double your asked-for pay scale, see what happens. It could be you are coming across too desperate and cheap and companies might think you might jump ship at the first opportunity.
..already coming out of this project. And really, they got a decent functional self powered wireless mesh equipeed solid state laptop down to 150 bucks so far. There's good hardware and good software and good alternate energy tech here, good communications (the laptops are designed with central wireless servers in mind as well, so a small community only needs one good internet connection to get it spread out). Looks like a success so far to me. And I am not seeing how it is going to fail, it is an educational project, direct from their main mission statement page, and even just as an e-reader-what is wrong with giving kids hundreds of books? You are going to ship dead trees books in these numbers for that cheap? I doubt it. And it goes far beyond just being a dedicated ebook reader, it is a functional decent little computer.
Dvorak is a tard, can't see the bigger picture. MS (Gates commented before anyway) wants to do something similar with cellphones and tiny screens, this looks more practical for its intended function. AFAIK, education has always been a "good idea", this is just one way to go about gettng the infrastructure in place, something that can be updated and used and won't be obsoleted in short order. Look at just the bayless windup radio, that was a huge success, just getting normal one way *radio* that could function without expensive batteries or mains power available to a lot of places made a difference for people,and this OLPC project goes far beyond that.
Most efficient but in most places it is not the cheapest to the consumer, and sometimes not even the most practical. Just delivering via the grid introduces some efficiency losses. And electrical heat has the unfortunate side effect of when there is a storm, say a blizzard or ice storm or windstorm, right when you want heat the most..you don't have it..
We run redundant here, wood, propane and electric (primary to tertiary based on practicality and cost for our particular situation), because no heat in the winter just sucks, and you also start to have to worry about your pipes freezing then bursting later on when it warms up.
Glad you brought up cable TV. I actually attended one of those lost in the mists of time townhall meetings when a cable company was pitching their wares, and I distinctly heard them mentioning about how there would be "no commercials" if they got their monopoly to string up cable.
Once ad supported phones hit, eventually they will all go to ads, inevitable, unless you agree to "opt out" and pay more, that's my prediction anyway.
In some respects, breaking up the old phone company has worked out in the long run, in other aspects it is still pretty closed, like try to get a non officially blessed phone activated by your local carrier, chances are they will just say "no", can't/won't do that. We've seen any number of articles and posts here about how the government lets them de-tune and dumb down phones and then lock them up so you can't do with them what you want to do and be forced to go through their expensive "features" list. Sure, there's a gray area and warez to try and get around some of those feature locks, but that's what it is, gray area.
I'd sure buy one, no idea why they aren't out there either. I had this idea years ago, just no way to pull it off. It's the governments gig to do it, I don't see the FCC giving permission for just anyone to rebroadcast it over the air. Anyway, that is why I have a lot of 12 VDC stuff and keep a heavy marine battery charged up inside the house, so I can plug some stuff in easy and keep going when the power goes out. Thgat little watchman though is *amazing* how good the electronics are, I can get a better picture with that and the little rod antenna than my normal big color and the outdoor antenna when the weather is bad. It's better than my other 12 volt TVs as well.
...video weather thing would be slick. We have weather radios, just mash the button instant on to the endless weather forecast. It would be neat to have a device like that that pulled the official NOAA radar images along with the audio. Just a small screen like those portable DVD players would be enough.
I have a black and white watchman sony TV in perfect working order, and I will be annoyed when it no longer will get OTA TV signals it can use, because we use it all the time when the power goes out to look at the radar images during storms.
He and his globalist Korporate Krime Krew just invent stuff out of their megalomaniacal fantasies and go and do whatever anyway. Remember, he's "The Decider", not the public, not congress, not any court anywhere. They do what they want to do. And even with passed so called "laws", he issues his opinion, a "signing statement", on what they mean, and usually it is pretty far off the mark of the intent of the law.
...I wonder if anyone (joe individual filing a normal 10-40 for example) has done this, or tried to? You would definitley need some method to estimate your "sales lost due to piracy" to justify the numbers you might claim, and like has been pointed out, there is no credible way to find out that I have seen referenced. Would just an estimate fly? Any bona-fide accountants here want to take a stab at answering this? Brick and mortar have "inventory shrinkage" where at a minimum they have some sort of paper trail on tangible products before they "shrank away", but how could an individual with a closed license app or song estimate "losses"? Posit you had at least some legitimate sales at your asking price, then go from there.
Oh, it has changed some, but my computer analogy still fits-those sorts of prices are reflected there as well. The difference is, competition. The music industry acts as a cartel a lot more than the computer industry. While there has been some "price fixing" going on with computers, notably the semi recent RAM price fixing, over all it is a little more independent and competitive, resulting on more gains in efficiency and more bargains for the consumers.
Production costs might be similar, but duplication costs--very, very cheap now. I think it would be quite possible for the corporations represented by the RIAA and MPAA to sell disks at a considerably lower margin, but increase over all volume, and probaby make a lot more money then they do now, plus not annoy potential and real customers. As soon as it became apparent that duplication of digital bits was so incredibly cheap to accomplish, they had a very short window to react in and alter business practices-they chose the method of ignoring it, hoping it would just go away, clinging to the past with a similar pricing model, which made piracy a foregone conclusion, and now they are engaged in missile- anti missile- anti anti missile warfare with their customers. It is seriously whacko.
I contend that was short sighted and a major blunder, that there was a severe failure at the upper levels of decision (that intartube thing level thinking) making to fully grok what the new technology really meant (the first true ubiqituous and widespread replicator tech available to everyone), and I think just the reality on the ground now-lawsuits, DRM, major legislative changes, people on all threee sides of the equation (talent/ production and distribution / consumer) are all enemies now, instead of the gestalt being of mutual and polite and civilized benefit.
For the record, I *can't wait* until replicator innovation can put me out of business. I hope everyone enjoys what that might mean(cheap and easy food in vast abundance in my case), and I will gladly find something else to do.
Sure, I'd agree they should get some, but not all of it, and as long as the over-all price isn't at a gouging level and the media isn't DRMed all to heck. Now what might constitute gouging is certainly open to debate, that would have to be looked at in more detail, but I think lately (the last several years), we haven't seen much in the cost of disks dropping, and now they seem to want almost as much for downloads as they want for physical media in a jewel case with the liner.
Several years ago, even the cheapest new computer was maybe around 1500 bucks, and music disks were 12 to 20 bucks. Now you can get a new computer for 3-500 dollars at the low end..and music disks are still around 12 to 20 dollars. It's like tech advances stand still for them guys.
Are people being gouged? Or is the computer industry just better at making use of new technology to become more efficient and diverse enough to where competition has resulted in better prices for the consumers?
I am forced to guess, and run the odds...OK, my assessment is.. I think the music buying public has been getting gouged for a long time. Tell them RIAA boys to drop prices down to around one third what they are now, and make the diff on volume sales instead. That's a recommendation of course, but I know at those prices, I buy zero new music, I stopped several years ago when I noticed disk prices never seemed to drop. they still haven't. I don't P2P pirate either..I just don't care that much about it beyond the abstract noticing of it, and I am annoyed they lobbied congress (paid bribes) to start us on this DRM hell sleigh ride. That part is annoying, and to be forced to pay top dollar on that?? I call gouging. If their expenses are just too great, they need to really take a look at where the waste is then, because almost all other industries out there have a steady double benefit of steadily cheaper prices and/or more features/quality, but for some reason, "entertainment" on plastic disks doesn't.
Now what this might have to do with being a volunteer online reporter to try and uncover scandals that might affect you from government or corporate shenanigans I am not sure, but I hoope I answered your question. When people notice the government isn't doing theirt job, and where government isn't even investigating crime because the government itself is part of the problem, then I think banding together to find out some facts and to share what you find out is a neat idea. If the central location that coordinates that, the online paper or hyper-blog whatever, needs ads for their infrastructure, then so be it. slashdot is both, ad supported and subscription. and I do not block ads online except for flash ads, for various reasons.
If the entertainment industry wants to be ad supported, they already have a model for that, TV and OTA radio. And frankly, the radio is where I listen to the bulk of my music, I just wish the government would make it easier for low power guys to get into the picture, so we had more diverse sources.
You also get the freely shared collaborative effort of other "investigators" who are interested in the same subject or subjects. That's your "pay", the information, access to data, the reason you even go to the newspaper website. That the aggregator-the paper-provides the structure and bandwith and pays for the full time employees is fair enough for them to get the ad revenue, doncha think? Certainly better than having to open a paypal account for every news website out there, IMO.
People have been tryng to figure out how to do this online thing for a long time, there just *aren't* that many options to pay for all of it. You have ads, or direct pay in some form, that's it. Everytime you can share, whether it is code or news or just learned expertise to answer a question on some help forum, it cuts costs for all of the above, including you, because we all can't be experts at everything, nor can we be all places at the same time to see what is happening. We have to rely on others, and no matter what, there is some expense to an online presence, especially if you are a host of some sort.
Re:Why to stop overfishin just pass a law...NOT
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Oceans Empty By 2048?
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that's some pretty funny deranged stuff man! Although who knows, there very well could be some engineered biocootie get out or be released on purpose and wipeout most of humanity. As to the invasive species-yep, it's a problem, I have seen it first hand, grew up in the great lakes region, I saw what just lamprey eels and alewives did to the fishing stocks there. And where I live now, terrestrial invasive species are quite the problem, multiflora rose, kudzu and japanese privet are near uncontrollable, I deal with those things all the time as part of my job.
As to "pass a law" etc, the best I think you might see happen I outlined, a lot of nations will be going to extensions of the commercial/economic zones off their coasts, and vigorously enforce it.
As to going to war and so forth, yes, it is quite possible, my own analysis looks to it getting pretty bad starting from around 2012 onwards due to a lot of resource depletion. I'd say right now all the middle east and african fighting going on is part of it, most of the fighting is taking place in areas that have some critical resource the planet needs, and the major powers are playing proxy war. And yes, the chinese are by far the most aggressive in going after the long term supplies. They are gonna ownzorz africa pretty soon,in my opinion.
Are you talking about buying a computer or just a fancy electronic wrapper for a microsoft product? The computer prices I am seeing in my local sales flyers are pretty good and I expect them to get even cheaper soon. For people who don't build their own systems and just get bundles, this looks to be a good "sales" season. Maybe not good overall for the computer companies, but for the consumer who wants a deal it's fine. And even if you run just all windows, who cares? Wait a bit into the new year, then go buy one cheap component online (a new mouse or something) and get an oem vista disk for cheap, that's usually been available in the past like that. It's always the opposite from the financial reporting sites. Bad for the big companies=good for the consumer. Just like new cars now, the manufacturers (for most models, not all but most) are sitting on inventory (last I read was 75 days backlog, instead of normal 50-60 days max) and offereng a ton of incentives, zero percent finance, cash off, etc, to move those units.
..for a long time. Fair is fair and all... and we have MacIntel now, too. It's just funny, that's all. I think it's amusing really. The name, not the situation, the situation sucks. Although better now than later, the entire computing world needs to have some things sorted in the courts more, copyrights versus patents (like, why does software get both, but novels and musical scores don't? Ideas represented by a language or languages and symbols, etc, able to be put on dead trees or represented by electronic bits, seems roughly similar to me anyway) and etc.
Of course, MS still isn't finished with the anti trust action, billy and stevie got a court date in iowa now. Isn't that special.
Well, both things are happening now, there is more oceanic market hunting, and also commecial fish farming, and you can see both results at most supermarkets.
The nature of the disputed report in the article is saying that it isn't working yet, that the wild fishing is depleting stocks to the point where they will suffer unrecoverable status, and some species would not take well to any sort of farming, the examle there might be the bluefin, I have NO idea how you could do that, you would need some pretty big tanks!hehehe but I guess at a hundred grand a pop, maybe someone will try it, or use the floating fish farm idea, huge self powered stations with suspended nets/cages the fish stay in, with on board caretakers up above, just floating with the currents. Actually sounds like a fun job if your quarters were adequate.....
Beyond that I can't really answer the question adequately. Farming fish has its own set of problems, but as a compromise I think it can work to a much greater extent than it is now, and it can be adapted to expand what is growing and provide additional income for the farmers, for example tiger prawns are grown in rice paddies, it's very common.. I'm doing it myself in a very small scale in our greenhouse, but I haven't put in a commercial (or freezer to be fair) sized crop yet, I am still playing with the how-to-do-its on tank maintenance and suchlike (in other words how to *not* make mosquito farms and algae pits, heh) with my available tools and expertise and resources. Hopefully soon I can gear up and have a winter (trout) and summer(catfish and bluegills) harvest.
Although it is still ridiculously easy to go up the dirt road to the pond and catch bass and bluegills... I still like the idea of having a little crop. The tanks of water help act as a heat source-sink for winter heating purposes and I would like them to be dual use..because I'm a geek and think it would be cool.
As to the open ocean, I would guess that pretty soon nations might agree on a furthering of the "market zone" off their coasts,to help protect their own fish stocks, and enforce it with coast guard action. They do it now but it is somewhat limited.
.......commercial fishing in two periods of time, separated by roughly a decade. The level of decrease in fish stocks I personally saw was astounding. And this was quite some time ago, I can't imagine it has gotten any better.
It really helps to get a handle on this if you stop thinking of it as fishing, and no, I am not kidding. Just a little mental trick works well. Switch the term from fishing to "oceanic market hunting", then go back and look in history what market hunting did to wild terrestrial animal species, passenger pigeon, bison, migratory wildfowl, the dodo, etc. It did not take long historically speaking to see humongous stock depletion. Ocean fishing is market hunting, it will have the same effect eventually, there's no way around it. The time frame may be arguable, but the effect won't if let to go on like it is now, because there will be demand, even if it is only from the top 2% of thee wealthiest. I mean, they used to serve *plovers tongues* in restaurants. That's the sort of goofy market pressure that can happen, all the way to extinction or near extinction.
The only way we managed to even remotely save a lot of terrestrial species was with a total ban on wild game hunting for commercial purposes(I will only speak of the US now I really don't have much knowledge of this from other countries). We have personal sport hunting now and that has worked with a lot of good game management in place, and that only came about from enough people noticing "hey, where did all the animals go to???" It was an almost too late collective "duh" moment, and one would hope we have a bit more data and scientific sophistication to work with now than we did in the late 1800s. And even with game management laws in place, some times desperate times can negate those factors. If you go back and look at the great depression era, some species that are in good shape suffered near total collapse, eastern white tailed deer got hunted to severely low levels back then, even though the laws were there, desperately poor people just had to eat, so they did, and the laws were just flaunted.
I agree with another poster above, in the oceans, trawling is responsible because it is so deadly efficient in killing a lot of animals. In the US they used to allow "punt guns" for waterfowl hunting, basically short barreled boat-mounted small cannon, very efficient in harvestng ducks, so efficient that during market hunting times they about wiped out some species in short order, they had to be banned outright, and now shotguns are limited to 10 gauge maximum size. I think we as humans are going to need to address this sort of thing with wild ocean hunting of fish if we don't want to suffer the same fate we did with the land animals. Heck, there has to be some more older New England and Candian slashdotters here who can remember when cod was dirt cheap in the store, I mean rdiculous cheap, I sure can, because they were so abundant, and there were still a lot of other species that were abundant so cod was considered a second tier-class fish, now it ain't so, and cod is now in a decline state and expensive.
The 9-11 attacks seemed to have primarily benefited the international mil/industrial complex, the PNAC ideological crowd, and israel. I can't see where they benefited joe muhammad on the street *very much at all*. And I am not sure where Osama is or his motivations at this point,he was long at least a marginal asset of the US intel community, and connected to the large international business community,so did he ever really cease to function as one of those folks, could there be overlapping interests and goals, instead of just one overwhelmingly large goal of the caliphate? If he changed to just the latter, when and where and why? That is a truly hidden secret, we have no timeline to look at, at least I have never seen it. With saddam, it is a little clearer, he was tolerated/supported/supplied as long as he wqas fighting iran and keeping sunnis and shias divided (the relationship with the kurds has always been hypocritcal, turkey has always fought them just as hard and they are still in NATO), but when he started growing uncontrollable and expansionist, and especially when he started threatening the petrodollar hegemony he got smashed. I think that was the real reason there. The US (western industrialised governments in other ways), has a long history of supporting varous despots as long as they suit a purpose, then turning around and demonising them and acting like the earlier support never existed. Look at Noriega for another example. Look at the argentine generals and brazilian generals. Look at the Taliban (not bin laden, the Taliban)who were tolerated until they actually DID control the opium trade, they just ruthlessly smashed it almost totally gone in just one year, and at the same time they did not want to accept pitiful oil pipeline offer from unocal and Rice, so then within weeks all of a sudden afghanistan is back on the radar and eventually they get invaded. Coincidence?? They even offered to give up bin laden as long as the trial was conducted at a more neutral place, not just hand him over to the US, and that was rejected out of hand. But they really did stop the bulk of the huge opium to heroin trade. I think that really annoyed some behind the scenes organized profiteers.
On the side, ever listen to george carlin much? He has a funny skit where he goes on how to really stop the drug trade, he said don't fool around with the little dealers, go to the top and throw the big bankers in jail who launder the bigmoney. It's pretty much right-on if that is the real goal. But it doesn't happen much, so you have to wonder whynot? I think I can answer it, it is just too profitable to stop, just the war on drugs in the US manufactured half the accepted police state.
Constant threats and wars serve a variety of purposes for various power blocs, I don't think there is ever any single one overlying cause to them for the most part. War is a racket just as much as it might be a legit struggle for this or that ideology. It's just a very complex and lucrative business.
Slashdot Mirror
double your asked-for pay scale, see what happens. It could be you are coming across too desperate and cheap and companies might think you might jump ship at the first opportunity.
..already coming out of this project. And really, they got a decent functional self powered wireless mesh equipeed solid state laptop down to 150 bucks so far. There's good hardware and good software and good alternate energy tech here, good communications (the laptops are designed with central wireless servers in mind as well, so a small community only needs one good internet connection to get it spread out). Looks like a success so far to me. And I am not seeing how it is going to fail, it is an educational project, direct from their main mission statement page, and even just as an e-reader-what is wrong with giving kids hundreds of books? You are going to ship dead trees books in these numbers for that cheap? I doubt it. And it goes far beyond just being a dedicated ebook reader, it is a functional decent little computer.
Dvorak is a tard, can't see the bigger picture. MS (Gates commented before anyway) wants to do something similar with cellphones and tiny screens, this looks more practical for its intended function. AFAIK, education has always been a "good idea", this is just one way to go about gettng the infrastructure in place, something that can be updated and used and won't be obsoleted in short order. Look at just the bayless windup radio, that was a huge success, just getting normal one way *radio* that could function without expensive batteries or mains power available to a lot of places made a difference for people,and this OLPC project goes far beyond that.
Most efficient but in most places it is not the cheapest to the consumer, and sometimes not even the most practical. Just delivering via the grid introduces some efficiency losses. And electrical heat has the unfortunate side effect of when there is a storm, say a blizzard or ice storm or windstorm, right when you want heat the most..you don't have it..
We run redundant here, wood, propane and electric (primary to tertiary based on practicality and cost for our particular situation), because no heat in the winter just sucks, and you also start to have to worry about your pipes freezing then bursting later on when it warms up.
stable, testing, experimental/bleeding edge?
Yep, sounds like a good idea really. Someone should try it......
Funniest one (to me anyway, and granted, I am strange), was when I was googling antarctica stuff and on the side was a shop at ebay for icebergs ad!
Glad you brought up cable TV. I actually attended one of those lost in the mists of time townhall meetings when a cable company was pitching their wares, and I distinctly heard them mentioning about how there would be "no commercials" if they got their monopoly to string up cable.
Once ad supported phones hit, eventually they will all go to ads, inevitable, unless you agree to "opt out" and pay more, that's my prediction anyway.
In some respects, breaking up the old phone company has worked out in the long run, in other aspects it is still pretty closed, like try to get a non officially blessed phone activated by your local carrier, chances are they will just say "no", can't/won't do that. We've seen any number of articles and posts here about how the government lets them de-tune and dumb down phones and then lock them up so you can't do with them what you want to do and be forced to go through their expensive "features" list. Sure, there's a gray area and warez to try and get around some of those feature locks, but that's what it is, gray area.
I'd sure buy one, no idea why they aren't out there either. I had this idea years ago, just no way to pull it off. It's the governments gig to do it, I don't see the FCC giving permission for just anyone to rebroadcast it over the air. Anyway, that is why I have a lot of 12 VDC stuff and keep a heavy marine battery charged up inside the house, so I can plug some stuff in easy and keep going when the power goes out. Thgat little watchman though is *amazing* how good the electronics are, I can get a better picture with that and the little rod antenna than my normal big color and the outdoor antenna when the weather is bad. It's better than my other 12 volt TVs as well.
...video weather thing would be slick. We have weather radios, just mash the button instant on to the endless weather forecast. It would be neat to have a device like that that pulled the official NOAA radar images along with the audio. Just a small screen like those portable DVD players would be enough.
I have a black and white watchman sony TV in perfect working order, and I will be annoyed when it no longer will get OTA TV signals it can use, because we use it all the time when the power goes out to look at the radar images during storms.
He and his globalist Korporate Krime Krew just invent stuff out of their megalomaniacal fantasies and go and do whatever anyway. Remember, he's "The Decider", not the public, not congress, not any court anywhere. They do what they want to do. And even with passed so called "laws", he issues his opinion, a "signing statement", on what they mean, and usually it is pretty far off the mark of the intent of the law.
go here
http://www.votersunite.org/electionproblems.asp
...I wonder if anyone (joe individual filing a normal 10-40 for example) has done this, or tried to? You would definitley need some method to estimate your "sales lost due to piracy" to justify the numbers you might claim, and like has been pointed out, there is no credible way to find out that I have seen referenced. Would just an estimate fly? Any bona-fide accountants here want to take a stab at answering this? Brick and mortar have "inventory shrinkage" where at a minimum they have some sort of paper trail on tangible products before they "shrank away", but how could an individual with a closed license app or song estimate "losses"? Posit you had at least some legitimate sales at your asking price, then go from there.
Damn Rotten Music
Oh, it has changed some, but my computer analogy still fits-those sorts of prices are reflected there as well. The difference is, competition. The music industry acts as a cartel a lot more than the computer industry. While there has been some "price fixing" going on with computers, notably the semi recent RAM price fixing, over all it is a little more independent and competitive, resulting on more gains in efficiency and more bargains for the consumers.
Production costs might be similar, but duplication costs--very, very cheap now. I think it would be quite possible for the corporations represented by the RIAA and MPAA to sell disks at a considerably lower margin, but increase over all volume, and probaby make a lot more money then they do now, plus not annoy potential and real customers. As soon as it became apparent that duplication of digital bits was so incredibly cheap to accomplish, they had a very short window to react in and alter business practices-they chose the method of ignoring it, hoping it would just go away, clinging to the past with a similar pricing model, which made piracy a foregone conclusion, and now they are engaged in missile- anti missile- anti anti missile warfare with their customers. It is seriously whacko.
I contend that was short sighted and a major blunder, that there was a severe failure at the upper levels of decision (that intartube thing level thinking) making to fully grok what the new technology really meant (the first true ubiqituous and widespread replicator tech available to everyone), and I think just the reality on the ground now-lawsuits, DRM, major legislative changes, people on all threee sides of the equation (talent/ production and distribution / consumer) are all enemies now, instead of the gestalt being of mutual and polite and civilized benefit.
For the record, I *can't wait* until replicator innovation can put me out of business. I hope everyone enjoys what that might mean(cheap and easy food in vast abundance in my case), and I will gladly find something else to do.
Sure, I'd agree they should get some, but not all of it, and as long as the over-all price isn't at a gouging level and the media isn't DRMed all to heck. Now what might constitute gouging is certainly open to debate, that would have to be looked at in more detail, but I think lately (the last several years), we haven't seen much in the cost of disks dropping, and now they seem to want almost as much for downloads as they want for physical media in a jewel case with the liner.
Several years ago, even the cheapest new computer was maybe around 1500 bucks, and music disks were 12 to 20 bucks. Now you can get a new computer for 3-500 dollars at the low end..and music disks are still around 12 to 20 dollars. It's like tech advances stand still for them guys.
Are people being gouged? Or is the computer industry just better at making use of new technology to become more efficient and diverse enough to where competition has resulted in better prices for the consumers?
I am forced to guess, and run the odds...OK, my assessment is.. I think the music buying public has been getting gouged for a long time. Tell them RIAA boys to drop prices down to around one third what they are now, and make the diff on volume sales instead. That's a recommendation of course, but I know at those prices, I buy zero new music, I stopped several years ago when I noticed disk prices never seemed to drop. they still haven't. I don't P2P pirate either..I just don't care that much about it beyond the abstract noticing of it, and I am annoyed they lobbied congress (paid bribes) to start us on this DRM hell sleigh ride. That part is annoying, and to be forced to pay top dollar on that?? I call gouging. If their expenses are just too great, they need to really take a look at where the waste is then, because almost all other industries out there have a steady double benefit of steadily cheaper prices and/or more features/quality, but for some reason, "entertainment" on plastic disks doesn't.
Now what this might have to do with being a volunteer online reporter to try and uncover scandals that might affect you from government or corporate shenanigans I am not sure, but I hoope I answered your question. When people notice the government isn't doing theirt job, and where government isn't even investigating crime because the government itself is part of the problem, then I think banding together to find out some facts and to share what you find out is a neat idea. If the central location that coordinates that, the online paper or hyper-blog whatever, needs ads for their infrastructure, then so be it. slashdot is both, ad supported and subscription. and I do not block ads online except for flash ads, for various reasons.
If the entertainment industry wants to be ad supported, they already have a model for that, TV and OTA radio. And frankly, the radio is where I listen to the bulk of my music, I just wish the government would make it easier for low power guys to get into the picture, so we had more diverse sources.
You also get the freely shared collaborative effort of other "investigators" who are interested in the same subject or subjects. That's your "pay", the information, access to data, the reason you even go to the newspaper website. That the aggregator-the paper-provides the structure and bandwith and pays for the full time employees is fair enough for them to get the ad revenue, doncha think? Certainly better than having to open a paypal account for every news website out there, IMO.
People have been tryng to figure out how to do this online thing for a long time, there just *aren't* that many options to pay for all of it. You have ads, or direct pay in some form, that's it. Everytime you can share, whether it is code or news or just learned expertise to answer a question on some help forum, it cuts costs for all of the above, including you, because we all can't be experts at everything, nor can we be all places at the same time to see what is happening. We have to rely on others, and no matter what, there is some expense to an online presence, especially if you are a host of some sort.
that's some pretty funny deranged stuff man! Although who knows, there very well could be some engineered biocootie get out or be released on purpose and wipeout most of humanity. As to the invasive species-yep, it's a problem, I have seen it first hand, grew up in the great lakes region, I saw what just lamprey eels and alewives did to the fishing stocks there. And where I live now, terrestrial invasive species are quite the problem, multiflora rose, kudzu and japanese privet are near uncontrollable, I deal with those things all the time as part of my job.
As to "pass a law" etc, the best I think you might see happen I outlined, a lot of nations will be going to extensions of the commercial/economic zones off their coasts, and vigorously enforce it.
As to going to war and so forth, yes, it is quite possible, my own analysis looks to it getting pretty bad starting from around 2012 onwards due to a lot of resource depletion. I'd say right now all the middle east and african fighting going on is part of it, most of the fighting is taking place in areas that have some critical resource the planet needs, and the major powers are playing proxy war. And yes, the chinese are by far the most aggressive in going after the long term supplies. They are gonna ownzorz africa pretty soon,in my opinion.
Are you talking about buying a computer or just a fancy electronic wrapper for a microsoft product? The computer prices I am seeing in my local sales flyers are pretty good and I expect them to get even cheaper soon. For people who don't build their own systems and just get bundles, this looks to be a good "sales" season. Maybe not good overall for the computer companies, but for the consumer who wants a deal it's fine. And even if you run just all windows, who cares? Wait a bit into the new year, then go buy one cheap component online (a new mouse or something) and get an oem vista disk for cheap, that's usually been available in the past like that. It's always the opposite from the financial reporting sites. Bad for the big companies=good for the consumer. Just like new cars now, the manufacturers (for most models, not all but most) are sitting on inventory (last I read was 75 days backlog, instead of normal 50-60 days max) and offereng a ton of incentives, zero percent finance, cash off, etc, to move those units.
..for a long time. Fair is fair and all... and we have MacIntel now, too. It's just funny, that's all. I think it's amusing really. The name, not the situation, the situation sucks. Although better now than later, the entire computing world needs to have some things sorted in the courts more, copyrights versus patents (like, why does software get both, but novels and musical scores don't? Ideas represented by a language or languages and symbols, etc, able to be put on dead trees or represented by electronic bits, seems roughly similar to me anyway) and etc.
Of course, MS still isn't finished with the anti trust action, billy and stevie got a court date in iowa now. Isn't that special.
Well, both things are happening now, there is more oceanic market hunting, and also commecial fish farming, and you can see both results at most supermarkets.
The nature of the disputed report in the article is saying that it isn't working yet, that the wild fishing is depleting stocks to the point where they will suffer unrecoverable status, and some species would not take well to any sort of farming, the examle there might be the bluefin, I have NO idea how you could do that, you would need some pretty big tanks!hehehe but I guess at a hundred grand a pop, maybe someone will try it, or use the floating fish farm idea, huge self powered stations with suspended nets/cages the fish stay in, with on board caretakers up above, just floating with the currents. Actually sounds like a fun job if your quarters were adequate.....
Beyond that I can't really answer the question adequately. Farming fish has its own set of problems, but as a compromise I think it can work to a much greater extent than it is now, and it can be adapted to expand what is growing and provide additional income for the farmers, for example tiger prawns are grown in rice paddies, it's very common.. I'm doing it myself in a very small scale in our greenhouse, but I haven't put in a commercial (or freezer to be fair) sized crop yet, I am still playing with the how-to-do-its on tank maintenance and suchlike (in other words how to *not* make mosquito farms and algae pits, heh) with my available tools and expertise and resources. Hopefully soon I can gear up and have a winter (trout) and summer(catfish and bluegills) harvest.
Although it is still ridiculously easy to go up the dirt road to the pond and catch bass and bluegills... I still like the idea of having a little crop. The tanks of water help act as a heat source-sink for winter heating purposes and I would like them to be dual use..because I'm a geek and think it would be cool.
As to the open ocean, I would guess that pretty soon nations might agree on a furthering of the "market zone" off their coasts,to help protect their own fish stocks, and enforce it with coast guard action. They do it now but it is somewhat limited.
.......commercial fishing in two periods of time, separated by roughly a decade. The level of decrease in fish stocks I personally saw was astounding. And this was quite some time ago, I can't imagine it has gotten any better.
It really helps to get a handle on this if you stop thinking of it as fishing, and no, I am not kidding. Just a little mental trick works well. Switch the term from fishing to "oceanic market hunting", then go back and look in history what market hunting did to wild terrestrial animal species, passenger pigeon, bison, migratory wildfowl, the dodo, etc. It did not take long historically speaking to see humongous stock depletion. Ocean fishing is market hunting, it will have the same effect eventually, there's no way around it. The time frame may be arguable, but the effect won't if let to go on like it is now, because there will be demand, even if it is only from the top 2% of thee wealthiest. I mean, they used to serve *plovers tongues* in restaurants. That's the sort of goofy market pressure that can happen, all the way to extinction or near extinction.
The only way we managed to even remotely save a lot of terrestrial species was with a total ban on wild game hunting for commercial purposes(I will only speak of the US now I really don't have much knowledge of this from other countries). We have personal sport hunting now and that has worked with a lot of good game management in place, and that only came about from enough people noticing "hey, where did all the animals go to???" It was an almost too late collective "duh" moment, and one would hope we have a bit more data and scientific sophistication to work with now than we did in the late 1800s. And even with game management laws in place, some times desperate times can negate those factors. If you go back and look at the great depression era, some species that are in good shape suffered near total collapse, eastern white tailed deer got hunted to severely low levels back then, even though the laws were there, desperately poor people just had to eat, so they did, and the laws were just flaunted.
I agree with another poster above, in the oceans, trawling is responsible because it is so deadly efficient in killing a lot of animals. In the US they used to allow "punt guns" for waterfowl hunting, basically short barreled boat-mounted small cannon, very efficient in harvestng ducks, so efficient that during market hunting times they about wiped out some species in short order, they had to be banned outright, and now shotguns are limited to 10 gauge maximum size. I think we as humans are going to need to address this sort of thing with wild ocean hunting of fish if we don't want to suffer the same fate we did with the land animals. Heck, there has to be some more older New England and Candian slashdotters here who can remember when cod was dirt cheap in the store, I mean rdiculous cheap, I sure can, because they were so abundant, and there were still a lot of other species that were abundant so cod was considered a second tier-class fish, now it ain't so, and cod is now in a decline state and expensive.
Microsoft goes way out of their way to make sure YOUR hardware is compatible with THEIR bank account! True facts dere, yep, uh huh, das rite....
...how many people are still going to want to run Suse? Any folks here currently running it going to switch to something else?
The 9-11 attacks seemed to have primarily benefited the international mil/industrial complex, the PNAC ideological crowd, and israel. I can't see where they benefited joe muhammad on the street *very much at all*. And I am not sure where Osama is or his motivations at this point,he was long at least a marginal asset of the US intel community, and connected to the large international business community,so did he ever really cease to function as one of those folks, could there be overlapping interests and goals, instead of just one overwhelmingly large goal of the caliphate? If he changed to just the latter, when and where and why? That is a truly hidden secret, we have no timeline to look at, at least I have never seen it. With saddam, it is a little clearer, he was tolerated/supported/supplied as long as he wqas fighting iran and keeping sunnis and shias divided (the relationship with the kurds has always been hypocritcal, turkey has always fought them just as hard and they are still in NATO), but when he started growing uncontrollable and expansionist, and especially when he started threatening the petrodollar hegemony he got smashed. I think that was the real reason there. The US (western industrialised governments in other ways), has a long history of supporting varous despots as long as they suit a purpose, then turning around and demonising them and acting like the earlier support never existed. Look at Noriega for another example. Look at the argentine generals and brazilian generals. Look at the Taliban (not bin laden, the Taliban)who were tolerated until they actually DID control the opium trade, they just ruthlessly smashed it almost totally gone in just one year, and at the same time they did not want to accept pitiful oil pipeline offer from unocal and Rice, so then within weeks all of a sudden afghanistan is back on the radar and eventually they get invaded. Coincidence?? They even offered to give up bin laden as long as the trial was conducted at a more neutral place, not just hand him over to the US, and that was rejected out of hand. But they really did stop the bulk of the huge opium to heroin trade. I think that really annoyed some behind the scenes organized profiteers.
On the side, ever listen to george carlin much? He has a funny skit where he goes on how to really stop the drug trade, he said don't fool around with the little dealers, go to the top and throw the big bankers in jail who launder the bigmoney. It's pretty much right-on if that is the real goal. But it doesn't happen much, so you have to wonder whynot? I think I can answer it, it is just too profitable to stop, just the war on drugs in the US manufactured half the accepted police state.
Constant threats and wars serve a variety of purposes for various power blocs, I don't think there is ever any single one overlying cause to them for the most part. War is a racket just as much as it might be a legit struggle for this or that ideology. It's just a very complex and lucrative business.
back atcha, thanks for the reply and good luck, and better skill