Even in "this economy", you can do better if your present employer is micromanaging that badly.... odds are if they have that attitude, they also are paying poorly relative to what else is available, check around.
a nice office with full snacks, comfortable chairs, nice lounge, music, being treated with courtesy and respect, decent pay, decent benefits, and having the freedom to develop in a non-restrictive manner, while still being held accountable for the result is a good mix, and that's where most businesses tend.
Tend to say they wish they could be more like... in reality you're usually stuck with whatever furniture has been bestowed by the former furniture fairies, the pay is what the pay is - same for the benes, yeah, sorry the health insurance sucks - but it's the best we can get because of (insert excuse here, not always to do with money), and that freedom to develop in a non-restrictive manner is always what we're going to be doing after we get this unterminable project out of the way...
Wherever you and your irrelevant perspective live, I suggest you stay out of Louisiana - they'll throw you in a jail cell with an alligator overnight for an attitude like that (and that's only a slight exaggeration.)
Call the backwater US states what you will, they are still more civilized and law abiding than the majority of the world, per capita, per land area, and per just about any other measure you care to use.
Sweden is one of the most highly civilized places on the planet, and the judge in their highly civilized court still decided on jail time. Whether the defendants serve their year in comfy lockup, or spend more than a year in an onerous appeals process that they ultimately win, the judge has punished them either way.
Was it an appropriate sentence? Irrelevant. The judge is the one who gets to decide that.
they didn't want to take all possible means to clamp down on it due to the fact that the majority of unlicensed copies were being used by amateurs who either didn't use the software that much, or would eventually learn the ins and outs and would get any company they worked for to buy a legitimate version for them for use at the office.
I have long believed that this same strategy was the key to Mr. Gates' Billions.
So it can all be solved by renaming it to "The Non-Pirate Bay"? Of course not.
Daytona Beach made signs advertising "Topless" illegal (and they really had gotten out of hand...) so, for quite a while, there were "Top---- Bar" signs all over town. Good for a laugh, at least. Not sure if it improved their image or not.
In real life, attitude is 99% of what matters, and The Pirate Bay couldn't get much more brazen in their attitude. Once you get into the legal system, the finer points of law come into play - but really, we all break laws every day - it's just when we piss someone off sufficiently that the courts come into play.
Yes, Google facilitates torrent sharing just as much as TPB does, but at least it's just a side effect of their otherwise useful system, not their reason for being.
If the recording industry continues to focus on punitive actions and fails to innovate, they will fade into obscurity.
This isn't about a "high concept" purely solar community, this is about getting federal subsidies for using alternative energy. They're going to go for maximum ROI, try to get a systemwide (covering their coal, gas and nuclear facilities) tax break in exchange for building this "significant" alternative energy project, so of course it's going to be as minimal as possible to still get the maximal benefits... I don't think much battery capacity is on the plans here, they'll just use the grid.
Unfortunately the sunniest places are also some of the hottest, requiring quite a lot of power-hungry air conditioning.
Hopefully they'll take advantage of highly-efficient ground source heat pumps since the water table is probably very high in the Ft. Meyers area.
There is groundwater in Ft. Myers, but it isn't as attractive for heat pumping as in other areas. Close to the coast, it's salt water intruded. Further inland, it periodically drops pretty far below ground due to aggressive pumping for irrigation (same source of the salt-water intrusion problem), and the final kicker is that groundwater temp is the annual average temp, which is only about 68 degrees, an o.k. heat sink, but not highly attractive the way ground-water cooling would be in, say, Minnesota.
The thinking behind subsidized alternative energy is to get it "out of the hole" and into the mainstream.
If you took away all of the federally sponsored sweet deals going to big oil (like the Iraq War?), "alternative" energy would be in much better shape than it is.
Just around the corner from Babcock is Lehigh Acres, you can pick up houses there for $30K now, one of the most under-occupied cities in the SouthEast. The whole inland area there is in a serious housing over-supply.
Tampa/St. Pete is a couple of hours North of Babcock.
It's more than the content industry... a film series, from that very same content industry, started as a pretty insightful commentary on Earth's cancer: Koyaanisqatsi, the second movie did some nice contrast on Northern vs Southern hemisphere, and as far as I can tell, the third in the trilogy just went off the rails down the creator's own navel.
Cool site, somebody is always awake - personally, I'd rather lose access to my E*Trade account on one known Saturday every 3 months, instead of one unknown weekday every 5 years.
Yeah, I thought about that... I suppose that New York's Saturday morning would be as good as any... as long as it is after close of business Friday and before open of business Monday everywhere.
After playing with various devices, I'm settling on 13" as my minimum screen size for "ordinary" web browsing, that is: web browsing where I might want to use the keyboard to type a comment or send an e-mail.
Now, if you move to consumptive web browsing, such as playing Pandora radio, checking stocks and weather, reading e-mails without responding more than a very few words, reading news, etc., then that can be done on an iPhone sized device, although personally I'd like a little bigger screen, or at least a lot more pixels (1280x720 is my "happy place" for a small screen, anything less starts to feel cramped.)
One thing I haven't found a use for is monthly fees - there are very very few gadget features that I see a reason to pay a monthly fee for. But, it's what makes this world go 'round... they'd get a lot farther with me if I were just paying for access to the network and could foot the bill for my own devices, rather than the revolving 2 year contract BS.
I'm assuming the white hats would only attack targets that actually care about security - ones that consent to be attacked for the sake of improving their robustness.
In another light: who cares about lame-o sites that can't be bothered with this? You probably don't have any money to extort anyway - so you're just a possible 'bot to the bad guys, not a direct target. The targets are the ones who should care enough to improve themselves.
The program would still benefit the little guys with new security patches against the newly found attacks, if the little guys could be bothered to do an automatic update.
I would be surprised if it was down for more than 24 hours following that though.
Concur - and if the bad guys would test the system more often (like they did 10 years ago when they hit Yahoo and E*Trade), we'd have a more robust system overall.
I'd be in favor of letting the white hats take a crack at the infrastructure 4 saturday mornings per year, see how much havoc they can wreak in 24 hours and then figure out how to stop them from doing it again in 3 months. We should pay them during the designated attack days based on how much trouble they cause, then pay a different set of people based on how well they withstand the same attacks 3 months later.
a lack of observation of some phenomenon happening elsewhere in the universe does not make that phenomenon impossible.
True, with the observation qualifier, but again with the perspective, the Universe is big... really big. If 'it' can happen, in all likelihood 'it' has happened and will happen again, many many times (for any given 'it'.)
Also, the tremendous progress humanity has made, from animal and sail power to nuclear power and a planetary computation/communication grid within less than 500 years, while mightily impressive (to ourselves, at least), probably isn't unique within our own galaxy, and almost certainly has happened before in any number of slightly older galaxies. It's likely that life on Earth was little more than jello balls until about 600 million years ago, once the jello balls started getting competitive with one another, things got interesting relatively quickly. Even 600 million years is a pretty small slice of the estimated 13.5 billion years that things have been going on in this universe.
If you swallow the Kurzweilian kool-aid about continuing exponential progress, another 500 years should see humanity mastering pretty much every trick available in the universe's play-book. Somewhere in there is cheap, safe, abundant controllable energy. With that, nothing should stop us from terraforming Mars, Venus, and probably planets around the nearby stars. As I understand it, we could put water and an atmosphere on the Moon if we just drop enough wet comets on it and top it up every couple of hundred years. After stunts like that, I imagine we'd probably pull some flashy stellar engineering in systems where the star isn't meeting our needs. etc. etc. etc.
Turn us loose with "warp drive", and we'd pretty much mow down the galaxy and anything else within travel range within another 1000 years. This is why I think that such a thing isn't likely possible, at least not in a Star Trek bop on over to the next star system in a couple of hours sense. With the scale of things, it's really hard to believe that no other life in the universe has beat us to this "technological awakening" and made it through to off-planet colonization, etc.
What we can observe in the universe consists of an expanding shell going back in time (just to mix some imagery...)
Given the nature of robust life on Earth, I would assume that robust life elsewhere would spread itself more or less as rapidly as it is able to. If significant, practical faster than light travel is possible, the life forms that know how to do it would be spread across a vast swath of their galaxies, farther if they could. Maybe they remain insignificant specks while they do this, but probably not - there should be some funky (Niven style) stellar scale engineering projects, bizarre coded signaling, and similar stuff going on at least some of the time during their evolution.
The thing that would make faster than light travelers more likely to spot would be that they should intersect our sphere of vision (shell of space-time awareness, whatever) across a fairly broad swath (of the past), and they should be "closer" to us than non-faster than light travelers who started at the same time (relative to the big bang.)
To me, the proof that (significant, practical) faster than light travel is not practicable comes in the form of a complete lack of evidence of other life forms bopping around the universe.
To think that we're the first to achieve this level of understanding of the universe is beyond conceit, possible, of course, but highly improbable. So, if it were possible to spread life faster than light, I would think that some evidence would have presented itself by now, not necessarily little green men landing in the desert, but some observable phenomenon somewhere in the universe.
We should be capable of observing faster than light travel phenomena long before we are capable of achieving it.
The kids are a lot more visible in the schools now, 30 years ago there were 1/50 boys that were "very shy" or "awkward", now there are 1/50 boys that are labeled autistic, and half of them wouldn't have been called "very shy" or "awkward" 30 years ago they would have been called bat-shit crazy.
Maybe it's because of "mainstreaming" that they're more visible now. Certainly there have been bat-shit crazy kids since time immemorial, and in the past they did get swept under the rug (out to the portable, or off campus altogether).
Slashdot Mirror
Even in "this economy", you can do better if your present employer is micromanaging that badly.... odds are if they have that attitude, they also are paying poorly relative to what else is available, check around.
a nice office with full snacks, comfortable chairs, nice lounge, music, being treated with courtesy and respect, decent pay, decent benefits, and having the freedom to develop in a non-restrictive manner, while still being held accountable for the result is a good mix, and that's where most businesses tend.
Tend to say they wish they could be more like... in reality you're usually stuck with whatever furniture has been bestowed by the former furniture fairies, the pay is what the pay is - same for the benes, yeah, sorry the health insurance sucks - but it's the best we can get because of (insert excuse here, not always to do with money), and that freedom to develop in a non-restrictive manner is always what we're going to be doing after we get this unterminable project out of the way...
Wherever you and your irrelevant perspective live, I suggest you stay out of Louisiana - they'll throw you in a jail cell with an alligator overnight for an attitude like that (and that's only a slight exaggeration.)
Call the backwater US states what you will, they are still more civilized and law abiding than the majority of the world, per capita, per land area, and per just about any other measure you care to use.
Sweden is one of the most highly civilized places on the planet, and the judge in their highly civilized court still decided on jail time. Whether the defendants serve their year in comfy lockup, or spend more than a year in an onerous appeals process that they ultimately win, the judge has punished them either way.
Was it an appropriate sentence? Irrelevant. The judge is the one who gets to decide that.
they didn't want to take all possible means to clamp down on it due to the fact that the majority of unlicensed copies were being used by amateurs who either didn't use the software that much, or would eventually learn the ins and outs and would get any company they worked for to buy a legitimate version for them for use at the office.
I have long believed that this same strategy was the key to Mr. Gates' Billions.
So it can all be solved by renaming it to "The Non-Pirate Bay"? Of course not.
Daytona Beach made signs advertising "Topless" illegal (and they really had gotten out of hand...) so, for quite a while, there were "Top---- Bar" signs all over town. Good for a laugh, at least. Not sure if it improved their image or not.
The guy who made it available != TPB
The judge disagrees with you.
In real life, attitude is 99% of what matters, and The Pirate Bay couldn't get much more brazen in their attitude. Once you get into the legal system, the finer points of law come into play - but really, we all break laws every day - it's just when we piss someone off sufficiently that the courts come into play.
Yes, Google facilitates torrent sharing just as much as TPB does, but at least it's just a side effect of their otherwise useful system, not their reason for being.
If the recording industry continues to focus on punitive actions and fails to innovate, they will fade into obscurity.
They roll up the sidewalks at dusk... not much need for night power.
However, lots of old codgers do head out for the golf course pre-dawn, will need to do something to supply them...
This isn't about a "high concept" purely solar community, this is about getting federal subsidies for using alternative energy. They're going to go for maximum ROI, try to get a systemwide (covering their coal, gas and nuclear facilities) tax break in exchange for building this "significant" alternative energy project, so of course it's going to be as minimal as possible to still get the maximal benefits... I don't think much battery capacity is on the plans here, they'll just use the grid.
Unfortunately the sunniest places are also some of the hottest, requiring quite a lot of power-hungry air conditioning.
Hopefully they'll take advantage of highly-efficient ground source heat pumps since the water table is probably very high in the Ft. Meyers area.
There is groundwater in Ft. Myers, but it isn't as attractive for heat pumping as in other areas. Close to the coast, it's salt water intruded. Further inland, it periodically drops pretty far below ground due to aggressive pumping for irrigation (same source of the salt-water intrusion problem), and the final kicker is that groundwater temp is the annual average temp, which is only about 68 degrees, an o.k. heat sink, but not highly attractive the way ground-water cooling would be in, say, Minnesota.
The thinking behind subsidized alternative energy is to get it "out of the hole" and into the mainstream.
If you took away all of the federally sponsored sweet deals going to big oil (like the Iraq War?), "alternative" energy would be in much better shape than it is.
You'd be better off to buy a foreclosed house in Port Charlotte, take the money left over and buy your own (federally subsidized) solar power system.
The only reason FPL is even talking about this is because of subsidies.
And all that stink, locally, is swamp gas.
They actually build a natural gas pipeline through there to feed a "clean" electric generator station not far away... maybe you found a leak?
Just around the corner from Babcock is Lehigh Acres, you can pick up houses there for $30K now, one of the most under-occupied cities in the SouthEast. The whole inland area there is in a serious housing over-supply.
Tampa/St. Pete is a couple of hours North of Babcock.
Greg Bear did a slightly whacked fictional treatment of this in 2002: Vitals.
It's more than the content industry... a film series, from that very same content industry, started as a pretty insightful commentary on Earth's cancer: Koyaanisqatsi, the second movie did some nice contrast on Northern vs Southern hemisphere, and as far as I can tell, the third in the trilogy just went off the rails down the creator's own navel.
Cool site, somebody is always awake - personally, I'd rather lose access to my E*Trade account on one known Saturday every 3 months, instead of one unknown weekday every 5 years.
Yeah, I thought about that... I suppose that New York's Saturday morning would be as good as any... as long as it is after close of business Friday and before open of business Monday everywhere.
After playing with various devices, I'm settling on 13" as my minimum screen size for "ordinary" web browsing, that is: web browsing where I might want to use the keyboard to type a comment or send an e-mail.
Now, if you move to consumptive web browsing, such as playing Pandora radio, checking stocks and weather, reading e-mails without responding more than a very few words, reading news, etc., then that can be done on an iPhone sized device, although personally I'd like a little bigger screen, or at least a lot more pixels (1280x720 is my "happy place" for a small screen, anything less starts to feel cramped.)
One thing I haven't found a use for is monthly fees - there are very very few gadget features that I see a reason to pay a monthly fee for. But, it's what makes this world go 'round... they'd get a lot farther with me if I were just paying for access to the network and could foot the bill for my own devices, rather than the revolving 2 year contract BS.
I'm assuming the white hats would only attack targets that actually care about security - ones that consent to be attacked for the sake of improving their robustness.
In another light: who cares about lame-o sites that can't be bothered with this? You probably don't have any money to extort anyway - so you're just a possible 'bot to the bad guys, not a direct target. The targets are the ones who should care enough to improve themselves.
The program would still benefit the little guys with new security patches against the newly found attacks, if the little guys could be bothered to do an automatic update.
I would be surprised if it was down for more than 24 hours following that though.
Concur - and if the bad guys would test the system more often (like they did 10 years ago when they hit Yahoo and E*Trade), we'd have a more robust system overall.
I'd be in favor of letting the white hats take a crack at the infrastructure 4 saturday mornings per year, see how much havoc they can wreak in 24 hours and then figure out how to stop them from doing it again in 3 months. We should pay them during the designated attack days based on how much trouble they cause, then pay a different set of people based on how well they withstand the same attacks 3 months later.
a lack of observation of some phenomenon happening elsewhere in the universe does not make that phenomenon impossible.
True, with the observation qualifier, but again with the perspective, the Universe is big... really big. If 'it' can happen, in all likelihood 'it' has happened and will happen again, many many times (for any given 'it'.)
Also, the tremendous progress humanity has made, from animal and sail power to nuclear power and a planetary computation/communication grid within less than 500 years, while mightily impressive (to ourselves, at least), probably isn't unique within our own galaxy, and almost certainly has happened before in any number of slightly older galaxies. It's likely that life on Earth was little more than jello balls until about 600 million years ago, once the jello balls started getting competitive with one another, things got interesting relatively quickly. Even 600 million years is a pretty small slice of the estimated 13.5 billion years that things have been going on in this universe.
If you swallow the Kurzweilian kool-aid about continuing exponential progress, another 500 years should see humanity mastering pretty much every trick available in the universe's play-book. Somewhere in there is cheap, safe, abundant controllable energy. With that, nothing should stop us from terraforming Mars, Venus, and probably planets around the nearby stars. As I understand it, we could put water and an atmosphere on the Moon if we just drop enough wet comets on it and top it up every couple of hundred years. After stunts like that, I imagine we'd probably pull some flashy stellar engineering in systems where the star isn't meeting our needs. etc. etc. etc.
Turn us loose with "warp drive", and we'd pretty much mow down the galaxy and anything else within travel range within another 1000 years. This is why I think that such a thing isn't likely possible, at least not in a Star Trek bop on over to the next star system in a couple of hours sense. With the scale of things, it's really hard to believe that no other life in the universe has beat us to this "technological awakening" and made it through to off-planet colonization, etc.
What we can observe in the universe consists of an expanding shell going back in time (just to mix some imagery...)
Given the nature of robust life on Earth, I would assume that robust life elsewhere would spread itself more or less as rapidly as it is able to. If significant, practical faster than light travel is possible, the life forms that know how to do it would be spread across a vast swath of their galaxies, farther if they could. Maybe they remain insignificant specks while they do this, but probably not - there should be some funky (Niven style) stellar scale engineering projects, bizarre coded signaling, and similar stuff going on at least some of the time during their evolution.
The thing that would make faster than light travelers more likely to spot would be that they should intersect our sphere of vision (shell of space-time awareness, whatever) across a fairly broad swath (of the past), and they should be "closer" to us than non-faster than light travelers who started at the same time (relative to the big bang.)
To me, the proof that (significant, practical) faster than light travel is not practicable comes in the form of a complete lack of evidence of other life forms bopping around the universe.
To think that we're the first to achieve this level of understanding of the universe is beyond conceit, possible, of course, but highly improbable. So, if it were possible to spread life faster than light, I would think that some evidence would have presented itself by now, not necessarily little green men landing in the desert, but some observable phenomenon somewhere in the universe.
We should be capable of observing faster than light travel phenomena long before we are capable of achieving it.
Stuff like this doesn't do anything to convince me that the "modern environment" isn't involved.
The kids are a lot more visible in the schools now, 30 years ago there were 1/50 boys that were "very shy" or "awkward", now there are 1/50 boys that are labeled autistic, and half of them wouldn't have been called "very shy" or "awkward" 30 years ago they would have been called bat-shit crazy.
Maybe it's because of "mainstreaming" that they're more visible now. Certainly there have been bat-shit crazy kids since time immemorial, and in the past they did get swept under the rug (out to the portable, or off campus altogether).