Are you sure you want to spend your (probably large amount of) money on this? If so, here are my suggestions.
Buy a mountain. Research what mountains are available, Choose one that is not a volcano or on a tectonic fault. Make sure it is not too prone to rockslides. Choose one that is away from the big city. Make sure there are no precious minerals underneath your mountain. Make sure there is some freshwater source nearby. Get a geologist to look at the land for you.
Buy the mineral rights under the mountain and nearby. You don't want anybody kicking you or your descendants off the land so they can strip mine for gold, and in the process, leveling your mountain. Be sure to consult an attorney at all appropriate time periods.
Build a deep, spacious underground lair. Make sure there are two ways to get in and out. The first is at the top of the mountain. You can defend that point with machine gun fire, should there ever be a revolution. The second access point should be near the bottom of the mountain. This is your secret passageway. If worse comes to worse, you can always use it to escape with your life, or retake your home from an invader. Conceal the secret entrance. No one from outside your family should either work on this entrance or know about it.
Down the sides of the mountain, plant some nice vegetation. On top, build a nice, handsome house or cottage. Don't make it too ostentatious or you will attract thieves and vagabonds. It should look a little ramshackle from the outside. The inside would be a different matter.
Be sure to leave room on top of the mountain for a heliport and such.
Whatever you build, keep in mind multiple purposes. Your great-great-great-great granchildren may need to stop using the home as a home, and start using it for commercial activity, such as for a ski lodge. Whatever. The next generation can reclaim it as a residence. Make all the rooms huge. That way they can be subdivided as necessary, etc.
Give your home a good, stuffy, but non-arrogant name, like "Old Bramblethorn." Then, mythologize. Give your home a sense of the mystical, a mystique. If necessary, hire a specialist in the area, such as an anthropologist. Make up a legend. Something like this. "One day I was hiking through the mountains, and climbing this particular mountain. Alone, I encountered a ferocious cougar. It attacked me and we wrestled for what seemed like hours. It was a terrible fight. I couldn't get the great, fanged beast off of me until I rolled while prone several times into a nearby bramblethorn. The horrible, hairy cat yelped in pain and limped off. I brushed off the dirt, sat up, and just then I saw a rainbow in the western sky. I knew then that I was master of the mountain. This is where I would build a home for my family. And I would call it Bramblethorn. And that, my young grandkids, is how this home came to be. Now off to bed and catch your forty winks as tomorrow we have a big day planned! Off you go!" You see, that way your descendants will not just like the home; they will love it. It will become a tradition. Then, one day, hundreds of years after you are gone, when one of your descendants inevitably says that the family should sell Old Bramblethorn as it would fetch a huge price on the real estate market, the ancestral home will be protected by its tradition. Another family member, probably the young and well-liked little girl of the family, will chime in and say, "Oh, but we can't sell Old Bramblethorn! We just can't!" The home is safe.
Store up tons and tons of money. Your family will need it to fight off the inevitable stream of lawyers, tax men, extortionists, and all the rest who will try to take the home away from you. Diversify your portfolio. Put some of it in gold, and store the gold, secretly, deep in the underground lair. If war or revolution comes, your descendants will be prepared.
Man is so vain as to want to build something that will last forever. Even the greatest structures, from the pyramids to Stonehenge to the great cathedrals to the Great Wall of China to Hoover Dam, will one day crumble to dust. This is a time when we have all seen much of the impermanence and fragility of our structures and lives, only the latter of which being of infinite value. I don't intend to psychoanalyze you as much as I intend to psychoanalyze myself, but after the murderous destruction of the World Trade Center we are all seeking that which is stable and sure.
There is but one way to be assured of shelter into the future. Store up good deeds and righteousness with God, and you shall have a place in the house of the Lord forever.
Ah, the good old days. Our college had just got on the Internet. Bitnet was good, but the most exciting thing was when Nathan sat down with me and helped me set up a SLIP connection between two computer labs. Very hot stuff. He needed to download some software, so he did this weird thing called telnet. He told me it was a secret connection to ___ State, a big public college, over the same wire as our Bitnet connection. Then he typed in some weird looking numbers and got a copy of PC-Route from somewhere. Soon, our college dumped Bitnet and hooked up with an extremely slow trickle of a link to the Internet. I was told this was the real Internet, and I saw that it was good. E-mail and newsgroups were first. Then I figured out telnet and ftp.
Finally, I stepped up to the big time and got gopher. Boy, I had about a hundred gopher bookmarks. It was simply the coolest thing in the world, after Usenet. One day, Nathan having graduated, Michael took me into his office and showed me this thing called Mosaic. It was crashing on his beloved Windows 3.1 Gateway (one of the few PCs on campus not running DOS), but he insisted that Mosaic was very cool. Then he showed me this wickedly cool program called lynx. Instantly I knew that gopher was finished. I was frustrated that lynx couldn't read my gopher bookmarks. Eventually I decided to convert the gopher bookmarks to lynx bookmarks. I didn't know it at the time, but this is how I learned HTML, since HTML was the file format for lynx bookmarks.
A couple of local gurus had set up a local Internet coffee shop. It was too far to walk, but when I got a ride there one day, I was amazed. Sun workstations. Many of them. A fast net connection. And on the Sun workstations was Mosaic. That was it. Since then, it's like I never logged off the net.
I hated Netscape for a long time. I think it was because they were effectively a monopolist. Charging money for a web browser was really holding back the net. I took a detour into OS/2 for a while, but found that Web Explorer was quickly outpaced by that old fiend Netscape.
Got a job as a network admin. This dork at the office was telling me about "IE." Oh yeah, I remembered, that was Microsoft's Spyglass browser. Whatever. It sucked.
Years passed. Netscape stagnated. IE got better, and became the monopoly browser. I stuck with Netscape 4.x and when it came out 6.x. I had to use IE more and more. It was bad. Then I started doing some vounteer QA work for the Mozilla Project. Mozilla got a lot better, but I was just there watching, along for the ride, not contributing as much as I aspired to.
Now Opera has matured and the khtml browsers are decent. Things are good. The latest Mozilla release is the still best, though.
If you just upgrade from milestone to milestone, like 1.2.1 to 1.3, then you should be able to install over the old version. If I were you, however, I'd uninstall the old version anyway.
The DNS cache is supposed to be flushable by going offline, then online again. Currently, it's broken, however. Eventually, it will be fixed.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192798
We're getting close to the point where most of the body can be transplanted. We already have seen face transplants, skin transplants, hair transplants (?), cornea transplants, arm transplants (and thus, presumably leg transplants), internal organ transplants, etc.
all books should eventually be online
on
An IMDb for Books
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is a good idea. There needs to be some kind of comprehensive source to get author, title, publisher, year published, etc, for all books published and extant. You probably only need to add another 100 million books or so plus other materials like pamphlets and periodicals. (PCIIW).
How are you going to pay for this? Maybe the UN will chip in? I assume you'll be including books written in all languages and writing systems.
This will be an important step toward the long-term goal of the Internet: putting all of human memory online.
One difficulty you'll eventually see will be people trying to censor all mention of certain books. It will be very difficult to verify that the data is not altered or deleted except for authorized and proper purposes.
So many cartoons represent garbage with crumpled papers and apple cores. It figures that a half-eaten Apple would end up associating itself with the trash. This is funny. I'll try to remember this for the next time some Apple-whacker starts telling me, as if I were utterly unaware of its very existence, of the inarguable superiority of his preferred platform. "Yes," I'll say, "Apple is so innovative, they even patented garbage. . . . No, it's not that it's an innovative technique, but it's that no one else would have ever thought of it. That's what makes it art. It's like the guy who patented silence, except more audacious."
This is good news. I hope that once all the scrolls have been opened and published, we will finally have the complete oeuvres of such greats as Aristotle. It could change the way we think about the ancients. It probably will not be as significant an event as the rediscovery of the classics that preceded the Renaissance, however.
Afghani is a needless variation and should be avoided. The fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary is not authoritative and is filled with questionable information.
For a while now, it's been my hobby to collect "people of place names", or at least the obscure ones. It's somewhat non-trivial to find them. Here's my current list. Corrections are appreciated. TIA.
Aberdeen, Scotland -- Aberdonians
Afghanistan -- Afghans
Alabama -- Alabamians, Alabamans
Allentown -- Allentonians
Argentina -- Argentines
Arkansas -- Arkansan, Arkansawyer (NW Arkansas only)
Arizona -- Arizonans
Austin -- Austinites
Bahamas -- Bahamian
Boston -- Bostonians
Camden -- Camdenites
Cincinnati -- Cincinnatians
Colorado -- Coloradans
Delaware -- Delawarians
Florida -- Floridians
Ghana -- Ghanaians
Gibraltar -- Gibraltarians
Greece -- Greeks
Houston -- Houstonians
Illinois -- Illinoisans
Indiana -- Hoosiers
Key West -- Conchs
Los Angeles -- Angelenos, Los Angelenos
Louisiana -- Louisianans
Madagascar - Madagascans
Maine -- Mainers
Maryland -- Marylanders
Miami -- Miamians
Michigan -- Michiganders
Naples -- Neapolitans
New Jersey -- New Jerseyans
Ohio -- Ohioans
Oregon -- Oregonians
Phoenix -- Phoenicians
San Antonio -- San Antonians
San Francisco -- San Franciscans
Seattle -- Seattleites
Sierra Leone -- Sierra Leoneans
Singapore -- Singaporeans
St Louis -- St. Louisans
Switzerland -- Swiss
Tennessee -- Tennesseans
Texas -- Texans
Turkey -- Turks
Twin Cities -- Twin Citians
Utah -- Utahans
Wichita -- Wichitans
You are missing the point. Just like the music industry.
If you sell your records at $20 a copy, you will not sell a million of them. Anymore. But if you sell your records at $10 a copy, you might. And if you sell them at $5 a copy, it's that much more likely.
So, yes, you can get paid. But in the current economic environment, the substitute goods (Economics 101 terminology) mean that you can't charge monopoly rent for it anymore. That is to say, music downloaders would rather have the convenience of an audio CD than the poor audio quality of MP3, as long as the audio CD isn't priced too high. The current price of 15 to 20 dollars is too high.
As an alternative, put out a mega-album with 2-3 CDs, a big booklet filled with lyrics, photos, art, and interesting notes. Put it all in a quality sleeve/jacket/jewel case. If the music is decent, you could probably charge 35, 40, maybe 50 dollars for it.
The days of easy money for musicians, groupies, executives, and the rest are over. Period. No more cutting a record for five weeks that makes millions. From now on, if you want to be a musician, you're going to have to work for your money.
As for the musicians who still want unlimited money, furs, diamonds, private airplanes, giant mansions, and all the illegal drugs they can inject in their ears, from now on they're going to have to work a lot harder to get all that dough.
The real winner in this will be that art form known as music.
Let's face reality. The customer is tired of financing the rock and roll lifestyle. He is tired of spending many dollars per album, increasing over time, only to hear about how not only the performer is living in some huge mansion, but how he wastes incredible amounts of money getting stoned and buying stupid stuff. Then we hear about how the producers are driving around in limos. Then we hear about how the record company executives are making the real money. Then we hear about the profits of the mega-corporate radio stations. Who's paying for all this? Us. We're sick of paying for it.
And the music just gets worse. There hasn't been much original music released since Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins broke in the early 1990s. It's not because the artists suck. It's because the record companies only invest in sugar-pop acts that are too watered down to be interesting. Is there a band that has artistic ingenuity or a political point? They won't get a contract, because the record company won't take a risk.
I'd pay about a dollar per song for a CD today. If I could find one I was interested in.
The whole music thing is overrated anyway. It's all just entertainment. In the end, you can get too much entertainment.
The big record companies have dug themselves into a deep hole. They're too big to release innovative or strongly artistic acts. They're too large and bulky to move nimbly. The giants are going to fall. Both music and art in general will be better for it.
If you are a SOHO or home user and you are concerned, then go register your own domain and pay register.com or whoever the $30 a year to get your e-mail address at the domain you own with SMTP service.
If you are a medium or large corporation and you need to run your own SMTP server, then you'd be in trouble. You'd have to look at a competing service, such as "cable TV", wireless, or T1.
As long as the fragments are small enough, they'll burn up in the atmosphere. If they're bigger, they should still be susceptible to the nuclear-tipped rocket method of changing their orbit.
Look, if there's a killer asteroid on its way, there will be no way to keep that quiet. At the very least, people will begin to wonder why astronomers all over the world are suddenly entering seminaries in droves, engaging in bacchanalia, and living lives of extreme hedonism.
Nor should there be any reason to fear a so-called "killer asteroid." There have got to be ways to fight back. Here is my own, back-of-a-napkin plan.
Calculate when the killer asteroid will hit. Because it's big, it will most likely be spotted years, if not decades in advance. The more time, the better.
Locate many large, nearby, non-killer asteroids.
Build many nuclear warhead-tipped rockets.
Fire the rockets at the smaller asteroids at such angles as to cause these smaller asteroids to deflect into the orbital path of the killer asteroid. Focus on hitting the killer asteroid on its dark side, again and again, so as to move it closer to the sun, to take advantage of the sun's gravity.
The killer asteroid should just miss the Earth on the side closest to the sun.
If successful, make a dramatic motion picture of the event. (Optional)
Of course, there is no need to actually send the killer asteroid into the sun.
Surely improvements could be made. The point is, we can indeed fight back. It would be stupid and cowardly to not try.
In any case, we should bear in mind that it is extremely improbable that a killer asteroid will hit in our lifetimes.
Slashdot Mirror
That's Tampa, Florida. "Tampa Bay" refers to a body of water.
No, it did not. But if it did, I think my players would have had a much better time!
There is but one way to be assured of shelter into the future. Store up good deeds and righteousness with God, and you shall have a place in the house of the Lord forever.
They told you running that slow was expected?
Finally, I stepped up to the big time and got gopher. Boy, I had about a hundred gopher bookmarks. It was simply the coolest thing in the world, after Usenet. One day, Nathan having graduated, Michael took me into his office and showed me this thing called Mosaic. It was crashing on his beloved Windows 3.1 Gateway (one of the few PCs on campus not running DOS), but he insisted that Mosaic was very cool. Then he showed me this wickedly cool program called lynx. Instantly I knew that gopher was finished. I was frustrated that lynx couldn't read my gopher bookmarks. Eventually I decided to convert the gopher bookmarks to lynx bookmarks. I didn't know it at the time, but this is how I learned HTML, since HTML was the file format for lynx bookmarks.
A couple of local gurus had set up a local Internet coffee shop. It was too far to walk, but when I got a ride there one day, I was amazed. Sun workstations. Many of them. A fast net connection. And on the Sun workstations was Mosaic. That was it. Since then, it's like I never logged off the net.
I hated Netscape for a long time. I think it was because they were effectively a monopolist. Charging money for a web browser was really holding back the net. I took a detour into OS/2 for a while, but found that Web Explorer was quickly outpaced by that old fiend Netscape.
Got a job as a network admin. This dork at the office was telling me about "IE." Oh yeah, I remembered, that was Microsoft's Spyglass browser. Whatever. It sucked.
Years passed. Netscape stagnated. IE got better, and became the monopoly browser. I stuck with Netscape 4.x and when it came out 6.x. I had to use IE more and more. It was bad. Then I started doing some vounteer QA work for the Mozilla Project. Mozilla got a lot better, but I was just there watching, along for the ride, not contributing as much as I aspired to.
Now Opera has matured and the khtml browsers are decent. Things are good. The latest Mozilla release is the still best, though.
If you just upgrade from milestone to milestone, like 1.2.1 to 1.3, then you should be able to install over the old version. If I were you, however, I'd uninstall the old version anyway.
Or go to Tools | Download Manager and remove the entries through the interface.
Might be your Javascript preferences. Try enabling everything.
The DNS cache is supposed to be flushable by going offline, then online again. Currently, it's broken, however. Eventually, it will be fixed. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192798
Have you filed a bug? If you haven't, please do so.
The brain is just about all that's left.
That's easy. The technology of Slashdot.
How are you going to pay for this? Maybe the UN will chip in? I assume you'll be including books written in all languages and writing systems.
This will be an important step toward the long-term goal of the Internet: putting all of human memory online.
One difficulty you'll eventually see will be people trying to censor all mention of certain books. It will be very difficult to verify that the data is not altered or deleted except for authorized and proper purposes.
If you work at a university, or other organization, talk to your entity's legal counsel.
There is no substitute for professional legal advice which applies to your particular situation.
So many cartoons represent garbage with crumpled papers and apple cores. It figures that a half-eaten Apple would end up associating itself with the trash. This is funny. I'll try to remember this for the next time some Apple-whacker starts telling me, as if I were utterly unaware of its very existence, of the inarguable superiority of his preferred platform. "Yes," I'll say, "Apple is so innovative, they even patented garbage. . . . No, it's not that it's an innovative technique, but it's that no one else would have ever thought of it. That's what makes it art. It's like the guy who patented silence, except more audacious."
This is good news. I hope that once all the scrolls have been opened and published, we will finally have the complete oeuvres of such greats as Aristotle. It could change the way we think about the ancients. It probably will not be as significant an event as the rediscovery of the classics that preceded the Renaissance, however.
Afghani is a needless variation and should be avoided. The fourth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary is not authoritative and is filled with questionable information.
No. The standard term in the English language is Afghan.
Aberdeen, Scotland -- Aberdonians
Afghanistan -- Afghans
Alabama -- Alabamians, Alabamans
Allentown -- Allentonians
Argentina -- Argentines
Arkansas -- Arkansan, Arkansawyer (NW Arkansas only)
Arizona -- Arizonans
Austin -- Austinites
Bahamas -- Bahamian
Boston -- Bostonians
Camden -- Camdenites
Cincinnati -- Cincinnatians
Colorado -- Coloradans
Delaware -- Delawarians
Florida -- Floridians
Ghana -- Ghanaians
Gibraltar -- Gibraltarians
Greece -- Greeks
Houston -- Houstonians
Illinois -- Illinoisans
Indiana -- Hoosiers
Key West -- Conchs
Los Angeles -- Angelenos, Los Angelenos
Louisiana -- Louisianans
Madagascar - Madagascans
Maine -- Mainers
Maryland -- Marylanders
Miami -- Miamians
Michigan -- Michiganders
Naples -- Neapolitans
New Jersey -- New Jerseyans
Ohio -- Ohioans
Oregon -- Oregonians
Phoenix -- Phoenicians
San Antonio -- San Antonians
San Francisco -- San Franciscans
Seattle -- Seattleites
Sierra Leone -- Sierra Leoneans
Singapore -- Singaporeans
St Louis -- St. Louisans
Switzerland -- Swiss
Tennessee -- Tennesseans
Texas -- Texans
Turkey -- Turks
Twin Cities -- Twin Citians
Utah -- Utahans
Wichita -- Wichitans
If you sell your records at $20 a copy, you will not sell a million of them. Anymore. But if you sell your records at $10 a copy, you might. And if you sell them at $5 a copy, it's that much more likely.
So, yes, you can get paid. But in the current economic environment, the substitute goods (Economics 101 terminology) mean that you can't charge monopoly rent for it anymore. That is to say, music downloaders would rather have the convenience of an audio CD than the poor audio quality of MP3, as long as the audio CD isn't priced too high. The current price of 15 to 20 dollars is too high.
As an alternative, put out a mega-album with 2-3 CDs, a big booklet filled with lyrics, photos, art, and interesting notes. Put it all in a quality sleeve/jacket/jewel case. If the music is decent, you could probably charge 35, 40, maybe 50 dollars for it.
The days of easy money for musicians, groupies, executives, and the rest are over. Period. No more cutting a record for five weeks that makes millions. From now on, if you want to be a musician, you're going to have to work for your money.
As for the musicians who still want unlimited money, furs, diamonds, private airplanes, giant mansions, and all the illegal drugs they can inject in their ears, from now on they're going to have to work a lot harder to get all that dough.
The real winner in this will be that art form known as music.
And the music just gets worse. There hasn't been much original music released since Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins broke in the early 1990s. It's not because the artists suck. It's because the record companies only invest in sugar-pop acts that are too watered down to be interesting. Is there a band that has artistic ingenuity or a political point? They won't get a contract, because the record company won't take a risk.
I'd pay about a dollar per song for a CD today. If I could find one I was interested in.
The whole music thing is overrated anyway. It's all just entertainment. In the end, you can get too much entertainment.
The big record companies have dug themselves into a deep hole. They're too big to release innovative or strongly artistic acts. They're too large and bulky to move nimbly. The giants are going to fall. Both music and art in general will be better for it.
If you are a medium or large corporation and you need to run your own SMTP server, then you'd be in trouble. You'd have to look at a competing service, such as "cable TV", wireless, or T1.
As long as the fragments are small enough, they'll burn up in the atmosphere. If they're bigger, they should still be susceptible to the nuclear-tipped rocket method of changing their orbit.
Nor should there be any reason to fear a so-called "killer asteroid." There have got to be ways to fight back. Here is my own, back-of-a-napkin plan.
Of course, there is no need to actually send the killer asteroid into the sun.
Surely improvements could be made. The point is, we can indeed fight back. It would be stupid and cowardly to not try.
In any case, we should bear in mind that it is extremely improbable that a killer asteroid will hit in our lifetimes.