Re:Anyone else feel like they're having a stroke?
on
Boot To Zork
·
· Score: 2
Heh. I'm waiting for someone to compile it for the Cisco platform... I'd love to play Zork via 9600 baud serial connection on a $100,000 core router... to the exclusion of doing any actual routing, of course...
Sad thing is, I've known book-smart people that made terrible decisions about anything unrelated to their areas of expertise, so his analogy isn't as poor as you'd think.
I'm not going to say that Apple is done, but this behavior is consistent with other times that Jobs wasn't running the place. Given that short of seances or Ouija Boards he's unavailable to drive the product innovation that has been Apple's only true trick to remaining strong, I don't forsee a bright future
As far as I've been able to tell, most espionage of a materiel type requires spying on companies, as it's those companies that are the true producers of materiel, not governments themselves.
That's the point, you don't have to use Solar as baseline, especially in the southern half of the country where the demand load is during daylight hours, for air conditioning, not at night, for heat. You use something else for base load, but your demand load during daylight hours dwarfs the amount of power needed for nighttime base load.
If the friggin' various governments would get their heads out of their asses, they'd provision for residential solar with the same degree of government assistance that the power utilities get, and they'd force the utilities into fair market prices for the energy they get from residential solar systems. As it stands right now, the residence is compensated at the lowest price per KWh that the power company charges its customers during the middle of the night when power is cheapest, even though it's distributing that power during the peak of demand, getting three or four times that price from customers. And on top of that, they're wanting to add an extra charge to the bills of residences with solar panels, claiming that they're losing revenue because of those solar panels.
It sounds like he was doing some simple ground effect tricks, and the heli got too close and clipped him. It's actually a hobby and a sport, in which many hundreds of people participate. If you think doing tricks with model helis is 'documented reckless behavior', then I have nothing to say but "You must be a ton of fun at parties.."
No, I have my own dangerous hobbies. I've built engines, rebuilt carburetors and had my share of spontaneous combustion of some of them that I screwed up with, and had other automotive issues that were interesting to deal with when they cropped up. Nothing like a front tire blowout on a 30 year old truck at 75mph... Anyway, he cut part of his head off, his fault. I'm not saying that I would've told him to not do what he was doing, but I wouldn't have wanted to be around when he was doing it either. He did what he wanted to do, and it cost him everything.
They control and monitor your traveling, communication and associations. They'll throw you in jail for consuming certain substances. Force you to admit guilt (being guilty or not) on threat of overwhelming jail times or punishments. Justice seems more like something bought than something inherent. Large smear campaigns of anyone that would dare stand against them.
They don't monitor or control all of my traveling. Yes, there are places where my license plate will be noted. There are also places where I may be stopped by an immigration officer. On the other hand, if I headed out, right now, for a 5000 mile road trip no one would stop me or attempt to even find out why I was doing it. I could also buy a cash bus ticket, or hitchhike, or rent a car, or ride a bicycle, and they wouldn't know where I was or where I was headed.
They don't monitor or control all of my communications. I have a ham radio license and I could talk to other hams and it's exceedingly unlikely that they're monitoring all of the available EM spectrum. If your definition of control includes the miniscule licensing requirements, I could use CB radio, or FRS radio. Or cheapo open-spectrum walkie-talkies. I can send mail through private shipping companies or private couriers and it'll arrive untouched and unopened. Ironically, I'm probably more secure using a landline phone to call another landline phone, as the rules for what they're allowed to do with those are actually more strict.
I have never been approached due to my associations. I am acquainted with a man in my community that was successfully prosecuted for weapons violations, and whose organization at the time was infiltrated because of a video they made and distributed that gave practical advice for destroying large buildings with explosives. After he served his three or so years for having an assault rifle modified for full-auto fire, he's free to be associated with again, and his only significant restriction is that he's not allowed to own guns anymore. This is a man that could well have been justifiably branded as a terrorist or a member of a terrorist cell, and yet his illegal acts got him only three years off and a need to check in with a parole officer once a month, even under Janet Reno's prosecution. I don't run into him very often, but he's otherwise free to come and go as he pleases. I've also never had any issues with some of the very extreme college professors that I've had classes from, and these people are published in their extreme views.
I don't feel that I can comment on the drugs side. I've known people that have gotten busted and basically got released with misdemeanor charges, though I've heard of cases where people received much stronger sentences than their offenses justified. But, remember, the bulk of these prosecutions are at the state level, not the federal level, and are very much inconsistent from state to state. A former coworker of mine noted that in Illinois, possession of a personal quantity of marijuana would result in a civil citation like a parking ticket, as opposed to the criminal prosecution like it would see here.
As for charges, the state will file any and all charges against you that prosecutors feel are appropriate. But, it's a paper tiger in some ways. You'll note that there have been examples of late like the Casey Anthony trial and the George Zimmerman trial where the prosecution lost, even though it appeared that they had very strong cases. Plus, even though it's not as common as it should be, sometimes the authorities themselves are arrested and convicted of their crimes too. On top of that, if defendants and defense attorneys decided to start forcing prosecutions to all go to trial instead of being plead down, it would break the judiciary. There literally would not be enough time to try everyone. A lack of ability to try everyone does not strike me as a hallmark of a police state.
There are also procedures for using chainsaws, barbecue grills, and other things that can kill a person. There probably are procedures, at least minimal, CYA procedures for model aircraft too. That he wasn't following them is why he killed himself. Given his performance-nature of his stunts, think of it like the guy who juggles chainsaws, a not-recommended use of the device, that could, and in this case did, lead to injury and death.
I play with model rockets. Fairly big ones, I'm up into the "G" engine size, and we practice a certain amount of range safety. I've had factory-made engines explode on the pad and that 30' distance is very important, as are following procedures for hooking up the electrical wiring for the ignition. Even with rockets that have exploded on the pad, rockets that have broken up in-flight right after leaving the pad, and rockets that have caught on fire, no one has ever been hurt because we're not stupid enough to sit right next to the rocket when we fire it. The only real danger we have to face is rockets whose parachute ejection fails, and the rocket coming down like a javelin, which has happened a couple of times but nowhere in the vicinity of where anyone was at the time.
I feel sorry for the guy's family, but my sympathy is limited by the documented reckless behavior he's shown before.
Okay, define it, in as many words as you need.
Mind you, I look on what's going down as being potential for later oppression, not occurring oppression, especially from the Federal level. I expect that state or local levels will actually infringe or outright oppress with much greater likelihood affecting my life than the Federal government will in practical matters.
What they're doing is wrong, but it hasn't reached a level that causes behavioral changes in the bulk of the population. Once it really does that in earnest then use of the word applies.
Our government isn't oppressive. It generally doesn't have to be, as we're usually more than willful in our ability to distract ourselves. Think along the lines of Bread and Circuses and Brave New World. The "news" is reporting that some stupid socialite bimbo was all over some singer with a sexist song after some other singer bimbo got nearly naked on stage for her part of his performance. Other "news" is reporting on some stupid gal who had sex on camera with some stupid guy that had sex with some pathetic gal that has tested positive for HIV, and the only close-to-relevant part is that the original gal was engaging in sexual exchanges with a guy that wants to be mayor of a really big city.
We don't have to have an oppressive government; we're fat-and-happy to the point that we don't care what our government does as long as our big-screen TVs provide us with enough sensationalism to keep us occupied by the 24 hour "news" cycle.
The sad thing, really, is that I expect that the vast majority of people are so boring that there isn't even anything interesting to know about them by watching them.
I think that the point is to change who makes the decisions, more than who handles the technical aspects.
Remember, after the original disaster, there are several examples of on-site plant managers and workers defying their corporate bosses to do things that weren't necessarily in TEPCO's interest, but were definitely necessary to attempt to stabilize the situation, like injecting seawater into the reactor when the distilled coolant level was falling.
If the workers and engineers know their business and TEPCO is fighting them with doing it, then the government should probably take over administration, with the ability to pay for all of the cleanup through TEPCO's budget, whether TEPCO likes it or not, as they've demonstrated on numerous occasions that their interest is in saving money and erring on the side of assuming the best, rather than the worst, when things are falling apart.
Yep, Palo Verde. Phoenix provides enough wastewater that I don't think they'll ever have an issue, even if water becomes somewhat more strongly rationed during a possible drought...
As I understand it, they have some large artificial cooling ponds that don't release into an existing body of water, and I expect that they have groundwater wells for if they ever need water in an emergency.
One of the biggest nuclear plants in North America is about 80 miles from where I live, and is not adjacent to any river or other large, natural body of water...
You don't have to dump water into a river or stream if you design your plant to not need that source of water...
I shudder to think of what the 3d printer people will come up with for "ink" prices and vendor-lock-in, especially given what they've managed to charge for inkjet cartridges. It would be cheaper to print with snake-bite venom than new cartridges.
This may sound overly pessimistic, but I fully expect consumer 3d printing to be a boondoggle. There will be incompatible, competing standards, there will be problems with designs not translating into physical devices properly (especially for inexpensive designs!) and since most 3d printing these days produces cheap plastic crap, it'll make just as much sense to get higher-quality, mass-produced cheap plastic crap at big-box stores where it's quality-checked to at least a minimum, than to attempt to produce one's own cheap plastic crap at home where one may not be able to perform the quality control one's self.
This does make me sad, but life will not be like Star Trek.
None of the hardware stores local to me sell high quality fasteners except for their non-chrome, non-stainless Grade-8 SAE or Grade 10.9 Metric, and I have lots and lots of places to choose from.
If I want high quality I have to go either Grainger or McMaster-Carr, and we're back to catalog again. So few people, relatively speaking, need this kind of hardware that it's difficult to justify speculatively distributing it around the country. It makes more sense to make enough to keep stocked in one or a few places, and to distribute it as ordered. Sure, it's annoying if you need a Stainless Grade 10.9 M10x1.25 10mm bolt, but most of the applications calling for this are also professional productions, not hobbyist or repair work, and the manufacturers or designers will order in batches to keep on-hand what they'll need for the development or manufacturing work, and reorder when they get low.
I've been surprised, in a good way, by Ace Hardware actually. Ace stores are franchises, and one franchise owner may only own a few stores, and their stores might not be close to each other. I have five Ace Hardware stores within ten miles of home, and only two of those are owned by the same franchise. They get to make choices for what they stock, and I know that this store may be better for fasteners and that store may be better for copper tubing and parts, and this other store may be best for PVC and black pipe and the like...
Heck, one of them has stocked HVAC-rated copper tubing in sizes over 1/4"ID, while most only sell lighter-wall in those sizes. This is handy for compressed air for the shop.
Ah, but the bazaar and the make-it-yourself are basically cottage-industry levels of production, not mass production. You're generally not going to get identical things out of cottage-industry. If you want sameness or mass-volume, you have to use a factory of some sort, which means one or few points of production and a need for distribution.
Before urbanization, we used to order much of what we bought from catalogs. You could order everything from shoelaces to a prefab house kit from the Sears Catalog, and if you lived in a rural place, you pretty much had to mail-order.
One can argue that the retail shopping experience that we've come to regard as the norm didn't really appear until the middle-class started shopping like the upper class did, where choice became possible and one could actually discriminate between objects to purchase. It's fairly expensive to run a retail store that's packed full of merchandise that lets everyone touch everything. You have to have plenty of floor space. You have to have pretty displays and lots of bright lighting. You have to clean up after the customers. You have to stock things speculatively en masse, and have to discount merchandise that doesn't sell but try to strike a balance between that discounted merch and full-retail prices for other merchandise, lest people not buy your full-price stuff and instead opt for the cheap stuff. And you have to deal with all of the inevitable clashes between your staff and the public, and between members of your staff.
A catalog service does away or shrinks many of these issues. Floorspace and lighting are what's OSHA-mandated. Appearance isn't so much an issue so long as the warehouse is kept tidy enough to avoid damaging the merchandise, and the warehouse can go decades between remodels if it's set up right in the first place. Less staff and no public browsing means no staff-public interaction problems, and if the staff is kept busy pulling and shipping merchandise, less staff-to-staff problems. The warehouse can also actually stock less materials if they want, so if something doesn't sell they don't have as much of it on hand as they might in retail stores, and since online it seems harder to compare this discounted thing with this full-priced thing on a tangible level, it might not even cannibalize full-priced sales.
I like some retail shopping, but sometimes it's really annoying, and I think there's plenty of good in a mail-order or internet-order catalog to make up for the negatives.
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Heh. I'm waiting for someone to compile it for the Cisco platform... I'd love to play Zork via 9600 baud serial connection on a $100,000 core router... to the exclusion of doing any actual routing, of course...
Sad thing is, I've known book-smart people that made terrible decisions about anything unrelated to their areas of expertise, so his analogy isn't as poor as you'd think. I'm not going to say that Apple is done, but this behavior is consistent with other times that Jobs wasn't running the place. Given that short of seances or Ouija Boards he's unavailable to drive the product innovation that has been Apple's only true trick to remaining strong, I don't forsee a bright future
As far as I've been able to tell, most espionage of a materiel type requires spying on companies, as it's those companies that are the true producers of materiel, not governments themselves.
...that all governments spy on all other governments, regardless of the state of cordiality between those nations.
Didn't we already know this?
That's the point, you don't have to use Solar as baseline, especially in the southern half of the country where the demand load is during daylight hours, for air conditioning, not at night, for heat. You use something else for base load, but your demand load during daylight hours dwarfs the amount of power needed for nighttime base load.
If the friggin' various governments would get their heads out of their asses, they'd provision for residential solar with the same degree of government assistance that the power utilities get, and they'd force the utilities into fair market prices for the energy they get from residential solar systems. As it stands right now, the residence is compensated at the lowest price per KWh that the power company charges its customers during the middle of the night when power is cheapest, even though it's distributing that power during the peak of demand, getting three or four times that price from customers. And on top of that, they're wanting to add an extra charge to the bills of residences with solar panels, claiming that they're losing revenue because of those solar panels.
Screw. them.
No, I have my own dangerous hobbies. I've built engines, rebuilt carburetors and had my share of spontaneous combustion of some of them that I screwed up with, and had other automotive issues that were interesting to deal with when they cropped up. Nothing like a front tire blowout on a 30 year old truck at 75mph... Anyway, he cut part of his head off, his fault. I'm not saying that I would've told him to not do what he was doing, but I wouldn't have wanted to be around when he was doing it either. He did what he wanted to do, and it cost him everything.
They don't monitor or control all of my traveling. Yes, there are places where my license plate will be noted. There are also places where I may be stopped by an immigration officer. On the other hand, if I headed out, right now, for a 5000 mile road trip no one would stop me or attempt to even find out why I was doing it. I could also buy a cash bus ticket, or hitchhike, or rent a car, or ride a bicycle, and they wouldn't know where I was or where I was headed.
They don't monitor or control all of my communications. I have a ham radio license and I could talk to other hams and it's exceedingly unlikely that they're monitoring all of the available EM spectrum. If your definition of control includes the miniscule licensing requirements, I could use CB radio, or FRS radio. Or cheapo open-spectrum walkie-talkies. I can send mail through private shipping companies or private couriers and it'll arrive untouched and unopened. Ironically, I'm probably more secure using a landline phone to call another landline phone, as the rules for what they're allowed to do with those are actually more strict.
I have never been approached due to my associations. I am acquainted with a man in my community that was successfully prosecuted for weapons violations, and whose organization at the time was infiltrated because of a video they made and distributed that gave practical advice for destroying large buildings with explosives. After he served his three or so years for having an assault rifle modified for full-auto fire, he's free to be associated with again, and his only significant restriction is that he's not allowed to own guns anymore. This is a man that could well have been justifiably branded as a terrorist or a member of a terrorist cell, and yet his illegal acts got him only three years off and a need to check in with a parole officer once a month, even under Janet Reno's prosecution. I don't run into him very often, but he's otherwise free to come and go as he pleases. I've also never had any issues with some of the very extreme college professors that I've had classes from, and these people are published in their extreme views.
I don't feel that I can comment on the drugs side. I've known people that have gotten busted and basically got released with misdemeanor charges, though I've heard of cases where people received much stronger sentences than their offenses justified. But, remember, the bulk of these prosecutions are at the state level, not the federal level, and are very much inconsistent from state to state. A former coworker of mine noted that in Illinois, possession of a personal quantity of marijuana would result in a civil citation like a parking ticket, as opposed to the criminal prosecution like it would see here.
As for charges, the state will file any and all charges against you that prosecutors feel are appropriate. But, it's a paper tiger in some ways. You'll note that there have been examples of late like the Casey Anthony trial and the George Zimmerman trial where the prosecution lost, even though it appeared that they had very strong cases. Plus, even though it's not as common as it should be, sometimes the authorities themselves are arrested and convicted of their crimes too. On top of that, if defendants and defense attorneys decided to start forcing prosecutions to all go to trial instead of being plead down, it would break the judiciary. There literally would not be enough time to try everyone. A lack of ability to try everyone does not strike me as a hallmark of a police state.
I'm curious as to what you mean by "smear ca
There are also procedures for using chainsaws, barbecue grills, and other things that can kill a person. There probably are procedures, at least minimal, CYA procedures for model aircraft too. That he wasn't following them is why he killed himself. Given his performance-nature of his stunts, think of it like the guy who juggles chainsaws, a not-recommended use of the device, that could, and in this case did, lead to injury and death.
I play with model rockets. Fairly big ones, I'm up into the "G" engine size, and we practice a certain amount of range safety. I've had factory-made engines explode on the pad and that 30' distance is very important, as are following procedures for hooking up the electrical wiring for the ignition. Even with rockets that have exploded on the pad, rockets that have broken up in-flight right after leaving the pad, and rockets that have caught on fire, no one has ever been hurt because we're not stupid enough to sit right next to the rocket when we fire it. The only real danger we have to face is rockets whose parachute ejection fails, and the rocket coming down like a javelin, which has happened a couple of times but nowhere in the vicinity of where anyone was at the time.
I feel sorry for the guy's family, but my sympathy is limited by the documented reckless behavior he's shown before.
Okay, define it, in as many words as you need. Mind you, I look on what's going down as being potential for later oppression, not occurring oppression, especially from the Federal level. I expect that state or local levels will actually infringe or outright oppress with much greater likelihood affecting my life than the Federal government will in practical matters. What they're doing is wrong, but it hasn't reached a level that causes behavioral changes in the bulk of the population. Once it really does that in earnest then use of the word applies.
Our government isn't oppressive. It generally doesn't have to be, as we're usually more than willful in our ability to distract ourselves. Think along the lines of Bread and Circuses and Brave New World. The "news" is reporting that some stupid socialite bimbo was all over some singer with a sexist song after some other singer bimbo got nearly naked on stage for her part of his performance. Other "news" is reporting on some stupid gal who had sex on camera with some stupid guy that had sex with some pathetic gal that has tested positive for HIV, and the only close-to-relevant part is that the original gal was engaging in sexual exchanges with a guy that wants to be mayor of a really big city.
We don't have to have an oppressive government; we're fat-and-happy to the point that we don't care what our government does as long as our big-screen TVs provide us with enough sensationalism to keep us occupied by the 24 hour "news" cycle.
The sad thing, really, is that I expect that the vast majority of people are so boring that there isn't even anything interesting to know about them by watching them.
Oh My God...
Elon Musk is a James Bond Villain! A real-life Max Zorin!
I think that the point is to change who makes the decisions, more than who handles the technical aspects.
Remember, after the original disaster, there are several examples of on-site plant managers and workers defying their corporate bosses to do things that weren't necessarily in TEPCO's interest, but were definitely necessary to attempt to stabilize the situation, like injecting seawater into the reactor when the distilled coolant level was falling.
If the workers and engineers know their business and TEPCO is fighting them with doing it, then the government should probably take over administration, with the ability to pay for all of the cleanup through TEPCO's budget, whether TEPCO likes it or not, as they've demonstrated on numerous occasions that their interest is in saving money and erring on the side of assuming the best, rather than the worst, when things are falling apart.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [user_665546_posting_content] block not found.
God, what a pea-brained idea...
And given their size, combined with the noises that Zombies make, the Mars company can market them under an existing brand!
...we can now artificially add one to the $POLITICAL_PARTISAN that needs one!
Yep, Palo Verde. Phoenix provides enough wastewater that I don't think they'll ever have an issue, even if water becomes somewhat more strongly rationed during a possible drought...
As I understand it, they have some large artificial cooling ponds that don't release into an existing body of water, and I expect that they have groundwater wells for if they ever need water in an emergency.
One of the biggest nuclear plants in North America is about 80 miles from where I live, and is not adjacent to any river or other large, natural body of water...
You don't have to dump water into a river or stream if you design your plant to not need that source of water...
I shudder to think of what the 3d printer people will come up with for "ink" prices and vendor-lock-in, especially given what they've managed to charge for inkjet cartridges. It would be cheaper to print with snake-bite venom than new cartridges.
This may sound overly pessimistic, but I fully expect consumer 3d printing to be a boondoggle. There will be incompatible, competing standards, there will be problems with designs not translating into physical devices properly (especially for inexpensive designs!) and since most 3d printing these days produces cheap plastic crap, it'll make just as much sense to get higher-quality, mass-produced cheap plastic crap at big-box stores where it's quality-checked to at least a minimum, than to attempt to produce one's own cheap plastic crap at home where one may not be able to perform the quality control one's self.
This does make me sad, but life will not be like Star Trek.
None of the hardware stores local to me sell high quality fasteners except for their non-chrome, non-stainless Grade-8 SAE or Grade 10.9 Metric, and I have lots and lots of places to choose from.
If I want high quality I have to go either Grainger or McMaster-Carr, and we're back to catalog again. So few people, relatively speaking, need this kind of hardware that it's difficult to justify speculatively distributing it around the country. It makes more sense to make enough to keep stocked in one or a few places, and to distribute it as ordered. Sure, it's annoying if you need a Stainless Grade 10.9 M10x1.25 10mm bolt, but most of the applications calling for this are also professional productions, not hobbyist or repair work, and the manufacturers or designers will order in batches to keep on-hand what they'll need for the development or manufacturing work, and reorder when they get low.
I've been surprised, in a good way, by Ace Hardware actually. Ace stores are franchises, and one franchise owner may only own a few stores, and their stores might not be close to each other. I have five Ace Hardware stores within ten miles of home, and only two of those are owned by the same franchise. They get to make choices for what they stock, and I know that this store may be better for fasteners and that store may be better for copper tubing and parts, and this other store may be best for PVC and black pipe and the like...
Heck, one of them has stocked HVAC-rated copper tubing in sizes over 1/4"ID, while most only sell lighter-wall in those sizes. This is handy for compressed air for the shop.
Ah, but the bazaar and the make-it-yourself are basically cottage-industry levels of production, not mass production. You're generally not going to get identical things out of cottage-industry. If you want sameness or mass-volume, you have to use a factory of some sort, which means one or few points of production and a need for distribution.
Before urbanization, we used to order much of what we bought from catalogs. You could order everything from shoelaces to a prefab house kit from the Sears Catalog, and if you lived in a rural place, you pretty much had to mail-order.
One can argue that the retail shopping experience that we've come to regard as the norm didn't really appear until the middle-class started shopping like the upper class did, where choice became possible and one could actually discriminate between objects to purchase. It's fairly expensive to run a retail store that's packed full of merchandise that lets everyone touch everything. You have to have plenty of floor space. You have to have pretty displays and lots of bright lighting. You have to clean up after the customers. You have to stock things speculatively en masse, and have to discount merchandise that doesn't sell but try to strike a balance between that discounted merch and full-retail prices for other merchandise, lest people not buy your full-price stuff and instead opt for the cheap stuff. And you have to deal with all of the inevitable clashes between your staff and the public, and between members of your staff.
A catalog service does away or shrinks many of these issues. Floorspace and lighting are what's OSHA-mandated. Appearance isn't so much an issue so long as the warehouse is kept tidy enough to avoid damaging the merchandise, and the warehouse can go decades between remodels if it's set up right in the first place. Less staff and no public browsing means no staff-public interaction problems, and if the staff is kept busy pulling and shipping merchandise, less staff-to-staff problems. The warehouse can also actually stock less materials if they want, so if something doesn't sell they don't have as much of it on hand as they might in retail stores, and since online it seems harder to compare this discounted thing with this full-priced thing on a tangible level, it might not even cannibalize full-priced sales.
I like some retail shopping, but sometimes it's really annoying, and I think there's plenty of good in a mail-order or internet-order catalog to make up for the negatives.
Just as long as he doesn't load the wrong program so that it thinks it's holding a screwdriver and is about to begin twisting...
What, that average global temperature is leveling off?