Society? Parents are a part of the society. Kids are a part of the society. Even the people on TV are part of the society.
We are part of the society, and so is the community. So when you say "we", who are you talking about? And if everyone is part of the society, who would this "we" be doing anything for or with?
The Chiefs kid, the one everyone suspected had a key for the evidence locker. Yeah him. Yeah, he is back from the military, and is a cop now too. And he is more or less functionally illiterate.
None of the tools you went to school with became cops? Around here they amount to garbage men with guns. The ones with brains become detectives. A few even make it to IAD.
Put up with them when you must, and avoid the ones with "Little Man" issues. But they don't deserve any more respect than any other random government employee that lives on the public teat.
I operated an accelerated caching web proxy at work for a time. I intentionally did not keep any logs from the proxy. I didn't want to know where people surfed. If I knew, then I could get dragged into legal action at some point. If the logs went to/dev/null, then I was safe.
My home desktop has a 6600GT and dual 20" 1600x1200 LCDs on DVI. Even with binary NVIDIA drivers, the best of the Linux distros do a shitty job with the screen realestate.
So I too am stuck with XP on a PC until Apple makes something reasonable to take its place.
The only thing which kept me from abandoning Windows when XP came out was the access I had to a no-activation-required corporate copy of XP. I will not put up with needing to call support because something changed on my system. I've never needed to call support for help with anything, and I'm not going to start now.
OS X doesn't require any activation bullshit. For me, that is almost enough by itself to justify the extra cost. I'm also happy that the decision of whether to update is left at my discretion. No annoying ballons whine about updates being disabled for example.
In the time between the purchase of a newly shipping Amiga 500 and my MacBook Pro, every system I've owned was hand assembled from parts I picked out. Over the years, I was happy with the 386 and its descendents.
But during that time I've seen controllerless modems, capacitor death, increasingly flimsy motherboards, low cycle count PCI connectors, shitty chipsets, dead pixels, unusually short lived fans, binary only drivers, outragously hot processors, and non-functional features a-plenty. Build-it-yourself PCs lost their lustre for me. All the component brands with traditions of quality have gradually become no better than the average. With a few exceptions, the industry is a discouraging mess.
There is no motivation for improvement. The mouth breathing masses keep financing 2k$ Dell or HP game machines every other year. Even stiff necked Intel has screwed the pooch long enough to be playing catchup to AMD. Morale is pretty low over there.
And those people who haven't given up on building their own machines have devolved into take-a-credit-card-to-fry's-and-sell-the-glowing-s hitpile-on-craigslist-next-week-cause-I-can't-pay- the-bill pussies. Even allowing that a quarter of them got the parts through the Intel employee-discount program, its a sad sight.
Microsoft long ago stopped any making any worthwhile improvements, and is in the business of turning the crank on the upgrade cash machine. Direct X 10? Gotta have Vista! Yawn.
The era of self-built and self-installed systems is almost over. The cattle won't protect themselves, so the platform will do it for them.
Some people put their hope in Linux. But the one enduring quality you can count on with Linux fans, is their cheapness. No significant hardware success story has come out of the years the Linux market has grown. Where are the "Designed for Linux" stickers. Even sad-old-Netware had stickers.
Apple hardware, like anything with any desirability, is going to cost more. But it ships with GCC. And Ruby. And Perl. And Python. And Xcode. And not-Internet Explorer. Its a good platform for anything but gaming. But they're not for everyone.
Buy a few movies and a couple of seasons worth of the shows you can stand to watch. Examples: STTOS, STTAS, SW, Gilligan's Island, Land of the Lost, Space 1999, Firefly, B5, The DUNE Miniseries, Monty Python, MST3K, etc.
(Exercise your fair use rights, rip the DVDs to ISO, and risk prison time.)
Build a Linux or BSD box with a generous quantity of disk space. Add a cron job, some perl code, mplayer, a DXR3, an RF modulator, and some coax, and you have your own channel 3 or 4 CCTV station. You can schedule programming to start every day just before you get home from work, and end when you typically go to bed.
For extra points, swap edit lists with your friends, so they can re-insert fun or dummy commercials at the correct points in the shows. (But don't swap actual content, that's illegal.) Public domain sign-on and sign-off footage would be nice too.
After figuratively kicking the Cablecos in the proverbial junk a few times, you can install a FXO/FXS card and Asterisk and go after the Telcos.
If you don't mind sharing coin op facilties with the down and out, then you shouldn't be put off by a used washer and dryer pair. As a young married couple, our first pair were used, and the washer was even a water and detergent conserving front loader.
We paid 125$ for the pair, and used a sharpie to make a hash mark on the top of the washer for each load washed and dryed. Even with energy costs, they paid for themselves in less than a year.
The washer's water pump seals failed after a few years, so we replace it with a free washer from a family friend. The dryer eventually wore out, etc. After 15 years, I think we're on our third used set. They don't run Linux or have touch screens, but I know we've saved energy by not participating in the "cult of the new".
My first cellphone was on a corporate plan through work, and at first the bills went direct to my employer. Unfortunately, the assholes went over to "you pay all the bills first, and then we'll reimburse you for it". That would've been OK, except that when I was let go in a RIF, I kept getting bills from AT&T. I had never signed a contract, and the phone had been reissued to some other empoyee. I had to threaten to take them to small claims court to get people to take me seriously and get the account swung over to the other employee.
The AT&T service had been alright, but the account confusion made it difficult to get signed with AT&T again as an individual. I looked around, and ultimately picked Sprint.
Sprint pricing wasn't as good, but not having access to a corporate plan, I was screwed anyway.
The corporation I worked for also had a corporate plan with AT&T wireless. The rates were excellent, and family plan phones were about 9$ per month. Once the Sprint contract expired, I spent a few more years with AT&T wireless on TDMA.
Eventually, AT&T WS pushed everyone from TDMA to GSM. Everything they told me about GSM quality was a lie. In retrospect, I should've stayed on TDMA until the last possible day.
Even after the transition to sucky GSM, the AT&T WS people were cool. And then they sold out their customer base to the cocksuckers at Cingular. It has been nothing but downhill from there. Southern idiot prison inmates for phone support, ongoing problems with my phone switching from AT&T to Cingular cell sites, Cingular turing my phone off while I'm on the road if my payment is late, getting charged 30$ to turn service back on, etc. I wouldn't waste piss on a Cingular employee, if they were on fire.
I've moved to a new job, and am almost through with my two year contract.
The cycle is close to being complete. The company I'm working for is pushing all the employees to go to Sprint. At this point, I don't care. I'm just happy to be moving away from Cingular.
If I didn't need a mobile phone for work, I'd turn the whole mess off, and be happy for it.
They have one game that is a bit like frogger. Only the frog is a student, and the cars have been replaced with tanks.
There is also a hacking game where you attempt to work your way around web filters to get access to information about the outside world.
Here in the U.S., we're still playing a game where you elect the village idiot, and then he helps his buddies at the oil companies wage war against low gas prices. I hear he is gradually loosing control of Congress though. I saw a leaked beta; the third installment in the trilogy is on its way. Something about return of that Jeb guy.
Someone needs to invent a controller that you have to stick your fingers in to make it work. Maybe add a lick activated fire button, and cover the whole thing with fur. Rumble, gotta have rumble.
You could call it the Microsoft XY-Box, the Nintendo Vaag, or the Sony OPP.
The Circuit City parking lot would be full of Subarus for a week.
Charities need money. Money comes almost exclusively from closed source companies.
You don't spit in the face of those closed source companies, and put down their product. You smile, but the reduced cost copies, and say good things about closed source companies.
Anyone grumpy about a slashdot story is not in your target audience anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
People who can't be reasoned with can go into swat teams and the military? I guess that is one way to address the problem.
Society? Parents are a part of the society. Kids are a part of the society. Even the people on TV are part of the society.
We are part of the society, and so is the community. So when you say "we", who are you talking about? And if everyone is part of the society, who would this "we" be doing anything for or with?
The Chiefs kid, the one everyone suspected had a key for the evidence locker. Yeah him. Yeah, he is back from the military, and is a cop now too. And he is more or less functionally illiterate.
None of the tools you went to school with became cops? Around here they amount to garbage men with guns. The ones with brains become detectives. A few even make it to IAD.
Put up with them when you must, and avoid the ones with "Little Man" issues. But they don't deserve any more respect than any other random government employee that lives on the public teat.
I operated an accelerated caching web proxy at work for a time. I intentionally did not keep any logs from the proxy. I didn't want to know where people surfed. If I knew, then I could get dragged into legal action at some point. If the logs went to /dev/null, then I was safe.
Either the guy lives in a place with a negative timezone offset, has been affected by the DST bug, or was uploaded by a timelord.
The video was clearly labeled "-24". What does Fox want?
I wonder how this compares to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetezzaNetezza.
Seems like the cooling process would be more efficient while the ambient temperature is lower, at night.
There must be some catalyst that can turn one hundred million tons of carbon dioxide into its constituent carbon monoxide and ozone.
How to get rid of the carbon monoxide and ozone? Well... it depends on what the next prize is.
Not following the spirit of the contest? This from a guy making a living off aeroplanes?
My home desktop has a 6600GT and dual 20" 1600x1200 LCDs on DVI. Even with binary NVIDIA drivers, the best of the Linux distros do a shitty job with the screen realestate.
So I too am stuck with XP on a PC until Apple makes something reasonable to take its place.
The only thing which kept me from abandoning Windows when XP came out was the access I had to a no-activation-required corporate copy of XP. I will not put up with needing to call support because something changed on my system. I've never needed to call support for help with anything, and I'm not going to start now.
s hitpile-on-craigslist-next-week-cause-I-can't-pay- the-bill pussies. Even allowing that a quarter of them got the parts through the Intel employee-discount program, its a sad sight.
OS X doesn't require any activation bullshit. For me, that is almost enough by itself to justify the extra cost. I'm also happy that the decision of whether to update is left at my discretion. No annoying ballons whine about updates being disabled for example.
In the time between the purchase of a newly shipping Amiga 500 and my MacBook Pro, every system I've owned was hand assembled from parts I picked out. Over the years, I was happy with the 386 and its descendents.
But during that time I've seen controllerless modems, capacitor death, increasingly flimsy motherboards, low cycle count PCI connectors, shitty chipsets, dead pixels, unusually short lived fans, binary only drivers, outragously hot processors, and non-functional features a-plenty. Build-it-yourself PCs lost their lustre for me. All the component brands with traditions of quality have gradually become no better than the average. With a few exceptions, the industry is a discouraging mess.
There is no motivation for improvement. The mouth breathing masses keep financing 2k$ Dell or HP game machines every other year. Even stiff necked Intel has screwed the pooch long enough to be playing catchup to AMD. Morale is pretty low over there.
And those people who haven't given up on building their own machines have devolved into take-a-credit-card-to-fry's-and-sell-the-glowing-
Microsoft long ago stopped any making any worthwhile improvements, and is in the business of turning the crank on the upgrade cash machine. Direct X 10? Gotta have Vista! Yawn.
The era of self-built and self-installed systems is almost over. The cattle won't protect themselves, so the platform will do it for them.
Some people put their hope in Linux. But the one enduring quality you can count on with Linux fans, is their cheapness. No significant hardware success story has come out of the years the Linux market has grown. Where are the "Designed for Linux" stickers. Even sad-old-Netware had stickers.
Apple hardware, like anything with any desirability, is going to cost more. But it ships with GCC. And Ruby. And Perl. And Python. And Xcode. And not-Internet Explorer. Its a good platform for anything but gaming. But they're not for everyone.
My buddy secured his neighbor's WAP on accident. He thought he was configuring his own.
The neighbor was confused when told that his router now had a WEP key in place.
What sense does it make for pot to be legal if smoking is not?
Buy a few movies and a couple of seasons worth of the shows you can stand to watch. Examples: STTOS, STTAS, SW, Gilligan's Island, Land of the Lost, Space 1999, Firefly, B5, The DUNE Miniseries, Monty Python, MST3K, etc.
(Exercise your fair use rights, rip the DVDs to ISO, and risk prison time.)
Build a Linux or BSD box with a generous quantity of disk space. Add a cron job, some perl code, mplayer, a DXR3, an RF modulator, and some coax, and you have your own channel 3 or 4 CCTV station. You can schedule programming to start every day just before you get home from work, and end when you typically go to bed.
For extra points, swap edit lists with your friends, so they can re-insert fun or dummy commercials at the correct points in the shows. (But don't swap actual content, that's illegal.) Public domain sign-on and sign-off footage would be nice too.
After figuratively kicking the Cablecos in the proverbial junk a few times, you can install a FXO/FXS card and Asterisk and go after the Telcos.
If you don't mind sharing coin op facilties with the down and out, then you shouldn't be put off by a used washer and dryer pair. As a young married couple, our first pair were used, and the washer was even a water and detergent conserving front loader.
We paid 125$ for the pair, and used a sharpie to make a hash mark on the top of the washer for each load washed and dryed. Even with energy costs, they paid for themselves in less than a year.
The washer's water pump seals failed after a few years, so we replace it with a free washer from a family friend. The dryer eventually wore out, etc. After 15 years, I think we're on our third used set. They don't run Linux or have touch screens, but I know we've saved energy by not participating in the "cult of the new".
My first cellphone was on a corporate plan through work, and at first the bills went direct to my employer. Unfortunately, the assholes went over to "you pay all the bills first, and then we'll reimburse you for it". That would've been OK, except that when I was let go in a RIF, I kept getting bills from AT&T. I had never signed a contract, and the phone had been reissued to some other empoyee. I had to threaten to take them to small claims court to get people to take me seriously and get the account swung over to the other employee.
The AT&T service had been alright, but the account confusion made it difficult to get signed with AT&T again as an individual. I looked around, and ultimately picked Sprint.
Sprint pricing wasn't as good, but not having access to a corporate plan, I was screwed anyway.
The corporation I worked for also had a corporate plan with AT&T wireless. The rates were excellent, and family plan phones were about 9$ per month. Once the Sprint contract expired, I spent a few more years with AT&T wireless on TDMA.
Eventually, AT&T WS pushed everyone from TDMA to GSM. Everything they told me about GSM quality was a lie. In retrospect, I should've stayed on TDMA until the last possible day.
Even after the transition to sucky GSM, the AT&T WS people were cool. And then they sold out their customer base to the cocksuckers at Cingular. It has been nothing but downhill from there. Southern idiot prison inmates for phone support, ongoing problems with my phone switching from AT&T to Cingular cell sites, Cingular turing my phone off while I'm on the road if my payment is late, getting charged 30$ to turn service back on, etc. I wouldn't waste piss on a Cingular employee, if they were on fire.
I've moved to a new job, and am almost through with my two year contract.
The cycle is close to being complete. The company I'm working for is pushing all the employees to go to Sprint. At this point, I don't care. I'm just happy to be moving away from Cingular.
If I didn't need a mobile phone for work, I'd turn the whole mess off, and be happy for it.
OK, where does my unemployable video game character sign up for welfare?
Pretty soon, the only jobs in the US not outsourced are going to be in the military.
At that point, what will there be left to defend?
How long could more than a trivial number of people get away with using their full download pipes?
Even if Verizon did allow downloads to proceed at full pace, who could host the upstread requirements, without using multicast?
Our education system is vilified by a buch of idiots who..... (wait for it).... went through our education system!
They have one game that is a bit like frogger. Only the frog is a student, and the cars have been replaced with tanks.
There is also a hacking game where you attempt to work your way around web filters to get access to information about the outside world.
Here in the U.S., we're still playing a game where you elect the village idiot, and then he helps his buddies at the oil companies wage war against low gas prices. I hear he is gradually loosing control of Congress though. I saw a leaked beta; the third installment in the trilogy is on its way. Something about return of that Jeb guy.
Someone needs to invent a controller that you have to stick your fingers in to make it work. Maybe add a lick activated fire button, and cover the whole thing with fur. Rumble, gotta have rumble.
You could call it the Microsoft XY-Box, the Nintendo Vaag, or the Sony OPP.
The Circuit City parking lot would be full of Subarus for a week.
Charities need money. Money comes almost exclusively from closed source companies.
You don't spit in the face of those closed source companies, and put down their product. You smile, but the reduced cost copies, and say good things about closed source companies.
Anyone grumpy about a slashdot story is not in your target audience anyway.
You want upper management, you need to run into their office and whack them in the junk every time they make a stupid decision about safety.
Even if it doesn't do any good, the image of the boss rolling around in the floor crying is good for morale.
Managing 20 people only nets you 15k above entry level? What kind of sweat shop is this?
With California's smog laws, and old car is one between 3 an 5 years old. (Don't forget insurance.)
You'd have to be a dual-income family or think about public assistance to have a family down there.
How often do storms need to hit various parts of the country before people stop moving back and rebuilding?