This is land (and launch pads) leased from the Wallops Island facility. NASA has been launching stuff from there for decades.
You are right, though it's my understanding that the land was actually purchased, along with rights-of-way enabling vehicular traffic to the now privatized (at taxpayer expense) launch area. But even if it is leased, it's a privatization paid for by the citizens of the area in order to boost employment, which is a kind of a boondoggle. This is another means of getting money from taxpayers.
Lease (or purchase) land as a government (but local this time) agency, using taxpayer money.
Create a government agency to "privately" launch satellites using taxpayer money.
Hire the same people being used in the other government site next door because, after all, they're actual rocket scientists using taxpayer money.
Buy something all ready purchased by the taxpayer from the taxpayers by using taxpayer money (a launch vehicle).
Get a contract from a military agency that all ready has launch capability (not being used) by using taxpayer money.
Do the launch by using taxpayer money.
Put out a big PR marketing piece about the success of the launch by using taxpayer money.
Do you see a trend here? Looks like the taxpayers just got boondoggled out of roughly double the amount of money it would have taken in order to just use Vandenburg -- or Wallops run by NASA or Cape Canaveral (which, as it is closer to the Equator is more efficient), also run by NASA. You have a "chase of taxpayer monies" to pay for stuff all ready created by the taxpayer monies, all to supposedly increase employment in an economically-depressed area.
Frankly, I think just sending a check to the people in the area so that they might use the money to move out of the area would be cheaper.
The article states that the rocket used was cobbled together from unused military rockets. It also mentions that the area is depressed and is looking to bootstrap itself into economic health through this venture.
I see a fleecing of the taxpayer going on here, as the rocket used came from the military (all ready paid for by the taxpayer -- though its refurbishment for use with a satellite might not have been. I see the land being acquired at taxpayer expense and I see the first launch being paid for by the military who could have saved the taxpayer money by launching from their own spaceport or NASA's.
I do appreciate attempts to improve an area by building an industrial zone or a commercial zone to attract jobs and employ underemployed people in a particular locality but I don't see too many rocket scientists applying for unemployment compensation these days, and that is the kind of person a spaceport hires. Oh, yes, they'll need security personnel, ground maintenance personnel and construction workers to build the facility, but that's not the major thrust of a spaceport, and I'll just bet a military use for a spaceport would preclude the presence of a lot of civilians without security clearance..
No, this looks like a fiscal boondoggle to me. And with the recent change in the membership of the US House of Repesentatives and Senate, one wonders whether or not anything else will ever launch from there. A "commercial" site that is wholly dependant on the military is not viable on its own
Everyone here is talking as if Apple would be excoriated for vaporware. Vaporware is usually software, not hardware, though some hardware can be vapor -- just not usually.
The real reason why Apple doesn't promote blogging and also the real reason why Jobs is so careful to go after websites that predict (accurately sometimes) what Apple will be releasing is because Steve Jobs met and knew Adam Osbourne. While the effect that is named after his is urban legend, Jobs is very interested in not making a suicidal marketing mistake.
Apple is primarily a hardware company. they do not want to cannibalize present sales with announcements about future developments. And hardware development takes a lot of cash.
That got me wondering about their metrics (how they measure this).
From TFA: "...the worst spacecraft failure in the history of the Chinese space program" Is this the worst in dollar (Yuan) amounts lost by shareholders? It this the worst in terms of totality and completeness of loss of function (there are functions left on the spacecraft, as the Chinese believe they can force it to re-enter the atmosphere and prevent it from becoming "really expensive space junk") or is this the worst in terms of the amount of information known to the public -- in other words a PR disaster?
One would imagine that the Chinese government is still getting used to the fact that they do not operate in total secrecy as they did from the time of their revolution and complete takeover of the mainland until a few years after Mao's death, especially with respect to their space projects. They have, to use a fundamentally Chinese expression, "lost face," and in a big way here. I would expect internal purges after a discovery period to find out who caused what to happen, assuming they can sift through their data and discover precisely what did happen.
Remember how this started out - a sexual harassment lawsuit. I forget the details...
You do forget the details. How this all started out was an investigation into the Whitewater investments made by the Clintons while Bill was sitting in the Arkansas Governor's office.
This morphed, after Kenneth Starr took over as special prosecutor, into an allegation made by Paula Jones of sexual harrassment when he was Governor of Arkansas -- a case prosecuted under a law pushed through Congress by the Clinton Administration to make things more fair for women in the workplace (ironic, that). This is due to an apparent fascination Mr. Starr has with sex. He's the type of person who would pull as many strings as possible to place himself on a censorship board so that he could see all of the fascinating material that ought to be censored and save personal copies of that material that was left out due to his censorship.
With respect to free speech...
The Supreme Court has, over the lifetime of the United States, reined in this radical notion of "free speech." Mr. Starr will, doubtless, call the banner unfurled by Joseph Frederick an "action." You and I might see a sign that has words on it as "speech," or "press" if you want to stretch the issue of printing on a banner. But if you read all of the Supreme Court decisions that limit free speech, you'll see them redefined as "actions," not "speech."
Personally, when it comes to speech, I'm a radical. I would like to see the "act" of hollering "Fire!" in a crowded theater protected. I would also love to see those persons inconvenienced by the person who did that protected in their assault on that idiot (hoping that their assault was one of words). I would also like to see theaters allowed to prohibit the admission of those who might emit false alarms.
I am in favor of the ability of all citizens of majority age to view, trade, distribute and read pornographic materials showing really disgusting acts and bizarre behaviors -- as long as no person acting within those materials was under the age of 21 and as long as nobody was harmed in the actions (I would mention that nobody is ever harmed by textual documents). This puts me outside of the mainstream of thought. I'm not a total sleaze-bag who gathers materials like that -- I just think that restricting anything is a violation of rights. This First Amendment is problematic and, the framers of that Amendment wanted it to be problematic. They grew up in a society that tried to control political discourse so that nobody who accused the government of ill will towards its citizenry could be charged with a crime and silenced by a long tour of a cell in some prison.
Mr. Starr is a true conservative in the sense that the conservatives during our American Revolution wanted limits on speech and the press. I wish him well as the "marketplace of ideas" proves his conservative viewpoint absolutely and irretrievably wrong.
If you look at the demographics for Harley-Davidson ownership you will see two trends: First, the average age is older -- certainly not in their 20s -- and second, the average income hovers around $80,000 per annum, which is an income that tends to be earned in the peak of one's professional life and not at the beginning.
I am aware of this fact about HD riders not because I'm a motorcycle nut, but because certain "baby boomer" statistics tend to resurface regularly in the media.
The demographics of newspaper readers (and subscribers) is also older. This suggests that older people want to be better informed than younger people, though there is this trend towards reading blogs in both.
The title of the article suggests grandparenthood. I'm not a grandparent at this juncture, nor am I about to be in the near future. But I'm over 50, so that automatically suggests a few things. To the extent people who purchase Macintoshes these days are not in their 20s seems to indicate to me several factors:
They are better able to afford a new Macintosh.
They make decisions based on more input (better product education).
They don't like the fact that others' computers are harder to learn and use.
They like the integration between the hardware and operating system that Apple is selling.
They like the better quality of a Macintosh over the quality of other machines.
They regard it as a better investment than a pee cee that one will need to replace within 3 years.
They like feeling "hip" and "young."
In my case, I just wanted to be able to get my work done. I was tired of the problems I was constantly having with Microsoft's operating system. I had experienced Mac-envy for years and had enough money to buy a Macintosh. And, so, well before I was 50, I bought my first Mac. I don't plan to go back.
Apparently, a foreign government may protest his unlawful detention under the Geneva Convention. Of course the USA doesn't seem to think the Geneva Convention applies.
I thought the interview was great. It's a clear analysis of how the military tribunals have no relationship at all whatsoever to the civilian jurisdiction other than to agree with the political ends of the civilian jurisdiction. Recently, several prominant detainees were moved to Guantanamo in order to give the Bush administration "cover" for his proposal for the bill on these tribunals. Our contact at the CIA leaked a great dissatisfaction with this move, as torture is not the usual and customary treatment at Guantanamo and it is in the "black prisons" run by the CIA elsewhere.
Bush refers to the war in Iraq as part of the "War on Terror." But Iraq consumes 7 times the number of US troops as Afghanistan, which is where Osama bin Laden was living at the time of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. And the US is completely disinterested in putting more resources into Afghanistan.
I therefore conclude that the "War on Terror" is not an actual war. It is a re-election campaign designed to play on fears and uncertainty in the American public created by one actual event and a whole host of other phantoms created by a brand new Department of Homeland Security in order to perpetuate its existence.
Republicans supposedly stand for lower taxes and less government. The DHS is the largest increase in our bureaucracy since World War II. And it has to be paid for. The war in Iraq is costing our treasury $1 Billion monthly. It is entirely being debt-financed. Sooner or later that debt will have to be paid and there will be no dividend for the US taxpayer to help soften the blow. Last time we debt-financed a war, we had horrible inflation. That war was Vietnam and the inflation took the price of an average family sedan from $2,500 to $3,000 to over $10,000. The average family home grew in cost from $36,000 to $250,000. It used to be that if you made $35,000 yearly, you were doing great. (Please note, all of these prices are quoted in US Dollars).
This false war is being used to strip Americans of their rights, give the Executive Branch dictatorial power and rack up huge deficits. It has allowed one political party to "redistrict" the entire United States so that all members of that party have "safe" districts and almost never face any competitive elections.
In the meantime, military lawyers who question this military tribunal process find their careers sidelined and the road to promotion ended. Americans who question the conduct of the war (because nobody in our Congress will -- unless it is to whitewash the policies of this administration) are attacked for being unpatriotic, "partisan" or, at best, misinformed. Our administration classifies everything which leads any thinking individual to wonder what they have to hide.
I note that anonymous cowards are the only persons who tend to reply to these posts.
The coward posting the parent has obviously not read any history. Similar things have happened in the US and we have teetered on the edge of outright dictatorship a number of times. I would point out the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that were passed by the President's party and signed by the President in a time of "crisis" where it was felt that the United States would soon have to defend itself in a war with France. The Sedition Act of 1918 was passed by the President's own party and signed by the President during a time of actual war.
What you are assuming is that I am arguing for a Democratic or Republican cause. I suppose I could say I have never been a Federalist, having not lived back in the 1700s. And I am not sure if I am a Woodrow Wilson Democrat, not having lived in World War I and knowing that the Democratic Party back then stood for things that today's Democratic Party does not stand for, including racial segregation, Jim Crow laws in the South and other beliefs not tolerated in today's society.
What I am talking about is how a particular party overreaches when it sees no impediment to its power. In this case, the Republican Party has given the Executive Branch incredible power to violate the individual civil liberties of any person, whether citizen or non-citizen for its own ends without any check from another branch of government, including the Judiciary. In fact, if you read the law setting up the tribunals, these military courts have no relation to civilian courts and there is no provision for an appeal to any civilian court (something that an ordinary private or seaman does have under our military court system -- though rarely used).
Furthermore, when I speak of a political party, I am also referring to my father's comment, equating the actions of one political party in power in the US with the actions of one political party in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. When it comes right down to it, John Adams was handed the same extraordinary power to go after anyone he didn't like with impunity -- just as Hitler did. This gave Adams absolute dictatorial power over Americans as well as foreign nationals living in the country in the same way that the law currently gives GW Bush absolute power to imprison, detain, torture and hold any person he can lay his hands on and call "enemy combatant."
I am as troubled by this as I am of Woodrow Wilson's powers as stated in the Sedition Act of 1918 and for the same reason: It is an agressive challenge to the Bill of Rights in our Constitution -- something these Presidents and the members of Congress who passed these laws have sworn to uphold, protect and defend.
Now, I realize the poster was just "shooting from the hip," but a clear, dispassionate consideration here is urged.
I very quickly summarized the commentary here on why one would move from the US to several flamewars based on a lack of understanding of the culture in various non-US countries to arguments about tax burdens and arguments about what constitutes an addictive drug.
These are side-issues.
The reson one might be interested in leaving the US relates to something that my father shocked me by saying just some weeks ago.
He referred to the current administration in the US, along with their supporters in Congress at fascists.
Now, I respect my father. I'm not just out of his house and I'm not still reacting to the "awful way he treated me" when I "turned insane" shortly after puberty. My father has consistently earned my respect by tending to be right and by letting go of a lot of his own personal garbage. I also know that he lived through a time in which fascism was considered a viable political system in three countries in Europe -- with other countries admiring the "benefits" of a totalitarian regime that gives itself a pass for criminal activity. This is a serious and very shocking statement from a man who watched as the entire world fought against fascism and managed to win.
The US government is fascist due to several factors:
This preserves the "Law-Free Zone" set up in Guantanimo. These detainees are kept in isolation from US Courts who, if there is adequate proof would be all too happy to confirm that these people are dangerous. Camp X-Ray also serves as a zone where the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of Prisoners of War may be utterly ignored. We broke off relations with North Vietnam (and later, Vietnam) due to their treatment of US prisoners in a manner that ignored the Geneva Conventions.
The act also pardons everyone and anyone for all acts that violate the Geneva Conventions, including the procedure of Extraordinary Rendition and backdates that exemption from prosecution to September 11th, 2001.
The President and his Executive Branch are given full reign in defining what an "enemy combatant" is. I recall that Hitler regarded Jewish persons within Germany and the territories acquired by Germany, as well as allied countries as enemies of the state. Also, anyone giving material aid to any enemy was branded with the same. There was no Habeus Corpus in Germany and the courts were puppets of the state.
What I'm saying here is that we have a very serious situation in the US where civil rights have been nullified by a political party that considers self-examination wrong and unpatriotic (there have been no committees in either the House of Representatives or the Senate to examine the conduct of the "war on terror") and are fully prepared to negate the entire Bill of Rights in order to maintain their grip on political power.
Many Americans aren't aware of how their rights have been suspended. Those who are find it hard to continue to live here.
Countries who honor the rights of their citizens and who do not give their executive branch the right to run roughshod over the rights of minorities and persons who hold political beliefs that may differ may look a lot better than the US today for a citizen concerned with our present government.
He is not a Muslim student at a Madrassah somewhere in Pakistan studying only the Koran and nothing else, getting his mind filled with garbage about how he and his "civilization" are being "humiliated by the West."
That would be tomorrow's foreign terrorist.
He is not a second-generation UK citizen of Pakistani descent, disaffected, searching for his roots in his native culture, swept away by some hate-mongering quasi-mullah preaching about "humiliation" outside the Mosque after Friday Services
That would be today's recently-arrested would-be plane bomber.
Banh wants to actively engage the world. He wants to be challenged and, hate them as you will, lawyers are all about matching wits. He would be a formidable opponent to any lawyer with his other skills in physics and math.
I took two days to carefully pick out the hardware for our new patron lab and three of us spent a day chuncking stuff into the boxes after turning our boardroom into an assembly line for the day.
That is five man-days. I typically bill my services at the rate of $750 per day for what I do -- which is not IT. In other words, you may go higher and your particular expertise (all of the hardware was carefully researched for compatibility) may be worth more.
You are, in essence, proving my point that your time is valuable. Were I in need to putting together the particular "penguin" distro you are maintaining here, I'd be asking if you consult because I would know going in that I have a very reliable expert in you. Assuming you keep your skills current, you're probably underpaid and a very, very valuable asset to whatever company you work for.
But we're talking about the difference between a quality suit manufacturer here and someone like Mohan's Custom Tailors. With respect to suits, I am a "special application." I stand 6'5" tall and weigh around 170 pounds. In this world where "big and tall" means both at the same time, Mohan's is the only way for me to get a decent suit. One expects to pay a little more and one does, in the same sense that your company paid more for their computers and your expertise combined than they would have by purchasing an "off the rack" model from either Dell, Apple or Hewlett Packard.
I don't see a 25 to 50% cost premium with Apple's computers. Not in terms of their length of usefulness or their baseline cost. Back when they used to cost considerably more than PCs, I thought their OS and the ease of use was worth a 25% premium (they have never commanded a 50% premium over top-tier manufactured PCs to my recollection). Frankly, the value added you and your co-workers gave and continue to give to the custom computers you built is probably commanding more than a 50% premium over their cost.
You are actually my favorite kind of control freak. You want high quality and you are willing to invest your own time and make sure you get it.
But then there are people like my Aunt Jeanne who can't do that. They have to rely on the computer sellers to get it right the first time.
One thing I've been telling people for a long time is that Macintosh computers last longer. I purchased my current Mac in 1999 and it is still very useful. I can run the latest operating system software on my Mac. There are two applications that I cannot run on it currently that are of interest to me: Motion and Shake. Motion requires a faster processor than the one I have (a Sonnet 1GHz upgrade) and Shake requires at least a G5. Final Cut Pro HD will run on my machine, though I'm not currently working with it.
All other applications that I might use do run on my Mac and probably will for the forseeable future, which will allow me to still use my computer for another year -- though I would like to upgrade after Apple has all of the kinks out of the early Intel boxes.
A seven-year-old PC cannot usually run the latest operating system or applications because you cannot put enough RAM into the box to get it to do those things. My argument is that one should take useful life into account when figuring costs.
And I value jmorris42 (1458)'s time -- perhaps more than he does. It takes him time to research and purchase all of the components he needs for his high-quality homebrew computer. It, then, takes him time to assemble it. Dell and Apple both charge for their research and assembly, which is why both will cost more directly than the unassembled components.
My question for Apple is, will the new Intel boxes have useful lives for as long as their Power PC-based ones.
I also question the basis for the suggestion that Apple is losing market share or that their market share is flattening out. If you are logging which operating system is hitting your servers, you have to take into account the fact that Apple's included browser, Safari may be set up to masquarade as Microsoft Windows-based Internet Exploiter, thus reducing the frequency of hits that are known Macintosh computers.
I think both Apple and Dell are doing good innovation. And, while Apple may be winning some kind of price war presently, commodity pricing may be manipulated by working on the supply chaining as well as putting together exclusive contracts with certain key manufacturers. Apple seems to have a price edge today. They may not tomorrow. Frankly, I didn't buy an Apple computer because it was cheaper. I bought an Apple computer because I knew it was made by a top-tier manufacturer that supports its product and because I wanted to run Apple's operating system which, I believe, is easier to use than Microsoft's.
A long time ago, I attended courses taught by Joshua Meyrowitz at the University of New Hampshire. While I was there, he was working on a book entitled "Television and the Obliteration of Childhood" which appears to be either out-of-print or available at the University of North Carolina not in book form. His more recent "No Sense of Place" also speaks to this particular issue.
If Josh will be so kind as to correct any brain-scrambling on my part, it's his thesis that "childhood" may be defined as a limit on what one knows and/or can know and that, with enough knowledge one functions in society as an adult. Children, exposed to the same television programs as an adult, aren't "children," in the old-fashioned sense of the word as they are in posession of the same information that adults have. From an informational approach, videogames also serve as an "information leveler" like television and, in my case, may serve to actually increase the knowledge a child may have about the virtual world of videogames over that of an adult. I don't play video games, so my daughter may know more than me (though, at five she does not play any yet).
But just playing videogames does not necessarily confer information that is usable in society, though a recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggested that children who play games have a better chance at figuring out a risk-reward scenerio than those who do not.
So if you define "childhood" as playing ball or running around the block or playing kick the can and hide and seek, you may be on to something with respect to childhood's end. But I prefer Dr. Meyrowitz's definition. Because playing games in childhood (and adulthood) is normal behavior, whether real or virtual. My only concern about game-playing from the standpoint of a parent is that it not be something that atrophies muscles. There needs to be game-playing in childhood experience that builds muscles, too.
I personally do not believe there is any real merit in trying to consolidate everything into one box. When I say everything I mean: computer, game console, visual media center, audio media center, all things that are audo-visual in nature beyond a book. The problem that you will ultimately experience is that this one unit for all services becomes a choke point in your house, unless you only have one room. It is very common in my multi-user domestic facility to have a stereo on in one room, a television on in another (with computer) and a third location that is computer only (needs more concentration).
I like your points. There seems to be this struggle between having intelligence in every device and some monolithic intelligence being the central repository of one's household's data and control.
Where a "media computer" really works is as a central server. I can share my iTunes music library (to the extent the DRM allows) with everyone in my home by using Apple's AirPort Express in locations where I would like to have audio distributed. This uses my Apple computer as a central server, if you will, for music (or media) distributed to "dumb" devices throughout my home.
Where a central server is not used is where one has a TiVo with their television, a stereo with an iPod dock, a computer, and a game console, where each device contains its own CPU and its own operating system and user interface and the user has to learn each device seperately.
Where Jobs may be going is in a direction where one learns a simple interface (Macintosh) and one is able, through the use of a central repository for data and control, to use that interface for many purposes. Jobs obviously believes that there is value in his design for User Interface and this will sell Apple's products. Apple's ability to innovate with industrial design should make the product enjoyable to have anywhere in one's home, assuming Jobs intends to project the Apple logo into the living room.
Where you get into a choke-point is where Apple seems to not do too well, which is in the area of gaming. Apple's Macintosh computers suffer from few games as compared to their Windoze competitors. One of the selling points for Apple's new Macs is that it can boot into Windoze XP as well as Apple's OS X, which sounds to me like a capitulation in that area.
But in the distributed processing model, you simply hook your X-Box 360 or your Nintendo up to your Apple high-definition monitor and you're good to go, using a KVM switch to switch the monitor from one input to another.
Bill Gates once stated that the television viewer is more passive than a computer user. The two are seperate pursuits. Apple seems to be disagreeing with Gates' statement in releasing larger and larger monitors for Macintosh computers and begging the concept that they might be used in the living room for entertainment as well.
From my standpoint, I like the large monitors. I work professionally in television post-production and large monitors are the kind of thing that really warms up an agency client who can see them even from the back couch of an edit facility. But the main monitor these days tends to be a projection monitor or a really huge LCD or plasma display. But the client tends to want to look over an editor's shoulder and "feel like they are a part of the action." In my opinion as an editor, the large monitor allows me a larger pallette of tools on-screen so that I can easily access any desired effect. Frankly, having someone nursemaid my work is not really necessary for someone with my experience in making good television or film.
But that has nothing to do with the living room, which is where Jobs seems to be headed, according to the rumors.
For our U.S.-based business, we simply blacklist all email from IP addresses outside the U.S. and Canada. We do not do business with any foreign interests, so we receive no legitimate email from other countries. This cuts our spam load by about 70 percent.
Increasingly, businesses in the US and Canada will find it impossible to do this (depending one one's business). The economy and business is global and, as time goes forward most non-local industries will need to be able to communicate across national boundaries. The spammers know this.
It used to be that you could safely block all e-mail from China. Multinationals can't do that any more. They're in China and are opening markets in many of the countries where spammers used to (and still do) operate freely.
Of course, if what you are doing is local lawn care, or dry cleaning for your locality, you'll be able to safely block anything from outside of the US (or your own nation). But many businesses are increasingly needing to find markets, services and suppliers internationally.
matt328, you are right, of course about the bloat.
And, you are right about us not needing that large a program just to get on-line.
But there are people who feel intimidated by all of this technology, who probably don't frequent Slashdot who really needed the bloated program to be able to figure it out. And one of them was my aunt.
With AO-Hell (3.0 and forward), she discovered the joys of e-mailing grandchildren (as well as nephews) and staying in closer touch with them. I sent her photos in my e-mails and her grandson showed her how to look at them and download them from my e-mails and look at them. This was a wonderful thing for her.
My aunt is now using a regular ISP and has a really good command of many of the same applications for access that we all have. But the handholding and extensive support available from AO-Hell and her grandson gave her the confidence necessary to function in the 21st century with modern technology.
I should mention that my aunt (and her younger brother, my father) grew up without electricity. The REA didn't get out to my grandparents' farmhouse until after my father went to college. So a lot of this modern technology is pretty advanced for someone who went from a childhood where electric lights were only available in town to instant high-speed connectivity almost anywhere all of the time. Neat thing is, one doesn't have to wait for the postal service to get the mail. One also doesn't have to find a stamp to send a note or a photo.
These animated characters are trademarked, not "copyrighted." The Disney version of these stories are copyrighted, as are most books.
You are completely allowed to reinterpret the generally available fairy tales that Disney has made millions from. You are not allowed to use Disney's trademarked characters to tell your story.
It's kind of like what would happen were you (or someone) to steal the formula for Coca-Cola. You can make a batch of soft drink, but you cannot use the Coca-Cola's trademarked bottle, nor their trademarked script to sell your soft drink. And, because you cannot do that, you could never hope to really challenge that company in the marketplace (and I'll bet people would claim that your soft drink tastes different than Coke).
Were you to publish an account of your war with Disney (to use an example) and then to die, your inheritors (and/or estate) would have a right to continue to publish your account and make a profit off of it. A great example of this is Charles Schulz's Peanuts characters which are, today, published daily as Peanuts Classics in newspapers, even though "Sparky" Schulz (Stanley Applebaum) passed away, the last original Peanuts strip published on 3 January, 2000. Schulz, in his will, demanded that there be no new strip creation after his death. His family and his estate both make a lot of money from this popular comic. His characters are trademarked. His strip is copyrighted.
It now says the chances of tomorrow's planned shuttle launch being scrapped are going up because of storms expected to hit central Florida.
Shuttle weather officer Kathy Winters says there's a 60 percent chance bad weather will force a scrub, up 20 percent from yesterday.
Winters says they're still hoping the sea breeze will push the storms far enough away for Atlantis to take off at 4:30 p-m, Eastern.
She says the weather looks better Monday and Tuesday, in case tomorrow is a no-go.
NASA officials are also checking to see if a lightning strike yesterday at the launch pad caused any damage.
If Hurricane Ernesto hits the gulf coast and Mission Control in Houston has to evacuate, the shuttle astronauts will spend that time just marking time. There is no backup for Mission Control in Houston.
I have never known a Ph.D. that did not have a particular axe to grind. Dr. Thompson would seem to be anti-computer games (entirely, not just the violent ones).
From TFA: it is important to keep in mind is that games rated E are played by children as young as 2 and 3 years old, and the developmental psychology literature indicates that young children do not have the developmental capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy until approximately age 6 or 7
I have a five-year-old little girl. She does watch television (mostly childrens' television but also a certain amount of "Boomerang" with their "horribly violent" Tom & Jerry cartoons. She has never played one video game. Never.
Perhaps it's because I'm old, ancient, decrepit, almost a complete fossil that she has no access to video games. I must be a totally mean and nasty daddy, according to Dr. Thompson. Here I have been consciously, deliberately and with evil intent parenting my daughter in such a way so as to limit her experiences with things like television, video games and other forms of childhood entertainment. Gawd, I must be completely horrid!!
But I think not.
There is one program that my little girl watches called "Dora The Explorer." She likes that show because there is a problem to solve and a map to follow. There's also the odd Spanish word and I want her to know that there are languages other than English that she can learn. Dora also exists on-line as a video game and for sale on Nickelodeon Jr.'s website (Please note, this site will cause popups on some browsers). The television show has many video game aspects to it, complete with mouse cursors and highlit objects when chosen. My daughter has seen me and her mother on the computer but we're both waiting for her to read before we even think about exposing her to the on-line stuff for children available on the Internet.
And even then, we don't plan to expose her to video games until she is past what Dr. Thompson considers an age where she can determine fantasy from reality (though at age 5, she does know the difference).
Perhaps there is a fantasy that Dr. Thompson has that needs exploring -- mainly: if there is a video game out there, all children of all ages will be playing it all of the time. As a parent, I'm happy to disabuse the good Doctor of her fantasy.
My little girl needs to have a solid grounding in the kinds of things she can do not-on-line, like coloring, learning to read, learning to write, playing at the park, learning to swim, drawing, playing with stuffed animals and dolls and using her imagination. She'll have plenty of years for those things her horrid daddy is neglecting to expose her to.
So I suppose I would tend to have the same bias as the Doctor. My daughter doesn't do video games. But the reason why she doesn't do them is not due to some game rating system but, rather, to my parenting (or my being a total meanie who just doesn't understand the need for children to be constantly fiddling with a mouse or joystick instead of getting enough exercise to build muscles). Dr. Thompson is inherently ignoring the ability of parents to "just say no," when it comes to things that won't assist in the development of their children.
Perhaps I'm totally out of touch with the needs of children these days. But I think my daughter will not be stunted in any way in her growth.
I used a Canon GL-2 camera for videoconferencing for a while. It's currently living a different life doing more mundane things but I did notice a few things.
Close-miking is important so that there is no question of what you are saying and what you are saying doesn't get drowned out by the ambient sound in your room.
But the consistently best picture I got was by using high-intensity lamps (desk and other variety) that have bulbs that produce 3200K white light (it's actually yellow but cameras, when set for "indoor" will naturally white balance to it).
Of course the best is a set of Lowel lights that are properly set, but one is hardly going to do a casual videoconference with a $1,000 kit of lights. But incorporating a couple of high-intensity lights and, perhaps, bouncing the light off a white wall or reflector onto your face will create a really nice image that will show up very well in a videoconference.
The current state-of-the-art in terms of technology and software is the Apple solution. I'd imagine Microsoft will try to challenge the Apple iSight and iChat AV solution in their upcoming Vista and I'd imagine the Open Source community will have a rather heterogenous hodgepodge of stuff that will work, but the proprietary vendors will probably lead the way in this instance.
Remember Cornell's CU-See-Me? It got bought out by White Pine Software.
You are absolutely correct. We don't do what we used to back when there was journalism on television. And one university professor told me that when the large corporations demanded that the news shows pay for themselves, that was the end of any attempt at journalism as a public service.
It's sad.
Of course, there is no rebuttal from the parent poster because the lunatic fringe don't like it when they're proven wrong.
Just recently, Bush announced that the real loser of the Israel-Lebanon war was Hezbollah. I think the facts are, daily, proving him wrong and that Hezbollah and their partners-in-crime, Iran, will find their status in the region ascendant. Israel will be seen as the real loser here and the ability of the US to broker so much as a roast beef sandwich in the Middle East has been utterly destroyed. The only thing we do there is to provide Israel with "cover" for their incitements (like today's attack in violation of the cease-fire agreement they just signed) and prevent the UN from taking any real steps to achieve peace in the region.
Ramtek, I think the parent was using common sense.
First a disclaimer: I work for an American television network in the news division. You will not see my commentary on our news report because we have been pandering to this Administration (and no, we're not Fox, which does not do news).
The Bush administration's talking point is to say that these people (being wiretapped) are calling Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda is calling them.
The reason why we have a judge approve a wiretap is to provide for a check on this very issue: What the administration says may or may not be true here. How do we (the public) know that on one end of the telephone is an Al Qaeda operative? The Bush administration is not exactly giving the American public a listing of the telephone numbers in question, nor the owners of those numbers.
Many people on Slashdot feel (at this point) that the Bush Administration has lied to the American public in the past. I was certain, prior to our attack on Iraq, that the Bush Administration was lying about the Weapons of Mass Destruction in that country. Today, only the lunatic fringe, like Ann Coulter and Dick Cheny still say that there were WMDs in Iraq. I was certain, despite the fact that I am not a CIA operative, because I use common sense. Saddam Hussein was very reluctant to tell anyone that he had no such weaponry because his enemy, to the east of him, was listening in. When he publically stated that he had no such weaponry (some five weeks before the US invasion) and cooperated with the UN inspectors, it was an absolute humiliation for him in the eyes of all hard-line Arab countries in the region.
There is no way he would have done that were he not telling the truth.
Another key phrase and "talking point" from the Bush administration prior to the was was "Regime Change." Bush set us on a course for invasion when he first uttered those words, a good four months before the invasion. Bush was lying when he said the US would do everything in our power to avert a war in Iraq after he set us on the course of regime change.
Another key was Bush's new "doctrine of pre-emption." No American President has ever told other countries that if they did something provocative that they would be invaded. To offer this novel doctrine is to declare the end of diplomacy as an American tool to protect our interests. Bush publically announced that the United States is now the bully on the playground who will slug first, ask questions later. This doctrine completely and absolutely justifies the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as it was a pre-emptive strike (not followed by an invasion) to try to get us to sell them our oil and to end our embargo on Japan for their war with China. No President with any sense at all would set a precident like that, as it particularly endangers Americans abroad as well as the nation as a whole. Our "doctrine of pre-emption" may be safely adopted by any country that opposes us now.
Now, why would anyone believe this guy about anything he says. If he went out and swore on a stack of his overtly fundamentalist-Christian bibles that he was not wiretapping my calls, I'd stop using the telephone all together.
Despite the fact that you may disagree with this, due to your own political stance, all of this is logical, rational and sensible. Currently, most Americans believe that Bush lied about Iraq. If he lied about Iraq, don't you think that it would be appropriate to apply Constitutional limitations on this President (just like is required of all other Presidents since Washington) to have a judge make sure he is (actually the NSA operatives acting on his behalf are) not lying in each of these wiretapping cases?
I lost ten good friends on September 11th. Osama bin Ladin is still laughing at America and his network is, today, stronger than ever. Case in point is the fact that we now have regular second-generation well-educated English citizens (of Pakistani descent) planning to carry out a co
Pardon my recent cultural illiteracy but I just heard that Tommy Chong was thrown into federal prison for 9 months for selling glass bongs to a DEA-run headshop in Pennsylvania. This use of this technology is a solution in search of a problem.
Tommy just published a book called The I Chong, half of which I read in about an hour and a half. I won't provide a link because most links are to booksellers like Amazon that don't pay authors appropriately.
I believe Mr. Chong is completely justified in sayng that his arrest and prosecution, along with his sentence was a clear-cut example of a police state action.
This technology ought to be used in a defensive manner to defend the US borders and to prevent terrorism being practiced within the US. Instead, it is being mis-used to fight a "war" on substances that were made illegal in order to discriminate against persons of color.
Re:Apple opted for poor quality when they chose In
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why not use AMD or Sun 64 bit processors if you're moving off the PowerPC? They're cooler, lower power, and arguably better performing.
I think one of the big issues was low power chips for laptops. You will note that the first Intel-based Macs were low-power cool chips like you would use in a laptop. (I am trying to include the iMacs and Mac Minis here which seem to be midway between laptops and desktops).
Another reason is that Intel makes a lot of the support chips that surround the processor. Apple most certainly used their clout as a first-tier manufacturer to demand a motherboard model that would really scream. They also certainly demanded to be "the first on the block" with Intel's newest technology -- at least for a certain amount of time.
I would also imagine that Apple wanted to get on board with Intel with a minimum of reinvestment and re-engineering. I do recall that IBM developed the bus structure for the G5 Mini-towers and it came from their midrange and mainframe products. Apple will, presumably, add value in the form of engineering innovation as time moves forward -- or they may just choose to be the first on the block with any new Intel innovations.
This is not to suggest that AMD does not innovate. They're a good company and they make excellent products. Without AMD, I don't think Intel would be as innovative or driven as they are. But in view of all of what Intel offers in making a motherboard for a computer, it was a good choice.
Despite Microsoft's Windoze vulnerabilities, we may be running some pretty old code for a while. We're international and pretty reluctant to export technology and software to certain countries, like Russia and China.
Most of our desktops that run Microsoft Office applications are running Windows 2000 Pro. We have a few high-end workstations that run XP and they may be upgraded to XP-64 if we can solve a particular problem with some software (there are no 64-bit Quicktime codecs for Windoze and we're reliant on Quicktime for a lot of our media files as it can deal with keying).
Our servers range from pee cees running Windoze to pee cees running Linux to Apple X-Serves. But on the desktop, we're still using some pretty old code because it's too expensive to upgrade and there is the potential that we'd be exporting a means by which someone may pirate Microsoft software.
Slashdot Mirror
This is land (and launch pads) leased from the Wallops Island facility. NASA has been launching stuff from there for decades.
You are right, though it's my understanding that the land was actually purchased, along with rights-of-way enabling vehicular traffic to the now privatized (at taxpayer expense) launch area. But even if it is leased, it's a privatization paid for by the citizens of the area in order to boost employment, which is a kind of a boondoggle. This is another means of getting money from taxpayers.
Lease (or purchase) land as a government (but local this time) agency, using taxpayer money.
Create a government agency to "privately" launch satellites using taxpayer money.
Hire the same people being used in the other government site next door because, after all, they're actual rocket scientists using taxpayer money.
Buy something all ready purchased by the taxpayer from the taxpayers by using taxpayer money (a launch vehicle).
Get a contract from a military agency that all ready has launch capability (not being used) by using taxpayer money.
Do the launch by using taxpayer money.
Put out a big PR marketing piece about the success of the launch by using taxpayer money.
Do you see a trend here? Looks like the taxpayers just got boondoggled out of roughly double the amount of money it would have taken in order to just use Vandenburg -- or Wallops run by NASA or Cape Canaveral (which, as it is closer to the Equator is more efficient), also run by NASA. You have a "chase of taxpayer monies" to pay for stuff all ready created by the taxpayer monies, all to supposedly increase employment in an economically-depressed area.
Frankly, I think just sending a check to the people in the area so that they might use the money to move out of the area would be cheaper.
The article states that the rocket used was cobbled together from unused military rockets. It also mentions that the area is depressed and is looking to bootstrap itself into economic health through this venture.
I see a fleecing of the taxpayer going on here, as the rocket used came from the military (all ready paid for by the taxpayer -- though its refurbishment for use with a satellite might not have been. I see the land being acquired at taxpayer expense and I see the first launch being paid for by the military who could have saved the taxpayer money by launching from their own spaceport or NASA's.
I do appreciate attempts to improve an area by building an industrial zone or a commercial zone to attract jobs and employ underemployed people in a particular locality but I don't see too many rocket scientists applying for unemployment compensation these days, and that is the kind of person a spaceport hires. Oh, yes, they'll need security personnel, ground maintenance personnel and construction workers to build the facility, but that's not the major thrust of a spaceport, and I'll just bet a military use for a spaceport would preclude the presence of a lot of civilians without security clearance..
No, this looks like a fiscal boondoggle to me. And with the recent change in the membership of the US House of Repesentatives and Senate, one wonders whether or not anything else will ever launch from there. A "commercial" site that is wholly dependant on the military is not viable on its own
Everyone here is talking as if Apple would be excoriated for vaporware. Vaporware is usually software, not hardware, though some hardware can be vapor -- just not usually.
The real reason why Apple doesn't promote blogging and also the real reason why Jobs is so careful to go after websites that predict (accurately sometimes) what Apple will be releasing is because Steve Jobs met and knew Adam Osbourne. While the effect that is named after his is urban legend, Jobs is very interested in not making a suicidal marketing mistake.
Apple is primarily a hardware company. they do not want to cannibalize present sales with announcements about future developments. And hardware development takes a lot of cash.
That got me wondering about their metrics (how they measure this).
From TFA: "...the worst spacecraft failure in the history of the Chinese space program" Is this the worst in dollar (Yuan) amounts lost by shareholders? It this the worst in terms of totality and completeness of loss of function (there are functions left on the spacecraft, as the Chinese believe they can force it to re-enter the atmosphere and prevent it from becoming "really expensive space junk") or is this the worst in terms of the amount of information known to the public -- in other words a PR disaster?
One would imagine that the Chinese government is still getting used to the fact that they do not operate in total secrecy as they did from the time of their revolution and complete takeover of the mainland until a few years after Mao's death, especially with respect to their space projects. They have, to use a fundamentally Chinese expression, "lost face," and in a big way here. I would expect internal purges after a discovery period to find out who caused what to happen, assuming they can sift through their data and discover precisely what did happen.
'Scuse me?
Remember how this started out - a sexual harassment lawsuit. I forget the details ...
You do forget the details. How this all started out was an investigation into the Whitewater investments made by the Clintons while Bill was sitting in the Arkansas Governor's office.
This morphed, after Kenneth Starr took over as special prosecutor, into an allegation made by Paula Jones of sexual harrassment when he was Governor of Arkansas -- a case prosecuted under a law pushed through Congress by the Clinton Administration to make things more fair for women in the workplace (ironic, that). This is due to an apparent fascination Mr. Starr has with sex. He's the type of person who would pull as many strings as possible to place himself on a censorship board so that he could see all of the fascinating material that ought to be censored and save personal copies of that material that was left out due to his censorship.
With respect to free speech...
The Supreme Court has, over the lifetime of the United States, reined in this radical notion of "free speech." Mr. Starr will, doubtless, call the banner unfurled by Joseph Frederick an "action." You and I might see a sign that has words on it as "speech," or "press" if you want to stretch the issue of printing on a banner. But if you read all of the Supreme Court decisions that limit free speech, you'll see them redefined as "actions," not "speech."
Personally, when it comes to speech, I'm a radical. I would like to see the "act" of hollering "Fire!" in a crowded theater protected. I would also love to see those persons inconvenienced by the person who did that protected in their assault on that idiot (hoping that their assault was one of words). I would also like to see theaters allowed to prohibit the admission of those who might emit false alarms.
I am in favor of the ability of all citizens of majority age to view, trade, distribute and read pornographic materials showing really disgusting acts and bizarre behaviors -- as long as no person acting within those materials was under the age of 21 and as long as nobody was harmed in the actions (I would mention that nobody is ever harmed by textual documents). This puts me outside of the mainstream of thought. I'm not a total sleaze-bag who gathers materials like that -- I just think that restricting anything is a violation of rights. This First Amendment is problematic and, the framers of that Amendment wanted it to be problematic. They grew up in a society that tried to control political discourse so that nobody who accused the government of ill will towards its citizenry could be charged with a crime and silenced by a long tour of a cell in some prison.
I would recommend that all persons concerned with this issue read John Wirenius' excellent book on freedom of speech as well as Richard N. Rosenfeld's The American Aurora (review) which should, hopefully, provide a bit of an educational background for the context of freedom of speech.
Mr. Starr is a true conservative in the sense that the conservatives during our American Revolution wanted limits on speech and the press. I wish him well as the "marketplace of ideas" proves his conservative viewpoint absolutely and irretrievably wrong.
If you look at the demographics for Harley-Davidson ownership you will see two trends: First, the average age is older -- certainly not in their 20s -- and second, the average income hovers around $80,000 per annum, which is an income that tends to be earned in the peak of one's professional life and not at the beginning.
I am aware of this fact about HD riders not because I'm a motorcycle nut, but because certain "baby boomer" statistics tend to resurface regularly in the media.
The demographics of newspaper readers (and subscribers) is also older. This suggests that older people want to be better informed than younger people, though there is this trend towards reading blogs in both.
The title of the article suggests grandparenthood. I'm not a grandparent at this juncture, nor am I about to be in the near future. But I'm over 50, so that automatically suggests a few things. To the extent people who purchase Macintoshes these days are not in their 20s seems to indicate to me several factors:
They are better able to afford a new Macintosh.
They make decisions based on more input (better product education).
They don't like the fact that others' computers are harder to learn and use.
They like the integration between the hardware and operating system that Apple is selling.
They like the better quality of a Macintosh over the quality of other machines.
They regard it as a better investment than a pee cee that one will need to replace within 3 years.
They like feeling "hip" and "young."
In my case, I just wanted to be able to get my work done. I was tired of the problems I was constantly having with Microsoft's operating system. I had experienced Mac-envy for years and had enough money to buy a Macintosh. And, so, well before I was 50, I bought my first Mac. I don't plan to go back.
Apparently, a foreign government may protest his unlawful detention under the Geneva Convention. Of course the USA doesn't seem to think the Geneva Convention applies.
I thought the interview was great. It's a clear analysis of how the military tribunals have no relationship at all whatsoever to the civilian jurisdiction other than to agree with the political ends of the civilian jurisdiction. Recently, several prominant detainees were moved to Guantanamo in order to give the Bush administration "cover" for his proposal for the bill on these tribunals. Our contact at the CIA leaked a great dissatisfaction with this move, as torture is not the usual and customary treatment at Guantanamo and it is in the "black prisons" run by the CIA elsewhere.
Bush refers to the war in Iraq as part of the "War on Terror." But Iraq consumes 7 times the number of US troops as Afghanistan, which is where Osama bin Laden was living at the time of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. And the US is completely disinterested in putting more resources into Afghanistan.
I therefore conclude that the "War on Terror" is not an actual war. It is a re-election campaign designed to play on fears and uncertainty in the American public created by one actual event and a whole host of other phantoms created by a brand new Department of Homeland Security in order to perpetuate its existence.
Republicans supposedly stand for lower taxes and less government. The DHS is the largest increase in our bureaucracy since World War II. And it has to be paid for. The war in Iraq is costing our treasury $1 Billion monthly. It is entirely being debt-financed. Sooner or later that debt will have to be paid and there will be no dividend for the US taxpayer to help soften the blow. Last time we debt-financed a war, we had horrible inflation. That war was Vietnam and the inflation took the price of an average family sedan from $2,500 to $3,000 to over $10,000. The average family home grew in cost from $36,000 to $250,000. It used to be that if you made $35,000 yearly, you were doing great. (Please note, all of these prices are quoted in US Dollars).
This false war is being used to strip Americans of their rights, give the Executive Branch dictatorial power and rack up huge deficits. It has allowed one political party to "redistrict" the entire United States so that all members of that party have "safe" districts and almost never face any competitive elections.
In the meantime, military lawyers who question this military tribunal process find their careers sidelined and the road to promotion ended. Americans who question the conduct of the war (because nobody in our Congress will -- unless it is to whitewash the policies of this administration) are attacked for being unpatriotic, "partisan" or, at best, misinformed. Our administration classifies everything which leads any thinking individual to wonder what they have to hide.
Fascism, indeed.
I note that anonymous cowards are the only persons who tend to reply to these posts.
The coward posting the parent has obviously not read any history. Similar things have happened in the US and we have teetered on the edge of outright dictatorship a number of times. I would point out the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that were passed by the President's party and signed by the President in a time of "crisis" where it was felt that the United States would soon have to defend itself in a war with France. The Sedition Act of 1918 was passed by the President's own party and signed by the President during a time of actual war.
What you are assuming is that I am arguing for a Democratic or Republican cause. I suppose I could say I have never been a Federalist, having not lived back in the 1700s. And I am not sure if I am a Woodrow Wilson Democrat, not having lived in World War I and knowing that the Democratic Party back then stood for things that today's Democratic Party does not stand for, including racial segregation, Jim Crow laws in the South and other beliefs not tolerated in today's society.
What I am talking about is how a particular party overreaches when it sees no impediment to its power. In this case, the Republican Party has given the Executive Branch incredible power to violate the individual civil liberties of any person, whether citizen or non-citizen for its own ends without any check from another branch of government, including the Judiciary. In fact, if you read the law setting up the tribunals, these military courts have no relation to civilian courts and there is no provision for an appeal to any civilian court (something that an ordinary private or seaman does have under our military court system -- though rarely used).
Furthermore, when I speak of a political party, I am also referring to my father's comment, equating the actions of one political party in power in the US with the actions of one political party in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. When it comes right down to it, John Adams was handed the same extraordinary power to go after anyone he didn't like with impunity -- just as Hitler did. This gave Adams absolute dictatorial power over Americans as well as foreign nationals living in the country in the same way that the law currently gives GW Bush absolute power to imprison, detain, torture and hold any person he can lay his hands on and call "enemy combatant."
I am as troubled by this as I am of Woodrow Wilson's powers as stated in the Sedition Act of 1918 and for the same reason: It is an agressive challenge to the Bill of Rights in our Constitution -- something these Presidents and the members of Congress who passed these laws have sworn to uphold, protect and defend.
Now, I realize the poster was just "shooting from the hip," but a clear, dispassionate consideration here is urged.
I very quickly summarized the commentary here on why one would move from the US to several flamewars based on a lack of understanding of the culture in various non-US countries to arguments about tax burdens and arguments about what constitutes an addictive drug.
These are side-issues.
The reson one might be interested in leaving the US relates to something that my father shocked me by saying just some weeks ago.
He referred to the current administration in the US, along with their supporters in Congress at fascists.
Now, I respect my father. I'm not just out of his house and I'm not still reacting to the "awful way he treated me" when I "turned insane" shortly after puberty. My father has consistently earned my respect by tending to be right and by letting go of a lot of his own personal garbage. I also know that he lived through a time in which fascism was considered a viable political system in three countries in Europe -- with other countries admiring the "benefits" of a totalitarian regime that gives itself a pass for criminal activity. This is a serious and very shocking statement from a man who watched as the entire world fought against fascism and managed to win.
The US government is fascist due to several factors:
The Military Commissions Act of 2006(PDF Alert), which was signed by Bush on October 17, 2006 suspends the writ of Habeus Corpus in a time that is definitely not a national emergency.
This preserves the "Law-Free Zone" set up in Guantanimo. These detainees are kept in isolation from US Courts who, if there is adequate proof would be all too happy to confirm that these people are dangerous. Camp X-Ray also serves as a zone where the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of Prisoners of War may be utterly ignored. We broke off relations with North Vietnam (and later, Vietnam) due to their treatment of US prisoners in a manner that ignored the Geneva Conventions.
The act also pardons everyone and anyone for all acts that violate the Geneva Conventions, including the procedure of Extraordinary Rendition and backdates that exemption from prosecution to September 11th, 2001.
The President and his Executive Branch are given full reign in defining what an "enemy combatant" is. I recall that Hitler regarded Jewish persons within Germany and the territories acquired by Germany, as well as allied countries as enemies of the state. Also, anyone giving material aid to any enemy was branded with the same. There was no Habeus Corpus in Germany and the courts were puppets of the state.
What I'm saying here is that we have a very serious situation in the US where civil rights have been nullified by a political party that considers self-examination wrong and unpatriotic (there have been no committees in either the House of Representatives or the Senate to examine the conduct of the "war on terror") and are fully prepared to negate the entire Bill of Rights in order to maintain their grip on political power.
Many Americans aren't aware of how their rights have been suspended. Those who are find it hard to continue to live here.
Countries who honor the rights of their citizens and who do not give their executive branch the right to run roughshod over the rights of minorities and persons who hold political beliefs that may differ may look a lot better than the US today for a citizen concerned with our present government.
He is not a Muslim student at a Madrassah somewhere in Pakistan studying only the Koran and nothing else, getting his mind filled with garbage about how he and his "civilization" are being "humiliated by the West."
That would be tomorrow's foreign terrorist.
He is not a second-generation UK citizen of Pakistani descent, disaffected, searching for his roots in his native culture, swept away by some hate-mongering quasi-mullah preaching about "humiliation" outside the Mosque after Friday Services
That would be today's recently-arrested would-be plane bomber.
Banh wants to actively engage the world. He wants to be challenged and, hate them as you will, lawyers are all about matching wits. He would be a formidable opponent to any lawyer with his other skills in physics and math.
In other words, he'll terrorize lawyers
Now, this is bad, why?
jmorris42 (1458) writes:
I took two days to carefully pick out the hardware for our new patron lab and three of us spent a day chuncking stuff into the boxes after turning our boardroom into an assembly line for the day.
That is five man-days. I typically bill my services at the rate of $750 per day for what I do -- which is not IT. In other words, you may go higher and your particular expertise (all of the hardware was carefully researched for compatibility) may be worth more.
You are, in essence, proving my point that your time is valuable. Were I in need to putting together the particular "penguin" distro you are maintaining here, I'd be asking if you consult because I would know going in that I have a very reliable expert in you. Assuming you keep your skills current, you're probably underpaid and a very, very valuable asset to whatever company you work for.
But we're talking about the difference between a quality suit manufacturer here and someone like Mohan's Custom Tailors. With respect to suits, I am a "special application." I stand 6'5" tall and weigh around 170 pounds. In this world where "big and tall" means both at the same time, Mohan's is the only way for me to get a decent suit. One expects to pay a little more and one does, in the same sense that your company paid more for their computers and your expertise combined than they would have by purchasing an "off the rack" model from either Dell, Apple or Hewlett Packard.
I don't see a 25 to 50% cost premium with Apple's computers. Not in terms of their length of usefulness or their baseline cost. Back when they used to cost considerably more than PCs, I thought their OS and the ease of use was worth a 25% premium (they have never commanded a 50% premium over top-tier manufactured PCs to my recollection). Frankly, the value added you and your co-workers gave and continue to give to the custom computers you built is probably commanding more than a 50% premium over their cost.
You are actually my favorite kind of control freak. You want high quality and you are willing to invest your own time and make sure you get it.
But then there are people like my Aunt Jeanne who can't do that. They have to rely on the computer sellers to get it right the first time.
One thing I've been telling people for a long time is that Macintosh computers last longer. I purchased my current Mac in 1999 and it is still very useful. I can run the latest operating system software on my Mac. There are two applications that I cannot run on it currently that are of interest to me: Motion and Shake. Motion requires a faster processor than the one I have (a Sonnet 1GHz upgrade) and Shake requires at least a G5. Final Cut Pro HD will run on my machine, though I'm not currently working with it.
All other applications that I might use do run on my Mac and probably will for the forseeable future, which will allow me to still use my computer for another year -- though I would like to upgrade after Apple has all of the kinks out of the early Intel boxes.
A seven-year-old PC cannot usually run the latest operating system or applications because you cannot put enough RAM into the box to get it to do those things. My argument is that one should take useful life into account when figuring costs.
And I value jmorris42 (1458)'s time -- perhaps more than he does. It takes him time to research and purchase all of the components he needs for his high-quality homebrew computer. It, then, takes him time to assemble it. Dell and Apple both charge for their research and assembly, which is why both will cost more directly than the unassembled components.
My question for Apple is, will the new Intel boxes have useful lives for as long as their Power PC-based ones.
I also question the basis for the suggestion that Apple is losing market share or that their market share is flattening out. If you are logging which operating system is hitting your servers, you have to take into account the fact that Apple's included browser, Safari may be set up to masquarade as Microsoft Windows-based Internet Exploiter, thus reducing the frequency of hits that are known Macintosh computers.
I think both Apple and Dell are doing good innovation. And, while Apple may be winning some kind of price war presently, commodity pricing may be manipulated by working on the supply chaining as well as putting together exclusive contracts with certain key manufacturers. Apple seems to have a price edge today. They may not tomorrow. Frankly, I didn't buy an Apple computer because it was cheaper. I bought an Apple computer because I knew it was made by a top-tier manufacturer that supports its product and because I wanted to run Apple's operating system which, I believe, is easier to use than Microsoft's.
A long time ago, I attended courses taught by Joshua Meyrowitz at the University of New Hampshire. While I was there, he was working on a book entitled "Television and the Obliteration of Childhood" which appears to be either out-of-print or available at the University of North Carolina not in book form. His more recent "No Sense of Place" also speaks to this particular issue.
If Josh will be so kind as to correct any brain-scrambling on my part, it's his thesis that "childhood" may be defined as a limit on what one knows and/or can know and that, with enough knowledge one functions in society as an adult. Children, exposed to the same television programs as an adult, aren't "children," in the old-fashioned sense of the word as they are in posession of the same information that adults have. From an informational approach, videogames also serve as an "information leveler" like television and, in my case, may serve to actually increase the knowledge a child may have about the virtual world of videogames over that of an adult. I don't play video games, so my daughter may know more than me (though, at five she does not play any yet).
But just playing videogames does not necessarily confer information that is usable in society, though a recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggested that children who play games have a better chance at figuring out a risk-reward scenerio than those who do not.
So if you define "childhood" as playing ball or running around the block or playing kick the can and hide and seek, you may be on to something with respect to childhood's end. But I prefer Dr. Meyrowitz's definition. Because playing games in childhood (and adulthood) is normal behavior, whether real or virtual. My only concern about game-playing from the standpoint of a parent is that it not be something that atrophies muscles. There needs to be game-playing in childhood experience that builds muscles, too.
tacocat (527354) wrote:
I personally do not believe there is any real merit in trying to consolidate everything into one box. When I say everything I mean: computer, game console, visual media center, audio media center, all things that are audo-visual in nature beyond a book. The problem that you will ultimately experience is that this one unit for all services becomes a choke point in your house, unless you only have one room. It is very common in my multi-user domestic facility to have a stereo on in one room, a television on in another (with computer) and a third location that is computer only (needs more concentration).
I like your points. There seems to be this struggle between having intelligence in every device and some monolithic intelligence being the central repository of one's household's data and control.
Where a "media computer" really works is as a central server. I can share my iTunes music library (to the extent the DRM allows) with everyone in my home by using Apple's AirPort Express in locations where I would like to have audio distributed. This uses my Apple computer as a central server, if you will, for music (or media) distributed to "dumb" devices throughout my home.
Where a central server is not used is where one has a TiVo with their television, a stereo with an iPod dock, a computer, and a game console, where each device contains its own CPU and its own operating system and user interface and the user has to learn each device seperately.
Where Jobs may be going is in a direction where one learns a simple interface (Macintosh) and one is able, through the use of a central repository for data and control, to use that interface for many purposes. Jobs obviously believes that there is value in his design for User Interface and this will sell Apple's products. Apple's ability to innovate with industrial design should make the product enjoyable to have anywhere in one's home, assuming Jobs intends to project the Apple logo into the living room.
Where you get into a choke-point is where Apple seems to not do too well, which is in the area of gaming. Apple's Macintosh computers suffer from few games as compared to their Windoze competitors. One of the selling points for Apple's new Macs is that it can boot into Windoze XP as well as Apple's OS X, which sounds to me like a capitulation in that area.
But in the distributed processing model, you simply hook your X-Box 360 or your Nintendo up to your Apple high-definition monitor and you're good to go, using a KVM switch to switch the monitor from one input to another.
Bill Gates once stated that the television viewer is more passive than a computer user. The two are seperate pursuits. Apple seems to be disagreeing with Gates' statement in releasing larger and larger monitors for Macintosh computers and begging the concept that they might be used in the living room for entertainment as well.
From my standpoint, I like the large monitors. I work professionally in television post-production and large monitors are the kind of thing that really warms up an agency client who can see them even from the back couch of an edit facility. But the main monitor these days tends to be a projection monitor or a really huge LCD or plasma display. But the client tends to want to look over an editor's shoulder and "feel like they are a part of the action." In my opinion as an editor, the large monitor allows me a larger pallette of tools on-screen so that I can easily access any desired effect. Frankly, having someone nursemaid my work is not really necessary for someone with my experience in making good television or film.
But that has nothing to do with the living room, which is where Jobs seems to be headed, according to the rumors.
For our U.S.-based business, we simply blacklist all email from IP addresses outside the U.S. and Canada. We do not do business with any foreign interests, so we receive no legitimate email from other countries. This cuts our spam load by about 70 percent.
Increasingly, businesses in the US and Canada will find it impossible to do this (depending one one's business). The economy and business is global and, as time goes forward most non-local industries will need to be able to communicate across national boundaries. The spammers know this.
It used to be that you could safely block all e-mail from China. Multinationals can't do that any more. They're in China and are opening markets in many of the countries where spammers used to (and still do) operate freely.
Of course, if what you are doing is local lawn care, or dry cleaning for your locality, you'll be able to safely block anything from outside of the US (or your own nation). But many businesses are increasingly needing to find markets, services and suppliers internationally.
matt328, you are right, of course about the bloat.
And, you are right about us not needing that large a program just to get on-line.
But there are people who feel intimidated by all of this technology, who probably don't frequent Slashdot who really needed the bloated program to be able to figure it out. And one of them was my aunt.
With AO-Hell (3.0 and forward), she discovered the joys of e-mailing grandchildren (as well as nephews) and staying in closer touch with them. I sent her photos in my e-mails and her grandson showed her how to look at them and download them from my e-mails and look at them. This was a wonderful thing for her.
My aunt is now using a regular ISP and has a really good command of many of the same applications for access that we all have. But the handholding and extensive support available from AO-Hell and her grandson gave her the confidence necessary to function in the 21st century with modern technology.
I should mention that my aunt (and her younger brother, my father) grew up without electricity. The REA didn't get out to my grandparents' farmhouse until after my father went to college. So a lot of this modern technology is pretty advanced for someone who went from a childhood where electric lights were only available in town to instant high-speed connectivity almost anywhere all of the time. Neat thing is, one doesn't have to wait for the postal service to get the mail. One also doesn't have to find a stamp to send a note or a photo.
These animated characters are trademarked, not "copyrighted." The Disney version of these stories are copyrighted, as are most books.
You are completely allowed to reinterpret the generally available fairy tales that Disney has made millions from. You are not allowed to use Disney's trademarked characters to tell your story.
It's kind of like what would happen were you (or someone) to steal the formula for Coca-Cola. You can make a batch of soft drink, but you cannot use the Coca-Cola's trademarked bottle, nor their trademarked script to sell your soft drink. And, because you cannot do that, you could never hope to really challenge that company in the marketplace (and I'll bet people would claim that your soft drink tastes different than Coke).
Were you to publish an account of your war with Disney (to use an example) and then to die, your inheritors (and/or estate) would have a right to continue to publish your account and make a profit off of it. A great example of this is Charles Schulz's Peanuts characters which are, today, published daily as Peanuts Classics in newspapers, even though "Sparky" Schulz (Stanley Applebaum) passed away, the last original Peanuts strip published on 3 January, 2000. Schulz, in his will, demanded that there be no new strip creation after his death. His family and his estate both make a lot of money from this popular comic. His characters are trademarked. His strip is copyrighted.
It now says the chances of tomorrow's planned shuttle launch being scrapped are going up because of storms expected to hit central Florida.
Shuttle weather officer Kathy Winters says there's a 60 percent chance bad weather will force a scrub, up 20 percent from yesterday.
Winters says they're still hoping the sea breeze will push the storms far enough away for Atlantis to take off at 4:30 p-m, Eastern.
She says the weather looks better Monday and Tuesday, in case tomorrow is a no-go.
NASA officials are also checking to see if a lightning strike yesterday at the launch pad caused any damage.
If Hurricane Ernesto hits the gulf coast and Mission Control in Houston has to evacuate, the shuttle astronauts will spend that time just marking time. There is no backup for Mission Control in Houston.
I have never known a Ph.D. that did not have a particular axe to grind. Dr. Thompson would seem to be anti-computer games (entirely, not just the violent ones).
From TFA: it is important to keep in mind is that games rated E are played by children as young as 2 and 3 years old, and the developmental psychology literature indicates that young children do not have the developmental capacity to distinguish reality from fantasy until approximately age 6 or 7
I have a five-year-old little girl. She does watch television (mostly childrens' television but also a certain amount of "Boomerang" with their "horribly violent" Tom & Jerry cartoons. She has never played one video game. Never.
Perhaps it's because I'm old, ancient, decrepit, almost a complete fossil that she has no access to video games. I must be a totally mean and nasty daddy, according to Dr. Thompson. Here I have been consciously, deliberately and with evil intent parenting my daughter in such a way so as to limit her experiences with things like television, video games and other forms of childhood entertainment. Gawd, I must be completely horrid!!
But I think not.
There is one program that my little girl watches called "Dora The Explorer." She likes that show because there is a problem to solve and a map to follow. There's also the odd Spanish word and I want her to know that there are languages other than English that she can learn. Dora also exists on-line as a video game and for sale on Nickelodeon Jr.'s website (Please note, this site will cause popups on some browsers). The television show has many video game aspects to it, complete with mouse cursors and highlit objects when chosen. My daughter has seen me and her mother on the computer but we're both waiting for her to read before we even think about exposing her to the on-line stuff for children available on the Internet.
And even then, we don't plan to expose her to video games until she is past what Dr. Thompson considers an age where she can determine fantasy from reality (though at age 5, she does know the difference).
Perhaps there is a fantasy that Dr. Thompson has that needs exploring -- mainly: if there is a video game out there, all children of all ages will be playing it all of the time. As a parent, I'm happy to disabuse the good Doctor of her fantasy.
My little girl needs to have a solid grounding in the kinds of things she can do not-on-line, like coloring, learning to read, learning to write, playing at the park, learning to swim, drawing, playing with stuffed animals and dolls and using her imagination. She'll have plenty of years for those things her horrid daddy is neglecting to expose her to.
So I suppose I would tend to have the same bias as the Doctor. My daughter doesn't do video games. But the reason why she doesn't do them is not due to some game rating system but, rather, to my parenting (or my being a total meanie who just doesn't understand the need for children to be constantly fiddling with a mouse or joystick instead of getting enough exercise to build muscles). Dr. Thompson is inherently ignoring the ability of parents to "just say no," when it comes to things that won't assist in the development of their children.
Perhaps I'm totally out of touch with the needs of children these days. But I think my daughter will not be stunted in any way in her growth.
I used a Canon GL-2 camera for videoconferencing for a while. It's currently living a different life doing more mundane things but I did notice a few things.
Close-miking is important so that there is no question of what you are saying and what you are saying doesn't get drowned out by the ambient sound in your room.
But the consistently best picture I got was by using high-intensity lamps (desk and other variety) that have bulbs that produce 3200K white light (it's actually yellow but cameras, when set for "indoor" will naturally white balance to it).
Of course the best is a set of Lowel lights that are properly set, but one is hardly going to do a casual videoconference with a $1,000 kit of lights. But incorporating a couple of high-intensity lights and, perhaps, bouncing the light off a white wall or reflector onto your face will create a really nice image that will show up very well in a videoconference.
The current state-of-the-art in terms of technology and software is the Apple solution. I'd imagine Microsoft will try to challenge the Apple iSight and iChat AV solution in their upcoming Vista and I'd imagine the Open Source community will have a rather heterogenous hodgepodge of stuff that will work, but the proprietary vendors will probably lead the way in this instance.
Remember Cornell's CU-See-Me? It got bought out by White Pine Software.
You are absolutely correct. We don't do what we used to back when there was journalism on television. And one university professor told me that when the large corporations demanded that the news shows pay for themselves, that was the end of any attempt at journalism as a public service.
It's sad.
Of course, there is no rebuttal from the parent poster because the lunatic fringe don't like it when they're proven wrong.
Just recently, Bush announced that the real loser of the Israel-Lebanon war was Hezbollah. I think the facts are, daily, proving him wrong and that Hezbollah and their partners-in-crime, Iran, will find their status in the region ascendant. Israel will be seen as the real loser here and the ability of the US to broker so much as a roast beef sandwich in the Middle East has been utterly destroyed. The only thing we do there is to provide Israel with "cover" for their incitements (like today's attack in violation of the cease-fire agreement they just signed) and prevent the UN from taking any real steps to achieve peace in the region.
Ramtek, I think the parent was using common sense.
First a disclaimer: I work for an American television network in the news division. You will not see my commentary on our news report because we have been pandering to this Administration (and no, we're not Fox, which does not do news).
The Bush administration's talking point is to say that these people (being wiretapped) are calling Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda is calling them.
The reason why we have a judge approve a wiretap is to provide for a check on this very issue: What the administration says may or may not be true here. How do we (the public) know that on one end of the telephone is an Al Qaeda operative? The Bush administration is not exactly giving the American public a listing of the telephone numbers in question, nor the owners of those numbers.
Many people on Slashdot feel (at this point) that the Bush Administration has lied to the American public in the past. I was certain, prior to our attack on Iraq, that the Bush Administration was lying about the Weapons of Mass Destruction in that country. Today, only the lunatic fringe, like Ann Coulter and Dick Cheny still say that there were WMDs in Iraq. I was certain, despite the fact that I am not a CIA operative, because I use common sense. Saddam Hussein was very reluctant to tell anyone that he had no such weaponry because his enemy, to the east of him, was listening in. When he publically stated that he had no such weaponry (some five weeks before the US invasion) and cooperated with the UN inspectors, it was an absolute humiliation for him in the eyes of all hard-line Arab countries in the region.
There is no way he would have done that were he not telling the truth.
Another key phrase and "talking point" from the Bush administration prior to the was was "Regime Change." Bush set us on a course for invasion when he first uttered those words, a good four months before the invasion. Bush was lying when he said the US would do everything in our power to avert a war in Iraq after he set us on the course of regime change.
Another key was Bush's new "doctrine of pre-emption." No American President has ever told other countries that if they did something provocative that they would be invaded. To offer this novel doctrine is to declare the end of diplomacy as an American tool to protect our interests. Bush publically announced that the United States is now the bully on the playground who will slug first, ask questions later. This doctrine completely and absolutely justifies the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as it was a pre-emptive strike (not followed by an invasion) to try to get us to sell them our oil and to end our embargo on Japan for their war with China. No President with any sense at all would set a precident like that, as it particularly endangers Americans abroad as well as the nation as a whole. Our "doctrine of pre-emption" may be safely adopted by any country that opposes us now.
Now, why would anyone believe this guy about anything he says. If he went out and swore on a stack of his overtly fundamentalist-Christian bibles that he was not wiretapping my calls, I'd stop using the telephone all together.
Despite the fact that you may disagree with this, due to your own political stance, all of this is logical, rational and sensible. Currently, most Americans believe that Bush lied about Iraq. If he lied about Iraq, don't you think that it would be appropriate to apply Constitutional limitations on this President (just like is required of all other Presidents since Washington) to have a judge make sure he is (actually the NSA operatives acting on his behalf are) not lying in each of these wiretapping cases?
I lost ten good friends on September 11th. Osama bin Ladin is still laughing at America and his network is, today, stronger than ever. Case in point is the fact that we now have regular second-generation well-educated English citizens (of Pakistani descent) planning to carry out a co
Pardon my recent cultural illiteracy but I just heard that Tommy Chong was thrown into federal prison for 9 months for selling glass bongs to a DEA-run headshop in Pennsylvania. This use of this technology is a solution in search of a problem.
Tommy just published a book called The I Chong, half of which I read in about an hour and a half. I won't provide a link because most links are to booksellers like Amazon that don't pay authors appropriately.
I believe Mr. Chong is completely justified in sayng that his arrest and prosecution, along with his sentence was a clear-cut example of a police state action.
This technology ought to be used in a defensive manner to defend the US borders and to prevent terrorism being practiced within the US. Instead, it is being mis-used to fight a "war" on substances that were made illegal in order to discriminate against persons of color.
why not use AMD or Sun 64 bit processors if you're moving off the PowerPC? They're cooler, lower power, and arguably better performing.
I think one of the big issues was low power chips for laptops. You will note that the first Intel-based Macs were low-power cool chips like you would use in a laptop. (I am trying to include the iMacs and Mac Minis here which seem to be midway between laptops and desktops).
Another reason is that Intel makes a lot of the support chips that surround the processor. Apple most certainly used their clout as a first-tier manufacturer to demand a motherboard model that would really scream. They also certainly demanded to be "the first on the block" with Intel's newest technology -- at least for a certain amount of time.
I would also imagine that Apple wanted to get on board with Intel with a minimum of reinvestment and re-engineering. I do recall that IBM developed the bus structure for the G5 Mini-towers and it came from their midrange and mainframe products. Apple will, presumably, add value in the form of engineering innovation as time moves forward -- or they may just choose to be the first on the block with any new Intel innovations.
This is not to suggest that AMD does not innovate. They're a good company and they make excellent products. Without AMD, I don't think Intel would be as innovative or driven as they are. But in view of all of what Intel offers in making a motherboard for a computer, it was a good choice.
Despite Microsoft's Windoze vulnerabilities, we may be running some pretty old code for a while. We're international and pretty reluctant to export technology and software to certain countries, like Russia and China.
Most of our desktops that run Microsoft Office applications are running Windows 2000 Pro. We have a few high-end workstations that run XP and they may be upgraded to XP-64 if we can solve a particular problem with some software (there are no 64-bit Quicktime codecs for Windoze and we're reliant on Quicktime for a lot of our media files as it can deal with keying).
Our servers range from pee cees running Windoze to pee cees running Linux to Apple X-Serves. But on the desktop, we're still using some pretty old code because it's too expensive to upgrade and there is the potential that we'd be exporting a means by which someone may pirate Microsoft software.