--hey, this is pretty slick! If you had a group of investor/owners/users, you could build an entire planned community based around one of these plants. Think a total alternate energy, live someplace that is now just salty marsh/desert area, have hydroponics farms and industries, etc. I also like that membrane filters can create really CLEAN water, too, and that's the only beef I got with this plant, they are going to use tired old fashioned chlorine tech to "treat" the water. but besides that, pretty spiffy!
Here's a thought. How about self education about politics and reality. How about doing the research to find out in advance if the people you are working for are really doing the best possible job, not lying to you, not making you go fight in a questionable war based on questionable reasons in advance of being put into a warzone?
Sorry man, got too many friends who as young men got stuck into a warzone based on a total lie and fabrication, the "tonkin gulf attacks". They got rah rah rahed into it, john wayned. Some got drafted, some just "joined up". Back then, real information was extremely hard to come by. Two of them I can name who are still alive got told for over 30 years their (illegal by signed convention) agent orange chemical warfare damage was illusionary, in their heads. This is NOT the case with general information now.
The background of saddam, bush, cheney, rumsfield, osama, are there, virtually anyone can do the research with a cheap dial up connection or for free at almost all public libraries. It takes the same time as watching one single football game on the TV to find out about enough lies to make anyone rational question this enterprise, that's it, that short of time with google and starting with a clean data slate, being honest about it.
My point is if YOU want to accept a check for military service, accept the responsibility that at this point in time you are in fact, a "mercenary", a soldier for hire. We don't have a draft now. In war, there are no rules. You accept "collateral damage" of your "enemy's" families, they not only find out about their little abdul or mohammed on the front lines, they themselves can get "direct feed back" in the form of exploding bombs on their own persons.
You can't have it both ways, you want your family to not have the possibilities of finding out about you being captured or hurt, then don't go over there and fight, unless you accept your adult responsibilities of the FULL ramifications of war, not the you get to pick and choose which things apply to you and your family or not, because in the real world, you don't get to pick and chose.
I support the US troops! These are my neighbors too, people not at their normal jobs today a lot of them, reserves, being exploited to the max. I know one guy personal who got called back over a year ago, and for what? Sign up for one reason, to DEFEND THE UNITED STATES WHEN IT'S ATTACKED,swell, hunt down osama, stick to that, but not this other crap,being used and abused for some other questionable reasons based on fabrications and exaggerations. Our own spooks can't even find any connections between osama and saddam, those guys HATE each other. British spooks, the same thing.
I support tour guys and nation to call it a draw, come home right now, with as few casualties as possible. Yes, I know that old model has some flaws to it,to actually be attacked, or to at least develop overwhelming evidence that an attack is imminent, but it just ain't there this time. To start down this path of pre emptive wars is just such a bad idea. That's what the 'bad guys" do, that's what stalin and hitler and tojo did, americans don't do that stuff! Once we do it a lot, the precedent established, we cannot any longer condemn any other nation for doing it. In the afghan war started by the russians, we went in and helped those moslems to resist, but unfortunately we picked some serious nutjobs like osama to "support", it was an extremely bad tactical decision, one of many made by the "profit over all" warlords back in Defense Inc. They do it all the time. Last week in the press it was all "secret emails and faxes to iraqi leaders indicated mass defections would occur". Now that that lie, one of hundreds, has been exposed, just look at reality, those people are defending their country from a hostile foreign nation, same as you or I would do. As thoroughly heinous and bad and as obnoxious as saddam is, and I assert he definetly is, these iraqis are finding our invasion a WORSE alternative,
...should charge money for them. Why should anyone release stuff to CERT for free then? Ta heck with that noise. Inform them you have found an exploit, all you need to do to describe it is say something like "this exploit concerns application xxx, it rates as critical (or whatever standards numerical scale that can be worked out), and CERT has a public posted fee schedule based on that. If it's not enough, some other exploit clearing house can offer the same exact service based on that model. I am SURE that if the exploit finders had a choice of getting a fee, getting paid to work, over doing it for free, 99 out of 100 people would accept the fee. Initial exchanges between the two contractural parties are done encrypted and signed and dated obviously, so neither party can claim fraud. Bona Fides are built on trust and peer review of releases. The exploit finders build their reputation based on performance, similar to a sellers rating, ie., they are caught exaggerating all the time, their stuf becomes of not much worth, so it doesn't sell. And the converse would be true obviously. Why should "open source" exploit finders be denied data and be denied their finder's fees if some company throws money into the equation? It works both ways. They either share freely,like normal open source code, or if charging goes on, BOTH sides get paid.
CERT is just a clearing house, they "take" other's bug finding efforts for free, but then sell the data, the good stuff that needs to be known about in a timely manner. It's the "timely manner" part that is controversial, but frankly I am of the "as soon as it's known about" persuasion, I think the info should be released as soon as known about, as a lesser of two evils option. I see the advantages and disadvantages of both methods, so it really is taste there, not all completely right or wrong.
CERT want their cake and eat it to, seems like a good business plan for them, bad for everyone else. Bad for their subscribers, bad for the freebie find-out-about-it week-later leeches, bad for the exploit finders.
..I don't know if this is available or not, just seems like a neat way to have a needed business. What's to stop any organization from declaring themselves an Independent Redhat Certification company,posting disclaimers all over their site of course noting who owns the copyright,etc, doing honest legitimate testing, etc, and offering a cert? They could charge a competetive price, and obviously cheaper than the "official" version. And once you got one cert, make it a LOT cheaper to get current all the time, just make the first one more expensive to establish your initial bona fides and competence? Would this be illegal, or what? And I don't mean like those "Lost your diploma? Guaranteed genuine replacement doploma look a likes! 2.98$$$" like you get in spam email, I mean a real effort, just cheaper?
--oh heck ya, I remember them, there was tons of stuff written and talked about on global cooling then. Just as many proportional as global warming now. and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if a lot of it was destroyed on purpose, too, just too embarassing to some.
My solution is to walk softly on the earth. That doesn't mean I am not going to walk, either.
--honest, I just don't see any financial or practical benefits for apples business model. they tried clones, even at that level they started running into the same problems that plague intel architecture, drivers, incompatabilities, glitches started showing up. I remember my sister bought a clone, she had problems with it that I never saw, dang if I can remember now though, but to both of us it was weird at the time, that I remember. Apple would be gone or nearly gone as a company if they had followed that path. You already have x86 architecture to play with, that market is saturated. Apple is a niche market, that sells integrated hardware and software. It's the only way they found to guarantee a higher level than an industry "norm" of quality. They opened up part of their development on their OS they sell,darwin, that's about as far as they could go and still be profitable. A better bet for them is to just get more advanced chips from IBM if motorola can't or won't do it. Their other business decisions are sound, and they really don't care if they sell a few more copies of their OS just so it can run on x86 stuff. They are a design and useability company, they aren't a lowest common demoninator hardware and software company even though that's the stuff they sell on a basic level, they are selling what they do with hardware and software in combination. They sell an idea that is well thought out and integrated and implemented. When they stick to innovative hardware designs combined with an OS that works pretty well for their customer base, they sell stuff, make money. Just can't see them getting into the ford business when there's a ford dealer on every corner allready. We got all the fords ya need, any size, can stick any engine in them ya want,except their top of the line engine, and that's it, you can mix and match,even use one of their engines that isn't quite top of the line, but their particular designs would just fall through the cracks once they started to duplicate the other ford companies. What would happen is initially they'd get a surge of orders, then that would drop to 1% or something, way below what they are doing now.
Just an opinion. I think it's good we have different chips and designs and OSs, I don't want to see just x86 completely take over anything. I own several of each, I like them for what they do good. I was happy with my old classic macs for years, I never really went through driver hell and incompatabile hardware and hardware that broke like all my PC friends did, never. what came with the machine always worked, anything I added that said 'works on the mac" did exactly that, it worked. It was a good thing, worth the few extra bucks to me.
I haven't used osx yet, I might sometime but not now, I admit it's from cost, but that's my problem, I can't afford a mercedes either, I don't own a very large size screen television, and I'd like to have a whopper diesel 4wd tractor with every posible attachment but ain't got the scratch for that either.. When the used hardware prices drop enough and I am inclined I intend to get the appropriate hardware and osx and try it, if then I don't like it I'll sell it or something else, but I just wouldn't like it if it was just cheap stuff. I got x86 boxes, the one I am on is nice, it runs linux well, I am happy with that now but not totally married to it, it's a piece of machinery when you get down to it.
Maybe they will do it, don't know, I think if they do they'll go out of business though.
If they want to make some more money now, they need to re think the newton, re release the best pda/phone/media player combo *thing* ever even conceived of. That's what apple is good at, being inventors and designers, and making sure their stuff works as advertised. It makes no sense for them to just mirror and duplicate 1,000 other companies efforts, and compete in that market. There's two basic business models, sell millions of things cheap, make a few bucks. Or sell thousands of things, and because of what you get, people pay mor
...but I missed it whenever it was first posted. Anyway,just went to the page easily to look, because for a noob and a non-coder this would be a good thing but the mpeg is just too big, guess I'll skip it on my very slow dialup connection. Does anyone know of just a few static images as an alternative? A small page of thumbs perhaps?
...movies in the future will most likely be of higher data size, doncha think? More 3-D styled, more stereo, much more special effects, etc. Look at everything else we do with computers, used to be able to browse the net pretty spiffy from a 14.4, but then the content got better, lots more pics and whatnot, so we needed more speed, more speed meant faster processors, yada yada. And not having to have the data compressed or be in any sort of lossy format is a +. so maybe instead of DVDs it will be ultradvd or something. didn't we have a thread here about two months back about some new formats on disk coming out? 20 gigs or something on a disk?
I don't know, I just like it some faster, speaking as a guy on rural dialup who's lucky to snag around a 26 k connection on a good day. Heck, I would be ecstatic with a floppy amount per second, that is gee whizz buck rogers stuff to me, reading about these guys got cable connections. That's personal flying car level to me. heh. Anyway, I just hope these wireless guys can get their stuff together and come up with THE WIRELESS INTARWEB and not 18 different kinds of wireless. I'm holding out, seems like a new wireless every other week. Makes betamax or vhs standard wars seem trivial. There needs to be a better and more robust standard,and I'd like to see it not any more complicated than like a set of rabbit ears to setup, get some sort of broadband with cheap hardware, emphasis *cheap* no 1000 buck satellite or having line of sight repeaters and having to build it myself from the nearest burg.
--there's a lot of things that will effect morale, primarily people work for "money".
So, is the company really profitable in what it does, or is it struggling with the remnants of venture capital and dotbomb kruft? If they aren't profitable, there's no way to have good morale. If what they do as their primary business is based on fluff and unnecessary extravagances that have limited and volatile markets, don't expect them to stay in business, so adjust your own morale in advance for that possibility. Go ahead and suck it down while you can get it, but don't keep false hopes.
If the company could be profitable but isn't, are the managers doing things like moving operations to much cheaper rent, slashing their own salaries, getting rid of those thousand buck chairs and business lunches and "personal assistants", or are they shipping labor offshore, keeping the same expensive offices, giving themselves bonuses, etc? If they are, you won't have good morale. Eventually it will be a handful of local bosses and all you guys will be bye bye, bad for morale obviously.
Is the company cooking the books to make it appear like they are profitable? Nose around, schmooze up to the bean counters, find out, because you DON'T want to be there when TSHTF. If they are, chances are good you'll come in one day and the owners will have split or something like that, no lie, that happened to me once in a good job,(small shop around 10 guys) came in monday morning,the boss/owner had split,cleaned out some personal stuff out of his office and around the shop, he had cleaned out the corporate accounts, moved from his house (I went and checked, he was poofed), had left everyone the previous friday night with rubber checks. Stuff happens. Or if a bigger place you might get raided by the feds or something, it's in the news every other day of financial mismanagement to make it look like companies are making money when they are bleeding red ink. You'll never have good morale with people like that "in charge". Any good morale will be built on false premises, the crash and letdown can be pretty bad. Be wary of uber professional sales types in management positions, they are necessary for all businesses, but are smooth talkers and actors by definition, if you keep smelling rats with what's going on, assume there's rodents no matter what smiley face they project or soothing words. Hmm, sort of like politicians re election commercials, talk with several large handfuls of salt.
If you are an employee, after first noticing the previous, well, you do your job! It's that easy! You use your brain, you are a professional about your work, you stay flexible enough to deal with unexpected things that occur, and you don't assume anything but it's a business, it's not a hangout, social club or place for games. That's not to say it can't be casual and sometimes fun, but that is secondary to the purpose of work, and it should be a far away secondary.
If you know you are doing a good job, then your morale should be good. If you are medium happy with your pay and bennies, accept it, don't think you'll get automatic raises all the time or that you deserve a never ending stream of attaboys. Accept criticism when it's necessary, and go ahead and ask if you don't know, if it's some project that has tons of variables, seek out an opinion voluntarily, ask "how does this look, is this what you really want?" etc. Sometimes management actually gets embarrased and doesn't want to address critical issues in a timely manner, they will let problems go too long without addressing them, so make it easier for them. You stop short of sucking up, that isn't required, just use a common sense approach. Everyone has good morale then, based on their ability to handle weird situations, no one is exactly the same, so don't assume they are.
Got a beef with co workers? Analyse it, see if it's work related, or personal, if it's personal, you just have to deal with it. Keep contact to a minimum , just enough to do your job, but if they keep s
...they get ignored. Sick ex-soldiers can't win wars or political popularity polls or elections. they'll spend millions of dollars to make humans into basically what passes for our current tech level cyborg war machines, then they might think about spending perhaps dozens of dollars or less once those machines aren't useful any longer. The nam vets were ignored,a lot of MIAs left to rot, the gulf war one vets were ignored, korean vets captured by the chinese were written off, and even in WW2 a lot of MIA went to what was ostensibly our "ally" at the time stalin's gulags, factories and mines and elsewhere, never to return, forgotten about.
Even though it was barely a decade ago, there are very few gulf war vets in this new war. There's a reason for that, google to find out. they weren't classed as "combat injuries" because it wasn't shrapnel or a bullet, but there were a lot of them, and quite a few aren't with us any more. For years as they laid in beds barfing their guts out and slowly fading they were told it was "psychological".
All that dust on the way to baghdad these guys are breathing now? Still full of radioactive particles from gulf war one and the DU rounds used. All those guys gonna get sick too, just watch, and uncle sugah will write them off, tissue paper humans to them, because they can always rah rah rah another large batch of them, especially when they tank the economy for the upper levels in the multinationals, and for thousands of young guys in podunk USA that reality becomes those seductive "service for your government" commercials that are pushed as "sign up bonus, guaranteed checks, paid for schooling, plus neato FPS video games" ads on the TV..
Couple months ago, bush signed a law severely limiting medical aid to vets 65 and older, right when they might really be needing it. That didn't get even a fraction of one percent of one days current "war" coverage, even though it was fairly important "news", but you see news like that isn't sexy and bloody and exciting whizzbang stuff. just like dragging out all that old news about who really set up and profited from saddam in the first place, where his WMD came from., the real names, the real bosses, the real companies involved. Ya, some french, some german, some this some that, but the bio stuff he's got came from new jersey, and the chems came from various places around the US. the reason why we know he's got WMD? Saw it written as a joke but it's true-we kept the receipts.
Rewarding the high level guys who cause the problems in the first place by electing them to office and allowing them to stay as top dogs in corporations and not sending them to prison instead is the same thing as hiring burglars and rapists and murders to be cops, firemen and EMT guys-you don't do that on a small scale, but for some reason in the US right now a lot of people seem to think it's OK to do that on a very large scale, just "forget about all that embarassing stuff in the past".
They spend the million bucks a soldier, yep. The reasons are they can make more money with less resources that way, the soldier part is just a piece of the machine, they are expendable and upgradeable in the next war.
It don't never change man. It's the bang for the buck. Notice the bang part and the buck part got nothing to do with that part in the middle,it's not even mentioned in that old phrase,there's no word in the phrase for it, the "human" part, that part is still cheap, always been cheap.
..thanks wow, a truly superior post, thanks for finding it, thanks for posting it. It's one of those things that should be printed out by the thousands and handed out all over. The parallels are amazing.
I've been watching this creeping fascism for decades now, ever since as a teen I realised that a President had gotten whacked, and that the "whomever did it's" had gotten away with it. A president who was determined to not fight illegal weird wars, who was returning the nation to honest money and getting us away from the federal reserve scam money, a president who saw the oil sisters raping everyone and getting away with it and was determined to stop it, a president who with his brother was determined to break the back of real organized crime after over 30 years of the nations federal "police" boss ignoring it and claiming it didn't even exist, and a president who was truly interested in having all people inside the nation be equal citizens. All those reasons and more, these fascists used as the excuse to whack him, and using their power inside high governmental agencies and the military and in international business, they avoided any penalty for their crime, just got away with it.
Since then, all the actions of this government point to a "shadow government" of fascists who year by year have taken over, until now they make up almost all of the "government" at any managerial and decision making level, and the people under them too scared or too brainwashed to resist this...junta is the word. It really is a junta, that's the best word that fits and what happened, a slow speed stealth junta takeover.
Soldiers used as mercenaries, rubber stamp bribed yes men play acting at being "elected representatives", so called "judges" coming from one of the two controlling organized crime ubergangs, and now an executive branch that is going for broke, no more pretenses needed, no more silly "rights" nonsense, just conmplete and total "command and control".
The bad part is, how many brainwashed sieg heilers we have now, same as "back then" when the bulk of another nation got faked out.
Learn from history or repeat, looks like we are repeating this go-around. Too bad.
--you take double grumpy pills this morning? I didn't say I don't use email,nor recommend that people don't use email, not even close, I just dropped off some lists I was on, both from not really using them and also from the obvious massive spam increases I got. I am reasonably careful on how I give my email out now, as well. Just normal common sense useages, and as a result I still communicate with people I want to, and get the same business emails I always got, but only a few spams per day, very easy to deal with. considering I used to get like dozens and dozens, I think my crude technique worked fairly well.
MY over-all solution to spam? Make it illegal, even if it's a UN thing, much as I don't like the UN for most purposes, for things like that it might actually be useful. Once it's illegal all over the planet it might work better, and any tiny nations that keep it "legal" can just be blocked by people if it gets to that. Personally I would have no problem whatsoever if my ISP blocked entire nations or domains if that was possible and they had a request thing for that, that any user could simply notify them. Commercial unsolicited mail should really be opt-in, not phony opt-in, no forged headers or return-tos. I say treat forged headers and phony return-to addys as fraud, wirefraud, a federal felony, which is what they are. Then they need as much po-leece effort and general press efforts as they are putting into "cracking down on P2P sharers". Governments always having this "war" on this or that, tell ya what, compared to all the other "wars" I'd say a "war on spam" would garner 99.999% planetary support against the "email spam terrorists". It won't stop all of it, but it will stop a lot of it. No one wants to pay per email, neither the senders nor the recipients. No one really wants the wasted bandwith except for those few jerk hosting places that sell space and bandwith to spammers, who SHOULD be universally shunned and blocked by people.
That pay per view e-mail nonsense just ain't gonna fly, so the main premise of the article is seriously flawed. It would be like going back to pay by the minute internet, yeech. Well, maybe some corporations might for their "official" email, but I can't see many individuals all eager to sign up for it. That and more research and adoption of these various spam filters, make them just much easier to use.
Maybe slashdot should run a poll, who would pay to send or receive email? I doubt many people would, but it would be interesting to see the results.
..if that bike runs it's electrical on a magneto I can guarantee you don't want to hook it directly up. Spike city. Your best bet is to get a 12 VDC car adapter, charge the batts separate,out of the laptop somehow, or let them recharge from your bike batt when it's stopped. Don't try to run the laptop with the motor running in other words. You can also get a flexible solar PV panel you can strap on top of your gear, so it will get some juice while you are driving and stopped. Unisolar makes them, different sizes, you can google for them, easy to find. I have two of them, work great! We have those for our backpacks here, to recharge small batts, so I guess a laptop batt isn't much different, just need to make sure you watch them, the voltage is unregulated, brighter sun, higher voltage. To get around that you can use a "charge controller" thing. Very large batts like car batteries don't need it, but I am just not sure about smaller drycells, although I've done it, I haven't done it a *lot* like for the time lengths you are suggesting, I just know it's possible. Might be a good idea to install dual batteries for the bike itself, so one can be recharging the laptop at night while camping say, leaving one for running the bike in the morning, switch them around or re-attach in parallel before you take off for that day's ride in the morning. I don't know if that bike is kick start only or electric or both, but you need some juice to start it either way as far as I know.
Besides that, NEAT TRIP MAN! Sounds like lotsa fun!
--I probably don't have all the details correctly, but here's the gist of the funniest and most practical example of junk snail mail I ever heard of. It was back duing the energy crisis of the 70's. It was on one of those TV shows like "That's Incredible". This guy up in new hampshire gets a brainstorm, his heating bills are outta sight. He gets himself on-purpose on every junk mailing list he can find, I mean goes WAY out of his way. Pretty soon he's getting mailbags full a day coming to his house. He gets one of those paper-log roller machines, rolls up the junk mail and burns it in his woodstove!
What I did for electronic spam and getting mailed viruses is I stopped being on lists, stopped using my email addy except to a few friends. It's taken awhile but I'm down to only a few a day now, easy enough to delete. Also using that "junk" feature with mozilla, but no idea if I'm even using it correctly, but I really only get a few now.
..and auctions in general have been around since caveman days probably. Just another corporate abuse of the system.
I am starting to get the "impression" pun intended that any company composed of more than two people should be suspect of being crooked and just generally lame.
And any governments of more than ONE person.
I think it's time to just scrap patents all together and scrap copyrights, or at most make them for a very short period, like two years max. And I don't care about the temporary economic models, it will change to whatever it needs to change to, because humans want stuff more than they don't want stuff, so stuff will still get invented and built and sold.
I'd also like to see an end to corporations being "persons", where the profits are protected and accumulated and spent by HUMANS, but the liabilities always seem to go to this fictititous "person".
This stuff is just completely out to lunch outta control.
--there's two completely different ways to price oil, one is the common "by the barrel" using terms of "money". This is just as important as estimates of volume. You need not only the volume, it needs to be recoverable, and not recoverable in terms of just "money". The other way to measure recoverability is to use a more scientific approach than "money", and that is to refer to oil out of the ground as "the amount of BTUs of energy used to get back x-amount of BTUs of energy in the form of crude oil that is usefull and useable". With the latter method, the bulk of the world's reserves are simply not available for much longer, this is called loosely "peaking" as it refers to various fields, and barring some amazingly efficient energy source that would negate it's use on extracting oil because it would be redundant then, the mideast fields, roughly speaking, are the vast bulk of recoverable oil that will remain so beyond a few more years.
Here and there around the planet there remain some good fields, but for the long haul, it's the mideast, in particular iraq, saudi arabia and iran. Just recently in historical terms, north sea and mexican oil are peaked and in decline. There remains recoverable oil but it will be gone soon. These mideast fields are so far ahead in terms of being the big kahunas nothing else comes close. They will remain economically and physically "recoverable" long past any other fields, roughly speaking. A lot of those wells there are still self pumping, under pressure from underground, their recovery costs are very marginal, that's why their oil is cheap still. On the contrary, and for another example, the US still has lakes of oil underground, huge amounts, but the point is moot, most of them are capped off now, the energy in terms of required BTU's for extraction needed, usually by injecting water underground to force the oil up, is about at a net break even BTU to BTU level now, so that oil will stay down there, even if you have "money" to throw at the project. It's a waste of time almost completely, and beyond a waste of time if you value the water. They would be marginally useful should foreign oil not only crack 80$ a barrel, but if the cheaper oil was even available at all to extract the more expensive, and if the water was there to use, which in the US west, ain't available. Arctic oil is somewhat more valuable, eventually it will get used, societal demands will rise so high that any environmental concerns will be ignored. those concerns are rather over exaggerrated, and once the price at the pump hits double what it is now, opposition will evaporate to a fringe level beyond now, but even then, there just isn't that much there. A study I looked at is, it is enough to run the government itself at it's current size, so I can guess who's going to get it once it opens up.
This century is the century of the resource wars, particularly oil, water, and arable farm land that doesn't require artificial irrigation. We are in the peak and now starting to decline "good old days" when it comes to energy, and with that, industrial civilization. I doubt even 1% of the g;lobal population is even concerned at this point, feeling that oil is an infinte resource and all you need to have it is to throw money at the problem.
Early predictions of resource limits, in particular the 70's, were based on junk and inadequate science, well before the planet was mapped and explored better with radar, etc. It is almost 30 years later since those mid 70's predictions, we have advanced significantly in our ability to measure. Now that we can do it much more accurately, we have a much better handle on oil supplies. It really ain't pretty. It comes down to the mid east fields got the lion's share, by a huge margin. We still have tarsands, oilsands and oilshale, but the recovery costs are astronomical, and not hardly any better than a few per cent useful in terms of energy needed, and a net loss in terms of wasted and polluted water. It's somewhat useful in canada where they have water
03/19/03 Stephen Koff and James F. McCarty Plain Dealer Reporters
C-SPAN, the cable television network popular with political junkies and insomniacs, is outraged that the City Club of Cleveland has banned broadcast media from covering today's speech by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Especially galling, says C-SPAN, is that Scalia is coming to the club to collect its Citadel of Free Speech Award. More at giant link, funny as heck except he really IS a "supreme" court judge.
Maybe we should escape to orbit, nuke the whole site, only way to be sure.
...sounds like a good way to interview your prospective new server-master. Give them a blank server box and a play domain. He gets to set it up however. Have him coder 'er up to what he thinks is "good stuff", serve wise and security-wise. Have a nice strange web page fulla blinkenlights graphics and flash and whatevers, THEN see if you can get it posted as a story on slashdot. Server don't cut it,or gets owned real quick, he don't get the job. Forget all the other resume stuff.
--I have a few of the camping style ammonia vapor refrigerators, they run either electric or from a small propane flame. No compressor, perfectly quiet. If you want a used one for a project, try some place that has wrecked/used RV's. You'll still have heat to exhaust from the room if you need that though, but your computer would stay pretty cool inside one.
--I am guessing syria next. Both israel and their allies in the US mideast conquering faction want the whole thing, so syria makes the most sense for the next target. Iran (let's assume it, safe bet) and north korea have nukes, they will be tougher. Once iraq and syria are controlled, re supply from the med is a piece of cake, no need to even involve turkey. Iran then is in a pincer, we can stage out of afghanistan and maybe pakistan as well as iraq. They will have to locate the nukes in iran first so they can be taken out first strike. North korea they will ignore as long as possible, because there's no easy to take them without irradiating parts of japan and china and russia. Even those EMP conventions they have won't do squat to 1950s era diesel tech. It would take over lapping neutron bombs, a lot of them, in a first strike,other EMP weapons, lots of conventionals, etc, because one single salvo from north koreas entrenched arty and missile batteries would cause significant damage to the south. Tough nut to crack all things considered.
Big wild card is, do any of these other target nations have secret treaties with each other? How long will they stand down and watch while one after another get picked off before they decide their only hope is a massive first strike back, using both conventional and as much assymetrical tactics as they can muster? and what's smuggled into the US already, that can be used anytime they get a go signal?
Some other nations of interest, yemen, libya, sudan. They might even stage a coup in saudi arabia if it looks like the princes are bugging out.
Another question is, in the medium term what will this do as regards russia and china? If they do nothing, they lose billions, plus much international face. China in particular can NOT afford to lose the cheap and easy access they are counting on to mideast oil for the next decade or two, my guess is they were planning on straight swaps eventually, bulk crude for manufactured goods, eliminate any dollar or euro middle man skim.
Here's a real wild one I read someplace. Suppose those stories of stolen russky nukes are real, and they managed to get at least a few of them upgraded and fixed so they are functional. Maybe they are buried on approaches to baghdad, to be used as whopper land mines.
It really just depends, saddam has had decades to think about things, if he decides a samson option is his only option, take as many with him as he can, there's no real way to predict anything. No nation has a complete lock on technology or cunning.
...should make a phone that can be as easily upgraded as any desktop box. That would be nice, take your old phone in, they swap out the necessary components, or you can do it, "upgrade" to the latest and best. Then at least only part of the phone becomes trash.
Conversely, an easy mod to make a useable FRS radio would be nice. Probably real hard and illegal, though.
Cell phone to > music file player? Tablet PC adapter? Garage door opener, universal remote control?
My beef with new phones is they are all too small now, it's ridiculous, can't hardly see the dang buttons very good now, even with bifocals. Bytes it, new cell phone designs need to pass a geezer test before being released, hahaha! Special "geezer edition", 50% bigger phone and buttons and screen, room for a bigger batt then, too!
Kinda like realising you really WOULD rather drive a cushy roomy crown vic then a fast rice burner.
I still got one of them bag phones, ya know, I still like it. Don't use it, but I like it, room inside the bag for a small laptop and some other junque with a little creative re arranging.
Re:Family Tree Tech support: Wood for the fire....
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Family Tech Support
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--yo man! I did tradeshows for 15 years, I be feeling your pain! SAME exact thing happened to me quickly after i first started, I was the one with the big v-8 van that sucked gas and could hold all the toolboxes and rolls of poly and carpet pad and the gang boxes and stuff. One day I notice I am doing the company's job, plus hauling all the other guys tools who drove tiny cars that got great mileage. Hmm, like what's wrong with this picture? Soooo, I started remodeling on the side when the shows were in, between setup and teardown, so I had the "excuse" to tell all of them and the company that they really needed to keep their stuff in their own vehicles because I needed the space in the van to haul lumber and drywall, etc. That worked out quite well, plus I upped my income!
--the "state of the art" now in mobile computing reminds me of that late 60's horsepower wars. There's the same basic mistake. Instead of making the engine more efficient, they basically increased the displacement to ridiculous levels. sure they started having fuel injection, but that's about it, it was just "bigger", less efficient, necessitating "more fuel" to accomplish the same tasks of basically transportation.
The better bet (maybe, this is my general question really) right now with fuel cells versus batteries is actually back to where the power is needed and what for and why exactly. Bigger and bigger chips (engine displacement) using more and power, more and more RAM needed, necesitated by apps that really are just huge, just humongous. How much of it is really necessary as opposed to "because we can" and it's easier to code to that inefficient set of standards?
Perhaps-just a thought, but perhaps, if there was a revolution on coding going back to small,mean fast and efficient, then maybe we wouldn't need bigger and bigger chips and more RAM to run everything? And the batteries that exist now would work adequately, last longer, not wear out as quick and we wouldn't have this "computer energy problem" as much? Is there a legit link between code bloat and energy useage that could be addressed? If programs were really written with "energy conservation" in mind, would this help? I dunno but I got a suspicion that coders knowing that the CPUs are bigger and faster and that there's a lot more RAM avaialable might make them skip little bits of code that would improve efficiency, and thereby borking energy conservation.
I don't know, not a coder, but I am more or less doing the same general computing stuff I did years ago, but it takes "more" of everything hardware-wise and including more electricity to do this stuff. The real only change I can see is occassionaly I look at some streaming video, but besides that it's the same, I browse, email, listen to the net radio, do IRC and etc, same stuff I did years ago, but now I need a bigger everything to do this. I know there's any number of immediate exceptions to the rule now someone can drop, 'I run super 4-d magnum quantum compiler, I need all I can get' and etc, that ain't my point. Does code bloat lead to hardware bloat that causes code bloat and back and forth that is responsible for batteries falling so far behind we have to screw around with fuel cells?
--I posted that last night anonymous so it would go in at 0, but now that I see it got bumped up it doesn't matter.
You have a valid technical point, so do I. I actually have a lot of points.
Current alleged copyright affronts are analogous in a way to ridiculously mandated 55 mph speed limits, that after a few years of MILLIONS of people simply ignoring them, all of those people lawbreakers technically, our society and laws changed back to something a bit saner. I don't see any differences between sharing and massive civil disobedience of patently absurd laws like that. It used to be "illegal" for "persons of color" to enter here and there. When I was a real young kid, there was an entire small city near me that had SIGNS at the city line, along with the moose and kiwanis signs, that sign said NO N***s ALLOWED. I SAW that sign with my own young just starting to read eyeballs. Well, eventually those and other "laws" based on total stupidity got changed. It is stupid to keep making stupid things the law! Just because it says it's a law don't make it right. I can cite many other examples. that part is easy.
The basic premise of the "outrage" of the RIAA and their movie partners in monopoly profits is now flawed. It is so seriously flawed that it is past the same ridiculous level those signs were at back then. It is worse flawed than the 55 mph limit, or the new takes you two tries to flush commodes. They are hanging onto their buggywhip archaic profits model based on an entire generation's ago level of technology..
File sharing has clearly shown exactly what "songs" and "movies" are worth, given technology advances. These bloated luddite monopolists are just frantically trying to hold on to profits that are no longer justified. It has nothing to do with what is right or wrong as pertains copyrights, that is clearly tangential, although that is their cry they are being "stolen" from. Nope, THEY are the ones who across the board, across the nation, who have refused to drop their prices from the easy availablity of advanced technology. they are SO FAR into price gouging and other criminal acts it ain't funny. THEY are the clear cut badguys here, their "law" they cite is about as relevant in todays world as you must hire a small boy to walk in front of your horseless carriage swinging a lamp, a law that used to be on the books some places.
If your hard drives were still going for hundreds of dollars for a 10 meg hardrive, when you knew they could be made much cheaper, and the hard drive manufacturers had colluded in an organization called the HMA hard drive manufacturers association to lock in prices the same as always, this would be called extreme abuse, it would be illegal, they would be sued not only into compliance with normal business reality but most likely out of existence and new corporations and executives would be taking their place. If an underground industry had arisen that assembled their own hard drives and were swapping them with each other for cheap, what it actually cost, then would these hard drive tech swappers be "illegal hard drive pirates"?
Not so the music and movie industry. They got an obvious joke fine for collusion in their price fixing schemes. They have been busted so many times for payola to keep the over the air music market locked at the top 40 drivel label I have lost count. Their media monoply companies like clear channel and a few whopper news orgs have hijacked the PUBLIC airwaves and own them now. They are serious serial criminals hiding behind a facade of respectability, and allowed to stay there by inertia, threats, bribery, intimidation. Screw them guys, they are crooks, gangsters, and dangerous for society and our economy..
These universities with legal departments and some deeper pockets should be ashamed they are not part of a massive class action to tear down that RIAA and get them sued out of business based on that simple principle. Songs and movies are NOT WORTH what they are being charged for. No
Slashdot Mirror
--hey, this is pretty slick! If you had a group of investor/owners/users, you could build an entire planned community based around one of these plants. Think a total alternate energy, live someplace that is now just salty marsh/desert area, have hydroponics farms and industries, etc. I also like that membrane filters can create really CLEAN water, too, and that's the only beef I got with this plant, they are going to use tired old fashioned chlorine tech to "treat" the water. but besides that, pretty spiffy!
Here's a thought. How about self education about politics and reality. How about doing the research to find out in advance if the people you are working for are really doing the best possible job, not lying to you, not making you go fight in a questionable war based on questionable reasons in advance of being put into a warzone?
Sorry man, got too many friends who as young men got stuck into a warzone based on a total lie and fabrication, the "tonkin gulf attacks". They got rah rah rahed into it, john wayned. Some got drafted, some just "joined up". Back then, real information was extremely hard to come by. Two of them I can name who are still alive got told for over 30 years their (illegal by signed convention) agent orange chemical warfare damage was illusionary, in their heads. This is NOT the case with general information now.
The background of saddam, bush, cheney, rumsfield, osama, are there, virtually anyone can do the research with a cheap dial up connection or for free at almost all public libraries. It takes the same time as watching one single football game on the TV to find out about enough lies to make anyone rational question this enterprise, that's it, that short of time with google and starting with a clean data slate, being honest about it.
My point is if YOU want to accept a check for military service, accept the responsibility that at this point in time you are in fact, a "mercenary", a soldier for hire. We don't have a draft now. In war, there are no rules. You accept "collateral damage" of your "enemy's" families, they not only find out about their little abdul or mohammed on the front lines, they themselves can get "direct feed back" in the form of exploding bombs on their own persons.
You can't have it both ways, you want your family to not have the possibilities of finding out about you being captured or hurt, then don't go over there and fight, unless you accept your adult responsibilities of the FULL ramifications of war, not the you get to pick and choose which things apply to you and your family or not, because in the real world, you don't get to pick and chose.
I support the US troops! These are my neighbors too, people not at their normal jobs today a lot of them, reserves, being exploited to the max. I know one guy personal who got called back over a year ago, and for what? Sign up for one reason, to DEFEND THE UNITED STATES WHEN IT'S ATTACKED,swell, hunt down osama, stick to that, but not this other crap,being used and abused for some other questionable reasons based on fabrications and exaggerations. Our own spooks can't even find any connections between osama and saddam, those guys HATE each other. British spooks, the same thing.
I support tour guys and nation to call it a draw, come home right now, with as few casualties as possible. Yes, I know that old model has some flaws to it,to actually be attacked, or to at least develop overwhelming evidence that an attack is imminent, but it just ain't there this time. To start down this path of pre emptive wars is just such a bad idea. That's what the 'bad guys" do, that's what stalin and hitler and tojo did, americans don't do that stuff! Once we do it a lot, the precedent established, we cannot any longer condemn any other nation for doing it. In the afghan war started by the russians, we went in and helped those moslems to resist, but unfortunately we picked some serious nutjobs like osama to "support", it was an extremely bad tactical decision, one of many made by the "profit over all" warlords back in Defense Inc. They do it all the time. Last week in the press it was all "secret emails and faxes to iraqi leaders indicated mass defections would occur". Now that that lie, one of hundreds, has been exposed, just look at reality, those people are defending their country from a hostile foreign nation, same as you or I would do. As thoroughly heinous and bad and as obnoxious as saddam is, and I assert he definetly is, these iraqis are finding our invasion a WORSE alternative,
...should charge money for them. Why should anyone release stuff to CERT for free then? Ta heck with that noise. Inform them you have found an exploit, all you need to do to describe it is say something like "this exploit concerns application xxx, it rates as critical (or whatever standards numerical scale that can be worked out), and CERT has a public posted fee schedule based on that. If it's not enough, some other exploit clearing house can offer the same exact service based on that model. I am SURE that if the exploit finders had a choice of getting a fee, getting paid to work, over doing it for free, 99 out of 100 people would accept the fee. Initial exchanges between the two contractural parties are done encrypted and signed and dated obviously, so neither party can claim fraud. Bona Fides are built on trust and peer review of releases. The exploit finders build their reputation based on performance, similar to a sellers rating, ie., they are caught exaggerating all the time, their stuf becomes of not much worth, so it doesn't sell. And the converse would be true obviously. Why should "open source" exploit finders be denied data and be denied their finder's fees if some company throws money into the equation? It works both ways. They either share freely,like normal open source code, or if charging goes on, BOTH sides get paid.
CERT is just a clearing house, they "take" other's bug finding efforts for free, but then sell the data, the good stuff that needs to be known about in a timely manner. It's the "timely manner" part that is controversial, but frankly I am of the "as soon as it's known about" persuasion, I think the info should be released as soon as known about, as a lesser of two evils option. I see the advantages and disadvantages of both methods, so it really is taste there, not all completely right or wrong.
CERT want their cake and eat it to, seems like a good business plan for them, bad for everyone else. Bad for their subscribers, bad for the freebie find-out-about-it week-later leeches, bad for the exploit finders.
..I don't know if this is available or not, just seems like a neat way to have a needed business. What's to stop any organization from declaring themselves an Independent Redhat Certification company,posting disclaimers all over their site of course noting who owns the copyright,etc, doing honest legitimate testing, etc, and offering a cert? They could charge a competetive price, and obviously cheaper than the "official" version. And once you got one cert, make it a LOT cheaper to get current all the time, just make the first one more expensive to establish your initial bona fides and competence? Would this be illegal, or what? And I don't mean like those "Lost your diploma? Guaranteed genuine replacement doploma look a likes! 2.98$$$" like you get in spam email, I mean a real effort, just cheaper?
--oh heck ya, I remember them, there was tons of stuff written and talked about on global cooling then. Just as many proportional as global warming now. and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if a lot of it was destroyed on purpose, too, just too embarassing to some.
My solution is to walk softly on the earth. That doesn't mean I am not going to walk, either.
--honest, I just don't see any financial or practical benefits for apples business model. they tried clones, even at that level they started running into the same problems that plague intel architecture, drivers, incompatabilities, glitches started showing up. I remember my sister bought a clone, she had problems with it that I never saw, dang if I can remember now though, but to both of us it was weird at the time, that I remember. Apple would be gone or nearly gone as a company if they had followed that path. You already have x86 architecture to play with, that market is saturated. Apple is a niche market, that sells integrated hardware and software. It's the only way they found to guarantee a higher level than an industry "norm" of quality. They opened up part of their development on their OS they sell,darwin, that's about as far as they could go and still be profitable. A better bet for them is to just get more advanced chips from IBM if motorola can't or won't do it. Their other business decisions are sound, and they really don't care if they sell a few more copies of their OS just so it can run on x86 stuff. They are a design and useability company, they aren't a lowest common demoninator hardware and software company even though that's the stuff they sell on a basic level, they are selling what they do with hardware and software in combination. They sell an idea that is well thought out and integrated and implemented. When they stick to innovative hardware designs combined with an OS that works pretty well for their customer base, they sell stuff, make money. Just can't see them getting into the ford business when there's a ford dealer on every corner allready. We got all the fords ya need, any size, can stick any engine in them ya want,except their top of the line engine, and that's it, you can mix and match,even use one of their engines that isn't quite top of the line, but their particular designs would just fall through the cracks once they started to duplicate the other ford companies. What would happen is initially they'd get a surge of orders, then that would drop to 1% or something, way below what they are doing now.
Just an opinion. I think it's good we have different chips and designs and OSs, I don't want to see just x86 completely take over anything. I own several of each, I like them for what they do good. I was happy with my old classic macs for years, I never really went through driver hell and incompatabile hardware and hardware that broke like all my PC friends did, never. what came with the machine always worked, anything I added that said 'works on the mac" did exactly that, it worked. It was a good thing, worth the few extra bucks to me.
I haven't used osx yet, I might sometime but not now, I admit it's from cost, but that's my problem, I can't afford a mercedes either, I don't own a very large size screen television, and I'd like to have a whopper diesel 4wd tractor with every posible attachment but ain't got the scratch for that either.. When the used hardware prices drop enough and I am inclined I intend to get the appropriate hardware and osx and try it, if then I don't like it I'll sell it or something else, but I just wouldn't like it if it was just cheap stuff. I got x86 boxes, the one I am on is nice, it runs linux well, I am happy with that now but not totally married to it, it's a piece of machinery when you get down to it.
Maybe they will do it, don't know, I think if they do they'll go out of business though.
If they want to make some more money now, they need to re think the newton, re release the best pda/phone/media player combo *thing* ever even conceived of. That's what apple is good at, being inventors and designers, and making sure their stuff works as advertised. It makes no sense for them to just mirror and duplicate 1,000 other companies efforts, and compete in that market. There's two basic business models, sell millions of things cheap, make a few bucks. Or sell thousands of things, and because of what you get, people pay mor
...but I missed it whenever it was first posted. Anyway,just went to the page easily to look, because for a noob and a non-coder this would be a good thing but the mpeg is just too big, guess I'll skip it on my very slow dialup connection. Does anyone know of just a few static images as an alternative? A small page of thumbs perhaps?
...movies in the future will most likely be of higher data size, doncha think? More 3-D styled, more stereo, much more special effects, etc. Look at everything else we do with computers, used to be able to browse the net pretty spiffy from a 14.4, but then the content got better, lots more pics and whatnot, so we needed more speed, more speed meant faster processors, yada yada. And not having to have the data compressed or be in any sort of lossy format is a +. so maybe instead of DVDs it will be ultradvd or something. didn't we have a thread here about two months back about some new formats on disk coming out? 20 gigs or something on a disk?
I don't know, I just like it some faster, speaking as a guy on rural dialup who's lucky to snag around a 26 k connection on a good day. Heck, I would be ecstatic with a floppy amount per second, that is gee whizz buck rogers stuff to me, reading about these guys got cable connections. That's personal flying car level to me. heh. Anyway, I just hope these wireless guys can get their stuff together and come up with THE WIRELESS INTARWEB and not 18 different kinds of wireless. I'm holding out, seems like a new wireless every other week. Makes betamax or vhs standard wars seem trivial. There needs to be a better and more robust standard,and I'd like to see it not any more complicated than like a set of rabbit ears to setup, get some sort of broadband with cheap hardware, emphasis *cheap* no 1000 buck satellite or having line of sight repeaters and having to build it myself from the nearest burg.
--there's a lot of things that will effect morale, primarily people work for "money".
So, is the company really profitable in what it does, or is it struggling with the remnants of venture capital and dotbomb kruft? If they aren't profitable, there's no way to have good morale. If what they do as their primary business is based on fluff and unnecessary extravagances that have limited and volatile markets, don't expect them to stay in business, so adjust your own morale in advance for that possibility. Go ahead and suck it down while you can get it, but don't keep false hopes.
If the company could be profitable but isn't, are the managers doing things like moving operations to much cheaper rent, slashing their own salaries, getting rid of those thousand buck chairs and business lunches and "personal assistants", or are they shipping labor offshore, keeping the same expensive offices, giving themselves bonuses, etc? If they are, you won't have good morale. Eventually it will be a handful of local bosses and all you guys will be bye bye, bad for morale obviously.
Is the company cooking the books to make it appear like they are profitable? Nose around, schmooze up to the bean counters, find out, because you DON'T want to be there when TSHTF. If they are, chances are good you'll come in one day and the owners will have split or something like that, no lie, that happened to me once in a good job,(small shop around 10 guys) came in monday morning,the boss/owner had split,cleaned out some personal stuff out of his office and around the shop, he had cleaned out the corporate accounts, moved from his house (I went and checked, he was poofed), had left everyone the previous friday night with rubber checks. Stuff happens. Or if a bigger place you might get raided by the feds or something, it's in the news every other day of financial mismanagement to make it look like companies are making money when they are bleeding red ink. You'll never have good morale with people like that "in charge". Any good morale will be built on false premises, the crash and letdown can be pretty bad. Be wary of uber professional sales types in management positions, they are necessary for all businesses, but are smooth talkers and actors by definition, if you keep smelling rats with what's going on, assume there's rodents no matter what smiley face they project or soothing words. Hmm, sort of like politicians re election commercials, talk with several large handfuls of salt.
If you are an employee, after first noticing the previous, well, you do your job! It's that easy! You use your brain, you are a professional about your work, you stay flexible enough to deal with unexpected things that occur, and you don't assume anything but it's a business, it's not a hangout, social club or place for games. That's not to say it can't be casual and sometimes fun, but that is secondary to the purpose of work, and it should be a far away secondary.
If you know you are doing a good job, then your morale should be good. If you are medium happy with your pay and bennies, accept it, don't think you'll get automatic raises all the time or that you deserve a never ending stream of attaboys. Accept criticism when it's necessary, and go ahead and ask if you don't know, if it's some project that has tons of variables, seek out an opinion voluntarily, ask "how does this look, is this what you really want?" etc. Sometimes management actually gets embarrased and doesn't want to address critical issues in a timely manner, they will let problems go too long without addressing them, so make it easier for them. You stop short of sucking up, that isn't required, just use a common sense approach. Everyone has good morale then, based on their ability to handle weird situations, no one is exactly the same, so don't assume they are.
Got a beef with co workers? Analyse it, see if it's work related, or personal, if it's personal, you just have to deal with it. Keep contact to a minimum , just enough to do your job, but if they keep s
...they get ignored. Sick ex-soldiers can't win wars or political popularity polls or elections. they'll spend millions of dollars to make humans into basically what passes for our current tech level cyborg war machines, then they might think about spending perhaps dozens of dollars or less once those machines aren't useful any longer. The nam vets were ignored,a lot of MIAs left to rot, the gulf war one vets were ignored, korean vets captured by the chinese were written off, and even in WW2 a lot of MIA went to what was ostensibly our "ally" at the time stalin's gulags, factories and mines and elsewhere, never to return, forgotten about.
Even though it was barely a decade ago, there are very few gulf war vets in this new war. There's a reason for that, google to find out. they weren't classed as "combat injuries" because it wasn't shrapnel or a bullet, but there were a lot of them, and quite a few aren't with us any more. For years as they laid in beds barfing their guts out and slowly fading they were told it was "psychological".
All that dust on the way to baghdad these guys are breathing now? Still full of radioactive particles from gulf war one and the DU rounds used. All those guys gonna get sick too, just watch, and uncle sugah will write them off, tissue paper humans to them, because they can always rah rah rah another large batch of them, especially when they tank the economy for the upper levels in the multinationals, and for thousands of young guys in podunk USA that reality becomes those seductive "service for your government" commercials that are pushed as "sign up bonus, guaranteed checks, paid for schooling, plus neato FPS video games" ads on the TV..
Couple months ago, bush signed a law severely limiting medical aid to vets 65 and older, right when they might really be needing it. That didn't get even a fraction of one percent of one days current "war" coverage, even though it was fairly important "news", but you see news like that isn't sexy and bloody and exciting whizzbang stuff. just like dragging out all that old news about who really set up and profited from saddam in the first place, where his WMD came from., the real names, the real bosses, the real companies involved. Ya, some french, some german, some this some that, but the bio stuff he's got came from new jersey, and the chems came from various places around the US. the reason why we know he's got WMD? Saw it written as a joke but it's true-we kept the receipts.
Rewarding the high level guys who cause the problems in the first place by electing them to office and allowing them to stay as top dogs in corporations and not sending them to prison instead is the same thing as hiring burglars and rapists and murders to be cops, firemen and EMT guys-you don't do that on a small scale, but for some reason in the US right now a lot of people seem to think it's OK to do that on a very large scale, just "forget about all that embarassing stuff in the past".
They spend the million bucks a soldier, yep. The reasons are they can make more money with less resources that way, the soldier part is just a piece of the machine, they are expendable and upgradeable in the next war.
It don't never change man. It's the bang for the buck. Notice the bang part and the buck part got nothing to do with that part in the middle,it's not even mentioned in that old phrase,there's no word in the phrase for it, the "human" part, that part is still cheap, always been cheap.
..thanks wow, a truly superior post, thanks for finding it, thanks for posting it. It's one of those things that should be printed out by the thousands and handed out all over. The parallels are amazing.
I've been watching this creeping fascism for decades now, ever since as a teen I realised that a President had gotten whacked, and that the "whomever did it's" had gotten away with it. A president who was determined to not fight illegal weird wars, who was returning the nation to honest money and getting us away from the federal reserve scam money, a president who saw the oil sisters raping everyone and getting away with it and was determined to stop it, a president who with his brother was determined to break the back of real organized crime after over 30 years of the nations federal "police" boss ignoring it and claiming it didn't even exist, and a president who was truly interested in having all people inside the nation be equal citizens. All those reasons and more, these fascists used as the excuse to whack him, and using their power inside high governmental agencies and the military and in international business, they avoided any penalty for their crime, just got away with it.
Since then, all the actions of this government point to a "shadow government" of fascists who year by year have taken over, until now they make up almost all of the "government" at any managerial and decision making level, and the people under them too scared or too brainwashed to resist this...junta is the word. It really is a junta, that's the best word that fits and what happened, a slow speed stealth junta takeover.
Soldiers used as mercenaries, rubber stamp bribed yes men play acting at being "elected representatives", so called "judges" coming from one of the two controlling organized crime ubergangs, and now an executive branch that is going for broke, no more pretenses needed, no more silly "rights" nonsense, just conmplete and total "command and control".
The bad part is, how many brainwashed sieg heilers we have now, same as "back then" when the bulk of another nation got faked out.
Learn from history or repeat, looks like we are repeating this go-around. Too bad.
--you take double grumpy pills this morning? I didn't say I don't use email,nor recommend that people don't use email, not even close, I just dropped off some lists I was on, both from not really using them and also from the obvious massive spam increases I got. I am reasonably careful on how I give my email out now, as well. Just normal common sense useages, and as a result I still communicate with people I want to, and get the same business emails I always got, but only a few spams per day, very easy to deal with. considering I used to get like dozens and dozens, I think my crude technique worked fairly well.
MY over-all solution to spam? Make it illegal, even if it's a UN thing, much as I don't like the UN for most purposes, for things like that it might actually be useful. Once it's illegal all over the planet it might work better, and any tiny nations that keep it "legal" can just be blocked by people if it gets to that. Personally I would have no problem whatsoever if my ISP blocked entire nations or domains if that was possible and they had a request thing for that, that any user could simply notify them. Commercial unsolicited mail should really be opt-in, not phony opt-in, no forged headers or return-tos. I say treat forged headers and phony return-to addys as fraud, wirefraud, a federal felony, which is what they are. Then they need as much po-leece effort and general press efforts as they are putting into "cracking down on P2P sharers". Governments always having this "war" on this or that, tell ya what, compared to all the other "wars" I'd say a "war on spam" would garner 99.999% planetary support against the "email spam terrorists". It won't stop all of it, but it will stop a lot of it. No one wants to pay per email, neither the senders nor the recipients. No one really wants the wasted bandwith except for those few jerk hosting places that sell space and bandwith to spammers, who SHOULD be universally shunned and blocked by people.
That pay per view e-mail nonsense just ain't gonna fly, so the main premise of the article is seriously flawed. It would be like going back to pay by the minute internet, yeech. Well, maybe some corporations might for their "official" email, but I can't see many individuals all eager to sign up for it. That and more research and adoption of these various spam filters, make them just much easier to use.
Maybe slashdot should run a poll, who would pay to send or receive email? I doubt many people would, but it would be interesting to see the results.
..if that bike runs it's electrical on a magneto I can guarantee you don't want to hook it directly up. Spike city. Your best bet is to get a 12 VDC car adapter, charge the batts separate,out of the laptop somehow, or let them recharge from your bike batt when it's stopped. Don't try to run the laptop with the motor running in other words. You can also get a flexible solar PV panel you can strap on top of your gear, so it will get some juice while you are driving and stopped. Unisolar makes them, different sizes, you can google for them, easy to find. I have two of them, work great! We have those for our backpacks here, to recharge small batts, so I guess a laptop batt isn't much different, just need to make sure you watch them, the voltage is unregulated, brighter sun, higher voltage. To get around that you can use a "charge controller" thing. Very large batts like car batteries don't need it, but I am just not sure about smaller drycells, although I've done it, I haven't done it a *lot* like for the time lengths you are suggesting, I just know it's possible. Might be a good idea to install dual batteries for the bike itself, so one can be recharging the laptop at night while camping say, leaving one for running the bike in the morning, switch them around or re-attach in parallel before you take off for that day's ride in the morning. I don't know if that bike is kick start only or electric or both, but you need some juice to start it either way as far as I know.
Besides that, NEAT TRIP MAN! Sounds like lotsa fun!
--I probably don't have all the details correctly, but here's the gist of the funniest and most practical example of junk snail mail I ever heard of. It was back duing the energy crisis of the 70's. It was on one of those TV shows like "That's Incredible". This guy up in new hampshire gets a brainstorm, his heating bills are outta sight. He gets himself on-purpose on every junk mailing list he can find, I mean goes WAY out of his way. Pretty soon he's getting mailbags full a day coming to his house. He gets one of those paper-log roller machines, rolls up the junk mail and burns it in his woodstove!
What I did for electronic spam and getting mailed viruses is I stopped being on lists, stopped using my email addy except to a few friends. It's taken awhile but I'm down to only a few a day now, easy enough to delete. Also using that "junk" feature with mozilla, but no idea if I'm even using it correctly, but I really only get a few now.
..and auctions in general have been around since caveman days probably. Just another corporate abuse of the system.
I am starting to get the "impression" pun intended that any company composed of more than two people should be suspect of being crooked and just generally lame.
And any governments of more than ONE person.
I think it's time to just scrap patents all together and scrap copyrights, or at most make them for a very short period, like two years max. And I don't care about the temporary economic models, it will change to whatever it needs to change to, because humans want stuff more than they don't want stuff, so stuff will still get invented and built and sold.
I'd also like to see an end to corporations being "persons", where the profits are protected and accumulated and spent by HUMANS, but the liabilities always seem to go to this fictititous "person".
This stuff is just completely out to lunch outta control.
--there's two completely different ways to price oil, one is the common "by the barrel" using terms of "money". This is just as important as estimates of volume. You need not only the volume, it needs to be recoverable, and not recoverable in terms of just "money". The other way to measure recoverability is to use a more scientific approach than "money", and that is to refer to oil out of the ground as "the amount of BTUs of energy used to get back x-amount of BTUs of energy in the form of crude oil that is usefull and useable". With the latter method, the bulk of the world's reserves are simply not available for much longer, this is called loosely "peaking" as it refers to various fields, and barring some amazingly efficient energy source that would negate it's use on extracting oil because it would be redundant then, the mideast fields, roughly speaking, are the vast bulk of recoverable oil that will remain so beyond a few more years.
Here and there around the planet there remain some good fields, but for the long haul, it's the mideast, in particular iraq, saudi arabia and iran. Just recently in historical terms, north sea and mexican oil are peaked and in decline. There remains recoverable oil but it will be gone soon. These mideast fields are so far ahead in terms of being the big kahunas nothing else comes close. They will remain economically and physically "recoverable" long past any other fields, roughly speaking. A lot of those wells there are still self pumping, under pressure from underground, their recovery costs are very marginal, that's why their oil is cheap still. On the contrary, and for another example, the US still has lakes of oil underground, huge amounts, but the point is moot, most of them are capped off now, the energy in terms of required BTU's for extraction needed, usually by injecting water underground to force the oil up, is about at a net break even BTU to BTU level now, so that oil will stay down there, even if you have "money" to throw at the project. It's a waste of time almost completely, and beyond a waste of time if you value the water. They would be marginally useful should foreign oil not only crack 80$ a barrel, but if the cheaper oil was even available at all to extract the more expensive, and if the water was there to use, which in the US west, ain't available. Arctic oil is somewhat more valuable, eventually it will get used, societal demands will rise so high that any environmental concerns will be ignored. those concerns are rather over exaggerrated, and once the price at the pump hits double what it is now, opposition will evaporate to a fringe level beyond now, but even then, there just isn't that much there. A study I looked at is, it is enough to run the government itself at it's current size, so I can guess who's going to get it once it opens up.
This century is the century of the resource wars, particularly oil, water, and arable farm land that doesn't require artificial irrigation. We are in the peak and now starting to decline "good old days" when it comes to energy, and with that, industrial civilization. I doubt even 1% of the g;lobal population is even concerned at this point, feeling that oil is an infinte resource and all you need to have it is to throw money at the problem.
Early predictions of resource limits, in particular the 70's, were based on junk and inadequate science, well before the planet was mapped and explored better with radar, etc. It is almost 30 years later since those mid 70's predictions, we have advanced significantly in our ability to measure. Now that we can do it much more accurately, we have a much better handle on oil supplies. It really ain't pretty. It comes down to the mid east fields got the lion's share, by a huge margin. We still have tarsands, oilsands and oilshale, but the recovery costs are astronomical, and not hardly any better than a few per cent useful in terms of energy needed, and a net loss in terms of wasted and polluted water. It's somewhat useful in canada where they have water
Scalia requests ban on broadcast media at talk
03/19/03
Stephen Koff and James F. McCarty
Plain Dealer Reporters
C-SPAN, the cable television network popular with political junkies and insomniacs, is outraged that the City Club of Cleveland has banned broadcast media from covering today's speech by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Especially galling, says C-SPAN, is that Scalia is coming to the club to collect its Citadel of Free Speech Award.
More at giant link, funny as heck except he really IS a "supreme" court judge.
Maybe we should escape to orbit, nuke the whole site, only way to be sure.
...sounds like a good way to interview your prospective new server-master. Give them a blank server box and a play domain. He gets to set it up however. Have him coder 'er up to what he thinks is "good stuff", serve wise and security-wise. Have a nice strange web page fulla blinkenlights graphics and flash and whatevers, THEN see if you can get it posted as a story on slashdot. Server don't cut it,or gets owned real quick, he don't get the job. Forget all the other resume stuff.
--I have a few of the camping style ammonia vapor refrigerators, they run either electric or from a small propane flame. No compressor, perfectly quiet.
If you want a used one for a project, try some place that has wrecked/used RV's. You'll still have heat to exhaust from the room if you need that though, but your computer would stay pretty cool inside one.
--I am guessing syria next. Both israel and their allies in the US mideast conquering faction want the whole thing, so syria makes the most sense for the next target. Iran (let's assume it, safe bet) and north korea have nukes, they will be tougher. Once iraq and syria are controlled, re supply from the med is a piece of cake, no need to even involve turkey. Iran then is in a pincer, we can stage out of afghanistan and maybe pakistan as well as iraq. They will have to locate the nukes in iran first so they can be taken out first strike. North korea they will ignore as long as possible, because there's no easy to take them without irradiating parts of japan and china and russia. Even those EMP conventions they have won't do squat to 1950s era diesel tech. It would take over lapping neutron bombs, a lot of them, in a first strike,other EMP weapons, lots of conventionals, etc, because one single salvo from north koreas entrenched arty and missile batteries would cause significant damage to the south. Tough nut to crack all things considered.
Big wild card is, do any of these other target nations have secret treaties with each other? How long will they stand down and watch while one after another get picked off before they decide their only hope is a massive first strike back, using both conventional and as much assymetrical tactics as they can muster? and what's smuggled into the US already, that can be used anytime they get a go signal?
Some other nations of interest, yemen, libya, sudan. They might even stage a coup in saudi arabia if it looks like the princes are bugging out.
Another question is, in the medium term what will this do as regards russia and china? If they do nothing, they lose billions, plus much international face. China in particular can NOT afford to lose the cheap and easy access they are counting on to mideast oil for the next decade or two, my guess is they were planning on straight swaps eventually, bulk crude for manufactured goods, eliminate any dollar or euro middle man skim.
Here's a real wild one I read someplace. Suppose those stories of stolen russky nukes are real, and they managed to get at least a few of them upgraded and fixed so they are functional. Maybe they are buried on approaches to baghdad, to be used as whopper land mines.
It really just depends, saddam has had decades to think about things, if he decides a samson option is his only option, take as many with him as he can, there's no real way to predict anything. No nation has a complete lock on technology or cunning.
...should make a phone that can be as easily upgraded as any desktop box. That would be nice, take your old phone in, they swap out the necessary components, or you can do it, "upgrade" to the latest and best. Then at least only part of the phone becomes trash.
Conversely, an easy mod to make a useable FRS radio would be nice. Probably real hard and illegal, though.
Cell phone to > music file player? Tablet PC adapter? Garage door opener, universal remote control?
My beef with new phones is they are all too small now, it's ridiculous, can't hardly see the dang buttons very good now, even with bifocals. Bytes it, new cell phone designs need to pass a geezer test before being released, hahaha! Special "geezer edition", 50% bigger phone and buttons and screen, room for a bigger batt then, too!
Kinda like realising you really WOULD rather drive a cushy roomy crown vic then a fast rice burner.
I still got one of them bag phones, ya know, I still like it. Don't use it, but I like it, room inside the bag for a small laptop and some other junque with a little creative re arranging.
--yo man! I did tradeshows for 15 years, I be feeling your pain! SAME exact thing happened to me quickly after i first started, I was the one with the big v-8 van that sucked gas and could hold all the toolboxes and rolls of poly and carpet pad and the gang boxes and stuff. One day I notice I am doing the company's job, plus hauling all the other guys tools who drove tiny cars that got great mileage. Hmm, like what's wrong with this picture? Soooo, I started remodeling on the side when the shows were in, between setup and teardown, so I had the "excuse" to tell all of them and the company that they really needed to keep their stuff in their own vehicles because I needed the space in the van to haul lumber and drywall, etc. That worked out quite well, plus I upped my income!
1- get a "Bender" costume
2- change pulleys on my lawn tractor
3- ?
4- win race! profit!
*possible step 3, carry 12 gauge, pick off pesky little tinny, whiny blinkenlights competition you see on the way
--the "state of the art" now in mobile computing reminds me of that late 60's horsepower wars. There's the same basic mistake. Instead of making the engine more efficient, they basically increased the displacement to ridiculous levels. sure they started having fuel injection, but that's about it, it was just "bigger", less efficient, necessitating "more fuel" to accomplish the same tasks of basically transportation.
The better bet (maybe, this is my general question really) right now with fuel cells versus batteries is actually back to where the power is needed and what for and why exactly. Bigger and bigger chips (engine displacement) using more and power, more and more RAM needed, necesitated by apps that really are just huge, just humongous. How much of it is really necessary as opposed to "because we can" and it's easier to code to that inefficient set of standards?
Perhaps-just a thought, but perhaps, if there was a revolution on coding going back to small,mean fast and efficient, then maybe we wouldn't need bigger and bigger chips and more RAM to run everything? And the batteries that exist now would work adequately, last longer, not wear out as quick and we wouldn't have this "computer energy problem" as much? Is there a legit link between code bloat and energy useage that could be addressed? If programs were really written with "energy conservation" in mind, would this help? I dunno but I got a suspicion that coders knowing that the CPUs are bigger and faster and that there's a lot more RAM avaialable might make them skip little bits of code that would improve efficiency, and thereby borking energy conservation.
I don't know, not a coder, but I am more or less doing the same general computing stuff I did years ago, but it takes "more" of everything hardware-wise and including more electricity to do this stuff. The real only change I can see is occassionaly I look at some streaming video, but besides that it's the same, I browse, email, listen to the net radio, do IRC and etc, same stuff I did years ago, but now I need a bigger everything to do this. I know there's any number of immediate exceptions to the rule now someone can drop, 'I run super 4-d magnum quantum compiler, I need all I can get' and etc, that ain't my point. Does code bloat lead to hardware bloat that causes code bloat and back and forth that is responsible for batteries falling so far behind we have to screw around with fuel cells?
--I posted that last night anonymous so it would go in at 0, but now that I see it got bumped up it doesn't matter.
You have a valid technical point, so do I. I actually have a lot of points.
Current alleged copyright affronts are analogous in a way to ridiculously mandated 55 mph speed limits, that after a few years of MILLIONS of people simply ignoring them, all of those people lawbreakers technically, our society and laws changed back to something a bit saner. I don't see any differences between sharing and massive civil disobedience of patently absurd laws like that. It used to be "illegal" for "persons of color" to enter here and there. When I was a real young kid, there was an entire small city near me that had SIGNS at the city line, along with the moose and kiwanis signs, that sign said NO N***s ALLOWED. I SAW that sign with my own young just starting to read eyeballs. Well, eventually those and other "laws" based on total stupidity got changed. It is stupid to keep making stupid things the law! Just because it says it's a law don't make it right. I can cite many other examples. that part is easy.
The basic premise of the "outrage" of the RIAA and their movie partners in monopoly profits is now flawed. It is so seriously flawed that it is past the same ridiculous level those signs were at back then. It is worse flawed than the 55 mph limit, or the new takes you two tries to flush commodes. They are hanging onto their buggywhip archaic profits model based on an entire generation's ago level of technology..
File sharing has clearly shown exactly what "songs" and "movies" are worth, given technology advances. These bloated luddite monopolists are just frantically trying to hold on to profits that are no longer justified. It has nothing to do with what is right or wrong as pertains copyrights, that is clearly tangential, although that is their cry they are being "stolen" from. Nope, THEY are the ones who across the board, across the nation, who have refused to drop their prices from the easy availablity of advanced technology. they are SO FAR into price gouging and other criminal acts it ain't funny. THEY are the clear cut badguys here, their "law" they cite is about as relevant in todays world as you must hire a small boy to walk in front of your horseless carriage swinging a lamp, a law that used to be on the books some places.
If your hard drives were still going for hundreds of dollars for a 10 meg hardrive, when you knew they could be made much cheaper, and the hard drive manufacturers had colluded in an organization called the HMA hard drive manufacturers association to lock in prices the same as always, this would be called extreme abuse, it would be illegal, they would be sued not only into compliance with normal business reality but most likely out of existence and new corporations and executives would be taking their place. If an underground industry had arisen that assembled their own hard drives and were swapping them with each other for cheap, what it actually cost, then would these hard drive tech swappers be "illegal hard drive pirates"?
Not so the music and movie industry. They got an obvious joke fine for collusion in their price fixing schemes. They have been busted so many times for payola to keep the over the air music market locked at the top 40 drivel label I have lost count. Their media monoply companies like clear channel and a few whopper news orgs have hijacked the PUBLIC airwaves and own them now. They are serious serial criminals hiding behind a facade of respectability, and allowed to stay there by inertia, threats, bribery, intimidation. Screw them guys, they are crooks, gangsters, and dangerous for society and our economy..
These universities with legal departments and some deeper pockets should be ashamed they are not part of a massive class action to tear down that RIAA and get them sued out of business based on that simple principle. Songs and movies are NOT WORTH what they are being charged for. No