You are anonymous already, so spill the beans, please. Please name the *exact* clueless bozo in charge, name/title, etc, of this decision to force you guys to use IE6, so that the population in general can ridicule and harangue him, shame and embarrass. It is also not very secure, so there is the whole "homerland cybersecurity" angle to push as well. We need a name to throw at some elected officials in the appropriate subcommittees and to the press.
I disagree on your economic analysis with software patents. Patents on software are a type of "broken windows fallacy" argument, and as such, are a hindrance to the economy, not any sort of positive asset.
This is *precisely* the time we should be abandoning outdated (**AA type numbers and agenda, the entertainment distribution "industry")/harmful(software and living things patenting)/useless(casino gambling banks and created out of thin air financial "products")/parasitic(governmental make-work mc jobs) "businesses".
Yes, there would be an adjustment period if we eliminated the bulk of those "jobs" up above, but after a short time, you would find people would be concentrating on real wealth production work, which in turn contributes to real wealth creation, an economy that doesn't need sham official figures to try and sugar coat reality, or one that relies on..shoot..bingo cards as somehow all that valuable. This "IP" stuff is all well and good in some extreme moderation levels, but you can't run a huge nation the size of the US on services, patenting everything possible, every little tiny nuance of anything, even abstract concepts, and then high stakes financial gambling. The rest of the planet is starting to route around those bottlenecks now, that is why we are having a financial crisis, because we have been doing things "that way". So it is "that way" that needs to change, not just do more of it.
..you got it. The value (primarily) in open source is using it in *another* business.
I have an analogy I use:
Home Depot (which would be the software only company) makes a lot of money selling tools and stuff, the materials used to do..things, a lot of different things. It's a good business but the market is limited to how many of these sorts of businesses can really exist. Now just one more step away, the amount made using the tools and stuff that comes from home depot dwarfs it. All the other businesses use Home Depot's stuff as an economic force multiplier. A simple carpentry job say requires X value lumber from Home Depot. Home Depot makes Y profit from that X, and it isn't all that much, much less than X. But, the carpenter, by doing value added work done with that lumber, probably makes 10x or better profit, at only 1X cost to him for what he bought at Home Depot.
If every business out there wanted to be just another Home Depot, it wouldn't work. Same with "software-only" as a stand alone business. The industry can support some, but not everyone can be in the software selling exclusively business, but USING the software is some unrelated business..that's where a lot more can be made. Yellow pages, A to Z, hundreds of thousands of businesses use software now, and can be profitable doing what they do. Open source and sharing helps drop the cost of X for all these other businesses, and savvy managers would realize it pays in the long run to share and share alike, as they get better tools to use in their unrelated business, meaning, they can help fund it a little by using their own devs or at least being good testers and users and contributing back what they can upstream.
It's not tinfoil hat, it is observing human nature. Once you have fatcats that are already mutil millionaires/billionaires, and they can easily buy anything they want, multiples, there's only one lust left, and that is dominance over other humans, a feudalistic outlook. That's what they want, that's how they live now, their policies support it, and it isn't accidental at all.
And it shows in the article, only evil people who want that sort of power treat employees that way, and the same mindset goes upstream from there. And at the tippy top, there you have people who regard endless wars as just profits central. If there is no legitimate war, by golly they will manufacture one, and they don't care a whit about bloodshed and pain and suffering. How evile can you get before it is acknowledged that it is in fact evil? How is that not a plan when they go way out of their way to do such things?
And that why all these fatcats love china and are building it up, while they try to destroy the US with our unique background of the sovereign individual with the government being subservient. They hate that, they like the older ways better with aristocrats in charge of everything and owning everything. The US middle class that got built up by the 60s was the antithesis to that, so it had to go, so they started making it go away. China is their posterboy dream society and nation, 1% corrupt controllers, and everyone else as serfs, and if you have enough money, you can do anything you want. Anything. Ya, once in awhile they might pop some minor fatcat, who possibly embarrassed them or didn't pay enough bribes upstream, etc...like in ancient times the Romans would chuck some fatcat to the lions for sport. They are evil, that's their nature. You don't get to the "top" like that without being psychopathic in some way.
Feudalism and the aristocracy never went away, they just changed clothing and titles around a little and come up with phony "elections", but it's the same old crap, just with new shiny tech around it. That's why I have been calling this trend to this sort of world and society as "technofeudalism".
That wasn't true two generations ago, and I remember it clearly, as do a lot of other folks on this board who are early boomers or older. The USA made just about everything people here bought, and they bought everything that was made, and the currency shifted around internally a lot more than it does now, acting as an economic force multiplier inside our own 50 state/nation "free trade common market", and not near as much went to imports from outside of those 50 states. And we had a robust middle class that actually owned things, instead of being in debt for everything beyond the ability to pay, and you only needed one normal blue collar level income to support a family, etc. We had ten year house notes, 12 month car loans, and medical insurance was way cheap.
Now what has changed is Cxx salaries went from around 10-40 times what a line worker made, to now..who knows, thousands? What does Balmer or any of these other transnational CEOs-and all their legions of sub bosses- make compared to the wage of these Chinese factory line workers? I'm not going to bother to look it up, but I bet it is more than 40 times, a LOT more. We also didn't have near as much wall street mass wealth skimming going on, and the propaganda shilling to engage in global wage arbitrage or "globalism" hadn't started yet (much).
As to people here not wanting to do the work, any time a factory announces hiring they have thousands of applications for hundreds of jobs generally speaking. As to ag work and construction etc "no one wants to do it so they have to import workers", another fairy tale. And I know I have read here *many* times that in white collar IT work they game the system to get insourced cheaper labor as well, come up with background credentials needed that are physically impossible for anyone to have achieved, then use that as "proof" they need more H1Bs and so on. Musta read hundreds of those anecdotals here over the years now.
These fatcats goal is to break the back of the middle class, to steal their wealth, full stop, so they can have their global two class society, especially in the US where the middle class got so big and strong. They are feudalists at heart. Between outsourcing and insourcing, they are succeeding. If their schemes worked for the nation as a whole, like those liars claim, then we wouldn't have an economic "crisis" like is going on. That proves their lies completely.
Last year, because of their corruption and takeover of government, they granted over a million green cards (that's just the legal insourcing, who knows how many million more off the books insourced people showed up to keep driving wages down), right in the middle of a mass unemployment situation with a lowballed 10% unemployment rate, and if you add in real part time workers and people finally off unemployment insurance, it is 17%, which is in the middle of "great depression" era numbers.
Outsourcing and insourcing, the double whammy plan to marginalize and destroy the middle class here so they can have their globalist master/serf society, with one percent owning everything eventually. That's what is going on.
....but I also think that applies to both major parties. I have little use for either of them. there is a small handful of the major elected members on both sides I have some admiration for, but for the most part, I regard both parties as being more corrupt than not, and they both will take as much corporate cash as they can, and dish out the favors. When you have an elected government primarily run by millionaires who all are tied to income from wall street in a big way..well, like you said, a plutocracy happens.
this -> "The European Union has a population larger than the United States and yet it manages just fine."..past history man, I'm talking about going forward. I really suggest you take the blinders off and LOOK at some in depth economic analysis, get beyond the headlines and read some contrarian economists. Oh heck, here's one, the darlingest of your ultra far left rich dudes, soros, argue with him why doncha about the future status of your dream welfare union.. the EU is right behind the US with the debt bomb realities. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-09/soros-says-greece-needs-cheaper-loans-to-avoid-death-circle-.html
really, ^^^^ those dudes right there run things. In and out of government, the musical chairs with thieves and liars in government, in the Fed, back to their Wall Street gangster lairs, lather rinse repeat, and it hasn't mattered a whit which imperial leader or group of goofballs in our congress we have had, D or R next to their name, it's those same dudes always *really* in charge behind the scenes....
Now see why we aren't going to be having any welfare state here, or even a credible economy soon? The system is already broken, we've been "corporate raided" on a huge scale, and even the "change" government is just more of the same tired old BS.
Your central banker pigs are just as much thieves as ours have been, you'll see... just wait. Your welfare states are going to be crumbling because you don't understand simple basic math, plus time travel, you can't live in the past and expect that to be the future or..along those lines, ain't happening. What was then, was then, in the future.....? I am old enough to remember when the US had a very decent real economy, we were the largest creditor nation, not the biggest borrower, and healthcare was cheap, affordable for most people. Even the crappiest jobs had free or cheap coverage, or you could buy it on the side for cheap. But then the corporate looting really began, along with the ludicrous expansion of government based on lying promises of something for nothing...now 35 years later, poofed, gone, we are sunk without borrowing money all the time, and we have no credible plans to pay back what we have already borrowed.
You have to make money to spend it, FIRST, on welfare or whatever, and no, running printing presses is not making money. You can't keep pouring six gallons of stuff from a five gallon bucket, and accounting and bookkeeping tricks only work so long. You don't make money by exporting jobs, them other fellas make the money then. And you certainly don't make money by letting your central casino bankers run rampant and steal everything that ain't nailed down, and especially when you run those thieves in and out of official government positions where they get to *set policy*.
Now some of the nations there in the EU just might squeak by over the
The larger governments get, the more inefficient and corrupt they get. It just happens. I just looked, Finland population = 5.4 million. US=300 million. Finland has a 200 member parliament, the US has 435 Reps and 100 senators (2 per state). the average citizen in the US is FAR from power, just do the math. See a problem yet with working coherently? The US government is huge already, millions of employees, and they are already so far in debt that even if we went to a 100% tax rate it would take years to break even and start over. We need to borrow trillions a year from some place foreign just to maintain what we have already. And borrowing means it has to be paid back, with interest. do the math again.
It's a big freaking mess. It's a debt bubble/bomb that is around two years from total implosion.
The tea party movement at its very basic core is just wanting to reduce the size of government down to a more manageable and affordable level, and get a handle on budgets and taxes, including simplifying the tax code, etc. They were against the bailouts, both the casino banks and the dinosaur car companies. They are against so called health care reform because they recognize it for what it is, a bailout for dinosaur insurance companies, it's a conjob that will just cost more.
People here are not all that adverse to helping, or caring for our poorest,, etc, just our past track record is rather dismal, and stuff always seems to cost many times more than what they initially claim it will cost, with only half the results, or less.
So even though you are talking about two countries/nations, there's no real comparison in what can be done, not at this time anyway, until we can come up with some way to afford what we are committed to already, yet alone any more welfare things. We are bleeding jobs the last two decades, bad, and need near two million jobs a year created just to maintain. And it isn't happening. There's just *pitiful* job creation going on.
In short, we can't afford it, "it" being everything they spend on now, wars, entitlements, whatever, the money just isn't there and they are existing on credit and wishful thinking and passing the buck to the future where it will magically get taken care of.
So don't blame the tea party folks for pointing out the realities of the situation. The entrenched D and R parties have had..forever to fix things, and they haven't. I've been active in politics since the early 60s and it's the same crap, election cycle after election cycle. It is NEVER going to get fixed as long as the D and R parties keep our government hijacked and run as a crony jobs and bribery program. Which is all it is at this point.
Something new is needed, and it is at least an attempt, I'll give them that. Other folks can try what they want to as well, but sure as heck just doing the same thing we have been doing over and over again will lead to the US being the fastest decaying super power empire ever at this rate. Once the rest of the world panics and starts really dumping the dollar (which I think has great odds of happening), and we lose global "reserve currency" status, that's it, the party is over, there won't be anything like you see now, let alone any full cradle to grave welfare society. The money just isn't there, it's already spent, years/decades ago. Broke, busted, bankrupt, flat..see?
You have to make wealth before you spend it, whatever you spend it on. They are trying to do that just by running the dollar printing press...and that won't work forever, just like that stupid house flipping bubble ponzi scheme didn't work forever either.
The false alarms will be tremendous. How about landscapers and farmers, or even joe homeowner spraying some weeds around his driveway? Modern technological life has a ton of chemicals associated with it. Use some bleach on your kitchen counter, or in the laundry, stuff like that.
If you doubt the corruption angle with drugs (which I guess is the basis of your reply, that that is "paranoid"? It's just data, man, look it up yourself, verification is a simple google search away, have at it, there have been tons of prosecuted cases over the years and all sorts of articles written about it, etc. Heck, read any article lately about the scene in mexico and they all mention how corrupt the government is there, and I sincerely doubt all this corruption magically stops exactly at the border.
Oh, if you are wondering or making an allusion, nope, don't smoke pot or do any other drugs other than cheap coffee and some cheap cigars. I rarely even take an aspirin.
I'm still in favor of legalizing it though, this prohibition "cure" just makes the situation much worse. The war on drugs was lost years ago, it will never work, and it has never been cost effective. Society is going to have to come up with something other than classifying some huge percentage of their population as criminals.
There are several reasons why the goons in most countries love to keep some drugs illegal, here are the five largest reasons, and this would more or less apply to mexico as well as the US right now:
1) They make a shitload, I mean just truckloads of cash more money at it, and all governments have insiders who are corrupt and in the drug trade, top to bottom to sideways. Look, they can't even keep drugs out of prisons, this is a major clue how corrupting all that huge cash money is. Illegal drug money funds from street cops all the way to judges, prosecutors, a lot of dotmil smugglers, spooks of various nations, and so on, all the way to major funding banks and real estate funds..that money is being transferred around "in the system" as well as under the table. Legalizing it would knock those cash profits down immensely, to those people and to the other "civilian" smugglers and dealers. Really, dealers are the last people to want it legalized. And the government simply does not want to lose all their "war on some drugs" gravy train. And gives pols some TV talking points about being "tough" on..drugs, whatever. They are always "tough"...lookit their ads during election cycles
2)Gives them a wonderful excuse to keep building the police state. They have people completely conditioned now to accept no knock raids, roadblocks, cameras, wiretaps, legions of "undercover" goons, etc..stuff that was taught to me was only done in evile places like east germany, back when I was a kid. Now..common. Plus, they got all the cops and paramilitary conditioned that it is all "legal and proper".
3)Takes more and more people out of the official "you are cool to vote" pool, and makes felons out of them, so they have legal obligations that go to forward point 2 above (the goal is for all citizens to be criminals so the governments can pwnz ur azz
4)creates a ton of unnecessary jobs in the criminal justice system, including building private for profit jails and running inmate slave labor factories and shops, supplying the hardware for the surveillance and command and control big bro state, etc. A lot of people make a lot of money off of big brother action now, and the war on terra and drugs are the two big reasons for them to do that.
5)then there's stuff like medicinal marijuana and industrial hemp..cheap to grow, effective for a lot of purposes..threatens a lot of established old big money interests.
Crap. And you are a cult member because you "believed" in their fairy tale threats and extortion and other lies, just like a good cult member "believes" in whatever his or her cult leaders tell them to believe. This is the sort of system we have
THAT is what would have crashed, and it deserves it. The other system, the one where people are honest and just go to work and make useful things and similar, would have been just fine in short order after we had disposed of that rotten carcass. And I'll counter that phony cult belief system every time I see it on this board. "Believing" in their lies and repeating them is no different from being a flat earther or scamsciencetologist.
There are no rules, just looting by the casino banks, facilitated by their cult members and brainwashing. Yep, I would be for a "free market" if it existed. Those turkeys would be past history by now if it did. You can defend them or believe in their lies, I refuse, I don't support conmen. And I wouldn't have said jack shit to you if you hadn't insulted the guy you were replying to with your snarky "nice try" comment. "ohhh we avoided a collapse". No we didn't, we facilitated even more ripoffs! We got put on the hook for trillions to support that grifter's economy!
I'll speak from long "olden days get off my lawn" perspective here as regards street protests. You realize that if you keep it up, not only will you eventually OD on teargas, but there is a distinct real possibility you will suffer permanent physical damage to your body from getting beat on by goons with clubs, plus spend a long time in the pokey, or get a heart attack from a Taser, or they will just shoot you. And nowadays they hire recent combat vets whose mindset is "kill" to be "community police". All the old cops are gone, and a lot of them were certainly bad enough, the new younger ones now are all black suited swat wannabees and snipers and door kickers and so on, where the main goal is protect the criminals at the top of the political scene.
If after all these decades we still have the bulk of the people voting for either criminal gang R or D...no use anymore, I quit. I know *I* am certainly not going out protesting anymore, those days are long freakin gone for this gray haired and bearded boy. It just ain't worth protesting when that simple easy step-to just STOP voting for the criminals isn't being taken in large enough numbers, in all age demographics, including my own.
The boomers (some, not all, but a lot at the time) did good, I honestly think we did, but after a decade and change of non stop protest and political reform and activism, and at least accomplishing some semblance of racial and gender equality and ending the draft and at least ending one big blood profits war..time for the next generations to step up and do something.
*crickets*
If they don't care about their future..well..that's it then, they don't care. If people succumb to brainwashing with that "don't waste your vote" BS and keep electing from the approved by the elite overlords pool of media-picked-for-you candidates...well, that's it, they don't care. If they can't see the brainwashing, just keep sucking it up, believing in that horsecrap drivel those professional pols spew, after all the evidence out there going back generations as to why this is a stoopid idea...well, they don't care, you get what you get when you don't care or allow yourself to become compromised.
In a way, I think ending the draft backfired bigtime. Not that I want it back, but when 50% of the young population was staring at the real possibility of fighting yet another bankers/wall street profits war...you did get a lot of protest and "social unrest". It dropped off rapidly once the draft ended. And the "overlords" learned from their mistakes, and came up with a new plan they implemented for controlling the population. With no draft, what they do now is a stealth economic draft and control. Blow the economy out enough, raise tuition costs enough, get people believing that credit (debt) is the same as wealth accumulation, and they get all the younger "volunteers" they need to "join up" and go fight those same wars, basically just to have a job, and the older ones get stuck in that perpetual debt trap, so they are very reluctant to become that nail sticking up that gets hammered.
When we had tons more entry level and "good enough" paying manufacturing jobs, you didn't see it as much, people weren't as afraid I think, they would go protest, but now that those are poofing, and a lot of service jobs that were traditionally taken by new entries to the work force like in construction go to wall street max profits labor arbitrage "new arrivals"..it doesn't leave much choice for a lot of younger folks. And they have so many people dependent on some check from the state for their life...they don't want to rock the boat. Carrot and the stick, equally applied. don't rock the boat, maybe you get a small carrot, rock the boat, you will get the big stick.
So the older ones are just tired of being the ones protesting, plus are now saddled in debt and staring at real old age sneaking up, and maybe losing their job, etc, and the younger folks are so economically compromised in advance of getting out of school e
Wrong. Your cult member response is just slap wrong.
That system needed to crash and burn, the sooner the better so we can rebuild around fairer ways and sounder economic policies. That three headed ultimate conjob scam bankster gangster criminal cartel of the Fed, Wall Street casino bank parasites and so called government regulators-who come from the first two, then go back to them at big bucks after their alleged government "service"- *needed* to collapse. The sooner the better. Pure scam ripoffs, bloated ticks, or as Matt Taibbi put it referring to goldman sachs, a vampire squid sucking the face of humanity. Just because some people got brainwashed into a Stockholm syndrome defense of their "masters", doesn't mean all of us got sucked into "believing" their extortionist lies and threats they used. Ya, an economy "would have crashed", THEIR bullshit thieving economy. They would have "earned" it. Pigs. Privatize profits, socialized their risks and huge gambling losses. Fascist, corporatist *pigs*, and too chicken shit and too corrupt and crooked to eat their own capitalist dogfood. Same sort of pigs and same policies that completely destroyed Iceland economically, a microcosm of the larger picture.
In a REAL free market, where the rules were applied fairly, those parasites would have crashed and burned, gone really bankrupt just like any other failed industry or business model, then their "financial products" their suckass "quants" come up with would have been exposed for the smoke and mirrors financial snakeoil they are, monopoly money crap, "weapons of mass financial destruction", worth maybe a fraction of a penny on the inflated buck, and that's only if they were printed out and the printouts sold for scrap.
Easily proven, not even close to being rocket surgery, a simple observation that counters that BS brainwashing they keep their economic cult members under control with -> IF those grifter's conjobs worked, they WOULDN'T have needed bailouts nor would there be any "economic crisis".
Well, I know what you are saying and agree with the sentiment. If you look back when the masks were banned, it was to counter ku klux klanners and other sorts going out and doing nasty stuff in public and hiding behind that anonymity. I am guessing now that it has been taken to court already, but I haven't researched it yet.
Now what I don't like is COPS being able to hide behind masks, plus remove their insignia, at public demonstrations. The same laws should apply to them as well.
As to infrared devices, etc., You can buy them, I own some night vision goggles, old style, that use infra red. They are classed in generations, old ww2 stuff is first gen, I think they are up to fifth gen by now. Goggles or scopes in that class, using passive image intensifying, cost thousands and are quite good, by accounts I have read.
I had one of my friends who got nailed with those fast fuel oil price hikes way back then do an emergency wood heater install, then he needed wood somehow. As everyone and their cuzzin leroy was scarfing up the traditional sources of wood fuel, he had a brainstorm. As he had two teenage sons he gave them a daily after school chore. First, he goes to the pawnshop and gets a few used skilsaws. Next, on his way home from work every day, he stops in alleys and scrounges free old wood pallets, looking for the heavy ones, which are usually made from "swamp oak", named such from their rather pissy smell. His sons got the task of cutting up the pallets into reasonable chunks, which they burned.
Like I said, a lot of places allow the cutting of firewood for personal use in the local national forest. Sometimes you can find a private party that would allow that as well, for cheap. So all you need then is a truck, or stout trailer.
Another way to get cheaper wood is to buy it in log length, have it delivered, and do the final cutting and stacking in the yard.
And yet another way is to contact tree trimmers and utility crews, tell them you'll let them dump hardwood trimmings. I've gotten a lot for free that way myself when I lived in town before.
As to gardens, you don't need much to make a decent hit, a 20' x 20' garden will give you a LOT of food. In season you will get bags and bags everyday. Plus run a google search for "edible landscaping", another good way to have a lot of food from a smaller in town area. And I once had an even larger garden than that, when I had an apartment. There was this old lady at the outskirts right out of town, she allowed folks to garden in her backyard, which was a tiny farm she and her late husband used to run. Once he was gone and she didn't work the farm, it sat empty, so she allowed the little garden plots. Perhaps a craigslist ask might work there "wanted, garden space close to xyzburg", etc.
There's a fairly well "growing" movement for urban gardening, even small scale urban poultry production. Heck, they are bulldozing down now half of Detroit, and a lot of gardens and little farms are going in all over that city.
As to costs, all relative I guess, location is what counts. Some areas of the nation are way more expensive than others. A friend of mine is this week closing on three acres-mostly wooded except for the yard- with a four bed two bath house on it, 169 thou. That property is roughly an hour even drive-time outside of Atlanta, so it isn't all that far from big time urban scene.
Anyway, if you are into self sufficiency/practical preparedness, check out my homepage, that is what it is all about. We have deep woods dwellers to urban apartment dwellers there, and every sort of location in between.
I use four cords a winter. It would be less but this cabin isn't insulated as well as it should be..yet..working on it, one of my numerous spring projects. I also know they make way more efficient wood burners than the one I use now. So..I could cut that amount in half. (I am in north Georgia for reference, obviously way more up north you would use more) In eastern decent rainfall deciduous/mixed forests, you can pull a cord an acre a year easy, probably more, and never run out, always have the same amount of trees and wood there. So say you are on a small plot of land, just three to say five acres, with a two acre woodlot. A well insulated home**, you could have space for a huge garden, a fish pond, some fruit trees, a chicken run, plenty of yard/grass/ even a small pasture, plus your hard wood trees for wood, and no stopping you having a lot of those trees being nut trees, walnuts/pecans whatever, so there's more food for you and the local wildlife.
Also keep in mind a lot of places allow firewood harvesting out of the local national or state forest, for free or a reasonable small fee.
**I am of the opinion that dollar for dollar, becoming more energy efficient in the first place-dropping demand-is the best dollar spent, talking about heating or cooling or lighting or any other regular energy use. I know I looked at the transportation scene and energy costs, and knowing I need a truck, looked for an efficient diesel over a faster gas engine truck. I don't care about speed, I just want to haul stuff from point A to B cheaply, and my 40 MPG diesel truck works for that, for most of my purposes. I don't really need a huge V8 all the time like a lot of guys have..and drive around mostly empty.
FF has automatic scrolling when you pick a spot on some web page and hit your left and right mouse buttons simultaneously. An up and down arrow icon thing appears, and you can adjust the automatic scroll speed by how close you leave the cursor to the new icon controller. Works great, it's very controllable, give it a shot. I use it a lot at dinner time, can sit here with my plate of food and eat in peace while I read an entire thread at my comfortable reading speed, without having to touch the mouse. The thing you are describing I have never seen happen, so can't comment on it. Ya, sounds bad, you must have something broken. I'd suggest trash it and reinstall.
As to the "unstable" beta build, etc..meh, works fine. I am not one to run unstable stuff, I find ubuntu's lack of updating FF in a timely manner to be annoying (and your stable version is obviously busted for you as it is), so I go just one step beyond to the community version they also sponsor. It's closer to the official moz builds and has the security fixes, etc *way* sooner than the official ubuntu version. It comes from their site, it is just a scosh newer than what they officially release, but they don't recommend against it, either, you have that option right there to add the repository, etc. I went to this ppa build after that last slashdot story about some big FF security hole, then I noticed that ubuntu didn't offer the upgrade automatically, so I did it with the ppa build instead. If you are running the official version, it is insecure from some new big hole (and I forget what it was, something nasty though)
...maybe I am just better at it....it's certainly not an enormous effort in terms of energy used or my time. I find it very cost effective, plus fun. It has actual value there as well to me. Especially splitting, quite relaxing in a physical fitness/exercise way, I actually look forward to it, same as some people look forward to a gaming session on the computer, or a round of golf.
And wood, being very renewable and sustainable, is rather a nice way to go. It also has a very good benefit as it insulates you from sudden market shocks. Example, I have personal friends who were using oil heat back during the opec embargoes. All of a sudden, with no notice, their heating bill was *larger* than their mortgage note. With wood, taken off your own site, this isn't a worry. You can be completely unemployed and still not worry about at least heat for you and your family. You don't need to have to come up with the scratch for a very important and expensive utility.
No one single source of energy can be all things to all people, but I certainly find wood heat to be at or near the top of the list as to being efficient in terms of my energy in to energy out, plus efficient in terms of cost. I have a 250 gallon propane tank, sitting full in the backyard, unused for the past three winters now. It is no longer my primary expensive fuel, it is my backup, only to be used in an emergency fuel. So ya, my time is as valuable to me as anyone else values their time, that's why I prefer to work directly for myself, and eliminate as much as that cash middleman as possible, Same way we grow the bulk of our food now, vegetables and meat. Cost effective, helps eliminate bills, helps insulate from market shocks, and I am not going to fire me or offshore me, etc for "enhanced shareholder value". I think of it as practical job insurance as well.
If you want cost efficiency, though, in terms of human money and time needed for harvesting, etc, plants win. For example, our wood (firewood heat) taken directly off the woodlot. Basically just a perpetual harvest as long as you don't clear cut it. You can't touch it with any other technique short of building entirely underground way below frost or summer heat levels. Cheaper than electricity (any source including nukes), cheaper than propane or natgas, cheaper than fuel oil. And I have built solar thermal collectors as well, it is still cheaper to use firewood for the sheer amount of energy you can get from it, and forget trying to do the same thing with solar PV at anywhere near the cost. I've used and own solar PV a lot, it works..but I wouldn't say it is cheaper, and that's the bottom line on energy, which is the cheapest/easiest and cleanest source, and that combo is "the most efficient". It is way more efficient use of my dollars. Renewable biofuels (some anyway) are at the top there, proly followed by hydropower and geothermal.
I love my solar panels, just spiffy, but they are no replacement for a few bucks a year liquid fuel and a chainsaw and my splitting ax. And the liquid fuels could be biofuel as well for the saw.
Burning firewood is yet our only practical and affordable "fusion" power, and as such is still pretty efficient.
Coal is really energy dense biofuel, but to make it takes so long you might as well not consider it, and it burns nastier than regular firewood. Oil is the same way.
In other words, different techniques and apparatus for different energy needs. You need to look at cost per watt/therm/btu, etc rather than just overall technical efficiencies of conversion.
Slashdot Mirror
You are anonymous already, so spill the beans, please. Please name the *exact* clueless bozo in charge, name/title, etc, of this decision to force you guys to use IE6, so that the population in general can ridicule and harangue him, shame and embarrass. It is also not very secure, so there is the whole "homerland cybersecurity" angle to push as well. We need a name to throw at some elected officials in the appropriate subcommittees and to the press.
I disagree on your economic analysis with software patents. Patents on software are a type of "broken windows fallacy" argument, and as such, are a hindrance to the economy, not any sort of positive asset.
This is *precisely* the time we should be abandoning outdated (**AA type numbers and agenda, the entertainment distribution "industry") /harmful(software and living things patenting) /useless(casino gambling banks and created out of thin air financial "products") /parasitic(governmental make-work mc jobs) "businesses".
Yes, there would be an adjustment period if we eliminated the bulk of those "jobs" up above, but after a short time, you would find people would be concentrating on real wealth production work, which in turn contributes to real wealth creation, an economy that doesn't need sham official figures to try and sugar coat reality, or one that relies on ..shoot..bingo cards as somehow all that valuable. This "IP" stuff is all well and good in some extreme moderation levels, but you can't run a huge nation the size of the US on services, patenting everything possible, every little tiny nuance of anything, even abstract concepts, and then high stakes financial gambling. The rest of the planet is starting to route around those bottlenecks now, that is why we are having a financial crisis, because we have been doing things "that way". So it is "that way" that needs to change, not just do more of it.
..you got it. The value (primarily) in open source is using it in *another* business.
I have an analogy I use:
Home Depot (which would be the software only company) makes a lot of money selling tools and stuff, the materials used to do..things, a lot of different things. It's a good business but the market is limited to how many of these sorts of businesses can really exist. Now just one more step away, the amount made using the tools and stuff that comes from home depot dwarfs it. All the other businesses use Home Depot's stuff as an economic force multiplier. A simple carpentry job say requires X value lumber from Home Depot. Home Depot makes Y profit from that X, and it isn't all that much, much less than X. But, the carpenter, by doing value added work done with that lumber, probably makes 10x or better profit, at only 1X cost to him for what he bought at Home Depot.
If every business out there wanted to be just another Home Depot, it wouldn't work. Same with "software-only" as a stand alone business. The industry can support some, but not everyone can be in the software selling exclusively business, but USING the software is some unrelated business..that's where a lot more can be made. Yellow pages, A to Z, hundreds of thousands of businesses use software now, and can be profitable doing what they do. Open source and sharing helps drop the cost of X for all these other businesses, and savvy managers would realize it pays in the long run to share and share alike, as they get better tools to use in their unrelated business, meaning, they can help fund it a little by using their own devs or at least being good testers and users and contributing back what they can upstream.
It's not tinfoil hat, it is observing human nature. Once you have fatcats that are already mutil millionaires/billionaires, and they can easily buy anything they want, multiples, there's only one lust left, and that is dominance over other humans, a feudalistic outlook. That's what they want, that's how they live now, their policies support it, and it isn't accidental at all.
And it shows in the article, only evil people who want that sort of power treat employees that way, and the same mindset goes upstream from there. And at the tippy top, there you have people who regard endless wars as just profits central. If there is no legitimate war, by golly they will manufacture one, and they don't care a whit about bloodshed and pain and suffering. How evile can you get before it is acknowledged that it is in fact evil? How is that not a plan when they go way out of their way to do such things?
And that why all these fatcats love china and are building it up, while they try to destroy the US with our unique background of the sovereign individual with the government being subservient. They hate that, they like the older ways better with aristocrats in charge of everything and owning everything. The US middle class that got built up by the 60s was the antithesis to that, so it had to go, so they started making it go away. China is their posterboy dream society and nation, 1% corrupt controllers, and everyone else as serfs, and if you have enough money, you can do anything you want. Anything. Ya, once in awhile they might pop some minor fatcat, who possibly embarrassed them or didn't pay enough bribes upstream, etc...like in ancient times the Romans would chuck some fatcat to the lions for sport. They are evil, that's their nature. You don't get to the "top" like that without being psychopathic in some way.
Feudalism and the aristocracy never went away, they just changed clothing and titles around a little and come up with phony "elections", but it's the same old crap, just with new shiny tech around it. That's why I have been calling this trend to this sort of world and society as "technofeudalism".
That wasn't true two generations ago, and I remember it clearly, as do a lot of other folks on this board who are early boomers or older. The USA made just about everything people here bought, and they bought everything that was made, and the currency shifted around internally a lot more than it does now, acting as an economic force multiplier inside our own 50 state/nation "free trade common market", and not near as much went to imports from outside of those 50 states. And we had a robust middle class that actually owned things, instead of being in debt for everything beyond the ability to pay, and you only needed one normal blue collar level income to support a family, etc. We had ten year house notes, 12 month car loans, and medical insurance was way cheap.
Now what has changed is Cxx salaries went from around 10-40 times what a line worker made, to now..who knows, thousands? What does Balmer or any of these other transnational CEOs-and all their legions of sub bosses- make compared to the wage of these Chinese factory line workers? I'm not going to bother to look it up, but I bet it is more than 40 times, a LOT more. We also didn't have near as much wall street mass wealth skimming going on, and the propaganda shilling to engage in global wage arbitrage or "globalism" hadn't started yet (much).
As to people here not wanting to do the work, any time a factory announces hiring they have thousands of applications for hundreds of jobs generally speaking. As to ag work and construction etc "no one wants to do it so they have to import workers", another fairy tale. And I know I have read here *many* times that in white collar IT work they game the system to get insourced cheaper labor as well, come up with background credentials needed that are physically impossible for anyone to have achieved, then use that as "proof" they need more H1Bs and so on. Musta read hundreds of those anecdotals here over the years now.
These fatcats goal is to break the back of the middle class, to steal their wealth, full stop, so they can have their global two class society, especially in the US where the middle class got so big and strong. They are feudalists at heart. Between outsourcing and insourcing, they are succeeding. If their schemes worked for the nation as a whole, like those liars claim, then we wouldn't have an economic "crisis" like is going on. That proves their lies completely.
Last year, because of their corruption and takeover of government, they granted over a million green cards (that's just the legal insourcing, who knows how many million more off the books insourced people showed up to keep driving wages down), right in the middle of a mass unemployment situation with a lowballed 10% unemployment rate, and if you add in real part time workers and people finally off unemployment insurance, it is 17%, which is in the middle of "great depression" era numbers.
Outsourcing and insourcing, the double whammy plan to marginalize and destroy the middle class here so they can have their globalist master/serf society, with one percent owning everything eventually. That's what is going on.
....but I also think that applies to both major parties. I have little use for either of them. there is a small handful of the major elected members on both sides I have some admiration for, but for the most part, I regard both parties as being more corrupt than not, and they both will take as much corporate cash as they can, and dish out the favors. When you have an elected government primarily run by millionaires who all are tied to income from wall street in a big way..well, like you said, a plutocracy happens.
Depends on what you are measuring. Apple is now the number 3 US company in terms of market cap. Only MS and Exxon are larger, and some are speculating they will surpass MS some time this year. http://247wallst.com/2010/04/06/apples-market-cap-may-pass-microsofts-soon/
And depending on who you read, they are getting between 7-10% of US computer sales now.
this -> "The European Union has a population larger than the United States and yet it manages just fine."..past history man, I'm talking about going forward. I really suggest you take the blinders off and LOOK at some in depth economic analysis, get beyond the headlines and read some contrarian economists. Oh heck, here's one, the darlingest of your ultra far left rich dudes, soros, argue with him why doncha about the future status of your dream welfare union.. the EU is right behind the US with the debt bomb realities. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-09/soros-says-greece-needs-cheaper-loans-to-avoid-death-circle-.html
More recent events and analysis
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/markets-rally-as-greek-debt-crisis-eases-1943155.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/7583304/Euphoria-over-Greek-rescue-fades-as-first-cracks-appear.html
Here is a short overview of the US debt situation as it is today
Let this one sink in a bit...
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article18393.html
These are the outright thieves "in charge" of our economic situation
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street/print
really, ^^^^ those dudes right there run things. In and out of government, the musical chairs with thieves and liars in government, in the Fed, back to their Wall Street gangster lairs, lather rinse repeat, and it hasn't mattered a whit which imperial leader or group of goofballs in our congress we have had, D or R next to their name, it's those same dudes always *really* in charge behind the scenes....
Now see why we aren't going to be having any welfare state here, or even a credible economy soon? The system is already broken, we've been "corporate raided" on a huge scale, and even the "change" government is just more of the same tired old BS.
Your central banker pigs are just as much thieves as ours have been, you'll see... just wait. Your welfare states are going to be crumbling because you don't understand simple basic math, plus time travel, you can't live in the past and expect that to be the future or..along those lines, ain't happening. What was then, was then, in the future.....? I am old enough to remember when the US had a very decent real economy, we were the largest creditor nation, not the biggest borrower, and healthcare was cheap, affordable for most people. Even the crappiest jobs had free or cheap coverage, or you could buy it on the side for cheap. But then the corporate looting really began, along with the ludicrous expansion of government based on lying promises of something for nothing...now 35 years later, poofed, gone, we are sunk without borrowing money all the time, and we have no credible plans to pay back what we have already borrowed.
You have to make money to spend it, FIRST, on welfare or whatever, and no, running printing presses is not making money. You can't keep pouring six gallons of stuff from a five gallon bucket, and accounting and bookkeeping tricks only work so long. You don't make money by exporting jobs, them other fellas make the money then. And you certainly don't make money by letting your central casino bankers run rampant and steal everything that ain't nailed down, and especially when you run those thieves in and out of official government positions where they get to *set policy*.
Now some of the nations there in the EU just might squeak by over the
The larger governments get, the more inefficient and corrupt they get. It just happens. I just looked, Finland population = 5.4 million. US=300 million. Finland has a 200 member parliament, the US has 435 Reps and 100 senators (2 per state). the average citizen in the US is FAR from power, just do the math. See a problem yet with working coherently? The US government is huge already, millions of employees, and they are already so far in debt that even if we went to a 100% tax rate it would take years to break even and start over. We need to borrow trillions a year from some place foreign just to maintain what we have already. And borrowing means it has to be paid back, with interest. do the math again.
It's a big freaking mess. It's a debt bubble/bomb that is around two years from total implosion.
The tea party movement at its very basic core is just wanting to reduce the size of government down to a more manageable and affordable level, and get a handle on budgets and taxes, including simplifying the tax code, etc. They were against the bailouts, both the casino banks and the dinosaur car companies. They are against so called health care reform because they recognize it for what it is, a bailout for dinosaur insurance companies, it's a conjob that will just cost more.
People here are not all that adverse to helping, or caring for our poorest,, etc, just our past track record is rather dismal, and stuff always seems to cost many times more than what they initially claim it will cost, with only half the results, or less.
So even though you are talking about two countries/nations, there's no real comparison in what can be done, not at this time anyway, until we can come up with some way to afford what we are committed to already, yet alone any more welfare things. We are bleeding jobs the last two decades, bad, and need near two million jobs a year created just to maintain. And it isn't happening. There's just *pitiful* job creation going on.
In short, we can't afford it, "it" being everything they spend on now, wars, entitlements, whatever, the money just isn't there and they are existing on credit and wishful thinking and passing the buck to the future where it will magically get taken care of.
So don't blame the tea party folks for pointing out the realities of the situation. The entrenched D and R parties have had..forever to fix things, and they haven't. I've been active in politics since the early 60s and it's the same crap, election cycle after election cycle. It is NEVER going to get fixed as long as the D and R parties keep our government hijacked and run as a crony jobs and bribery program. Which is all it is at this point.
Something new is needed, and it is at least an attempt, I'll give them that. Other folks can try what they want to as well, but sure as heck just doing the same thing we have been doing over and over again will lead to the US being the fastest decaying super power empire ever at this rate. Once the rest of the world panics and starts really dumping the dollar (which I think has great odds of happening), and we lose global "reserve currency" status, that's it, the party is over, there won't be anything like you see now, let alone any full cradle to grave welfare society. The money just isn't there, it's already spent, years/decades ago. Broke, busted, bankrupt, flat..see?
You have to make wealth before you spend it, whatever you spend it on. They are trying to do that just by running the dollar printing press...and that won't work forever, just like that stupid house flipping bubble ponzi scheme didn't work forever either.
The false alarms will be tremendous. How about landscapers and farmers, or even joe homeowner spraying some weeds around his driveway? Modern technological life has a ton of chemicals associated with it. Use some bleach on your kitchen counter, or in the laundry, stuff like that.
If you doubt the corruption angle with drugs (which I guess is the basis of your reply, that that is "paranoid"? It's just data, man, look it up yourself, verification is a simple google search away, have at it, there have been tons of prosecuted cases over the years and all sorts of articles written about it, etc. Heck, read any article lately about the scene in mexico and they all mention how corrupt the government is there, and I sincerely doubt all this corruption magically stops exactly at the border.
Oh, if you are wondering or making an allusion, nope, don't smoke pot or do any other drugs other than cheap coffee and some cheap cigars. I rarely even take an aspirin.
I'm still in favor of legalizing it though, this prohibition "cure" just makes the situation much worse. The war on drugs was lost years ago, it will never work, and it has never been cost effective. Society is going to have to come up with something other than classifying some huge percentage of their population as criminals.
There are several reasons why the goons in most countries love to keep some drugs illegal, here are the five largest reasons, and this would more or less apply to mexico as well as the US right now:
1) They make a shitload, I mean just truckloads of cash more money at it, and all governments have insiders who are corrupt and in the drug trade, top to bottom to sideways. Look, they can't even keep drugs out of prisons, this is a major clue how corrupting all that huge cash money is. Illegal drug money funds from street cops all the way to judges, prosecutors, a lot of dotmil smugglers, spooks of various nations, and so on, all the way to major funding banks and real estate funds..that money is being transferred around "in the system" as well as under the table. Legalizing it would knock those cash profits down immensely, to those people and to the other "civilian" smugglers and dealers. Really, dealers are the last people to want it legalized. And the government simply does not want to lose all their "war on some drugs" gravy train. And gives pols some TV talking points about being "tough" on..drugs, whatever. They are always "tough"...lookit their ads during election cycles
2)Gives them a wonderful excuse to keep building the police state. They have people completely conditioned now to accept no knock raids, roadblocks, cameras, wiretaps, legions of "undercover" goons, etc..stuff that was taught to me was only done in evile places like east germany, back when I was a kid. Now..common. Plus, they got all the cops and paramilitary conditioned that it is all "legal and proper".
3)Takes more and more people out of the official "you are cool to vote" pool, and makes felons out of them, so they have legal obligations that go to forward point 2 above (the goal is for all citizens to be criminals so the governments can pwnz ur azz
4)creates a ton of unnecessary jobs in the criminal justice system, including building private for profit jails and running inmate slave labor factories and shops, supplying the hardware for the surveillance and command and control big bro state, etc. A lot of people make a lot of money off of big brother action now, and the war on terra and drugs are the two big reasons for them to do that.
5)then there's stuff like medicinal marijuana and industrial hemp..cheap to grow, effective for a lot of purposes..threatens a lot of established old big money interests.
Blades or flechette rounds
Still useful to have good muscles in space, to overcome unexpected conditions.
Of course, we may have smarter/better robot workers by then as well..
Crap. And you are a cult member because you "believed" in their fairy tale threats and extortion and other lies, just like a good cult member "believes" in whatever his or her cult leaders tell them to believe. This is the sort of system we have
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32906678/looting_main_street/
THAT is what would have crashed, and it deserves it. The other system, the one where people are honest and just go to work and make useful things and similar, would have been just fine in short order after we had disposed of that rotten carcass. And I'll counter that phony cult belief system every time I see it on this board. "Believing" in their lies and repeating them is no different from being a flat earther or scamsciencetologist.
There are no rules, just looting by the casino banks, facilitated by their cult members and brainwashing. Yep, I would be for a "free market" if it existed. Those turkeys would be past history by now if it did. You can defend them or believe in their lies, I refuse, I don't support conmen. And I wouldn't have said jack shit to you if you hadn't insulted the guy you were replying to with your snarky "nice try" comment. "ohhh we avoided a collapse". No we didn't, we facilitated even more ripoffs! We got put on the hook for trillions to support that grifter's economy!
fuck..that...shit
I'll speak from long "olden days get off my lawn" perspective here as regards street protests. You realize that if you keep it up, not only will you eventually OD on teargas, but there is a distinct real possibility you will suffer permanent physical damage to your body from getting beat on by goons with clubs, plus spend a long time in the pokey, or get a heart attack from a Taser, or they will just shoot you. And nowadays they hire recent combat vets whose mindset is "kill" to be "community police". All the old cops are gone, and a lot of them were certainly bad enough, the new younger ones now are all black suited swat wannabees and snipers and door kickers and so on, where the main goal is protect the criminals at the top of the political scene.
If after all these decades we still have the bulk of the people voting for either criminal gang R or D...no use anymore, I quit. I know *I* am certainly not going out protesting anymore, those days are long freakin gone for this gray haired and bearded boy. It just ain't worth protesting when that simple easy step-to just STOP voting for the criminals isn't being taken in large enough numbers, in all age demographics, including my own.
The boomers (some, not all, but a lot at the time) did good, I honestly think we did, but after a decade and change of non stop protest and political reform and activism, and at least accomplishing some semblance of racial and gender equality and ending the draft and at least ending one big blood profits war..time for the next generations to step up and do something.
*crickets*
If they don't care about their future..well..that's it then, they don't care. If people succumb to brainwashing with that "don't waste your vote" BS and keep electing from the approved by the elite overlords pool of media-picked-for-you candidates...well, that's it, they don't care. If they can't see the brainwashing, just keep sucking it up, believing in that horsecrap drivel those professional pols spew, after all the evidence out there going back generations as to why this is a stoopid idea...well, they don't care, you get what you get when you don't care or allow yourself to become compromised.
In a way, I think ending the draft backfired bigtime. Not that I want it back, but when 50% of the young population was staring at the real possibility of fighting yet another bankers/wall street profits war...you did get a lot of protest and "social unrest". It dropped off rapidly once the draft ended. And the "overlords" learned from their mistakes, and came up with a new plan they implemented for controlling the population. With no draft, what they do now is a stealth economic draft and control. Blow the economy out enough, raise tuition costs enough, get people believing that credit (debt) is the same as wealth accumulation, and they get all the younger "volunteers" they need to "join up" and go fight those same wars, basically just to have a job, and the older ones get stuck in that perpetual debt trap, so they are very reluctant to become that nail sticking up that gets hammered.
When we had tons more entry level and "good enough" paying manufacturing jobs, you didn't see it as much, people weren't as afraid I think, they would go protest, but now that those are poofing, and a lot of service jobs that were traditionally taken by new entries to the work force like in construction go to wall street max profits labor arbitrage "new arrivals"..it doesn't leave much choice for a lot of younger folks. And they have so many people dependent on some check from the state for their life...they don't want to rock the boat. Carrot and the stick, equally applied. don't rock the boat, maybe you get a small carrot, rock the boat, you will get the big stick.
So the older ones are just tired of being the ones protesting, plus are now saddled in debt and staring at real old age sneaking up, and maybe losing their job, etc, and the younger folks are so economically compromised in advance of getting out of school e
Wrong. Your cult member response is just slap wrong.
That system needed to crash and burn, the sooner the better so we can rebuild around fairer ways and sounder economic policies. That three headed ultimate conjob scam bankster gangster criminal cartel of the Fed, Wall Street casino bank parasites and so called government regulators-who come from the first two, then go back to them at big bucks after their alleged government "service"- *needed* to collapse. The sooner the better. Pure scam ripoffs, bloated ticks, or as Matt Taibbi put it referring to goldman sachs, a vampire squid sucking the face of humanity. Just because some people got brainwashed into a Stockholm syndrome defense of their "masters", doesn't mean all of us got sucked into "believing" their extortionist lies and threats they used. Ya, an economy "would have crashed", THEIR bullshit thieving economy. They would have "earned" it. Pigs. Privatize profits, socialized their risks and huge gambling losses. Fascist, corporatist *pigs*, and too chicken shit and too corrupt and crooked to eat their own capitalist dogfood. Same sort of pigs and same policies that completely destroyed Iceland economically, a microcosm of the larger picture.
In a REAL free market, where the rules were applied fairly, those parasites would have crashed and burned, gone really bankrupt just like any other failed industry or business model, then their "financial products" their suckass "quants" come up with would have been exposed for the smoke and mirrors financial snakeoil they are, monopoly money crap, "weapons of mass financial destruction", worth maybe a fraction of a penny on the inflated buck, and that's only if they were printed out and the printouts sold for scrap.
Easily proven, not even close to being rocket surgery, a simple observation that counters that BS brainwashing they keep their economic cult members under control with -> IF those grifter's conjobs worked, they WOULDN'T have needed bailouts nor would there be any "economic crisis".
Well, I know what you are saying and agree with the sentiment. If you look back when the masks were banned, it was to counter ku klux klanners and other sorts going out and doing nasty stuff in public and hiding behind that anonymity. I am guessing now that it has been taken to court already, but I haven't researched it yet.
Now what I don't like is COPS being able to hide behind masks, plus remove their insignia, at public demonstrations. The same laws should apply to them as well.
As to infrared devices, etc., You can buy them, I own some night vision goggles, old style, that use infra red. They are classed in generations, old ww2 stuff is first gen, I think they are up to fifth gen by now. Goggles or scopes in that class, using passive image intensifying, cost thousands and are quite good, by accounts I have read.
Just found this news story about urban gardening around the world
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/04/08/urban.farming.city.growing.food/
The mask banning is quite true and enforced in a lot of places. Just the facts.
I had one of my friends who got nailed with those fast fuel oil price hikes way back then do an emergency wood heater install, then he needed wood somehow. As everyone and their cuzzin leroy was scarfing up the traditional sources of wood fuel, he had a brainstorm. As he had two teenage sons he gave them a daily after school chore. First, he goes to the pawnshop and gets a few used skilsaws. Next, on his way home from work every day, he stops in alleys and scrounges free old wood pallets, looking for the heavy ones, which are usually made from "swamp oak", named such from their rather pissy smell. His sons got the task of cutting up the pallets into reasonable chunks, which they burned.
Like I said, a lot of places allow the cutting of firewood for personal use in the local national forest. Sometimes you can find a private party that would allow that as well, for cheap. So all you need then is a truck, or stout trailer.
Another way to get cheaper wood is to buy it in log length, have it delivered, and do the final cutting and stacking in the yard.
And yet another way is to contact tree trimmers and utility crews, tell them you'll let them dump hardwood trimmings. I've gotten a lot for free that way myself when I lived in town before.
As to gardens, you don't need much to make a decent hit, a 20' x 20' garden will give you a LOT of food. In season you will get bags and bags everyday. Plus run a google search for "edible landscaping", another good way to have a lot of food from a smaller in town area. And I once had an even larger garden than that, when I had an apartment. There was this old lady at the outskirts right out of town, she allowed folks to garden in her backyard, which was a tiny farm she and her late husband used to run. Once he was gone and she didn't work the farm, it sat empty, so she allowed the little garden plots. Perhaps a craigslist ask might work there "wanted, garden space close to xyzburg", etc.
There's a fairly well "growing" movement for urban gardening, even small scale urban poultry production. Heck, they are bulldozing down now half of Detroit, and a lot of gardens and little farms are going in all over that city.
As to costs, all relative I guess, location is what counts. Some areas of the nation are way more expensive than others. A friend of mine is this week closing on three acres-mostly wooded except for the yard- with a four bed two bath house on it, 169 thou. That property is roughly an hour even drive-time outside of Atlanta, so it isn't all that far from big time urban scene.
Anyway, if you are into self sufficiency/practical preparedness, check out my homepage, that is what it is all about. We have deep woods dwellers to urban apartment dwellers there, and every sort of location in between.
I use four cords a winter. It would be less but this cabin isn't insulated as well as it should be..yet..working on it, one of my numerous spring projects. I also know they make way more efficient wood burners than the one I use now. So..I could cut that amount in half. (I am in north Georgia for reference, obviously way more up north you would use more) In eastern decent rainfall deciduous/mixed forests, you can pull a cord an acre a year easy, probably more, and never run out, always have the same amount of trees and wood there. So say you are on a small plot of land, just three to say five acres, with a two acre woodlot. A well insulated home**, you could have space for a huge garden, a fish pond, some fruit trees, a chicken run, plenty of yard/grass/ even a small pasture, plus your hard wood trees for wood, and no stopping you having a lot of those trees being nut trees, walnuts/pecans whatever, so there's more food for you and the local wildlife.
Also keep in mind a lot of places allow firewood harvesting out of the local national or state forest, for free or a reasonable small fee.
**I am of the opinion that dollar for dollar, becoming more energy efficient in the first place-dropping demand-is the best dollar spent, talking about heating or cooling or lighting or any other regular energy use. I know I looked at the transportation scene and energy costs, and knowing I need a truck, looked for an efficient diesel over a faster gas engine truck. I don't care about speed, I just want to haul stuff from point A to B cheaply, and my 40 MPG diesel truck works for that, for most of my purposes. I don't really need a huge V8 all the time like a lot of guys have..and drive around mostly empty.
FF has automatic scrolling when you pick a spot on some web page and hit your left and right mouse buttons simultaneously. An up and down arrow icon thing appears, and you can adjust the automatic scroll speed by how close you leave the cursor to the new icon controller. Works great, it's very controllable, give it a shot. I use it a lot at dinner time, can sit here with my plate of food and eat in peace while I read an entire thread at my comfortable reading speed, without having to touch the mouse. The thing you are describing I have never seen happen, so can't comment on it. Ya, sounds bad, you must have something broken. I'd suggest trash it and reinstall.
As to the "unstable" beta build, etc..meh, works fine. I am not one to run unstable stuff, I find ubuntu's lack of updating FF in a timely manner to be annoying (and your stable version is obviously busted for you as it is), so I go just one step beyond to the community version they also sponsor. It's closer to the official moz builds and has the security fixes, etc *way* sooner than the official ubuntu version. It comes from their site, it is just a scosh newer than what they officially release, but they don't recommend against it, either, you have that option right there to add the repository, etc. I went to this ppa build after that last slashdot story about some big FF security hole, then I noticed that ubuntu didn't offer the upgrade automatically, so I did it with the ppa build instead. If you are running the official version, it is insecure from some new big hole (and I forget what it was, something nasty though)
...maybe I am just better at it....it's certainly not an enormous effort in terms of energy used or my time. I find it very cost effective, plus fun. It has actual value there as well to me. Especially splitting, quite relaxing in a physical fitness/exercise way, I actually look forward to it, same as some people look forward to a gaming session on the computer, or a round of golf.
And wood, being very renewable and sustainable, is rather a nice way to go. It also has a very good benefit as it insulates you from sudden market shocks. Example, I have personal friends who were using oil heat back during the opec embargoes. All of a sudden, with no notice, their heating bill was *larger* than their mortgage note. With wood, taken off your own site, this isn't a worry. You can be completely unemployed and still not worry about at least heat for you and your family. You don't need to have to come up with the scratch for a very important and expensive utility.
No one single source of energy can be all things to all people, but I certainly find wood heat to be at or near the top of the list as to being efficient in terms of my energy in to energy out, plus efficient in terms of cost. I have a 250 gallon propane tank, sitting full in the backyard, unused for the past three winters now. It is no longer my primary expensive fuel, it is my backup, only to be used in an emergency fuel. So ya, my time is as valuable to me as anyone else values their time, that's why I prefer to work directly for myself, and eliminate as much as that cash middleman as possible, Same way we grow the bulk of our food now, vegetables and meat. Cost effective, helps eliminate bills, helps insulate from market shocks, and I am not going to fire me or offshore me, etc for "enhanced shareholder value". I think of it as practical job insurance as well.
If you want cost efficiency, though, in terms of human money and time needed for harvesting, etc, plants win. For example, our wood (firewood heat) taken directly off the woodlot. Basically just a perpetual harvest as long as you don't clear cut it. You can't touch it with any other technique short of building entirely underground way below frost or summer heat levels. Cheaper than electricity (any source including nukes), cheaper than propane or natgas, cheaper than fuel oil. And I have built solar thermal collectors as well, it is still cheaper to use firewood for the sheer amount of energy you can get from it, and forget trying to do the same thing with solar PV at anywhere near the cost. I've used and own solar PV a lot, it works..but I wouldn't say it is cheaper, and that's the bottom line on energy, which is the cheapest/easiest and cleanest source, and that combo is "the most efficient". It is way more efficient use of my dollars. Renewable biofuels (some anyway) are at the top there, proly followed by hydropower and geothermal.
I love my solar panels, just spiffy, but they are no replacement for a few bucks a year liquid fuel and a chainsaw and my splitting ax. And the liquid fuels could be biofuel as well for the saw.
Burning firewood is yet our only practical and affordable "fusion" power, and as such is still pretty efficient.
Coal is really energy dense biofuel, but to make it takes so long you might as well not consider it, and it burns nastier than regular firewood. Oil is the same way.
In other words, different techniques and apparatus for different energy needs. You need to look at cost per watt/therm/btu, etc rather than just overall technical efficiencies of conversion.