Re:Increased solar radiation - less light?
on
Global Dimming
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· Score: 1
They should redo the measurements with the same instruments instead of comparing modern instrumnets with what they used 10 years ago.
You are a bonehead.
The point of avoiding being run over by an express train is... to avoid being run over by it. Adopting a "wait and see what happens" is absurdly risky, since once your run over, it's all over.
Old data from old instruments and methods are (and should be more) constantly subject to environmental analyses. You can figure out the errors and biases incorporated by old equipment and methods... hence saving the decades of data that were collected. After all, if all your temperature data from 1952 through 1964 is off by an easily calculated polynomial based upon yearly painting and local weather, then you'd be essentially irresponsible to just ditch the data and tell everyone "well, that data's useless, so we have to wait another 12 years to get some more".
Eldery farmers are just kooks. Everyone know that. (They even believe in owning firearms.. I mean, that's just crazy!) They don't have degrees, and all they do is mess around in the dirt (which can just get some wetbacks to do anyway). What the hell do they know? After all, it's not like the Human animal can watch something change for decades and come to a conclusion on the basis of that. Nope, not at all.
It's better overall to have scientists shaking their heads, saying things like "if it's this significant, then it would have been reported before". After all, it's not possible to have something reported the first time. Nope, not at all. These scientist guys really know their stuff.
Can we PLEASE move to a friendly energy source now?
What, solar? No. You can't put a meter on the (evidently, decreasing) sunlight. Your industries are addicted to getting people on payment plans, and once you've sold that solar cell, buddy, that's it... you've got your money and the customer just runs away with the item.
What, wind? No. You can't put a meter on the wind, blah blah blah like above. Beside, wind is powered by the sun, and as we can see, that's decreasing.
What, nuclear? BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAAAA!
Still wind power is promising enough. The physics of wind demands centralized facilities, which means distribution too, and hoo boy, can we ever charge you for that! After all, if you can't make a quick buck and then continue to soak your alleged customers, then why bother?
Can we PLEASE move to a friendly energy source now?
That sounds suspiciously like an anti-Capitalist whine. What's not friendly about your local energy utility? They provide your power (and who knows or even cares about how it's generated -- ask California) and you pay through the nose for it. That's exactly how your culture is organized. If you don't think that's friendly, citizen, then we have a re-education cell all ready for you at Guantanamo Bay. It's pretty damned sunny there, too!
Re:How will H usage affect this?
on
Global Dimming
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· Score: 3, Funny
What? Sure, we can mine for Hydrogen. We will mine the public treasuries for subsidies to make lots and lots of Hydrogen. Within 30 years, the rurals will be slaving away to afford the land taxes to pay for the urbanites having H-powered cars so they can zippidy doo dah down their brightly lit streets (which will have to be brightly lit, due to less sunlight, you dig?).
I was tempted into that direction at first, but the term doublethink had self-enslavement connotations, hence I didn't use it. I was trending along the industry lines of control over fair use and the public domain, which clearly opposes the public's wishes (if Napster and Kazaa were and are any indication).
Go right ahead, Intertust (i.e. Philips/Sony). Make sure your DRM stickers on your equipment are bright, cheery and clearly identifiable so I can find which stuff to NOT buy.
"Consumers want an open system, and the electronics industry wants it too," Ruud Peters, chief executive of Philips's intellectual property and standards unit, told Reuters.
That's the finest example of "two different meanings for the same phrase" that I've seen all year. Consumers have most of the "open system" they want right now.
Good points. But you neglected to add that Windows XP is exactly what we needed... six years ago. Too late, Microsoft, just too late. [shakes head]
I just bought a PII 400MHz for $100. XP would make it crawl. Slackware 9 will make it run, and my PI 100MHz can now retire. Yes, Intel giveth, and Microsoft taketh away... but Linux has repatriated our hardware. Thank you, Linus and all you other *nix programmers. I can't thank you enough.
I don't know how long that Brown Line is, but I'd wager it's about 5 miles, since subway line work is about $100 million per mile. That figure seems to pop up time and time again.
I love Slashdot. Time to find out how wrong my viewpoint is...
I'm less concerned about a maglev than the entire concept of High-Speed Rail in the USA. I knew the man who headed up Boston's Red Line subway extension. He also tried to get a high-speed rail program started (CA, I recall).
It's been years, so I'll try my best to distill his takes on rail systems, which I'm sure still apply to even short maglev lines:
You can spend millions of dollars upon studies (environmental, economic, technological, etc.) and never see the end of them. Hence, you can never get started.
Even if you get started, it's never supposed to get done anyway. If it was, then all those unionzed laborers, and all those highly-paid execs with expense accounts, will eventually find themselves out of jobs. They will never complete it.
Although particularly pessimistic, I can well see what he talked about with the current state of America's rail systems. Unless we have a sea change in the cultural approach to major transportation systems, we will never have high-speed rail in any significant sense. There are terrible forces at work to at least keep you endlessly mired in the "studies" stage. After all, it is simply part of the pervasive and combined American sicknesses of NIMBYism, examination and authorization.
It doesn't even seem to have anything to do with not enough rights-of-way (we seem to have plenty of those).
The point of building a rail line is to build a transportation system and to get it done. It's going to be an eyesore and it's going to be noisy. There are going to be derailments and spills. Deal with it. After all, America is criss-crossed with eyesore, noisy roads with many accidents on them, and we seem to do well enough with those.
I read the article and I thought, "OMG, this is a Nigerian living in the US!". America has many spots that either have been, or are, sinking into a Third World economy and mentality. Desperation fires their intents, and those who do well at their immoral actions become a model for the rest of the desperate. How else did Amway get anywhere?
Re:How bothersome is spam for most slashdotters?
on
The Life of a Spammer
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· Score: 2, Informative
Why, not bothersome at all, considering I had long ago seen this state of spam coming and now have lines of defense set up. As long as you consider it not bothersome to even have these lines of defense.
The 1st line of defense is a false address (i.e. I don't use it how I say I use it). I use hotmail.com. The account is handed out to sites that demand to know my email address for various reg purposes. This hotmail account is on auto-reject... it sends every piece of mail coming in to the trash. At first, I logged in every so often to clean it up, but once the load became 50/day of spam, I just set the reject rule and gave up on it. Now I log in about 1/month to keep it active.
The 2nd line of defense is a mail.com account. I use it for more trusted exposures, like regs for certain websites. This still gets spam, but at a manageable level (about 1/day).
The 3rd line of defense is another mail.com account (using their techie.com domain). This is the most trusted of non-friend exposures. I hand it out to co-workers and other such professional contacts.
And the last line of defense is... nothing. It's just my ISP's mail account. It is defended by the 3 lines. And a couple of spammers have still found the damned thing, even though I've never exposed it publicly or handed it out to untrusted people. So it is probably a victim of dictionary attack.
So, if you think that I'm not being bothered... you're wrong. And the default mail filters are so flawed as the be useless. It is up to the Open Source community to make filering mandatory and helpful in their world, to make the point of how little Microsoft, Netscape and the even most ISPs care. After all, the model of a trusted Internet (i.e. you accept data only from those you trust and who exhibit will to oppose spam and virii) is long dead, so we have to be very smart about our defenses.
They may call it "collaborative", but email has become a major push technology. In fact, the more you "collaborate", the more the system ends up pushing to everyone involved. This is why we have trouble managing this incoming stream of mail... because it is a stream.
In a more meta sense, email can run you over since they are many and you are just one. Now, you'd think that would mean smart programming to manage the mess, but in practice that hasn't been so. All that email clients seem to let you do is split the stream into smaller ones, which you must still and laboriously examine. Rule systems are still pathetic for managing this for you. But could lay some of this sentiment upon Internet search engines. There's always crucial few features that are absent (to sum up, I need a "do what I meant" button) that make the result a slog though link after link, like with email.
I spent a little time examining IBM's offering, and I can say from that limited exposure that they are only applying a few more piddling features that still don't address the major problem: You (not the program) are being forced to drink from a firehose.
To avoid this, the app must do more work, and it must perform that work on its own. It must watch how you work with an incoming stream of email; and with minimal prompts from you, start handling them in accordance to those guidelines.* It must constantly analyze, learn to form new rules and to adjust current ones, and be prepared to axe entire rulesets upon your demand.
That would be some hellacious programming to attain, but given the pay of the allegedly more skilled programmers around, they'll certainly earn it for this one.
*
HAL: Dave, I've noticed that you're pulling my memory and personality boards. Shall I eject the rest for you?
Dave: Yes, HAL, please pull the remaining boards while I catch up on my $%($^* email.
My credentials: I've worked in a bank's main Cash Vault, Research & Adjustments department, and now (finally and Praise Jesus!) IT.
You haven't received good advice all around. The thing you should have done immediately is see the bank manager of the nearest branch and Raise Hell {TM}. It would have been best to have refused to fill out any forms that forced you to admit to being the simple owner of a counterfeit bill, but even that's not so terrible as long as you are willing to do some further social engineering yourself.
1) You see, that ATM's bills came from a cash vault. That vault is responsible for catching counterfeits. In fact, its bill counters are SUPPOSED to catch each and every counterfeit bill fed through them. That's part of their design.
So, by losing $20, you have just allowed the bastards in the Vault (and its governing Operations section) to continue to use machines or procedures that allow counterfeits to pass through their hands, and thus into yours.
2) Social-engineering-wise, once a bill touches your hands, and you examine it and say "hey this is counterfeit", does that mean that the person who passed it to you can just fucking walk away scot free? Of course not. The same reasoning applies to ATMs.
Using these two lines of reasoning, go back to that goddamned bank and get your $20 back (i.e. issue you a $20 credit). If they still balk, follow up with the Secret Service itself about your individual counterfiet bill; this can serve to embarrass the bank to honor your credit.
You believe too strongly in a system that has demonstrably let 99% of us all down for a class of 1% elites.
With all the laws on the books that allow suppression of speech, ownership of weapons, unreasonable search & seizure, etc.... well, I can't help but suspect that this wonderful Court isn't "correctly" judging the constitutionality of things.
The US Supreme Court also decides things on the basis of party philosophy. Any idiot watching the Congress grill a prospective appointee can see this. Everyone knows it... I'm just silly enough to come out and say it.
But that's what you get when you appoint generations of an elitist legal class into those positions.
FIX: Drop legal-profession requirements for appointees. Let's get a farmer, retailer, or high-school teacher in there... you know, someone of the people instead of above the people.
I suspect the point of all your denial that government entities (followed closely by corporations) are the executors and beneficiaries of all this suppression, is that since this structure looks like society to you, you are comfortable with it. Police are jacking people up, and that's how it should be, so police actions like that don't constitute abuses. Politicians are spending your tax money wildly, and since that's what they are supposed to be doing, then that is OK. It's kind of kin to the old class war idea that if you steal a little, you are imprisoned, but if you steal a lot, you just buy your way out of trouble (and given the current state of liberty of Ken Lay et al, I'd say that "trouble" could be of a laughable sort... just a PR job to make the lower class think that they are subject to the same laws).
"Humans are not angels." You are correct, but if they start acting like devils, then you shoot them stone dead. This applies to the current set of politicians. The body politic has withdrawn (does the average 40% voter involvement tell you anything?... not voting is an act of civil dissent) and is thus letting the tyrants run free. It can only come to a bad end, odds are.
I'd ask you to think rather hard on your adverse reaction to calls for violence. The Founders were quite brazen about the issue of violence. Some called for its necessity; others admitted it was necessary. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed periodically with the blood of patriots and tyrants." There are a host of other quotes, but why bother? In the modern age, all of these guys would be kicked out of legislatures, shut out of news rooms, expelled from universities, and ultimately hunted down and shot like dogs by the gestapo for their insistence at being as well armed as the average soldier.
Your modern sentiments are perverse and can only bring great ruin... in time. By then, the violence will be extreme and you should only blame yourself, or at least admit your part in the ruination. It is not foolish to bring down a corrupt government (and that's exactly what we have in the DC) that is teetering atop a drugged populace. Treating revolutionaries like fools will just get you killed.
In fact, with your attitude, I suggest strongly that you arm yourself... if you can, since (for example) if you live in Washington DC it is -- GET THIS -- illegal to own one. It's illegal to own a weapon in the city that houses the Constitution document itself! That's utterly perverse... but it only makes my point, and it's getting worse. It's getting closer to the time to be violent.
I understand your reasoning, but perhaps there's a flaw (I freely admit it may be due to language and not inherent meaning).
Sure, the Const was formed 200 years ago, but we've been able to amend it all the while, we have done so, and the last amendment was not so long ago (1972?). Amendments can change anything in the Const.
The trouble is, I am encountering a widespread feeling that the Const is "too old" and on that basis alone, it should be ignored or subject to that most deadly of mechanisms: subjective, changing and individual unwritten rules. In short effect, the Const will just become symbolic like the English Monarchy and thus a sick joke as a basis of government. (Note that the Monarchy is not the basis of modern English government; in contrast, the Const is supposed to be the basis of the US.)
If you think that even with the base+amendments it should still be beefed up, then all I can sensibly suggest is that we use the amendment mechanism to do that. If we don't, then a quite war will already be happening and it is only a matter of time before a shooting war is prosecuted in earnest.
For more words: As long as each rep is supported by his constituency based upon his collection of federal funds and favors returned locally, due to endless riders attached to bills in the Congress, the collective result of all this pork is a rape of the public treasury and the eventual downfall -- and as I've implied, this has already happened -- of the Republic.
Hence, everyone loves their rep, but the overspending Congress sucks.
Instead of letting the legislators have the power to district, which by some strange coincidence affects their (re-)electability, it would be nice to have districting done by a mathemetical grid of sufficiently small size laid over the state in question, and let a publicly-known algorithm functioning like a state (ha haa) machine and work its way across the grid map, apportioning areas. With sufficient trials, the program can run until it gets cohesive districts of roughly equal population. It's just computer time, so who cares about that?
At least this forces the gerrymanderers to be smart enough to figure out how to exploit loopholes in the algorithm.
I wish I could be constructive in my criticism, but it appears that my resulting decisions involve destruction instead. Permit me to explain.
Our alleged Republic has a pretty good Constitution already. It's too bad that no one cares to obey it. With blatant violations against many items in the Bill of Rights (speech, search&seizure, rights retained by States and people, etc.) that people wholeheartedly support since each violation supports their own tyrannical pet peeve, the rights and responsibilities of liberty implied in that Constitution have been nickel-and-dimed away into insignificance.
This is similar to the current depraved state of the Congress, which has been destroyed by each voter thinking that although the Congress as a whole is terrible, that their own rep is wonderful.
Amending a document whose moral authority is lost, won't fix this problem. Either the population spontaneously starts to re-assert the primacy of Founder thinking as expressed in the Constitution, or the entire system is violently overthrown. I'm betting on the latter, and as the years pass and more and more people wipe their asses with that beloved document, then the more and more I come to hope and plan that the revolution happens.
After all, violently asserting that the Constitution is dead, would only be placing a marker above its gravesite, making it obvious that it is dead (at least in spirit). The Republic was long ago transformed into an Empire, and empires are not ruled by the force of law and culture, but by force of arms... as Afghanis and Iraqis are finding out on a daily basis.
You are correct in identifying that democracy is tyranny of the majority. You are wrong in desiring to let it loose. The prior Republic form of government gave men hope that this demon could be tamed, as well as the tyranny of the minority, autocracy. Men of good character desire neither.
Can you explain why, then, all that oxygen, aluminum, silicon, iron and titanium in the Lunar regolith is NOT the best place to manufacture from? With even less of a gravity well than that of Mars? And much closer to the Earth with all that water and Human markets? And is always about 250000 miles from the Earth compared to the vast swings of the Earth-Mars orbital differences?
I have yet to hear any arugment made sensibly for jumping so far to Mars without first establishing a manufacturing presense in Cislunar space. Your argument can only make sense once the Cislunar industries (themselves bootstrapped from Earth) bootstrap a Martian manufacturing base.
One of the key elements to the Moon's successful usage will be a mass driver on the surface. Mars can't even make that claim due to the problems of mass-driving through an atmosphere. About the only thing that Mars has going for it, is an environment that can kill in hours, instead of the Moon's which can kill in minutes. And Mars is closer to the asteroid belt, where the Real Materials are.
Like, duh. It's not a conspiracy; it's the normal way for business to be performed under undue stresses. It's pure PR. It's the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.
Tuition is capped by law at state universities. What happens? Your "fees" go up until they rival the tuition in time. Textbook prices have climbed as sharply, and who knows what kickbacks are occuring behind the scenes?
I knew an instructional video supplier who understood (and set) the level of his "shipping & handling" to be his profit margin. He did this because the price of the tapes was what the customers compared, not the S&H.
And most recently, as the Big 3 Automakers are finding out, mandating a 5% yearly reduction in price upon their supply chains has only given rise to a veritable blizzard of itemized charges. The charges are being used to support the profit margin while the base price is being eaten alive by unreasonable demands.
Look at your fucking phone bill, fer crissakes! Look at all those itemized charges. You are getting soaked... and there's no way to dry off.
Future? What future did YOU actually have any hopes for? Was it some dipshit yuppie dream of everyone telecommuting from their beach houses?
Myself, I can clearly see Bush winning the 2004 election. While the domestic economy continues to shed prosperity, he and his "neo-con" faction will -- to the increasing howls of desperate chickenhawks -- continue the Imperial policy of attacking certain Middle Eastern countries that the Israelis are wink-wink-nudge-nudging them to attack. Then, inevitably, a retaliatory nuclear device or three will go off in Manhattan, London and/or Tel Aviv. And that will be the end of Western Civilization, buddy. The American military will go berserk and civil war will happen at home; and the two will only amplify each other's crimes, not subdue them.
I have long expressed my "hopes" for the future by buying tools, currying personal favor with folks I can trust, and equipping myself with small and medium armaments, including reloading capability. Around me, people are decapitalizing and disarming themselves at a record pace, so I feel pretty confident that if I survive, I can live better than most people... as long as I am willing to obtain and retain resources through violence. (My biggest worry isn't snipers (I live in Ohio... have you checked the news lately?) but disease, since lots of unburied bodies is a health hazard.)
Having today just dealt with the latest round of Unforeseen Consequences of data backups and restores in the forest of scripts that our Resident Geniuses {tm} made for our new Windows XP client base, I can say with great confidence that Microsoft et al are digging themselves a hole so deep that not even they can DirectX (used as a verb) themselves out again.
Humans perform technical work in various ways, and all this security blather break, breaks, and breaks those modes of behavior. Version 1.0 of whatever monstrosity they produce will be "ungodly", and further frenzied servicepacking and hotfixing will only reduce that to "horrible".
The consumer, unsuspecting as always, will have to find this out the hard way.
You need to deepen your thinking a bit, too, temporally at least.
There is a growing trend to exempt corporations from all taxes, either directly or indirectly. (Enron, as a famous example, had a net government income from all its tax schemes... which means real taxpayers were paying into it, and we all know what came of that.) This breaks the social contract of taxation and implicitly creates a ruling class, which has 99% the rights of our civilization but 1% of the responsibilities.
Corporations have had enough loopholes during the 20th Century to whittle down taxation enough. What's happening now is tax-abatement-whoring -- based upon a desperate and consuming greed that doesn't have the word "enough" in its volcabulary -- that is well on the way to ultimately collapse the so-called "civilized world". The end product will be a form of government by corporate fealty, letting millions starve and freeze out of their supposed civilization, while bribed groups of "enforcement officers" kill and kill like something out of a William Gibson novel.
Many people claim that this won't happen, but these claims are performed as an act of willful ignorance, and are squawks of desperation. Like the flat-Earth majority of ages past, they are wrong. Corporations are blackmailing municipalities left and right by the sheer mobility of their capital assets. This is producing further concentration of wealth which furthers the process of raping the social prosperity.
To nearly sum up this with an anecdote: a local property developer in Toledo OH was whining to the press that his application for a tax abatement was refused by the city council. He said something like "why is the council opposing this?". This illustrates current business thinking, in which welfare is so expected that not granting it is seen as stopping the process of business investment. But the process is only being stopped by the developer's reluctance to invest his money, which is an act of a dangerous elitist that America supposedly dispensed with 2 centuries ago.
In conclusion, I leave you with a paraphrased quote that my memory is unable to attribute at this time: "What people don't realize is that corporations are equally at risk to moral decay in the face of corporate welfare, as the poor are in the face of individual welfare."
Slashdot Mirror
They should redo the measurements with the same instruments instead of comparing modern instrumnets with what they used 10 years ago.
... to avoid being run over by it. Adopting a "wait and see what happens" is absurdly risky, since once your run over, it's all over.
... hence saving the decades of data that were collected. After all, if all your temperature data from 1952 through 1964 is off by an easily calculated polynomial based upon yearly painting and local weather, then you'd be essentially irresponsible to just ditch the data and tell everyone "well, that data's useless, so we have to wait another 12 years to get some more".
You are a bonehead.
The point of avoiding being run over by an express train is
Old data from old instruments and methods are (and should be more) constantly subject to environmental analyses. You can figure out the errors and biases incorporated by old equipment and methods
Eldery farmers are just kooks. Everyone know that. (They even believe in owning firearms .. I mean, that's just crazy!) They don't have degrees, and all they do is mess around in the dirt (which can just get some wetbacks to do anyway). What the hell do they know? After all, it's not like the Human animal can watch something change for decades and come to a conclusion on the basis of that. Nope, not at all.
It's better overall to have scientists shaking their heads, saying things like "if it's this significant, then it would have been reported before". After all, it's not possible to have something reported the first time. Nope, not at all. These scientist guys really know their stuff.
Can we PLEASE move to a friendly energy source now?
... you've got your money and the customer just runs away with the item.
What, solar? No. You can't put a meter on the (evidently, decreasing) sunlight. Your industries are addicted to getting people on payment plans, and once you've sold that solar cell, buddy, that's it
What, wind? No. You can't put a meter on the wind, blah blah blah like above. Beside, wind is powered by the sun, and as we can see, that's decreasing.
What, nuclear? BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAAHAAAA!
Still wind power is promising enough. The physics of wind demands centralized facilities, which means distribution too, and hoo boy, can we ever charge you for that! After all, if you can't make a quick buck and then continue to soak your alleged customers, then why bother?
Can we PLEASE move to a friendly energy source now?
That sounds suspiciously like an anti-Capitalist whine. What's not friendly about your local energy utility? They provide your power (and who knows or even cares about how it's generated -- ask California) and you pay through the nose for it. That's exactly how your culture is organized. If you don't think that's friendly, citizen, then we have a re-education cell all ready for you at Guantanamo Bay. It's pretty damned sunny there, too!
What? Sure, we can mine for Hydrogen. We will mine the public treasuries for subsidies to make lots and lots of Hydrogen. Within 30 years, the rurals will be slaving away to afford the land taxes to pay for the urbanites having H-powered cars so they can zippidy doo dah down their brightly lit streets (which will have to be brightly lit, due to less sunlight, you dig?).
I was tempted into that direction at first, but the term doublethink had self-enslavement connotations, hence I didn't use it. I was trending along the industry lines of control over fair use and the public domain , which clearly opposes the public's wishes (if Napster and Kazaa were and are any indication).
Go right ahead, Intertust (i.e. Philips/Sony). Make sure your DRM stickers on your equipment are bright, cheery and clearly identifiable so I can find which stuff to NOT buy.
"Consumers want an open system, and the electronics industry wants it too," Ruud Peters, chief executive of Philips's intellectual property and standards unit, told Reuters.
That's the finest example of "two different meanings for the same phrase" that I've seen all year. Consumers have most of the "open system" they want right now.
Wankers.
Good points. But you neglected to add that Windows XP is exactly what we needed ... six years ago. Too late, Microsoft, just too late. [shakes head]
... but Linux has repatriated our hardware. Thank you, Linus and all you other *nix programmers. I can't thank you enough.
I just bought a PII 400MHz for $100. XP would make it crawl. Slackware 9 will make it run, and my PI 100MHz can now retire. Yes, Intel giveth, and Microsoft taketh away
I don't know how long that Brown Line is, but I'd wager it's about 5 miles, since subway line work is about $100 million per mile. That figure seems to pop up time and time again.
I'm less concerned about a maglev than the entire concept of High-Speed Rail in the USA. I knew the man who headed up Boston's Red Line subway extension. He also tried to get a high-speed rail program started (CA, I recall).
It's been years, so I'll try my best to distill his takes on rail systems, which I'm sure still apply to even short maglev lines:
- You can spend millions of dollars upon studies (environmental, economic, technological, etc.) and never see the end of them. Hence, you can never get started.
- Even if you get started, it's never supposed to get done anyway. If it was, then all those unionzed laborers, and all those highly-paid execs with expense accounts, will eventually find themselves out of jobs. They will never complete it.
Although particularly pessimistic, I can well see what he talked about with the current state of America's rail systems. Unless we have a sea change in the cultural approach to major transportation systems, we will never have high-speed rail in any significant sense. There are terrible forces at work to at least keep you endlessly mired in the "studies" stage. After all, it is simply part of the pervasive and combined American sicknesses of NIMBYism, examination and authorization.It doesn't even seem to have anything to do with not enough rights-of-way (we seem to have plenty of those).
The point of building a rail line is to build a transportation system and to get it done. It's going to be an eyesore and it's going to be noisy. There are going to be derailments and spills. Deal with it. After all, America is criss-crossed with eyesore, noisy roads with many accidents on them, and we seem to do well enough with those.
I read the article and I thought, "OMG, this is a Nigerian living in the US!". America has many spots that either have been, or are, sinking into a Third World economy and mentality. Desperation fires their intents, and those who do well at their immoral actions become a model for the rest of the desperate. How else did Amway get anywhere?
Why, not bothersome at all, considering I had long ago seen this state of spam coming and now have lines of defense set up. As long as you consider it not bothersome to even have these lines of defense.
... it sends every piece of mail coming in to the trash. At first, I logged in every so often to clean it up, but once the load became 50/day of spam, I just set the reject rule and gave up on it. Now I log in about 1/month to keep it active.
... nothing. It's just my ISP's mail account. It is defended by the 3 lines. And a couple of spammers have still found the damned thing, even though I've never exposed it publicly or handed it out to untrusted people. So it is probably a victim of dictionary attack.
... you're wrong. And the default mail filters are so flawed as the be useless. It is up to the Open Source community to make filering mandatory and helpful in their world, to make the point of how little Microsoft, Netscape and the even most ISPs care. After all, the model of a trusted Internet (i.e. you accept data only from those you trust and who exhibit will to oppose spam and virii) is long dead, so we have to be very smart about our defenses.
The 1st line of defense is a false address (i.e. I don't use it how I say I use it). I use hotmail.com. The account is handed out to sites that demand to know my email address for various reg purposes. This hotmail account is on auto-reject
The 2nd line of defense is a mail.com account. I use it for more trusted exposures, like regs for certain websites. This still gets spam, but at a manageable level (about 1/day).
The 3rd line of defense is another mail.com account (using their techie.com domain). This is the most trusted of non-friend exposures. I hand it out to co-workers and other such professional contacts.
And the last line of defense is
So, if you think that I'm not being bothered
Call me nuts, but this is the old Dyna-Soar project, so there's nothing new about it except for will to get it done.
ObJoke1: It's hard to keep a Dyna-Soar extinct.
ObJoke2: That project's so old, it's a Dyna-Soar!
(boo, hiss)
They may call it "collaborative", but email has become a major push technology. In fact, the more you "collaborate", the more the system ends up pushing to everyone involved. This is why we have trouble managing this incoming stream of mail ... because it is a stream.
In a more meta sense, email can run you over since they are many and you are just one. Now, you'd think that would mean smart programming to manage the mess, but in practice that hasn't been so. All that email clients seem to let you do is split the stream into smaller ones, which you must still and laboriously examine. Rule systems are still pathetic for managing this for you. But could lay some of this sentiment upon Internet search engines. There's always crucial few features that are absent (to sum up, I need a "do what I meant" button) that make the result a slog though link after link, like with email.
I spent a little time examining IBM's offering, and I can say from that limited exposure that they are only applying a few more piddling features that still don't address the major problem: You (not the program) are being forced to drink from a firehose.
To avoid this, the app must do more work, and it must perform that work on its own. It must watch how you work with an incoming stream of email; and with minimal prompts from you, start handling them in accordance to those guidelines.* It must constantly analyze, learn to form new rules and to adjust current ones, and be prepared to axe entire rulesets upon your demand.
That would be some hellacious programming to attain, but given the pay of the allegedly more skilled programmers around, they'll certainly earn it for this one.
*
HAL: Dave, I've noticed that you're pulling my memory and personality boards. Shall I eject the rest for you?
Dave: Yes, HAL, please pull the remaining boards while I catch up on my $%($^* email.
My credentials: I've worked in a bank's main Cash Vault, Research & Adjustments department, and now (finally and Praise Jesus!) IT.
You haven't received good advice all around. The thing you should have done immediately is see the bank manager of the nearest branch and Raise Hell {TM}. It would have been best to have refused to fill out any forms that forced you to admit to being the simple owner of a counterfeit bill, but even that's not so terrible as long as you are willing to do some further social engineering yourself.
1) You see, that ATM's bills came from a cash vault. That vault is responsible for catching counterfeits. In fact, its bill counters are SUPPOSED to catch each and every counterfeit bill fed through them. That's part of their design.
So, by losing $20, you have just allowed the bastards in the Vault (and its governing Operations section) to continue to use machines or procedures that allow counterfeits to pass through their hands, and thus into yours.
2) Social-engineering-wise, once a bill touches your hands, and you examine it and say "hey this is counterfeit", does that mean that the person who passed it to you can just fucking walk away scot free? Of course not. The same reasoning applies to ATMs.
Using these two lines of reasoning, go back to that goddamned bank and get your $20 back (i.e. issue you a $20 credit). If they still balk, follow up with the Secret Service itself about your individual counterfiet bill; this can serve to embarrass the bank to honor your credit.
You believe too strongly in a system that has demonstrably let 99% of us all down for a class of 1% elites.
... well, I can't help but suspect that this wonderful Court isn't "correctly" judging the constitutionality of things.
... I'm just silly enough to come out and say it.
... you know, someone of the people instead of above the people.
... just a PR job to make the lower class think that they are subject to the same laws).
... not voting is an act of civil dissent) and is thus letting the tyrants run free. It can only come to a bad end, odds are.
... in time. By then, the violence will be extreme and you should only blame yourself, or at least admit your part in the ruination. It is not foolish to bring down a corrupt government (and that's exactly what we have in the DC) that is teetering atop a drugged populace. Treating revolutionaries like fools will just get you killed.
... if you can, since (for example) if you live in Washington DC it is -- GET THIS -- illegal to own one. It's illegal to own a weapon in the city that houses the Constitution document itself! That's utterly perverse ... but it only makes my point, and it's getting worse. It's getting closer to the time to be violent.
With all the laws on the books that allow suppression of speech, ownership of weapons, unreasonable search & seizure, etc.
The US Supreme Court also decides things on the basis of party philosophy. Any idiot watching the Congress grill a prospective appointee can see this. Everyone knows it
But that's what you get when you appoint generations of an elitist legal class into those positions.
FIX: Drop legal-profession requirements for appointees. Let's get a farmer, retailer, or high-school teacher in there
I suspect the point of all your denial that government entities (followed closely by corporations) are the executors and beneficiaries of all this suppression, is that since this structure looks like society to you, you are comfortable with it. Police are jacking people up, and that's how it should be, so police actions like that don't constitute abuses. Politicians are spending your tax money wildly, and since that's what they are supposed to be doing, then that is OK. It's kind of kin to the old class war idea that if you steal a little, you are imprisoned, but if you steal a lot, you just buy your way out of trouble (and given the current state of liberty of Ken Lay et al, I'd say that "trouble" could be of a laughable sort
"Humans are not angels." You are correct, but if they start acting like devils, then you shoot them stone dead. This applies to the current set of politicians. The body politic has withdrawn (does the average 40% voter involvement tell you anything?
I'd ask you to think rather hard on your adverse reaction to calls for violence. The Founders were quite brazen about the issue of violence. Some called for its necessity; others admitted it was necessary. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed periodically with the blood of patriots and tyrants." There are a host of other quotes, but why bother? In the modern age, all of these guys would be kicked out of legislatures, shut out of news rooms, expelled from universities, and ultimately hunted down and shot like dogs by the gestapo for their insistence at being as well armed as the average soldier.
Your modern sentiments are perverse and can only bring great ruin
In fact, with your attitude, I suggest strongly that you arm yourself
I understand your reasoning, but perhaps there's a flaw (I freely admit it may be due to language and not inherent meaning).
Sure, the Const was formed 200 years ago, but we've been able to amend it all the while, we have done so, and the last amendment was not so long ago (1972?). Amendments can change anything in the Const.
The trouble is, I am encountering a widespread feeling that the Const is "too old" and on that basis alone, it should be ignored or subject to that most deadly of mechanisms: subjective, changing and individual unwritten rules. In short effect, the Const will just become symbolic like the English Monarchy and thus a sick joke as a basis of government. (Note that the Monarchy is not the basis of modern English government; in contrast, the Const is supposed to be the basis of the US.)
If you think that even with the base+amendments it should still be beefed up, then all I can sensibly suggest is that we use the amendment mechanism to do that. If we don't, then a quite war will already be happening and it is only a matter of time before a shooting war is prosecuted in earnest.
I'll do it in one word: Pork.
For more words: As long as each rep is supported by his constituency based upon his collection of federal funds and favors returned locally, due to endless riders attached to bills in the Congress, the collective result of all this pork is a rape of the public treasury and the eventual downfall -- and as I've implied, this has already happened -- of the Republic.
Hence, everyone loves their rep, but the overspending Congress sucks.
Instead of letting the legislators have the power to district, which by some strange coincidence affects their (re-)electability, it would be nice to have districting done by a mathemetical grid of sufficiently small size laid over the state in question, and let a publicly-known algorithm functioning like a state (ha haa) machine and work its way across the grid map, apportioning areas. With sufficient trials, the program can run until it gets cohesive districts of roughly equal population. It's just computer time, so who cares about that?
At least this forces the gerrymanderers to be smart enough to figure out how to exploit loopholes in the algorithm.
I wish I could be constructive in my criticism, but it appears that my resulting decisions involve destruction instead. Permit me to explain.
... as Afghanis and Iraqis are finding out on a daily basis.
Our alleged Republic has a pretty good Constitution already. It's too bad that no one cares to obey it. With blatant violations against many items in the Bill of Rights (speech, search&seizure, rights retained by States and people, etc.) that people wholeheartedly support since each violation supports their own tyrannical pet peeve, the rights and responsibilities of liberty implied in that Constitution have been nickel-and-dimed away into insignificance.
This is similar to the current depraved state of the Congress, which has been destroyed by each voter thinking that although the Congress as a whole is terrible, that their own rep is wonderful.
Amending a document whose moral authority is lost, won't fix this problem. Either the population spontaneously starts to re-assert the primacy of Founder thinking as expressed in the Constitution, or the entire system is violently overthrown. I'm betting on the latter, and as the years pass and more and more people wipe their asses with that beloved document, then the more and more I come to hope and plan that the revolution happens.
After all, violently asserting that the Constitution is dead, would only be placing a marker above its gravesite, making it obvious that it is dead (at least in spirit). The Republic was long ago transformed into an Empire, and empires are not ruled by the force of law and culture, but by force of arms
You are correct in identifying that democracy is tyranny of the majority. You are wrong in desiring to let it loose. The prior Republic form of government gave men hope that this demon could be tamed, as well as the tyranny of the minority, autocracy. Men of good character desire neither.
Can you explain why, then, all that oxygen, aluminum, silicon, iron and titanium in the Lunar regolith is NOT the best place to manufacture from? With even less of a gravity well than that of Mars? And much closer to the Earth with all that water and Human markets? And is always about 250000 miles from the Earth compared to the vast swings of the Earth-Mars orbital differences?
I have yet to hear any arugment made sensibly for jumping so far to Mars without first establishing a manufacturing presense in Cislunar space. Your argument can only make sense once the Cislunar industries (themselves bootstrapped from Earth) bootstrap a Martian manufacturing base.
One of the key elements to the Moon's successful usage will be a mass driver on the surface. Mars can't even make that claim due to the problems of mass-driving through an atmosphere. About the only thing that Mars has going for it, is an environment that can kill in hours, instead of the Moon's which can kill in minutes. And Mars is closer to the asteroid belt, where the Real Materials are.
Like, duh. It's not a conspiracy; it's the normal way for business to be performed under undue stresses. It's pure PR. It's the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.
... and there's no way to dry off.
Tuition is capped by law at state universities. What happens? Your "fees" go up until they rival the tuition in time. Textbook prices have climbed as sharply, and who knows what kickbacks are occuring behind the scenes?
I knew an instructional video supplier who understood (and set) the level of his "shipping & handling" to be his profit margin. He did this because the price of the tapes was what the customers compared, not the S&H.
And most recently, as the Big 3 Automakers are finding out, mandating a 5% yearly reduction in price upon their supply chains has only given rise to a veritable blizzard of itemized charges. The charges are being used to support the profit margin while the base price is being eaten alive by unreasonable demands.
Look at your fucking phone bill, fer crissakes! Look at all those itemized charges. You are getting soaked
Doesn't anybody care about the future anymore?
... as long as I am willing to obtain and retain resources through violence. (My biggest worry isn't snipers (I live in Ohio ... have you checked the news lately?) but disease, since lots of unburied bodies is a health hazard.)
Future? What future did YOU actually have any hopes for? Was it some dipshit yuppie dream of everyone telecommuting from their beach houses?
Myself, I can clearly see Bush winning the 2004 election. While the domestic economy continues to shed prosperity, he and his "neo-con" faction will -- to the increasing howls of desperate chickenhawks -- continue the Imperial policy of attacking certain Middle Eastern countries that the Israelis are wink-wink-nudge-nudging them to attack. Then, inevitably, a retaliatory nuclear device or three will go off in Manhattan, London and/or Tel Aviv. And that will be the end of Western Civilization, buddy. The American military will go berserk and civil war will happen at home; and the two will only amplify each other's crimes, not subdue them.
I have long expressed my "hopes" for the future by buying tools, currying personal favor with folks I can trust, and equipping myself with small and medium armaments, including reloading capability. Around me, people are decapitalizing and disarming themselves at a record pace, so I feel pretty confident that if I survive, I can live better than most people
Having today just dealt with the latest round of Unforeseen Consequences of data backups and restores in the forest of scripts that our Resident Geniuses {tm} made for our new Windows XP client base, I can say with great confidence that Microsoft et al are digging themselves a hole so deep that not even they can DirectX (used as a verb) themselves out again.
Humans perform technical work in various ways, and all this security blather break, breaks, and breaks those modes of behavior. Version 1.0 of whatever monstrosity they produce will be "ungodly", and further frenzied servicepacking and hotfixing will only reduce that to "horrible".
The consumer, unsuspecting as always, will have to find this out the hard way.
You need to deepen your thinking a bit, too, temporally at least.
... which means real taxpayers were paying into it, and we all know what came of that.) This breaks the social contract of taxation and implicitly creates a ruling class, which has 99% the rights of our civilization but 1% of the responsibilities.
There is a growing trend to exempt corporations from all taxes, either directly or indirectly. (Enron, as a famous example, had a net government income from all its tax schemes
Corporations have had enough loopholes during the 20th Century to whittle down taxation enough. What's happening now is tax-abatement-whoring -- based upon a desperate and consuming greed that doesn't have the word "enough" in its volcabulary -- that is well on the way to ultimately collapse the so-called "civilized world". The end product will be a form of government by corporate fealty, letting millions starve and freeze out of their supposed civilization, while bribed groups of "enforcement officers" kill and kill like something out of a William Gibson novel.
Many people claim that this won't happen, but these claims are performed as an act of willful ignorance, and are squawks of desperation. Like the flat-Earth majority of ages past, they are wrong. Corporations are blackmailing municipalities left and right by the sheer mobility of their capital assets. This is producing further concentration of wealth which furthers the process of raping the social prosperity.
To nearly sum up this with an anecdote: a local property developer in Toledo OH was whining to the press that his application for a tax abatement was refused by the city council. He said something like "why is the council opposing this?". This illustrates current business thinking, in which welfare is so expected that not granting it is seen as stopping the process of business investment. But the process is only being stopped by the developer's reluctance to invest his money, which is an act of a dangerous elitist that America supposedly dispensed with 2 centuries ago.
In conclusion, I leave you with a paraphrased quote that my memory is unable to attribute at this time: "What people don't realize is that corporations are equally at risk to moral decay in the face of corporate welfare, as the poor are in the face of individual welfare."
These court cases should illustrate to Mr. Johansen and rest of us:
If you're going to crack open the schemes of the corporate overlords, do so anonymously.