...are quite commmon Nowadays in some areas. Basically you have a room -all six sides- that is totally built out of reinforced concrete around 1.5 feet thick. It has steel air vents and whatnot and the door is quite heavy steel Maybe, maybe not take a direct hit from an F-5 tornado, but most anything else in the form of big storms is survivable.
It's more common than you might think, I've seen several in more upscale housing. I've also seen some dandy buried generators with large fuel tanks at homes to go along with the safe rooms. Most folks won't brag on it around the neighborhood, because they don't want to deal with folks who have done nothing to help themselves if an emergency hits, and who can blame them really, most people won't do a dang thing to help themselves in advance except buy jetskis and such like.
Glad you made it out OK. You got to think though the poor people left on the island with no anything of value mixed in with the looters and rioters.
People just don't grasp how thin the veneer of civilisation is. I've been through three riots, and I don't mean watching it on Tv from 30 miles away either. It goes from normal to MAN 0 MAN THIS REALLY SUCKS in a few minutes. People you might have been sitting next to in a restaurant the day before are now rampaging animals.
Anyway, again, glad you made it out and now you got a tremendous life lesson that most westerners never get, I hope the idea of survivalism and security and backups for everything-besides your data-EVERYTHING-has made an impression. Any area is one cataclysmic event away from normal to sheesh, and 99% of the people out there are as ill prepared as children. My friend who is a survivalist as I am just went through charlie then frances, he had the only generator in his neighborhood, the only stored water, the only stored food, the only functional equipment to deal with big trees down, the only fuel stash, etc. He's doing OK, his neighbors, hat in hand have to go be refugees. Your big screen home entertainment center is worth diddly squat in any emergency, wheras the same amount oif money would leave you with something of everything to deal with morphing reality. He even went through the looter scenario in florida-something not reported a lot on mainstream TV, but the scum come out of the woodwork when they smell opportunity. Luckily he is very well armed and trained, he definetyly had to use what he had, and the laws still allow a minimum of self defense. The local cops even thanked him, as he was able to help keep his neighborhood going and looter-free and they made him a local distribution point for ice, water and food, as he had his stuff together enough they used him so they could go deal with areas where no one was prepared at all.
...until it's as bad as those examples to notice the trends and patterns. They have been on a crash course of getting the infrastructure in place and in developing the mindshare in enough of the population to accept a bigger implemented dictatorship.
If I can use a rough analogy, politically in the US right now you are looking at your dashboard and the check engine light is on, and it's been on for quite awile. You have two choices, keep ignoring it because obviously your car is still running, or take note of it and fix what's broken as soon as possible so it doesn't get worse.
I don't think it's practical to wait until the engine seizes.
Past couple days there have been articles about a possible north korean nuclear "test". We also have heard repeatedly that the US will somehow "deal" with north korea and nukes, and that it wouldn't be "tolerated".
Here is the speculation, just perhaps this was a pre emptive strike on nuke facilities there, either to destroy them because they truly are a threat, or as a pretext to go "see, toldyaso, they got nukes aimed at iowa and etc". Or both. Easy enough maybe with a micronuke and a cruise missile or via a stealth fighter, etc. Or maybe it was some MOAB variant to give the effect of a small nuke but not the rads. Remember that big train station blast that narrowly missed kim ill dung when he returned from china? That was another one that didn't add up logically, it was just too coincidental with the timing and location and too large. Even the NKs might not know this latest was an attack, they might think at this time it was an accident at their own facilities.
Just speculation, so far looks like a test, but I'm not sure they would want to waste one just testing it. They can't have that many yet even if they have completed them.
I am also suspicious because beyond anything else they are known as great diggers and tunnelers, seems like they would have gone to great lengths to use an underground deep shaft for testing purposes, partially at least to limit radioactivity so as to not whizz off like say china right now. So far, this appears to be a surface level blast, so we should know shortly from monitoring places around the world if it's nuclear or non nuclear, besides the sesimic info.
Ok, here's a question, what besides a micronuke or a MOAB could have gone off at that geogrqphical place that would give the seismic record and the visuals?
Another question, given that the NKs just love to propogandize, why no reaction from them, why no press release? If it was a successful test seems like they would be bragging on it, saying stuff like "running dog imperial lackeys dare not invade glorious PRK homeland now" and more etc. There's nothing on the north korean news site right now about it.
So, looks more like an accident or someone hit them first and wants to play stupid about it. We've also coincidently had a lot of our naval assets sorta hanging around the place for awhile now, it sorta slipped from the main news pages but a month or so back it was being discussed a lot how "unprecedented" it was to have all these various navies all out to sea at the same time.
mutually assured partial destruction. Yes, the US could wipe them out, then over the next week the radioactive cloud would drift over china and japan and maybe parts of russia then on to the US. And if they have a few themselves, they might could hit a few places with them, say seoul for starters.
Just not sure the US knows how to deal with this. It's insurance from the NKs to not get invaded more than anything else. I expect it might work for them, too. Just like it probably will for Iran.
and it didn't come directly from any of the sci fi futurists, one of them just mentioned it as his best quote:
"Then I heard Lenny Bruce say: 'If you want to imagine a world government, think of the whole world run by the phone company and nowhere else to go.' "
Being an outside maintenance dude, I see this sort of weird pricing with small engines. Say you got a small riding mower needs a new engine. You can get mowers on sale for as little as 600 clams. Want just the engine? 599$. Guess what most guys do....
I say go for it before RIO won't care, they sell more gadgets, they are happy, you get a microdrive and the leftovers for your junk hardware box (or storage unit or whatever), and that's a geek +1 cool factor, because you can never have enough hardware junk. Evah. That's the rules and stuff.
--sounds like a good idea. Make it public enough so that examiners reference it all the time, and make sure they have the URL for it. And send the reference to every patent attorney and politician out there. Making a large repository of prior "thoughts and ideas" might help to mitigate patent frenzy. You could have a sub section where prior art that tends to argue against already issued patents as well. Wiki style is well understood, I would think a lot of developers might drop interesting ideas there just to keep them from getting patented. there's no way to fight industries with boatloads of cash, they are the only ones who can actually apply and get patents by the hundreds, but establishing the prior art is as easy as mashing the "submit" button on your idea, and much cheaper to pull off. Sort of a peer review wiki, concentrating on IP ideas.
Maybe someone with the bandwith and interest can host it, and maybe some legal geeks can write up the mission statement and goals, etc.
Here you go the The Aranizer. I've listened to the guys spiel, and he's (his customers) had success with his gizmos even in mortuaries and such like. Sounds like it's what you are looking for. Small medium large home and office size and industrial sizes as well. Give em a call, ask questions.
...as in a major class action lawsuit. they get granted monopoly air time frequenices, basically licenses to print money, and they are SUPPOSED to be "in the public interest", and they clearly are NOT when they simply refuse to cover third parties. Independents make up at least 1/3 of the elctorate, ie, they AREN'T Rs or Ds, yet we surely do not see 1/3 the political coverage devoted to those folks, ALL you see with few exceptions is coverage of two private political parties. That isn't news, that's major social engineering propoganda, and the big networks should have been fined out of existence by now or had their licenses pulled over it. There needs to be some serious big time lawsuits over news coverage in this nation. I'd also like to see some RICO lawsuits against the D and R parties for ongoing criminal racketeering as in hijacking the election process and in dominating vovernment in generral. No place in the constitution does it say that the design is to allow some private parties to have complete 100% control over government, we do NOT have an offical "two party" law anyplace, but in practice they run it like it is so. It's criminal behavior. It's so far into the brainwashing that you'll hear people say we have a "two party system" like it's the law, carved in stone, inviolate, it must always be so, and was always so. Nuts. That's just a brainwashed response, and the schools are just as guilty of it.
How are ISPs supposed to actually block sites? Have teams of surfers constantly looking for them to add to the list or what? And what's a "site" a news group posting, a web page, individual emails, files shared over networks?
I've seen some of these filters at work in libraries. Tried to get to a political site once, it was blocked. Went home, went to the site, they had a parody flag set up that used a swastika instead of stars, that made the website a "hate speech" site so the library filtered it. Nuts.
..watching politics for a long time. The media coverage is vital. Whenever third parties and candidates get even close to normal coverage they do quite well. If they got equal coverage I'd bet we'd have huge numbers of third parties in every aspect of government at every level, but they CAN'T get coverage. This lasts a few cycles then a third party guy gets coverage, gets millions of votes. Lather, rinse, repeat. Now I think they realise they should never cover third parties except for negative spin stories, well, like you see here.
The real biggee I remember was the national debates, you get some guy on there, and you can see third parties are viable. I'd blame the media and it's obvious brainwashing and propoganda efforts more than any other reason for the dominance of the R and D criminal cartel. And calling it a criminal cartel is the truth-they are. At the top, the mass media is owned by a handful of billionaires, so you will only see media reports that perpetuate their own corporate blow dried alleged "candidates". And since the rise of independent press and the internet, they realise their monopoly on info was threatened, so they had to come up with some way to insure the corporate party candidate gets in always, hence blackbox voting.
People in the USA need to wake up that they live in a dictatorship, that their vote itself comes pre-wasted for them. The only wasted vote are all the ones cast thinking that it will make a difference, because it won't, the corporate party "won" a long time ago and now runs bi annual political melodrama TV fiction shows to keep people amused and faked out.
I mean, c'mon, two skull and bones white male connected elite globalist millionaires as the "choices"? How blatant does it have to get?
yes it would. With hard drive space being so cheap now, there's little need for dependencies and the confusion of what goes where with all the distros. Stick the libraries with the app, the app can go wherever. Joe user can see a web page with a decent "linux" app, go "yep, jiss what I need", download it to directory of choice, install it. No going "hmm, it's an RPM but izzit a mandrake or an ochre chapeau or a... and which version of one of them izzit.. hmm... " Putting it all together from the gitgo makes sense in 2004. In 1994, nope, shared libraries were necessary, not today though, it's inertia that keeps that action going more than anything else, because it's from "back in the day" and stuck in the gurus minds that's how it should always be.. nuts! Makes sense to me to move forward. Seems like a decent project, hope he can find some gratis hosting space someplace.
what I have been thinking about and did a few post musings on when the subject of spam came up. A closed system, only cool guys inside, and verification. When google announced their email I had hoped it would be the same idea, because they had the size to pull it off, to get enough people to switch to it that it would force others to actually have verifiable addys so that spammers and virus spewers could be eliminated pronto. White list/black list is a good idea, it beats filtering and giving all email an initial whitelist permission. that's bass ackwards. Email needs to be assumed to be bogus until proven otherwise.
outsorcing is only killiong itself, it's relatively huge shoirt term profits. the reason is very simple, when you remove a good paying middle class job you remove that person as a consumer for the stuff you want to bring back and sell from overseas. You are seeing it now, this )precarious) economy is credit based, it's not based on actual ownership, and they've about milked that kitty dry. The proof of that is prime rate lending, they had to drop it to ridiculous to even keep up the credit binge. If people really were gaining so much more from all the offshoring of blue and white collar jobs, there wouldn't be a need for 30 year home notes and interest only loans and 60 month car loans, would there? Ya, people are buying more, there's more gadgets out there at walmart, but it's getting a little past shaky-O clock with that noise now, and credit can only go so far. The CEOs and wall street are actually killing the goose that laid the golden egg, the huge US middle class that took generations to build up. There's enough remnants still that people will debate the decline is happening, but it is, every sign points to it.
protectionism-root word = "protect". A large nation like ours needs to be economically vertically integrated, not just a service economy consisting of a few wealthy people and a lot of serfs waiting on them. Fedualism is just "wrong".
...in other discussions on this topic. IT in general has awesome power in this nation. A national uniun with enough members in enough industries/places would have the power to actually force the ending of all outsourcing and H1B visas with just the threat of a strike.That's just one for instance. Think of a controlled y2k bad news scenario, and that's the potential power a national IT union would have.
And people saying unions are teh evil-think about it, global industry already has their own "unions", they have industry organizations and a LOT of back room collusion and high level bribery to politicians that goes on. They want the monopoly on organized power, and go way out of their way to keep it, and to keep people faked out they are better off "on their own".
The biggest thing with unions to keep them honest and effective and to not get greedy and self defeating themselves is to NEVER allow a dynasty of union "bosses", that's the first and easiest way they become corrupt. Stay away from hoffa or reuther-ism type dynasties. Learn from history is the best advice. Unions can be good by skill and luck or bad by design and implementation if you fail to learn from history where previous unions went bogus.
Folks might want to check some of the fine print on the new draft law provisions as well, last I read there were some interesting details in there concerning IT folk.
Continued immigration and a stubborn high school dropout rate have stymied efforts to improve literacy in Los Angeles County, where more than half the working-age population can't read a simple form, a report released Wednesday found.
Alarmingly, only one in every 10 workers deemed functionally illiterate is enrolled in literacy classes and half of them drop out within three weeks, said the study by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles.
"It's an emergency situation," said Mayor James Hahn, adding that poor literacy rates could jeopardize the region's economy by driving out high-tech businesses and other industries that pay well.
In the Los Angeles region, 53 percent of workers ages 16 and older were deemed functionally illiterate, the study said.
That percentage dropped to 44 percent in the greater San Fernando Valley -- which includes Agoura Hills and Santa Clarita -- but soared to 85 percent in some pockets of the Valley.
The study measured levels of literacy across the region using data from the 2000 Census, the U.S. Department of Education and a survey of literacy programs taken from last September to January.
It classified 3.8 million Los Angeles County residents as "low-literate," meaning they could not write a note explaining a billing error, use a bus schedule or locate an intersection on a street map.
And despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent in public schools over the past decade to boost literacy rates, functional illiteracy levels have remained flat because of a steady influx of non-English-speaking immigrants and a 30 percent high school dropout rate, authors of the report said.
---and some more at the URL
But! That's not NEAR as important as customised cars, the latest pop music and videos, near-universal addiction to professional sports, wearing the latest cool fashion and being able to ace videogames! We'll show 'em! Hey, let's throw MORE tax payer money at the public schools! Hey, let's just ELIMINATE borders! Hey, MORE tax breaks for corporations to move overseas! Waitaminnit! I got it! WARS! Let's just have MORE WARS and just TAKE what we need! That should work!
What's helped the USA the MOST is having access to cheap oil. Most of that other economic stuff is academic masturbation. Not all of it, but most of it. We built up our economy after WW2 with oil at 2-4$/barrel IIRC. Once our domestic oil got marginal and expensive, we switched to getting oil at cut rate prices from ridiculous dictators on the take and "royal" poobahs overseas. Everytime one of them guys get's the wise idea that they are better off charging a better price or actually using their own oil domestically-or not using the fiat FRN as the currency that is acceptable, we send in the boys with the guns and get a new poohbah in there. Either the spooks change it or the overt military changes it. Look at Saddam, as long as it was swap or oil for US petrodollars, he could do whatever he wanted to do, for years. As soon as he started to insist on Euros, WHAM! All of a sudden he's this big threat, etc,poof, new war, he's gone. One of them amazing coincidences that really isn't.
I know this doesn't address outsourcing per se, but it's the biggest factor in helping to keep millionaires as millionaires. When even relatively cheaper oil wasn't enough, they only had two choices to keep their profits up, ship off the jobs they could to much cheaper labor place, or get another source of cheap oil. Now that there really isn't any more cheap oil,no place, there's not much more they can do. They are certainly not going to go personally broke or give up their personal jetliners and multiple mansions jazz. That leaves sticking it to the middle class here domestically, and using the stock market casino scam and normal partisan politics to keep people faked out that they can get rich, too, sometime in the future, or that it's "the other party's" fault. Heck, they even sold credit as pay to people, and they bought it, people have actually switched to the notion that being in perpetual debt is somehow accumulating wealth. Just an amazing bit of propoganda and brainwashing.
It's an admirable scam, well thought out, well implemented, seems to be working well for the globalist "elite" boys. I keep wondering when Joe and Jane sixpack will notice. Most don't until they go broke, and the more well off they were, the harder it will hit them, the ole cognitive dissonance sets in. Each of them will vote for the globaist scamster skull and bonesman of their choice, and whomever gets in, Joe and Jane will just get broker, but blame it on the OTHER globalist bonesman and the OTHER globalist party.
...in warfare they might do this. Maybe some of their vehicles would/could run on wasted people and parts, which you can accumulate in piles in said war.
All that is going to happen now is that they will move to another hosting provider. As in big deal, non story, no lessening of spam. If these people know not much will ever happen to them, and the hosting providers know they can make a bundle, the problem continues and gets worse. Block a few biggees in a row, just *maybe* a new and different message will get out to spammers and the goofs who host them knwingly. The message now is "naughty naughty, don't do that or we'll stamp our feet". OOh wow, that's got to be scary. Not. I say block 'em. I sincerely doubt it would ever get to "the entire internet" before spam was almost completely curtailed.
Oh well, who cares really....if people wanted to really eliminate spam from their inboxes they would do a default blacklist on all email and only allow whitelist entries in, and use webforms for first contacts. Instead they want to fool with rube goldberg voodoo AI attempts that barely work.
If we treated email addresses like we treated physical phone numbers and street addresses, there would be a lot less spam. spam exists because it's incredibly easy and extremely cheap to create millions of addys. If it would cost 10$ a year (whatever) per email addy, email would be treated more seriously. Everyone wants free email anarchy, so you get what you see. You can't have it both ways, either email needs some regulation like DNS entries, or you'll get spam and relayed viruses and whatnot. Phooie. A few years ago I about 100% gave up on email, I maybe do a few a week now, that's it. I just stopped using it because of all the crap associated with it, and I dread using it now. I would *gladly* pay 10 a year for secure and verifiable email service where only honest people had access to it, at least verifiable ways to see who was honest or not. The way it is now will never be fixable. Never.
...as in forever. Let it serve as an abject lesson to other hosters that if they take up the soon to be alleged spam gap, they too will get permanently blocked.
...but that means you are always relying on others to do your analysis for you, plus just pure leeching. Everyone's time is valuable, yes? And yes again, if you read at say +4 you'll get some gems, but you'll also miss some gems because of unfair/illogical/partisan modding down. I've seen some pretty good stuff get whacked down for what seems to be merely fanboi political reasons one way or the other. If I had been reading at a high threshold I would have missed it. "Metamod" is supposed to fix that, but we have quite literally no way to know if it's working or not, with the ease of creating new accounts, etc.
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...are quite commmon Nowadays in some areas. Basically you have a room -all six sides- that is totally built out of reinforced concrete around 1.5 feet thick. It has steel air vents and whatnot and the door is quite heavy steel Maybe, maybe not take a direct hit from an F-5 tornado, but most anything else in the form of big storms is survivable.
It's more common than you might think, I've seen several in more upscale housing. I've also seen some dandy buried generators with large fuel tanks at homes to go along with the safe rooms. Most folks won't brag on it around the neighborhood, because they don't want to deal with folks who have done nothing to help themselves if an emergency hits, and who can blame them really, most people won't do a dang thing to help themselves in advance except buy jetskis and such like.
Glad you made it out OK. You got to think though the poor people left on the island with no anything of value mixed in with the looters and rioters.
People just don't grasp how thin the veneer of civilisation is. I've been through three riots, and I don't mean watching it on Tv from 30 miles away either. It goes from normal to MAN 0 MAN THIS REALLY SUCKS in a few minutes. People you might have been sitting next to in a restaurant the day before are now rampaging animals.
Anyway, again, glad you made it out and now you got a tremendous life lesson that most westerners never get, I hope the idea of survivalism and security and backups for everything-besides your data-EVERYTHING-has made an impression. Any area is one cataclysmic event away from normal to sheesh, and 99% of the people out there are as ill prepared as children. My friend who is a survivalist as I am just went through charlie then frances, he had the only generator in his neighborhood, the only stored water, the only stored food, the only functional equipment to deal with big trees down, the only fuel stash, etc. He's doing OK, his neighbors, hat in hand have to go be refugees. Your big screen home entertainment center is worth diddly squat in any emergency, wheras the same amount oif money would leave you with something of everything to deal with morphing reality. He even went through the looter scenario in florida-something not reported a lot on mainstream TV, but the scum come out of the woodwork when they smell opportunity. Luckily he is very well armed and trained, he definetyly had to use what he had, and the laws still allow a minimum of self defense. The local cops even thanked him, as he was able to help keep his neighborhood going and looter-free and they made him a local distribution point for ice, water and food, as he had his stuff together enough they used him so they could go deal with areas where no one was prepared at all.
IP Ideas magazine, print version, and online version. All ideas copylefted.
...until it's as bad as those examples to notice the trends and patterns. They have been on a crash course of getting the infrastructure in place and in developing the mindshare in enough of the population to accept a bigger implemented dictatorship.
If I can use a rough analogy, politically in the US right now you are looking at your dashboard and the check engine light is on, and it's been on for quite awile. You have two choices, keep ignoring it because obviously your car is still running, or take note of it and fix what's broken as soon as possible so it doesn't get worse.
I don't think it's practical to wait until the engine seizes.
Past couple days there have been articles about a possible north korean nuclear "test". We also have heard repeatedly that the US will somehow "deal" with north korea and nukes, and that it wouldn't be "tolerated".
Here is the speculation, just perhaps this was a pre emptive strike on nuke facilities there, either to destroy them because they truly are a threat, or as a pretext to go "see, toldyaso, they got nukes aimed at iowa and etc". Or both. Easy enough maybe with a micronuke and a cruise missile or via a stealth fighter, etc. Or maybe it was some MOAB variant to give the effect of a small nuke but not the rads. Remember that big train station blast that narrowly missed kim ill dung when he returned from china? That was another one that didn't add up logically, it was just too coincidental with the timing and location and too large. Even the NKs might not know this latest was an attack, they might think at this time it was an accident at their own facilities.
Just speculation, so far looks like a test, but I'm not sure they would want to waste one just testing it. They can't have that many yet even if they have completed them.
I am also suspicious because beyond anything else they are known as great diggers and tunnelers, seems like they would have gone to great lengths to use an underground deep shaft for testing purposes, partially at least to limit radioactivity so as to not whizz off like say china right now. So far, this appears to be a surface level blast, so we should know shortly from monitoring places around the world if it's nuclear or non nuclear, besides the sesimic info.
Ok, here's a question, what besides a micronuke or a MOAB could have gone off at that geogrqphical place that would give the seismic record and the visuals?
Another question, given that the NKs just love to propogandize, why no reaction from them, why no press release? If it was a successful test seems like they would be bragging on it, saying stuff like "running dog imperial lackeys dare not invade glorious PRK homeland now" and more etc. There's nothing on the north korean news site right now about it.
So, looks more like an accident or someone hit them first and wants to play stupid about it. We've also coincidently had a lot of our naval assets sorta hanging around the place for awhile now, it sorta slipped from the main news pages but a month or so back it was being discussed a lot how "unprecedented" it was to have all these various navies all out to sea at the same time.
mutually assured partial destruction. Yes, the US could wipe them out, then over the next week the radioactive cloud would drift over china and japan and maybe parts of russia then on to the US. And if they have a few themselves, they might could hit a few places with them, say seoul for starters.
Just not sure the US knows how to deal with this. It's insurance from the NKs to not get invaded more than anything else. I expect it might work for them, too. Just like it probably will for Iran.
and it didn't come directly from any of the sci fi futurists, one of them just mentioned it as his best quote:
"Then I heard Lenny Bruce say: 'If you want to imagine a world government, think of the whole world run by the phone company and nowhere else to go.' "
A-MEN!
Being an outside maintenance dude, I see this sort of weird pricing with small engines. Say you got a small riding mower needs a new engine. You can get mowers on sale for as little as 600 clams. Want just the engine? 599$. Guess what most guys do....
I say go for it before RIO won't care, they sell more gadgets, they are happy, you get a microdrive and the leftovers for your junk hardware box (or storage unit or whatever), and that's a geek +1 cool factor, because you can never have enough hardware junk. Evah. That's the rules and stuff.
--sounds like a good idea. Make it public enough so that examiners reference it all the time, and make sure they have the URL for it. And send the reference to every patent attorney and politician out there. Making a large repository of prior "thoughts and ideas" might help to mitigate patent frenzy. You could have a sub section where prior art that tends to argue against already issued patents as well. Wiki style is well understood, I would think a lot of developers might drop interesting ideas there just to keep them from getting patented. there's no way to fight industries with boatloads of cash, they are the only ones who can actually apply and get patents by the hundreds, but establishing the prior art is as easy as mashing the "submit" button on your idea, and much cheaper to pull off. Sort of a peer review wiki, concentrating on IP ideas.
Maybe someone with the bandwith and interest can host it, and maybe some legal geeks can write up the mission statement and goals, etc.
Here you go the The Aranizer. I've listened to the guys spiel, and he's (his customers) had success with his gizmos even in mortuaries and such like. Sounds like it's what you are looking for. Small medium large home and office size and industrial sizes as well. Give em a call, ask questions.
...as in a major class action lawsuit. they get granted monopoly air time frequenices, basically licenses to print money, and they are SUPPOSED to be "in the public interest", and they clearly are NOT when they simply refuse to cover third parties. Independents make up at least 1/3 of the elctorate, ie, they AREN'T Rs or Ds, yet we surely do not see 1/3 the political coverage devoted to those folks, ALL you see with few exceptions is coverage of two private political parties. That isn't news, that's major social engineering propoganda, and the big networks should have been fined out of existence by now or had their licenses pulled over it. There needs to be some serious big time lawsuits over news coverage in this nation. I'd also like to see some RICO lawsuits against the D and R parties for ongoing criminal racketeering as in hijacking the election process and in dominating vovernment in generral. No place in the constitution does it say that the design is to allow some private parties to have complete 100% control over government, we do NOT have an offical "two party" law anyplace, but in practice they run it like it is so. It's criminal behavior. It's so far into the brainwashing that you'll hear people say we have a "two party system" like it's the law, carved in stone, inviolate, it must always be so, and was always so. Nuts. That's just a brainwashed response, and the schools are just as guilty of it.
How are ISPs supposed to actually block sites? Have teams of surfers constantly looking for them to add to the list or what? And what's a "site" a news group posting, a web page, individual emails, files shared over networks?
I've seen some of these filters at work in libraries. Tried to get to a political site once, it was blocked. Went home, went to the site, they had a parody flag set up that used a swastika instead of stars, that made the website a "hate speech" site so the library filtered it. Nuts.
..watching politics for a long time. The media coverage is vital. Whenever third parties and candidates get even close to normal coverage they do quite well. If they got equal coverage I'd bet we'd have huge numbers of third parties in every aspect of government at every level, but they CAN'T get coverage. This lasts a few cycles then a third party guy gets coverage, gets millions of votes. Lather, rinse, repeat. Now I think they realise they should never cover third parties except for negative spin stories, well, like you see here.
The real biggee I remember was the national debates, you get some guy on there, and you can see third parties are viable. I'd blame the media and it's obvious brainwashing and propoganda efforts more than any other reason for the dominance of the R and D criminal cartel. And calling it a criminal cartel is the truth-they are. At the top, the mass media is owned by a handful of billionaires, so you will only see media reports that perpetuate their own corporate blow dried alleged "candidates". And since the rise of independent press and the internet, they realise their monopoly on info was threatened, so they had to come up with some way to insure the corporate party candidate gets in always, hence blackbox voting.
People in the USA need to wake up that they live in a dictatorship, that their vote itself comes pre-wasted for them. The only wasted vote are all the ones cast thinking that it will make a difference, because it won't, the corporate party "won" a long time ago and now runs bi annual political melodrama TV fiction shows to keep people amused and faked out.
I mean, c'mon, two skull and bones white male connected elite globalist millionaires as the "choices"? How blatant does it have to get?
yes it would. With hard drive space being so cheap now, there's little need for dependencies and the confusion of what goes where with all the distros. Stick the libraries with the app, the app can go wherever. Joe user can see a web page with a decent "linux" app, go "yep, jiss what I need", download it to directory of choice, install it. No going "hmm, it's an RPM but izzit a mandrake or an ochre chapeau or a ... and which version of one of them izzit.. hmm... " Putting it all together from the gitgo makes sense in 2004. In 1994, nope, shared libraries were necessary, not today though, it's inertia that keeps that action going more than anything else, because it's from "back in the day" and stuck in the gurus minds that's how it should always be.. nuts! Makes sense to me to move forward. Seems like a decent project, hope he can find some gratis hosting space someplace.
... a floppy based install instead of a mini cd? Reason is old machines with just floppies and smaller hard drives.
Like some of mine for instance.... like my old laptop still running 95.....and no way to attach a cd to it.... and stuff
what I have been thinking about and did a few post musings on when the subject of spam came up. A closed system, only cool guys inside, and verification. When google announced their email I had hoped it would be the same idea, because they had the size to pull it off, to get enough people to switch to it that it would force others to actually have verifiable addys so that spammers and virus spewers could be eliminated pronto. White list/black list is a good idea, it beats filtering and giving all email an initial whitelist permission. that's bass ackwards. Email needs to be assumed to be bogus until proven otherwise.
... in a portable device, I would suggest the *new*
I Pod Version 6
plug it in, scroll to where you want to go to....
outsorcing is only killiong itself, it's relatively huge shoirt term profits. the reason is very simple, when you remove a good paying middle class job you remove that person as a consumer for the stuff you want to bring back and sell from overseas. You are seeing it now, this )precarious) economy is credit based, it's not based on actual ownership, and they've about milked that kitty dry. The proof of that is prime rate lending, they had to drop it to ridiculous to even keep up the credit binge. If people really were gaining so much more from all the offshoring of blue and white collar jobs, there wouldn't be a need for 30 year home notes and interest only loans and 60 month car loans, would there? Ya, people are buying more, there's more gadgets out there at walmart, but it's getting a little past shaky-O clock with that noise now, and credit can only go so far. The CEOs and wall street are actually killing the goose that laid the golden egg, the huge US middle class that took generations to build up. There's enough remnants still that people will debate the decline is happening, but it is, every sign points to it.
protectionism-root word = "protect". A large nation like ours needs to be economically vertically integrated, not just a service economy consisting of a few wealthy people and a lot of serfs waiting on them. Fedualism is just "wrong".
...in other discussions on this topic. IT in general has awesome power in this nation. A national uniun with enough members in enough industries/places would have the power to actually force the ending of all outsourcing and H1B visas with just the threat of a strike.That's just one for instance. Think of a controlled y2k bad news scenario, and that's the potential power a national IT union would have.
And people saying unions are teh evil-think about it, global industry already has their own "unions", they have industry organizations and a LOT of back room collusion and high level bribery to politicians that goes on. They want the monopoly on organized power, and go way out of their way to keep it, and to keep people faked out they are better off "on their own".
The biggest thing with unions to keep them honest and effective and to not get greedy and self defeating themselves is to NEVER allow a dynasty of union "bosses", that's the first and easiest way they become corrupt. Stay away from hoffa or reuther-ism type dynasties. Learn from history is the best advice. Unions can be good by skill and luck or bad by design and implementation if you fail to learn from history where previous unions went bogus.
Folks might want to check some of the fine print on the new draft law provisions as well, last I read there were some interesting details in there concerning IT folk.
serendipity, this is on drudge right now:
5 4~ 2388909,00.html
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~209
Illiteracy shockingly high in L.A.
Half of workers unable to read
By Rachel Uranga
Staff Writer
Continued immigration and a stubborn high school dropout rate have stymied efforts to improve literacy in Los Angeles County, where more than half the working-age population can't read a simple form, a report released Wednesday found.
Alarmingly, only one in every 10 workers deemed functionally illiterate is enrolled in literacy classes and half of them drop out within three weeks, said the study by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles.
"It's an emergency situation," said Mayor James Hahn, adding that poor literacy rates could jeopardize the region's economy by driving out high-tech businesses and other industries that pay well.
In the Los Angeles region, 53 percent of workers ages 16 and older were deemed functionally illiterate, the study said.
That percentage dropped to 44 percent in the greater San Fernando Valley -- which includes Agoura Hills and Santa Clarita -- but soared to 85 percent in some pockets of the Valley.
The study measured levels of literacy across the region using data from the 2000 Census, the U.S. Department of Education and a survey of literacy programs taken from last September to January.
It classified 3.8 million Los Angeles County residents as "low-literate," meaning they could not write a note explaining a billing error, use a bus schedule or locate an intersection on a street map.
And despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent in public schools over the past decade to boost literacy rates, functional illiteracy levels have remained flat because of a steady influx of non-English-speaking immigrants and a 30 percent high school dropout rate, authors of the report said.
---and some more at the URL
But! That's not NEAR as important as customised cars, the latest pop music and videos, near-universal addiction to professional sports, wearing the latest cool fashion and being able to ace videogames! We'll show 'em! Hey, let's throw MORE tax payer money at the public schools! Hey, let's just ELIMINATE borders! Hey, MORE tax breaks for corporations to move overseas! Waitaminnit! I got it! WARS! Let's just have MORE WARS and just TAKE what we need! That should work!
What's helped the USA the MOST is having access to cheap oil. Most of that other economic stuff is academic masturbation. Not all of it, but most of it. We built up our economy after WW2 with oil at 2-4$/barrel IIRC. Once our domestic oil got marginal and expensive, we switched to getting oil at cut rate prices from ridiculous dictators on the take and "royal" poobahs overseas. Everytime one of them guys get's the wise idea that they are better off charging a better price or actually using their own oil domestically-or not using the fiat FRN as the currency that is acceptable, we send in the boys with the guns and get a new poohbah in there. Either the spooks change it or the overt military changes it. Look at Saddam, as long as it was swap or oil for US petrodollars, he could do whatever he wanted to do, for years. As soon as he started to insist on Euros, WHAM! All of a sudden he's this big threat, etc,poof, new war, he's gone. One of them amazing coincidences that really isn't.
I know this doesn't address outsourcing per se, but it's the biggest factor in helping to keep millionaires as millionaires. When even relatively cheaper oil wasn't enough, they only had two choices to keep their profits up, ship off the jobs they could to much cheaper labor place, or get another source of cheap oil. Now that there really isn't any more cheap oil,no place, there's not much more they can do. They are certainly not going to go personally broke or give up their personal jetliners and multiple mansions jazz. That leaves sticking it to the middle class here domestically, and using the stock market casino scam and normal partisan politics to keep people faked out that they can get rich, too, sometime in the future, or that it's "the other party's" fault. Heck, they even sold credit as pay to people, and they bought it, people have actually switched to the notion that being in perpetual debt is somehow accumulating wealth. Just an amazing bit of propoganda and brainwashing.
It's an admirable scam, well thought out, well implemented, seems to be working well for the globalist "elite" boys. I keep wondering when Joe and Jane sixpack will notice. Most don't until they go broke, and the more well off they were, the harder it will hit them, the ole cognitive dissonance sets in. Each of them will vote for the globaist scamster skull and bonesman of their choice, and whomever gets in, Joe and Jane will just get broker, but blame it on the OTHER globalist bonesman and the OTHER globalist party.
...in warfare they might do this. Maybe some of their vehicles would/could run on wasted people and parts, which you can accumulate in piles in said war.
All that is going to happen now is that they will move to another hosting provider. As in big deal, non story, no lessening of spam. If these people know not much will ever happen to them, and the hosting providers know they can make a bundle, the problem continues and gets worse. Block a few biggees in a row, just *maybe* a new and different message will get out to spammers and the goofs who host them knwingly. The message now is "naughty naughty, don't do that or we'll stamp our feet". OOh wow, that's got to be scary. Not. I say block 'em. I sincerely doubt it would ever get to "the entire internet" before spam was almost completely curtailed.
Oh well, who cares really....if people wanted to really eliminate spam from their inboxes they would do a default blacklist on all email and only allow whitelist entries in, and use webforms for first contacts. Instead they want to fool with rube goldberg voodoo AI attempts that barely work.
If we treated email addresses like we treated physical phone numbers and street addresses, there would be a lot less spam. spam exists because it's incredibly easy and extremely cheap to create millions of addys. If it would cost 10$ a year (whatever) per email addy, email would be treated more seriously. Everyone wants free email anarchy, so you get what you see. You can't have it both ways, either email needs some regulation like DNS entries, or you'll get spam and relayed viruses and whatnot. Phooie. A few years ago I about 100% gave up on email, I maybe do a few a week now, that's it. I just stopped using it because of all the crap associated with it, and I dread using it now. I would *gladly* pay 10 a year for secure and verifiable email service where only honest people had access to it, at least verifiable ways to see who was honest or not. The way it is now will never be fixable. Never.
...as in forever. Let it serve as an abject lesson to other hosters that if they take up the soon to be alleged spam gap, they too will get permanently blocked.
...but that means you are always relying on others to do your analysis for you, plus just pure leeching. Everyone's time is valuable, yes? And yes again, if you read at say +4 you'll get some gems, but you'll also miss some gems because of unfair/illogical/partisan modding down. I've seen some pretty good stuff get whacked down for what seems to be merely fanboi political reasons one way or the other. If I had been reading at a high threshold I would have missed it. "Metamod" is supposed to fix that, but we have quite literally no way to know if it's working or not, with the ease of creating new accounts, etc.