As I suggested, a true economic collapse in the US would make all this "dominance in world trade and other areas" pretty much past tense. But for all the hype and panic stricken media reports of the troubled economy, I still observe large numbers of new 4- and 5- bedroom houses being built, people driving brand new *very* expensive cars... and I live in a part of the country that's supposedly *poor*... We're a long way from "the average person doesn't know where his next 10 meals are coming from."
So if the situation is that things need to get a whole lot worse before people will be motivated to change anything, looks to be a long time coming.
Countries only stay "in line" because they choose to. As long as you don't do the few things that entail getting "out of line", which pretty much involves mass murder, unilateral invasions, and making hydrogen bombs and anthrax.
As to your politicians who regard blind obedience to whatever whim comes from the usa, they should be reminded that it's their duty to live and die by independence and freedom.
"Probably no - invalidity is always a risk and Lemelson demanded fully paid up licenses. "
Fine then. If some people in industry got their lollipop stolen, so much the better. Their voices will be heard in places where the name "slashdot" is unfamiliar.
It never ceases to amaze me that these so-called "foreign" governments seem ever willing to follow any rule the US makes, or even implies.
Why does I.P. litigation survive? Seems to me the first nation to simply ignore these stifling rules would gain the advantage that could lead to industrial superiority. While "we" are busy suing each other in a ceaseless effort to keep ideas from flourishing into productive new venues, someone else could certainly be ignoring all that as so much bullshit that happens in RightPondia, and getting on with business.
It's not just IP laws. For instance, just because the USA is stuck in the legacy of 1937 doesn't mean some other country couldn't be doing the whole fuel-and-paper-from-hemp thing. But instead, everybody seems to be happy as clams following the "lead" of the US, no matter how wrong the US gets it.
I've never understood it. Maybe a true, complete, and irrevocable economic collapse in the US will help other countries on the road toward cultural and political independence. It doesn't look like anything else is ever going to do it.
If the US Congress decided Up was Down, the rest of the goddamned world would follow suit, people saying the whole while "in a FREE country Up is Up and Down is Down" even as their own leaders follow like ducks on a fishing line.
My '90 Volvo is on the threshold of a quarter million km.
If I listen, I can hear the main bearings singing their swan song. Cross that bridge when I come to it, I suppose. Otherwise my car runs no worse than when it was new, and I actually believe I'm getting better emissions numbers today and no worse fuel efficiency. Yes, I've swapped out suspension parts, struts and bearings once, brakes a few times, I have a habit of bending tie rods, and I probably need to do something about the steering box that leaks a bit. But engine and tranny are just fabulous, and I just laugh at the price of new cars.
My other car is a '62 VW Van. The original owner drove it from Nova Scotia to Peru and back. The next 2 owners drove the hell out of it too. Still works fine for me.
See, the reason it's a good thing that every single thing that can be conceived of gets patented *today*, is because it's for *the children.*
Not just any children, but for the children of the current generation.
See, all these ridiculous patents (and the reasonable ones as well) are going to expire just as children who are coming into the world right now start to reach the age where they have to work for a living. And LOOK at all the wonderful stuff that will be entering the public domain at the same time!
The only thing left to do is make sure that copyright is freed at the same time!
Pintos aren't that bad. They were the Ford Escort of the day -- with more HP than an Escort, actually. Ford's answer to the Chevy Nova. They even came in a slightly sportier model with better suspension. 2 liter engine. A stock pinto could do a quarter mile in under 18. They had big hatchbacks when other cars just had trunks, and they had awesome roadtrip potential.
The only problem was the design flaw in the gas tank, and of course the biggest problem was the management decision to go ahead with the dangerous design, callously documenting the cost-benefit analysis in terms of expected deaths and injuries each year. The Ford execs literally argued their case to the government that it would be cheaper to let the people burn, and pay litigation costs, than to fix the design. To this day it surprises me the company is allowed to do business, but that's another story.
But other than the gas tank, the car had begun to take on the sort of niche that you see 4-cyl hondas in today. They were easy to modify. You could bore and stroke the motors, lower the front end, open up the exhaust, and it was cheap to paint.
Basically the pinto represents the (American) end of the line that started with the Ford Anglia, and ended with the Cortina.
Pintos were well put together, and it shouldn't be a surprise to see one still running, any more than you see BMW 2002's or Volvo 140's from the same era. What's not surprising of course, is that you never see pintos AT ALL, because they were all dumped by 1980, by people who were scared of the whole burned-beyond-recognition thing. Can't say I blame them.
Watching the flight control specialists lately has made me wish the NASA channel didn't come in so fuzzy on my cable system.
I'd really like to see some of those specialist's screens up close. They look like X desktops. The fact that they are the desktops for roles where lives and billions of dollars are at stake makes them interesting.
"So the writer spent dozens upon dozens of hours building, tearing down, rebuilding and troubleshooting."
Doesn't anybody plan anymore?
First, build a thorough set of requirements. Make sure everything here can be done before you spend a dime or touch a screwdriver.
Next, design your system. Maybe make the interface first and test it against a mock back-end system.
By the time you start dealing with crap like video cards and file codecs and ALSA/Jack drivers and optical audio I/O and making an infrared remote drive a linux box and whatever else this thing is supposed to do, you should KNOW what you plan to do.
I've read quite a few accounts by folks who want to build a PVR this and MythTV that and FreeVo the other thing, but nobody seems to have really started with actual requirements and a design of what they wanted to do. Usually they have just taken their PC, expecting to keep using it for every other general purpose as before, and used hardware basically chosen at random, and then are surprised when the resulting contraption is not reliable or spouse-proof or less expensive than a tivo.
Compared to a PVR, a multitrack hard disk audio recorder ought to be simple.
Less than 4 digits doesn't even really get you a good conventional wired mike.
Plenty of pros are using wireless SM58's, I guess that's UT24/58. But you've already gone there I guess, and your power lines won't move huh?
A hundred bucks can go a long way towards damned good low-Z cables. Just use real mic's! (The expensive options that the studios is still the good old wired Telefunken).
Foley guys won't touch wireless. TV news folks use AKG's and Shure's, and deal with RF issues just like you. You aren't finding the high-end wireless stuff because there's not that much out there. People with 4 or 5 grand to spend on a microphone aren't bothering with toys like "wireless".
It's something of a shock to realize that I'm much closer to the age of you guys' fathers... But I remember the first digital watches (and the first calculators) very well. The first ones that were available to any kind of consumer market at all, were Pulsar watches around 1972. The stainless steel ones were about $300, the gold plated ones were about $400. Later they made "fine jewelry" versions that were in the $2000 range. I don't remember any of the early ones having the "flick your wrist" feature, but then, I only knew a few people who had LED watches. Then by 1977, it would have been hard to find anyone who DIDN'T have an LED watch. Whatever year Mattel Football was out, was the same year I got my first calculator, a Rockwell 44RD, which I never used, because I traded some AFX car stuff for an HP-25C which changed my life.
I really miss LEDs. I think LEDs are much more efficient today than they were in the 1970s, and it would be neat to have an LED watch which didn't need frequent battery changes. And I'd probably *still* play that damned football game.
"Remember when encryption came to browsers, and you had to certify that you were in the U.S. before you could download Netscape?"
Remember what a joke that was? Does anybody seriously believe that people beyond the reach of the long A.R.M. of the Clinton Administration were doing without 128-bit SSL because they were supposed to click "no" on some download page? Or because RSA was "controlled" under the *US* patent rules?
"You are looking to find problems for which there is no solution"
On the contrary. I already have the problems for which there is no solution. You don't have to look very far to find unsupported hardware. To make matters worse, even if you want to spec your hardware purposely for linux, it's difficult. I'm not *looking* for a problem...
I have an aquarium fish that eats goldfish. What is the legal distinction between my buying feeder fish for my pets, and eating them myself? The only way there could be a problem is if the goldfish-swallowers steal the fish they swallow. There are laws against stealing...
We need something we can't have. And if you ask for it you get flamed for asking: device drivers for YOUR hardware. As an alternative, we could make do with real hardware compatability lists, but they would have to really say what to buy, and they'd have to be current.
2.6.1 was a step backwards for me; framebuffer console support has broken for the two drivers that I need; radeonfb and tridentfb. Reponses to my bug reports have ranged from "fix it yourself", to "you don't need that feature". It does not appear that very many people know what framebuffer consoles are, and the kernel was released with these broken drivers not even tagged as "experimental." That's poor quality. Don't flame *me*. I understand the issues. But we're trying to break into a market where people don't take excuses.
What else doesn't work on your system? Quick, tell me what PCI 802.11g card to buy. I need a thousand of them fed-exed from my vendor to deploy on my linux desktops.
Does the SD card reader work on my Toshiba notebooks? Why not? Again, I know the reason is that it's "obscure hardware". The business folks that you need to impress in order to get your system on their desktops don't care, and don't listen to your excuses.
How about multimedia playback? Without really trying hard, can the desktop users deal with all the media formats that they're going to encoounter? Don't make the excuse that "recreational use" requires multimedia and "professional use" does not. The people who you need to sell the product to don't take excuses.
It's a tough situation, because a whole lot of these problems aren't going to be fixed, and least not in 2004, the "year of the desktop". Not unless Microsoft stops selling office products and stops supporting Exchange. Not unless all the hardware companies were getting on the ball last year and are going to suddenly release specs for all the broken hardware. To the layman, the linux system is going to appear as a defective product, if you try to market it as a true alternative to Windows or MacOS.
PLEASE don't flame me. I KNOW the deal. I LOVE linux. I use it on *my* desktop. I work for a company that has a huge deployment of linux on developer desktops and servers. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Unix advocate from the beginning, and I've been all about linux since my first exposure to the 0.99 kernel. I know we can "get on the desktop" and we're actually already there in some situations. But climbing over the Great Wall of Hardware Compatability, and then breaking through the Singularity of Software Targets? Maybe the hardware thing will happen as more Asian computer manufacturers are forced by Asian customers to support universal systems. Maybe the software thing will happen after the hardware thing does, and the demand increases.
But just saying that "this is the year of the desktop" isn't going to create the market demand. Buying controlling stock in a few hardware manufacturers might just do it. Start with Toshiba and Dell. Nobody who could afford that, has the balls to actually say "this company sells Linux systems and does not support Windows" It's only corporate-suicide if you don't believe in the strategy, provided you have enough cash to weather the early years of the plan...:-)
What I'm getting at, is the possibility that there was "elevator music" before 1920 -- before audio recording was widely available. 1979 is not the issue here. Neither are elevators. Ok maybe elevators had radios. So I'm up against a great deal of inertia, but I'm only trying to validate or repudiate an informal statement of a music professor who explained "what elevator music means" in terms of certain chord progressions that will indeed have an emotional effect on the listener, at an unconscious level.
I think it's plausible. The only evidence to the contrary that I've found is the dictionary reference.
It's pretty revealing that you think of pre-1979 as your parent's generation. I actually remember elevators with operators.
All this time has passed, and we still can't think of a more efficient heavy launch vehicle? I've heard it said that we "couldn't" even build another Saturn V. Baloney, I say. But can't we do better anyway?
The term "elevator music" didn't have anything to do with the music being played in elevators -- it refers to musical characteristics that are supposed to elevate your *mood*. Dictionary etymology notwithstanding -- I *know* the term had widespread usage before 1979 (where Merriam-Webster places it without a cite.) It wouldn't really surprise me if there was elevator music before there were elevators or even recorded music, but I'll be a while checking music history sources.
I want to draw a severe distinction between bad smells from a natural source like animals, and bad smells from a synthetic source, like a chemical plant. Is that too much to ask?
"yeah, the same chemical and plastics that go into things like, oh, disposable cameras and memory cards. "
I've lived near both memory fabs (still do) and plastics plants and and oil refinery -- they didn't emit fumes that made the entire town unlivable. You could not pay me enough to stay in Longview Texas for longer than it takes to fill my tank up. I suppose whatever they're doing there is legal, and deemed safe, but it's WAY more than I could handle. Chip fabs and polyethylene molding plants might pollute more, but they don't make it literally painful for me to open my eyes or breathe in the whole town.
I can handle *Los Angeles* on a bad smog day, but I'd rather not set foot in Longview...
People tried to compare it to animal wastes. That's like comparing chernobyl to a gas-powered generator. The comparison isn't possible in a reasonable universe of discourse.
Slashdot Mirror
As I suggested, a true economic collapse in the US would make all this "dominance in world trade and other areas" pretty much past tense. But for all the hype and panic stricken media reports of the troubled economy, I still observe large numbers of new 4- and 5- bedroom houses being built, people driving brand new *very* expensive cars... and I live in a part of the country that's supposedly *poor*... We're a long way from "the average person doesn't know where his next 10 meals are coming from."
So if the situation is that things need to get a whole lot worse before people will be motivated to change anything, looks to be a long time coming.
Countries only stay "in line" because they choose to. As long as you don't do the few things that entail getting "out of line", which pretty much involves mass murder, unilateral invasions, and making hydrogen bombs and anthrax.
As to your politicians who regard blind obedience to whatever whim comes from the usa, they should be reminded that it's their duty to live and die by independence and freedom.
"Probably no - invalidity is always a risk and Lemelson demanded fully paid up licenses. "
Fine then. If some people in industry got their lollipop stolen, so much the better. Their voices will be heard in places where the name "slashdot" is unfamiliar.
>Even foreign governments.
It never ceases to amaze me that these so-called "foreign" governments seem ever willing to follow any rule the US makes, or even implies.
Why does I.P. litigation survive? Seems to me the first nation to simply ignore these stifling rules would gain the advantage that could lead to industrial superiority. While "we" are busy suing each other in a ceaseless effort to keep ideas from flourishing into productive new venues, someone else could certainly be ignoring all that as so much bullshit that happens in RightPondia, and getting on with business.
It's not just IP laws. For instance, just because the USA is stuck in the legacy of 1937 doesn't mean some other country couldn't be doing the whole fuel-and-paper-from-hemp thing. But instead, everybody seems to be happy as clams following the "lead" of the US, no matter how wrong the US gets it.
I've never understood it. Maybe a true, complete, and irrevocable economic collapse in the US will help other countries on the road toward cultural and political independence. It doesn't look like anything else is ever going to do it.
If the US Congress decided Up was Down, the rest of the goddamned world would follow suit, people saying the whole while "in a FREE country Up is Up and Down is Down" even as their own leaders follow like ducks on a fishing line.
My '90 Volvo is on the threshold of a quarter million km.
If I listen, I can hear the main bearings singing their swan song. Cross that bridge when I come to it, I suppose. Otherwise my car runs no worse than when it was new, and I actually believe I'm getting better emissions numbers today and no worse fuel efficiency. Yes, I've swapped out suspension parts, struts and bearings once, brakes a few times, I have a habit of bending tie rods, and I probably need to do something about the steering box that leaks a bit. But engine and tranny are just fabulous, and I just laugh at the price of new cars.
My other car is a '62 VW Van. The original owner drove it from Nova Scotia to Peru and back. The next 2 owners drove the hell out of it too. Still works fine for me.
See, the reason it's a good thing that every single thing that can be conceived of gets patented *today*, is because it's for *the children.*
Not just any children, but for the children of the current generation.
See, all these ridiculous patents (and the reasonable ones as well) are going to expire just as children who are coming into the world right now start to reach the age where they have to work for a living. And LOOK at all the wonderful stuff that will be entering the public domain at the same time!
The only thing left to do is make sure that copyright is freed at the same time!
WE MUST DO IT FOR THE CHILDREN.
>a running Pinto
Pintos aren't that bad. They were the Ford Escort of the day -- with more HP than an Escort, actually. Ford's answer to the Chevy Nova. They even came in a slightly sportier model with better suspension. 2 liter engine. A stock pinto could do a quarter mile in under 18.
They had big hatchbacks when other cars just had trunks, and they had awesome roadtrip potential.
The only problem was the design flaw in the gas tank, and of course the biggest problem was the management decision to go ahead with the dangerous design, callously documenting the cost-benefit analysis in terms of expected deaths and injuries each year. The Ford execs literally argued their case to the government that it would be cheaper to let the people burn, and pay litigation costs, than to fix the design. To this day it surprises me the company is allowed to do business, but that's another story.
But other than the gas tank, the car had begun to take on the sort of niche that you see 4-cyl hondas in today. They were easy to modify. You could bore and stroke the motors, lower the front end, open up the exhaust, and it was cheap to paint.
Basically the pinto represents the (American) end of the line that started with the Ford Anglia, and ended with the Cortina.
Pintos were well put together, and it shouldn't be a surprise to see one still running, any more than you see BMW 2002's or Volvo 140's from the same era. What's not surprising of course, is that you never see pintos AT ALL, because they were all dumped by 1980, by people who were scared of the whole burned-beyond-recognition thing. Can't say I blame them.
Watching the flight control specialists lately has made me wish the NASA channel didn't come in so fuzzy on my cable system.
I'd really like to see some of those specialist's screens up close. They look like X desktops. The fact that they are the desktops for roles where lives and billions of dollars are at stake makes them interesting.
"So the writer spent dozens upon dozens of hours building, tearing down, rebuilding and troubleshooting."
Doesn't anybody plan anymore?
First, build a thorough set of requirements. Make sure everything here can be done before you spend a dime or touch a screwdriver.
Next, design your system. Maybe make the interface first and test it against a mock back-end system.
By the time you start dealing with crap like video cards and file codecs and ALSA/Jack drivers and optical audio I/O and making an infrared remote drive a linux box and whatever else this thing is supposed to do, you should KNOW what you plan to do.
I've read quite a few accounts by folks who want to build a PVR this and MythTV that and FreeVo the other thing, but nobody seems to have really started with actual requirements and a design of what they wanted to do. Usually they have just taken their PC, expecting to keep using it for every other general purpose as before, and used hardware basically chosen at random, and then are surprised when the resulting contraption is not reliable or spouse-proof or less expensive than a tivo.
Compared to a PVR, a multitrack hard disk audio recorder ought to be simple.
Less than 4 digits doesn't even really get you a good conventional wired mike.
Plenty of pros are using wireless SM58's, I guess that's UT24/58. But you've already gone there I guess, and your power lines won't move huh?
A hundred bucks can go a long way towards damned good low-Z cables. Just use real mic's! (The expensive options that the studios is still the good old wired Telefunken).
Foley guys won't touch wireless. TV news folks use AKG's and Shure's, and deal with RF issues just like you. You aren't finding the high-end wireless stuff because there's not that much out there. People with 4 or 5 grand to spend on a microphone aren't bothering with toys like "wireless".
It's something of a shock to realize that I'm much closer to the age of you guys' fathers... But I remember the first digital watches (and the first calculators) very well. The first ones that were available to any kind of consumer market at all, were Pulsar watches around 1972. The stainless steel ones were about $300, the gold plated ones were about $400. Later they made "fine jewelry" versions that were in the $2000 range. I don't remember any of the early ones having the "flick your wrist" feature, but then, I only knew a few people who had LED watches. Then by 1977, it would have been hard to find anyone who DIDN'T have an LED watch. Whatever year Mattel Football was out, was the same year I got my first calculator, a Rockwell 44RD, which I never used, because I traded some AFX car stuff for an HP-25C which changed my life.
I really miss LEDs. I think LEDs are much more efficient today than they were in the 1970s, and it would be neat to have an LED watch which didn't need frequent battery changes. And I'd probably *still* play that damned football game.
"Remember when encryption came to browsers, and you had to certify that you were in the U.S. before you could download Netscape?"
Remember what a joke that was? Does anybody seriously believe that people beyond the reach of the long A.R.M. of the Clinton Administration were doing without 128-bit SSL because they were supposed to click "no" on some download page? Or because RSA was "controlled" under the *US* patent rules?
"You are looking to find problems for which there is no solution"
On the contrary. I already have the problems for which there is no solution. You don't have to look very far to find unsupported hardware. To make matters worse, even if you want to spec your hardware purposely for linux, it's difficult. I'm not *looking* for a problem...
Which 802.11g card was I supposed to buy, again?
I have an aquarium fish that eats goldfish. What is the legal distinction between my buying feeder fish for my pets, and eating them myself? The only way there could be a problem is if the goldfish-swallowers steal the fish they swallow. There are laws against stealing...
Love that. I hope the long ARM doesn't reach to NZ :-)
We need something we can't have. And if you ask for it you get flamed for asking: device drivers for YOUR hardware. As an alternative, we could make do with real hardware compatability lists, but they would have to really say what to buy, and they'd have to be current.
:-)
2.6.1 was a step backwards for me; framebuffer console support has broken for the two drivers that I need; radeonfb and tridentfb. Reponses to my bug reports have ranged from "fix it yourself", to "you don't need that feature". It does not appear that very many people know what framebuffer consoles are, and the kernel was released with these broken drivers not even tagged as "experimental." That's poor quality. Don't flame *me*. I understand the issues. But we're trying to break into a market where people don't take excuses.
What else doesn't work on your system? Quick, tell me what PCI 802.11g card to buy. I need a thousand of them fed-exed from my vendor to deploy on my linux desktops.
Does the SD card reader work on my Toshiba notebooks? Why not? Again, I know the reason is that it's "obscure hardware". The business folks that you need to impress in order to get your system on their desktops don't care, and don't listen to your excuses.
How about multimedia playback? Without really trying hard, can the desktop users deal with all the media formats that they're going to encoounter? Don't make the excuse that "recreational use" requires multimedia and "professional use" does not. The people who you need to sell the product to don't take excuses.
It's a tough situation, because a whole lot of these problems aren't going to be fixed, and least not in 2004, the "year of the desktop". Not unless Microsoft stops selling office products and stops supporting Exchange. Not unless all the hardware companies were getting on the ball last year and are going to suddenly release specs for all the broken hardware. To the layman, the linux system is going to appear as a defective product, if you try to market it as a true alternative to Windows or MacOS.
PLEASE don't flame me. I KNOW the deal. I LOVE linux. I use it on *my* desktop. I work for a company that has a huge deployment of linux on developer desktops and servers. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Unix advocate from the beginning, and I've been all about linux since my first exposure to the 0.99 kernel. I know we can "get on the desktop" and we're actually already there in some situations. But climbing over the Great Wall of Hardware Compatability, and then breaking through the Singularity of Software Targets? Maybe the hardware thing will happen as more Asian computer manufacturers are forced by Asian customers to support universal systems. Maybe the software thing will happen after the hardware thing does, and the demand increases.
But just saying that "this is the year of the desktop" isn't going to create the market demand.
Buying controlling stock in a few hardware manufacturers might just do it. Start with Toshiba and Dell. Nobody who could afford that, has the balls to actually say "this company sells Linux systems and does not support Windows"
It's only corporate-suicide if you don't believe in the strategy, provided you have enough cash to weather the early years of the plan...
What I'm getting at, is the possibility that there was "elevator music" before 1920 -- before audio recording was widely available. 1979 is not the issue here. Neither are elevators. Ok maybe elevators had radios. So I'm up against a great deal of inertia, but I'm only trying to validate or repudiate an informal statement of a music professor who explained "what elevator music means" in terms of certain chord progressions that will indeed have an emotional effect on the listener, at an unconscious level.
I think it's plausible. The only evidence to the contrary that I've found is the dictionary reference.
It's pretty revealing that you think of pre-1979 as your parent's generation. I actually remember elevators with operators.
>I wonder what they'll use as a booster.
All this time has passed, and we still can't think of a more efficient heavy launch vehicle?
I've heard it said that we "couldn't" even build another Saturn V. Baloney, I say. But can't we do better anyway?
Let's try this again.
Would you rather I put traces of animal fat in your food and soil, or would you rather have benzene and arsenic in your drinking water.
Think carefully before answering.
Why do you think it's illogical to make a distinction between pollutants?
I think it's interesting that we'll spend almost, but not quite, as much money in the next FIVE years, as we spent fighting marijuana LAST year alone.
"I just spent some time here in Photoshop CS (REGISTERED LEGAL COPY) scanning in a $20 Andrew Jackson and nothing has happened."
Maybe your $20 is counterfeit?
(Have you just confessed to a crime, btw?)
"I'm sure the artists did not envision this for there music when it was uploaded to mp3.com."
Whether they envisioned it or not is fully beside the point -- they surrendered distribution rights, wilfully and knowingly and legally.
If they wanted to avoid these consequences, they should not have taken the actions that led directly to them.
The term "elevator music" didn't have anything to do with the music being played in elevators -- it refers to musical characteristics that are supposed to elevate your *mood*. Dictionary etymology notwithstanding -- I *know* the term had widespread usage before 1979 (where Merriam-Webster places it without a cite.) It wouldn't really surprise me if there was elevator music before there were elevators or even recorded music, but I'll be a while checking music history sources.
I want to draw a severe distinction between bad smells from a natural source like animals, and bad smells from a synthetic source, like a chemical plant. Is that too much to ask?
"No one will buy their house, so they can't afford to move?"
That, bundled with the fact that the Eastman/Kodak corp is pretty much the main employer.
"yeah, the same chemical and plastics that go into things like, oh, disposable cameras and memory cards. "
I've lived near both memory fabs (still do) and plastics plants and and oil refinery -- they didn't emit fumes that made the entire town unlivable. You could not pay me enough to stay in Longview Texas for longer than it takes to fill my tank up. I suppose whatever they're doing there is legal, and deemed safe, but it's
WAY more than I could handle. Chip fabs and polyethylene molding plants might pollute more, but they don't make it literally painful for me to open my eyes or breathe in the whole town.
I can handle *Los Angeles* on a bad smog day, but I'd rather not set foot in Longview...
People tried to compare it to animal wastes. That's like comparing chernobyl to a gas-powered generator. The comparison isn't possible in a reasonable universe of discourse.