What about the factoid that you hear now and then about how the Caspian sea region has more oil than the Middle East?
It's not a fact or a factoid - it's wrong. The Caspian Sea has a pile of oil, but it is being extracted at a ferocious rate. Technically Russia peaked recently, but it on a very bumpy plateau and from what I've read (mostly from IEA et al) they won't really be in true decline for another few years.
Once the war in Afghanistan is "won" there are going to be some nifty pipelines running through there, aren't there?
You can build pipelines all over the place. It doesn't affect flow rates.
Rather than betting on a resource shortage, might it not be a better idea to push some of the many other reasons to get away from burning fossil [1] fuels?
I completely agree. However, you don't have to "bet" on the near term decline of oil resource. It's a reality. Happening now. It's happening Right Now. you're experiencing the first throes of the end of the fossil fuel era. Unfortunately, the USA decided to go to the Casino a few years before it all hit the fan, and pissed all of their money away on bullshit. So, now they're fucked, and they don't have the resources (financial or otherwise) to deal with the level of investment required to pull them out of the energy death spiral they're in.
Germany, Denmark, and a handful of others are on track to transition to the next phase of industrialism, but if Large Players don't get on board ASAP, they will be dragged under with the rest.
The decisions made by everyone alive RIGHT NOW will determine the viability of the human race. It's an enormous responsibility, and one most people living today are ill-equipped to deal with.
..and you say you were running into Rar files when downloading multimedia? Mp3's and stuff? My GOD thats just stupid. Rar will compress an Mp3/Aac/whatever by just about 0%.. and is even likely to INCREASE the filesize (just like Zip will.)
Agreed. The ONLY reason I can think of them using.rar files on mp3s is that their.rar maker puts it together as a directory for them, and they are too lazy or stupid to figure to do that on their own.
Informed opinions vary, but not by much. The general consensus is that we are on a short-lived plateau of production. It might go up a bit, it might go down a bit, but it will be essentially flat for a few more years, and then begin an irreversible and terminal decline.
Economic work has no direct relationship with energy consumed.
This isn't the best retort, but it points at the truth of the matter: "Then why didn't the Romans go to the moon?" Obviously, they didn't have the metalurgical understandings or the knowledge of gravitational physics or scientific understanding to pull it off, but before ANY of that can be done, you have to have an energy infrastructure of a quality and sophistication that allows a moonshot, and THAT is something they did not and could not have. And that was probably a good thing, because if the Romans had discovered oil and coal, we could have gone extinct with a dead planet by the year 1000...
Lump of labour has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I'm using "work" in a more distilled sense, related to physics. You can twist things about socially and economically, but you can't live outside the laws of physics, esp. thermodynamics and gravity, nor can you have an "economy" outside of these rules as well.
1. All work requires energy. Energy is the capacity for doing work.
2. Oil and gas production is at or near peak, and we get 85% of our energy from it, and Coal is not a "good idea".
3. Therefore: our capacity to do work will decline if efficiency doesn't meet decline rates, and work can't grow if the efficiencies don't exceed decline rates.
4. decline rates in major oil fields are extreme - The North Sea, Mexico's Cantarell, are both in double digit decline rates. The USA has been declining since 1970. The only places left are mostly i nthe middle east, and some of them are at or near peak, and their production cannot be increased to match the declines elsewhere.
Therefore, a loan, which is a claim on future labour, is not a "great idea" when we know that the sum total of work can only decline from present levels, if efficiencies are not implemented immediately, and decisively.
From this, and the excesses of the system at the peak of energy development, the logical direction of survival would be for the USA to:
1. Nationalise the banks, immediately.
2. By nationalising the banks the USgov repudiates the bank debt.
3. Disband the Federal Reserve. The USgov will be responsible for its money supply.
4. Nationalise USA Health Care. Face facts: This whole nonsense about âoeyour health care decisions should be between you and your doctorâ is BS. You know who makes your health care decisions? The insurance company. The USgov should eat the health care industry directly (on the one end) and get really pretty damn stiff with fat ass Americans on the other end.
5. Gas should be USD$5 gallon. Minimum. If gas is cheaper than that due to over production or demand destruction, then the remainder goes directly into alternative energy systems.
6. Car makers should go chap 11, and restructure under strict supervision. There should a be a refocusing of vehicles away from the armoured chariat and more towards the beefed up bicycle/tricycle.
7. The USA must abandon its Empire. The Pentagon must cut its budget by 50% a year until it is the size of the Chinese rate, or less, of spending. American Troops must be brought home, decomissioned, and retrained for the powerdown.
8. Crash Infrastructure improvements geared around livable homes and communities worth caring about. LOTS of insulation. Lots of geothermal, etc..
Now if you see an opening for financial mathematics in that, you're better than I am.
I don't think "financial mathematics" has much of a future. Any more than public relations or drama therapy.
I said "probably". There is, of course, chances of contamination from previous stars. IIRC, the universe originally consisted of a massive soup of energy and matter. Hydrogen is the simplest element: 1 proton, 1 electron. In highly energised situations, you can strip the electron off, and instead of hydrogen,you just have a proton feeling lonely (Ha). So, the first element would logically be Hydrogen.
It takes time (millions of years) for stars to form, and given the energetic state of the early universe, star formation would have been difficult. Eventually, stars would form, and they would be pure hydrogen. Some would last a really long time (some might still exist today!) and some would be gigantic hyperstars that would blow apart within a several million years, leaving behind blackholes and some heavier elements. But the universe would still be even more overwhelmingly composed of hydrogen than now.
So I think it would be reasonable to conjecture that early stars would have more hydrogen, and the earliest stars would be even purer.
Hence, my qualifier of "probably very weak in heavier elements", and thus my point that this is very interesting news. It will be fascinating to see what comes of the data.
On a more pedestrian note, please read more carefully.
Perhaps we can then figure out roughly the size of the star that blowed up, in that it can't have been a star that takes more or less than about 600 million years to do that.
Also, it probably was very weak in heavier elements, so it would have been a very pure collection of hydrogen. So, we're looking at a pretty "pure case" of massive star formation, fuel burning and some kind of hypernova.
As noed above: all you need is a family of 4 watching Hulu, and you'll blow through 44gigs in a week, easily.
This goes someplace, so bear with me.
For a few weeks I went on a DL kick where I decided to do all my vinyl into digital. I have 1104 vinyl LPs. About 1/3 I bought the CD for because I liked the convenience. I have bought hundreds of CDs as well - I now own about 1400 CDs.
I ripped all the CDs into a drive over the period of a few months, and the drive became part of a gigantic home jukebox of some 27,000 songs running off of iTunes on a MacBook.
So, that left me at around 840 records on vinyl. I could buy a USB turntable and spend hours digitising and labeling it, and I seriously considered that - there are some fairly decent digital turntables out there.
But then I thought: hold on... let's do the math. 840 records, each taking about 1.5 hours EACH to digitise, cut apart in Audacity, and then put the ID tags in as I export as MP3. So, now we're looking at around 1300 hours. So, if I do four records a week, that will take 6 hours a week and 4 years of my life...
Fuck. That. Shit.
So, I went link hunting and found some systems like chewbone.blogspot.com where I enter in the record I'm looking for and a series of links for DL come up. YAY!
So, each record at 192 is about 80 megs, or about 12 per gig with a result of about 70gigs of music. Over the period of a few weeks idling on vacation, I was able to do this.
And now, I'm done. So the ISP would have seen a massive splurge in activity. And I now have 32,183 songs on my drive, and a lot of it digitised version of vinyl that some kind soul had the patience to sample and upload to a file system.
I learned a lot about those file systems, too. I now officially hate rapidshare. They're good if ou pay them, but they suck monkey balls if you don't. Megaupload is often slower than rapidshare, but they don't insist on a 15 minute waiting period. The best is mediafire. Also, as a mac user using Stuffit Deluxe, all you people using.rar files can go fuck yourselves. Zip files work JUST FINE thank you, and they open easily in OSX. And to think zip files were "those funky windows things"...
So, anyway, had my ISP been itchy about bandwidth, I'd have been shut down for doing something that isn't (per my intent) "evil". I was just looking for digital copies of my incredible and incredibly obscure vinyl collection. And I was rather scrupulous about it, too. Example: DOME. They had 4 records, I only have the first one on vinyl. I only DL'd the first one. If I want the others, I can go find the vinyl or buy the CD.
NOw, I'm not making some case for flawless seamless integrity or consistency, but I am sugesting that in the greater scheme of things, ISP choking bandwidth will result in people abandoning ISPs....
I agree, but I would emphasise the Networking Thing, A LOT. Example: Get a degree in CS in say, 1982. So, you learned to be a wiz at COBOL, BASIC, PASCAL, and C. Great. Now, no one uses COBOL or PASCAL as much as they used to, but that's not the point - you upgrade your skills as you go.
However: you remember your buddy from English class. He got you in touch with some people at a party at his place. You end up marrying one of these people.
Years later, you run into the buddy from English, and he says "Cool - i remember that - that was an awesome party. Do you know someone who can manage a group?" And you volunteer yourself, and the next thing you know, you have a new job.
OR, you SUCK ASS at school, but your parents are rich and they send you to the best, and you join a frat and make lots of connections, and after all the booze you can drink, you sit your retarded self down and get elected president.
It's like that. I would submit that the CONNECTIONS you make in university are just as important as the skills you learn and the ideas you are exposed to.
So if you're opposed to the manner in which the research was done, you shouldn't be allowed to benefit from the resulting medical treatment? Interesting. Well, I hope that if you're ever rescued from some mountainside with severe frostbite and hypothermia, you won't mind being allowed to die.
Because an awful lot of our knowledge of how the human body responds to extreme cold originates from research done by the German military, the better to treat their casualties on the Eastern front. I'll give you one guess where they got their research subjects.
what you wrote is completely incoherent and bass ackwards presumptuous. I have no problem with where knowledge is produced. we learned a lot about knives from hacking each other up. doesn't mean I'm going to cut my veggies with a spoon...
So what the fuck is your point? Mine is simple: if you don't like how something is made, then don't use it.
People who decry stem cell research should not be permitted the benefits of the research. What I wrote was OBVIOUS blowback from the anti-stem cell position. That I've been rated flamebait goes to show the disposition of the mod, not my point.
And I think that anyone who is opposed to embryonic stem cell research should not be allowed to have this treatment, should they need it and testing proves it successful.
Most of the crap people buy they don't need anyway, and it's just a waste of energy and resources.
So, STOP IT. Just stop. Do something else.
Once you're used to it, you'll be at an advantage when civilisation plows into the wall of resource depletion and the rest of the suckers are wondering "wuh wuh wuh happened???"
Yes, exactly - we're seeing what happens when the ideology of ignorant "Business As Usual" fossil fuel guzzling nimrods meets the stark implacable reality of resource depletion.
Unloading truckloads of paper for Johns Manville in a factory so filled with asbestos, the air was blue. They declared bankruptcy rather than pay all the medical expenses for their dying employees.
The paper was dumped into a hopper that went up the side of a vat where it was boiled with chemicals and broken down into paper gunk and poo. The poo was excreted from a large pipe, where it was put in drums and "taken somewhere".
Another hideous job was scraping gum off the floor of a large department store. That REALLY sucked. The boss was a dick. My fellow employees were idiots, theives, or (like me at the time) ne'er do wells stoner punks.
So, coding in crappy conditions is bad enough. doing bullshit in crappy conditions is worse.
(note: ALL of my computers are Apple Computers - even the one running Linux)
It pains me that apple just let this market segment slide out of reach. They could have KICKED ASS.
Right now I am typing on my iBook G4. IT FUCKING WORKS. and it runs OS X, and all is well, except: it's a powerPC. So it's a legacy machine. Eventually developers will no longer support this machine. C'est la vie.
But: this is an awesome little box, and had Apple made a 12 inch or less MacBook running on a celeron or Atom, they'd be printing MONEY.
Why? Because Everyone Would Want One.
A colleague and recent convert at work said "My in-laws need a computer - this MacBook Pro rocks - it's easy. It's what they need..."
People Need Simple computers that Do Simple Things.
But Apple dropped the ball with their eyes on the high margin. Good move, ace. Now MS has moved in and with the exception of the eeePC, has totally and completely insanely dominated that entire market. Fuckwits.
I think it's really not too late. If Apple came up with a netbook in June, (kind of like a cheapy laptop version of the MacMini) and with a good adver campaign, they could easily blow Linux out of the water, and come to parity with MS.
Don't want "anonymous" posts? OK, fine, I'll just get an email address from one of a jillion places, like Microsoft or Yahoo or Google, and post using my "real name", CHEWTOY347RGB, because that is SO much more REAL than being an Anonymous Coward.
Actually, why bother? Seriously. My name REALLY IS Ralph Spoilsport. I live in Ukaipah on Rhode Island School of Design Terrace. Every morning I commute to work at Ralph Spoilsport Motors, over in West Gommorah.
And about this "Terrorism" meme floating since 9/11. What these people don't understand is violence. When it flows from the top of the social hierarchy down, it is invisible (like being forced to work to feed yourself) or rationalised (viz. warfare).
When violence flows UP the hierarchy from below, it is condemned (as terrorism, laziness, whatever) and persecuted (with invasions, arrests, assassinations, gitmo, etc.)
I don't see middle eastern terrorists flying planes into towers in Oslo, or the USA invading China to remove its brutal totalitarian government. Why? Because Norway hasn't been an invasive empire since the Vikings called it quits centuries ago, and China has the ability to readily defend itself, unlike Iraq in 2003, or (as it was perceived at the time) Viet Nam in 1964, or Poland in 1939.
If you want to stop terrorism, renounce your Empire and leave people the fuck alone. Eventually you won't be targeted for being a belligerent asshole, and you won't have to worry about scribblings by anonymous douchebags.
It's not a problem WITH civilisation, but more the problem OF civilisation and its inherent unsustainability. If you want a better explanation, read Endgame vol 2 by Derek Jensen.
Slashdot Mirror
cut me slack dude - I was dealing with a crowd of 6 year olds all day...
It's not a fact or a factoid - it's wrong. The Caspian Sea has a pile of oil, but it is being extracted at a ferocious rate. Technically Russia peaked recently, but it on a very bumpy plateau and from what I've read (mostly from IEA et al) they won't really be in true decline for another few years.
Once the war in Afghanistan is "won" there are going to be some nifty pipelines running through there, aren't there?
You can build pipelines all over the place. It doesn't affect flow rates.
Rather than betting on a resource shortage, might it not be a better idea to push some of the many other reasons to get away from burning fossil [1] fuels?
I completely agree. However, you don't have to "bet" on the near term decline of oil resource. It's a reality. Happening now. It's happening Right Now. you're experiencing the first throes of the end of the fossil fuel era. Unfortunately, the USA decided to go to the Casino a few years before it all hit the fan, and pissed all of their money away on bullshit. So, now they're fucked, and they don't have the resources (financial or otherwise) to deal with the level of investment required to pull them out of the energy death spiral they're in.
Germany, Denmark, and a handful of others are on track to transition to the next phase of industrialism, but if Large Players don't get on board ASAP, they will be dragged under with the rest.
The decisions made by everyone alive RIGHT NOW will determine the viability of the human race. It's an enormous responsibility, and one most people living today are ill-equipped to deal with.
So, choose wisely.
RS
Agreed. The ONLY reason I can think of them using .rar files on mp3s is that their .rar maker puts it together as a directory for them, and they are too lazy or stupid to figure to do that on their own.
RS
Gas and oil production *may* be at a peak: more probably not in our lifetimes.
Wrong. Here's a chart from a few years ago that is quite accurate.
Informed opinions vary, but not by much. The general consensus is that we are on a short-lived plateau of production. It might go up a bit, it might go down a bit, but it will be essentially flat for a few more years, and then begin an irreversible and terminal decline.
Economic work has no direct relationship with energy consumed.
This isn't the best retort, but it points at the truth of the matter: "Then why didn't the Romans go to the moon?" Obviously, they didn't have the metalurgical understandings or the knowledge of gravitational physics or scientific understanding to pull it off, but before ANY of that can be done, you have to have an energy infrastructure of a quality and sophistication that allows a moonshot, and THAT is something they did not and could not have. And that was probably a good thing, because if the Romans had discovered oil and coal, we could have gone extinct with a dead planet by the year 1000...
Lump of labour has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I'm using "work" in a more distilled sense, related to physics. You can twist things about socially and economically, but you can't live outside the laws of physics, esp. thermodynamics and gravity, nor can you have an "economy" outside of these rules as well.
RS
1. All work requires energy. Energy is the capacity for doing work.
2. Oil and gas production is at or near peak, and we get 85% of our energy from it, and Coal is not a "good idea".
3. Therefore: our capacity to do work will decline if efficiency doesn't meet decline rates, and work can't grow if the efficiencies don't exceed decline rates.
4. decline rates in major oil fields are extreme - The North Sea, Mexico's Cantarell, are both in double digit decline rates. The USA has been declining since 1970. The only places left are mostly i nthe middle east, and some of them are at or near peak, and their production cannot be increased to match the declines elsewhere.
Therefore, a loan, which is a claim on future labour, is not a "great idea" when we know that the sum total of work can only decline from present levels, if efficiencies are not implemented immediately, and decisively.
From this, and the excesses of the system at the peak of energy development, the logical direction of survival would be for the USA to:
1. Nationalise the banks, immediately.
2. By nationalising the banks the USgov repudiates the bank debt.
3. Disband the Federal Reserve. The USgov will be responsible for its money supply.
4. Nationalise USA Health Care. Face facts: This whole nonsense about âoeyour health care decisions should be between you and your doctorâ is BS. You know who makes your health care decisions? The insurance company. The USgov should eat the health care industry directly (on the one end) and get really pretty damn stiff with fat ass Americans on the other end.
5. Gas should be USD$5 gallon. Minimum. If gas is cheaper than that due to over production or demand destruction, then the remainder goes directly into alternative energy systems.
6. Car makers should go chap 11, and restructure under strict supervision. There should a be a refocusing of vehicles away from the armoured chariat and more towards the beefed up bicycle/tricycle. 7. The USA must abandon its Empire. The Pentagon must cut its budget by 50% a year until it is the size of the Chinese rate, or less, of spending. American Troops must be brought home, decomissioned, and retrained for the powerdown.
8. Crash Infrastructure improvements geared around livable homes and communities worth caring about. LOTS of insulation. Lots of geothermal, etc..
Now if you see an opening for financial mathematics in that, you're better than I am.
I don't think "financial mathematics" has much of a future. Any more than public relations or drama therapy.
It takes time (millions of years) for stars to form, and given the energetic state of the early universe, star formation would have been difficult. Eventually, stars would form, and they would be pure hydrogen. Some would last a really long time (some might still exist today!) and some would be gigantic hyperstars that would blow apart within a several million years, leaving behind blackholes and some heavier elements. But the universe would still be even more overwhelmingly composed of hydrogen than now.
So I think it would be reasonable to conjecture that early stars would have more hydrogen, and the earliest stars would be even purer.
Hence, my qualifier of "probably very weak in heavier elements", and thus my point that this is very interesting news. It will be fascinating to see what comes of the data.
On a more pedestrian note, please read more carefully.
cheers,
RS
Also, it probably was very weak in heavier elements, so it would have been a very pure collection of hydrogen. So, we're looking at a pretty "pure case" of massive star formation, fuel burning and some kind of hypernova.
This is really interesting stuff.
RS
This goes someplace, so bear with me.
For a few weeks I went on a DL kick where I decided to do all my vinyl into digital. I have 1104 vinyl LPs. About 1/3 I bought the CD for because I liked the convenience. I have bought hundreds of CDs as well - I now own about 1400 CDs.
I ripped all the CDs into a drive over the period of a few months, and the drive became part of a gigantic home jukebox of some 27,000 songs running off of iTunes on a MacBook.
So, that left me at around 840 records on vinyl. I could buy a USB turntable and spend hours digitising and labeling it, and I seriously considered that - there are some fairly decent digital turntables out there.
But then I thought: hold on... let's do the math. 840 records, each taking about 1.5 hours EACH to digitise, cut apart in Audacity, and then put the ID tags in as I export as MP3. So, now we're looking at around 1300 hours. So, if I do four records a week, that will take 6 hours a week and 4 years of my life...
Fuck. That. Shit.
So, I went link hunting and found some systems like chewbone.blogspot.com where I enter in the record I'm looking for and a series of links for DL come up. YAY!
So, each record at 192 is about 80 megs, or about 12 per gig with a result of about 70gigs of music. Over the period of a few weeks idling on vacation, I was able to do this.
And now, I'm done. So the ISP would have seen a massive splurge in activity. And I now have 32,183 songs on my drive, and a lot of it digitised version of vinyl that some kind soul had the patience to sample and upload to a file system.
I learned a lot about those file systems, too. I now officially hate rapidshare. They're good if ou pay them, but they suck monkey balls if you don't. Megaupload is often slower than rapidshare, but they don't insist on a 15 minute waiting period. The best is mediafire. Also, as a mac user using Stuffit Deluxe, all you people using .rar files can go fuck yourselves. Zip files work JUST FINE thank you, and they open easily in OSX. And to think zip files were "those funky windows things"...
So, anyway, had my ISP been itchy about bandwidth, I'd have been shut down for doing something that isn't (per my intent) "evil". I was just looking for digital copies of my incredible and incredibly obscure vinyl collection. And I was rather scrupulous about it, too. Example: DOME. They had 4 records, I only have the first one on vinyl. I only DL'd the first one. If I want the others, I can go find the vinyl or buy the CD.
NOw, I'm not making some case for flawless seamless integrity or consistency, but I am sugesting that in the greater scheme of things, ISP choking bandwidth will result in people abandoning ISPs....
RS
People like you are the reason civilisation is doomed.
nationoffinks
mod dishwasha up. totally on target.
Example: daughter wants to see Twilight. OK. Fine, we all make compromises for the people we love.
Tickets: $11 adult $8 kid. So: $30 tickets.
child, wife and self insist on popcorn, drinks, etc. I've memorised the price: $24.15
So, one afternoon movie experience: $54.15.
Also: transportation: 2 adults one child on subway. $2.75 per adult, 75cent child, each way. Total: $12.50. Add that on.
$66.65 to go see a movie.
x12 months = $799.80
I can wander down the street to that shithole of a Best Buy and get a 32" LCD HDTV for $469.
That would leave plenty of money to rent videos.
And I wouldn't have to deal with the mouth breathing retard behind me yapping through the whole fucking movie.
And when you glare at him and tell him to shut the fuck up, he feels ENTITLED to continue flapping his insolent stupidities.
I hate going to the movies. The movies are fine, and fun. The audiences make me ill.
RS
However: you remember your buddy from English class. He got you in touch with some people at a party at his place. You end up marrying one of these people.
Years later, you run into the buddy from English, and he says "Cool - i remember that - that was an awesome party. Do you know someone who can manage a group?" And you volunteer yourself, and the next thing you know, you have a new job.
OR, you SUCK ASS at school, but your parents are rich and they send you to the best, and you join a frat and make lots of connections, and after all the booze you can drink, you sit your retarded self down and get elected president.
It's like that. I would submit that the CONNECTIONS you make in university are just as important as the skills you learn and the ideas you are exposed to.
RS
FORWARD! INTO THE PAST!!!
RS
Two guys singing, whistling, and otherwise imitating drum machines and synths. And a perky girl who pops up saying "LATE!"
Sweet and kind work by nice people.
RS
Because an awful lot of our knowledge of how the human body responds to extreme cold originates from research done by the German military, the better to treat their casualties on the Eastern front. I'll give you one guess where they got their research subjects.
what you wrote is completely incoherent and bass ackwards presumptuous. I have no problem with where knowledge is produced. we learned a lot about knives from hacking each other up. doesn't mean I'm going to cut my veggies with a spoon...
So what the fuck is your point? Mine is simple: if you don't like how something is made, then don't use it.
People who decry stem cell research should not be permitted the benefits of the research. What I wrote was OBVIOUS blowback from the anti-stem cell position. That I've been rated flamebait goes to show the disposition of the mod, not my point.
RS
Let them go blind.
RS
sure, it kills tress, but it's MINE ALL MINE BABEEE!!!
So, STOP IT. Just stop. Do something else.
Once you're used to it, you'll be at an advantage when civilisation plows into the wall of resource depletion and the rest of the suckers are wondering "wuh wuh wuh happened???"
RS
Yes, exactly - we're seeing what happens when the ideology of ignorant "Business As Usual" fossil fuel guzzling nimrods meets the stark implacable reality of resource depletion.
RS
Unloading truckloads of paper for Johns Manville in a factory so filled with asbestos, the air was blue. They declared bankruptcy rather than pay all the medical expenses for their dying employees.
The paper was dumped into a hopper that went up the side of a vat where it was boiled with chemicals and broken down into paper gunk and poo. The poo was excreted from a large pipe, where it was put in drums and "taken somewhere".
Another hideous job was scraping gum off the floor of a large department store. That REALLY sucked. The boss was a dick. My fellow employees were idiots, theives, or (like me at the time) ne'er do wells stoner punks.
So, coding in crappy conditions is bad enough. doing bullshit in crappy conditions is worse.
The Waaambulance tag is appropriate.
RS
You stupid fucks blew it.
(note: ALL of my computers are Apple Computers - even the one running Linux)
It pains me that apple just let this market segment slide out of reach. They could have KICKED ASS.
Right now I am typing on my iBook G4. IT FUCKING WORKS. and it runs OS X, and all is well, except: it's a powerPC. So it's a legacy machine. Eventually developers will no longer support this machine. C'est la vie.
But: this is an awesome little box, and had Apple made a 12 inch or less MacBook running on a celeron or Atom, they'd be printing MONEY.
Why? Because Everyone Would Want One.
A colleague and recent convert at work said "My in-laws need a computer - this MacBook Pro rocks - it's easy. It's what they need..."
People Need Simple computers that Do Simple Things.
But Apple dropped the ball with their eyes on the high margin. Good move, ace. Now MS has moved in and with the exception of the eeePC, has totally and completely insanely dominated that entire market. Fuckwits.
I think it's really not too late. If Apple came up with a netbook in June, (kind of like a cheapy laptop version of the MacMini) and with a good adver campaign, they could easily blow Linux out of the water, and come to parity with MS.
but they won't.
RS
Actually, why bother? Seriously. My name REALLY IS Ralph Spoilsport. I live in Ukaipah on Rhode Island School of Design Terrace. Every morning I commute to work at Ralph Spoilsport Motors, over in West Gommorah.
And about this "Terrorism" meme floating since 9/11. What these people don't understand is violence. When it flows from the top of the social hierarchy down, it is invisible (like being forced to work to feed yourself) or rationalised (viz. warfare).
When violence flows UP the hierarchy from below, it is condemned (as terrorism, laziness, whatever) and persecuted (with invasions, arrests, assassinations, gitmo, etc.)
I don't see middle eastern terrorists flying planes into towers in Oslo, or the USA invading China to remove its brutal totalitarian government. Why? Because Norway hasn't been an invasive empire since the Vikings called it quits centuries ago, and China has the ability to readily defend itself, unlike Iraq in 2003, or (as it was perceived at the time) Viet Nam in 1964, or Poland in 1939.
If you want to stop terrorism, renounce your Empire and leave people the fuck alone. Eventually you won't be targeted for being a belligerent asshole, and you won't have to worry about scribblings by anonymous douchebags.
It's not a problem WITH civilisation, but more the problem OF civilisation and its inherent unsustainability. If you want a better explanation, read Endgame vol 2 by Derek Jensen.
RS
Now, I didn't say you'd LIKE what 's next...
RS