Millions and millions of households are quite willing to pay a monthly fee for cable or satellite television, even when free OTA signals are available. Why would another method of delivery be different? All it has to do is A) not suck technology-wise, and B) be fair in price.
Just use a book (or multiple books) code cipher for your index. You don't need to remember a thing beyond which books and what your key starting number is, the pattern. And if someone is in your house throwing all your books at cracking the remote server, you are already screwed and have much bigger problems, such as they probably already installed a keylogger on you. If you are that much of a target for someone to take that much interest....time for plan B or C then, involving plastic surgery, new ID and some nation where there is no extradition treaty 0_o
..on what the website that needs design and maintenance does in the first place? There's no such thing as a generic website, some are just for fun, and may be quite involved and complex, but aren't really designed to rake in cash, so no, it couldn't be self supporting for the web-person most likely, whereas others are designed from the start to be profitable, an e-commerce site for instance.
Just as a casual web surfer, I can see the difference between a well designed and easy to use site or not, and that has to come from someone or a team that has superior skills, and a lot of those folks DO make a living at it, so it is like any other job.
"Wow, all you can do really well is run this CNC machine, is that really enough to make a living? I mean, you can't build a house or run a vineyard, your skills are lacking from my own leetness, so you must be inferior to me"
"Can someone who only understands transmissions really expect to make a living at that, just that one skill, when cars are so much more than just the transmission"?
What's your skill, and how do you justify your check? Really, what are you saying?
The only reasonable answer is, if you somehow get a check from that skill, and the check cashes. That's the only justification or criteria needed to determine if your skill set is adequate or not.
Most of your modern reality that makes its way to your ideal urban pad with your high speed connection is heavily subsidized in order to happen. Your water is brought in with public maintained pipelines, and the cost of the water itself is laughably low, because it is government seized and provided to you. Your electricity comes from rural areas where the transmission lines and towers are just plunked onto private land where they receive no transit fees, it is just seized from them, and you get to enjoy much cheaper electricity from that government "subsidy" of outright theft. Your food is brought to you over publicly built and maintained roads, imagine what that would cost if all the roads were privately maintained toll roads, where a new fee had to be paid to each owner as it crossed property lines, etc. Your natural gas for heating and hot water, again, it comes from rural areas and is brought to you at an extremely low cost compared to if the pipelines had to negotiate transit frees from every property owner between you and the gas well head. And so on, there's a rather decent list there.
So when are you going to pay a reasonable fair market rate for all that stuff, avoiding the public subsidy you currently enjoy, or when are you moving to where all of that comes from? Why should the rural areas provide you with those necessities for cheaper than fair market rates or outright free when it comes to water?
You should take your other colleagues in the online version and just walk away and start your own news company then. Eliminate the upper management skim, more cash for you guys, less headaches. And stay private, don't get involved with outside investors, then you can stay focused.
All these big corporations are so fond of slashing "overhead" by outsourcing or firing good people, screw them, outsource yourself to working for yourself, eliminate that big fat overhead expense of layers of PHBs and short term profits fixated "investors".
Google in particular just offers links, with no ads. The frikking links have to say *something*. Some content they pay for themselves, the rest, just links. Google in essence is a big glorified phone directory, except for the tubes. Guess what newspaper idjits, the shoe is on the other foot, you have to pay big bucks to get good "coverage" in the yellow pages. Google should follow that precedent and *charge them for indexing them*, no pay, no coverage. And if it gets real rough for google, they have enough cash to start their own global news collecting network, enough cash and infrastructure, using both hired ande volunteer reporters, that they could blow AP and the others out of the water. I hope google doesn't cave in and fights them over this. And screw murdoch, he is a planetary leech anyway, a scumbag.
you know, that used to exist, with a twist. Back in the day (talking about me now, and a million other kids back then), local teenagers would scrape up the cash for a lawnmower, then mow several yards in the neighborhood as a way to make some cash (then rake leaves in the fall, shovel driveways in the winter, etc). The price was reasonable, the homeowners got time to themselves, and didn't need to own a mower.
Now, about the only people who do that are professional lawn care people, they charge a lot more to mow because as adults they need-to-make-a-real-living-rate, not just a few bucks a yard (I will date myself, two bucks to mow an average suburban yard back then, now it is probably 50 bucks or something like that***) so for a lot of people it is actually cheaper now to just mow their own lawns, especially as they can sit down while they do it. And those robot lawnmowers are hitting the turf now, soon to be as common as roombas.
*** Ha! A LONG time later, I am still mowing! HAHAHAH! Spring, summer,fall that is my primary job on this farm, doing all the extensive mowing, most of it anyway. I brush hog, boom mower mow, rotary mow for haying, and do finish mowing. A lot of all of the above. If you want an idea of what a good quality industrial finish mower costs, like you would use around your yard, the one I use the most lately was 15 grand....*used*. So ya, if a neighborhood would pop for something like that, a quality diesel powered mower that would last and knock the yards out, it would be doable and make sense to share, but for 200 bucks for a decent push mower for smaller yards or a grand or so for a regular gasser cheap riding mower, as opposed to popping 50 bucks or more for a lawn service..most folks just do it themselves. kids who mow yards for cheap are rare nowadays I think. Although, perhaps with the economy tanking, such regular necessary but drudge work might make a comeback at lower rates (like I think a whole lotta other jobs will make a comeback but at much lower rates-that is in the mysterious future though..).
Anyway, openmoko is a great idea...for netbooks now. Easier/cheaper hardware selection and so on. IMO of course. An open netbook thing that could be upgraded easily every few years without dumping the whole thing, just a mobo swap and so on, would be spiffy. As would normal sized laptops, some open standard thing for those as well. Desktops and servers are covered, you can build your own cheap, but not netbooks or laptops or PDAs/Smartphones. I think it makes more sense now to concentrate on netbooks, they apparently fill a real decent niche for people and are popular. OLPC had a "great idea" and just ran it into the ground with exceptions and not selling the things outright and so on, all it took was someone else to actually sell the things and the "great idea" took off, it hit the price/features/coolness factor all at the same time. Plus professional marketing as opposed to Negropontes wanking it around and not "getting it" on the general public enthusiasm he ignored. "yes, you can buy one at double price or one million of them if you are a government".
not just skype...and that would be the wireless telcos policies and various restrictions (hardware and software) and additional fees, etc., surrounding tethering and data transfer in general terms. Bits are bits are bits, they shouldn't be allowed to charge "extra" for moving bits based on what the bits are doing, or if they are traveling through an additional legal device the consumer may own and use. Since when are there different flavor bits, like voice bits, text bits, some web page bits, or whatever? They are getting away with charging different fees for different things like that, when it is all just the same "bits" moving around.
The source I used for my second reply to you had references, they seem legit. And when I first posted, I was going on what I said, my grade school memories going back over half a century now, and the references are there for that. And I have made an additional point in my second reply, hopefully it was clear enough and it was my intention, that it was a correction from my first reply, after more googling around, that there are many possible and overlapping and coincidental origins there, as you can see in the links. There apparently is no exact origin, it is contentious still, although there are some more prominent origins over the others. I'm perfectly willing to accept that expansion of the data personally, my ego isn't destroyed by only being partially correct. I am actually a little proud of remembering "okeh" and all that from way back then. I can ever remember the teachers name I had at the time, her last name only though.
As to technocrat he warned a couple of times-on the board-sorry you didn't see it but it was posted- that he was thinking about shutting the site down probably and eventually did so, based on his idea of when to do it. He *did* shut it down once for a couple of hours or so but quickly brought it back up not too far before his eventual permanent shutdown, maybe you missed that, too. It was costing him serious coinage out of pocket, and that and the deevolution of the threads into "not what he wanted" made the decision. I don't know for a fact, but maybe he did it without more notice to save money, he just didn't want to tote the bandwith bill anymore, and giving an additional weeks official notice-whatever- would have just run that up more when he didn't want to pay for it, and I do know he was trying to concentrate more on his other work. And by then I had also wanted out as main editor and decided to stop posting due to what I considered to be massive and wasteful trolling and some nasty personal commentary that was going down, that we couldn't seem to stop by merely asking, and I was also concerned that I might not be able to remain online either, which I still am, my income has dropped pretty bad over the past year.. Mostly though it just wasn't worth it to me anymore, although I certainly enjoyed it for a real long time, it finally just got to be not worth it, so I quit, and shortly thereafter Bruce took the site down. If it had been all me, ya, I would have done it slower, even just a few more days and real clear notice to finish your threads out and save what you wanted,etc, so I will agree with you there, but I wasn't paying the costs either(except for a lot of my time, a *lot*), nor was I the only editor with commit privileges.
As to survivalism/preparedness issues, you are more than welcome to remain a non survivalist based on your personal right to choose lifestyle and beliefs. I personally don't trust the political power structure or business or political leaders to have my best interests at heart, they have their own best interests at heart and that includes ripping off and lying to the other 99% of the general population. That's just my *opinion* though. Yours may differ wildly.
I like backups for my life's necessities, and it has sure come in handy over the years from long term big blizzards wiping out the infrastructure locally to me to unexpected job loss from a bad injury to whatever, a variety of what are to me quite legit reasons. I have redundant resources for water and food and electrical power, etc, outside of what is classed as modern "normal", just as a good hedge on events on a larger scale that could well be outside my control. This just seems more prudent than not to me, and lately, a lot more people are seeing that as a good idea. Myself and others on technocrat liked discussing that sometimes because it is handy and followed some of the posting guidelines, how to use your technological skills and tools to make life better. And seeing as how I put up most of the articles, I know for a fact we covered archaeology to zoology and every
...why desktops didn't have a built in battery deal that lived in an expansion bay. If you could even keep RAM alive for extended periods even with the machine shut down that would be spiffy as an option, let alone as a little general UPS.
Apparently it is in dispute, but is certainly not bullshit. It is one of many possible origins. Okeh as the Indian word is what I was taught way back in grade school, and is number #2 in this following list. Here is the answers.com page that has all the possibly etymological origins, "OK" has quite the history and could come from any number of original words, or various abbreviations. So take yer pick there, it is pretty interesting there are so many of them.
As to Technocrat, Bruce had posted previously to the takedown that he might have to do that, as it wasn't fitting his idea of what he wanted plus the cost of the site. It wasn't totally unexpected at all.
OK comes from "okay" which comes from a native American language, Chocktaw, "okeh", meaning "it is so" or "thank you" depending on context and inflection.
..is that this is Honda, a name brand major manufacturer who are in a position to mass produce things that actually work and are affordable. Sure, random joe nerd youtoober or pick a university project of choice might come up with something spiffy, but when Honda does it, there's at least some hope you might get one, one day.
...aren't you separating your working programs from your fooling around programs on different workspaces? That's why they are there, to help organize your flow better. One click then, poof, back and forth, Gimp to browser or whatever.
I know that is only half your complaint (never used gimp so no idea there on all the buttons), but it is a solution to the first one you mentioned. No need to cram everything you are doing all on one workspace/desktop.
"they won't do it unless forced"..well, that can work, but it is the "stick" method, you get bludgeoned by government to do something, because they sayso and threaten you with dire consequences if you don't jump.
There *is* another method to bring about constructive change that the government can do, that is called the "carrot" method. You give tax credits for those technologies and practices that seem a lot better.
Now, what isn't going to work, but is what they want to do because it also gives them a lot more power over other humans, which is what they also really like to have, is force-instituting another huge global "market" skimming industry. Ya know, middleman traders who do nothing but buy and sell those "war on carbon" credits.
Looking at the biz headlines, seems we already have enough of them sort of money vampire dudes mucking up the economy as it is. And now they are going to want to tax you on top of that. The taxes will primarily go to running the new government (federal, UN global, whatever they scheme up) department of accepting the carbon tax monies department, to fund busywork "broken window economic theory" jobs.
I'm for conservation, clean air, clean water, diversified and decentralized alternative energy and so forth, and have been since I was a young man and got into solar power and so forth. The easiest way for people and corporations to afford this is to let them take a chunk of their money that now goes to the government busywork jobs industry and buy into newer cleaner and more efficient tech. Oh noes, gov gets less money! But the tech gets adopted then, and much faster than the double whammy of forced purchasing of carbon credits, then getting taxed on top of that. You make it a much better deal for people and companies to "go green", they will do it gladly and more or less voluntarily, whereas if you double whammy them on costs plus threaten fines and whatnot, they are going to look at the whole situation as another bogus ripoff and power grab, which the current schemes are, in spades.
Here's an example: You want to know why SUVs took off so much, even for people who apparently didn't need a big station wagon with 4wd? Joe government made it very lucrative for them with their tax deductions, they offered a bunch of carrots, it was cheaper for them to get those sorts of vehicles than anything else.
Now, if they want much better mileage cars and cheaper to afford, all they would need to do is offer a REAL tax credit incentive, and you'd see those car companies burning the midnight oil to get 20 grand cars that got 60 mpg and be plugins plus and were built good out there. Same with solar power, same with what I think makes the most sense today, retrofitting buildings to "superinsulated" levels, eliminating a lot of the demand for electricity and natgas, meaning less is burnt, meaning less of that e-vile greenhouse gas stuff. If it also helps the climate on a macro scale, it probably would, that's just frosting, more good news.
Carrot or stick, and who likes to be bludgeoned over being fed again? Ya, they are both examples of government social engineering, but which seems more attractive and more likely to succeed and cost the actual real consumer less, when you look at what they get? Tax money volume X is already a blackhole the way it is now, if you could have the same amount, and wind up with a cool ride in the driveway and solar panels on the roof, which would you rather have, that stuff, or knowing you were paying for more bureaucratic jobs? Either way, that loot is coming out of your wallet, so that's a wash. I will ponder on this.... me, I'd prefer the carrot and having the cool new high tech ride in the driveway and the solar panels on the roof.
Nope, haven't forgotten that, am aware of it, and also at the elevators and so on as well (although a lot of elevators had a very hard time keeping up with demand this year from a propane shortage for winter wheat). It is still MUCH lower than back when we maintained national food stockpiles. We had enough to provide some minimal basic foods for everyone for more than one complete growing season (and we fed poor folks domestically and used it for food aid overseas a lot back then), now we are at at best hoping this years growing season is OK all the time. *Hope* is the keyword there, because there is no backup. We will this year if harvests go good have a little more grains than last year, because of the economic slump. As to produce, California farmers are mostly SOL this year because of the drought, they just got their taps shutoff recently, that will cause some shortages as they are the largest producers. And, there's very little carry over of foodstuffs that can be stored sans refrigeration, some, but nothing like there used to be, the stuff gets sold or used quickly. If you are interested here is a (google cache) article from last year talking about the last of the official grain stockpiles being sold off.
And the other part of the equation is we were talking originally about some big electronic disaster, space weather wildcards. This would really impact getting stuff-food- delivered around and more food actually grown again the next season. The whole interconnected system needs to be up and working..for the whole system to be up and working. We can survive a small percentage downtime as long as it is spread out all over, this is what we do today, that's normal, but a general sudden drop in modern tech would devastate not only ag production but about everything else.
The whittling out toothpicks from tree branches industry would do OK though;).
I'll concede on that one readily, and like when they call out the guard for other flood situations or fires. Then yes, constructive and useful things happen. The permanent works the engineers do would be classed as productive wealth creation then. Too bad the will and funding weren't there for the engineers to make those NOLA levees just a scosh better in advance though. We'll have to place the blame there at a higher governmental level. I did have a theory though, a ten cent levee and flood control surtax on drinks and restaurant meals in new orleans for some years previous-a dedicated fund- might have provided more than enough cash to do a better job. We have some precedent, road repairs from fuel taxes. NOLA is known to be a party town, a very modest surcharge, low enough to not matter to people there or tourists, but high enough to start to accumulate serious coin, might have helped.
The overall lesson though is still valid, you just can't completely rely on the Federal government all the time.
Based on past and current historical parallels. When an entire nation collapses, I mean borked to smithereens, the military usually de evolves into just armed looter gangs, that's the only logistics they cover. It is only in smaller crises that they stay practical and actually can contribute some help, anything larger than a local regional event..all we have is other examples to look at. So we look, and that is what is there to see, it gets to warlords and looting and so on, bad stuff. The main article is referring to such an event as the bulk of our modern technology would be toast, so all bets are off then, and our only other examples are all bad news. If you think it would be different here for some magical reason...hmm..good luck with that.
Even back in our historical "great depression" days, the scale of disaster wasn't the same, not even close, we are talking in this situation the basic modern infrastructure gone over the entire nation. And even looking at our most recent large regional disaster, hurricane katrina, the government itself made it worse by stopping a rather huge flotilla of state residents going in with personal boats to try and save people. The government actually caused massively higher loss of life that needed to have occurred by throwing their normal response of military "must maintain all levels of command and control!!" option at the problem instead of just allowing the people to be more proactive in their own defense and being more flexible. They chose to not be flexible, and this was done on purpose, because they have different priorities. This is just data, we even covered it here on slashdot when that was going on.
And if you personally think it is a bad idea to not be personally prepared.. to have no backups for your day to day life's necessities...again..good luck with that! Different strokes man! Have fun, hope it works out for you!
The way I look at it is binary, you are either a survivalist (or "prepper"), or a non-survivalist. Whoops! That "non" part can get pretty ugly, and quick.
..along with the Mennonites and Amish and lot of modern back to the landers, who at least partially offset their modern lifestyle and normal employment by having large gardens or smaller niche farms, their own onsite backup or primary power, etc,. This is along with the still existent full time commercial farms, which could be repurposed to more generalized production (including a lot more decentralized energy production, both electricity and liquid biofuels) given enough time and incentive. The larger the farm though the harder that is to do because of all the specialization that is required today.
Personally, as a sort of national priority this year (and I notice the whitehouse first lady has lead by example just lately, I'd take that as a big fat *clue* to the rest of the nation) I'd like to see all of suburbia in the US take half or even just one third of their lawns and put them to "crisis gardens" and I mean now, starting this spring now, no "thinking about it", just do it. Just for backup purposes for the nation as a whole. Cheap to do, no exotic tech needs to be developed, and could pay off handsomely in averting some bad scenarios down the road... because you never know about those black swan events.
A hundred bucks locally to me would get you a 50 lb sack of rice, similar some sort of quantity beans. Another hundred would buy a lot of canned food on sale. Water is critical though, relying on that tap for the only source is real iffy. Here we have our own well, plus stored water in a few water barrels, plus a local stream and quite large pond. To go with this good quality water filters, in our case, berkeys. And yes, rotate the stock. The saying we use is "store what you eat, eat what you store".
I've been into this sort of thing ever since the cuban missile crisis and then a few years later a whopper big snowstorm that shut everything down for more than two weeks where I was. And when I mean shutdown, even the largest snowplows got bogged down, 4 feet of snow in 24 hours, then drifting for a few days. And very few snowmobiles back then either. It makes an impression on you what happens once normal supply is borked.
"Wacky survivalists" is an historically very recent notion. For the bulk of mankind's history, having a well stocked larder-stores adequate to get you through to the next harvest season- and the means to supply yourself with adequate shelter and heat and water, etc based on your own and mostly local sources was quite the ordinary norm. It has only been the last two or three generations where that started to fall out of favor.
We have had numerous examples of much smaller and more localized infrastructure destruction, and the best observations have shown that areas start to suffer fast after a three day outage of general modern technology. Just in time delivery systems and centralized power and water and natgas delivery and so on are the main cause of that.without massive outside the region resupply, that's it, civilization falls apart rapidly. Three days isn't very long. If the event/disaster is much longer than three days, and no outside help is coming in (because the next region over is just as bad off, as the region next to that, etc), you'd see some pretty dire circumstances arise.
Here is one example for the US, we no longer maintain a national emergency bulk food stockpile. It used to be millions of bushels of this or that, dried milk and so on. We maintained that for decades, then they stopped and went to what is called set aside. This is due to farming changes and "the market". We- the government "we"- used to pay minimal price controls and stockpile various surplus foods, in order to maintain our domestic agricultural base through wild market swings and seasonal weather variations, but they more or less stopped that some time ago and now we have no stockpiled food, they sold the last of it off earlier last year finally.
In other words, on a very large scale, we have no backup civilization or big national pantry. It doesn't exist, just not there. The government has zero provisions to help the people in general at any national scale sized event. They have provisions to use military force to "stay in charge", they call it "maintaining continuity of government", that's it. We have a national petroleum reserve as the only exception, and it is in the form of just crude, it would still need refining and delivery-that's iffy enough in such a scenario to even be possible- (and even then most would go to the government and not the people).
On the other hand, there is nothing stopping people from instituting their own stores and provisions and having a personal backup protection scheme, the "wacky survivalists" type method that all our ancestors considered normal and a very good idea. In the community we still call it survivalism, but it has a less scary name now too, "practical preparedness". Here is a plain vanilla example, for roughly the same cash people put into a big screen plasma TV they can have a decent amount of long term dried stored food. For what a cheap laptop or other "must have" electronic gadget of the month costs, you can have a pretty decent gravity powered water filter. The folks in suburbia and in the hinterland get laughed at a lot as having unsustainable lifestyles, but they are living in the only places where you can have a rationally large enough local garden and access to alternative water supplies, etc, along with firewood. Choices one can choose now in other words. All the big cities would collapse rapidly in such a national sized electronic disaster as in TFA, it would become beyond ugly, right up to and including cannibalism.
Basically, the government sucks when it comes to national and practical "civil defense". They only have a military solution. The military doesn't produce anything, it just takes it/spends it/wears it out. Look at the recent articles about the relatively small numbers of homeless in California, possibly our richest state. They can't even deal with such a teeny tiny homeless situation at very low numbers adequately. Extrapolate those numbers from thousands to tens of millions or more and it becomes easy to see the problems...
So it is up to the individual now to decide to incorporate a practical preparedness plan and alter lifestyle a little bit, the article scenario is only one of many potential wildcards that could occur.
..an automatic way - an option- for webpages (with some "standards" sort of code) to automatically redirect-based on the viewers settings- to the opposite of 3D live motion spinning and whatnot full flash full bloat page, to the low res/print this page version. It is really bogus when all you want is the text, but you have to load the full bloat version *just* to find the "print this article" link. That sort of defeats the purpose. Images off and noscript and ABP helps, but that still isn't enough.
Maybe this is possible now, but I don't know how to do it. Running a text based browser does not much good if the web page you land on (most of them now it seems) is very text based browser unfriendly.
Something like a desktop version of.mobi, along those lines, and if it became common coding practice.
..a motorcycle or scooter replacement, those folks are already motorized. You have whole families there trying to ride plus carry their stuff on some (I mean one, single) small scooter, so which is safer again? And the scooters by and large actually produce more tailpipe emissions, being 2 strokes in a lot of cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Millions and millions of households are quite willing to pay a monthly fee for cable or satellite television, even when free OTA signals are available. Why would another method of delivery be different? All it has to do is A) not suck technology-wise, and B) be fair in price.
Just use a book (or multiple books) code cipher for your index. You don't need to remember a thing beyond which books and what your key starting number is, the pattern. And if someone is in your house throwing all your books at cracking the remote server, you are already screwed and have much bigger problems, such as they probably already installed a keylogger on you. If you are that much of a target for someone to take that much interest....time for plan B or C then, involving plastic surgery, new ID and some nation where there is no extradition treaty 0_o
..on what the website that needs design and maintenance does in the first place? There's no such thing as a generic website, some are just for fun, and may be quite involved and complex, but aren't really designed to rake in cash, so no, it couldn't be self supporting for the web-person most likely, whereas others are designed from the start to be profitable, an e-commerce site for instance.
Just as a casual web surfer, I can see the difference between a well designed and easy to use site or not, and that has to come from someone or a team that has superior skills, and a lot of those folks DO make a living at it, so it is like any other job.
"Wow, all you can do really well is run this CNC machine, is that really enough to make a living? I mean, you can't build a house or run a vineyard, your skills are lacking from my own leetness, so you must be inferior to me"
"Can someone who only understands transmissions really expect to make a living at that, just that one
skill, when cars are so much more than just the transmission"?
What's your skill, and how do you justify your check? Really, what are you saying?
The only reasonable answer is, if you somehow get a check from that skill, and the check cashes. That's the only justification or criteria needed to determine if your skill set is adequate or not.
Most of your modern reality that makes its way to your ideal urban pad with your high speed connection is heavily subsidized in order to happen. Your water is brought in with public maintained pipelines, and the cost of the water itself is laughably low, because it is government seized and provided to you. Your electricity comes from rural areas where the transmission lines and towers are just plunked onto private land where they receive no transit fees, it is just seized from them, and you get to enjoy much cheaper electricity from that government "subsidy" of outright theft. Your food is brought to you over publicly built and maintained roads, imagine what that would cost if all the roads were privately maintained toll roads, where a new fee had to be paid to each owner as it crossed property lines, etc. Your natural gas for heating and hot water, again, it comes from rural areas and is brought to you at an extremely low cost compared to if the pipelines had to negotiate transit frees from every property owner between you and the gas well head. And so on, there's a rather decent list there.
So when are you going to pay a reasonable fair market rate for all that stuff, avoiding the public subsidy you currently enjoy, or when are you moving to where all of that comes from? Why should the rural areas provide you with those necessities for cheaper than fair market rates or outright free when it comes to water?
You should take your other colleagues in the online version and just walk away and start your own news company then. Eliminate the upper management skim, more cash for you guys, less headaches. And stay private, don't get involved with outside investors, then you can stay focused.
All these big corporations are so fond of slashing "overhead" by outsourcing or firing good people, screw them, outsource yourself to working for yourself, eliminate that big fat overhead expense of layers of PHBs and short term profits fixated "investors".
Google in particular just offers links, with no ads. The frikking links have to say *something*. Some content they pay for themselves, the rest, just links. Google in essence is a big glorified phone directory, except for the tubes. Guess what newspaper idjits, the shoe is on the other foot, you have to pay big bucks to get good "coverage" in the yellow pages. Google should follow that precedent and *charge them for indexing them*, no pay, no coverage. And if it gets real rough for google, they have enough cash to start their own global news collecting network, enough cash and infrastructure, using both hired ande volunteer reporters, that they could blow AP and the others out of the water. I hope google doesn't cave in and fights them over this. And screw murdoch, he is a planetary leech anyway, a scumbag.
you know, that used to exist, with a twist. Back in the day (talking about me now, and a million other kids back then), local teenagers would scrape up the cash for a lawnmower, then mow several yards in the neighborhood as a way to make some cash (then rake leaves in the fall, shovel driveways in the winter, etc). The price was reasonable, the homeowners got time to themselves, and didn't need to own a mower.
Now, about the only people who do that are professional lawn care people, they charge a lot more to mow because as adults they need-to-make-a-real-living-rate, not just a few bucks a yard (I will date myself, two bucks to mow an average suburban yard back then, now it is probably 50 bucks or something like that***) so for a lot of people it is actually cheaper now to just mow their own lawns, especially as they can sit down while they do it. And those robot lawnmowers are hitting the turf now, soon to be as common as roombas.
*** Ha! A LONG time later, I am still mowing! HAHAHAH! Spring, summer,fall that is my primary job on this farm, doing all the extensive mowing, most of it anyway. I brush hog, boom mower mow, rotary mow for haying, and do finish mowing. A lot of all of the above. If you want an idea of what a good quality industrial finish mower costs, like you would use around your yard, the one I use the most lately was 15 grand....*used*. So ya, if a neighborhood would pop for something like that, a quality diesel powered mower that would last and knock the yards out, it would be doable and make sense to share, but for 200 bucks for a decent push mower for smaller yards or a grand or so for a regular gasser cheap riding mower, as opposed to popping 50 bucks or more for a lawn service..most folks just do it themselves. kids who mow yards for cheap are rare nowadays I think. Although, perhaps with the economy tanking, such regular necessary but drudge work might make a comeback at lower rates (like I think a whole lotta other jobs will make a comeback but at much lower rates-that is in the mysterious future though..).
Anyway, openmoko is a great idea...for netbooks now. Easier/cheaper hardware selection and so on. IMO of course. An open netbook thing that could be upgraded easily every few years without dumping the whole thing, just a mobo swap and so on, would be spiffy. As would normal sized laptops, some open standard thing for those as well. Desktops and servers are covered, you can build your own cheap, but not netbooks or laptops or PDAs/Smartphones. I think it makes more sense now to concentrate on netbooks, they apparently fill a real decent niche for people and are popular. OLPC had a "great idea" and just ran it into the ground with exceptions and not selling the things outright and so on, all it took was someone else to actually sell the things and the "great idea" took off, it hit the price/features/coolness factor all at the same time. Plus professional marketing as opposed to Negropontes wanking it around and not "getting it" on the general public enthusiasm he ignored. "yes, you can buy one at double price or one million of them if you are a government".
epic dumbness there
not just skype...and that would be the wireless telcos policies and various restrictions (hardware and software) and additional fees, etc., surrounding tethering and data transfer in general terms. Bits are bits are bits, they shouldn't be allowed to charge "extra" for moving bits based on what the bits are doing, or if they are traveling through an additional legal device the consumer may own and use. Since when are there different flavor bits, like voice bits, text bits, some web page bits, or whatever? They are getting away with charging different fees for different things like that, when it is all just the same "bits" moving around.
The source I used for my second reply to you had references, they seem legit. And when I first posted, I was going on what I said, my grade school memories going back over half a century now, and the references are there for that. And I have made an additional point in my second reply, hopefully it was clear enough and it was my intention, that it was a correction from my first reply, after more googling around, that there are many possible and overlapping and coincidental origins there, as you can see in the links. There apparently is no exact origin, it is contentious still, although there are some more prominent origins over the others. I'm perfectly willing to accept that expansion of the data personally, my ego isn't destroyed by only being partially correct. I am actually a little proud of remembering "okeh" and all that from way back then. I can ever remember the teachers name I had at the time, her last name only though.
As to technocrat he warned a couple of times-on the board-sorry you didn't see it but it was posted- that he was thinking about shutting the site down probably and eventually did so, based on his idea of when to do it. He *did* shut it down once for a couple of hours or so but quickly brought it back up not too far before his eventual permanent shutdown, maybe you missed that, too. It was costing him serious coinage out of pocket, and that and the deevolution of the threads into "not what he wanted" made the decision. I don't know for a fact, but maybe he did it without more notice to save money, he just didn't want to tote the bandwith bill anymore, and giving an additional weeks official notice-whatever- would have just run that up more when he didn't want to pay for it, and I do know he was trying to concentrate more on his other work. And by then I had also wanted out as main editor and decided to stop posting due to what I considered to be massive and wasteful trolling and some nasty personal commentary that was going down, that we couldn't seem to stop by merely asking, and I was also concerned that I might not be able to remain online either, which I still am, my income has dropped pretty bad over the past year.. Mostly though it just wasn't worth it to me anymore, although I certainly enjoyed it for a real long time, it finally just got to be not worth it, so I quit, and shortly thereafter Bruce took the site down. If it had been all me, ya, I would have done it slower, even just a few more days and real clear notice to finish your threads out and save what you wanted,etc, so I will agree with you there, but I wasn't paying the costs either(except for a lot of my time, a *lot*), nor was I the only editor with commit privileges.
As to survivalism/preparedness issues, you are more than welcome to remain a non survivalist based on your personal right to choose lifestyle and beliefs. I personally don't trust the political power structure or business or political leaders to have my best interests at heart, they have their own best interests at heart and that includes ripping off and lying to the other 99% of the general population. That's just my *opinion* though. Yours may differ wildly.
I like backups for my life's necessities, and it has sure come in handy over the years from long term big blizzards wiping out the infrastructure locally to me to unexpected job loss from a bad injury to whatever, a variety of what are to me quite legit reasons. I have redundant resources for water and food and electrical power, etc, outside of what is classed as modern "normal", just as a good hedge on events on a larger scale that could well be outside my control. This just seems more prudent than not to me, and lately, a lot more people are seeing that as a good idea. Myself and others on technocrat liked discussing that sometimes because it is handy and followed some of the posting guidelines, how to use your technological skills and tools to make life better. And seeing as how I put up most of the articles, I know for a fact we covered archaeology to zoology and every
...why desktops didn't have a built in battery deal that lived in an expansion bay. If you could even keep RAM alive for extended periods even with the machine shut down that would be spiffy as an option, let alone as a little general UPS.
Apparently it is in dispute, but is certainly not bullshit. It is one of many possible origins. Okeh as the Indian word is what I was taught way back in grade school, and is number #2 in this following list. Here is the answers.com page that has all the possibly etymological origins, "OK" has quite the history and could come from any number of original words, or various abbreviations. So take yer pick there, it is pretty interesting there are so many of them.
As to Technocrat, Bruce had posted previously to the takedown that he might have to do that, as it wasn't fitting his idea of what he wanted plus the cost of the site. It wasn't totally unexpected at all.
OK comes from "okay" which comes from a native American language, Chocktaw, "okeh", meaning "it is so" or "thank you" depending on context and inflection.
..is that this is Honda, a name brand major manufacturer who are in a position to mass produce things that actually work and are affordable. Sure, random joe nerd youtoober or pick a university project of choice might come up with something spiffy, but when Honda does it, there's at least some hope you might get one, one day.
...aren't you separating your working programs from your fooling around programs on different workspaces? That's why they are there, to help organize your flow better. One click then, poof, back and forth, Gimp to browser or whatever.
I know that is only half your complaint (never used gimp so no idea there on all the buttons), but it is a solution to the first one you mentioned. No need to cram everything you are doing all on one workspace/desktop.
Two private "bloody rich" business guys go up at the same time, "discuss business", then get to deduct expenses off their taxes.
"they won't do it unless forced"..well, that can work, but it is the "stick" method, you get bludgeoned by government to do something, because they sayso and threaten you with dire consequences if you don't jump.
There *is* another method to bring about constructive change that the government can do, that is called the "carrot" method. You give tax credits for those technologies and practices that seem a lot better.
Now, what isn't going to work, but is what they want to do because it also gives them a lot more power over other humans, which is what they also really like to have, is force-instituting another huge global "market" skimming industry. Ya know, middleman traders who do nothing but buy and sell those "war on carbon" credits.
Looking at the biz headlines, seems we already have enough of them sort of money vampire dudes mucking up the economy as it is. And now they are going to want to tax you on top of that. The taxes will primarily go to running the new government (federal, UN global, whatever they scheme up) department of accepting the carbon tax monies department, to fund busywork "broken window economic theory" jobs.
I'm for conservation, clean air, clean water, diversified and decentralized alternative energy and so forth, and have been since I was a young man and got into solar power and so forth. The easiest way for people and corporations to afford this is to let them take a chunk of their money that now goes to the government busywork jobs industry and buy into newer cleaner and more efficient tech. Oh noes, gov gets less money! But the tech gets adopted then, and much faster than the double whammy of forced purchasing of carbon credits, then getting taxed on top of that. You make it a much better deal for people and companies to "go green", they will do it gladly and more or less voluntarily, whereas if you double whammy them on costs plus threaten fines and whatnot, they are going to look at the whole situation as another bogus ripoff and power grab, which the current schemes are, in spades.
Here's an example: You want to know why SUVs took off so much, even for people who apparently didn't need a big station wagon with 4wd? Joe government made it very lucrative for them with their tax deductions, they offered a bunch of carrots, it was cheaper for them to get those sorts of vehicles than anything else.
Now, if they want much better mileage cars and cheaper to afford, all they would need to do is offer a REAL tax credit incentive, and you'd see those car companies burning the midnight oil to get 20 grand cars that got 60 mpg and be plugins plus and were built good out there. Same with solar power, same with what I think makes the most sense today, retrofitting buildings to "superinsulated" levels, eliminating a lot of the demand for electricity and natgas, meaning less is burnt, meaning less of that e-vile greenhouse gas stuff. If it also helps the climate on a macro scale, it probably would, that's just frosting, more good news.
Carrot or stick, and who likes to be bludgeoned over being fed again? Ya, they are both examples of government social engineering, but which seems more attractive and more likely to succeed and cost the actual real consumer less, when you look at what they get? Tax money volume X is already a blackhole the way it is now, if you could have the same amount, and wind up with a cool ride in the driveway and solar panels on the roof, which would you rather have, that stuff, or knowing you were paying for more bureaucratic jobs? Either way, that loot is coming out of your wallet, so that's a wash. I will ponder on this.... me, I'd prefer the carrot and having the cool new high tech ride in the driveway and the solar panels on the roof.
Nope, haven't forgotten that, am aware of it, and also at the elevators and so on as well (although a lot of elevators had a very hard time keeping up with demand this year from a propane shortage for winter wheat). It is still MUCH lower than back when we maintained national food stockpiles. We had enough to provide some minimal basic foods for everyone for more than one complete growing season (and we fed poor folks domestically and used it for food aid overseas a lot back then), now we are at at best hoping this years growing season is OK all the time. *Hope* is the keyword there, because there is no backup. We will this year if harvests go good have a little more grains than last year, because of the economic slump. As to produce, California farmers are mostly SOL this year because of the drought, they just got their taps shutoff recently, that will cause some shortages as they are the largest producers. And, there's very little carry over of foodstuffs that can be stored sans refrigeration, some, but nothing like there used to be, the stuff gets sold or used quickly. If you are interested here is a (google cache) article from last year talking about the last of the official grain stockpiles being sold off.
And the other part of the equation is we were talking originally about some big electronic disaster, space weather wildcards. This would really impact getting stuff-food- delivered around and more food actually grown again the next season. The whole interconnected system needs to be up and working..for the whole system to be up and working. We can survive a small percentage downtime as long as it is spread out all over, this is what we do today, that's normal, but a general sudden drop in modern tech would devastate not only ag production but about everything else.
The whittling out toothpicks from tree branches industry would do OK though ;).
I'll concede on that one readily, and like when they call out the guard for other flood situations or fires. Then yes, constructive and useful things happen. The permanent works the engineers do would be classed as productive wealth creation then. Too bad the will and funding weren't there for the engineers to make those NOLA levees just a scosh better in advance though. We'll have to place the blame there at a higher governmental level. I did have a theory though, a ten cent levee and flood control surtax on drinks and restaurant meals in new orleans for some years previous-a dedicated fund- might have provided more than enough cash to do a better job. We have some precedent, road repairs from fuel taxes. NOLA is known to be a party town, a very modest surcharge, low enough to not matter to people there or tourists, but high enough to start to accumulate serious coin, might have helped.
The overall lesson though is still valid, you just can't completely rely on the Federal government all the time.
Based on past and current historical parallels. When an entire nation collapses, I mean borked to smithereens, the military usually de evolves into just armed looter gangs, that's the only logistics they cover. It is only in smaller crises that they stay practical and actually can contribute some help, anything larger than a local regional event..all we have is other examples to look at. So we look, and that is what is there to see, it gets to warlords and looting and so on, bad stuff. The main article is referring to such an event as the bulk of our modern technology would be toast, so all bets are off then, and our only other examples are all bad news. If you think it would be different here for some magical reason...hmm..good luck with that.
Even back in our historical "great depression" days, the scale of disaster wasn't the same, not even close, we are talking in this situation the basic modern infrastructure gone over the entire nation. And even looking at our most recent large regional disaster, hurricane katrina, the government itself made it worse by stopping a rather huge flotilla of state residents going in with personal boats to try and save people. The government actually caused massively higher loss of life that needed to have occurred by throwing their normal response of military "must maintain all levels of command and control!!" option at the problem instead of just allowing the people to be more proactive in their own defense and being more flexible. They chose to not be flexible, and this was done on purpose, because they have different priorities. This is just data, we even covered it here on slashdot when that was going on.
And if you personally think it is a bad idea to not be personally prepared.. to have no backups for your day to day life's necessities...again..good luck with that! Different strokes man! Have fun, hope it works out for you!
The way I look at it is binary, you are either a survivalist (or "prepper"), or a non-survivalist. Whoops! That "non" part can get pretty ugly, and quick.
..along with the Mennonites and Amish and lot of modern back to the landers, who at least partially offset their modern lifestyle and normal employment by having large gardens or smaller niche farms, their own onsite backup or primary power, etc,. This is along with the still existent full time commercial farms, which could be repurposed to more generalized production (including a lot more decentralized energy production, both electricity and liquid biofuels) given enough time and incentive. The larger the farm though the harder that is to do because of all the specialization that is required today.
Personally, as a sort of national priority this year (and I notice the whitehouse first lady has lead by example just lately, I'd take that as a big fat *clue* to the rest of the nation) I'd like to see all of suburbia in the US take half or even just one third of their lawns and put them to "crisis gardens" and I mean now, starting this spring now, no "thinking about it", just do it. Just for backup purposes for the nation as a whole. Cheap to do, no exotic tech needs to be developed, and could pay off handsomely in averting some bad scenarios down the road... because you never know about those black swan events.
A hundred bucks locally to me would get you a 50 lb sack of rice, similar some sort of quantity beans. Another hundred would buy a lot of canned food on sale. Water is critical though, relying on that tap for the only source is real iffy. Here we have our own well, plus stored water in a few water barrels, plus a local stream and quite large pond. To go with this good quality water filters, in our case, berkeys. And yes, rotate the stock. The saying we use is "store what you eat, eat what you store".
I've been into this sort of thing ever since the cuban missile crisis and then a few years later a whopper big snowstorm that shut everything down for more than two weeks where I was. And when I mean shutdown, even the largest snowplows got bogged down, 4 feet of snow in 24 hours, then drifting for a few days. And very few snowmobiles back then either. It makes an impression on you what happens once normal supply is borked.
"Wacky survivalists" is an historically very recent notion. For the bulk of mankind's history, having a well stocked larder-stores adequate to get you through to the next harvest season- and the means to supply yourself with adequate shelter and heat and water, etc based on your own and mostly local sources was quite the ordinary norm. It has only been the last two or three generations where that started to fall out of favor.
We have had numerous examples of much smaller and more localized infrastructure destruction, and the best observations have shown that areas start to suffer fast after a three day outage of general modern technology. Just in time delivery systems and centralized power and water and natgas delivery and so on are the main cause of that.without massive outside the region resupply, that's it, civilization falls apart rapidly. Three days isn't very long. If the event/disaster is much longer than three days, and no outside help is coming in (because the next region over is just as bad off, as the region next to that, etc), you'd see some pretty dire circumstances arise.
Here is one example for the US, we no longer maintain a national emergency bulk food stockpile. It used to be millions of bushels of this or that, dried milk and so on. We maintained that for decades, then they stopped and went to what is called set aside. This is due to farming changes and "the market". We- the government "we"- used to pay minimal price controls and stockpile various surplus foods, in order to maintain our domestic agricultural base through wild market swings and seasonal weather variations, but they more or less stopped that some time ago and now we have no stockpiled food, they sold the last of it off earlier last year finally.
In other words, on a very large scale, we have no backup civilization or big national pantry. It doesn't exist, just not there. The government has zero provisions to help the people in general at any national scale sized event. They have provisions to use military force to "stay in charge", they call it "maintaining continuity of government", that's it. We have a national petroleum reserve as the only exception, and it is in the form of just crude, it would still need refining and delivery-that's iffy enough in such a scenario to even be possible- (and even then most would go to the government and not the people).
On the other hand, there is nothing stopping people from instituting their own stores and provisions and having a personal backup protection scheme, the "wacky survivalists" type method that all our ancestors considered normal and a very good idea. In the community we still call it survivalism, but it has a less scary name now too, "practical preparedness". Here is a plain vanilla example, for roughly the same cash people put into a big screen plasma TV they can have a decent amount of long term dried stored food. For what a cheap laptop or other "must have" electronic gadget of the month costs, you can have a pretty decent gravity powered water filter. The folks in suburbia and in the hinterland get laughed at a lot as having unsustainable lifestyles, but they are living in the only places where you can have a rationally large enough local garden and access to alternative water supplies, etc, along with firewood. Choices one can choose now in other words. All the big cities would collapse rapidly in such a national sized electronic disaster as in TFA, it would become beyond ugly, right up to and including cannibalism.
Basically, the government sucks when it comes to national and practical "civil defense". They only have a military solution. The military doesn't produce anything, it just takes it/spends it/wears it out. Look at the recent articles about the relatively small numbers of homeless in California, possibly our richest state. They can't even deal with such a teeny tiny homeless situation at very low numbers adequately. Extrapolate those numbers from thousands to tens of millions or more and it becomes easy to see the problems...
So it is up to the individual now to decide to incorporate a practical preparedness plan and alter lifestyle a little bit, the article scenario is only one of many potential wildcards that could occur.
..an automatic way - an option- for webpages (with some "standards" sort of code) to automatically redirect-based on the viewers settings- to the opposite of 3D live motion spinning and whatnot full flash full bloat page, to the low res/print this page version. It is really bogus when all you want is the text, but you have to load the full bloat version *just* to find the "print this article" link. That sort of defeats the purpose. Images off and noscript and ABP helps, but that still isn't enough.
Maybe this is possible now, but I don't know how to do it. Running a text based browser does not much good if the web page you land on (most of them now it seems) is very text based browser unfriendly.
Something like a desktop version of .mobi, along those lines, and if it became common coding practice.
..a motorcycle or scooter replacement, those folks are already motorized. You have whole families there trying to ride plus carry their stuff on some (I mean one, single) small scooter, so which is safer again? And the scooters by and large actually produce more tailpipe emissions, being 2 strokes in a lot of cases.