In some countries, university professors actually make decent money, but that seems to be rare - you're really getting paid in prestige and lifestyle rather than cash...
On the other hand, no, the $88million wasn't the government's money to begin with, it was the people's money that the government took. In a democracy the government claims they're taking the people's money to do something better than the people would have done with it on their own, but it's still the people's money. In a feudal society or theocracy or some other kinds of governmental structure, the money actually _may_ be the government's (that doesn't mean that it wasn't taken by force, but it was done as a personal action by the rulers and their henchpersons, so it's really their money for whatever they feel like spending it on.)
The new Yellow $20 bills were created for use during Yellow Terror Alert. The new Red $50 bills are being prepared for after the election, when we go to Red Alert.
It's nice when the government stops their greedy reservation of parts of the spectrum and lets the public have it back! (OK, they haven't quite done that yet, but it sounds like they might soon...) Now we can start using the 7Hz band for the Internet!
Need to protect yourself against venue damage too
on
Anatomy of a LAN Party?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Ask your local Science Fiction Convention staff. They encounter similar issues, though they usually don't have hardware problems, only people problems.
Even if you make all the attendees sign a permission slip saying that you're not responsible for them or their hardware and that they understand that LAN parties, like bungee-jumping, are an inherently dangerous activity, and that they agree to pay for any damage they do, you still need to protect yourself against attendees doing dangerous or stupid things. Because there's some reasonable probability that they will, and either you won't be able to figure out who it was or they won't have the personal assets or insurance to cover it. Maybe they plug their PC into 240VAC and the blue smoke gets out and sets off the sprinklers, or maybe they plug their Ethernet into the building PBX jacks and fry the PBX (yes, I know RJ45 is designed to discourage problems like that), or maybe their extra-high-power 802.11b card triggers the garage door opener and some outsider steals the snowplow, or your PCs use up too much power and a circuit breaker trips, taking out the coffeepot in the lobby, or who know what other stupid things can happen.
They have an entry fee, which looks like $20 advance / $25 at the door. Assuming they had one last year, which they probably did, it was either too low to break even, or too high so it scared away people, or just right and breaking even's rough in their market (or at least, with their advertising budget.)
Maybe sell T-shirts - have some onsite, and set up a CafePress store to sell more of them in case you run out?
Protectionism's far older than that
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
Protectionism is far older than that - one reason that the US Constitution gives the Feds power to control Interstate Commerce was to prevent the US states from doing their own protectionism on trade between states, and many people argue that that is one reason that the US became an economic power (besides having a lot of nice land and mineral resources to steal from the Indians, of course.)
But Bush is a Republican whose party loudly advocates free trade (in between doing favors for their friends), so he deserves to be bashed for blatant protectist moves.
Sure, this helps the spam problem by making spammers use more difficult interfaces to send lots of Hotmail via multiple accounts, though they'll probably find ways around that. (Obviously forcing them to the web interfaces limit the speed at which you can send spam.)
But preventing non-spammer users from using the notoriously virus-prone Outlook interface to read their email reduces the chances that they'll get infected, so their machines are less likely to be turned into spam-sending zombies. This is a Good Thing.
Caffeine's not addictive? You should try drinking as much coffee as I used to and then stop and enjoy the withdrawal symptoms. It's not as addictive as tobacco or crack, and it can easily be used at levels that don't cause addiction in most people, but it can be quite addictive if you use it that way. Sometimes when I've been using it and stop, it's just a bit tough waking up in the morning and staying awake late in the afternoon, but I've had times that I've gotten two weeks of severe withdrawal headaches and needed to start the day with tylenol instead.
... at least when they're not flip-flopping, most Republican politicians say they believe most issues should be left to the states, and say that the Federal government should be small and let the states handle policy issues that are within their capabilities. (Of course, both Bushes have been in favor of the Feds getting increased power over education, because that seems to be politically popular, in spite of also wanting to talk about local responsibility.)
The Constitution might arguably let the Feds regulate the Interstate Commerce aspects of drug policy, but local policy-making is something that Republican core doctrine says ought to take priority over Federal policy.
According to a speech President Bush #1 in ~1990, 7/8 of cocaine users aren't addicts, just occasional users - compare this to tobacco, where ~95% of users are addicts. (He didn't realize that was what his figures meant, but that's what they meant.) Somehow America survived when 1/2 of the adult population used to be tobacco addicts and are still caffeine addicts today. More like 10% are alcoholics, but in spite of alcohol being universally available, most of your friends aren't homeless winos, even if they're alcoholics. Crack is a bit more addictive than snorting regular coke, but one of the main reasons people use it is that it's a cheaper high and regular coke is hard to get in some communities. Heroin addiction is about as dangerous as tobacco addiction, and cocaine addiction is 3-4 times safer, though if it's going to kill you it usually gets you young and quickly rather then slowly and painfully when you're old.
According to Bush#1's Office of National Drug Control Policy strategy report, if cocaine and heroin were legal, you could be a cokehead for less than the price of a pack a day of cigarettes or a pint of cheap booze, and a junkie for under $1/day. So all this crime and violence associated with Drug Prohibition are because there's some compelling moral difference between being a junkie and being a drunkard, so important that we should criminalize users and let sellers attack each other on the streets with illegal assault weapons and let terrorists fund their organizations with opium-growing profits.
But it's going to take a lot of social change before America relaxes enough to legalize cocaine and heroin - think about Marijuana legalization first. Sure, the first month it's legal a lot of us are going to go on a few weekend benders and get it out of our systems (:-), just like the first few weekends after The Noble Experiment of alcohol Prohibition was repealed. And too many stoned drivers will get in car accidents for a while, but mostly people will stay home and order pizza. And the first six months or a year's worth of demand will mostly be satisfied by former criminals who were professionally growing it, until the tobacco farmers take over and people start growing their own in their back yards. (Marijuana's already the largest agricultural cash crop in the tobacco-growing states, as well as in the West Coast lumber-growing regions, but that's mainly because the street price is as expensive per ounce as gold rather than as cheap per pound as tomatoes.)
Just because the drug policies turn lots of users into criminals,
and make users spend lots of money for inherently cheap products, ruining the economic lives of many and leading some into crime, especially blacks and Mexicans who can't afford to buy expensive dope on their wages,
and create strong profit incentives for people to go into the drug business,
and teach kids that drug dealing and joining gangs can make them rich and that going to jail is normal,
and require far more police to fight them, and more prisons to put users and sellers in,
and a much bigger government to hire all the police and prison guards,
and require armies to go attack countries in Latin America which grow drugs,
and armies to attack terrorists and resistance armies who are funded by drug profits,
and much bigger government to hire all the armies,
and creates huge corruption in drug-producing countries and drug consuming cities' police forces,
and lets politicians claim that they need ever-increasing power to stop all these problems,
doesn't mean that Prohibition is a Failure! It just depends on what you want for society.... Think of it as Evolution in Action.
"Gateway Drugs" are such a tired bogus line. If you want a statistically significant "gateway drug", try tobacco and alcohol. Almost anybody who's tried illegal drugs has also tried both first (imagine a heroin user saying "Booze? No, that's bad for you, I'd never try that!"), and while some kids may find it easier to _buy_ illegal drugs than to buy booze in a store, it's still easy for them to find enough alcohol and tobacco to decide if they like it. Some kids try booze and like getting wasted, and look for more wastage drugs; some kids try tobacco and like looking cool, feeling edgy but calm and getting really cranky when you need more, and annoying people around them with their behavior, and go looking for speed and coke.
For one of my friends, though, marijuana was a gateway drug. After the first time he got stoned, he said "Wow! They really LIED to me about pot! I wonder what ELSE they lied to me about?" and headed off to try all the other things they'd told him were Bad, many of which he also liked, though a few of them he decided really _were_ bad.
And while we're at it, what message would it send to our kids? We might send the message that when _adults_ are wrong about things, they admit it and change their minds, or we might send the message that when adults are wrong, we tell kids that they have to do what we say Because We Said It and we'll make up whatever bogus lies will scare them into believing us, just like we do about so many other things.
According to some article I read a decade or two ago, probably in National Geographic, in some parts of Tibet it's fairly common for a woman to be married to a set of brothers. Typically she marries the oldest one first, and then the others as they get to marriagable age. Leftover women end up becoming nuns or something (and yes, Buddhists to have nuns.)
If something that big hit the Earth, it would release a huge amount of debris into the atmosphere, affecting solar energy absorbtion/reflection, maybe doing a nuclear-winter-style cooling, affecting clouds, possibly causing chemical-related problems depending on what it threw around, making a big atmospheric shock wave that would devaste everything in a huge radius around it, cause lots of fires, and cause a big earthquake which might trigger more quakes, etc.,
But the moon doesn't have an atmosphere or oceans, so most of those things simply won't happen - lots of dust goes ballistic and lands, a chunk of the moon's surface gets vaporized (ok, causing a temporary localized atmosphere of sorts, but not enough to care about), and the dust covers some existing craters, but if there's a new crater on a side of the moon we can see, maybe it'd be deep enough to get some real insight about the inside of the moon.
Certainly lots of business for astronomers for a while. It'd be much more annoying if it hit the far side of the moon where we can only see it from spaceships.
My cat had a Hotmail account relatively early on. Because they insist that you provide true information when signing up for an account, my cat provided correct information about herself. Unfortunately, after Microsoft bought out Hotmail, they developed the annoying Passport one-registration-system-to-rule-them-all login system, though old accounts continued to work for a while. Then the Feds passed some law about protecting the information of children on the web, which led to most online services banning access to anyone under 13. My cat was about 3 years old at the time, so her account got canned, and neither I nor she wanted to go through Passport to create a new account, so we switched to Yahoo or something.
Xenophobic Bullshit
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"Bad Immigration Policy"? My ancestors let your ancestors move to North America, so don't bitch if we let other people move here too. Meanwhile, when I moved to California from New Jersey, I came twice as far as a typical Mexican immigrant, and I only speak one of the four or five main languages used here in SF, but nobody made me ask permission from some bureaucrat to move here.
Yes, we've got a job crunch in this country, and we had a severe job crunch in the dot-bomb technology industry, with an estimated 49% of San Francisco's high-tech jobs disappearing, so my friends were affected much more strongly than the average American, and there's a non-trivial chance I'll get laid off next week.
One reason we're having trouble is that technological change created a lot of temporary opportunities for jobs until the market figured out what the web business was really worth and the VC money all dried up.
Another reason has to do with rapidly rising interest rates in Y2K, which _is_ something politicians had a lot of influence on, which happened as the Y2K-conversion software boom jobs dried up and the dogfood-on-line.com companies were running out of their early funding rounds.
Another reason is that Bush's protectionism raised the price of steel, hurting any American manufacturers who used steel, harming a lot more business than it saved.
Moore's Law really zapped the telecommunications industry, by suddenly giving us near-infinite fiber bandwidth when everybody's construction funding had depended on selling it at slowly declining prices, and the "Internet capacity demand doubling every 15 minutes" phenomenon only slowed down the crash a bit.
Information wants to be free and the Internet lets anybody work from anywhere in the world. That seemed like a good reason for everybody to move to San Francisco, but in fact anybody in the world who's reasonably educated can compete with us, even if the xenophobes don't let them move here. That's not just the software business - almost any white-collar job is really about either manipulating information or talking to people face to face; the cost of phone calls dropped to near-zero once government monopolies in most of the world realized that white-collar jobs were more important than ripoff telephone prices.
Container shipping means that not only can information go anywhere in the world, physical stuff can be transported cheaply too, so manufacturing jobs can easily be done around the world.
The American Education System has been declining over the last 30 years, just in case you thought this was a purely Libertarian rant. School systems aren't putting out the quality of education they used to, which means that students aren't prepared for high-value jobs, but schools also aren't teaching mechanical skills that laborers would use.
The poll doesn't want questions from people over 35, but suggests we ask young people we know to ask the questions. So for you younger Slashdotters out there - Would you ask Bush why he keeps lying to the public, and how long he thinks they'll keep believing it? And ask Kerry why he doesn't call Bush on the lies?
Sure, Bill Clinton lied about his sex life. But Bush lies about National Policy and reasons we should go to war with people his neocon cronies wanted to go to war with when he got elected.
I was only there about 10 days, didn't take the computer, some of the hotel rooms didn't even have phones. No problem, mon. Seemed a bit silly to use maps made of actual dead trees, but it worked ok. Spent a lot of time talking to family, hanging out at the beach, drinking things with rum in them, driving around volcanoes.
Of course, when I got back home, my PC was grumpy and had several hundred non-spam emails to hand me, mixed in with spam about how I could win free trips to Hawaii.
I can't read the real press release, which is in Japanese, but this says that it's not VGA resolution, it's 320x240 QVGA, which I guess is subtly different from CGA (presumably including lots more colors.) So if it's 368dpi, then it's less than an inch wide, roughly right for a cell phone display.
If some cracker destroys things or steals from people, that says he's got no fundamental morality or respect for other people - there's no way to trust him with anything or expect him to play well with others, no matter how bright he might be. I'm not talking about someone who just graffitis a web site without trashing the originals; that's immaturity and possible to outgrow. But somebody who releases a virus that can trash people's machines, especially if it trashes them on purpose, or deals with stolen credit card numbers, or deletes files? Not a chance.
If it's somebody who just tourists around other people's systems, or uses them as a springboard to get to other places, then maybe, if he's got Redeeming Social Value and useful skills and personality, I'd consider him.
Been Done, more or less. NCSA's Scientific Computing on Playstation 2 web page. Supercomputer Cluster of ~70 Playstations, Easy-to-read glossy BBC Article. GPUs and DSPs aren't particularly good at general I/O or interrupt handling, but they're really good at chowing down on a stream of data fed to them by a more general processor, so projects like this generally use the GPU for computation and the main CPU for communications and user interface.
There have been systems like this using DSPs for years; I've worked with some of them in the mid-late-80s. The Bell Labs DSP supercomputer had a tree-structured network of DSPs, and I think a more general-purpose processor at the root, back when 25 MFLOPS was blazingly fast for a single floating-point DSP, and the box had 127 of them, producing up to about 2 GFLOPS on applications like FFTs. It was one of the fastest ray-tracers around.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, no, the $88million wasn't the government's money to begin with, it was the people's money that the government took. In a democracy the government claims they're taking the people's money to do something better than the people would have done with it on their own, but it's still the people's money. In a feudal society or theocracy or some other kinds of governmental structure, the money actually _may_ be the government's (that doesn't mean that it wasn't taken by force, but it was done as a personal action by the rulers and their henchpersons, so it's really their money for whatever they feel like spending it on.)
The new Yellow $20 bills were created for use during Yellow Terror Alert. The new Red $50 bills are being prepared for after the election, when we go to Red Alert.
It's nice when the government stops their greedy reservation of parts of the spectrum and lets the public have it back! (OK, they haven't quite done that yet, but it sounds like they might soon...) Now we can start using the 7Hz band for the Internet!
Even if you make all the attendees sign a permission slip saying that you're not responsible for them or their hardware and that they understand that LAN parties, like bungee-jumping, are an inherently dangerous activity, and that they agree to pay for any damage they do, you still need to protect yourself against attendees doing dangerous or stupid things. Because there's some reasonable probability that they will, and either you won't be able to figure out who it was or they won't have the personal assets or insurance to cover it. Maybe they plug their PC into 240VAC and the blue smoke gets out and sets off the sprinklers, or maybe they plug their Ethernet into the building PBX jacks and fry the PBX (yes, I know RJ45 is designed to discourage problems like that), or maybe their extra-high-power 802.11b card triggers the garage door opener and some outsider steals the snowplow, or your PCs use up too much power and a circuit breaker trips, taking out the coffeepot in the lobby, or who know what other stupid things can happen.
Maybe sell T-shirts - have some onsite, and set up a CafePress store to sell more of them in case you run out?
But Bush is a Republican whose party loudly advocates free trade (in between doing favors for their friends), so he deserves to be bashed for blatant protectist moves.
What I want _will_ unfortunately take a long time to achieve, because too many people are way too hung up in the Prohibition power trip.
But preventing non-spammer users from using the notoriously virus-prone Outlook interface to read their email reduces the chances that they'll get infected, so their machines are less likely to be turned into spam-sending zombies. This is a Good Thing.
Caffeine's not addictive? You should try drinking as much coffee as I used to and then stop and enjoy the withdrawal symptoms. It's not as addictive as tobacco or crack, and it can easily be used at levels that don't cause addiction in most people, but it can be quite addictive if you use it that way. Sometimes when I've been using it and stop, it's just a bit tough waking up in the morning and staying awake late in the afternoon, but I've had times that I've gotten two weeks of severe withdrawal headaches and needed to start the day with tylenol instead.
The Constitution might arguably let the Feds regulate the Interstate Commerce aspects of drug policy, but local policy-making is something that Republican core doctrine says ought to take priority over Federal policy.
According to Bush#1's Office of National Drug Control Policy strategy report, if cocaine and heroin were legal, you could be a cokehead for less than the price of a pack a day of cigarettes or a pint of cheap booze, and a junkie for under $1/day. So all this crime and violence associated with Drug Prohibition are because there's some compelling moral difference between being a junkie and being a drunkard, so important that we should criminalize users and let sellers attack each other on the streets with illegal assault weapons and let terrorists fund their organizations with opium-growing profits.
But it's going to take a lot of social change before America relaxes enough to legalize cocaine and heroin - think about Marijuana legalization first. Sure, the first month it's legal a lot of us are going to go on a few weekend benders and get it out of our systems (:-), just like the first few weekends after The Noble Experiment of alcohol Prohibition was repealed. And too many stoned drivers will get in car accidents for a while, but mostly people will stay home and order pizza. And the first six months or a year's worth of demand will mostly be satisfied by former criminals who were professionally growing it, until the tobacco farmers take over and people start growing their own in their back yards. (Marijuana's already the largest agricultural cash crop in the tobacco-growing states, as well as in the West Coast lumber-growing regions, but that's mainly because the street price is as expensive per ounce as gold rather than as cheap per pound as tomatoes.)
- Just because the drug policies turn lots of users into criminals,
- and make users spend lots of money for inherently cheap products, ruining the economic lives of many and leading some into crime, especially blacks and Mexicans who can't afford to buy expensive dope on their wages,
- and create strong profit incentives for people to go into the drug business,
- and teach kids that drug dealing and joining gangs can make them rich and that going to jail is normal,
- and require far more police to fight them, and more prisons to put users and sellers in,
- and a much bigger government to hire all the police and prison guards,
- and require armies to go attack countries in Latin America which grow drugs,
- and armies to attack terrorists and resistance armies who are funded by drug profits,
- and much bigger government to hire all the armies,
- and creates huge corruption in drug-producing countries and drug consuming cities' police forces,
- and lets politicians claim that they need ever-increasing power to stop all these problems,
doesn't mean that Prohibition is a Failure! It just depends on what you want for society.... Think of it as Evolution in Action.For one of my friends, though, marijuana was a gateway drug. After the first time he got stoned, he said "Wow! They really LIED to me about pot! I wonder what ELSE they lied to me about?" and headed off to try all the other things they'd told him were Bad, many of which he also liked, though a few of them he decided really _were_ bad.
And while we're at it, what message would it send to our kids? We might send the message that when _adults_ are wrong about things, they admit it and change their minds, or we might send the message that when adults are wrong, we tell kids that they have to do what we say Because We Said It and we'll make up whatever bogus lies will scare them into believing us, just like we do about so many other things.
According to some article I read a decade or two ago, probably in National Geographic, in some parts of Tibet it's fairly common for a woman to be married to a set of brothers. Typically she marries the oldest one first, and then the others as they get to marriagable age. Leftover women end up becoming nuns or something (and yes, Buddhists to have nuns.)
But the moon doesn't have an atmosphere or oceans, so most of those things simply won't happen - lots of dust goes ballistic and lands, a chunk of the moon's surface gets vaporized (ok, causing a temporary localized atmosphere of sorts, but not enough to care about), and the dust covers some existing craters, but if there's a new crater on a side of the moon we can see, maybe it'd be deep enough to get some real insight about the inside of the moon.
Certainly lots of business for astronomers for a while. It'd be much more annoying if it hit the far side of the moon where we can only see it from spaceships.
These days I've got an account on Fastmail.fm, which is a really well-run free (with optional paid upgrades) mail system, and I mostly use dodgeit.com for more disposable website registrations and such.
Yes, we've got a job crunch in this country, and we had a severe job crunch in the dot-bomb technology industry, with an estimated 49% of San Francisco's high-tech jobs disappearing, so my friends were affected much more strongly than the average American, and there's a non-trivial chance I'll get laid off next week.
Sure, Bill Clinton lied about his sex life. But Bush lies about National Policy and reasons we should go to war with people his neocon cronies wanted to go to war with when he got elected.
Of course, when I got back home, my PC was grumpy and had several hundred non-spam emails to hand me, mixed in with spam about how I could win free trips to Hawaii.
I can't read the real press release, which is in Japanese, but this says that it's not VGA resolution, it's 320x240 QVGA, which I guess is subtly different from CGA (presumably including lots more colors.) So if it's 368dpi, then it's less than an inch wide, roughly right for a cell phone display.
There are some things that man was not meant to adapt to musical theatre. And you can get the album, too!
If it's somebody who just tourists around other people's systems, or uses them as a springboard to get to other places, then maybe, if he's got Redeeming Social Value and useful skills and personality, I'd consider him.
Or Southern-American. A dumb Yankee can be just as dumb, but you've got to be Southern to be a "cracker".
Ozzy once complained along the lines of "Just _once_ you bite the head off a live bat on stage and nobody _ever_ stops ragging you about it."
There have been systems like this using DSPs for years; I've worked with some of them in the mid-late-80s. The Bell Labs DSP supercomputer had a tree-structured network of DSPs, and I think a more general-purpose processor at the root, back when 25 MFLOPS was blazingly fast for a single floating-point DSP, and the box had 127 of them, producing up to about 2 GFLOPS on applications like FFTs. It was one of the fastest ray-tracers around.