2 bucks for a music CD, 3 dollars for a movie DVD. Stamped out by the millions, that is a reasonable price, still plenty of room for profit for all concerned. They would sell way more copies then they do now, less profit per disk, but sell hella lot more disks. In the store, on the rack, no DRM crap, plays in any player you have. Download, don't care, it's ho hum. I prefer original hard copies of stuff.
That's my offer anyway. I used to buy a lot of music, then started buying some expensive on tape vids when that came out..then quit. I noticed they refused to drop prices as tech made making copies extremely cheap, especially since they switched to cheap stamped plastic discs. That is gouging, that lead to the problems they experience.
I don't D/L bootlegs either, in case you want to make some peg legger accusation. Legit free to copy would be fair game or at best I buy used very cheap or cutrate marked down bargain bin, but nothing full price anymore-it's a rip, gouging.
I know if it was me up there, no junk gets tossed! I keep about everything, you ought to see my worn out lawnmower collection, let alone ancient computers and other electronic gadgets. I even cut the cords off of really busted stuff and save those-hey, you never know when you might need a plug! My space station would look like sanford and space sons....
Are there any salvage laws yet? What is "abandoned" in space? Everything up there was at one point pretty darn valuable, just from the sheer launching costs let alone any tech it represents.
I would imagine that once private industry is up there all the time, that "space junk" will become a valuable resource and won't be allowed to just de orbit and burn up. They'll do something with it.
I think an ISP that catered to a step above uncaring noobs might be a good idea. Instead of just taking anyone with the cash, if you knew in advance you were going to get service from a professionally run company that really DID care about their customers, and did have some way to verify that they knew at least about phishing and proper netiquette and email scams and keeping a clean box, etc, it just might be a good thing.Probably be chaeper to run the business anyway, much less lame tech support calls or less zombies on your net.
There's something sorta similar in meatspace. I used to be a lifeguard at some big condos, and we had a rule, adult or not, you couldn't go into the deep end until we knew you and you had passed a three lap swimming test. No exceptions, it didn't matter if your rent was paid or not or how ripped you looked in your trunks or *anything*, you had to prove you could swim, period.. Now some guys were macho jerks about it, would say "FU, you think I can't swim?" etc, but we stuck to it and didn't have many problems with people after the few jerks were weeded out. So ya, a simple but effective test to get on the net, at least as pertains to normal functionality and the ability to use email without getting hosed and emphasizing the importance of trying to stay as malware free as possible.. I wouldn't have a prob with it really, I might sign with such an ISP voluntarily.
If you are a stockholder, you might want to consider looking at the situation from that point of view-with your lawyers. When working as an employee doesn't work, turn around and look at it from an ownership position, which as a stockholder you are. If they are putting your investment and the other stockholders and the clients at serious risk, you just might have a rather strong case. Think about it, a firm like that really relies on trust from the clients and public reputation for accuracy and security-if what you say is true they are not doing due diligence to maintain that. Then let your hired mouthpieces do the talking for you, just shutup at that point.. The tightwad stupid managers may ignore you, but they aren't going to ignore them.
$40 for a business??? Why don't you get all the employees to chip in 10 bucks a month as a christmas present to the company (and their jobs and sanity), and get better service for a year? Once your boss sees that it works, he is liable to grudgingly accept reality and pop for it.
...that threw any usable light. I am a big alternative energy proponent, I have certainly ranted enough here on the subject, so I keep buying these things every year thinking maybe now they are good enough and maybe I can use them and nuts! They suck! I wind up replacing them back with normal incandescents. If you want fluorescents, you have to use the normal tube jobs and that's it. The screw in ones bite it except for some sort of dim weird colored ambience light or for a porch light or something.
Now if they can get some affordable LED lights out there where the LEDS are aimed correctly (think shape/angle of the table lampshade for instance) instead of just being "round", then maybe they'll have a winner. But not at the prices they charge or that light wasting shape for the screw-ins I have seen-no thanks again.
You have to take all those factors into consideration. What's the best tool? Will that tool be viable 5 years down the road, after you have committed a lot of time and money into it, or will it turn out to be an expensive white elephant, and just keep costing and costing until such a time as supporting the tool with time and money costs more than getting your original job done? MS wants you to keep the tool as the most important part, forever and ever, and keep shoveling cash their way. FOSS encourages you to use the tools now, keep using them in the future, share what you learn about it, others share with you freely, and in the meantime maybe save a lot of your cash and time and use it for something else possibly more important than just keeping the tool supplier in yachts and benzs. FOSS lets you get on with life, staying stuck to the MS tool rental store means you are their property and cash cow in perpetuity. They like to bandy about TCO figures, but seems to me you can never determine what that realistically is if you get on an endless check writing treadmill to redmond.
no, I knew that, rights are born-with. I was just pointing out the government seems to think they are all government-granted, as in they restrict them all the time with absolutely no regards about it. This latest one, fries my grits: "free speech zones". Like, WTF is that? How can any badged wonder who has taken an oath support such idiocy and unlawfullness? The free speech zone is anyplace inside the US, period, not some cage three miles from a political rally.
The list is huge, the infractions too numerous to count practically. And the Rs and Ds just trade off which of the born with rights they want to fold bend mutilate and staple. The end result is, politics as business as usual means you are screwed unless you are part of the above the law elite globalist class.
That's why I think eventually the system will collapse, it's just too terribly broken, in too many areas. Not sure when, but I bet it happens.
Have to disagree. A high tech military needs a supply train that is in a safe area. cut that train anyplace and they grind to a halt-no fuel, food, water, resupply, etc. They completely rely on an intact and safe rear area. With widespread guerrila type war, that evaporates. And decimation against the civilian populations would lead to reactionary reprisals against the military and their civilian supporters. It's OK to try that way over yonder, trying it in the same place you are trying to live at can't be done for very long unless you enjoy overwhelming popular support, something you wouldn't have if you were flattening your own cities.
It just doesn't work, numerous examples out there. They would have to resort to suicidal widespread use of WMD. Even conventional weaponry woud run out soon, then there would be little resupply. You aren't going to get factory workers to do much of a good job keeping the armaments flowing when their kin folk are being decimated or stuck in camps. You aren't going to get farmers to keep supplying food when their fields are napalmed and their tractors destroyed. The conventional forces would indeed have initial mass destruction on their side, but eventually would lose as they just ran out of stuff to keep the high tech edge.
How do you take out a fighter plane when you have no anti air defences? You waste the pilots in their bar. The tanker trucks delivering fuel, they come around a corner, poof, no more fuel. And etc. This has been wargamed extensively by people all over, smart guys, they all have come up with the same outcome. Assymetrical warfare is the hardest warfare for conventional forces to fight. And if they just start levelling cities, any "support" they have in that population will go away, and they'll start having desertions in the ranks and grunts turning their weapons on superiors in fragging incidents then leaving with their weapons.
BTW, I don't drink nor have any drinking buddies and think the ar-15 is rather a wussy and underpowered weapon. They should have stuck with the 14 for design,and emphasized marksmanship like they used to. And for that matter, most causalities in modern warfare come from exploding ordnance of some type, not riflery.
And no, they aren't even close to suceeding in irak from their tactics, all they are doing is creating more anti american feeling. You kill one person innocently, you now have their whole family bent on blood revenge, something the masterminds directing this war failed to take into consideration, believing their own loony end times armageddon scenarios instead of actually talking to any middle east experts. Those are different folks with different cultures. Putting the PNAC *idiots* in charge was the surest way to failure. All they did was keep firing real military analysts-their own guys!- untl they found enough political hack "yes men" in uniform to proceed. No one with any military smarts supports their tactics, let alone their over all long term goals and how to go about it. They screwed the pooch *bigtime* on this one, you can see the prooof daily in the news, and are just about ready to step into it way over their heads. Now that's just an opinion and prediction, so we'll just have to wait and see if I am correct or not on that, no way to say with any certainty right now. I'll also say this-if they try some stunt and manage to knock another 15-20% of the planets oil supply out of the market, you will be seeing other large nations that depend on that oil getting pretty whizzed off, and perhaps acting accordingly.
The rest of the planet could easily use the threat of stopping the use of the federal reserve note to get the US to stop being nasty.That's it, that's the superweapon that can't be ignored.
The only way the US government is proceeding along this globalism path without total economic collapse right now is the repatriation of already exported greenbacks,coming back in the form of trade for further IOUs (the economy is already borked from that right now, no fix for it really). When that stops, and it most certainly will sometime, well, the Feds can print up all they want to then,and you can see how that works out like in zimbabwe right now. It doesn't.
As to military might, excluding planet busting mass use of WMD, which would be suicide basically, I think the current running wars show how effective high tech is *or isn't* when you have significant numbers of the local population annoyed with you. It only takes a few percent of the locals really annoyed, that's it, you are stuck in a war of attrition you will lose eventually. They can right now barely hold on to small selected areas in a small country, let alone try to pull that off in numerous nations all at the same time all over the planet. I don't think it's even remotely possible to do that.
Sometimes, like with alcoholics or drug addicts, they can't see the problem until they hit rock bottom. This software patent issue will inevitably collapse under its own burdensome restrictions, and THEN we'll get some meaningful change. Until then I expect it to get much worse unfortunately, but the rest of the planet might decide to just go ahead and ignore the bulk of software/business process/natural living things patents.
The other part is demographics, we are now getting close to the first full internet-accessed generation reaching voting age. This is *very important* and could conceivably be a major factor in changing a lot of aspects of government, not just with software patents, but across a whole range o social and economic issues.
Probably why governments are in such a tizzy to slap more restrictions on the internet, BTW, it is a direct threat to "rule by your betters" model that exists in most nations now.
The problem has been too many people in positions of authority who just don't "get it" on the whole voluntary sharing idea, or how unfettered access to software increases productivity in all the other areas of the economy. Adding onerous restrictions and unnecessary cost and layers of parasitical skimming middlemen just slows down progress and technological advances.
We had non tangible "Intellectual Property" back when all this was setup as a governmentally controlled resource. They specifically EXCLUDED writings, music, drawings, etc from those things that were worthy of getting a patent, relying on copyright instead. They were correct them and showed some amazing foresight that should carry on to today. Copyright should be more than enough for various stuff typed up in some language, which is all software really is. If you allow software patents, you might as well allow novels and paintings and musical scores to be patented.
I think "US government" refers to the Federal government. Most on your list is controlled by state or local governments, or should be. For just one instance, there's no need for a federal department of education. You could eliminate that entire bureaucracy. Military-we aren't supposed to have a perpetual large standing Army, especally one used in non defensive interventionist wars. The fathers were especially critical of that idea, saying it would lead to despotism. Police/firemen, etc,are local issues for the most part. We don't need near three dozen federal police agencies (yes, there are almost that many). Sewage/garbage/infrastructure, etc, local for the most part.
I think it's rather easy to see how disfunctional the federal government has become, they have exclusive control over one small basically urban area, DC. Can they run even that? Always been a mess near as I can see.
We are supposed to have by design a federation of 50 near completely soverign States, and the Federal government was severely restricted in the beginning, now they operate on a default everything under the sun is their business, they assume all rights, well beyond their lawful powers, they assume the only rights you have are the ones they grant, and seem all too eager to take those away completely and restrict the rest whenever they feel like it.
Yes, the Feds could get by on much less cash, we would need to return to Constitutional governmnet, not this mishmash of government by federal executive branch decree and laws (and lawmakers) bought by transnational corporations.
One of the larger issues they found was the high level of people unaware of any of the risks. Which is understandable because of the paucity of national coverage. We have a lot of smaller local coverage reports, but it doesn't move upstream to hit the big broadcasters, etc, near as much as it should.
You mean an ad where you are stuck in stinky rush hour traffic and the AC goes on the fritz so you roll the window down, except it's electric so you can't because it's broken? Then the one chance a year you get to wind 'er out, the bigbro camera catches you and you get a ticket?
That ad? Ya, I'd like to see it too. I also think they should make all the "closed track, professional driver" scenes illegal to use with advertising street cars. They should just stick to leggy girls in miniskirts getting in and out of the car and be done with it;)
You have 6-10 years to save up for a new engine. Don't buy a new car! Do the maintenance as required, then put in a new engine, possibly a rebuilt transaxle or transmission, etc, whatever you need. You'll come out loads cheaper that way (in most instances, not all of course, YMMV) if you really are buying brand new and you haven't totally beat the old ride to death in the meanwhile.
With that said, hemi refers to the shape of the combustion chamber, hemispherical.
Good point with the virtualization, might work. But..if people got it working there on their beige boxes...why would they want to drop one to three grand to get about the same thing on ac hardware? A small percent speed bump? Seems iffy, but ya, might be interesting. I'm not interested in it, but I know a lot of people would be. I ran apple hardware for over a decade, but then I discovered linux and the GPL. I'll struggle by with that, and build my own systems. I *used* to pay the premium but I see no big reason to do that now, I don't have any critical "mac only" apps to run. Windows was never an option for me really, not a lot of interest since DOS on a 286 days, man I hated that crap, switched to mac first time I tried, I mean I bought the box on the spot...but that was then, this is now. I like GUI, and sure am glad a lot of smart devs decided it might be a good idea to use it with linux. What you can get now is *plenty* good enough for my purposes. If there was a 200-300 buck new mac, just a plain jane tower that was upgradeable, I might try it again, but not for more, no real purpose nor need, and I build my systems on the cheap.
That's easy enough for them to address-no support on anything but mac hardware. But I also doubt they will do it at this time, but eventually they will, as open source keeps chipping away at all aspects of the computer environment. Might be some many years down the road but eventually they'll do it. They've shown that they will make hard decisions, with good, bad or "meh' as the outcome, but they have proven they can alter their business direction. Most likely it will occur once their OS will boot due to third party enthusiast's work on random x86 hardware, which it eventually will do in a non painful manner. I don't think they'll be able to prevent that, so their hand will be forced.
Vacation cabin + the family station wagon in one package. Pretty successful. Like you said, the multifunction cellphone, now with camera, wifi, GPS, radar, laser beams, plays MP3s and vidcasts. next year..more. They sell a couple of them... hey! Beenie frikkin weenie! huh, huh? Banana splits? Lunch boxes with a thermos inside? (ya, I know, geezerville) Girls in high heels? Computer bundles? Little bit 0 everything fireworks pack? Ace doubles sci-fi paperbacks? Box of cereal with toy inside? crew cab pickups? am-fm *and* cassette or cd player? Savage model 24 series?
and so forth
Lotsa successful convergences out there that combine two or more separate things into a new thing that is spiffy.
If you leave the pivoting guards in place it works perfectly fine, skil saws or table saws. That and knowing you are using a tool that has no pity...
Now what I would like to see is a lightweight integral sensor for chainsaws that will let you know there's an old piece of barbed wire embedded deep in a tree, or a nail or staple or even the odd bullet. Yep, found one of them once, but not cutting, splitting, right there on the break, some old jacketed rifle bullet.
You can *guess* if you see obvious marks in the bark if there's wire in there, but that's it, a guess. I imagine you could take the time with a hobbiest metal detector, but I've never done that.
60's were strange. We had various bad news war coverage all the time, still civil rights issues, riots, etc. but when it came to space, it's like everything stopped. All the channels covered space shots, they would suspend regular programming and just follow it all day long. Just about everyone loved it. It was something to just feel good about. So when we got a modern (for then) space show, it...took off is the word. Even though it was cancelled quickly, and no one really knew why besides the producers. And yes, I think that was the real kick in the pants decade for tech advances, although we are getting a LOT more now, it just seemed and felt more important then. Now it is normal to hear about fantastic advances, back then it was still exciting, even if by modern standards they weren't all that special or innovative. You just *knew* neat stuff was coming, it wasn't there yet, but it would be soon.
google that term. It just so happens I ran across that the other day doing an article for Technocrat and thought it was pretty neat. That's what workers are doing in argentina after various international economic schemes and scams blew their economy out. The courts there let them take over abandoned factories in various ways to see if the workers could make a go of it after the owners gave up and went bankrupt. It's exactly what you are looking for as for organizational structure.
Slashdot Mirror
Commercially viable electric vehicles in the 50s, in common useage? Do you recall the model/name of them to go look it up?
2 bucks for a music CD, 3 dollars for a movie DVD. Stamped out by the millions, that is a reasonable price, still plenty of room for profit for all concerned. They would sell way more copies then they do now, less profit per disk, but sell hella lot more disks. In the store, on the rack, no DRM crap, plays in any player you have. Download, don't care, it's ho hum. I prefer original hard copies of stuff.
That's my offer anyway. I used to buy a lot of music, then started buying some expensive on tape vids when that came out..then quit. I noticed they refused to drop prices as tech made making copies extremely cheap, especially since they switched to cheap stamped plastic discs. That is gouging, that lead to the problems they experience.
I don't D/L bootlegs either, in case you want to make some peg legger accusation. Legit free to copy would be fair game or at best I buy used very cheap or cutrate marked down bargain bin, but nothing full price anymore-it's a rip, gouging.
I know if it was me up there, no junk gets tossed! I keep about everything, you ought to see my worn out lawnmower collection, let alone ancient computers and other electronic gadgets. I even cut the cords off of really busted stuff and save those-hey, you never know when you might need a plug! My space station would look like sanford and space sons....
Are there any salvage laws yet? What is "abandoned" in space? Everything up there was at one point pretty darn valuable, just from the sheer launching costs let alone any tech it represents.
I would imagine that once private industry is up there all the time, that "space junk" will become a valuable resource and won't be allowed to just de orbit and burn up. They'll do something with it.
I think an ISP that catered to a step above uncaring noobs might be a good idea. Instead of just taking anyone with the cash, if you knew in advance you were going to get service from a professionally run company that really DID care about their customers, and did have some way to verify that they knew at least about phishing and proper netiquette and email scams and keeping a clean box, etc, it just might be a good thing.Probably be chaeper to run the business anyway, much less lame tech support calls or less zombies on your net.
There's something sorta similar in meatspace. I used to be a lifeguard at some big condos, and we had a rule, adult or not, you couldn't go into the deep end until we knew you and you had passed a three lap swimming test. No exceptions, it didn't matter if your rent was paid or not or how ripped you looked in your trunks or *anything*, you had to prove you could swim, period.. Now some guys were macho jerks about it, would say "FU, you think I can't swim?" etc, but we stuck to it and didn't have many problems with people after the few jerks were weeded out. So ya, a simple but effective test to get on the net, at least as pertains to normal functionality and the ability to use email without getting hosed and emphasizing the importance of trying to stay as malware free as possible.. I wouldn't have a prob with it really, I might sign with such an ISP voluntarily.
If you are a stockholder, you might want to consider looking at the situation from that point of view-with your lawyers. When working as an employee doesn't work, turn around and look at it from an ownership position, which as a stockholder you are. If they are putting your investment and the other stockholders and the clients at serious risk, you just might have a rather strong case. Think about it, a firm like that really relies on trust from the clients and public reputation for accuracy and security-if what you say is true they are not doing due diligence to maintain that. Then let your hired mouthpieces do the talking for you, just shutup at that point.. The tightwad stupid managers may ignore you, but they aren't going to ignore them.
$40 for a business??? Why don't you get all the employees to chip in 10 bucks a month as a christmas present to the company (and their jobs and sanity), and get better service for a year? Once your boss sees that it works, he is liable to grudgingly accept reality and pop for it.
...that threw any usable light. I am a big alternative energy proponent, I have certainly ranted enough here on the subject, so I keep buying these things every year thinking maybe now they are good enough and maybe I can use them and nuts! They suck! I wind up replacing them back with normal incandescents. If you want fluorescents, you have to use the normal tube jobs and that's it. The screw in ones bite it except for some sort of dim weird colored ambience light or for a porch light or something.
Now if they can get some affordable LED lights out there where the LEDS are aimed correctly (think shape/angle of the table lampshade for instance) instead of just being "round", then maybe they'll have a winner. But not at the prices they charge or that light wasting shape for the screw-ins I have seen-no thanks again.
cost/benefits/longevity/support
You have to take all those factors into consideration. What's the best tool? Will that tool be viable 5 years down the road, after you have committed a lot of time and money into it, or will it turn out to be an expensive white elephant, and just keep costing and costing until such a time as supporting the tool with time and money costs more than getting your original job done? MS wants you to keep the tool as the most important part, forever and ever, and keep shoveling cash their way. FOSS encourages you to use the tools now, keep using them in the future, share what you learn about it, others share with you freely, and in the meantime maybe save a lot of your cash and time and use it for something else possibly more important than just keeping the tool supplier in yachts and benzs. FOSS lets you get on with life, staying stuck to the MS tool rental store means you are their property and cash cow in perpetuity. They like to bandy about TCO figures, but seems to me you can never determine what that realistically is if you get on an endless check writing treadmill to redmond.
no, I knew that, rights are born-with. I was just pointing out the government seems to think they are all government-granted, as in they restrict them all the time with absolutely no regards about it. This latest one, fries my grits: "free speech zones". Like, WTF is that? How can any badged wonder who has taken an oath support such idiocy and unlawfullness? The free speech zone is anyplace inside the US, period, not some cage three miles from a political rally.
The list is huge, the infractions too numerous to count practically. And the Rs and Ds just trade off which of the born with rights they want to fold bend mutilate and staple. The end result is, politics as business as usual means you are screwed unless you are part of the above the law elite globalist class.
That's why I think eventually the system will collapse, it's just too terribly broken, in too many areas. Not sure when, but I bet it happens.
Have to disagree. A high tech military needs a supply train that is in a safe area. cut that train anyplace and they grind to a halt-no fuel, food, water, resupply, etc. They completely rely on an intact and safe rear area. With widespread guerrila type war, that evaporates. And decimation against the civilian populations would lead to reactionary reprisals against the military and their civilian supporters. It's OK to try that way over yonder, trying it in the same place you are trying to live at can't be done for very long unless you enjoy overwhelming popular support, something you wouldn't have if you were flattening your own cities.
It just doesn't work, numerous examples out there. They would have to resort to suicidal widespread use of WMD. Even conventional weaponry woud run out soon, then there would be little resupply. You aren't going to get factory workers to do much of a good job keeping the armaments flowing when their kin folk are being decimated or stuck in camps. You aren't going to get farmers to keep supplying food when their fields are napalmed and their tractors destroyed. The conventional forces would indeed have initial mass destruction on their side, but eventually would lose as they just ran out of stuff to keep the high tech edge.
How do you take out a fighter plane when you have no anti air defences? You waste the pilots in their bar. The tanker trucks delivering fuel, they come around a corner, poof, no more fuel. And etc. This has been wargamed extensively by people all over, smart guys, they all have come up with the same outcome. Assymetrical warfare is the hardest warfare for conventional forces to fight. And if they just start levelling cities, any "support" they have in that population will go away, and they'll start having desertions in the ranks and grunts turning their weapons on superiors in fragging incidents then leaving with their weapons.
BTW, I don't drink nor have any drinking buddies and think the ar-15 is rather a wussy and underpowered weapon. They should have stuck with the 14 for design,and emphasized marksmanship like they used to. And for that matter, most causalities in modern warfare come from exploding ordnance of some type, not riflery.
And no, they aren't even close to suceeding in irak from their tactics, all they are doing is creating more anti american feeling. You kill one person innocently, you now have their whole family bent on blood revenge, something the masterminds directing this war failed to take into consideration, believing their own loony end times armageddon scenarios instead of actually talking to any middle east experts. Those are different folks with different cultures. Putting the PNAC *idiots* in charge was the surest way to failure. All they did was keep firing real military analysts-their own guys!- untl they found enough political hack "yes men" in uniform to proceed. No one with any military smarts supports their tactics, let alone their over all long term goals and how to go about it. They screwed the pooch *bigtime* on this one, you can see the prooof daily in the news, and are just about ready to step into it way over their heads. Now that's just an opinion and prediction, so we'll just have to wait and see if I am correct or not on that, no way to say with any certainty right now. I'll also say this-if they try some stunt and manage to knock another 15-20% of the planets oil supply out of the market, you will be seeing other large nations that depend on that oil getting pretty whizzed off, and perhaps acting accordingly.
The rest of the planet could easily use the threat of stopping the use of the federal reserve note to get the US to stop being nasty.That's it, that's the superweapon that can't be ignored.
The only way the US government is proceeding along this globalism path without total economic collapse right now is the repatriation of already exported greenbacks,coming back in the form of trade for further IOUs (the economy is already borked from that right now, no fix for it really). When that stops, and it most certainly will sometime, well, the Feds can print up all they want to then,and you can see how that works out like in zimbabwe right now. It doesn't.
As to military might, excluding planet busting mass use of WMD, which would be suicide basically, I think the current running wars show how effective high tech is *or isn't* when you have significant numbers of the local population annoyed with you. It only takes a few percent of the locals really annoyed, that's it, you are stuck in a war of attrition you will lose eventually. They can right now barely hold on to small selected areas in a small country, let alone try to pull that off in numerous nations all at the same time all over the planet. I don't think it's even remotely possible to do that.
Sometimes, like with alcoholics or drug addicts, they can't see the problem until they hit rock bottom. This software patent issue will inevitably collapse under its own burdensome restrictions, and THEN we'll get some meaningful change. Until then I expect it to get much worse unfortunately, but the rest of the planet might decide to just go ahead and ignore the bulk of software/business process/natural living things patents.
The other part is demographics, we are now getting close to the first full internet-accessed generation reaching voting age. This is *very important* and could conceivably be a major factor in changing a lot of aspects of government, not just with software patents, but across a whole range o social and economic issues.
Probably why governments are in such a tizzy to slap more restrictions on the internet, BTW, it is a direct threat to "rule by your betters" model that exists in most nations now.
The problem has been too many people in positions of authority who just don't "get it" on the whole voluntary sharing idea, or how unfettered access to software increases productivity in all the other areas of the economy. Adding onerous restrictions and unnecessary cost and layers of parasitical skimming middlemen just slows down progress and technological advances.
We had non tangible "Intellectual Property" back when all this was setup as a governmentally controlled resource. They specifically EXCLUDED writings, music, drawings, etc from those things that were worthy of getting a patent, relying on copyright instead. They were correct them and showed some amazing foresight that should carry on to today. Copyright should be more than enough for various stuff typed up in some language, which is all software really is. If you allow software patents, you might as well allow novels and paintings and musical scores to be patented.
I think "US government" refers to the Federal government. Most on your list is controlled by state or local governments, or should be. For just one instance, there's no need for a federal department of education. You could eliminate that entire bureaucracy. Military-we aren't supposed to have a perpetual large standing Army, especally one used in non defensive interventionist wars. The fathers were especially critical of that idea, saying it would lead to despotism. Police/firemen, etc,are local issues for the most part. We don't need near three dozen federal police agencies (yes, there are almost that many). Sewage/garbage/infrastructure, etc, local for the most part.
I think it's rather easy to see how disfunctional the federal government has become, they have exclusive control over one small basically urban area, DC. Can they run even that? Always been a mess near as I can see.
We are supposed to have by design a federation of 50 near completely soverign States, and the Federal government was severely restricted in the beginning, now they operate on a default everything under the sun is their business, they assume all rights, well beyond their lawful powers, they assume the only rights you have are the ones they grant, and seem all too eager to take those away completely and restrict the rest whenever they feel like it.
Yes, the Feds could get by on much less cash, we would need to return to Constitutional governmnet, not this mishmash of government by federal executive branch decree and laws (and lawmakers) bought by transnational corporations.
Scoop has an article about a zogby poll commissioned to look at US voters impressions of computerised/blackbox voting.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0608/S00220.htm
One of the larger issues they found was the high level of people unaware of any of the risks. Which is understandable because of the paucity of national coverage. We have a lot of smaller local coverage reports, but it doesn't move upstream to hit the big broadcasters, etc, near as much as it should.
You mean an ad where you are stuck in stinky rush hour traffic and the AC goes on the fritz so you roll the window down, except it's electric so you can't because it's broken? Then the one chance a year you get to wind 'er out, the bigbro camera catches you and you get a ticket?
;)
That ad? Ya, I'd like to see it too. I also think they should make all the "closed track, professional driver" scenes illegal to use with advertising street cars. They should just stick to leggy girls in miniskirts getting in and out of the car and be done with it
You have 6-10 years to save up for a new engine. Don't buy a new car! Do the maintenance as required, then put in a new engine, possibly a rebuilt transaxle or transmission, etc, whatever you need. You'll come out loads cheaper that way (in most instances, not all of course, YMMV) if you really are buying brand new and you haven't totally beat the old ride to death in the meanwhile.
With that said, hemi refers to the shape of the combustion chamber, hemispherical.
Good point with the virtualization, might work. But..if people got it working there on their beige boxes...why would they want to drop one to three grand to get about the same thing on ac hardware? A small percent speed bump? Seems iffy, but ya, might be interesting. I'm not interested in it, but I know a lot of people would be. I ran apple hardware for over a decade, but then I discovered linux and the GPL. I'll struggle by with that, and build my own systems. I *used* to pay the premium but I see no big reason to do that now, I don't have any critical "mac only" apps to run. Windows was never an option for me really, not a lot of interest since DOS on a 286 days, man I hated that crap, switched to mac first time I tried, I mean I bought the box on the spot...but that was then, this is now. I like GUI, and sure am glad a lot of smart devs decided it might be a good idea to use it with linux. What you can get now is *plenty* good enough for my purposes. If there was a 200-300 buck new mac, just a plain jane tower that was upgradeable, I might try it again, but not for more, no real purpose nor need, and I build my systems on the cheap.
That's easy enough for them to address-no support on anything but mac hardware. But I also doubt they will do it at this time, but eventually they will, as open source keeps chipping away at all aspects of the computer environment. Might be some many years down the road but eventually they'll do it. They've shown that they will make hard decisions, with good, bad or "meh' as the outcome, but they have proven they can alter their business direction. Most likely it will occur once their OS will boot due to third party enthusiast's work on random x86 hardware, which it eventually will do in a non painful manner. I don't think they'll be able to prevent that, so their hand will be forced.
does it take a cookie to work? check that?
Vacation cabin + the family station wagon in one package. Pretty successful. Like you said, the multifunction cellphone, now with camera, wifi, GPS, radar, laser beams, plays MP3s and vidcasts. next year..more. They sell a couple of them... hey! Beenie frikkin weenie! huh, huh? Banana splits? Lunch boxes with a thermos inside? (ya, I know, geezerville) Girls in high heels? Computer bundles? Little bit 0 everything fireworks pack? Ace doubles sci-fi paperbacks? Box of cereal with toy inside? crew cab pickups? am-fm *and* cassette or cd player? Savage model 24 series?
and so forth
Lotsa successful convergences out there that combine two or more separate things into a new thing that is spiffy.
If you leave the pivoting guards in place it works perfectly fine, skil saws or table saws. That and knowing you are using a tool that has no pity...
Now what I would like to see is a lightweight integral sensor for chainsaws that will let you know there's an old piece of barbed wire embedded deep in a tree, or a nail or staple or even the odd bullet. Yep, found one of them once, but not cutting, splitting, right there on the break, some old jacketed rifle bullet.
You can *guess* if you see obvious marks in the bark if there's wire in there, but that's it, a guess. I imagine you could take the time with a hobbiest metal detector, but I've never done that.
...to think some of this stuff is officially sanctioned, state sponsored or at least allowed to continue?
60's were strange. We had various bad news war coverage all the time, still civil rights issues, riots, etc. but when it came to space, it's like everything stopped. All the channels covered space shots, they would suspend regular programming and just follow it all day long. Just about everyone loved it. It was something to just feel good about. So when we got a modern (for then) space show, it...took off is the word. Even though it was cancelled quickly, and no one really knew why besides the producers. And yes, I think that was the real kick in the pants decade for tech advances, although we are getting a LOT more now, it just seemed and felt more important then. Now it is normal to hear about fantastic advances, back then it was still exciting, even if by modern standards they weren't all that special or innovative. You just *knew* neat stuff was coming, it wasn't there yet, but it would be soon.
google that term. It just so happens I ran across that the other day doing an article for Technocrat and thought it was pretty neat. That's what workers are doing in argentina after various international economic schemes and scams blew their economy out. The courts there let them take over abandoned factories in various ways to see if the workers could make a go of it after the owners gave up and went bankrupt. It's exactly what you are looking for as for organizational structure.