so hey, i hope you come back and check this thread, because I think I can help you.
I was in the same boat a few months ago. I have been using clie's (and a couple of actual palms) as my primary ebook readers since the late 90s, and would probably have gone on doing so forever if the things were still made.
however when my third SJ33 died a couple of years ago, I decided to see if I could jump to something more modern but still possessing the features I need (can upload my own books, backlit screen, fairly high resolution, and preferably an auto-scrolling ebook app.... ooooohhh, deepreader, how i miss you).
so anyway, I "borrowed" my girlfriend's ipod touch and started dicking around with it. I concluded that the screen was good enough pretty quickly, and the battery life seemed to be at least on par with my clie's, so that was fine. what took me forever to find though was a good ebook app. but rather than detailing my months-long search and all the candidates that i tried and rejected, i'll just cut to the punchline:
get eReader. its seems to be based on the same code as the palm app, which was my second favorite ebook reader after deepreader. and it has the two absolute most important features: auto-scrolling, and the ability to add your own books.
seriously. get it. it's free, and you can import your own books. there is one caveat of course: the books have to be in.pdb format, at least as far as i've been able to tell. if you are like me and have been using pdb files on a palm for years, that aint a problem. likewise, if your books are in txt, doc, html, or any other standard text-style format, its easy as hell to convert them to pdb files. google around a bit and you'll find multiple ways to convert, but i still use the same command line tool i've been using for years: makedoc
anyway, i was watching the ipad coverage waiting for the same sort of news. specifically, i wanted to see if the ibooks app would have autoscrolling or at least the ability to add your own books. i didn't see anything about that, but i can at least deduce that the ereader app from my ipod touch should work on an ipad. now granted, it may not look that great upscaled, but i'm hoping that they release a new version that can handle the ipad resolution natively. if so, i'm totally buying that sucker.
so yea, just wanted to drop a line and help out a fellow (non-kindle) ebook reader. good luck, and i hope this works for you!
So hey, oddly enough i've been looking for almost exactly this sort of device. my situation is slightly different, but my needs are mostly similar. specifically, my PC gaming setup (and PC working setup... only one PC) is now in my living room: my monitor is my 50 inch hdtv, and my keyboard and mouse are set up across the room, about 10 feet away. for gaming, it is beautiful, blah blah blah, meaningless materialistic drivel. the point is, i've been attempting to use a mouse and keyboard from a frigging couch. needless to say, this is a concept rife with issues.
without any alterations, my mouse hand would have fallen off after the first hour or so. i did stumble upon a solution which sorta works.... i put my wireless keyboard on my lap, and put a pillow under my right elbow, and then the mouse on the couch surface. the pillow provides enough support that i can work/game like this for hours, as long as i take frequent breaks.
anyway, the relevant stuff: this set up is tolerable, but it's crappy enough that i've been shopping for a new solution almost non-stop for months. i haven't really found anything, in all honesty. i found that lapinator thing and a few similar devices, but for my mouse-hand needs, they just wouldn't cut it. i need something that can offer wrist/arm support for the right hand, otherwise i'm screwed. that being said, i DID find some things that might help the poster. specifically, BED TRAYS.
bed trays are... well i dunno, i'd never heard of them before amazon decided that they were PRECISELY what i was looking for. as usual amazon was wrong, but at least i now know what they are. just head on over to amazon or wherever the hell you want and search for bed trays. they're like little TV dinner-type racks, except designed to be propped up on the surface of a bed, couch, chair, futon, whatever, straddling your legs as you sit. pretty neat, i thought. and some of them are damn cheap.
like i said, they didn't help me, so i'm STILL looking for a solution (suggestions warmly welcomed!) but they may just help a chair-bound laptop user.
100% agreed on that snake oil crap. i pretty much just avoid the entire right half of my store, as it's strictly booze, "herbal medicines" and uninteresting cheeses. the left half however (consisting of the fresh produce and the meat/fish) is probably my favorite 300-500 square feet of retail space in this city.
oh, and their hummus is pretty badass.
and of course the grind-yer-own peanut butter (honey roasted is the SHIT)
damn, i need to shut up. and eat some damn dinner.
i have a bad habit of hitting up the baton rouge store once every few months for salmon steaks. i usually end up spending way too much money when i go (which is why i regulate my visit frequency after all) but it's divine feasting for that night at least.
ya know, just a few short years ago, i would have agreed extremely wholeheartedly, but after 10000 days, i just can't seem to get behind tool like i could in the olden days. i dunno, either i'm growing out of them (god i hope not) or this album just wasn't as good (or rather, as much to my liking, i suppose).
anywho, up to that point, i still agree that tool's albums are basically mindblowing.
carry on.:P
Ask yourself why we're using corn for ethanol when Brazil has shown that sugarcane can be used much more efficiently?
err.... because that's completely false? nice try buddy, and you make good points, but sugarcane is significantly LESS efficient for ethanol production at the moment. we're working on it, and in fact i'm working on a project in this area for the next couple of years, but for now, sugarcane is a dead fucking end for ethanol. if we (louisiana) can get some serious policy changes in our ridiculous tariff and subsidy regime, we may be able to do something about it (as hawaii is doing).
the bottom line is, ethanol is not economically sustainable whether it's from corn, sugarbeets, or sugarcane. until and unless a huge change in infrastructure happens, it's not going to be either. that means it will, for the forseeable future, be dependent on subsidies and other such bullshit.
(resubmitting, login failed)
i've never heard "door" pronouced "doeor" and i've lived in the south my entire life. hell, i've never even been north of the mason-dixon line. i HAVE heard it pronouced "doh" by more than one extreme cajun, but that's about it. (yay anecdotal non-evidence!)
I couldn't agree more. I'm working on my PhD in economics at the moment, but getting here was one hell of a ride through basically every major known to man. At least one of these required me to take basic micro and macro....
My macro class was pretty dry and boring, which was what I and everyone else there (including the professor) seemed to expect.
My micro class on the other hand was taught by an incredible man who had an absolutely infectious passion for the material. I was converted from day one, and changed my major two weeks into the semester. He became my advisor and steered me through the rest of my undergraduate career. When I was debating going to grad school, he bought me a copy of Freakonomics and suggested I spent a weekend reading it and thinking before I decided. I won't say that the book seriously influenced my decision, but it certainly helped renew my passion for economics after the beatdown of my final semesters.
My point? there is no magic bullet. I think economics is a profoundly powerful tool, and an amazingly interesting study. I'm disappointed at the image that it has with most people as the "dismal science." And yes, a big part of that problem is that most students have no sense of perspective, or come into economics with a preconcieved notion of how boring the subject is. I also agree that books like Freakonomics help (i bought a copy for my own father after I told him what I was doing for grad school. he went from being disappointed that I was going to be a "banker or money man" to being fascinated with my research work and quizzing me every chance he gets).
That being said, I think that another (possibly more powerful) way to help students see the beauty of economics is the same answer to so many issues in education: teachers. I've always been a bright kid (this is slashdot for chrissakes... we're all bright, except perhaps for the trolls) and I've always been incredibly curious about most areas of study. This is why it took me 2 years of changing majors to settle down... I wanted to study EVERYTHING. Somehow though, economics slipped completely under my radar until that one teacher changed everything. One teacher really can make a difference, as fruity and captain-planety (redundant?) as that sounds. In fact, it is that realization that pushed me over the edge and made me go to grad school. I knew that if i could share and demonstrate the same passion for economics that my advisor did, I'd have a chance of making some sort of impact.
[Already, my passion is being divided between sharing with undergrads and working on my own research, and i have never had more fun (in academics anyway). I have the fortune to be at a fairly high-powered research institute, so I am free to work on and be funded for just about anything. This is not the sort of place I would want to be a professor at, as I would prefer to focus on teaching after my dissertation, but as a grad student it's perfect.]
Anyways, as I recall, the point I was trying to make was this: Books like Freakonomics are great. Teachers like the one I had are greater, but harder to come by. If you find either, count yourself lucky, and spread the word however you can.
econ programs worth a damn tend to require at least calc II, ACAL, linear, diff.eq., and set theory. if a student doesn't have them by the time they finish the undergrad level, they'd do well to acquire them before going any further.
and yes, i'm an econ phd, and yes all of these were required before i could take my first phd level econometrics classes.
disclaimer: IAAE (i am an economist) (god i hate acronyms)
I actually did a study like this, and though i doubt it was one of the ones you read, i did indeed examine the relationship between sales and new album releases. in fact, my final model found three statistically significant variables that accounted for most of the variation in record sales (at the 95% confidence level).
those three variables were %change in GDP (year on year), Personal Consumption Expenditures (which helps account for people's changing spending habits in times of economic uncertainty and such), and New Album Releases.
I ran dozens of different models in an attempt to capture the "piracy" effect, and after two years was forced to conclude that this effect, if it exists at all, is indistinguishable from random noise. in other words, it is insignificant.
I am continuing my research into this area and I have actually recently found a couple of additional economists interested in helping my research, so hopefully we will be able to contribute more to the literate on the subject in the future. regardless, there is already an awful lot of evidence that at least makes us seriously question the veracity of the industry's claims, and makes us wonder how the flying fuck they justify their rather ridiculous conclusions.
you dont happen to have any of these test vidcasts available online or in an emailable form, eh?
this stuff interests the hell out of me, but being an academic, my primary exposure to such things comes in the form of a lot of people saying a lot of things... and then doing precisely nothing. such is the way of the academic world.
oddly, this is more or less precisely the story of my life, except replace the PhD in Applied Math with one in Economics. other than that, same basic story, and same feeling of complete satisfaction.
yet again i'm going to have to call you on the fact that you have no clue what my city (lafayette) is like, or what this campaign was really all about.
newflash buddy, this is NOT a "massive investment into the future of our community" but a massive investment in the future of LUS, our local utility provider, who just got voted a $125 million dollar gift from our government. furthermore, we already HAVE cheap reliable internet access (5mbps cable for $40... not the best, but no more expensive than what LUS promises to offer) and we have already SEEN our fabled "amazing tech boom." We are home to golfballs.com and yes, that amazing cingular call center, as well as tons of smaller computer and engineering firms. horrraaaaaay.....
what has the minor tech boom of the past 8 years done for us? caused the city to grow beyond its logical and reasonable size, basically. we've absorbed several formerly suburban and rural areas, as well as a few former outskirts areas, and just kinda merged them into the urban sprawl, for what it's worth. Lafayette has been the number one favorite louisiana city to live in, raise a family in, and educate your children in for a decade running, but we've been slipping in the last few years, because we're starting to become "just another big city" and it's pretty damn sad. the school segregation problem has become epic in scale since this growth spurt, and thus the city was forced into this horrible bussing program that is threatening to destroy our gifted program.
ok, rant off, sorry.
and no, the economic benefits of investing in this sort of thing are not likely to be widely or even mildly felt in the community. there are going to be precisely two major benefactors overall: LUS (the utility) and ULL (the university). As i mentioned previously, we already have a fantastic telecom infrastructure, with nearly all homes in the city limits being either DSL or Cable modem eligible, and this LUS plan is going to change nothing substantial about this. in the two years that it will take for LUS to acheive anything concrete (there own best-case estimate) BS and Cox will likely have extended their reach to everywhere that LUS was planning to wire.
Not that job-making and -killing is a viable economic argument in the first place, but if LUS does succeed in making any significant impact on the job situation in lafayette, it will mostly likely be because they force out BS or Cox and destroy those jobs.
to be fair, the higher taxes argument is also bunk though. In the wording of the measure passed yesterday, the parish cannot raise taxes to help with LUS's plan, but only sell revenue bonds. Yes they are open-ended revenue bonds and could theoretically be used to buy the LUS director a new car or luxury catering services for the LUS Fiber employees (both of which problems this state has sadly dealt with in the recent past) but I sincerely doubt that this will happen in this case. I believe LUS means well, oddly enough.... I just think the government has NO business intruding on the telecom industry. Ultimately this debate was not about Fiber. It was about good government.
just to preface, i live in lafayette louisiana, the city in the article, and I have been working with the anti-LUS political group, Fiber411.
to set you straight from the get-go, the free market was NOT in fact subject to harm previous to this vote, though it would be accurate to say that having lost this vote yesterday, we now certainly ARE subject to harm, thanks to the instrusion of the public sector into an already-crowded private industry.
yea, that's right, crowded. monopolistic tactics? hardly. Cox and Bellsouth have both recently greatly expanded their efforts in all three tiers of telecom (tv, phone, and net) and are directly competing in every respect. to claim that together these two rabid competitors form some kind of strange new monopoly is just bizarre. you could argue oligopoly, i suppose, but you'd be barking up the wrong tree regardless. in addition, we've got quite a few local telecoms, though to be fair, none can compete with BS and Cox on all three levels.
anyway, to attack your own simple-minded views, anyone with any economic knowledge knows that to you only need the government to intervene in the matter of PUBLIC GOODS and that telecommunications is anything but a public good.
so a) you are wrong because you have no idea of the situation involved and b) you are wrong because you have no understanding of economics.
er... try re-reading my original statement.
it seems you somehow got "pockets of resistance"...
Actually, it also reaches the roots of american sentiment to speak of "pockets of resistance" when in fact, it's masses upon masses of resistance against the U.S. foreign policy
...from "pockets of the globe"...
widespread anti-american sentiment across pockets of the globe
come now. it's pretty obvious from my statement that i'm fully aware of the "masses upon masses" of "resistance" to which i was not even referring. never was i talking about positions counter to US policy, and never was i talking about iraq. i'm talking about the anti-american sentiment that has been building up in places around the world, (especially areas of europe who were once the globes premiere imperial powers... these are the aforementioned "pockets of the globe") since around the end of World War I. this type of thing has obviously escalated at various times, and this war with iraq is just another example, and certainly not the best or most significant one... merely the most recent.
I think that this corporate thing just reaches to the roots of the problems in American society -- one person "helping" another by fuelling their hatred against a third party, only to have it backfire on them. and i think that this post reaches the roots of the problem of widespread anti-american sentiment across pockets of the globe -- one person "projecting" the problems of the administration onto the "society" as a whole. mass generalizations are massively ignorant.
ah, you misunderstand. it was the desktops that attracted the rumors of fraud.
the original descriptions were completely off the wall and since their 3.8GHz model appeared around the time that the 3.0GHz p4 hit the shelves, the timing certainly added to it.
i called them myself, but over the course of two weeks, i never reached anyone but voicemail.
this site has much more indepth information about these guys. it would appear that they are not a fake after all, but there is certainly still something fishy about them. god knows you'd never catch me doing business with em.
Slashdot Mirror
so hey, i hope you come back and check this thread, because I think I can help you.
I was in the same boat a few months ago. I have been using clie's (and a couple of actual palms) as my primary ebook readers since the late 90s, and would probably have gone on doing so forever if the things were still made.
however when my third SJ33 died a couple of years ago, I decided to see if I could jump to something more modern but still possessing the features I need (can upload my own books, backlit screen, fairly high resolution, and preferably an auto-scrolling ebook app.... ooooohhh, deepreader, how i miss you).
so anyway, I "borrowed" my girlfriend's ipod touch and started dicking around with it. I concluded that the screen was good enough pretty quickly, and the battery life seemed to be at least on par with my clie's, so that was fine. what took me forever to find though was a good ebook app. but rather than detailing my months-long search and all the candidates that i tried and rejected, i'll just cut to the punchline:
get eReader. its seems to be based on the same code as the palm app, which was my second favorite ebook reader after deepreader. and it has the two absolute most important features: auto-scrolling, and the ability to add your own books.
seriously. get it. it's free, and you can import your own books. there is one caveat of course: the books have to be in .pdb format, at least as far as i've been able to tell. if you are like me and have been using pdb files on a palm for years, that aint a problem. likewise, if your books are in txt, doc, html, or any other standard text-style format, its easy as hell to convert them to pdb files. google around a bit and you'll find multiple ways to convert, but i still use the same command line tool i've been using for years: makedoc
anyway, i was watching the ipad coverage waiting for the same sort of news. specifically, i wanted to see if the ibooks app would have autoscrolling or at least the ability to add your own books. i didn't see anything about that, but i can at least deduce that the ereader app from my ipod touch should work on an ipad. now granted, it may not look that great upscaled, but i'm hoping that they release a new version that can handle the ipad resolution natively. if so, i'm totally buying that sucker.
so yea, just wanted to drop a line and help out a fellow (non-kindle) ebook reader. good luck, and i hope this works for you!
So hey, oddly enough i've been looking for almost exactly this sort of device. my situation is slightly different, but my needs are mostly similar. specifically, my PC gaming setup (and PC working setup... only one PC) is now in my living room: my monitor is my 50 inch hdtv, and my keyboard and mouse are set up across the room, about 10 feet away. for gaming, it is beautiful, blah blah blah, meaningless materialistic drivel. the point is, i've been attempting to use a mouse and keyboard from a frigging couch. needless to say, this is a concept rife with issues.
without any alterations, my mouse hand would have fallen off after the first hour or so. i did stumble upon a solution which sorta works.... i put my wireless keyboard on my lap, and put a pillow under my right elbow, and then the mouse on the couch surface. the pillow provides enough support that i can work/game like this for hours, as long as i take frequent breaks.
anyway, the relevant stuff: this set up is tolerable, but it's crappy enough that i've been shopping for a new solution almost non-stop for months. i haven't really found anything, in all honesty. i found that lapinator thing and a few similar devices, but for my mouse-hand needs, they just wouldn't cut it. i need something that can offer wrist/arm support for the right hand, otherwise i'm screwed. that being said, i DID find some things that might help the poster. specifically, BED TRAYS.
bed trays are... well i dunno, i'd never heard of them before amazon decided that they were PRECISELY what i was looking for. as usual amazon was wrong, but at least i now know what they are. just head on over to amazon or wherever the hell you want and search for bed trays. they're like little TV dinner-type racks, except designed to be propped up on the surface of a bed, couch, chair, futon, whatever, straddling your legs as you sit. pretty neat, i thought. and some of them are damn cheap.
like i said, they didn't help me, so i'm STILL looking for a solution (suggestions warmly welcomed!) but they may just help a chair-bound laptop user.
100% agreed on that snake oil crap. i pretty much just avoid the entire right half of my store, as it's strictly booze, "herbal medicines" and uninteresting cheeses. the left half however (consisting of the fresh produce and the meat/fish) is probably my favorite 300-500 square feet of retail space in this city.
oh, and their hummus is pretty badass.
and of course the grind-yer-own peanut butter (honey roasted is the SHIT)
damn, i need to shut up. and eat some damn dinner.
i have a bad habit of hitting up the baton rouge store once every few months for salmon steaks. i usually end up spending way too much money when i go (which is why i regulate my visit frequency after all) but it's divine feasting for that night at least.
ya know, just a few short years ago, i would have agreed extremely wholeheartedly, but after 10000 days, i just can't seem to get behind tool like i could in the olden days. i dunno, either i'm growing out of them (god i hope not) or this album just wasn't as good (or rather, as much to my liking, i suppose). anywho, up to that point, i still agree that tool's albums are basically mindblowing. carry on. :P
bwaahahahahahaha... ignorance is the single funniest thing on this earth. thanks guys, you just made my morning.
the bottom line is, ethanol is not economically sustainable whether it's from corn, sugarbeets, or sugarcane. until and unless a huge change in infrastructure happens, it's not going to be either. that means it will, for the forseeable future, be dependent on subsidies and other such bullshit. (resubmitting, login failed)
i've never heard "door" pronouced "doeor" and i've lived in the south my entire life. hell, i've never even been north of the mason-dixon line. i HAVE heard it pronouced "doh" by more than one extreme cajun, but that's about it. (yay anecdotal non-evidence!)
I couldn't agree more. I'm working on my PhD in economics at the moment, but getting here was one hell of a ride through basically every major known to man. At least one of these required me to take basic micro and macro....
My macro class was pretty dry and boring, which was what I and everyone else there (including the professor) seemed to expect.
My micro class on the other hand was taught by an incredible man who had an absolutely infectious passion for the material. I was converted from day one, and changed my major two weeks into the semester. He became my advisor and steered me through the rest of my undergraduate career. When I was debating going to grad school, he bought me a copy of Freakonomics and suggested I spent a weekend reading it and thinking before I decided. I won't say that the book seriously influenced my decision, but it certainly helped renew my passion for economics after the beatdown of my final semesters.
My point? there is no magic bullet. I think economics is a profoundly powerful tool, and an amazingly interesting study. I'm disappointed at the image that it has with most people as the "dismal science." And yes, a big part of that problem is that most students have no sense of perspective, or come into economics with a preconcieved notion of how boring the subject is. I also agree that books like Freakonomics help (i bought a copy for my own father after I told him what I was doing for grad school. he went from being disappointed that I was going to be a "banker or money man" to being fascinated with my research work and quizzing me every chance he gets).
That being said, I think that another (possibly more powerful) way to help students see the beauty of economics is the same answer to so many issues in education: teachers. I've always been a bright kid (this is slashdot for chrissakes... we're all bright, except perhaps for the trolls) and I've always been incredibly curious about most areas of study. This is why it took me 2 years of changing majors to settle down... I wanted to study EVERYTHING. Somehow though, economics slipped completely under my radar until that one teacher changed everything. One teacher really can make a difference, as fruity and captain-planety (redundant?) as that sounds. In fact, it is that realization that pushed me over the edge and made me go to grad school. I knew that if i could share and demonstrate the same passion for economics that my advisor did, I'd have a chance of making some sort of impact.
[Already, my passion is being divided between sharing with undergrads and working on my own research, and i have never had more fun (in academics anyway). I have the fortune to be at a fairly high-powered research institute, so I am free to work on and be funded for just about anything. This is not the sort of place I would want to be a professor at, as I would prefer to focus on teaching after my dissertation, but as a grad student it's perfect.]
Anyways, as I recall, the point I was trying to make was this: Books like Freakonomics are great. Teachers like the one I had are greater, but harder to come by. If you find either, count yourself lucky, and spread the word however you can.
back to work.
calculus nothin.
:)
econ programs worth a damn tend to require at least calc II, ACAL, linear, diff.eq., and set theory. if a student doesn't have them by the time they finish the undergrad level, they'd do well to acquire them before going any further.
and yes, i'm an econ phd, and yes all of these were required before i could take my first phd level econometrics classes.
smile, math is fun
disclaimer: IAAE (i am an economist) (god i hate acronyms)
I actually did a study like this, and though i doubt it was one of the ones you read, i did indeed examine the relationship between sales and new album releases. in fact, my final model found three statistically significant variables that accounted for most of the variation in record sales (at the 95% confidence level).
those three variables were %change in GDP (year on year), Personal Consumption Expenditures (which helps account for people's changing spending habits in times of economic uncertainty and such), and New Album Releases.
I ran dozens of different models in an attempt to capture the "piracy" effect, and after two years was forced to conclude that this effect, if it exists at all, is indistinguishable from random noise. in other words, it is insignificant.
I am continuing my research into this area and I have actually recently found a couple of additional economists interested in helping my research, so hopefully we will be able to contribute more to the literate on the subject in the future. regardless, there is already an awful lot of evidence that at least makes us seriously question the veracity of the industry's claims, and makes us wonder how the flying fuck they justify their rather ridiculous conclusions.
you dont happen to have any of these test vidcasts available online or in an emailable form, eh?
this stuff interests the hell out of me, but being an academic, my primary exposure to such things comes in the form of a lot of people saying a lot of things... and then doing precisely nothing. such is the way of the academic world.
wait wait wait, wtf is this:
What's more, the folks at Mozilla, the newly for-profit producer of Firefox, are still cranking away at making their software the browser of choice.
mozilla is for-profit now? whaaa-? when did this shit happen? or is this just an example of bad reporting?
oddly, this is more or less precisely the story of my life, except replace the PhD in Applied Math with one in Economics. other than that, same basic story, and same feeling of complete satisfaction.
cheers to you, mate.
yet again i'm going to have to call you on the fact that you have no clue what my city (lafayette) is like, or what this campaign was really all about.
newflash buddy, this is NOT a "massive investment into the future of our community" but a massive investment in the future of LUS, our local utility provider, who just got voted a $125 million dollar gift from our government. furthermore, we already HAVE cheap reliable internet access (5mbps cable for $40... not the best, but no more expensive than what LUS promises to offer) and we have already SEEN our fabled "amazing tech boom." We are home to golfballs.com and yes, that amazing cingular call center, as well as tons of smaller computer and engineering firms. horrraaaaaay.....
what has the minor tech boom of the past 8 years done for us? caused the city to grow beyond its logical and reasonable size, basically. we've absorbed several formerly suburban and rural areas, as well as a few former outskirts areas, and just kinda merged them into the urban sprawl, for what it's worth. Lafayette has been the number one favorite louisiana city to live in, raise a family in, and educate your children in for a decade running, but we've been slipping in the last few years, because we're starting to become "just another big city" and it's pretty damn sad. the school segregation problem has become epic in scale since this growth spurt, and thus the city was forced into this horrible bussing program that is threatening to destroy our gifted program.
ok, rant off, sorry.
and no, the economic benefits of investing in this sort of thing are not likely to be widely or even mildly felt in the community. there are going to be precisely two major benefactors overall: LUS (the utility) and ULL (the university). As i mentioned previously, we already have a fantastic telecom infrastructure, with nearly all homes in the city limits being either DSL or Cable modem eligible, and this LUS plan is going to change nothing substantial about this. in the two years that it will take for LUS to acheive anything concrete (there own best-case estimate) BS and Cox will likely have extended their reach to everywhere that LUS was planning to wire.
Not that job-making and -killing is a viable economic argument in the first place, but if LUS does succeed in making any significant impact on the job situation in lafayette, it will mostly likely be because they force out BS or Cox and destroy those jobs.
to be fair, the higher taxes argument is also bunk though. In the wording of the measure passed yesterday, the parish cannot raise taxes to help with LUS's plan, but only sell revenue bonds. Yes they are open-ended revenue bonds and could theoretically be used to buy the LUS director a new car or luxury catering services for the LUS Fiber employees (both of which problems this state has sadly dealt with in the recent past) but I sincerely doubt that this will happen in this case. I believe LUS means well, oddly enough.... I just think the government has NO business intruding on the telecom industry. Ultimately this debate was not about Fiber. It was about good government.
wow, hard to be much more wrong than this guy.
just to preface, i live in lafayette louisiana, the city in the article, and I have been working with the anti-LUS political group, Fiber411.
to set you straight from the get-go, the free market was NOT in fact subject to harm previous to this vote, though it would be accurate to say that having lost this vote yesterday, we now certainly ARE subject to harm, thanks to the instrusion of the public sector into an already-crowded private industry.
yea, that's right, crowded. monopolistic tactics? hardly. Cox and Bellsouth have both recently greatly expanded their efforts in all three tiers of telecom (tv, phone, and net) and are directly competing in every respect. to claim that together these two rabid competitors form some kind of strange new monopoly is just bizarre. you could argue oligopoly, i suppose, but you'd be barking up the wrong tree regardless. in addition, we've got quite a few local telecoms, though to be fair, none can compete with BS and Cox on all three levels.
anyway, to attack your own simple-minded views, anyone with any economic knowledge knows that to you only need the government to intervene in the matter of PUBLIC GOODS and that telecommunications is anything but a public good.
so a) you are wrong because you have no idea of the situation involved and b) you are wrong because you have no understanding of economics.
thanks, come again
and yes, i AM a PhD in economics, why do you ask?
as a louisiana native and former computer consultant, the only way i can answer your post is with tears.
cold, bitter tears.
one more person for your mac mini list, coming your way :)
a) thank you for correcting my ignorance, and
b) that's a damn fine idea.
well... can they be worse than TPM and AoTC?
...stop laughing and try to have a little faith in lucas... i still like indiana jones, dammit!
somebody has a serious anger complex.
chill the fuck out and stop blaming your bitterness on the fictional elitist college male that you seem to think is haunting you.
goddamn, could you GET any more pretentious? take a step back for a second and realize that you are talking about a GAME.
is your sense of perspective coming back yet? yea? remembering how unimportant this crap is? good.
check your ego at the door when you are engaging in a "deepish" debate about fucking video games, for chrissakes.
er... try re-reading my original statement. it seems you somehow got "pockets of resistance" ...
...
Actually, it also reaches the roots of american sentiment to speak of "pockets of resistance" when in fact, it's masses upon masses of resistance against the U.S. foreign policy
...from "pockets of the globe"
widespread anti-american sentiment across pockets of the globe
come now. it's pretty obvious from my statement that i'm fully aware of the "masses upon masses" of "resistance" to which i was not even referring. never was i talking about positions counter to US policy, and never was i talking about iraq. i'm talking about the anti-american sentiment that has been building up in places around the world, (especially areas of europe who were once the globes premiere imperial powers... these are the aforementioned "pockets of the globe") since around the end of World War I. this type of thing has obviously escalated at various times, and this war with iraq is just another example, and certainly not the best or most significant one... merely the most recent.
I think that this corporate thing just reaches to the roots of the problems in American society -- one person "helping" another by fuelling their hatred against a third party, only to have it backfire on them.
and i think that this post reaches the roots of the problem of widespread anti-american sentiment across pockets of the globe -- one person "projecting" the problems of the administration onto the "society" as a whole. mass generalizations are massively ignorant.
ah, you misunderstand. it was the desktops that attracted the rumors of fraud.
the original descriptions were completely off the wall and since their 3.8GHz model appeared around the time that the 3.0GHz p4 hit the shelves, the timing certainly added to it.
i called them myself, but over the course of two weeks, i never reached anyone but voicemail.
this site has much more indepth information about these guys. it would appear that they are not a fake after all, but there is certainly still something fishy about them. god knows you'd never catch me doing business with em.