Hello! These are MEDICAL students! An EXTREMELY important part of their field is the ability to arrive at diagnoses when presented with a set of symptoms. (It's so important that Discover magazine devotes one of its montly columns to the narration of a tricky medical diagnosis: it's called "Vital Signs.")
And who says that those symptoms HAVE to come from firsthand observation? If they did, no doctor could ever phone up a colleague for a consultation, or derive any worthwhile conclusions from reading a patient's chart.
In fact, I once read a rather interresting passage in a novel about a retired physician who intended to spend his declining years diagnosing the maladys of the characters from great works of literature. The example given is from Hamlet. In Act III, Scene IV, Hamlet kills Polonius, and proceeds to hide the body. According to what I read, it could be derived from Hamlet's responses in Act IV, Scene I to queries as to the body's location (e.g. "if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.") and others that Hamlet had hid the body in with the King's chamber-pot (to mask the smell of rot), and it was unlikely to be found accidentally, as the King suffered from constipation.
Unfortunately, I believe that the novel was borrowed, as I can't find it on my shelves.
Hmmm. Could the ring have been made of a gold/mercury amalgamation? That WOULD explain it's being maleable enough to fit fingers of different sizes.
Now, to figure out just what alloy that it was that the embedded scrollwork was made from which would glow red at a temperature below the melting point of the amalgam (something with phosphorous in it, perhaps?)....
Not all traces are buses. Buses are long circuits that carry signals (or power, of you want to get technical) to or between multiple (at least 3) devices. A connection which can only allow communication bewteen two devices is NOT a bus. (The Pentium4 and the original Athlon both reside on a point-to-point connection, not a bus, as the CPU is only able to communicate with one thing along that connection: the motherboard northbridge.)
Also, buses are not confined to printed-circuit-boards. Parallel IDE cables are a bus (with only three nodes: master, slave, and controller), the floppy-drive cable is a bus (with up to five nodes, when properly implemented), SCSI cables are a bus, Firewire (AKA IEEE1392) is a bus, original (coaxial) ethernet is a bus, and, of course, USB (universal serial bus) is a bus.
It's not just the PSOne, though: he also has handcrafted hand-held NES, SNES, a brand new PS2, and (the source of the URL and the beginning of all of this madness) a plethora of hand-held VCS units (AKA the Atari 2600.)
This man is amazing! And if I had a few extra hundred dollars just lying around, I'd probably try and buy one of them from him.
That's a nice set of specs for the PSP; very informative.
However, it doesn't really do anything for your arguement that the PSP is NOT a handheld PSOne without one crucial element: a set of PSOne specs for comparison.
While it's easy to see that the PSP has more features than the PSOne (802.11, memorystick, etc), it is NOT so easy to see that these aren't just architectural improvements (add-ons) to the old PSOne.
Without that PSOne spec, you've given us no reason to believe that Sony can't just drop their enormous library of old PSOne titles to the new PSP disc (shovelware) and sell them to us again.
We here in Minnesota (the home of Hormel, and thus, of Spam) as rather well known for our ability to make fun of ourselves; just look at Garrison Kellior and "A Prarie Home Companion" (a radio program broadcast by mostly public stations on Saturday evenings and Sunday at midday.) One of the most popular recurring characters is "Guy Noir, private-eye", who suffers through horrible embarassments in the course of his (not very successful) practice, and somehow always muddles through without taking it out on anyone else.
Like that, the people at Hormel understand that all of the Spam humor isn't REALLY directed at them, so why not have a little fun with it, doncha' know?
I, too, eagerly anticipate the release of a Powerbook with an IBM PPC 970.
But if the only built-in pointing device is a trackpoint, there's no way that I will buy one.
I've never been able to make any kind of a curved path with a trackpoint: I either get a straight line, or some nasty zig-zag. And do you know why? Because there's no feedback. It's the same reason that the flat membrane keyboards on the Atari 400 and the Timex Sinclair sucked: there was no direct feedback to your fingers as to whether or not the keypress had been accomplished. The Air Force originally deployed the F-16 jet fighter with a control-stick that operated much like a touchpoint: the stick itself didn't move, but produced control-output proportional to pressure applied to the stick by the pilot; they had to be removed and replaced with a conventional joystick type controllers where the control-output is proportional to the actual POSITION of the stick in order for the pilots to actually be able to perform manuvers with the kind of precision that the airframe is capable of.
It boggles the mind that the same company that sold so many of those noisy-as-hell tactile-feedback clicky keyboards would also insist on such a non-responsive device as the trackpoint.
Says you.
Think about it this way: "TIME" (as in vibrations of an electron in the outer shell of a cesium atom) may be real, but "THE time" (as in "lunch time" "departure time", and "quitting time") is a polite fiction that we observe collectively in order to make synchronizing our activities easier. That's one reason why we have time-zones in the first place: so that a train trip that takes an hour doesn't land you at a destination where the clocks say that the trip took only 57 minutes (or an hour AND three minutes, depending on which way that you traveled.) After all, the "real" time is determined by when exactly the sun is at the apex of its arc in the sky, which we call "high noon." (I'd say "when the sun is directly overhead", except that that isn't true for more than twice a year for any place on earth, and it isn't true at ALL for any place on earth north of the tropic of Cancer or south of the tropic of Capricorn.)
By the same token, daylight-savings-time is OBVIOUSLY wrong, as "high noon" doesn't occur until 13:00 if you are observing it. So, in that light (ha ha), the sundial is right: it's the people that are observing daylight "savings" who are wrong.
Of course, you COULD go to the other extreme and move to an "Amish Paradise", though I'd think that most Google employees would identify more with the sentiment that "It's All About the Pentiums" and instead go off on their own and try to found the next "Ebay" or something.
Not that you have to be in the heart of the valley to start something big. After all, Bill Gate$ started out in "Albuquerque" (in order to be close to MITS calculator, makers of the Altair 8800.)
Unless "Everything You Know Is Wrong" about Google as an employer, however, I'd have trouble believeing that any of their employees couldn't stand to spend "One More Minute" there.
"When I Was Your Age", people didn't expect to receive enough money from their company's IPO to retire, be a "Couch Potato" and sit around getting "Fat" for the rest of their lives. I guess that it beats being stuck in a "Traffic Jam" every day trying to get to work.
All right, I guess that that's enough: "I Was Only Kidding": I knew that you meant the song "This Is the Life."
Speaking of "Weird Al" Yankovic, I just picked up his "Ultimate Video Collection" on DVD for $16.99 retail. I highly recommend it! 24 tracks, plus extras. (Especially "Bob." It's a Bob Dylan parody done completely in palindrome. I love it!)
You seem to be ignoring the fact that one of the secondary roles in Sky Captain.. was played by Sir Lawrence Olivier, a very recognisable and much beloved august figure of stage and screen. A person for whom many hold a great deal of attachment and "loyalty" to.
And not a bad performance for a man who's been dead since 1989.
Without the CGI that you seem to hold in such distain, it would not have been possible to cast Olivier in that role at all. Which could be considered a loss: he fits the character so well.
It doesn't matter that it's not REALLY Sir Lawrence Olivier on the screen: of course it's not: it's a MOVING PICTURE, not a live stage performance! It's the illusion of 25 frames of film per second being projected onto a reflective screen to produce the perception of motion! It's not REAL at all.
The point of a movie isn't to FORCE you to believe what's on the screen (how can you: you paid money to see what you know is a fake): the point is to produce an environment that ALLOWS you to SUSPEND your own DISBELIEF long enough to enjoy the movie.
In the words of Sir Lawrence Oliver himself:
"Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is, and not so much a matter of being real." -- Sir Laurence Olivier
Trust me when I say that most of the ocean floor is deep enough that once you get beyond the continental shelf, it would take a major government to retrieve anything from the ocean floor. Mainly cause that is over a mile down.
You've never read Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder, have you?
I only mention it because it is the story of the location (they didn't know where it was) and the salvage of the 1857 wreck of the side-wheel steam ship the SS Central America in the 1980's by a privately funded group headed up by Tommy Thomson... in 8000 feet of water.
The last time that I checked, that was over a mile.
And they only did it for the 21 tons of gold that went down with the ship! Weapons-grade fissionables are worth far more than gold to the right customer.
Do you still think that we should just depend upon the site's inaccessability to protect it?
$7 a pop. that is the new standard. who's with me???!!!
Sure, it SOUNDS like a great idea: after all, if you price it low enough, you can make it up on volume, right?
The trouble with that idea is that it assumes the only limiting factor on the acceptance of a piece of software is its price. I'll neglect all of the other obvious ones (usability, applicability, compatibility, etc.) and instead I'll address the one truely hard limit on software sales: time.
We're all human, and we're all limited to the 24-hour day. There comes a point where you simply CAN'T spend any more time on the computer. Many people are already at the point where they WON'T spend any more time on the computer than they already do, so in order for an app. to achieve acceptance, it would have to supplant an app. which is already in use, which automatically doubles the price of the app., as the user has paid for two apps., but is only using one (and that assumes that the first app. only cost the $7 that you are advocating! It could have been much more!)
What's more, if the new app. isn't a direct one-for-one replacement for the old app. (in which case, why adopt it?), then the user has to give up any missing functionality from the old app., as well as spend the necessary time to learn the usage of the new app.
In short, in a relatively saturated market (such as the current one),in order to insure adoptance, you've got to somehow write software which allows the user to spend LESS time using the computer (thus giving them more TIME: the most valuable comodity of all.)
And, well, lets just say that that is a concept that is pretty foreign to the average software developer, shall we?
Either that, or you've got to have some kind of external influence (such as operating system upgrade incompatibilities) that force obsolescence of existing apps. periodically. Sounds rather like the MicroSoft business-model, now doesn't it?...
Those don't sound like hard qualifications to meet.
I know of a place local to me where the company offers 50% 401k matching (up to 3% company contribution), there is a pension-plan that is contributed to at about that same rate, (contingent on the company making a profit, and it hasn't failed to make a profit for over 20 years), there is a monthly bonus consisting of 5% of the company's after-payroll revenues distributed among the employees, and at the end of the first year, you'll have acrued 2 weeks of vacation time, usable in hourly increments, with the amount of vacation that you acrue going up each year. Also, there is a flex-time program that allow employees to take time off on one day and make it up on other days.The company health and dental plans are, I believe, ~50% funded.
Sound good?
Well, it's a maufacturing job, and I'm pretty sure that they are only hiring for production positions. Starting wage is $7/hr.
How can there be a mention of Bio-Diesel on/. and not have anyone mention Thermal conversion?
This is the process that Discover magazine published two articles about (one intoduction in May of 2003, and a one-page update in July of 2004) Anything Into Oil. Anything Into Oil (update.)
The first application that this process is being put to is the disposal of slaughterhouse waste (blood, guts, and bones) by turning them into fertilizer and fuel oil (at 85% energy efficiency!) I find this highly exciting, as it promises a future where an individual human's bio-load on the planet may be reduced by the reprocessing of the waste that he produces into resources that then don't need to be drawn from non-renewable sources.
I anxiously await reports of sucessful full-time operation of their 200-ton-a-day plant in Carthage, Missouri this Fall.
What this economic analysis leaves out is the large quantities of corn, soybeans, and other oil-rich vegetables which are left in fields to rot because the government wishes to help the poor farmers by artificially inflating the price of those goods
This is incorrect. Having grown up on a farm, and currently living in a farming community (I could hit a field of soybeans from my front door with a frisbee), I can unequivically say that no corn or soybeans are left in the fields to rot due to government price-controls. (a few small patches of corn are raised as forage for game in wildlife reserves, but that quantity is insignificant.)
What the government DOES is pay the farmer to NOT PLANT the cash crops AT ALL, thereby saving large amounts of cash on the costs of the chemicals and fuels necessary to cultivate those crops, and instead to plant a simple "cover" crop which, by it's existance, helps to choke out the inevitible population of weeds that would arise in an open, fallow field, and discourages erosion by covering the bare soil. This cover crop (usually a simple grass, like oats, which can be planted quickly and without complex equipment) is then, yes tilled into the soil to rot, thus discourageing erosion over the winter and enriching the soil for the next year, when a cash crop WILL be grown there.
Should the demand for crop oils rise significantly (as expressed in the price paid for them on the open market) then the farmers will respond by raising oil crops and high-oil varieties of crops in larger quantities to meet that demand. As usual, sucessful farmers react to market pressures (whether natural or artificial (government induced)) in order to maximize their ROI (sometimes that means selling the land to a developer of subdivisions, but I digress.) Unsucessful farmers tend to be those who fail to react to market pressures, and soon cease to be farmers.
I positively HATE the statement "Don't throw your vote away!"
Why? Because it is simply impossible for someone who is actually voting to throw their vote away: voting for a losing candidate does NOT make the voter a loser! The ONLY way for a voter to express their will in the leadership of the government is to vote for the candidate that supports similar ideals. How can actually doing that be called "throwing your vote away?"
The problem lies in having a voting system that is so obviously biased toward only having two candidates. How so? Because, under the current "single vote to a single candidate" system, it is largely impossible to vote AGAINST both of the two "leaders" in the race: in order to vote anti-Republican, one MUST vote Democratic (and visa versa.) This does two things: it creates an "Us vs. Them" mentality that divides the electorate, thus giving non-voting individuals (corporations) an advantage in influencing public policy, and it steals support from new parties by forcing voters to support one of the two major parties in order to oppose the other.
To those who say "But any system more complicated than the current one is unworkable for the general public!" I say: think of a group that holds the outcome of contests of little to no consequence in high regard and, in fact, regularily pays money in order to attend said contests. Think of sports-fans. Think of the crowd of screaming fans at the baseball game, with their foam "#1" fingers and their "official merchanise" apparel, doing the wave.
Now think of how that group chooses the players for the All-Star game. That's right: they choose multiple candidates in order of preference.
Baseball is trivial. Democracy is vital. If MLB can get voting "right", then why can't we?
Support a voting system that allows the voter to vote against BOTH of the major parties and FOR the candiate that they actually WANT in office!
I'm sick and tired of having to upgrade something on my computer. I love consoles. I can get any new games that come out
Try telling that to the people why want to play Final Fantasy XI on their PlayStation2, but who don't have the network interface. Even if you WANTED to play it in a single-player mode (is there one?), you CAN'T without the network interface, because that's how the hard-drive that is required for (and included with) FFXI interfaces with the PS2!
My mom would not know what a man page is. Nobody likes to do real work: Most projects are organized by...
my last point... Most people like to do real work: We don't sit at the keyboard, glowing...
When attempting to prove something, it is vitally important that your arguments not contradict each other. To do so completely invalidates your proof, regardless of the truth of your conclusion.
I didn't say that I disagreed with you: but your "proof" of your conclusions is worthless, due to its being internally inconsistent.
But, I thought that we were looking for info on "emerge?"
"Portage" is what I do with a canoe in order to get around a set of rapids without having to run them.
Face facts: the general public doesn't want to learn anything about computers: they just want to USE them. And it's hard to fault them for that, really.
Have you ever heard the concept of "brainspace?" The idea is that our metal resources are finite, and in order to learn (devote more resources to) a subject, we must begin to forget (devote fewer resources to) other subjects in our minds.
The easiest example that comes to mind came from an article in Smithsonian, if I recall correctly, about tournament Scrabble players. The key skill in trournament Scrabble play is to have the largest possible collection of valid word spellings to draw on in your mind, in order to not only form your own words, but to challenge the word-spellings of your opponent if they are invalid. Do you know how they do this?
They don't memorize the definitions.
For the vast majority of people who COULD make use of a computer, a custom Knopix CD could serve their needs completely, because they don't need anything more than a black-box to perform their work.
It's only for the IT professional/hobbyist for whom the computer IS the job does any kind of low-level knowledge of how installations, maintainance, or processing take place make efficient use of brainspace. For everyone else, it is simply a waste.
It's these requirements to learn how things work on Linux before being able to USE them that are the primary barrier to entry for may people. To be brutally honest, I've taken classes in multiple computer languages (and gotten good grades), including COBOL, VisualBasic, VAX Assembly, and C in the Unix environment, and I STILL don't know how to read a MAN page. Really! The layout of a Man page follows no organizational structure that I can recognise the meaning of.
Someday I may make a meaningful usage of a unix distribution. But for now, I've got a Macintosh on my desk. (running MacOS 9 for now)
That's right! The government! (in the form of law-enforcement personell, mostly.)
The problem is, although it is relatively easy to get a concensus when dealing with an issue in the abstract (personX, conditionY, amountZ, etc.), the vast majority of people have very little trouble justifying to themselves making an exception for themselves.
So, you have to implement personal costs to counter the personal rewards that ignoring the community's best interests (or, at least, communal decisions) can bring.
So, for those who contemplate vandalism, public endangerment, and theft; we have public-service, fines, and incarceration.
Remember to keep the implementation of an idea seperate from the idea itself: just because government as we practice it today is wasteful and stifling doesn't mean that it HAS to be.
Get involved and FIX IT!
Aside: I was always intrigued by the Soviet Russian system of two legislative bodies: one only passed legislation, and one only repealed it. The idea of a whole house of representatives elected expressly for the purpose of culling bad legislation from the code of law seemed to have promise.
Slashdot Mirror
And who says that those symptoms HAVE to come from firsthand observation? If they did, no doctor could ever phone up a colleague for a consultation, or derive any worthwhile conclusions from reading a patient's chart.
In fact, I once read a rather interresting passage in a novel about a retired physician who intended to spend his declining years diagnosing the maladys of the characters from great works of literature. The example given is from Hamlet. In Act III, Scene IV, Hamlet kills Polonius, and proceeds to hide the body. According to what I read, it could be derived from Hamlet's responses in Act IV, Scene I to queries as to the body's location (e.g. "if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.") and others that Hamlet had hid the body in with the King's chamber-pot (to mask the smell of rot), and it was unlikely to be found accidentally, as the King suffered from constipation.
Unfortunately, I believe that the novel was borrowed, as I can't find it on my shelves.
Now, to figure out just what alloy that it was that the embedded scrollwork was made from which would glow red at a temperature below the melting point of the amalgam (something with phosphorous in it, perhaps?)....
Also, buses are not confined to printed-circuit-boards. Parallel IDE cables are a bus (with only three nodes: master, slave, and controller), the floppy-drive cable is a bus (with up to five nodes, when properly implemented), SCSI cables are a bus, Firewire (AKA IEEE1392) is a bus, original (coaxial) ethernet is a bus, and, of course, USB (universal serial bus) is a bus.
http://www.benheck.com/
-or-
http://www.classicgaming.com/vcsp/
It's not just the PSOne, though: he also has handcrafted hand-held NES, SNES, a brand new PS2, and (the source of the URL and the beginning of all of this madness) a plethora of hand-held VCS units (AKA the Atari 2600.)
This man is amazing! And if I had a few extra hundred dollars just lying around, I'd probably try and buy one of them from him.
However, it doesn't really do anything for your arguement that the PSP is NOT a handheld PSOne without one crucial element: a set of PSOne specs for comparison.
While it's easy to see that the PSP has more features than the PSOne (802.11, memorystick, etc), it is NOT so easy to see that these aren't just architectural improvements (add-ons) to the old PSOne.
Without that PSOne spec, you've given us no reason to believe that Sony can't just drop their enormous library of old PSOne titles to the new PSP disc (shovelware) and sell them to us again.
Like that, the people at Hormel understand that all of the Spam humor isn't REALLY directed at them, so why not have a little fun with it, doncha' know?
But if the only built-in pointing device is a trackpoint, there's no way that I will buy one.
I've never been able to make any kind of a curved path with a trackpoint: I either get a straight line, or some nasty zig-zag. And do you know why? Because there's no feedback. It's the same reason that the flat membrane keyboards on the Atari 400 and the Timex Sinclair sucked: there was no direct feedback to your fingers as to whether or not the keypress had been accomplished. The Air Force originally deployed the F-16 jet fighter with a control-stick that operated much like a touchpoint: the stick itself didn't move, but produced control-output proportional to pressure applied to the stick by the pilot; they had to be removed and replaced with a conventional joystick type controllers where the control-output is proportional to the actual POSITION of the stick in order for the pilots to actually be able to perform manuvers with the kind of precision that the airframe is capable of.
It boggles the mind that the same company that sold so many of those noisy-as-hell tactile-feedback clicky keyboards would also insist on such a non-responsive device as the trackpoint.
Says you. Think about it this way: "TIME" (as in vibrations of an electron in the outer shell of a cesium atom) may be real, but "THE time" (as in "lunch time" "departure time", and "quitting time") is a polite fiction that we observe collectively in order to make synchronizing our activities easier. That's one reason why we have time-zones in the first place: so that a train trip that takes an hour doesn't land you at a destination where the clocks say that the trip took only 57 minutes (or an hour AND three minutes, depending on which way that you traveled.) After all, the "real" time is determined by when exactly the sun is at the apex of its arc in the sky, which we call "high noon." (I'd say "when the sun is directly overhead", except that that isn't true for more than twice a year for any place on earth, and it isn't true at ALL for any place on earth north of the tropic of Cancer or south of the tropic of Capricorn.)
By the same token, daylight-savings-time is OBVIOUSLY wrong, as "high noon" doesn't occur until 13:00 if you are observing it. So, in that light (ha ha), the sundial is right: it's the people that are observing daylight "savings" who are wrong.
When viewed objectivly, that is.
And it's not just cheesy 80's movies... It's cheesy 80's movies with computer-animation!
Of course, you COULD go to the other extreme and move to an "Amish Paradise", though I'd think that most Google employees would identify more with the sentiment that "It's All About the Pentiums" and instead go off on their own and try to found the next "Ebay" or something.
Not that you have to be in the heart of the valley to start something big. After all, Bill Gate$ started out in "Albuquerque" (in order to be close to MITS calculator, makers of the Altair 8800.)
Unless "Everything You Know Is Wrong" about Google as an employer, however, I'd have trouble believeing that any of their employees couldn't stand to spend "One More Minute" there.
"When I Was Your Age", people didn't expect to receive enough money from their company's IPO to retire, be a "Couch Potato" and sit around getting "Fat" for the rest of their lives. I guess that it beats being stuck in a "Traffic Jam" every day trying to get to work.
All right, I guess that that's enough: "I Was Only Kidding": I knew that you meant the song "This Is the Life."
Speaking of "Weird Al" Yankovic, I just picked up his "Ultimate Video Collection" on DVD for $16.99 retail. I highly recommend it! 24 tracks, plus extras. (Especially "Bob." It's a Bob Dylan parody done completely in palindrome. I love it!)
And not a bad performance for a man who's been dead since 1989.
Without the CGI that you seem to hold in such distain, it would not have been possible to cast Olivier in that role at all. Which could be considered a loss: he fits the character so well.
It doesn't matter that it's not REALLY Sir Lawrence Olivier on the screen: of course it's not: it's a MOVING PICTURE, not a live stage performance! It's the illusion of 25 frames of film per second being projected onto a reflective screen to produce the perception of motion! It's not REAL at all.
The point of a movie isn't to FORCE you to believe what's on the screen (how can you: you paid money to see what you know is a fake): the point is to produce an environment that ALLOWS you to SUSPEND your own DISBELIEF long enough to enjoy the movie.
In the words of Sir Lawrence Oliver himself:
"Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is, and not so much a matter of being real." -- Sir Laurence Olivier
You've never read Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder, have you?
I only mention it because it is the story of the location (they didn't know where it was) and the salvage of the 1857 wreck of the side-wheel steam ship the SS Central America in the 1980's by a privately funded group headed up by Tommy Thomson... in 8000 feet of water.
The last time that I checked, that was over a mile.
And they only did it for the 21 tons of gold that went down with the ship! Weapons-grade fissionables are worth far more than gold to the right customer.
Do you still think that we should just depend upon the site's inaccessability to protect it?
Sure, it SOUNDS like a great idea: after all, if you price it low enough, you can make it up on volume, right?
The trouble with that idea is that it assumes the only limiting factor on the acceptance of a piece of software is its price. I'll neglect all of the other obvious ones (usability, applicability, compatibility, etc.) and instead I'll address the one truely hard limit on software sales: time.
We're all human, and we're all limited to the 24-hour day. There comes a point where you simply CAN'T spend any more time on the computer. Many people are already at the point where they WON'T spend any more time on the computer than they already do, so in order for an app. to achieve acceptance, it would have to supplant an app. which is already in use, which automatically doubles the price of the app., as the user has paid for two apps., but is only using one (and that assumes that the first app. only cost the $7 that you are advocating! It could have been much more!)
What's more, if the new app. isn't a direct one-for-one replacement for the old app. (in which case, why adopt it?), then the user has to give up any missing functionality from the old app., as well as spend the necessary time to learn the usage of the new app.
In short, in a relatively saturated market (such as the current one),in order to insure adoptance, you've got to somehow write software which allows the user to spend LESS time using the computer (thus giving them more TIME: the most valuable comodity of all.)
And, well, lets just say that that is a concept that is pretty foreign to the average software developer, shall we?
Either that, or you've got to have some kind of external influence (such as operating system upgrade incompatibilities) that force obsolescence of existing apps. periodically. Sounds rather like the MicroSoft business-model, now doesn't it?...
I know of a place local to me where the company offers 50% 401k matching (up to 3% company contribution), there is a pension-plan that is contributed to at about that same rate, (contingent on the company making a profit, and it hasn't failed to make a profit for over 20 years), there is a monthly bonus consisting of 5% of the company's after-payroll revenues distributed among the employees, and at the end of the first year, you'll have acrued 2 weeks of vacation time, usable in hourly increments, with the amount of vacation that you acrue going up each year. Also, there is a flex-time program that allow employees to take time off on one day and make it up on other days.The company health and dental plans are, I believe, ~50% funded.
Sound good?
Well, it's a maufacturing job, and I'm pretty sure that they are only hiring for production positions. Starting wage is $7/hr.
Still sound good? Didn't think so.
Benefits aren't everything.
Incorrect: the eMac comes with a 17" CRT.
Aside from that, I'd say that your analysis is spot-on.
A cheap AMD cpu isn't so cheap once you add in the cost of a more costly motherboard and a seperate video card.
(I know, that's not really a problem now, but it wasn't always.)
This is the process that Discover magazine published two articles about (one intoduction in May of 2003, and a one-page update in July of 2004)
Anything Into Oil.
Anything Into Oil (update.)
The first application that this process is being put to is the disposal of slaughterhouse waste (blood, guts, and bones) by turning them into fertilizer and fuel oil (at 85% energy efficiency!) I find this highly exciting, as it promises a future where an individual human's bio-load on the planet may be reduced by the reprocessing of the waste that he produces into resources that then don't need to be drawn from non-renewable sources.
I anxiously await reports of sucessful full-time operation of their 200-ton-a-day plant in Carthage, Missouri this Fall.
This is incorrect. Having grown up on a farm, and currently living in a farming community (I could hit a field of soybeans from my front door with a frisbee), I can unequivically say that no corn or soybeans are left in the fields to rot due to government price-controls. (a few small patches of corn are raised as forage for game in wildlife reserves, but that quantity is insignificant.)
What the government DOES is pay the farmer to NOT PLANT the cash crops AT ALL, thereby saving large amounts of cash on the costs of the chemicals and fuels necessary to cultivate those crops, and instead to plant a simple "cover" crop which, by it's existance, helps to choke out the inevitible population of weeds that would arise in an open, fallow field, and discourages erosion by covering the bare soil. This cover crop (usually a simple grass, like oats, which can be planted quickly and without complex equipment) is then, yes tilled into the soil to rot, thus discourageing erosion over the winter and enriching the soil for the next year, when a cash crop WILL be grown there.
Should the demand for crop oils rise significantly (as expressed in the price paid for them on the open market) then the farmers will respond by raising oil crops and high-oil varieties of crops in larger quantities to meet that demand. As usual, sucessful farmers react to market pressures (whether natural or artificial (government induced)) in order to maximize their ROI (sometimes that means selling the land to a developer of subdivisions, but I digress.) Unsucessful farmers tend to be those who fail to react to market pressures, and soon cease to be farmers.
Why? Because it is simply impossible for someone who is actually voting to throw their vote away: voting for a losing candidate does NOT make the voter a loser! The ONLY way for a voter to express their will in the leadership of the government is to vote for the candidate that supports similar ideals. How can actually doing that be called "throwing your vote away?"
The problem lies in having a voting system that is so obviously biased toward only having two candidates. How so? Because, under the current "single vote to a single candidate" system, it is largely impossible to vote AGAINST both of the two "leaders" in the race: in order to vote anti-Republican, one MUST vote Democratic (and visa versa.) This does two things: it creates an "Us vs. Them" mentality that divides the electorate, thus giving non-voting individuals (corporations) an advantage in influencing public policy, and it steals support from new parties by forcing voters to support one of the two major parties in order to oppose the other.
To those who say "But any system more complicated than the current one is unworkable for the general public!" I say: think of a group that holds the outcome of contests of little to no consequence in high regard and, in fact, regularily pays money in order to attend said contests. Think of sports-fans. Think of the crowd of screaming fans at the baseball game, with their foam "#1" fingers and their "official merchanise" apparel, doing the wave.
Now think of how that group chooses the players for the All-Star game. That's right: they choose multiple candidates in order of preference.
Baseball is trivial. Democracy is vital. If MLB can get voting "right", then why can't we?
Support a voting system that allows the voter to vote against BOTH of the major parties and FOR the candiate that they actually WANT in office!
Try telling that to the people why want to play Final Fantasy XI on their PlayStation2, but who don't have the network interface. Even if you WANTED to play it in a single-player mode (is there one?), you CAN'T without the network interface, because that's how the hard-drive that is required for (and included with) FFXI interfaces with the PS2!
my last point... Most people like to do real work: We don't sit at the keyboard, glowing...
When attempting to prove something, it is vitally important that your arguments not contradict each other. To do so completely invalidates your proof, regardless of the truth of your conclusion.
I didn't say that I disagreed with you: but your "proof" of your conclusions is worthless, due to its being internally inconsistent.
robot throwing
Pay attention to the motion of the camera (and what the robot does just prior to the camera moving!)
But, I thought that we were looking for info on "emerge?"
"Portage" is what I do with a canoe in order to get around a set of rapids without having to run them.
Face facts: the general public doesn't want to learn anything about computers: they just want to USE them. And it's hard to fault them for that, really.
Have you ever heard the concept of "brainspace?" The idea is that our metal resources are finite, and in order to learn (devote more resources to) a subject, we must begin to forget (devote fewer resources to) other subjects in our minds.
The easiest example that comes to mind came from an article in Smithsonian, if I recall correctly, about tournament Scrabble players. The key skill in trournament Scrabble play is to have the largest possible collection of valid word spellings to draw on in your mind, in order to not only form your own words, but to challenge the word-spellings of your opponent if they are invalid. Do you know how they do this?
They don't memorize the definitions.
For the vast majority of people who COULD make use of a computer, a custom Knopix CD could serve their needs completely, because they don't need anything more than a black-box to perform their work.
It's only for the IT professional/hobbyist for whom the computer IS the job does any kind of low-level knowledge of how installations, maintainance, or processing take place make efficient use of brainspace. For everyone else, it is simply a waste.
It's these requirements to learn how things work on Linux before being able to USE them that are the primary barrier to entry for may people. To be brutally honest, I've taken classes in multiple computer languages (and gotten good grades), including COBOL, VisualBasic, VAX Assembly, and C in the Unix environment, and I STILL don't know how to read a MAN page. Really! The layout of a Man page follows no organizational structure that I can recognise the meaning of.
Someday I may make a meaningful usage of a unix distribution. But for now, I've got a Macintosh on my desk. (running MacOS 9 for now)
That's right! The government! (in the form of law-enforcement personell, mostly.)
The problem is, although it is relatively easy to get a concensus when dealing with an issue in the abstract (personX, conditionY, amountZ, etc.), the vast majority of people have very little trouble justifying to themselves making an exception for themselves.
So, you have to implement personal costs to counter the personal rewards that ignoring the community's best interests (or, at least, communal decisions) can bring.
So, for those who contemplate vandalism, public endangerment, and theft; we have public-service, fines, and incarceration.
Remember to keep the implementation of an idea seperate from the idea itself: just because government as we practice it today is wasteful and stifling doesn't mean that it HAS to be.
Get involved and FIX IT!
Aside: I was always intrigued by the Soviet Russian system of two legislative bodies: one only passed legislation, and one only repealed it. The idea of a whole house of representatives elected expressly for the purpose of culling bad legislation from the code of law seemed to have promise.
C:\ongratns.W95
(or something like that)