"Carbon offsets" are just more bullshit to funnel money from the poor to the bankers.
But it's actually worse than that, because third-world governments are now evicting people from their land so they can plant trees to rake in some of that cash:
I thought private space combined with 3D printing was going to revolutionize everything? I was thinking private 3D printed sub-orbital transports, flights leaving every half hour, FILLED with people!
That's an interesting point. Could SpaceX build a reusable suborbital launcher which could fly the same distance for less than the train?
My guess would be yes, given how ludicrously expensive this railroad is going to be.
In twenty years, California will have swollen to perhaps 50million people
Only if the Chinese or Mexicans invade. Most of the people I know in California with actual productive jobs are trying to get out, and blowing another $98,000,000,000 on some stupid railway will only make them more determined to do so.
The first transcontinental railroad took less than 10 years to build -- considerably less. Before doing something like this, figure out why the hell it's going to take 30 years, and fix that first.
The first railroads were intended as a way to get from place to place, and hence they actually had to be completed in a sensible amount of time in order to operate and recoup their costs (though I believe they struggled to do so?). These new railroads appear to be intended as a jobs program for union workers, so the longer they take, the better.
Screen real-estate was only ever a problem on 7" netbooks, which haven't existed in any meaningful way since Microsoft killed the netbook concept and everyone discovered that they preferred 10" ultraportables anyway.
You should have tried Windows Update on my 10" netbook before I wiped XP and replaced it with Linux. Between the Windows menu bar, the various IE menu bars and the various Windows Update frames there were about three lines left for actual useful information.
In that first screenshot, everything in the bottom bar could easily be incorporated into the top bar saving valuable vertical screen real estate.
My Gnome 2 installation has top and bottom bars and there's barely a spare pixel on them. I couldn't fit everything I want on just one bar.
Note that a screen that's so limited in vertical space that you don't want two bars is also likely to be so limited in horizontal space that you need two bars if you want enough space for it to be usable.
Reducing the use of vertical space made sense for netbooks and other small screen devices, but trying to push the same design onto machines which do have big screens is retarded.
The "consumer" solution for this is not a full computer but a Bluetooth keyboard for one's existing phone or tablet.
Yeah, so now you have a shitty attempt to recreate a desktop with a fraction of the power and costs several times as much.
The idea that everyone is going to be doing real productive work on a phone with a 3" screen using a bluetooth keyboard is just laughable. Certainly more so than the idea we'd abandon workstations for X-terminals was twenty years ago.
it's hard to see what would make people want to go back to clunky difficult to maintain desk-bound computers.
That's what they said about X terminals.
Sure, if all you do is look at web pages then a desktop is overkill. But as soon as you want to write a resume, you're fscked if all you have is a phone or a tablet.
Secondary to the goal of consistency across installed instances during administration, is wide adoption. Wide use translates to credibility, when pitching contracts and negoriating deals.
You don't get wide adoption by pushing changes that users hate. There's a reason why so many people have switched to Mint lately.
Indeed. If, say, he'd written bad things about Obama on a blog in Britain, the US government would have extradited him. It's awful that the Thais had to wait for him to actually travel to Thailand.
This is quite an interesting phenomenon to me. It seems like with the whole "cloud" business, we're going back to a client-server computing approach; the servers and clients are just a shit-ton more powerful than anything 20-30 years ago.
Don't worry, ten years from now everyone will remember that the thin-client model sucks and we'll be back to building powerful local systems again.
And the 'performance' of having to move the mouse all over the screen, switch to a different overlay display, move the mouse all over the screen to click on an icon or take your hand off the mouse to type in the name of the application you start is not an improvement over Gnome 2.
No, but since Gnome 2 isn't being developed any more, there's not much choice if you don't want to use a crappy interface which tries to hide some of the most important tools from users.
And who do you think gets blamed when they do allow you to set up your own wireless network and someone hacks into the building because you used a password of 'password'?
The problem with the 'all-seeing eye' is that it sees everything and is overloaded with irrelevant details. After the next major terrorist attack the government will be asking why the 'intelligence' agencies yet again failed to detect them and the answer will be that they were wasting their time chasing up thousands of useless 'leads' spewed out by their surveillance systems.
According to the ICE website, they seize domains after they have collected evidence and obtained a warrant, the same way they seize things in any other crime.
In what sense is a domain name evidence in a crime?
Are you saying that if the police claim I'm selling counterfeit DVDs they can seize my telephone number and redirect it to their own phone, thereby probably putting me out of business even if I'm completely innocent?
This is purely about punishment without conviction.
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You mean the one restart that takes a minute and a half on Windows 7?
Followed by thirteen and a half minutes for all the crapware to start up after you log in.
Obviously it's more expensive and difficult to build down than up, but if you haven't noticed, there is a finite amount of land to build up on.
Whereas there's an infinite amount of land to build down on?
That was my first thought when I saw this. They clearly don't read their comics or they'd know what a bad idea it is.
"Carbon offsets" are just more bullshit to funnel money from the poor to the bankers.
But it's actually worse than that, because third-world governments are now evicting people from their land so they can plant trees to rake in some of that cash:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/22/uganda-farmer-land-gave-me-everything
The Global Climate Warming Change scam spreads evil wherever it goes.
I thought private space combined with 3D printing was going to revolutionize everything? I was thinking private 3D printed sub-orbital transports, flights leaving every half hour, FILLED with people!
That's an interesting point. Could SpaceX build a reusable suborbital launcher which could fly the same distance for less than the train?
My guess would be yes, given how ludicrously expensive this railroad is going to be.
And because trains suck ass.
In twenty years, California will have swollen to perhaps 50million people
Only if the Chinese or Mexicans invade. Most of the people I know in California with actual productive jobs are trying to get out, and blowing another $98,000,000,000 on some stupid railway will only make them more determined to do so.
The first transcontinental railroad took less than 10 years to build -- considerably less. Before doing something like this, figure out why the hell it's going to take 30 years, and fix that first.
The first railroads were intended as a way to get from place to place, and hence they actually had to be completed in a sensible amount of time in order to operate and recoup their costs (though I believe they struggled to do so?). These new railroads appear to be intended as a jobs program for union workers, so the longer they take, the better.
Compared to all this, my Windows computers are easy.
You really think that Joe User can plug a new SATA drive into their Windows box and 'easily' set up the system to use it?
Every time I have to use Windows I find it a horrible kludge and can't believe I managed to run it for ten years between SunOS and Linux.
Screen real-estate was only ever a problem on 7" netbooks, which haven't existed in any meaningful way since Microsoft killed the netbook concept and everyone discovered that they preferred 10" ultraportables anyway.
You should have tried Windows Update on my 10" netbook before I wiped XP and replaced it with Linux. Between the Windows menu bar, the various IE menu bars and the various Windows Update frames there were about three lines left for actual useful information.
In that first screenshot, everything in the bottom bar could easily be incorporated into the top bar saving valuable vertical screen real estate.
My Gnome 2 installation has top and bottom bars and there's barely a spare pixel on them. I couldn't fit everything I want on just one bar.
Note that a screen that's so limited in vertical space that you don't want two bars is also likely to be so limited in horizontal space that you need two bars if you want enough space for it to be usable.
Reducing the use of vertical space made sense for netbooks and other small screen devices, but trying to push the same design onto machines which do have big screens is retarded.
The "consumer" solution for this is not a full computer but a Bluetooth keyboard for one's existing phone or tablet.
Yeah, so now you have a shitty attempt to recreate a desktop with a fraction of the power and costs several times as much.
The idea that everyone is going to be doing real productive work on a phone with a 3" screen using a bluetooth keyboard is just laughable. Certainly more so than the idea we'd abandon workstations for X-terminals was twenty years ago.
I think I started on Ubuntu with 8.04. There seem to be more and more bugs with every new release.
it's hard to see what would make people want to go back to clunky difficult to maintain desk-bound computers.
That's what they said about X terminals.
Sure, if all you do is look at web pages then a desktop is overkill. But as soon as you want to write a resume, you're fscked if all you have is a phone or a tablet.
Secondary to the goal of consistency across installed instances during administration, is wide adoption. Wide use translates to credibility, when pitching contracts and negoriating deals.
You don't get wide adoption by pushing changes that users hate. There's a reason why so many people have switched to Mint lately.
Indeed. If, say, he'd written bad things about Obama on a blog in Britain, the US government would have extradited him. It's awful that the Thais had to wait for him to actually travel to Thailand.
This is quite an interesting phenomenon to me. It seems like with the whole "cloud" business, we're going back to a client-server computing approach; the servers and clients are just a shit-ton more powerful than anything 20-30 years ago.
Don't worry, ten years from now everyone will remember that the thin-client model sucks and we'll be back to building powerful local systems again.
And it's so much shinier than fixing bugs.
And the 'performance' of having to move the mouse all over the screen, switch to a different overlay display, move the mouse all over the screen to click on an icon or take your hand off the mouse to type in the name of the application you start is not an improvement over Gnome 2.
Most of us used Gnome 2 because we didn't like KDE or XFCE. Now we don't like Gnome 3 either.
IMHO KDE is too bloated and clunky and XFCE is too cut down. Gnome 2 used to be just about right in the middle.
Why do people make a big deal about a distro's default desktop? You can install whatever you want.
Yeah, I could just 'apt-get install gnome-2' on the latest Ubuntu.
Oh, no. I can't, can I?
Most people just want a distro that doesn't suck out of the box.
No, but since Gnome 2 isn't being developed any more, there's not much choice if you don't want to use a crappy interface which tries to hide some of the most important tools from users.
And who do you think gets blamed when they do allow you to set up your own wireless network and someone hacks into the building because you used a password of 'password'?
The problem with the 'all-seeing eye' is that it sees everything and is overloaded with irrelevant details. After the next major terrorist attack the government will be asking why the 'intelligence' agencies yet again failed to detect them and the answer will be that they were wasting their time chasing up thousands of useless 'leads' spewed out by their surveillance systems.
According to the ICE website, they seize domains after they have collected evidence and obtained a warrant, the same way they seize things in any other crime.
In what sense is a domain name evidence in a crime?
Are you saying that if the police claim I'm selling counterfeit DVDs they can seize my telephone number and redirect it to their own phone, thereby probably putting me out of business even if I'm completely innocent?
This is purely about punishment without conviction.