Its amazing what you can get over there. You can buy anything from a completely assembled product down to every little piece that goes to make one. I am currently looking into having some of my stuff replicated and sold through them.
I never thought I would be taken as a shill for Bill Gates.
I have been so pissed off about some of his products I could just about climb the walls.
I do not know who to blame, as there are many special interests and factions with their hand in it.
However, I am in much agreement on how he sees fit as to how to distribute the proceeds of his business. He seems intent on leaving a legacy of making a difference. Much unlike most folk I know that seem to take finance like sharks at a feeding frenzy.
When some people accumulate enough wealth, they become empowered enough to make a difference in the history of man. Some ( like Gates ) are using their resources in a way which will benefit humanity, others will go out and buy all the rental property they can.
I am hoping so badly ( hoping, mind you, not really anticipating ) that our lawmakers in Congress will see and craft tax law to encourage the kind of stuff Gates is doing and closing all of these tax advantages of simply rent-seeking and financial churning.
If Gates gets favorable tax treatments for doing this kind of stuff, it only empowers him to do more similar things as well as lead others to use the power of their wealth in a similar manner.
If there is one thing Gates has demonstrated over and over, he does have the leadership, organizational, and business skills to do it.
I know I have left lots of anti-Microsoft rants here: I feel hypocritical in posting this. Those rants were my venting my frustration as an older guy about software becoming so un-necessarily complex with all these special interest groups trying to get their proprietary add-ons adopted into Windows that pranksters have started having a heyday leaving a mess in everyone's machine. I was rooting for a very simple but thoroughly understood OS that was pretty damned bulletproof. My feeling was if pranksters thought setting people's fancy little outhouses on fire, then what I wanted was a simple one made out of cinder block.
I keep seeing the argument of what we get for a dollar funded to NASA. I ask what we get for a dollar funded to professional sports. I get to see some grown man chase all over some field trying to snare a ball.
I admit a lot of kids see this and dream of becoming a sports star or rock star. Is this a productive use of a human lifetime? Some say it is, some say it isn't, and I am not qualified to state. All I know is advancement of science is a dream to me. As far as I am concerned, Space Exploration is to science like programming games is to computer science. Its the stepping stone, the common basis of knowledge, from which we spring off whatever comes up.
NASA has always been an icon for me - an entity who is actually doing something that has never been done before. Will I benefit from a romp on the moon? Probably not. Would I benefit from stronger alloys, higher energy density batteries, more sophisticated CAD systems, and legions of kids which were motivated by the Scientists at NASA. I believe I will.
Our society seems to be quickly succumbing to what the economists refer to as "tragedy of the commons", where everybody is in it for themselves regardless of the cost to others. Our government is passing all sorts of laws encouraging "rent seeking" ( ownership benefits ) at the expense of production ( job creation ), leading us into a welfare state. I see big social problems ahead with this leadership model, as the ownership faction will run amok, leading to enormous wealth disparities between those who labor and those who own. We are setting ourselves up for a civil war between the worker and the politician/banker classes.
We seem to have no problem funding enormous salaries for someone to hit a ball with a stick. Here we have fostered an intelligence great enough to have placed a part of ourselves on another planet, and we bicker over whether we can even fund manning the operation? I am quite sad over this whole affair. It seems the only idols we are given is all this bread and circus crap. No more Spock, Scotty, or Steve Squyres.
Many of today's "stars" seem to be analogous to the "pump-n-dump" offerings of investment advisor.
They go about "stoking the star making machinery" to pump up some unknown artist they get for cheap, get him into debt up to his eyebrows, own all his works, then dump him.
Then have Congress write law for them honoring this business model.
I have a real tender spot in me that gets quite worked up when I see the cold hard realities of economics butt up against what I consider pure human compassion.
I have way too many friends who are diabetic and their insulin production is down.
I do not mean to take away from anything, but I would sure love to see research like this directed to problems that affect the lifestyles of a large number of people.
I know they are working on it, but personally, I would like to see them throw all they've got at these pesky insulin and maintenance drug problems where just a little chemical injection by a tailored cell assembly would do the trick. Forcing patients to be tethered to the pharmacist with little bottles of pills has got to go.
Somehow I keep thinking of a pneumatic silicone rubber seal, kinda like a molded innertube fitted to a typical face contour.
Variances in the surface would deform and displace its fill fluid, whose internal pressure would maintain the seal as the face contours change.
I have a sound-cancellation headset with some technology like this on the earpieces. They seal pretty well, yet are so comfortable I wear the headset on cold days to keep my ears warm.
In this modern land of anything goes I offer what we all need is a good, solid, minimal, and highly secure PUBLIC foundation system, of which we are all made very aware of exactly how it works, much like I had to "suffer" through years of English classes. Such a system would include a knowledge of HTML, TCP/IP, and a basic windowing system. Have this core system thoroughly understood and bug-free.
If webmasters conform to this, we should be able to limit the amount of hostile code released as there is no receptor for it in our machines, however any webmaster putting stuff on the internet requiring extensions and whatever will take the same risk as those distributing halloween candy to kids.... make those "hold harmless" clauses about as effective as someone distributing razor blades in apples and handing that to kids.
That little business phrase of "<insert applet here> required to view this page" would mean that business accepts FULL and UNLIMITED LIABILITY for mischief carried an any applet he required, just as anyone passing candy to kids also accepts full liability for what is in it.. Even requiring pop-ups would mean the business requiring the pop-ups agrees to full liability for anyone misled by an errant popup - even if that popup did not come from his site. I believe by now all of us see how pop-ups can be used for all sorts of phishing work, as once some hapless user is on some business site, he has to answer whatever the popup asks to make it go away. The popup may look real, but it could be just a planted bug to use the trust a customer had for a business.
I get the very strong idea that such a move would have a very chilling effect on the proliferation of hostile code when the ones who are encouraging its vectors to be installed are also compelled to accept liability for its actions.
If there is computing to be done, that oughta be done on the server side. In my mind, the client should be considered as dumb as a bag of rocks, only capable of sending and receiving data. It seems terribly risky to me to be running any sort of arbitrary code provided from "someone on the internet".
I know there will be cries of "assigning responsibility will be bad for business", however I assert that that is the kind of business I would be better off not having.
I feel what we are seeing right now is the inevitable result of a Congress, lobbied by special interests, passing law benefiting ownership rights and protection rackets of artificially mandated monopolies instead of passing law rewarding job creation.
We now have an entire nation not very gainfully employed. We outsource our core technologies and manufacturing, instead spending our resources on Finance, Insurance, Real Estate and Entertainment.
Actually, many times I find the South Park interpretation to be more believable and realistic than the real thing - especially when it comes to religions.
Matt and Trey seem to have pretty good bullshit detectors and have the skill to illustrate their point.
I think a lot of people that get poked at are pissed because they know he is right, but does not want him exposing them for what they are to the general public.
Incidentally, I loved his run at the Mormons, and the way he wrapped up the episode. His Scientology run is a classic spot-on in my book.
If one is so "touchy" on their beliefs, maybe one needs to re-examine whether those beliefs are based on truth or hearsay. Beliefs based on shaky ground in the first place will be threatened by stuff like this. If your belief system is firmly grounded in truth, you can watch anything like this without getting worked up over it.
I think Matt and Trey do a helluva good job. They show more insight into the human condition than most I see on TV these days.
Here are the little doppler 10GHz radar toys I have been playing around with. I had been playing around with a boxful of old radar detector returns - being I had a lot of horns, I put the Gunn diode at the focal point of one and aimed it out, then watched for multipath doppler at the other receiving horns. My intent was to triangulate from several receivers and from that deduce the location of anything moving in the field. Never got that one to work the way I wanted it to... and it drew too much power to boot.
Anyway, I have been lately playing around with these. Cheap. You get a frequency out in the hertz region, with its amplitude and frequency representing the size and speed of the object being sensed. This thing is from what I can tell is the same technology used in supermarket door sensors. Personally, I like hooking them up to variable frequency audio oscillators so if I get woke up in the middle of the night and I think something's in the house... just keep real still and anything moving at all will show up as variances in pitch - and you know right quick if something is moving around anywhere in the house.
Somehow, I am of the belief that the NSA is behind this beta thing.
I get the idea that Linux advocates and NSA aren't exactly the best of friends. I would think the NSA would support a controllable business model, one that can be controlled with regulation and rewards, which will be a team player and work with them in producing consumer products for the masses.
My fear is one day running an unlicensed OS will be as illegal as growing your own pot, making moonshine, growing food from unlicensed seed, or whatever. The surveillance systems to verify compliance are now mostly in place.
Now all one needs to do is pay off some lawmaker to confer rights to doing something, as Congress can and will instantiate methods of legal extortion at the bequest of special interests.
A LOT of us are doing a form of whitelisting for exactly the same reason.
How many of us are running programs similar to NOSCRIPT mostly because of hostile code and inattentive webmasters unwittingly distributing malicious code wrapped in advertisements?
I learned about NOSCRIPT right here on Slashdot ( Thanks, guys!!! ) in response to one of my posts where I was whining ( loudly ) about not being to be on the net for more than a few hours before I had to reboot Windows to try to get my system back.
There is a lot of nasty stuff out there, and it seems most of it comes riding in on scripting or coaxing me to run their attachment. Often I have seen them try to piggyback on the trust I have for a business - a business that places that trust at risk if the business insists I enable javascript for his site, then the bad guy uses that coercion of the business model to his own advantage.
I think that is what a lot of the clamor here has been all about. We see wealthy investor type men taking control from the techie base and may force us to "drop our defenses" in order to communicate, and we are collectively screaming "NO" as loud as we can to the deaf ears of the businessman.
I think we have all seen the suit people take down a business, and we don't want it happening here.
Not only will there be fewer stupid comments when these guru types leave... there will also be fewer of the gems these guys also leave. If I wanted social chitchat - I would go to facebook. Try asking a technical question over there.
It will be a lot easier to destroy Slashdot than it was to build it. I just really hate to see it go. I just lost my other favorite site, TheOilDrum, not too long ago. Sure, there are other similar sites, but they are not the same. It was like having my favorite watering hole burn down.
There is only one Slashdotter I know personally, the rest of you I only know by your presence here, yet in a way I feel I am among peers and friends here. You have been very generous to help me when I had problems, as well as give me sanity checks when I go overboard. I do not want to see this go away.
I have also seen Leonard Nimoy on the old "Sea Hunt" TV series ( Lloyd Bridges ) and "Highway Patrol" ( Broderick Crawford ). Old black-and-white TV of the 50's and early 60's. I really enjoy those old shows - when it was about acting and not so much special effects. Those old stars are what made Hollywood so special. Even to this day, I enjoy seeing re-runs of *some* of the old 50's shows ( however, I feel most of them were crap - no different from today ).
I just kept getting cognitive dissonance, as they usually had Nimoy playing the bad guy... and all the time I kept seeing him as Spock. Star Trek was by far my favorite TV series of all time.
My condolences to him and his family. His acting career brought a lot of us into technological interests. The only person that ranked beside Leonard in my book was James Doohan ( Engineer Montgomery Scott ).
The most significant thing anything has is its mind.
It does not even have to be human. Animals become very loved companions as well.
If the mind is sour, I don't have much of a use for it - and do not enjoy its presence.
A woman's mind is by far the most attractive thing she has as far as I am concerned. The rest, although it may be physically attractive, is meaningless if the mind is not there. Something like that, like a porn video, is only good for venting lust, and as soon as the prostatic pressure is released, the want or need of companionship with it is gone. Its just an irritant.
My own take is women spend way way way too much time at department store beauty aisles trying to mimic the celebrities of the day, and not enough pursuing their own intellectual interests.
What makes this particular woman stand out is she DID pursue her intellectual interests - and do I ever find that attractive. Someone who would understand someone else also pursuing intellectual interests instead of just being led around by the men behind the microphones running the "star making machinery".
We seem to be so enamored by sports that we will pay for whatever someone markets as sports-related - for what reason I will never know. The whole concept of paying extra for some sports logo emblazoned on a coat or shirt completely escapes me. Even a Star Trek logo does not mean that much to me. If I want some marking on myself or my things, I will put it so myself. I will not mark other's stuff - that's called vandalism.
( I guess that's why I trained for engineering... its about the only thing I seem to understand. Why people will pay for stuff like this is completely beyond me; I cannot even stand having to sit through a game, much less pay attention to it. I would rather post on Slashdot. That oughta tell ya how low on my priorities a game is.... actually it does rank above doing my taxes - which I hate even worse. )
Congrats for feeling that way. I wish more of us had such a conscience.
Consider leaving a decent savings account along with the kids... if something happens to you, you have left a rainy day account to take care of your obligations.
I am hard pressed to trust anyone to pay my bills after my interment. I learned my lesson after years of dutifully paying for dental "insurance", month after month dutifully enclosing my check for "coverage", only to have it explained to me in the dentist's office when an expensive procedure was recommended, that I would not be "covered" because it was "abrasion" and not normal wear and tear. There went several thousand dollars worth of premiums down the drain. No wonder insurance companies can pay agents, build big buildings, and advertise like all getout. They get to keep the premium money, cause sick people don't put up much of a fight. The insurance industry has also found out that if people wise up to their business model, they can go lobby Congress to make their product mandatory. Many Congressmen are quite reticent to "just say NO" to a Lobbyist.
I get the idea our brains are wired very similar to the old-school analog computers ( yes, analog... integrators, summers, multipliers, dividers, log/antilog, whatever ).
I am talking patch-boards. pots, switches, lots of meters and analog chart recorders here, fellas, without a keyboard in sight. One programmed these with straight math, where you literally wired your equation into the machine.
Back in my day, I could solve problems on those things thousands of times faster than I could on a digital minicomputer ( DEC PDP series ). However I never got the exact same answer on duplicate runs of the analog machine. It was the original "fuzzy logic"... the slightest bit of noise or variance in the analog logic and the answer would come out different.
Nothing is very concrete in the analog world.
Note that in an analog computer, all processes run in parallel. The basic functions - integration and differentiation - all took place realtime no matter how many of 'em I used... however I rarely used more than a couple of dozen. I seem to have literally millions of them running in me - each one running at only several Hz, but in parallel - they come up with answers about as fast as I remember my old analog machines solving simple nonlinear differential equations - and also like the old analog computer - the logic at which I arrive at conclusions is often quite fuzzy and is apt to give a wildly different result upon the slightest adjustment of the input parameters.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup...
This is the arm for the little guy. ; This one is for wholesale business
Its amazing what you can get over there. You can buy anything from a completely assembled product down to every little piece that goes to make one. I am currently looking into having some of my stuff replicated and sold through them.
I never thought I would be taken as a shill for Bill Gates.
I have been so pissed off about some of his products I could just about climb the walls.
I do not know who to blame, as there are many special interests and factions with their hand in it.
However, I am in much agreement on how he sees fit as to how to distribute the proceeds of his business. He seems intent on leaving a legacy of making a difference. Much unlike most folk I know that seem to take finance like sharks at a feeding frenzy.
Agreed.
When some people accumulate enough wealth, they become empowered enough to make a difference in the history of man. Some ( like Gates ) are using their resources in a way which will benefit humanity, others will go out and buy all the rental property they can.
I am hoping so badly ( hoping, mind you, not really anticipating ) that our lawmakers in Congress will see and craft tax law to encourage the kind of stuff Gates is doing and closing all of these tax advantages of simply rent-seeking and financial churning.
If Gates gets favorable tax treatments for doing this kind of stuff, it only empowers him to do more similar things as well as lead others to use the power of their wealth in a similar manner.
If there is one thing Gates has demonstrated over and over, he does have the leadership, organizational, and business skills to do it.
I know I have left lots of anti-Microsoft rants here: I feel hypocritical in posting this. Those rants were my venting my frustration as an older guy about software becoming so un-necessarily complex with all these special interest groups trying to get their proprietary add-ons adopted into Windows that pranksters have started having a heyday leaving a mess in everyone's machine. I was rooting for a very simple but thoroughly understood OS that was pretty damned bulletproof. My feeling was if pranksters thought setting people's fancy little outhouses on fire, then what I wanted was a simple one made out of cinder block.
I keep seeing the argument of what we get for a dollar funded to NASA. I ask what we get for a dollar funded to professional sports. I get to see some grown man chase all over some field trying to snare a ball.
I admit a lot of kids see this and dream of becoming a sports star or rock star. Is this a productive use of a human lifetime? Some say it is, some say it isn't, and I am not qualified to state. All I know is advancement of science is a dream to me. As far as I am concerned, Space Exploration is to science like programming games is to computer science. Its the stepping stone, the common basis of knowledge, from which we spring off whatever comes up.
NASA has always been an icon for me - an entity who is actually doing something that has never been done before. Will I benefit from a romp on the moon? Probably not. Would I benefit from stronger alloys, higher energy density batteries, more sophisticated CAD systems, and legions of kids which were motivated by the Scientists at NASA. I believe I will.
Our society seems to be quickly succumbing to what the economists refer to as "tragedy of the commons", where everybody is in it for themselves regardless of the cost to others. Our government is passing all sorts of laws encouraging "rent seeking" ( ownership benefits ) at the expense of production ( job creation ), leading us into a welfare state. I see big social problems ahead with this leadership model, as the ownership faction will run amok, leading to enormous wealth disparities between those who labor and those who own. We are setting ourselves up for a civil war between the worker and the politician/banker classes.
We seem to have no problem funding enormous salaries for someone to hit a ball with a stick. Here we have fostered an intelligence great enough to have placed a part of ourselves on another planet, and we bicker over whether we can even fund manning the operation? I am quite sad over this whole affair. It seems the only idols we are given is all this bread and circus crap. No more Spock, Scotty, or Steve Squyres.
My take on this as well.
Many of today's "stars" seem to be analogous to the "pump-n-dump" offerings of investment advisor.
They go about "stoking the star making machinery" to pump up some unknown artist they get for cheap, get him into debt up to his eyebrows, own all his works, then dump him.
Then have Congress write law for them honoring this business model.
Sorry... I replied in haste.
I have a real tender spot in me that gets quite worked up when I see the cold hard realities of economics butt up against what I consider pure human compassion.
And keep that poor guy condemned to live out the rest of his life with a syringe in his arm...
I have way too many friends who are diabetic and their insulin production is down.
I do not mean to take away from anything, but I would sure love to see research like this directed to problems that affect the lifestyles of a large number of people.
I know they are working on it, but personally, I would like to see them throw all they've got at these pesky insulin and maintenance drug problems where just a little chemical injection by a tailored cell assembly would do the trick. Forcing patients to be tethered to the pharmacist with little bottles of pills has got to go.
NoScript.
Somehow I keep thinking of a pneumatic silicone rubber seal, kinda like a molded innertube fitted to a typical face contour.
Variances in the surface would deform and displace its fill fluid, whose internal pressure would maintain the seal as the face contours change.
I have a sound-cancellation headset with some technology like this on the earpieces. They seal pretty well, yet are so comfortable I wear the headset on cold days to keep my ears warm.
In this modern land of anything goes I offer what we all need is a good, solid, minimal, and highly secure PUBLIC foundation system, of which we are all made very aware of exactly how it works, much like I had to "suffer" through years of English classes. Such a system would include a knowledge of HTML, TCP/IP, and a basic windowing system. Have this core system thoroughly understood and bug-free.
If webmasters conform to this, we should be able to limit the amount of hostile code released as there is no receptor for it in our machines, however any webmaster putting stuff on the internet requiring extensions and whatever will take the same risk as those distributing halloween candy to kids.... make those "hold harmless" clauses about as effective as someone distributing razor blades in apples and handing that to kids.
That little business phrase of "<insert applet here> required to view this page" would mean that business accepts FULL and UNLIMITED LIABILITY for mischief carried an any applet he required, just as anyone passing candy to kids also accepts full liability for what is in it.. Even requiring pop-ups would mean the business requiring the pop-ups agrees to full liability for anyone misled by an errant popup - even if that popup did not come from his site. I believe by now all of us see how pop-ups can be used for all sorts of phishing work, as once some hapless user is on some business site, he has to answer whatever the popup asks to make it go away. The popup may look real, but it could be just a planted bug to use the trust a customer had for a business.
I get the very strong idea that such a move would have a very chilling effect on the proliferation of hostile code when the ones who are encouraging its vectors to be installed are also compelled to accept liability for its actions.
If there is computing to be done, that oughta be done on the server side. In my mind, the client should be considered as dumb as a bag of rocks, only capable of sending and receiving data. It seems terribly risky to me to be running any sort of arbitrary code provided from "someone on the internet".
I know there will be cries of "assigning responsibility will be bad for business", however I assert that that is the kind of business I would be better off not having.
I feel what we are seeing right now is the inevitable result of a Congress, lobbied by special interests, passing law benefiting ownership rights and protection rackets of artificially mandated monopolies instead of passing law rewarding job creation.
We now have an entire nation not very gainfully employed. We outsource our core technologies and manufacturing, instead spending our resources on Finance, Insurance, Real Estate and Entertainment.
Oooh! Game time! Gotta Go...
Actually, many times I find the South Park interpretation to be more believable and realistic than the real thing - especially when it comes to religions.
Matt and Trey seem to have pretty good bullshit detectors and have the skill to illustrate their point.
I think a lot of people that get poked at are pissed because they know he is right, but does not want him exposing them for what they are to the general public.
Incidentally, I loved his run at the Mormons, and the way he wrapped up the episode. His Scientology run is a classic spot-on in my book.
If one is so "touchy" on their beliefs, maybe one needs to re-examine whether those beliefs are based on truth or hearsay. Beliefs based on shaky ground in the first place will be threatened by stuff like this. If your belief system is firmly grounded in truth, you can watch anything like this without getting worked up over it.
I think Matt and Trey do a helluva good job. They show more insight into the human condition than most I see on TV these days.
Here are the little doppler 10GHz radar toys I have been playing around with. I had been playing around with a boxful of old radar detector returns - being I had a lot of horns, I put the Gunn diode at the focal point of one and aimed it out, then watched for multipath doppler at the other receiving horns. My intent was to triangulate from several receivers and from that deduce the location of anything moving in the field. Never got that one to work the way I wanted it to... and it drew too much power to boot.
Anyway, I have been lately playing around with these. Cheap. You get a frequency out in the hertz region, with its amplitude and frequency representing the size and speed of the object being sensed. This thing is from what I can tell is the same technology used in supermarket door sensors. Personally, I like hooking them up to variable frequency audio oscillators so if I get woke up in the middle of the night and I think something's in the house... just keep real still and anything moving at all will show up as variances in pitch - and you know right quick if something is moving around anywhere in the house.
How about these?
Somehow, I am of the belief that the NSA is behind this beta thing.
I get the idea that Linux advocates and NSA aren't exactly the best of friends. I would think the NSA would support a controllable business model, one that can be controlled with regulation and rewards, which will be a team player and work with them in producing consumer products for the masses.
My fear is one day running an unlicensed OS will be as illegal as growing your own pot, making moonshine, growing food from unlicensed seed, or whatever. The surveillance systems to verify compliance are now mostly in place.
Now all one needs to do is pay off some lawmaker to confer rights to doing something, as Congress can and will instantiate methods of legal extortion at the bequest of special interests.
Thanks for the tip, Hairy.... I wish I had some modpoints for you, but all I can do at the present is express my gratitude in words.
A LOT of us are doing a form of whitelisting for exactly the same reason.
How many of us are running programs similar to NOSCRIPT mostly because of hostile code and inattentive webmasters unwittingly distributing malicious code wrapped in advertisements?
I learned about NOSCRIPT right here on Slashdot ( Thanks, guys!!! ) in response to one of my posts where I was whining ( loudly ) about not being to be on the net for more than a few hours before I had to reboot Windows to try to get my system back.
There is a lot of nasty stuff out there, and it seems most of it comes riding in on scripting or coaxing me to run their attachment. Often I have seen them try to piggyback on the trust I have for a business - a business that places that trust at risk if the business insists I enable javascript for his site, then the bad guy uses that coercion of the business model to his own advantage.
I think that is what a lot of the clamor here has been all about. We see wealthy investor type men taking control from the techie base and may force us to "drop our defenses" in order to communicate, and we are collectively screaming "NO" as loud as we can to the deaf ears of the businessman.
I think we have all seen the suit people take down a business, and we don't want it happening here.
Not only will there be fewer stupid comments when these guru types leave... there will also be fewer of the gems these guys also leave. If I wanted social chitchat - I would go to facebook. Try asking a technical question over there.
It will be a lot easier to destroy Slashdot than it was to build it. I just really hate to see it go. I just lost my other favorite site, TheOilDrum, not too long ago. Sure, there are other similar sites, but they are not the same. It was like having my favorite watering hole burn down.
There is only one Slashdotter I know personally, the rest of you I only know by your presence here, yet in a way I feel I am among peers and friends here. You have been very generous to help me when I had problems, as well as give me sanity checks when I go overboard. I do not want to see this go away.
I have also seen Leonard Nimoy on the old "Sea Hunt" TV series ( Lloyd Bridges ) and "Highway Patrol" ( Broderick Crawford ). Old black-and-white TV of the 50's and early 60's. I really enjoy those old shows - when it was about acting and not so much special effects. Those old stars are what made Hollywood so special. Even to this day, I enjoy seeing re-runs of *some* of the old 50's shows ( however, I feel most of them were crap - no different from today ).
I just kept getting cognitive dissonance, as they usually had Nimoy playing the bad guy... and all the time I kept seeing him as Spock. Star Trek was by far my favorite TV series of all time.
My condolences to him and his family. His acting career brought a lot of us into technological interests. The only person that ranked beside Leonard in my book was James Doohan ( Engineer Montgomery Scott ).
Both were role models to me.
The most significant thing anything has is its mind.
It does not even have to be human. Animals become very loved companions as well.
If the mind is sour, I don't have much of a use for it - and do not enjoy its presence.
A woman's mind is by far the most attractive thing she has as far as I am concerned. The rest, although it may be physically attractive, is meaningless if the mind is not there. Something like that, like a porn video, is only good for venting lust, and as soon as the prostatic pressure is released, the want or need of companionship with it is gone. Its just an irritant.
My own take is women spend way way way too much time at department store beauty aisles trying to mimic the celebrities of the day, and not enough pursuing their own intellectual interests.
What makes this particular woman stand out is she DID pursue her intellectual interests - and do I ever find that attractive. Someone who would understand someone else also pursuing intellectual interests instead of just being led around by the men behind the microphones running the "star making machinery".
CPE 1704 TKS
password: Joshua
Its only lucrative because we make it so...
We seem to be so enamored by sports that we will pay for whatever someone markets as sports-related - for what reason I will never know. The whole concept of paying extra for some sports logo emblazoned on a coat or shirt completely escapes me. Even a Star Trek logo does not mean that much to me. If I want some marking on myself or my things, I will put it so myself. I will not mark other's stuff - that's called vandalism.
( I guess that's why I trained for engineering... its about the only thing I seem to understand. Why people will pay for stuff like this is completely beyond me; I cannot even stand having to sit through a game, much less pay attention to it. I would rather post on Slashdot. That oughta tell ya how low on my priorities a game is.... actually it does rank above doing my taxes - which I hate even worse. )
Congrats for feeling that way. I wish more of us had such a conscience.
Consider leaving a decent savings account along with the kids... if something happens to you, you have left a rainy day account to take care of your obligations.
I am hard pressed to trust anyone to pay my bills after my interment. I learned my lesson after years of dutifully paying for dental "insurance", month after month dutifully enclosing my check for "coverage", only to have it explained to me in the dentist's office when an expensive procedure was recommended, that I would not be "covered" because it was "abrasion" and not normal wear and tear. There went several thousand dollars worth of premiums down the drain. No wonder insurance companies can pay agents, build big buildings, and advertise like all getout. They get to keep the premium money, cause sick people don't put up much of a fight. The insurance industry has also found out that if people wise up to their business model, they can go lobby Congress to make their product mandatory. Many Congressmen are quite reticent to "just say NO" to a Lobbyist.
I get the idea our brains are wired very similar to the old-school analog computers ( yes, analog ... integrators, summers, multipliers, dividers, log/antilog, whatever ).
I am talking patch-boards. pots, switches, lots of meters and analog chart recorders here, fellas, without a keyboard in sight. One programmed these with straight math, where you literally wired your equation into the machine.
Back in my day, I could solve problems on those things thousands of times faster than I could on a digital minicomputer ( DEC PDP series ). However I never got the exact same answer on duplicate runs of the analog machine. It was the original "fuzzy logic"... the slightest bit of noise or variance in the analog logic and the answer would come out different.
Nothing is very concrete in the analog world.
Note that in an analog computer, all processes run in parallel. The basic functions - integration and differentiation - all took place realtime no matter how many of 'em I used... however I rarely used more than a couple of dozen. I seem to have literally millions of them running in me - each one running at only several Hz, but in parallel - they come up with answers about as fast as I remember my old analog machines solving simple nonlinear differential equations - and also like the old analog computer - the logic at which I arrive at conclusions is often quite fuzzy and is apt to give a wildly different result upon the slightest adjustment of the input parameters.