Your response doesn't include any reason why there would be secret procedural information.
Sorry, there I go infering stuff again. More explicitly- if the procedural information of the cross checking was known, the scammers could come up with new ways to hide their cheating on the loopholes. Due to who pays for Congressional Campaigns (what, you expected it to be good business to spend $5 million to gain a $250,000/year job for two years?), the majority of the IRS's budget is spent following around the people who don't have enough to have a congresscritter intervene in the investigation. So of course, any secret procedural information would be cross-checks that raise red flags targeting relatively poor people for audits.
It's a secret how the taxes are calculated? That's fucked up.
Yep- and it's because the IRS does not have the job you think they have. Collecting taxes is the minor, unimportant job. The important job is catching people who cheated on the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other low-income loopholes.
At least I misread the KB article to begin with- people linking to Excel spreadsheets for Select Queries won't be affected- only Insert and Update functionality will be disabled. But that's everybody who sends data to a spreadsheet for calculations....
If you had a recording of your life and wanted to know your boss's exact statement about your project 6 months ago, you will need to spend hours and hours and hours flipping through footage looking for it.
That's where visual search tools come into use- I'm not saying we have the technology RIGHT NOW to find stuff in a 6 month archive of video- I'm saying that the storage is coming close (perpendicular recording Hitachi Microdrives are coming out in 2007, at which point you'll be able to carry 60GB around pretty easily), and the software too thanks to the War on Terror (the same software algorithims that allow a Predator to target a single individual with a Hellfire missile or allows the TSA to pick out a face in the crowd for extra scrutiny at the airport, will one day allow your child to automatically sift through a petabyte data store of video to find a first meeting of a first love). With a Petabyte of storage, you can also afford to devote some space to diary indexing- entering a note on your PDA that syncs to the camera to mark a date-time-stamp on the video as something of interest, with notes as to what was interesting about it. With it being a RAID array, it can be hot swapable and continuous back up, so that a single drive dying doesn't mean you lost 3 months of your life.
We're talking convergence in the near future, not the present. But there's at least 4 currently separate technologies that are coming together quite quickly to allow you to do all of this...and it will cause a change in the culture, because such PDA/camera systems are sure to become quite ubiquitous.
It isn't- most of those gigabytes will be wasted. What this is useful for is as an external memory periphereal to your brain. Human brains are very efficient at storing data, but notoriously inefficient at data retrieval- by the time you're 30 the pathways for retrieval are begining to degrade in reverse- you'll be still able to remember what your locker combination was in high school, but what you had for breakfast this morning may be lost forever.
Such a "life recording system", especially if incorporated into a device small enough to carry around with you that could say, keep local the recordings of the past 168 hours in a low-res format, backed up weekly on your home petabyte data store, would be incredibly useful. What did the boss tell you to do on Monday just before going off on that trip? Rewind to Monday and watch it!
NOBODY except maybe a voyeur on 8x fast forward is going to want to watch your whole life- but the porn opportunities for somebody of the opposite sex or homosexuals are amazing so such cameras would have to be banned from communal locker rooms and the like.
So you're condemning Microsoft for having code written by contractors rather than employees and for not reinventing all technology from scratch. Um. That's pretty silly.
No, I'm not- I'm just saying that the hacker ethic is more respectable, because it gives credit where credit is due. The fact you think Microsoft wrote the first version of VB or should have all the credit for Windows is what is pretty silly here.
I'm not "condemning" anybody- I'm just stating facts. You've obviously forgotten the first rule of text based communications: the emotion is stripped out. Any emotional content you read into a message is from the reader, not the writer; reading between the lines comes from YOU.
In the C sense of that word. This isn't going to impact Microsoft sales one bit- it's a relatively minor piece of functionality that most professional software engineers would stay the hell away from to begin with (after all, you can mimic it in a more controled fashion using an ODBC or OLEDB connection from VBA anyway). Who it's going to impact is those people who don't really understand the difference between a spreadsheet and a database to begin with- who link to their spreadsheets to gain SQL Query capability over them, or to keep a spreadsheet in sync with a database for reporting purposes. This is going to result in a major headache for anybody who provides helpdesk support for such people. In the organization I contract for, I'd say we're going to generate about 800 requests in the first week to "fix my broken database".
It's well hidden, but Vibe contains Green Tea Extract which contains caffine. But with all the other antioxidants, vitamins, and natural frutcose this drink gives you, I can certainly understand that the jitter effect is either muted or non-existant.....
Jolt Ultra is going to be my new caffinated drink if I go diabetic for exactly this reason (All the caffine, NONE of the sugar, it's made with splenda).
Yes- and for the purpose of documenting my life, I don't need no stinkin' TV quality either. Given this, what I want is a digital camera that can handle sound and picture, recorded constantly to a Type III CF slot, at 240x360 pixels and 16 bit stereo sound, in MPEG-2 format. I then would want the Petabyte array at home- and Hitachi's new 6GB microdrive on the road. I'd then be able to record all the interesting (read waking) hours of my life, and have them indexed by day and hour for recall, pretty easily.
Everything in this list contains code that was written by contractors- that is, purchased from some other company. A few things in this list (Windows OS, NT family, MS-DOS, WORD, Sybase SQL Server) contain "look and feel" GUIs directly stolen from other products.
You seem to think that recombining technologies already in existance means you've created something new. It doesn't. The closest one I see in this list to an actual "Invented by Microsoft" is Windows CE- but even that is really just a cut-down of the code bases from CP/M (where FAT came from to begin with), Windows OS, and Model 100 OS, recompiled for some really odd little microprocessors.
NOBODY in software engineering works alone, we've all shared the work all along, since the earliest days when MIT students started a drawerfull of source code. To some extent, therefore, copyrights and patents on "software" have always been rather bogus- and the whole idea of respecting a bogus law is in and of itself bogus.
But by working on this insistance that Bill G is a software engineer, you downgrade his real genius- a genius I really admire- the art of the deal. NONE of what Microsoft has done has been illegal- strongarm yes, illegal no- and it was simply brilliant the way he took CP/M-86 and marketed it as PC-DOS before the original developer was finished debugging and willing to release. Likewise was the adaptation of Bourne Shell (long before the GPL, versions of Unix were open source) subdirectories for MS-DOS 2 and above. Likewise the adaptation of VB version 1, written entirely by a contractor, to become by Version 3 the primary programming language for Windows (I had a similar toolkit I was selling way back in 1982 for TI Extended Basic- though mine was more tuned to programming video games and graphics displays). These were brilliant business deals- doing them propelled Microsoft to monopoly status and made the desktop PC a common household item. But original work, hacks the level of the Woz? Or for that matter even understanding the general hacker mentality? Nope, can't say that these deals fit the mold.
Hmm, that's a thought- I wonder if my wife's relatives in Eastern Oregon would let me experiment a bit if I could guarantee their cattle wouldn't get cancer...their land in the Wallowa Mountains is about the same climate as Hanford....
I suppose I could simulate it for a short time with just a regular fire- but I can't get the long-term data I need (respective temperatures inside and outside, and a count of average daily watts produced over the course of a year) with just a fire- or at least, not very easily. Plus, I'm looking for the specific climate at the Hanford res to begin with- as the original intent is to do something good for my local community, and moving the waste would be antithetical to the theory...
The theory is, these devices are quite common, and more people would use them if more sites supported them. I like Google Mobile, I use a handful of other sites that are compatible, including Snapstream.net for Beyond TV (now that's a slick mobile site- it autodetects Windows CE and Pilot, and shrinks back to a subset that works wonderfully for finding a show you just heard about and scheduling it for recording to your home PC, which allows you to download it back to your device for later watching- completely cool closed loop).
Now for best practices- go light on the graphics, better if you MUST have pictures should be a link to the picture, not an IMG tag. Text only. Few people have the newer Windows Mobile 5.0 devices with the hi-res screen- think 240 pixels wide. These devices are great for vertical scrolling, bad for side scrolling. Keep entry to links or single field with a submit button- javascript may not work well, and typing is a real pain on these devices. Same idea with pictures- think 240x240 or 240x320 at most.
Thanks for your views on the matter. Rest assured, I shall give them due thought and consideration. One more unrelated (apologies) question - just so I know where you're coming from. Given your views expressed in this (and other) thread(s), your ID, etc...what are your views on legal immigration to the country?
Painful, but necessary and controlable. I personally think it should be limited to ZPG- which given the sorry state of third generation American fertility, would be about a half a million individuals a year.
Of course, given my views on abortion, we could completely replace the need for immigration with single-payer health care for mothers and children in accordance with UDHR Article 25 (thus reducing the need for abortion by a half a million children a year); and the technical importation of human brains and skillsets with UDHR Article 26 if we choose to. We have the resources to do so, and refuse to only out of greed.
By not granting our own citizens Article 25 & 26 rights according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we open ourselves up for exploitation by the multinational corporations- and maybe worse yet, we face exactly the same problem in this generation that the Native Americans faced in 1840 when many tribes were simply declared extinct, their lands given over to foreign invaders.
$55 for the balloon- and just thinking about it, I'd expect about $3000 (the price of 6-8 cell phones) per balloon. They're only relays to ground stations after all, not full blown towers in and of themselves (or else they'd have to be tethered).
Unfortunately, I can't agree with your thinking that closing trade with the rest of the world is in any way the "best for the country".
That's because you're thinking with the gain, instead of against it.
In addition to profit, free trade is also what brings about a mutual sharing of technology, ideas, resources, innovation and ultimately a closer-knit global community.
Given the state of technology in the global community, we're better off without them- and they're better off without us. It's the same basic theory as the Prime Directive- it's bad news any time a culture becomes imperialistic. We've got all the ideas, resources, innovation, and technology we need right here at home- and they'll be *much* better off if they develop their own instead of copying us. If they really do think we're that much better than what they've currently got- let them apply for statehood and live under our laws and our government- thus insuring REAL free trade, just like we have between the states right now.
Shutting off a country's borders to international trade just isn't the right answer.
It's a damned sight better answer than letting a few parasites oppress the world through corporatism, including our own government now that a good many of them are actually richer in resources than the government. But you see good American corporations in that role- where all I see is a bunch of Traitors that need to be executed.
You could do without importing oil, or without having imported it for the past century?
Absolutely- without cheap oil, we'd just have a much quicker adoption of alternative native renewable fuels- such as cellulose ethanol (million of sustainable board feet of wood from Pacific Northwest forests), vegetable oil biofuels, recycled turkey guts, etc. The original two internal combustion engines (Diesel and Ford) ran on biofuels (Vegetable Oil and Ethanol), as did the original two external combustion engines (Steam and Sterling, both of which run just fine on wood). Liquified coal can replace the rest of what we need over what we produce ourselves. It's time America became self-sufficient again, in fact, it's begining to look vital to our national security to end the oil trade once and for all- no matter who you think took the towers down, it was definately related, at least tangentially, to our corrupt trade practices and control of oil in the Middle East (If you believe the official story, then bin Laden attacked us because of our sending troops to Saudi Arabia to protect the oil against Saddam Hussien. If you believe the conspiracy theorists, we faked the attack so that we would begin a war against Islam in general and/or bin Laden and Saddam Hussien in specific, to protect the Royal House of Saud and thus our access to Mideast Oil in general.) Either way, oil trade has destabilized our peace- and making that trade illegal and finding other replacements for it should be the primary priority in the War On Terror.
It's all just a matter of thinking against the gain- that is, thinking in terms of what is best for the country and citizens as opposed to what is best for profit.
Yes, this would be a continuous process of launching balloons and retrieving the electronics after the balloons drift away or burst. But reading the article would have answered that for you.
Seems to me that would require nine balloons at any given time, not three.
Oh, and just to point out the level of cluelessness, the Apple ][ you cite as your example used a 6502 not a 6802. The 6502 was a totally different chip than the 68xx family from a different vendor with a different architecture. You'd think you'd know at least that.
On this one, you're right- somehow I got that digit flipped wrong, and I DID know at least that- shows how long it's been since I messed with any of the Apple ][ line...
Bill worked on vast amounts of software himself as a developer for the first decade of Microsoft and as a individual starting with Altair Basic (he wrote almost all of it) and ending with the OS for the Radio Shack Model 100 (the first popular laptop in history and still spoken of with awe by reporters) which he wrote himself.
The OS for the Model 100 WAS Altair Basic- recompiled and with a video editor. BasicA, GWBasic, MS Basic, Altair basic, it's all the same program basically. The first OS Microsoft actually produced was PC-DOS; and that was really CPM. I know the history as well as you do- you can't fool me with slightly different items.
Microsoft develops vastly more software than it buys.
the US wouldn't be able to export any products to "non-state" countries. That alone, according to the CIA World Factbook would account for almost 1 trillion dollars ($927.5 billion) lost in lost exports.
Good- those are goods and services that should STAY IN THE UNITED STATES TO BEGIN WITH!!!! The large majority of our exports are our natural resources, and we're stupid to let go of them. We worry about the cost of steel and our local steel industry- but we export billions of tons of scrap metal and raw iron to China. We worry about the cost of food, despite it being historically low right now- and send our subsidized food out to third world countries to destroy their small family farms. NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE if you take the profit out of it- and even with the profit in it, it's trading our morality and ethics for money, which is always a stupid thing to do.
Doesn't sound so attractive now, does it.
Sounds a hell of a lot more attractive than what is going on right now- letting a few traitors take advantage of our natural resources and inventive labor market to make themselves rich while returning virtually nothing (hint, the trade balance is so bad that overall, dollar value of exports-imports has been negative for three decades now). When I look at a trillion dollars worth of exports and a trillion and a half worth of imports, I see this as a business that USA, Inc. really needs to shut down. It's a net loss for us- and will be for the next 500 years or so.
Well, actually for the experiment I'm not really that into actually obtaining the fuel myself- I'm perfectly willing to let somebody FAR more qualified, say from the government, take my invention at the gate to Handford, hook it up to the phone lines, transfer the fuel into it, and leave it in place to gather the data. I can always call in to get the data, and they get the added benefit of automated alarms in case of sudden changes in the temperature or the liquid level. And the waste doesn't actually have to leave the Hanford Reservation- if the experiment is successfull, just hook up the synchronized inverter to the power grid and leave it alone for the next 10,000 years or so, feeding really small amounts of energy into the power grid. By "Really small amounts" I mean probably in the microwatts...as in "not worth it if it wasn't for the need to contain the waste to begin with". I'm just betting that a modern basic stamp uses *less* electricity than can be generated by the difference in temperature between the shielded radioactive sludge and the outside.
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Your response doesn't include any reason why there would be secret procedural information.
Sorry, there I go infering stuff again. More explicitly- if the procedural information of the cross checking was known, the scammers could come up with new ways to hide their cheating on the loopholes. Due to who pays for Congressional Campaigns (what, you expected it to be good business to spend $5 million to gain a $250,000/year job for two years?), the majority of the IRS's budget is spent following around the people who don't have enough to have a congresscritter intervene in the investigation. So of course, any secret procedural information would be cross-checks that raise red flags targeting relatively poor people for audits.
It's a secret how the taxes are calculated? That's fucked up.
Yep- and it's because the IRS does not have the job you think they have. Collecting taxes is the minor, unimportant job. The important job is catching people who cheated on the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other low-income loopholes.
Better yet, do what Nazi Germany did- just propose this research to Gitmo Bay torturers, and let THEM do the research for you.
At least I misread the KB article to begin with- people linking to Excel spreadsheets for Select Queries won't be affected- only Insert and Update functionality will be disabled. But that's everybody who sends data to a spreadsheet for calculations....
If you had a recording of your life and wanted to know your boss's exact statement about your project 6 months ago, you will need to spend hours and hours and hours flipping through footage looking for it.
That's where visual search tools come into use- I'm not saying we have the technology RIGHT NOW to find stuff in a 6 month archive of video- I'm saying that the storage is coming close (perpendicular recording Hitachi Microdrives are coming out in 2007, at which point you'll be able to carry 60GB around pretty easily), and the software too thanks to the War on Terror (the same software algorithims that allow a Predator to target a single individual with a Hellfire missile or allows the TSA to pick out a face in the crowd for extra scrutiny at the airport, will one day allow your child to automatically sift through a petabyte data store of video to find a first meeting of a first love). With a Petabyte of storage, you can also afford to devote some space to diary indexing- entering a note on your PDA that syncs to the camera to mark a date-time-stamp on the video as something of interest, with notes as to what was interesting about it. With it being a RAID array, it can be hot swapable and continuous back up, so that a single drive dying doesn't mean you lost 3 months of your life.
We're talking convergence in the near future, not the present. But there's at least 4 currently separate technologies that are coming together quite quickly to allow you to do all of this...and it will cause a change in the culture, because such PDA/camera systems are sure to become quite ubiquitous.
It isn't- most of those gigabytes will be wasted. What this is useful for is as an external memory periphereal to your brain. Human brains are very efficient at storing data, but notoriously inefficient at data retrieval- by the time you're 30 the pathways for retrieval are begining to degrade in reverse- you'll be still able to remember what your locker combination was in high school, but what you had for breakfast this morning may be lost forever.
Such a "life recording system", especially if incorporated into a device small enough to carry around with you that could say, keep local the recordings of the past 168 hours in a low-res format, backed up weekly on your home petabyte data store, would be incredibly useful. What did the boss tell you to do on Monday just before going off on that trip? Rewind to Monday and watch it!
NOBODY except maybe a voyeur on 8x fast forward is going to want to watch your whole life- but the porn opportunities for somebody of the opposite sex or homosexuals are amazing so such cameras would have to be banned from communal locker rooms and the like.
So you're condemning Microsoft for having code written by contractors rather than employees and for not reinventing all technology from scratch. Um. That's pretty silly.
No, I'm not- I'm just saying that the hacker ethic is more respectable, because it gives credit where credit is due. The fact you think Microsoft wrote the first version of VB or should have all the credit for Windows is what is pretty silly here.
I'm not "condemning" anybody- I'm just stating facts. You've obviously forgotten the first rule of text based communications: the emotion is stripped out. Any emotional content you read into a message is from the reader, not the writer; reading between the lines comes from YOU.
In the C sense of that word. This isn't going to impact Microsoft sales one bit- it's a relatively minor piece of functionality that most professional software engineers would stay the hell away from to begin with (after all, you can mimic it in a more controled fashion using an ODBC or OLEDB connection from VBA anyway). Who it's going to impact is those people who don't really understand the difference between a spreadsheet and a database to begin with- who link to their spreadsheets to gain SQL Query capability over them, or to keep a spreadsheet in sync with a database for reporting purposes. This is going to result in a major headache for anybody who provides helpdesk support for such people. In the organization I contract for, I'd say we're going to generate about 800 requests in the first week to "fix my broken database".
It's well hidden, but Vibe contains Green Tea Extract which contains caffine. But with all the other antioxidants, vitamins, and natural frutcose this drink gives you, I can certainly understand that the jitter effect is either muted or non-existant.....
Jolt Ultra is going to be my new caffinated drink if I go diabetic for exactly this reason (All the caffine, NONE of the sugar, it's made with splenda).
A lot of the choices are available Here!
Yes- and for the purpose of documenting my life, I don't need no stinkin' TV quality either. Given this, what I want is a digital camera that can handle sound and picture, recorded constantly to a Type III CF slot, at 240x360 pixels and 16 bit stereo sound, in MPEG-2 format. I then would want the Petabyte array at home- and Hitachi's new 6GB microdrive on the road. I'd then be able to record all the interesting (read waking) hours of my life, and have them indexed by day and hour for recall, pretty easily.
Everything in this list contains code that was written by contractors- that is, purchased from some other company. A few things in this list (Windows OS, NT family, MS-DOS, WORD, Sybase SQL Server) contain "look and feel" GUIs directly stolen from other products.
You seem to think that recombining technologies already in existance means you've created something new. It doesn't. The closest one I see in this list to an actual "Invented by Microsoft" is Windows CE- but even that is really just a cut-down of the code bases from CP/M (where FAT came from to begin with), Windows OS, and Model 100 OS, recompiled for some really odd little microprocessors.
NOBODY in software engineering works alone, we've all shared the work all along, since the earliest days when MIT students started a drawerfull of source code. To some extent, therefore, copyrights and patents on "software" have always been rather bogus- and the whole idea of respecting a bogus law is in and of itself bogus.
But by working on this insistance that Bill G is a software engineer, you downgrade his real genius- a genius I really admire- the art of the deal. NONE of what Microsoft has done has been illegal- strongarm yes, illegal no- and it was simply brilliant the way he took CP/M-86 and marketed it as PC-DOS before the original developer was finished debugging and willing to release. Likewise was the adaptation of Bourne Shell (long before the GPL, versions of Unix were open source) subdirectories for MS-DOS 2 and above. Likewise the adaptation of VB version 1, written entirely by a contractor, to become by Version 3 the primary programming language for Windows (I had a similar toolkit I was selling way back in 1982 for TI Extended Basic- though mine was more tuned to programming video games and graphics displays). These were brilliant business deals- doing them propelled Microsoft to monopoly status and made the desktop PC a common household item. But original work, hacks the level of the Woz? Or for that matter even understanding the general hacker mentality? Nope, can't say that these deals fit the mold.
Hmm, that's a thought- I wonder if my wife's relatives in Eastern Oregon would let me experiment a bit if I could guarantee their cattle wouldn't get cancer...their land in the Wallowa Mountains is about the same climate as Hanford....
I suppose I could simulate it for a short time with just a regular fire- but I can't get the long-term data I need (respective temperatures inside and outside, and a count of average daily watts produced over the course of a year) with just a fire- or at least, not very easily. Plus, I'm looking for the specific climate at the Hanford res to begin with- as the original intent is to do something good for my local community, and moving the waste would be antithetical to the theory...
The theory is, these devices are quite common, and more people would use them if more sites supported them. I like Google Mobile, I use a handful of other sites that are compatible, including Snapstream.net for Beyond TV (now that's a slick mobile site- it autodetects Windows CE and Pilot, and shrinks back to a subset that works wonderfully for finding a show you just heard about and scheduling it for recording to your home PC, which allows you to download it back to your device for later watching- completely cool closed loop).
Now for best practices- go light on the graphics, better if you MUST have pictures should be a link to the picture, not an IMG tag. Text only. Few people have the newer Windows Mobile 5.0 devices with the hi-res screen- think 240 pixels wide. These devices are great for vertical scrolling, bad for side scrolling. Keep entry to links or single field with a submit button- javascript may not work well, and typing is a real pain on these devices. Same idea with pictures- think 240x240 or 240x320 at most.
Thanks for your views on the matter. Rest assured, I shall give them due thought and consideration. One more unrelated (apologies) question - just so I know where you're coming from. Given your views expressed in this (and other) thread(s), your ID, etc...what are your views on legal immigration to the country?
Painful, but necessary and controlable. I personally think it should be limited to ZPG- which given the sorry state of third generation American fertility, would be about a half a million individuals a year.
Of course, given my views on abortion, we could completely replace the need for immigration with single-payer health care for mothers and children in accordance with UDHR Article 25 (thus reducing the need for abortion by a half a million children a year); and the technical importation of human brains and skillsets with UDHR Article 26 if we choose to. We have the resources to do so, and refuse to only out of greed.
By not granting our own citizens Article 25 & 26 rights according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we open ourselves up for exploitation by the multinational corporations- and maybe worse yet, we face exactly the same problem in this generation that the Native Americans faced in 1840 when many tribes were simply declared extinct, their lands given over to foreign invaders.
$55 for the balloon- and just thinking about it, I'd expect about $3000 (the price of 6-8 cell phones) per balloon. They're only relays to ground stations after all, not full blown towers in and of themselves (or else they'd have to be tethered).
Unfortunately, I can't agree with your thinking that closing trade with the rest of the world is in any way the "best for the country".
That's because you're thinking with the gain, instead of against it.
In addition to profit, free trade is also what brings about a mutual sharing of technology, ideas, resources, innovation and ultimately a closer-knit global community.
Given the state of technology in the global community, we're better off without them- and they're better off without us. It's the same basic theory as the Prime Directive- it's bad news any time a culture becomes imperialistic. We've got all the ideas, resources, innovation, and technology we need right here at home- and they'll be *much* better off if they develop their own instead of copying us. If they really do think we're that much better than what they've currently got- let them apply for statehood and live under our laws and our government- thus insuring REAL free trade, just like we have between the states right now.
Shutting off a country's borders to international trade just isn't the right answer.
It's a damned sight better answer than letting a few parasites oppress the world through corporatism, including our own government now that a good many of them are actually richer in resources than the government. But you see good American corporations in that role- where all I see is a bunch of Traitors that need to be executed.
You could do without importing oil, or without having imported it for the past century?
Absolutely- without cheap oil, we'd just have a much quicker adoption of alternative native renewable fuels- such as cellulose ethanol (million of sustainable board feet of wood from Pacific Northwest forests), vegetable oil biofuels, recycled turkey guts, etc. The original two internal combustion engines (Diesel and Ford) ran on biofuels (Vegetable Oil and Ethanol), as did the original two external combustion engines (Steam and Sterling, both of which run just fine on wood). Liquified coal can replace the rest of what we need over what we produce ourselves. It's time America became self-sufficient again, in fact, it's begining to look vital to our national security to end the oil trade once and for all- no matter who you think took the towers down, it was definately related, at least tangentially, to our corrupt trade practices and control of oil in the Middle East (If you believe the official story, then bin Laden attacked us because of our sending troops to Saudi Arabia to protect the oil against Saddam Hussien. If you believe the conspiracy theorists, we faked the attack so that we would begin a war against Islam in general and/or bin Laden and Saddam Hussien in specific, to protect the Royal House of Saud and thus our access to Mideast Oil in general.) Either way, oil trade has destabilized our peace- and making that trade illegal and finding other replacements for it should be the primary priority in the War On Terror.
It's all just a matter of thinking against the gain- that is, thinking in terms of what is best for the country and citizens as opposed to what is best for profit.
Yes, this would be a continuous process of launching balloons and retrieving the electronics after the balloons drift away or burst. But reading the article would have answered that for you.
Seems to me that would require nine balloons at any given time, not three.
Oh, and just to point out the level of cluelessness, the Apple ][ you cite as your example used a 6502 not a 6802. The 6502 was a totally different chip than the 68xx family from a different vendor with a different architecture. You'd think you'd know at least that.
On this one, you're right- somehow I got that digit flipped wrong, and I DID know at least that- shows how long it's been since I messed with any of the Apple ][ line...
Bill worked on vast amounts of software himself as a developer for the first decade of Microsoft and as a individual starting with Altair Basic (he wrote almost all of it) and ending with the OS for the Radio Shack Model 100 (the first popular laptop in history and still spoken of with awe by reporters) which he wrote himself.
The OS for the Model 100 WAS Altair Basic- recompiled and with a video editor. BasicA, GWBasic, MS Basic, Altair basic, it's all the same program basically. The first OS Microsoft actually produced was PC-DOS; and that was really CPM. I know the history as well as you do- you can't fool me with slightly different items.
Microsoft develops vastly more software than it buys.
Yeah, right- name something.
the US wouldn't be able to export any products to "non-state" countries. That alone, according to the CIA World Factbook would account for almost 1 trillion dollars ($927.5 billion) lost in lost exports.
Good- those are goods and services that should STAY IN THE UNITED STATES TO BEGIN WITH!!!! The large majority of our exports are our natural resources, and we're stupid to let go of them. We worry about the cost of steel and our local steel industry- but we export billions of tons of scrap metal and raw iron to China. We worry about the cost of food, despite it being historically low right now- and send our subsidized food out to third world countries to destroy their small family farms. NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY SENSE if you take the profit out of it- and even with the profit in it, it's trading our morality and ethics for money, which is always a stupid thing to do.
Doesn't sound so attractive now, does it.
Sounds a hell of a lot more attractive than what is going on right now- letting a few traitors take advantage of our natural resources and inventive labor market to make themselves rich while returning virtually nothing (hint, the trade balance is so bad that overall, dollar value of exports-imports has been negative for three decades now). When I look at a trillion dollars worth of exports and a trillion and a half worth of imports, I see this as a business that USA, Inc. really needs to shut down. It's a net loss for us- and will be for the next 500 years or so.
Well, actually for the experiment I'm not really that into actually obtaining the fuel myself- I'm perfectly willing to let somebody FAR more qualified, say from the government, take my invention at the gate to Handford, hook it up to the phone lines, transfer the fuel into it, and leave it in place to gather the data. I can always call in to get the data, and they get the added benefit of automated alarms in case of sudden changes in the temperature or the liquid level. And the waste doesn't actually have to leave the Hanford Reservation- if the experiment is successfull, just hook up the synchronized inverter to the power grid and leave it alone for the next 10,000 years or so, feeding really small amounts of energy into the power grid. By "Really small amounts" I mean probably in the microwatts...as in "not worth it if it wasn't for the need to contain the waste to begin with". I'm just betting that a modern basic stamp uses *less* electricity than can be generated by the difference in temperature between the shielded radioactive sludge and the outside.