Possibly the worst movie ever made twice. Certainly the dullest.
It was made for people with attention spans longer than that commonly exhibited by a gnat. If the original was so lame it wouldn't have been copied, the sincerest form of flattery.
If ou want action adventure and things that go boom, Tarkovsky isn't for you, but if you want something that's graceful, intelligent, complex, resonant, a bit difficult but beautiful, and is a general all around work of genius, then Tarkovsky's the director for you.
Any list of 100 greatest films that DOES include a semi amusing piece of piffle like A Hard Day's Night, but doesn't include ANY films made by Andrey Tarkovsky (Andrey Rublev, Solaris, nostalghia, The Stalker, The Sacrifice, etc.) or Chris Marker (La Jette, Sans Soleil, etc.) is Total Fucking Bullshit. Pure and Simple.
I would like to hear some OS X users opinions on this post. Is there a standard security update tool in OS X?
sure: OS X simply IS more secure. It's not completely impenetrable, but in order to install almost ANYTHING of significance (like a program) on the hard drive, you have to type your name and password. A lot of knuckleheads wanking about on pr0n sites would likely (if not cheerfully) install mal/spyware on a Mac if it meant they had "special" access to electronic images of naked people. Idiots are Idiots, and you can't completely protect them, but once they learn that if they visit a site and the Security Dialogue Box suddenly pops up asking for name and password, they should probably click "cancel" and go somewhere else.
Thanks to VB and COM and all that crap running behind everything in Windows, all that mal/spyware crap just slides down the pipe with great invisibility.
If Macs became more popular, they might have a problem with viruses, but I am not certain where the pathology vector lies with that - even when Apple was a really significant part of market vack in the late 80s and early 90s there were comparatively few viruses for the platform. That might change if it went back up to 20%, but I'm not certain, given the present infection process, that 20% would be enough to permit enough propagation to create a pathological growth curve.
Oh, and Yes: OS X has REGULAR security updates, that are sometimes fairly frequent.
Given the amount of energy that goes into making a piece of high technology, and the loss of metals and petroleum to build something that is vastly more toxic to dispose of than paper and pencil, and how little energy goes into making a pencil and small pad of paper, I think it is the height of idiocy to apply such high technology to something that can be just as easily handled with a pencil and paper.
I'll repeat the main point: Get A Small Pad of Paper and a Pencil. A small, all purpose, Swiss army knife is useful for sharpening them, also, small sharpeners are easily found. It will cost you less than $5 and you're set. You can even use parts of it to store important phone numbers and stuff.
Just because something CAN be done with technology doesn't mean it SHOULD be done with technology.
Given the state of the world, I would recommend we get used to such solutions...
the last time I checked, MS has something like $40 billion in cash. So, divide 40 billion by 5 million and you get 21.9 YEARS before they run out of whatever they've got stashed under the mattress.
The money isn't going to hurt these people - it's the bad publicity.
Of course, MS dittoheads, lackies and lusers might kick up such a fuss, that if MS holds out, they might spin it into "Those Mean Old Europeans are Picking in a Good American Corporation" and after a few years, the Europeans might just give up.
Also. once the judgement is passed, it's not like they're going to get busted again - they're already in the doghouse of international opinion.
My guess is they will find some kind of settlement, and brush it under the carpet. With the kind of Social Amnesia that your average idiot American suffers under, it'll all be forgotten in six months, like Iraqi WMD, and Japanese Internment Camps...
I agree it would be nice to see AOL take a chunk or two out of MS's hide, but I doubt that will happen. AOL is a middleman, and if there's one thing that technology's drive to efficiency hates is middlemen.
There is content, there are content users. Anything that gets between those two will eventually be pushed aside.
In principle this is correct. Unfortunately, it's not possible in practice.
Why? Space isn't empty.
Let's say you're in a machine with the frontal area of 10 sq meters. IIRC, in "empty space" there's about 1 vagrant ionised atom of some variety (usually hydrogen) for every cubic meter of space. Now, accelerate as gradually as you want, by the time you get to 9/10 c you're going to be plowing through a veritable wall of hydrogen and the occassional dust particle at relativistic speeds. You're be a glowing radioactive mess in fairly short order. Sure: send out an EM field ahead of yourself to try and deflect it. At near light speed, the EM will seem to leave your ship at light speed, but relative to the poor unsuspecting dust speck, the field hit it and some tiny fraction of a second your ship is occupying the space that dust spect was. The energy required to move that little dust speck, and the trillions of other dust specks and atoms in your way, would be truly incredible, and would only add to the mass of your ship, making it harder to accellerate and harder to miss dust specks and vagrant atoms and other particles of crap floating around in the void.
But you are correct - it's the accelleration that kills you (or decelleration, in the case of defenestration...)
Ralph Spoilsport is a character from a record by the Firesign Theatre on the LP "How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all".
The reference to the Dog Star, Serious, is from "Everything You Know Is Wrong" by Firesign Theatre.
All the old Fireheads out there get the joke. I do recommend their first four or five records. The closest thing America ever came to Shakespeare.
It would seem that this could be useful in the USA as well. I wonder why they're not supporting it here? Are they in bed with Microsoft, or do they have an agreement to only use MS in the US?
In bed? Sure - and MS has their arm so far up HP's ass that they can make the lips move. The USA is the fat golden sacred cow to MS and they will fight tooth and claw to keep it that way.
That HP got this far with Linux is a miracle and a testament to how even in a company as Windows centric in practice as HP is, the animosity toward MS is so deep and universal.
A family member works at HP, so I know of what I speak.
China has existed for more than 2000 years. See them as a superpower will be very interesting. As the very least they have much more culture than the US. Unfortunately, their regime is not exactly open to human rights - but the USA won't be for long, either.
Tha'ts the Big Problem. The former Communist states are, for the most part, little more than reformed despotisms. There are exceptions: Poland, Hungary, Czech Rep., etc. but for every Former East Germany, there's a Belarus... China's pretty much part of that syndrome, just amplified to a frightning degree.
About the Oil Peak thing: a real irony would be that the oil fields replenish, as has been theorized in several papers (which have NOT been debunked - abiotic oil exists, however it is considered as unlikely that it makes a significant amount of the oil we need)
Actually microscopic, at this point - we're pulling it out of the ground so fast I don't see any significant oil stocks coming into existence for at least another 100 million years, abiotic or otherwise.
Now this really scares me. See, its quite obvious that the ruling class would extract the ABC-arsenal out of the US - after all, they don't want those peasants to ruin their off-shored homes. But if the peasants get hold of bombs, several parts of the globe will turn into major warzones.
Actually not that scary. All these American idiots will be trying to fill the tanks of their SUVs so they can drive to the Walmart to get food on the other side of the suburban hell they live in. IF they throw nukes ANYWHERE it will be at the Chinese or Koreans (likey in some proxy state like Taiwan or Korea or Nepal). There's an excellent paper on that here:
Apparently the year 2012 is considered the beginning of a crucial time...
As for NYC, SF, LA, well - I'm European, I have never visited the USA, but it seems to be that 90% of what the US image is about is concentrated in the coasts. The glorious land of the free mostly exists there, or so it seems.
It's more of an archipelago. NYC is very liberal, but if you go out into the rural sections, you end up dealing with the same fucking retards you'd find in Indiana, Kansas, or Kentucky.
My post went from a +5 interesting to a 1 Flamebait.
This says to me the following happened:
Not everyone on/. is a rational secular person. When I first posted, secualr people rated me up. After a while, as the day wore on, the bible thumpers and their fellow rtavellers arrived and started using mod points and gave me a flamebait value. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it wsa just ONE person with mod points who's a right wing creep and dislikes me and pounded my post into Flamebait with all of his points.
Brilliant. As I said folks - these asshats play to win. The modding of my post only proves it.
You know, with China its the other way round. The US plug is in China, and they can't pull it. China is rapidly becoming a new superpower, maybe outstripping the US in its rise.
Nothing maybe about it, really. China IS the next superpower. However, they have different priorities and history than the USA, so I don't see them as being quite the same insanely rapacious religious freeeks that the USA is turning out to be. They will turn out to be a different kind of greed. But given thing like the Oil Peak, and the ever burgeoning human population both on earth and in their own country, they won't have the same "free head start" the USA did with Texas Oil, appalachian coal and other 19th and early 20th century resources the USA had, so China will have to pick its battle more carefully.
EU, Russia, India, Pakistan and most of Asia have good/excellent relations with China. US will be losing, thats for sure. Unfortunately, the EU is still very bonded to the USA. Lets see what happens when they crash.
The EU is a new thing, and I think it is a model for the future: a kind of "opt-in" democracy. Set some rules on how to play. If you pass those rules, you get to play, if you don't, you get kicked out. I think the EU is going to be setting its sites on Africa and west Asia, especially after Turkey joins.
The Roman Empire didn't fall, really. What happened was the Roman Ruling class figured out in the 4th century that there was really nothing to gain to the north and west - it was a land of insane poverty stricken barbarians. So, they opened up shop in Constantinople - closer to the wealth of trade from the Middle East and South Asia, moved all the money there, and let Rome die on the vine. The Eastern Empire went on for almost another 1000 years before it was finally smashed by a different bunch of religious zealot assholes, the Moslems.
Same thing is slowly happening now. The wealth is being extracted from the USA. the ruling class is off shoring their money and production facilities. When the moment is right, they'll just walk away and let the peasants fight over the scraps.
At that point, I think we'll see the USA devolve, much like the UK or the former CCCP - split into smaller more manageable states. And like the former Soviets, some areas will do better than others. NYC, SF, LA etc will end up in countries much like Moscow and St. Pete's (only with better weather). But places like Texas, the Deep South, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and much of the midwest (Kansas, Nebraska, et al) etc. will end up more like the (x)stans (Tajik, Turkmeni, etc.) - a bunch of warlike oppressive nut job semi-arid landlocked hell holes run by cruel fascist regimes.
Canada will survive a while longer, assuming it can solve the energy problem of winter without using Oil, coal, or wood.
Mexico is actually in a marginally better place, if it can focus on reducing the rich/poor ratio and universally educating its people. They won't freeze during the winter, and have enough wide open desert for solar energy - they might come out OK.
But the USA is cooked. Stick a fork in this place... we're done...
must be wrested away from Bible Thumping retards. If they win, we're all fucked.
Having a religion or some notion of a spirit world is one thing. There are plenty of people who go to work every day, drive cars, pay taxes, and do all the other things people do: but they always have THE WEIRD VOICES IN THEIR HEADS.
The voices to them are real, and they take medication to keep them at bay. Religion is much like that. You can love the voices in your head as much as you want, but when they tell you to enact legislation based on antiquated notions from people who lived millennia ago who also had voices in their head, and this legislation runs counter to the scientific method and its ancillary reasoning systems (such as Occam's Razor) then you need to tell the voices to fuck off.
Civilisation is on the verge of complete collapse from over population and a running out of energy stocks. It is imperitive that clear headed rational peaceful secular thinking reign in this time of impending crisis and catastrophe. Otherwise, the religious zealots will run away with the ball and all our descendants will be living in caves - in a neolithic level of Hobbesian misery, or, in a crude medieval state of ignorance and oppression.
The religious right is correct, this is a fight. What the secularists don't seem to get through their thick little heads is:
a: this really is a fight, and if they don't fight back, they WILL LOSE, and this country is good as cooked.
b: that it's a fight to the finish. It's a Civil War - but a Cold Civil War. However: the outcome will be just as crucial and important for the future of the species.
The USA may only be 5% of the planet, but it has lots of nukes.
If it looks like the right wing is going to completely triumph both culturally and militarily in he USA, I urge the people of the EU, Japan, South Korea, and China to tell your leaders to pull the plug. Sell their American Bonds, sell their dollars. Let the USA sink into the oblivion of its multi-trillion dollar debt. If they complain, tell them to ask Jesus for the money. It'll be tough, but you all can get along without us. The destruction of the USA won't be accomplished with guns or bombs. It willbe accomplished with electronic money transfers, bond sales, and the will to put down a bunch of ignorant greedy bible thumping suburbanshees before they do us all in with their wasteful ignorant ways.
Is this flamebait?
sort of - it depends on whether you view a demand that the people of reason, tolerance, and science stand up and save the world from the ignorant and stupid.
And if you're a scientist who believes in God - fine. It's good to see you have caged the voices. That's progress.
As Lost Circuits points out, power consumption worldwide has been exploding as more CPUs come online and the CPU power requirements increase so a significant power reduction will reduce the burden on electrical grids everywhere."
Well, let's see - computers used to take up entire rooms and eat thousands of watts of juice to get very little done.
Now, they eat up less per computer, and each computer does some insane order of magnitude more work, BUT: there are jillions more computers.
Reducing the power consumption per unit only matters if you have a fixed number of units. As the third world comes online, (and whats left of Moore's Law continues its march for the next few decades) it won't matter that much how little each unit consumes when there is some vastly larger magnitude of numbers of units out there suckin' juice off the mother teat grid.
Our household has 4 (working) computers, soon there will be five (when I get the powerbook working again). If EVERY household had four or five working computers all over the world over the next ten years, reducing the power consumption even by half per machine over the same amount of time wouldn't stave off the inevitable power crunch.
The result?
As things stand now: CATASTROPHE.
For more on this looming disaster, this Vug Under The Rug, go here:
Anyways, is submitting your own music collection to be played "OS"? It's pretty much just the equivalent to taking in requests.
We have ONE station and HOW MANY pod casters?
Pick a number - it doesn't matter. The fact is this is just the MegaCorp's attempt at co-opting the podcasting social algorithm. Podcasting is NOT revolutionary or even all that progressive, so it doens't matter that much. But this is just a typical attempt at a cash in.
giant corporation looks at what the "Kids" are doing and wonders how to turn a buck on it.
40 years ago, it was "let's sign hundreds of rock music acts" now, it's "let the podcasters in" - it's still bullshit.
You go to someone's house. you turn on your file sharing and plug into a router. Everyone sees each other's drive and you share files.
I now have 112 gigs of music.
I used to have 123 gigs, but as I go through what I've "brorrowed" i find that so and so SUCKS ASS. (I still cringe when I think of how "a friend" told me that Coldplay was good. "copy this folder man- it fuckin' rocks!" Urf! no accounting for taste - but: the same friend had some early Kraftwerk that I had never heard, and within a fwe days I was on GEMM.COM and had it sent to Chez Spoilsport ultrapronto!
AND: years ago as a teenager I had spent ridiculous sums of cash on Led Zeppelin records (1 - houses of the holy) only to have them all wear out. In the 90s when I did most of my CD collecting, I neglected LZ, so now I have it all on mp3, and I don't have to bother sampling the scratchy old LPs. I paid my money
(I actually paid RETAIL at Sam Goodys. Sorry - I was young... except for LZ4 which was given to me when I turned 16... which was typical for New Jersey in the mid 1970s....)
and I deserve my onw personal mp3 versions. If digital had existed in 197x I would have done the same then (as it was I did record everything to cassette. but that was NOT a sideways move...)
I say FUCK RIAA.
Rat fucking bastards.
I also say FUCK people who don't buy the records. Sure: I have a BUTTLOAD of mp3s but guess what? I also have a VAST collect of CDs and LPs. And thanks to MP3s I trade at LAN parties, my coolectio nof CDs and LPs continues to grow...
I trust (some of) my friend's taste in music. I DON'T rtust the crap I hear on the radio. Rap is especially laughable anymore.... "Keepin' it real"... As IF you hypocritical motherfuckers.
If you look at a certain screenshot HERE while you can, it shows some "icons" those graphic designer WhizKidz at M$ devised.
What I noticed immediately was the "reflection" on the screen depicted in the icon. It looks EXACTLY like a reflection of one of those evil Evil EVIL fluorescent tube light boxes found in every Generic Office Environment.
My guess is the dweeb who designed the icon was so lacking in imagination, that he or she figured "Heck: I gots me a monitor RIGHT HERE!", and here being, of course, their own little hideous Veal Fattening Pen in some dank corner of the M$ campus, where they swelter under the cool ugly fluorescent light boxes, and dress up their miserable cube with little pathetic chatchkies from home to prove that they are Individuals(!).
If this is the quality of art we can expect for Longhorn, I'm certain it will go down well with the dreary "You never got fired for ordering RCA / IBM / Microsoft" PHBs, and will be a subject of excoriation by anyone with more than three brain cells to rub together.
"Heh - looky there! It's got the reflection of them thar fluorescent lights, just like I have over MY HEAD right NOW! Wow - that Microsoft - always thinking of how to make me feel at home..."
Urk. I hope Longhorn is a complete and abject failure, so it forces M$ to get off its ass and make something worthwhile for a change, although, once would be a big improvement.
Altsys created FH and fontographer. Aldus was a different company fro mAdobe. Aldus owned the rights to market FH. Aldus invented Pagemaker. Adobe bought Aldus, thinking they could kill FH and get Ragemaker in the bargain. What happened was they got ragemaker, but FH fully reverted back to Altsys, whihc was soon bought up by Macromedia. Adobe refused to let go of the FH product, so Altsys and MM sued Adobe. Adobe surrendered.
IMHO, FH is still the superior app, but that doesn't matter anymore.
Photoshop is a great application, but it hasn't dramatically improved much since version 5, IMHO. It's added some cool features, but basically it's about the same.
since people use what they learn, and Adobe has an educational sock puppet called Art Institute International (and supplies software for hundreds of other schools) these kids will grow up to use what they learn, and if they learn the Adobe System, they will use the Adobe System, and that will be on MS Windows.
You are EXACTLY correct that Adobe was (and is) afraid of Apple. Too bad Apple was beaten to the punch in collecting MM...
I completely agree with you about Firework's superiority. However, you are underestimating the medieval nature of Adobe system's internal and political structure. These people practically invented the NIH syndrome.
They are NOT to be trusted to do anything correctly.
IF things go the way you describe, then I would submit that they would rename Fireworks as ImageReady, and shoehorn Fireworks into the Adobe UI to make it look and act like ImageReady.
I do agree though - Fireworks is a vastly superior product. You note that "Adobe would be insane to drop it completely." I guess you don't know this: Adobe Is Insane. Expect the worst.
This merger is going to set graphic and internet development software back 10 years.
I figure that Dreamweaver will "replace" GoLive, but only to include the clunkiness of GoLive, which is why I described it as a merge at the expense of DW.
I'm not certain, but I just know about Adobe's xemophobia and NIH syndrome from friends who have worked there, and it is not to be underestimated. They will cheerfully hobble an application just to prevent any overlap, even when better examples exist.
Example: Freehand vs: AI and Ragemaker/InDesign.
Freehand had multiple page support since the gitgo. Illustrator (AI) never did, and never will. FreeHand had a single selection tool (that was decidedly superior) and only adopted multiple selection tools when ex-adobe whiners whinged loud enough. If FreeHand hadn't sprung a memory leak around rev 9, it would still be superior to AI, even with multiple selection tools.
AI never grew extra pages because it would make Ragemaker / InDesign superfluous for small publications (which is the VAST majority of printing needs).
Adobe is a predatory and evil corporation. They bought a killer app that did long documents better than Ragemaker. they killed the killer app (I forget its name - this was several years ago...) Heck: Adobe bought Aldus hoping to kill FreeHand, but was sued by Macromedia who had bought Altsys who actually owned the code! That's how Macromedia ended up with FH and Adobe with Ragemaker.
This is all such a horrible horrible mess.
You are correct about DW having the better rep (it's a VASTLY superior app to GoLive) but Adobe's sense of "turf" runs deep, and I would expect not the next version of DW (which will be whatever MM is working on now) but the version after that to completely suck great steaming tourdes thanks to Adobe's meddling.
Another interesting question is:
How and who will manage the macromedial fiefdom in Adobe?
Or will it be held (typically Adobe) so tightly that any sense of these products being independent and innovative is completely stifled?
Also: here's an evil clue - Microsoft was not the feared enemy, but perhaps Apple...
Slashdot Mirror
Solaris
Possibly the worst movie ever made twice. Certainly the dullest.
It was made for people with attention spans longer than that commonly exhibited by a gnat. If the original was so lame it wouldn't have been copied, the sincerest form of flattery.
If ou want action adventure and things that go boom, Tarkovsky isn't for you, but if you want something that's graceful, intelligent, complex, resonant, a bit difficult but beautiful, and is a general all around work of genius, then Tarkovsky's the director for you.
Lemme guess: you're an american...
RS
RS
Thanks to VB and COM and all that crap running behind everything in Windows, all that mal/spyware crap just slides down the pipe with great invisibility.
If Macs became more popular, they might have a problem with viruses, but I am not certain where the pathology vector lies with that - even when Apple was a really significant part of market vack in the late 80s and early 90s there were comparatively few viruses for the platform. That might change if it went back up to 20%, but I'm not certain, given the present infection process, that 20% would be enough to permit enough propagation to create a pathological growth curve.
Oh, and Yes: OS X has REGULAR security updates, that are sometimes fairly frequent.
best,
RS
a small notebook for USD$0.75
and
some pencils which can be had for$1.86
Given the amount of energy that goes into making a piece of high technology, and the loss of metals and petroleum to build something that is vastly more toxic to dispose of than paper and pencil, and how little energy goes into making a pencil and small pad of paper, I think it is the height of idiocy to apply such high technology to something that can be just as easily handled with a pencil and paper.
I'll repeat the main point: Get A Small Pad of Paper and a Pencil. A small, all purpose, Swiss army knife is useful for sharpening them, also, small sharpeners are easily found. It will cost you less than $5 and you're set. You can even use parts of it to store important phone numbers and stuff.
Just because something CAN be done with technology doesn't mean it SHOULD be done with technology.
Given the state of the world, I would recommend we get used to such solutions...
RS
The money isn't going to hurt these people - it's the bad publicity.
Of course, MS dittoheads, lackies and lusers might kick up such a fuss, that if MS holds out, they might spin it into "Those Mean Old Europeans are Picking in a Good American Corporation" and after a few years, the Europeans might just give up.
Also. once the judgement is passed, it's not like they're going to get busted again - they're already in the doghouse of international opinion.
My guess is they will find some kind of settlement, and brush it under the carpet. With the kind of Social Amnesia that your average idiot American suffers under, it'll all be forgotten in six months, like Iraqi WMD, and Japanese Internment Camps...
RS
I agree it would be nice to see AOL take a chunk or two out of MS's hide, but I doubt that will happen. AOL is a middleman, and if there's one thing that technology's drive to efficiency hates is middlemen.
There is content, there are content users. Anything that gets between those two will eventually be pushed aside.
RS
Why? Space isn't empty.
Let's say you're in a machine with the frontal area of 10 sq meters. IIRC, in "empty space" there's about 1 vagrant ionised atom of some variety (usually hydrogen) for every cubic meter of space. Now, accelerate as gradually as you want, by the time you get to 9/10 c you're going to be plowing through a veritable wall of hydrogen and the occassional dust particle at relativistic speeds. You're be a glowing radioactive mess in fairly short order. Sure: send out an EM field ahead of yourself to try and deflect it. At near light speed, the EM will seem to leave your ship at light speed, but relative to the poor unsuspecting dust speck, the field hit it and some tiny fraction of a second your ship is occupying the space that dust spect was. The energy required to move that little dust speck, and the trillions of other dust specks and atoms in your way, would be truly incredible, and would only add to the mass of your ship, making it harder to accellerate and harder to miss dust specks and vagrant atoms and other particles of crap floating around in the void.
But you are correct - it's the accelleration that kills you (or decelleration, in the case of defenestration...)
RS
Ralph Spoilsport is a character from a record by the Firesign Theatre on the LP "How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all".
The reference to the Dog Star, Serious, is from "Everything You Know Is Wrong" by Firesign Theatre.
All the old Fireheads out there get the joke. I do recommend their first four or five records. The closest thing America ever came to Shakespeare.
RS
RS
In bed? Sure - and MS has their arm so far up HP's ass that they can make the lips move. The USA is the fat golden sacred cow to MS and they will fight tooth and claw to keep it that way.
That HP got this far with Linux is a miracle and a testament to how even in a company as Windows centric in practice as HP is, the animosity toward MS is so deep and universal.
A family member works at HP, so I know of what I speak.
RS
China has existed for more than 2000 years. See them as a superpower will be very interesting. As the very least they have much more culture than the US. Unfortunately, their regime is not exactly open to human rights - but the USA won't be for long, either.
Tha'ts the Big Problem. The former Communist states are, for the most part, little more than reformed despotisms. There are exceptions: Poland, Hungary, Czech Rep., etc. but for every Former East Germany, there's a Belarus... China's pretty much part of that syndrome, just amplified to a frightning degree.
About the Oil Peak thing: a real irony would be that the oil fields replenish, as has been theorized in several papers (which have NOT been debunked - abiotic oil exists, however it is considered as unlikely that it makes a significant amount of the oil we need)
Actually microscopic, at this point - we're pulling it out of the ground so fast I don't see any significant oil stocks coming into existence for at least another 100 million years, abiotic or otherwise.
Now this really scares me. See, its quite obvious that the ruling class would extract the ABC-arsenal out of the US - after all, they don't want those peasants to ruin their off-shored homes. But if the peasants get hold of bombs, several parts of the globe will turn into major warzones.
Actually not that scary. All these American idiots will be trying to fill the tanks of their SUVs so they can drive to the Walmart to get food on the other side of the suburban hell they live in. IF they throw nukes ANYWHERE it will be at the Chinese or Koreans (likey in some proxy state like Taiwan or Korea or Nepal). There's an excellent paper on that here:
China delates future security environoment
Apparently the year 2012 is considered the beginning of a crucial time...
As for NYC, SF, LA, well - I'm European, I have never visited the USA, but it seems to be that 90% of what the US image is about is concentrated in the coasts. The glorious land of the free mostly exists there, or so it seems.
It's more of an archipelago. NYC is very liberal, but if you go out into the rural sections, you end up dealing with the same fucking retards you'd find in Indiana, Kansas, or Kentucky.
An interesting article on that is here:
URBAN ARCHIPELAGO
Cheers,
RS
This says to me the following happened:
Not everyone on /. is a rational secular person. When I first posted, secualr people rated me up. After a while, as the day wore on, the bible thumpers and their fellow rtavellers arrived and started using mod points and gave me a flamebait value. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it wsa just ONE person with mod points who's a right wing creep and dislikes me and pounded my post into Flamebait with all of his points.
Brilliant. As I said folks - these asshats play to win. The modding of my post only proves it.
RS
ardor wrote:
You know, with China its the other way round. The US plug is in China, and they can't pull it. China is rapidly becoming a new superpower, maybe outstripping the US in its rise.
Nothing maybe about it, really. China IS the next superpower. However, they have different priorities and history than the USA, so I don't see them as being quite the same insanely rapacious religious freeeks that the USA is turning out to be. They will turn out to be a different kind of greed. But given thing like the Oil Peak, and the ever burgeoning human population both on earth and in their own country, they won't have the same "free head start" the USA did with Texas Oil, appalachian coal and other 19th and early 20th century resources the USA had, so China will have to pick its battle more carefully.
EU, Russia, India, Pakistan and most of Asia have good/excellent relations with China. US will be losing, thats for sure. Unfortunately, the EU is still very bonded to the USA. Lets see what happens when they crash.
The EU is a new thing, and I think it is a model for the future: a kind of "opt-in" democracy. Set some rules on how to play. If you pass those rules, you get to play, if you don't, you get kicked out. I think the EU is going to be setting its sites on Africa and west Asia, especially after Turkey joins.
The Roman Empire didn't fall, really. What happened was the Roman Ruling class figured out in the 4th century that there was really nothing to gain to the north and west - it was a land of insane poverty stricken barbarians. So, they opened up shop in Constantinople - closer to the wealth of trade from the Middle East and South Asia, moved all the money there, and let Rome die on the vine. The Eastern Empire went on for almost another 1000 years before it was finally smashed by a different bunch of religious zealot assholes, the Moslems.
Same thing is slowly happening now. The wealth is being extracted from the USA. the ruling class is off shoring their money and production facilities. When the moment is right, they'll just walk away and let the peasants fight over the scraps.
At that point, I think we'll see the USA devolve, much like the UK or the former CCCP - split into smaller more manageable states. And like the former Soviets, some areas will do better than others. NYC, SF, LA etc will end up in countries much like Moscow and St. Pete's (only with better weather). But places like Texas, the Deep South, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and much of the midwest (Kansas, Nebraska, et al) etc. will end up more like the (x)stans (Tajik, Turkmeni, etc.) - a bunch of warlike oppressive nut job semi-arid landlocked hell holes run by cruel fascist regimes.
Canada will survive a while longer, assuming it can solve the energy problem of winter without using Oil, coal, or wood.
Mexico is actually in a marginally better place, if it can focus on reducing the rich/poor ratio and universally educating its people. They won't freeze during the winter, and have enough wide open desert for solar energy - they might come out OK.
But the USA is cooked. Stick a fork in this place... we're done...
RS
Having a religion or some notion of a spirit world is one thing. There are plenty of people who go to work every day, drive cars, pay taxes, and do all the other things people do: but they always have THE WEIRD VOICES IN THEIR HEADS.
The voices to them are real, and they take medication to keep them at bay. Religion is much like that. You can love the voices in your head as much as you want, but when they tell you to enact legislation based on antiquated notions from people who lived millennia ago who also had voices in their head, and this legislation runs counter to the scientific method and its ancillary reasoning systems (such as Occam's Razor) then you need to tell the voices to fuck off.
Civilisation is on the verge of complete collapse from over population and a running out of energy stocks. It is imperitive that clear headed rational peaceful secular thinking reign in this time of impending crisis and catastrophe. Otherwise, the religious zealots will run away with the ball and all our descendants will be living in caves - in a neolithic level of Hobbesian misery, or, in a crude medieval state of ignorance and oppression.
The religious right is correct, this is a fight. What the secularists don't seem to get through their thick little heads is:
a: this really is a fight, and if they don't fight back, they WILL LOSE, and this country is good as cooked.
b: that it's a fight to the finish. It's a Civil War - but a Cold Civil War. However: the outcome will be just as crucial and important for the future of the species.
The USA may only be 5% of the planet, but it has lots of nukes.
If it looks like the right wing is going to completely triumph both culturally and militarily in he USA, I urge the people of the EU, Japan, South Korea, and China to tell your leaders to pull the plug. Sell their American Bonds, sell their dollars. Let the USA sink into the oblivion of its multi-trillion dollar debt. If they complain, tell them to ask Jesus for the money. It'll be tough, but you all can get along without us. The destruction of the USA won't be accomplished with guns or bombs. It willbe accomplished with electronic money transfers, bond sales, and the will to put down a bunch of ignorant greedy bible thumping suburbanshees before they do us all in with their wasteful ignorant ways.
Is this flamebait?
sort of - it depends on whether you view a demand that the people of reason, tolerance, and science stand up and save the world from the ignorant and stupid.
And if you're a scientist who believes in God - fine. It's good to see you have caged the voices. That's progress.
RS
Or am I missing something?
cheers!
RS
RS
Well, let's see - computers used to take up entire rooms and eat thousands of watts of juice to get very little done.
Now, they eat up less per computer, and each computer does some insane order of magnitude more work, BUT: there are jillions more computers.
Reducing the power consumption per unit only matters if you have a fixed number of units. As the third world comes online, (and whats left of Moore's Law continues its march for the next few decades) it won't matter that much how little each unit consumes when there is some vastly larger magnitude of numbers of units out there suckin' juice off the mother teat grid.
Our household has 4 (working) computers, soon there will be five (when I get the powerbook working again). If EVERY household had four or five working computers all over the world over the next ten years, reducing the power consumption even by half per machine over the same amount of time wouldn't stave off the inevitable power crunch.
The result?
As things stand now: CATASTROPHE.
For more on this looming disaster, this Vug Under The Rug, go here:
DIE OFF
It's going to take a lot more than recycling, hybrids, and low power computing to avoid the disaster.
RS
Anyways, is submitting your own music collection to be played "OS"? It's pretty much just the equivalent to taking in requests.
We have ONE station and HOW MANY pod casters?
Pick a number - it doesn't matter. The fact is this is just the MegaCorp's attempt at co-opting the podcasting social algorithm. Podcasting is NOT revolutionary or even all that progressive, so it doens't matter that much. But this is just a typical attempt at a cash in.
giant corporation looks at what the "Kids" are doing and wonders how to turn a buck on it.
40 years ago, it was "let's sign hundreds of rock music acts" now, it's "let the podcasters in" - it's still bullshit.
RS
I've been to several. It works and it rocks.
You go to someone's house. you turn on your file sharing and plug into a router. Everyone sees each other's drive and you share files.
I now have 112 gigs of music.
I used to have 123 gigs, but as I go through what I've "brorrowed" i find that so and so SUCKS ASS. (I still cringe when I think of how "a friend" told me that Coldplay was good. "copy this folder man- it fuckin' rocks!" Urf! no accounting for taste - but: the same friend had some early Kraftwerk that I had never heard, and within a fwe days I was on GEMM.COM and had it sent to Chez Spoilsport ultrapronto!
AND: years ago as a teenager I had spent ridiculous sums of cash on Led Zeppelin records (1 - houses of the holy) only to have them all wear out. In the 90s when I did most of my CD collecting, I neglected LZ, so now I have it all on mp3, and I don't have to bother sampling the scratchy old LPs. I paid my money
(I actually paid RETAIL at Sam Goodys. Sorry - I was young... except for LZ4 which was given to me when I turned 16... which was typical for New Jersey in the mid 1970s....)
and I deserve my onw personal mp3 versions. If digital had existed in 197x I would have done the same then (as it was I did record everything to cassette. but that was NOT a sideways move...)
I say FUCK RIAA.
Rat fucking bastards.
I also say FUCK people who don't buy the records. Sure: I have a BUTTLOAD of mp3s but guess what? I also have a VAST collect of CDs and LPs. And thanks to MP3s I trade at LAN parties, my coolectio nof CDs and LPs continues to grow...
I trust (some of) my friend's taste in music. I DON'T rtust the crap I hear on the radio. Rap is especially laughable anymore.... "Keepin' it real"... As IF you hypocritical motherfuckers.
bitterly,
RS
Brilliant. I guess Apple is cleaning Wall Street's ears but MSFT has their arm up the butt of the Wall Street Parasites right to the elbow.
RS
What I noticed immediately was the "reflection" on the screen depicted in the icon. It looks EXACTLY like a reflection of one of those evil Evil EVIL fluorescent tube light boxes found in every Generic Office Environment.
My guess is the dweeb who designed the icon was so lacking in imagination, that he or she figured "Heck: I gots me a monitor RIGHT HERE!", and here being, of course, their own little hideous Veal Fattening Pen in some dank corner of the M$ campus, where they swelter under the cool ugly fluorescent light boxes, and dress up their miserable cube with little pathetic chatchkies from home to prove that they are Individuals(!).
If this is the quality of art we can expect for Longhorn, I'm certain it will go down well with the dreary "You never got fired for ordering RCA / IBM / Microsoft" PHBs, and will be a subject of excoriation by anyone with more than three brain cells to rub together.
"Heh - looky there! It's got the reflection of them thar fluorescent lights, just like I have over MY HEAD right NOW! Wow - that Microsoft - always thinking of how to make me feel at home..."
Urk. I hope Longhorn is a complete and abject failure, so it forces M$ to get off its ass and make something worthwhile for a change, although, once would be a big improvement.
RS
Altsys created FH and fontographer. Aldus was a different company fro mAdobe. Aldus owned the rights to market FH. Aldus invented Pagemaker. Adobe bought Aldus, thinking they could kill FH and get Ragemaker in the bargain. What happened was they got ragemaker, but FH fully reverted back to Altsys, whihc was soon bought up by Macromedia. Adobe refused to let go of the FH product, so Altsys and MM sued Adobe. Adobe surrendered.
IMHO, FH is still the superior app, but that doesn't matter anymore.
Photoshop is a great application, but it hasn't dramatically improved much since version 5, IMHO. It's added some cool features, but basically it's about the same.
RS
since people use what they learn, and Adobe has an educational sock puppet called Art Institute International (and supplies software for hundreds of other schools) these kids will grow up to use what they learn, and if they learn the Adobe System, they will use the Adobe System, and that will be on MS Windows.
You are EXACTLY correct that Adobe was (and is) afraid of Apple. Too bad Apple was beaten to the punch in collecting MM...
RS
They are NOT to be trusted to do anything correctly.
IF things go the way you describe, then I would submit that they would rename Fireworks as ImageReady, and shoehorn Fireworks into the Adobe UI to make it look and act like ImageReady.
I do agree though - Fireworks is a vastly superior product. You note that "Adobe would be insane to drop it completely." I guess you don't know this: Adobe Is Insane. Expect the worst.
This merger is going to set graphic and internet development software back 10 years.
RS
I'm not certain, but I just know about Adobe's xemophobia and NIH syndrome from friends who have worked there, and it is not to be underestimated. They will cheerfully hobble an application just to prevent any overlap, even when better examples exist.
Example: Freehand vs: AI and Ragemaker/InDesign.
Freehand had multiple page support since the gitgo. Illustrator (AI) never did, and never will. FreeHand had a single selection tool (that was decidedly superior) and only adopted multiple selection tools when ex-adobe whiners whinged loud enough. If FreeHand hadn't sprung a memory leak around rev 9, it would still be superior to AI, even with multiple selection tools.
AI never grew extra pages because it would make Ragemaker / InDesign superfluous for small publications (which is the VAST majority of printing needs).
Adobe is a predatory and evil corporation. They bought a killer app that did long documents better than Ragemaker. they killed the killer app (I forget its name - this was several years ago...) Heck: Adobe bought Aldus hoping to kill FreeHand, but was sued by Macromedia who had bought Altsys who actually owned the code! That's how Macromedia ended up with FH and Adobe with Ragemaker.
This is all such a horrible horrible mess.
You are correct about DW having the better rep (it's a VASTLY superior app to GoLive) but Adobe's sense of "turf" runs deep, and I would expect not the next version of DW (which will be whatever MM is working on now) but the version after that to completely suck great steaming tourdes thanks to Adobe's meddling.
Another interesting question is:
How and who will manage the macromedial fiefdom in Adobe?
Or will it be held (typically Adobe) so tightly that any sense of these products being independent and innovative is completely stifled?
Also: here's an evil clue - Microsoft was not the feared enemy, but perhaps Apple...
RS