No, that wasn't the question...my question was - how many people have actually been to the city that are making negative comments? I didn't answer my own question. And neither did you for that matter. For the record, I wasn't talking about suburbs either. I simply mentioned I was from the suburbs, hence, given my proximity to and knowledge of the city, my interest in the question.
OK, evangelize on the qualities of Detroit. Is your contention that it isn't a shithole? Then prove it. My understanding of the place is high crime, population flight, and unemployment. Are these premises incorrect? Even the Wikipedia entry, of all things, paints the same basic picture: city just barely starting to emerge from decades of depression, with half the population it had 50 years ago. It has the highest unemployment in the country. Poorest city in the country. Most dangerous city in the country. That meets my definition of "shithole" when you hit the crap trifecta.
True, but at the same time, the race riots, white flight, and crooked mayor had a more profound and deep affect. I think had these not occurred, the city would presently be in much better shape than it is now....despite the economic conditions of the 70s/80s. In any event, my other question was - why not see what the city's like first before commenting on it? You didn't answer that question either.
In the end, the cause doesn't matter since my assertion was the effect. If your contention is that a non-crooked mayor would have somehow attracted tons of industry to replace that of the auto makers who ran the hell away from Detroit, that's a tough assertion to prove, though it may not be wrong. But in the end, it's irrelevant. And in making that case, you seem to implicitly agree with my original assertion that Detroit has a lot of economic problems that haven't been fixed...my original point.
In any event, my other question was - why not see what the city's like first before commenting on it? You didn't answer that question either.
Same reasons I don't take vacations in Gary, IN.
On a different note, I wanted to comment that the moderation of the three relevant postings here seems particularly biased. Or more bluntly, sucks. Apparently anything that disputes a negativism or shows a hint of optimism/upside deserves a 0 score, while anything negative and close-minded should be applauded with a 1+
The population of the US may be increasing, but only in certain desirable areas. The "Rust Belt" - cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh - continues to shrink. Pittsburgh alone has lost over HALF of its population from nearly 700,000 in the 1960s to barely over 300,000 today (and not just due to people leaving for the suburbs). If you're willing to tolerate the winters there's plenty of room up here!
Yeah, but then I'd have to live in Pittsburgh. The problem with the rust belt cities is that, to varying degrees, they just haven't figured out how to attract brain-heavy industries to replace the muscle-heavy industries they lost in hte last 40 years. Nothing draws people to places like Pittsburgh. But man, do I see a lot of Steeler fans living all along the east coast. Presumably they're among the 400,000 who left for jobs elsewhere.
Now don't get me wrong, Pittsburgh's still no Detroit.
The "long tunnel inside the Earth" idea is a pretty good notion, save for the problem of bumping your head as soon as the capsule hits atmosphere at Mach-whatever.
And except for, um, the fact that gravity would start slowing you down after you pass the core, to the point that you only reach the other side before falling back? Ignoring parasitic forces (ie, friction), you'd set up one big harmonic oscillator.
The speed has nothing to do with it. Gravities are a unit of acceleration.
Au contraire. When we have something travelling in a ring, it's speed is directly related to its acceleration, it's just that the acceleration is along a vector pointing to the center of the ring. So we're looking at the centrifugal/centripetal forces. If this thing is travelling at 10000 m/s along a 2000m ring (their numbers), you end up with a centrifugal force of about 5000g's
Fc=(mv^2)/r, Fg=m*9.8m/s^2, so we have Fc/Fg = (mv^2)/(r)/(9.8m/s^2) ~ 5000g. They say 2000g, so the numbers don't quite add up somewhere, but in the ballpark.
So to get to the top speed necessary on the track in question, the object will be subject to massive sustained g forces
long is Pat going to live before all hell breaks loose and Slackware becomes another Debian? Slackware is ancient enough already...
Yeah, it would be much better if it had a mission statement, a philosophy, a logo, its own color, and a bunch of annoying splash screens everywhere. Oh, and it should change its name to something that means something vaguely nice in some African language.
We should be bringing everyone else UP to our standards rather than racing to the lowest level out there. But we are racing to the bottom. That is the problem.
What do you think happens when we end up basically creating a huge middle class in, say, India? That's the best path to social change (which is in fact occurring there). Look, keeping India and China as third world nations is simply not maintainable. They will improve their living standards and with it their education, and with that their competitiveness. The US needs to ask itself what it can do to maintain its advantage while competing in a world of people that are every bit as smart as us, and possibly better educated through secondary school.
Leveraging a monopoly to gain market share in another market is illegal. In this case, MS has bundled their software music player with Windows, which is illegal in and of itself.
Not at all. You're probably confused with the Netscape case - but there, they strongarmed OEMs to *not* include Netscape. That's the "leverage" part. Simply competing in multiple markets, when you have a monopoly in one, is absolutely not illegal. It's not illegal for those products to work well together to the point that they make a compelling combination either. That's fair competition, doing something better than someone else.
Now, if they start forcing OEMs to include their player and not iTunes (as if any OEMs included iTunes now), that would be illegal. Hacking windows to make iTunes and iPods incompatible would be illegal. Making music software is *not* illegal, nor is including it in Windows free of charge.
If their hardware and software players play it and that ability is not offered to all other software player and hardware player manufacturers, free of charge, then that too is illegal.
No, it's not, especially since MS won't have a monopoly in music players.
Illegally using a monopoly position to expand into other markets.
What, precisely, is illegal about this? It would be illegal if they decided to cripple iTunes/iPod on Vista. Simply making a music player that is designed to work well with their OS is not illegal at all.
Hmmmm....can't recall the last time I was deciding between an MP3 player and a game console. Not the same market, really. Why not extend the logic to anything else that has transistors and costs $250?
I do agree, though, that MS's crippled wireless capability won't be much of a selling point, at which point you're buying an iPod. Unless you've been waiting the last 5 years to have a player with an FM tuner so you can listen to Clearchannel.
Secondly even if it had been, he wasn't denied access by the owners of the airport, but by agents of the federal government. Since TSA agents are required there by law and answer to the federal government, they're not agents of any theoretical owner of the airport and are not the owner's agents. They have no right to make decisions like that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the main point of TSA is that those people would actually be gov. employees, as opposed to the previous clowns they had checking baggage before 9/11 who weren't. At that point, they don't *answer* to the federal government...they are *representatives* of the federal government.
To me, the greater question is, does claiming that a TSA rep is an asshole make you a risk? If not, these people are using their misplaced authority for petty vengeance, which is a massive (and unsurprising) abuse of power.
I see one process running ("top[1]"), and two or three others (X, postgres) that occasionally pick up a quanta or two, and a couple dozen sitting around in "sleep" state. Load average 0.0 / 0.1 / 0.1.
Oddly enough, if I telnet into a development DB server (a dual-processor P-IV box), I see basically the same thing (it's another group's server, and they're in a staff meeting). Couple of Oracle processes in "cpu0" and "cpu1" states, couple of dozen more in "sleep" state. Load average 0.2 / 0.2 / 0.2.
Your point?
My point is...can I have those cycles you're wasting? Sheesh, my "top" is always a mess.
"Oil companies claim the backers of Prop 87, some of them venture capitalists, would profit from state money flowing into the alternative-energy projects they are funding."
What do you mean, "claim?" That's the entire point of the thing. It's not like this is some hidden agenda here.
Take it from someone who was there. Actually, there was a particular box of cereal that offered the perfect whistle as the "prize"...
It wasn't ever necessary to purse your lips and whistle as such. Some people used boxes to gen the tone, but when you start whipping out a device and attaching it to a payphone, passers-by tend to look at you oddly. We went lo-tech to avoid notice. Several of us were also musicians and it's not that hard to create a whistle that will produce a specific tone.
Oh, I'm about 30, so I'm old enough to recall the tail end of the fun days. I know the cereal, and have read many ramblings from the man who took his name from the cereal. My approach was to find unattended phones to which electronica could be attached without notice. Probably because I'm a geek and not a musician, but hey, everyone solves their problems in different ways. College campuses are terrible about leaving unlocked junction boxes in basements. Often as not, these were just plywood with racks of twisted-pair connections nailed to them. A quickly kludged beige-box (calling that a box is generous) was all you needed to get access to as many lines as you could think up uses for.
Yeah, basically the insiders and the law firm are divvying up the corpse of SCO. If there exist any non-insider shareholders, there should be a suit, this is blatant and ridiculous.
Nobody "whistled into pay phones". You could use a tone generator to make the same sound as a quarter dropping, and get a free call. 2600Hz was from home phones, to 800 numbers. Typical how people misremember things that they never did in the first place.
2600 was to get trunk access from any line. This was typically done with a blue box. The quarter tones were done with a red box by replacing the crystal in a standard dialer with (I believe) about a 6.5 MHz crystal (can't remember the exact frequency). And there were a few people with perfect pitch who in fact could blow a perfect 2600 Hz, but they were rare. I could not, not to mention which I was mainly being facetious. Besides, the people who had fun with phones just to get free calls were the jackasses in the first place.
Whistling into pay phones for free calls was legal...
Could you do a good 2600 Hz?
For what it's worth, it was never legal, as nebulous "theft of service" or "misuse of network" laws would have gotten you. But you wouldn't have gotten caught, which is close enough.
Really, use of any work that is licensed to one party to another is subject to copyright law as well as any contract that exists between the two parties. Copyright covers default rights and restrictions; others may be placed into effect by the parties to a contract.
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No, that wasn't the question...my question was - how many people have actually been to the city that are making negative comments? I didn't answer my own question. And neither did you for that matter. For the record, I wasn't talking about suburbs either. I simply mentioned I was from the suburbs, hence, given my proximity to and knowledge of the city, my interest in the question.
OK, evangelize on the qualities of Detroit. Is your contention that it isn't a shithole? Then prove it. My understanding of the place is high crime, population flight, and unemployment. Are these premises incorrect? Even the Wikipedia entry, of all things, paints the same basic picture: city just barely starting to emerge from decades of depression, with half the population it had 50 years ago. It has the highest unemployment in the country. Poorest city in the country. Most dangerous city in the country. That meets my definition of "shithole" when you hit the crap trifecta.
True, but at the same time, the race riots, white flight, and crooked mayor had a more profound and deep affect. I think had these not occurred, the city would presently be in much better shape than it is now....despite the economic conditions of the 70s/80s. In any event, my other question was - why not see what the city's like first before commenting on it? You didn't answer that question either.
In the end, the cause doesn't matter since my assertion was the effect. If your contention is that a non-crooked mayor would have somehow attracted tons of industry to replace that of the auto makers who ran the hell away from Detroit, that's a tough assertion to prove, though it may not be wrong. But in the end, it's irrelevant. And in making that case, you seem to implicitly agree with my original assertion that Detroit has a lot of economic problems that haven't been fixed...my original point.
In any event, my other question was - why not see what the city's like first before commenting on it? You didn't answer that question either.
Same reasons I don't take vacations in Gary, IN.
On a different note, I wanted to comment that the moderation of the three relevant postings here seems particularly biased. Or more bluntly, sucks. Apparently anything that disputes a negativism or shows a hint of optimism/upside deserves a 0 score, while anything negative and close-minded should be applauded with a 1+
Perhaps no one agrees with you?
As a resident of one of the many Detroit suburbs (which, as a whole, rival most other cities') I often wonder at this blind bashing of Detroit.
I think that's a self-answering question. We ain't talking suburbs here.
My parents grew up in Detroit during the 40s/50s/60s and I can tell you that it was a rival of most other US cities at the time.
Not contested...during that time period.
Unfortunately, race riots and a crooked mayor served to destroy the city's core over the course of two decades (70s/80s).
You forgot the complete implosion of the economy round about that time, which is still struggling to recover.
Hey, as long as you don't live in America's crappiest city, right? ;)
And for your Detroit residents, Detroit's still no....hmm...Beirut?
The population of the US may be increasing, but only in certain desirable areas. The "Rust Belt" - cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh - continues to shrink. Pittsburgh alone has lost over HALF of its population from nearly 700,000 in the 1960s to barely over 300,000 today (and not just due to people leaving for the suburbs). If you're willing to tolerate the winters there's plenty of room up here!
Yeah, but then I'd have to live in Pittsburgh. The problem with the rust belt cities is that, to varying degrees, they just haven't figured out how to attract brain-heavy industries to replace the muscle-heavy industries they lost in hte last 40 years. Nothing draws people to places like Pittsburgh. But man, do I see a lot of Steeler fans living all along the east coast. Presumably they're among the 400,000 who left for jobs elsewhere.
Now don't get me wrong, Pittsburgh's still no Detroit.
"Another testimony to how our society refuses to reward those who enrich it."
Society votes with it's wallets, and deems itself insufficiently enriched.
The "long tunnel inside the Earth" idea is a pretty good notion, save for the problem of bumping your head as soon as the capsule hits atmosphere at Mach-whatever.
And except for, um, the fact that gravity would start slowing you down after you pass the core, to the point that you only reach the other side before falling back? Ignoring parasitic forces (ie, friction), you'd set up one big harmonic oscillator.
The speed has nothing to do with it. Gravities are a unit of acceleration.
Au contraire. When we have something travelling in a ring, it's speed is directly related to its acceleration, it's just that the acceleration is along a vector pointing to the center of the ring. So we're looking at the centrifugal/centripetal forces. If this thing is travelling at 10000 m/s along a 2000m ring (their numbers), you end up with a centrifugal force of about 5000g's
Fc=(mv^2)/r, Fg=m*9.8m/s^2, so we have Fc/Fg = (mv^2)/(r)/(9.8m/s^2) ~ 5000g. They say 2000g, so the numbers don't quite add up somewhere, but in the ballpark.
So to get to the top speed necessary on the track in question, the object will be subject to massive sustained g forces
long is Pat going to live before all hell breaks loose and Slackware becomes another Debian? Slackware is ancient enough already...
Yeah, it would be much better if it had a mission statement, a philosophy, a logo, its own color, and a bunch of annoying splash screens everywhere. Oh, and it should change its name to something that means something vaguely nice in some African language.
*Then* it'll be a real l33+ distro.
We should be bringing everyone else UP to our standards rather than racing to the lowest level out there. But we are racing to the bottom. That is the problem.
What do you think happens when we end up basically creating a huge middle class in, say, India? That's the best path to social change (which is in fact occurring there). Look, keeping India and China as third world nations is simply not maintainable. They will improve their living standards and with it their education, and with that their competitiveness. The US needs to ask itself what it can do to maintain its advantage while competing in a world of people that are every bit as smart as us, and possibly better educated through secondary school.
Hint: It's university support.
It's getting to that point that's kind of a problem.
Problem is that, after the moon, the learning curve for landing on heavenly bodies jumps a bit. Gets a little hairier after Mars, too.
No, it's about on par for pisspaille.
Leveraging a monopoly to gain market share in another market is illegal. In this case, MS has bundled their software music player with Windows, which is illegal in and of itself.
Not at all. You're probably confused with the Netscape case - but there, they strongarmed OEMs to *not* include Netscape. That's the "leverage" part. Simply competing in multiple markets, when you have a monopoly in one, is absolutely not illegal. It's not illegal for those products to work well together to the point that they make a compelling combination either. That's fair competition, doing something better than someone else.
Now, if they start forcing OEMs to include their player and not iTunes (as if any OEMs included iTunes now), that would be illegal. Hacking windows to make iTunes and iPods incompatible would be illegal. Making music software is *not* illegal, nor is including it in Windows free of charge.
If their hardware and software players play it and that ability is not offered to all other software player and hardware player manufacturers, free of charge, then that too is illegal.
No, it's not, especially since MS won't have a monopoly in music players.
Illegally using a monopoly position to expand into other markets.
What, precisely, is illegal about this? It would be illegal if they decided to cripple iTunes/iPod on Vista. Simply making a music player that is designed to work well with their OS is not illegal at all.
Hmmmm....can't recall the last time I was deciding between an MP3 player and a game console. Not the same market, really. Why not extend the logic to anything else that has transistors and costs $250? I do agree, though, that MS's crippled wireless capability won't be much of a selling point, at which point you're buying an iPod. Unless you've been waiting the last 5 years to have a player with an FM tuner so you can listen to Clearchannel.
Secondly even if it had been, he wasn't denied access by the owners of the airport, but by agents of the federal government. Since TSA agents are required there by law and answer to the federal government, they're not agents of any theoretical owner of the airport and are not the owner's agents. They have no right to make decisions like that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the main point of TSA is that those people would actually be gov. employees, as opposed to the previous clowns they had checking baggage before 9/11 who weren't. At that point, they don't *answer* to the federal government...they are *representatives* of the federal government.
To me, the greater question is, does claiming that a TSA rep is an asshole make you a risk? If not, these people are using their misplaced authority for petty vengeance, which is a massive (and unsurprising) abuse of power.
I see one process running ("top[1]"), and two or three others (X, postgres) that occasionally pick up a quanta or two, and a couple dozen sitting around in "sleep" state. Load average 0.0 / 0.1 / 0.1.
Oddly enough, if I telnet into a development DB server (a dual-processor P-IV box), I see basically the same thing (it's another group's server, and they're in a staff meeting). Couple of Oracle processes in "cpu0" and "cpu1" states, couple of dozen more in "sleep" state. Load average 0.2 / 0.2 / 0.2.
Your point?
My point is...can I have those cycles you're wasting? Sheesh, my "top" is always a mess.
"Oil companies claim the backers of Prop 87, some of them venture capitalists, would profit from state money flowing into the alternative-energy projects they are funding."
What do you mean, "claim?" That's the entire point of the thing. It's not like this is some hidden agenda here.
Take it from someone who was there. Actually, there was a particular box of cereal that offered the perfect whistle as the "prize"...
It wasn't ever necessary to purse your lips and whistle as such. Some people used boxes to gen the tone, but when you start whipping out a device and attaching it to a payphone, passers-by tend to look at you oddly. We went lo-tech to avoid notice. Several of us were also musicians and it's not that hard to create a whistle that will produce a specific tone.
Oh, I'm about 30, so I'm old enough to recall the tail end of the fun days. I know the cereal, and have read many ramblings from the man who took his name from the cereal. My approach was to find unattended phones to which electronica could be attached without notice. Probably because I'm a geek and not a musician, but hey, everyone solves their problems in different ways. College campuses are terrible about leaving unlocked junction boxes in basements. Often as not, these were just plywood with racks of twisted-pair connections nailed to them. A quickly kludged beige-box (calling that a box is generous) was all you needed to get access to as many lines as you could think up uses for.
Open a prompt and type "top".
...would be better. Get all three letters on different buttons.
Yeah, basically the insiders and the law firm are divvying up the corpse of SCO. If there exist any non-insider shareholders, there should be a suit, this is blatant and ridiculous.
Nobody "whistled into pay phones". You could use a tone generator to make the same sound as a quarter dropping, and get a free call. 2600Hz was from home phones, to 800 numbers. Typical how people misremember things that they never did in the first place.
2600 was to get trunk access from any line. This was typically done with a blue box. The quarter tones were done with a red box by replacing the crystal in a standard dialer with (I believe) about a 6.5 MHz crystal (can't remember the exact frequency). And there were a few people with perfect pitch who in fact could blow a perfect 2600 Hz, but they were rare. I could not, not to mention which I was mainly being facetious. Besides, the people who had fun with phones just to get free calls were the jackasses in the first place.
So what's typical again? ;)
Whistling into pay phones for free calls was legal...
Could you do a good 2600 Hz?
For what it's worth, it was never legal, as nebulous "theft of service" or "misuse of network" laws would have gotten you. But you wouldn't have gotten caught, which is close enough.
Really, use of any work that is licensed to one party to another is subject to copyright law as well as any contract that exists between the two parties. Copyright covers default rights and restrictions; others may be placed into effect by the parties to a contract.