*ALL* big-time charities and non-profits exist to make big bucks for their board of directors. There ain't a big charity around that doesn't pay its directors into the six figures.
For a charity with low administration costs and high payout to the people it's to serve, check out the Heifer project. They ship farmyard stock to villages, which then breed the stock as a renewable resource. Best charity I've found yet.
Indeedy, a tame citizen is the most desirable of citizens. They passively accept the corporate dictum of "live to work." Keep that 40+ hour workweek lifestyle, and keep purchasing expensive toys and houses in that one-upmanship game of keeping up with the neighbours. Keep the corporations healthy, wealthy and unaccountable.
What Corporate Amerika *doesn't* want are citizens who think for themselves, who have free will, who recognize the need for balance between work life and enjoying life, and are capable of saying "No" to a purchase.
Spy on the kids. Get 'em used to being watched. Get 'em used to being controlled by others.
I'm pretty sure this is about not digging up the streets. Read the article.
They're only running 1200 feet of cable. That's not enough for transmission to be a problem. But it is a helluva problem to expand the system: the old conduits were laid down a looooong time ago, and are at capacity.
The new cabling allows them to triple the capacity without digging new trenches.
I'm pretty sure that's what this is about: expanding inner-city capacity without the expense and trouble of laying new conduits.
We'll string you up by your ankles, with your head three feet above concrete, then cut the line.
If you survive that without being knocked unconscious, I'll quit wearing my helmet.
Of course, this isn't a realistic test. For reality, you'd need to be dropped from about five feet, with a moving start of about 25mph (the average crash speed).
Damn straight. *MOST* SUVs are built on a car chassis with a car engine. The bloody Lexus SUV is a *CAMRY* with a big shell!
There's nothing off-road competent about almost every SUV. Many of them are 2WD, which immediately eliminates them as off-road vehicles; and of the 4WD ones, most of them are run off tiny car engines, and have inadequate suspension and clearance.
Ooooh. I'd never thought of it terms of getting bigger, slower fans. Very cool.
Thanks! Your post has been the *ONE* truly useful post I've read in about a year!
--
Re:Could have used this
on
Got Tracks?
·
· Score: 2
Locally we lost two Caterpillar tractors in the mud, a few years back. I believe the farmer was trying to reclaim some swampy ground, so he was trying to backfill the wet area.
Caterpillar one sunk like a fucking rock. IIRC, less than half of it was above-ground by the time they got the second Cat out to rescue it.
But it was still a freakin' swamp, so *OF COURSE* Cat #2 started sinking.
I think they managed to rescue #2. #1 is now, as far as I know, completely disappeared... a relic awaiting rediscovery by an advanced civilization a few thousand years from now, when internal combustion engines are unknown.
"WTF is this?!" they'll cry. "My self [they'll be atheists by then, so there won't be cries of 'my gods'] it's little wonder they were choking to death on pollution, when they were driving things like this all over the place!"
I don't really care if it's water cooling, magic pink smoke, immersing in an oil bath, or whatever it takes to accomplish the task...
...what I want, more than overclocking, is for the freakin' roar of three fans to be silenced! My god, this box is noisy.
While I love the speed of my new computer, I kinda long for the days of my AMD K2-200, which didn't have any fans at all. Not on the CPU, not for the case, and not in the power supply. Just hung the latter outside the box for convection cooling and, oh!, was it a quiet machine...
This machine would start glowing if the fans were stopped...:-(
Er, no. Hacking at its finest was back when one had to weild a soldering iron. And not just replacing the quartz oscillator, either.
My greatest hack was doubling my computer's memory by soldering new memory directly over the old memory, leaving one leg bent up to be wired to a page-flip lead on the CPU. Goes low: original RAM is R/W; goes high, new RAM is R/W.
Second-greatest was hacking the serial port. Ran wires from the legs of a serial I/O chip (I forget the part number) directly to the motherboard; and other wires from the chip to a port connector. Stuffed the whole thing under the integrated keyboard, melted a hole in the case to dangle the port outta...
*That* was hacking. Have gun, will solder. Whoo-hoo!
I have basically given up on TV. I don't have cable and the television itself is some twenty-five years old and significantly smaller than my computer monitor. It's there so I can watch the occasional movie rental. Hell, I can't even go DVD, 'cause it'd be a crime to connect it to this P.O.S. "Electrohome" tv.
But over the past four months, I've actually *made the effort* to watch one particular show: North of 60.
It's set on an Indian reservation in the North-West Territories. It cuts no crap: there's a *lot* of humanity in it. It's written and played with honesty: life's a bitch when you're a status Indian ekeing it out in the North. In this show, children die, bodies are buried, cops collude with badguys, spouses cheat and lie -- it's gritty.
It is, in my opinion, one of the best pieces of television to ever air. It's like Hillstreet Blues or Degrassi Jr. High: shows where the characters are fully-developed and absolutely human, completely capable of being good and bad at the same time, and sometimes making disasterous life decisions with consequences that fuckin' hurt.
Is good television like that still being produced? What do we have for *great* human drama? I know ER was pretty damn great for a while -- has it devolved into the senseless comedy pap that St. Elsewhere suffered during its dying days?
Powerful hour-long human drama. An extinct species.:-(
Yes, yes, you can go on endlessly about the advantages of open source, and on the whole I'll agree with you.
But where Linux loses is marketing. And that, alas, is exactly where Microsoft excels. MS could sell ice to the Inuit.
The people who really count--that is, the people who decide to spend several million dollars on an operating system for their business: we're talking banks and big business, and the cumulative bijillion little businesses--are going to buy Microsoft Windows.
Not because it's the best, but because they are businessmen, not computer geeks. They don't know how Linux can be to their advantage, they don't understand how Microsoft products have high cost-of-ownership, and they don't see any good business studies that prove Linux is going to save them an order of magnitude in costs.
Indeed, what really drives them to buy are the glossy full-page advertisements with simple words. All the technical, moral and philosophical arguments in the world aren't going to make a dent.
If Linux is to dominate, it needs to be marketed.
It also needs a few missing killer apps, but, hey, that'll happen.
And you don't even begin to talk about viruses and prions.
Prions especially frighten me. There doesn't appear to be any bodily mechanism for combating them.
They also kind of appeal to my sense of irony. Here we humans are, thinking were about the most advanced damn organism to ever exist... and we could be easily wiped out by the most primitive quasi-lifeform that exists.
Sorry, bubba, but they eat "cellulose byproducts," by and large. There are several feedlots in my area, and all of them have a mountain of woodchips that the cows graze on. The woodchips are waste product from our timber industry.
A lot of that wood will be coniferous waste, mainly varieties of pine. Pine contains pine oils, which are used in pine-sol household cleaner ("pine solvent" would be the source of that name) and the like.
It surprises me that the cows don't get deathly sick from the pine chips.
Yes, they are also being fed "traditional" processed feed, which does contain rendered animals in it, including bits o' cattle (though, apparently, not any sheep this week, according to the delivery sign at the local byproducts rendering plant).
Now, the rendering plant, there's a whole other topic for discussion. My god, the shite that goes into that place is appalling. Not just the kibbles'n'bits left over from cutting animals into meat, but also a lot of whole dead animals. WTF they die from? If they were sick, WTF you wanna put 'em into animal feed for? Good god.
On the whole, the entire scene is enough to make a person turn vegetarian.
One person I met had an interesting perspective: "Eating factory meat is disrespectful to the animal." Ain't that the truth!
The hay-bale thing is being done more and more up here in parts of Canada (in central BC, at any rate).
Actually, I think it's straw. And I don't think concrete is dripped over it.
You start off with a shipload of straw. It's compressed like hell into a massive, dense brick, and sprayed with fire retardent. Damn stuff won't burn anyway; it's packed hard enough that there's no airspace, so at worst you could drop a torch on it and it *might* eventually sorta smolder.
You pour a bit of a concrete base for the bales, raise 'em up off the ground, and have rebar spikes. You spike the bales, using 'em like bricks.
Then you use adobe/concrete/whatever to finish.
You get a house with walls a couple feet thick and extremely insulated. There's nearly no heating cost: your computer, dinner-time cooking, television, and body heat will probably heat the place adequately through most of the winter.
And best of all, you get huge windowsills. Oh, yah, baby. Lotsa plants and pillows...
But WalMart/Eckerds/Walgreens don't have monopolies, not in the least.
What they do have is economy of scale. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and just because you can't compete with them doesn't make them EvileNasty.
There's nothing stopping you from teaming up with all the convience stores in your area, and sharing the bulk orders. You're not in competition with each other: you serve completely different customer bases. So work together as a loose coalition, so that you all can compete against your real competition.
No one guaranteed your father a successful business. If he can't make it work in the face of competition -- even when that competition is a superstore with efficiency levels that'd give your dad wet dreams -- then it's fair and just that his business ceases to be.
Speaking of efficiency levels, your dad's business wastes at least 30% of its costs on inefficiency, rework, mistakes and such. Reducing those costs will pay back to the bottom line something on the order of 100% better than increasing sales. If he really wants to compete, he can: and he can do it by focusing on cutting senseless overhead costs.
That's how WalMart has done it, by the way. They typically don't keep warehouses of inventory: they keep it all on semi-trailers, en route to just-in-time restocking. They use sophisticated computer tracking and modeling. They make manufacturers responsible for maintaining inventory levels. They are, in a word, wickedly efficient.
The whitespace thing is pretty easy to deal with; simply be consistent. Python doesn't care if you use tabs or spaces, and doesn't care how many tabs or spaces you use, *as long as you're consistent.*
There are a few utilities to check your source for proper indentation, or to convert tabsspaces.
And the major macro-programmable editors all have hacks that let them deal very intelligently with whitespace, including automatically indenting at appropriate times.
Plus there are a few Python-specific editors, that also do code-colouring and such.
All in all, FeErOfWhItEsPacE is silly.
What's the problem with lists? How would you want to write them??
Given that this sad news follows not so long after the discussion about how many hour a week do you geeks all work, I'd just like to say:
That could be you at age 49, too.
So perhaps all you sixty-hour work-lifers should think about it. Before you get a chance to enjoy life, it could be over.
He leaves behind a wife and a seven year-old daughter. The people that were most important to him, and who he was most important to. Poof! Their Douglas is irrevocably gone from their lives.
I'm not saying everyone should become completely hedonistic and live only for the moment... but you gotta make sure that you do get to live.
Out of respect for the people who care for you, take a few minutes to assess your life. Make sure that you've got a good balance between work, family, and play. Make it a life worth living.
If there's one thing God must have, it's a sense of humour, elsewise he'd suicide from the mess he made when he introduced man to the planet. Biggest mistake an all-seeing, all-knowing god could make...
Slashdot Mirror
*ALL* big-time charities and non-profits exist to make big bucks for their board of directors. There ain't a big charity around that doesn't pay its directors into the six figures.
For a charity with low administration costs and high payout to the people it's to serve, check out the Heifer project. They ship farmyard stock to villages, which then breed the stock as a renewable resource. Best charity I've found yet.
--
Perhaps I've been poorly misinformed, but don't rocket launches release a shitload of ozone-depleting chemicals?
Australia already has a lotta trouble with skin cancer. Can't imagine launching rockets right into the ozone hole is gonna help 'em any...
--
Not hardwired for *anything*?
Why will babies not crawl out onto a glass-top table, then? Why do you flinch if something flicks near your face?
Obviously, one is hardwired for things.
--
Tame. They will be very tame citizens.
And that's Good For The Economy!
Indeedy, a tame citizen is the most desirable of citizens. They passively accept the corporate dictum of "live to work." Keep that 40+ hour workweek lifestyle, and keep purchasing expensive toys and houses in that one-upmanship game of keeping up with the neighbours. Keep the corporations healthy, wealthy and unaccountable.
What Corporate Amerika *doesn't* want are citizens who think for themselves, who have free will, who recognize the need for balance between work life and enjoying life, and are capable of saying "No" to a purchase.
Spy on the kids. Get 'em used to being watched. Get 'em used to being controlled by others.
After all, it's Good For The Economy!
--
This wasn't about transmission losses.
I'm pretty sure this is about not digging up the streets. Read the article.
They're only running 1200 feet of cable. That's not enough for transmission to be a problem. But it is a helluva problem to expand the system: the old conduits were laid down a looooong time ago, and are at capacity.
The new cabling allows them to triple the capacity without digging new trenches.
I'm pretty sure that's what this is about: expanding inner-city capacity without the expense and trouble of laying new conduits.
--
Better yet, hold the base of the bulb in one hand, and piss into the toilet with the other!
Hey, it's time to winnow out the Slashdot crowd. Evolution in action...
--
Let's make a deal, LoRyder!
We'll string you up by your ankles, with your head three feet above concrete, then cut the line.
If you survive that without being knocked unconscious, I'll quit wearing my helmet.
Of course, this isn't a realistic test. For reality, you'd need to be dropped from about five feet, with a moving start of about 25mph (the average crash speed).
--
Damn straight. *MOST* SUVs are built on a car chassis with a car engine. The bloody Lexus SUV is a *CAMRY* with a big shell!
There's nothing off-road competent about almost every SUV. Many of them are 2WD, which immediately eliminates them as off-road vehicles; and of the 4WD ones, most of them are run off tiny car engines, and have inadequate suspension and clearance.
Only silly damn buggers buy SUVs.
--
Ooooh. I'd never thought of it terms of getting bigger, slower fans. Very cool.
Thanks! Your post has been the *ONE* truly useful post I've read in about a year!
--
Locally we lost two Caterpillar tractors in the mud, a few years back. I believe the farmer was trying to reclaim some swampy ground, so he was trying to backfill the wet area.
Caterpillar one sunk like a fucking rock. IIRC, less than half of it was above-ground by the time they got the second Cat out to rescue it.
But it was still a freakin' swamp, so *OF COURSE* Cat #2 started sinking.
I think they managed to rescue #2. #1 is now, as far as I know, completely disappeared... a relic awaiting rediscovery by an advanced civilization a few thousand years from now, when internal combustion engines are unknown.
"WTF is this?!" they'll cry. "My self [they'll be atheists by then, so there won't be cries of 'my gods'] it's little wonder they were choking to death on pollution, when they were driving things like this all over the place!"
--
I don't really care if it's water cooling, magic pink smoke, immersing in an oil bath, or whatever it takes to accomplish the task...
:-(
...what I want, more than overclocking, is for the freakin' roar of three fans to be silenced! My god, this box is noisy.
While I love the speed of my new computer, I kinda long for the days of my AMD K2-200, which didn't have any fans at all. Not on the CPU, not for the case, and not in the power supply. Just hung the latter outside the box for convection cooling and, oh!, was it a quiet machine...
This machine would start glowing if the fans were stopped...
--
Er, no. Hacking at its finest was back when one had to weild a soldering iron. And not just replacing the quartz oscillator, either.
My greatest hack was doubling my computer's memory by soldering new memory directly over the old memory, leaving one leg bent up to be wired to a page-flip lead on the CPU. Goes low: original RAM is R/W; goes high, new RAM is R/W.
Second-greatest was hacking the serial port. Ran wires from the legs of a serial I/O chip (I forget the part number) directly to the motherboard; and other wires from the chip to a port connector. Stuffed the whole thing under the integrated keyboard, melted a hole in the case to dangle the port outta...
*That* was hacking. Have gun, will solder. Whoo-hoo!
--
You are so right.
:-(
I have basically given up on TV. I don't have cable and the television itself is some twenty-five years old and significantly smaller than my computer monitor. It's there so I can watch the occasional movie rental. Hell, I can't even go DVD, 'cause it'd be a crime to connect it to this P.O.S. "Electrohome" tv.
But over the past four months, I've actually *made the effort* to watch one particular show: North of 60.
It's set on an Indian reservation in the North-West Territories. It cuts no crap: there's a *lot* of humanity in it. It's written and played with honesty: life's a bitch when you're a status Indian ekeing it out in the North. In this show, children die, bodies are buried, cops collude with badguys, spouses cheat and lie -- it's gritty.
It is, in my opinion, one of the best pieces of television to ever air. It's like Hillstreet Blues or Degrassi Jr. High: shows where the characters are fully-developed and absolutely human, completely capable of being good and bad at the same time, and sometimes making disasterous life decisions with consequences that fuckin' hurt.
Is good television like that still being produced? What do we have for *great* human drama? I know ER was pretty damn great for a while -- has it devolved into the senseless comedy pap that St. Elsewhere suffered during its dying days?
Powerful hour-long human drama. An extinct species.
--
Yes, yes, you can go on endlessly about the advantages of open source, and on the whole I'll agree with you.
But where Linux loses is marketing. And that, alas, is exactly where Microsoft excels. MS could sell ice to the Inuit.
The people who really count --that is, the people who decide to spend several million dollars on an operating system for their business: we're talking banks and big business, and the cumulative bijillion little businesses--are going to buy Microsoft Windows.
Not because it's the best, but because they are businessmen, not computer geeks. They don't know how Linux can be to their advantage, they don't understand how Microsoft products have high cost-of-ownership, and they don't see any good business studies that prove Linux is going to save them an order of magnitude in costs.
Indeed, what really drives them to buy are the glossy full-page advertisements with simple words. All the technical, moral and philosophical arguments in the world aren't going to make a dent.
If Linux is to dominate, it needs to be marketed.
It also needs a few missing killer apps, but, hey, that'll happen.
--
Yah, well, we might believe you if you weren't a member of the [Durham University Fart Lighting Society] we just might believe you.
But you are a DULFSer, [as this film clip shows]!
Atmospheric reentry, damn right. Ain't no silo-ceramic high-tech tile gonna survive that sorta abuse!
--
And you don't even begin to talk about viruses and prions.
Prions especially frighten me. There doesn't appear to be any bodily mechanism for combating them.
They also kind of appeal to my sense of irony. Here we humans are, thinking were about the most advanced damn organism to ever exist... and we could be easily wiped out by the most primitive quasi-lifeform that exists.
--
Kind of like how humans normally work, eh?
Find something good. Swarm the fucker. Obliterate it. Repeat.
Happened to California. Brazilian forests. Passenger pigeons. Baby seals. Whale oil. Etcetera.
We're almost like not-very-smart viruses. (Not very smart because, after all, most viruses don't actually kill their host.)
--
I think it entirely depends on location. WHere I live, you can barely purchase a single-wide mobile home for $36k... with no land.
--
Sorry, bubba, but they eat "cellulose byproducts," by and large. There are several feedlots in my area, and all of them have a mountain of woodchips that the cows graze on. The woodchips are waste product from our timber industry.
A lot of that wood will be coniferous waste, mainly varieties of pine. Pine contains pine oils, which are used in pine-sol household cleaner ("pine solvent" would be the source of that name) and the like.
It surprises me that the cows don't get deathly sick from the pine chips.
Yes, they are also being fed "traditional" processed feed, which does contain rendered animals in it, including bits o' cattle (though, apparently, not any sheep this week, according to the delivery sign at the local byproducts rendering plant).
Now, the rendering plant, there's a whole other topic for discussion. My god, the shite that goes into that place is appalling. Not just the kibbles'n'bits left over from cutting animals into meat, but also a lot of whole dead animals. WTF they die from? If they were sick, WTF you wanna put 'em into animal feed for? Good god.
On the whole, the entire scene is enough to make a person turn vegetarian.
One person I met had an interesting perspective: "Eating factory meat is disrespectful to the animal." Ain't that the truth!
--
The hay-bale thing is being done more and more up here in parts of Canada (in central BC, at any rate).
Actually, I think it's straw. And I don't think concrete is dripped over it.
You start off with a shipload of straw. It's compressed like hell into a massive, dense brick, and sprayed with fire retardent. Damn stuff won't burn anyway; it's packed hard enough that there's no airspace, so at worst you could drop a torch on it and it *might* eventually sorta smolder.
You pour a bit of a concrete base for the bales, raise 'em up off the ground, and have rebar spikes. You spike the bales, using 'em like bricks.
Then you use adobe/concrete/whatever to finish.
You get a house with walls a couple feet thick and extremely insulated. There's nearly no heating cost: your computer, dinner-time cooking, television, and body heat will probably heat the place adequately through most of the winter.
And best of all, you get huge windowsills. Oh, yah, baby. Lotsa plants and pillows...
--
Cheap electrical heating - a hit, where there's hydroelectricity.
Roads reserved exclusively for business traffic - a possible hit, when considering high-occupancy vehicle lanes.
Lightweight metals in large building construction - a hit, for sure.
Houses that cost $36k. My god. If only. If only...
Plastic plates that decompose at 250F - surely this is a hit. Biodegradeable/recyclable, no?
Plastic waterproof furniture - only deck chairs. Although... you can buy entire suites of inflatable furniture.
Loss of culinary skills - damn straight that's a hit. Way too many people can't boil water without burning it these days.
Woodpulp into food - a hit: ever seen a cattle feedlot? Those poor buggers are eating nothing but woodchip waste, it seems. Ugh.
Videophones in every home - QuickCam, perhaps?
Rocket-powered planes - in his terms, probably a hit: what else would you call some of the military jet engines? Nearest thing to a rocket.
Cars running on alcohol - a hit. Brazil has shiploads of 'em. Hellva thing.
Yes, some of these are hair-splitting.
--
But WalMart/Eckerds/Walgreens don't have monopolies, not in the least.
What they do have is economy of scale. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and just because you can't compete with them doesn't make them EvileNasty.
There's nothing stopping you from teaming up with all the convience stores in your area, and sharing the bulk orders. You're not in competition with each other: you serve completely different customer bases. So work together as a loose coalition, so that you all can compete against your real competition.
No one guaranteed your father a successful business. If he can't make it work in the face of competition -- even when that competition is a superstore with efficiency levels that'd give your dad wet dreams -- then it's fair and just that his business ceases to be.
Speaking of efficiency levels, your dad's business wastes at least 30% of its costs on inefficiency, rework, mistakes and such. Reducing those costs will pay back to the bottom line something on the order of 100% better than increasing sales. If he really wants to compete, he can: and he can do it by focusing on cutting senseless overhead costs.
That's how WalMart has done it, by the way. They typically don't keep warehouses of inventory: they keep it all on semi-trailers, en route to just-in-time restocking. They use sophisticated computer tracking and modeling. They make manufacturers responsible for maintaining inventory levels. They are, in a word, wickedly efficient.
--
The whitespace thing is pretty easy to deal with; simply be consistent. Python doesn't care if you use tabs or spaces, and doesn't care how many tabs or spaces you use, *as long as you're consistent.*
There are a few utilities to check your source for proper indentation, or to convert tabsspaces.
And the major macro-programmable editors all have hacks that let them deal very intelligently with whitespace, including automatically indenting at appropriate times.
Plus there are a few Python-specific editors, that also do code-colouring and such.
All in all, FeErOfWhItEsPacE is silly.
What's the problem with lists? How would you want to write them??
--
Given that this sad news follows not so long after the discussion about how many hour a week do you geeks all work, I'd just like to say:
That could be you at age 49, too.
So perhaps all you sixty-hour work-lifers should think about it. Before you get a chance to enjoy life, it could be over.
He leaves behind a wife and a seven year-old daughter. The people that were most important to him, and who he was most important to. Poof! Their Douglas is irrevocably gone from their lives.
I'm not saying everyone should become completely hedonistic and live only for the moment... but you gotta make sure that you do get to live.
Out of respect for the people who care for you, take a few minutes to assess your life. Make sure that you've got a good balance between work, family, and play. Make it a life worth living.
--
If there's one thing God must have, it's a sense of humour, elsewise he'd suicide from the mess he made when he introduced man to the planet. Biggest mistake an all-seeing, all-knowing god could make...
--