwork.
Either way, he should be treasured. I wonder how he would react to a flaming dog poo attack on his asteroidal property?
Dirt bike Trial racing is done at just a few mph and having an extra powered wheel could be great. But trials bikes are specialized and of next to no use to an ordinary rider.
Most people are after good suspension and a good power/weight ratio. This technology would have to be really something to avoid contradicting those goals.
if the guy that made the machines was a partisan crook as long as the system was secure.
By secure I mean that system can't be cheated even if the people that run it have unlimited money and very good motivation.
Failing that, I'll accept a system that makes it very hard with severe penalties for even trying to cheat me out of my democracy. Life in FPMITA prison or death. It's that important.