I have a Dell LCD TV that is 3 years old and the back light just failed on it last night. Of course I didn't get the extended service on it. Who expects a TV to fail after just 3 years? (TV's usually last 10 to 15 years or more if you don't drop them too many times when you are moving. )
Oh, by the way did I mention that the external HDTV tuner that I also bought from Dell at the same time died about a month ago?...(ACK... back blurvision. It is just amazing how crappy a regular TV picture looks after you have had HD for a little while.)
Note to self... NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER BUY ANYTHING FROM DELL AGAIN.
Completly unworkable. Assume a household with 3 children. Are we supposed to set up a dedicated computer room instead of their bedrooms (where kids have had their PCs since..forever...1981 in my case) and make sure there is a full time watcher?
Um... Yes it is called parenting your children. You, as the adult, are supposed to be in charge of your children and what they are doing. You are supposed to be taking care of them and making sure that they are ok. Not ignoring them while they play on the internet in their rooms with the door closed.
There is no way in hell children under 16 should have unsupervised internet access. As the parent it is your job to supervise them. Counting on the Government or some "net-nanny" software to do it for you is shirking your responsibilities.
In my house there are 7 computers. Only 3 of them have access to the internet and they are all in a public room where anyone can walk by and see what is on the screen. My wife and I do walk by on a regular basis.
The PC's that are in the kids rooms do not have internet access. They can play games, watch dvd's, listen to music, burn cd's, do homework, etc, in their rooms but if they want to use email, IM, or the Web they have to do it in public.
Coupled with the fact that we actually talk to our kids about what is approprite and what is not, this seems to do the job.
I agree. I use mplayer which plays both windows media and real files just fine, (in fact the windows media files stream a little smoother).
Whenever I am on a web site that does video streaming I will choose real if it is available, just to keep the Real usership numbers up on site. This isn't because I love Real but rather because they released a player for Linux when there were no others available.
I also expect Microsoft to do as Apple does and try to break open viewers with each new release. At least Real doesn't try to punish you for using Linux.
To go off on a tangent that is one of the things that really, really pisses me off about Apple. They go out of their way to exclude Linux users. Oh well they are slowly losing relevance as a pc company anyway. Soon they will be just another os on intel. With Linux PC's available at Fry's for under $200 both they and Microsoft will be tightening their belts more and more over the next few years. They look to me like they are trying to become a consumer electonics company. For now it seems to be working with the iPods and such but I wonder how long it will be before people start noticing the emperors cloths. The iPod is "stylish" and "hip" and "cool" but is it really the best mp3 player out there?....maybe.
I know Apple users are not likely to switch to Linux but young users will. The next generation of computer users don't have any problem at all using Linux. They don't seem to need the dumbed down interface either. My kids have no problem logging on, changing their screens/icons/menus and using the software. Their little friends don't seem to have any problems either. They actually fight over which one gets to use my computer and which one has to use moms windows machine. Moms spec's out better but mine feels faster/smoother and doesn't lock up when they play flash games on it.
I went to www.live.com with my mozilla browser and with Konqueror.
With Mozilla I can see a few of the menu items along the left side of the page but the search box at the top is missing and has a message saying that firefox support is coming soon. With Konqueror the search box at the top is there and seems to work (took me to MSN search) but the rest of the page is blank. When I investigated a little I found that it seems to be because of java script errors. Namely:
One thing that I have not seen addressed is the number of mirrors that may have been available. The MIT group used 129 mirrors. While the greeks mirrors were probably crude, if the king ordered it every person in the city could have been holding a mirror. How many people were in the city.. or would fit on the wall, 1000? 10,000? 50,000?
Seems to me that if you have 10,000 mirrors shining at the boats, aim and mirror flatness is not as much of a factor.
I tend to agree. Finding files is easy if you put them away in the right place to start with. Kind of like getting a piece of paper from your boss and filing it in your filing cab in the folder marked From_Boss_2005 vs. throughing it on your desk and hoping that you remember to read it before your boss is expecting an answer.
What is the deal today... just about every comment on the board is at +5. They must have given out way to many moderator points.
30+ dollars on a single ticket, drink and popcorn is a bit of an exaggeration and there's still a pretty huge difference between seeing a movie on a widescreen TV vs. an actual theater screen which is however many feet tall and wide.
Agreed, but...
I think that the movie theaters are way over priced. I love going to the theater but I have cut my trips way down. I don't mind paying six dollars for a so-so movie but when the price got to ten I started saying forget it.
I took my wife and my youngest kid to see Valiant the other night. ( I wanted to give him some exclusive mommy and daddy time and it was the only G rated movie close by.)
The bill ended up being over $30 after drinks and snacks were added. My kid enjoyed it but it is a "B" movie at best. There are some movies that are better in the theater but not many. (The big epics like LOR are about the only ones I can think of.)
Instead I have started a tradition of "Movie Night" at our house. About twice a month we go and rent a few movies. I take some pictures down off of the living room wall, set up a used LCD projector that I got for almost nothing, plug in a DVD player and a set of speakers I got at Costco.
The kids each invite a friend or two, we rearrange the couches, pop some corn and have a blast. On the living room wall we can watch movies at about 70" which looks as big as a theater screen. We have even done it outdoors a couple of times this summer.
In fact the neighbor kids have started asking me when the next movie night is.
I met him briefly once at an off-airport ticket counter in Bellevue WA. I was waiting for my tickets to print, looked over and saw Scotty standing next to me! I shook his hand and told him that I enjoyed his Scotty character.
There were several "hard core" trekies there. Very geeky, fawning on him, commenting about this or that episode, trying to make tribble jokes, and generally making a nusince of themselves. All the while he just wanted to buy his tickets.
I remember that he was humble, polite and very patient each and every one of them. He took the time to shake each of their hands and listen to their stories. Very classy.
(sarcasm)Be my guest. Live without TV. Live without movies. Live without music.(/sarcasm)
Is there really anything worth watching on TV anymore? I probably watch one or two hours a month tops. They put out boring crap that doesn't even interest me in the slightest.
Go rent the movie you want to see and watch it on your DVD player. Or, for that matter, a few minutes spent looking for torrents will find you almost any movie or TV show worth watching, if you don't mind waiting for the download and taking the chance that you will get caught.
Music? Well if you want the latest top 20 you will have to either pay for the cd's, listen to the radio or try to find a download and take your chances.
I think that all the interesting new stuff is being put out by small independent bands. if I like the music I try to buy directly from the band if I can. I don't plan on buying anything at all from the big studios if I can help it. Hopefully my refusal to buy from them is part of the reason the greedy bastards are complaining so much.
Talk up "open content" to all of the non-tech's you know. How many slashdotters are there? If a hundred thousand techs started mentioning it to the sheep tomorrow it would create some buzz.
Person A: $30000 - After tax: $27200 - After living expenses: $10400 vs Person B: $60000 - After tax: $45200 - After living expenses: $28400
The same living expenses for both? Probably not. The person who makes more is not going to settle for that 1 bedroom apartment in the lower rent part of town or that 10 year old beater car. More then likely the reason he makes more is because he wants more enough to do what it takes to live the way he wants. We all do this, We reach for the level of wealth that we want until "whatever it takes" becomes more then the extra wealth is worth to us.
To use myself for an example, I could make a LOT more in my chosen field if I was willing to be on the road for weeks at a time. In fact I used to do this. I was on the road pretty much non-stop for 11 years. I payed cash for cars. I never had less them $500 in my pocket and seldom less then $1000 in case I saw something I wanted.
To me that is now too high a price. I have children. The whole POINT to having children is to treasure them and enjoy them as they grow up. (Otherwise they are just a noisy expense.) I would miss out on all of that.
So, I don't spend more then one or two weeks a year on the road anymore. I have a 1100 sqfoot house in the best school district in the state and drive an 9 year old pickup truck. I don't have a big screen TV. I am typing this on a 5 year old computer running a free OS. I don't have cable.
Is it fair that the guy across the street has a big screen TV and 2 new cars? Should we penalize him for making and having more? Don't be silly.
In my example, the person earning $60k had 6 times as much money to spend as a person earning $30k. I said this was "unfair" - ( x2 != x6
By your numbers one person has 6 times the disposible income of another so we have to penalize the person who has more.
This fair vs unfair bit is one of the points I was trying to make.
This is envy. Pure and simple.
Getting to the actual numbers, I suspect that the person who makes more will live in a more expensive place, spend more and pay more in sales tax and probably doesn't have 6 times as much to spend but that is tangent to the argument. What the argument really boils down to is: Should it be the policy of the government to enforce "fairness" by penalizing those who are lucky/workharder/whatever and have more then the average?
I say no.
If you are worried about the person who makes $20,000 paying 33% and not having enough to live on then set the tax law up so that below a certain poverty line they don't pay any income tax. Make the cut off sensible ($23k or something like that) and then charge eveyone else whatever percentage is needed to balance the budget. No deductions for anything. I think that your will find both the rich and the poor on the same side of the argument when it turns out that that spiffy new bomber added.2% to everyones tax rate all by itself.
Make it a law that the budget MUST be balanced unless congress votes by a super majority that for one year the national interest outweighs that law. If they need more then one year then make them vote again for the next year.
Let the news pundents debate loud and long on every station about whether or not this years tax percentage increase from 22.8% to 24.6% is the result of new unavoidable expenses, or pork. Let the majority and minority leaders get on explain just why they need that increase.
Let them get on and brag next year about how they are so wonderfull that they lowered the rate from 24.6% to 24.5%.
That's why you should have a flat tax with absolutely no deductions at all. Start with 25% and work your way from there. Then, no one can complain about how someone else isn't paying their fair share
They will complain though. I know several liberals and through some kind of fuzzy headed, rationalizing, nonsensical, logic they believe that if you make $100,000 a year and pay $33,000 in taxes you are not paying as much as if you make $50,000 a year and pay $16,500.
I call this the politics of envy. "You have more then the poor downtrodden masses so it's not _FAIR_. You are bad and must be punished for having more."
Nevermind that nowadays anyone with a few brains and the willingness to work really, really hard can have that $100,000.
I know, I know, it makes no sense but these people don't think for themselves anyway. Some pointy headed nitwit has spouted some politicaly correct nonsense to them and they swallow it and spew it back out without processing it at all. They are true believers and get downright hostile if you challange their beliefs with logic. Forget having a rational argument with them. As soon as you make a valid point they start insulting GW instead of attacking your point. (Side note: This insulting GW is the standard noise they make when they are together in a herd and need the comfort of knowing that the herd is there around them, kind of like the way a flock of sheep will bleat to each other. Another Side Note: Most of them are kind of full of themselves and think that they are much much smarter then all those "dumb trailer park types" in the red states. I think that this is part of the reason they are so angry. They can not believe that their guy lost because of those stupid trailer park people. I find this attitude really ugly.
Last week I rented "Around the World in 80 Days", a Disney movie, from Blockbuster Video. It would not play. The previews played ok but it locked up as soon as the movie started. I tried three different DVD players.
So I returned to the store and got a replacement.
After enduring comments about my DVD player being defective, I returned home with a different copy. Same thing...the previews played but the movie did not.
So I returned to the store and got a third copy. This one played ok.
I think that Disney has some serious QA problems.
By the way I looked at the disk serial number on the boxes and Blockbuster put the two copies that didn't work right back on the shelf for someone else to fight with. Way to look after your customers, Blockbuster!
Dilbert's Ultimate House has some good ideas, and some silly ones.
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/duh/
Ideas that I really liked were the home theater room. I just recently got a used presentation projector and we had our first "movie night" this weekend in the living room. We moved the couches and chairs around, took some stuff off of the wall to make a blank spot, popped a bunch of popcorn and invited some of the kids friends over. It was a blast. I am currently trying to figure out how to mount the projector so it is hidden when it is not being used and get some better speakers.
I was given this one because the owner didn't think that it was good for anything.
Dell Latitude laptop 233Mhz PII CPU 64MB ram 2 GB hard disk Windows 98
I removed the disk drive and added:
20 GB laptop disk drive -- $50 128MB ram -- $10 headphones -- had them already external Supra Express 56k modem -- had it already PCMCI 10Mb ethernet card -- had it already Debian Linux -- free
The battery should be replaced since it only lasts for about 30 minutes but I really don't care about using it in airports and such, I am in front of a computer all the time anyway.
So, for $60 plus the time to set it up I have a machine that I can use when I am in a motel room to surf the internet, check email, play non-graphic or low-graphic games, read, use as a terminal via ssh or ssh+vnc into remote systems, or listen to music.
Note: I originaly installed SUSE but found this machine too slow.
- - the one that does it all while also making upper management feel warm and fuzzy?"
If it is warm and fuzzies for the pointy hair types, then on servers you want RH Enterprise if you have the budget, and one of the RH clones like CentOS or Whitebox if you don't. The bosses always like it if you can tell them you are using "Enterprise Linux" in the data center.
(note: lately Whitebox has been kind of slow with the errata so I have been using CentOS.)
If managment is not involved CentOS is still a good choice or Debian if you want something that is just rock solid and supported forever.
If you want a nice desktop OS I would suggest Mepis. It looks good and there is enough hand holding that your users don't freak out too badly.
(By the way, at home I run Debian, just because I got tired of installing a new Fedora every six months.)
But you don't understand, simply not doing something themselves that they disagree with is not enough for a lot of people. Busybodies, they feel a great need to make sure that no one else can do it either.
I agree with one of the earlier posters who stated that "...I find the RV generators a lot more disruptive then some guy with a laptop..."
If everyone retires at age 150 and lives to age 1500, then 90% of the population won't be working. That means that 10% of the population has to generate goods and services sufficient to provide the wealth necessary to support and entertain the rest. This might be possible with technology improving worker efficiency, but it doesn't seem terribly likely.
I don't really see people sitting around "retired" for thousands of years. To begin with it is the creating and the doing of new things that makes life fun. Those few that retired and sat around would end up ether killing themselves ( on purpose or through lifestyle choices like drugs, etc.) or would get bored enough after a few years to go back to school or start a business or go exploring , or fall in love and start a new family. Remember these are not "old folks" with weak tired bodies. These are people with young energetic bodies. They will not be sitting around in a rocking chair any more then a twenty-something sits around.
There will end up being huge changes in society. Manditory poplulation control becomes unavoidable. Space travel becomes a bigger priority in order to provide new living room and to give society a goal. Money will either become a barrier to long life for the masses if the treatments are expensive or if the treatments are cheap it will become much less importaint since anyone will become wealthy given enough time and compound interest. The idea of marrage will change. I love my wife dearly and can not imagine being without her but living for a thousand years makes the phrase "till death do us part" sound unlikely. Will we still get along in 800 years? Who knows? I expect that it will become common for people to take a break from their marrage for years or even decades at a time but not get divorced becouse their finances and families are too intertwined. They may even still love each other but just need a break. Or perhaps the normal "marrage" will be a contract to live together and raise a family for a set period (Fifty years? That gives enough time for the grand children to grow up.) with prenuptual agreements all the way around.
At least the crappy science shows are good for a laugh. The ones that I REALLY hate are the "reality shows" like "The Bachelor" (cough, hack, gag, vomit on the floor even thinking about it) or The Apprentice (runs screeming into his office...someone buy Donald a new wig, please!)
My wife is hooked on a couple of them. The situations are so contrived and so stupid and the people are such greedy, whining, loosers that I can't even stay in the room when they are on. They are that bad!
I can only imagine how angry people must be when a crime is committed against them, and they find out that the only analysis most police will do is take a statement.
Over the years I have had 2 cars broken into and one stolen. The first break in the cop took a statement and started to leave. I asked him if he was going to take finger prints or anything so he got out the finger print dust. I don't think that he had ever done it before as he got more dust on the floor and on him then on the dash and never did find a fingerprint. (not even mine)
The second time, they found my car in another city and wanted me to pay the towing charge and the impound charge and were not even interested in solving the crime. In fact they weren't even going to give my car back unless I paid them several hundred dollars. BASTARDS!
The third time I called the cops and got a message that they could not come investigate but that I should leave my report at the beep. ( I shit you not... this was in Portland OR. about 5 years ago.)
Most TV show that suck. CSI sucks too. It is good for a chuckle if you really, really have nothing else to do and are too tired to go play on the internet.
I always get a good laugh out of the magic scanner machine. They rinse a q-tip into a little test tube, put the test tube into a rack, the rack gets roboticaly loaded into a machine, there is a couple of seconds of the sound of a dot matrix printer, and the "tech" says in a serious voice, "It's a piece of rubber from the tire of a 1989 green chevy pickup truck! There were only 1000 of this model produced of which only 17 are still on the road and only one is registered in this state. The owner is the suspects sister!"
At this point they confront the sister who admits that she really was in town after all and she did cut up the body, disolve it in lye, grid up the bones and throw the dust in the Atlantic, "but he was already dead."
Since one of the teeth didn't get ground up all the way they are able to put the tooth back into the magic scanner (cue more dot matrix printer sounds) and show he really died of poisoning on tuesday when the sister said that she saw him alive on wednesday.
They then connect to a national database that tracks the cash purchases of everyone in the country for the last 10 years (here we are treated to the sound of a 9600baud modem, dee,doo,deeeeeeeeee,doooo,dooooooooo!) to show that last August she bought some rat poison when she was in Chicago for a business trip and had an affair with the dead guy.
They confront her again and this time she admits she did it. We get about 20 seconds of the main character finally on a date with the cute scientist from out of town when his pager goes off (no nooky for you) and its time to watch an ad for a new cure for erectile disfunction ( when a quiet time becomes the right time) .
I also have an old laptop from hell. (PII 233) So far the 2 most usefull configurations I have found were.
1) Mimimal RedHat 7.2 install ( not even X) then Ximian Desktop 1 -- This worked GREAT! Fast, looked great, everything worked fine. PCMCIA network cards worked with minimal fuss. 56k modem worked fine. Ximian installed a working X as part of the deps. The machine booted fast and was responsive when I had several things running. Of course since it worked great this option is no longer available.
2) SUSE 9.1 install then use YAST2 to install ICEWM or Blackbox. -- This runs ok, everything works although KDE is slow as molassas. (WTF guys even Win2000 runs rings around KDE on this machine! And don't tell me to tweek KDE for speed I have spent several hours turning everything off I could and KDE is still slow, slow, slow.) ICEWM is quick enough to be useable, Blackbox is a hair quicker but not enough to matter. Neither one is as fast as the old RH7.2/Ximan1 option. The SUSE boot is still very slow but luckly the suspend keys work with SUSE so most of the time I can suspend instead of shutdown. Starting from suspend is pretty quick.
I'd be willing to bet they can get better pay and job security running casinos.
I live in the State of Washington where indian casinos are all over the place. I have to say that the casinos don't help the average indian very much.
The tribal elders get a nice kick back from the big gaming companys ( Trump, etc.) but that doesn't pull the average indian up any. They may get a yearly profit sharing check but that just means that they can have a plasma screen and DirectTV in the single-wide. Few of the actual members of the tribe get good jobs out of the deal. You will see a few dealers that are indians and the pit boss may be an indian but those are not jobs with a future. Not jobs that are going to create a strong middle class in the tribe. Not jobs that are going get their kids interested in collage.
I rarely gamble in them as I find them depressing.
I think that the tribes would do much better for their people if they could get some kind of high tech industry to set up on their land. Some of them own very valuable land like big lots in the middle of Tacoma. (small city to the south)
If the tribal elders could convice Dell or Google or Gateway or Intel or someone like that to lease a building and hire/train/educate the members of the tribe in exchage for a sweetheart deal they would be doing a lot more good for their people then just setting up another casino.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Dell LCD TV that is 3 years old and the back light just failed on it last night. Of course I didn't get the extended service on it. Who expects a TV to fail after just 3 years? (TV's usually last 10 to 15 years or more if you don't drop them too many times when you are moving. )
Oh, by the way did I mention that the external HDTV tuner that I also bought from Dell at the same time died about a month ago?...(ACK... back blurvision. It is just amazing how crappy a regular TV picture looks after you have had HD for a little while.)
Note to self... NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER, EVER BUY ANYTHING FROM DELL AGAIN.
Completly unworkable. Assume a household with 3 children. Are we supposed to set up a dedicated computer room instead of their bedrooms (where kids have had their PCs since ..forever...1981 in my case) and make sure there is a full time watcher?
Um... Yes it is called parenting your children. You, as the adult, are supposed to be in charge of your children and what they are doing. You are supposed to be taking care of them and making sure that they are ok. Not ignoring them while they play on the internet in their rooms with the door closed.
There is no way in hell children under 16 should have unsupervised internet access. As the parent it is your job to supervise them. Counting on the Government or some "net-nanny" software to do it for you is shirking your responsibilities.
In my house there are 7 computers. Only 3 of them have access to the internet and they are all in a public room where anyone can walk by and see what is on the screen. My wife and I do walk by on a regular basis.
The PC's that are in the kids rooms do not have internet access. They can play games, watch dvd's, listen to music, burn cd's, do homework, etc, in their rooms but if they want to use email, IM, or the Web they have to do it in public.
Coupled with the fact that we actually talk to our kids about what is approprite and what is not, this seems to do the job.
I agree. I use mplayer which plays both windows media and real files just fine, (in fact the windows media files stream a little smoother).
Whenever I am on a web site that does video streaming I will choose real if it is available, just to keep the Real usership numbers up on site. This isn't because I love Real but rather because they released a player for Linux when there were no others available.
I also expect Microsoft to do as Apple does and try to break open viewers with each new release. At least Real doesn't try to punish you for using Linux.
To go off on a tangent that is one of the things that really, really pisses me off about Apple. They go out of their way to exclude Linux users. Oh well they are slowly losing relevance as a pc company anyway. Soon they will be just another os on intel. With Linux PC's available at Fry's for under $200 both they and Microsoft will be tightening their belts more and more over the next few years. They look to me like they are trying to become a consumer electonics company. For now it seems to be working with the iPods and such but I wonder how long it will be before people start noticing the emperors cloths. The iPod is "stylish" and "hip" and "cool" but is it really the best mp3 player out there?....maybe.
I know Apple users are not likely to switch to Linux but young users will. The next generation of computer users don't have any problem at all using Linux. They don't seem to need the dumbed down interface either. My kids have no problem logging on, changing their screens/icons/menus and using the software. Their little friends don't seem to have any problems either. They actually fight over which one gets to use my computer and which one has to use moms windows machine. Moms spec's out better but mine feels faster/smoother and doesn't lock up when they play flash games on it.
I went to www.live.com with my mozilla browser and with Konqueror.
With Mozilla I can see a few of the menu items along the left side of the page but the search box at the top is missing and has a message saying that firefox support is coming soon. With Konqueror the search box at the top is there and seems to work (took me to MSN search) but the rest of the page is blank. When I investigated a little I found that it seems to be because of java script errors. Namely:
This must be very complex java script for the top Microsoft programers to be fighting this much with it.
One thing that I have not seen addressed is the number of mirrors that may have been available. The MIT group used 129 mirrors. While the greeks mirrors were probably crude, if the king ordered it every person in the city could have been holding a mirror. How many people were in the city.. or would fit on the wall, 1000? 10,000? 50,000?
Seems to me that if you have 10,000 mirrors shining at the boats, aim and mirror flatness is not as much of a factor.
The University of Rochester used lasers to heat and compress pellets of fuel in the 1970's.
I tend to agree. Finding files is easy if you put them away in the right place to start with. Kind of like getting a piece of paper from your boss and filing it in your filing cab in the folder marked From_Boss_2005 vs. throughing it on your desk and hoping that you remember to read it before your boss is expecting an answer.
K.O.A.T.D.U.S.: Kinetic Operational Android Trained for Destruction and Ultimate Sabotage.
Cool!
Agreed, but...
I think that the movie theaters are way over priced. I love going to the theater but I have cut my trips way down. I don't mind paying six dollars for a so-so movie but when the price got to ten I started saying forget it.
I took my wife and my youngest kid to see Valiant the other night. ( I wanted to give him some exclusive mommy and daddy time and it was the only G rated movie close by.)
The bill ended up being over $30 after drinks and snacks were added. My kid enjoyed it but it is a "B" movie at best. There are some movies that are better in the theater but not many. (The big epics like LOR are about the only ones I can think of.)
Instead I have started a tradition of "Movie Night" at our house. About twice a month we go and rent a few movies. I take some pictures down off of the living room wall, set up a used LCD projector that I got for almost nothing, plug in a DVD player and a set of speakers I got at Costco.
The kids each invite a friend or two, we rearrange the couches, pop some corn and have a blast. On the living room wall we can watch movies at about 70" which looks as big as a theater screen. We have even done it outdoors a couple of times this summer.
In fact the neighbor kids have started asking me when the next movie night is.
I met him briefly once at an off-airport ticket counter in Bellevue WA. I was waiting for my tickets to print, looked over and saw Scotty standing next to me! I shook his hand and told him that I enjoyed his Scotty character.
There were several "hard core" trekies there. Very geeky, fawning on him, commenting about this or that episode, trying to make tribble jokes, and generally making a nusince of themselves. All the while he just wanted to buy his tickets.
I remember that he was humble, polite and very patient each and every one of them. He took the time to shake each of their hands and listen to their stories. Very classy.
Is there really anything worth watching on TV anymore? I probably watch one or two hours a month tops. They put out boring crap that doesn't even interest me in the slightest.
Go rent the movie you want to see and watch it on your DVD player. Or, for that matter, a few minutes spent looking for torrents will find you almost any movie or TV show worth watching, if you don't mind waiting for the download and taking the chance that you will get caught.
Music? Well if you want the latest top 20 you will have to either pay for the cd's, listen to the radio or try to find a download and take your chances.
I think that all the interesting new stuff is being put out by small independent bands. if I like the music I try to buy directly from the band if I can. I don't plan on buying anything at all from the big studios if I can help it. Hopefully my refusal to buy from them is part of the reason the greedy bastards are complaining so much.
There are a few people putting out "open" content now. Some of it can be found on http://www.legaltorrents.com/
Talk up "open content" to all of the non-tech's you know. How many slashdotters are there? If a hundred thousand techs started mentioning it to the sheep tomorrow it would create some buzz.
The same living expenses for both? Probably not. The person who makes more is not going to settle for that 1 bedroom apartment in the lower rent part of town or that 10 year old beater car. More then likely the reason he makes more is because he wants more enough to do what it takes to live the way he wants. We all do this, We reach for the level of wealth that we want until "whatever it takes" becomes more then the extra wealth is worth to us.
To use myself for an example, I could make a LOT more in my chosen field if I was willing to be on the road for weeks at a time. In fact I used to do this. I was on the road pretty much non-stop for 11 years. I payed cash for cars. I never had less them $500 in my pocket and seldom less then $1000 in case I saw something I wanted.
To me that is now too high a price. I have children. The whole POINT to having children is to treasure them and enjoy them as they grow up. (Otherwise they are just a noisy expense.) I would miss out on all of that.
So, I don't spend more then one or two weeks a year on the road anymore. I have a 1100 sqfoot house in the best school district in the state and drive an 9 year old pickup truck. I don't have a big screen TV. I am typing this on a 5 year old computer running a free OS. I don't have cable.
Is it fair that the guy across the street has a big screen TV and 2 new cars? Should we penalize him for making and having more? Don't be silly.
By your numbers one person has 6 times the disposible income of another so we have to penalize the person who has more.
This fair vs unfair bit is one of the points I was trying to make.
This is envy. Pure and simple.
Getting to the actual numbers, I suspect that the person who makes more will live in a more expensive place, spend more and pay more in sales tax and probably doesn't have 6 times as much to spend but that is tangent to the argument. What the argument really boils down to is:
Should it be the policy of the government to enforce "fairness" by penalizing those who are lucky/workharder/whatever and have more then the average?
I say no.
If you are worried about the person who makes $20,000 paying 33% and not having enough to live on then set the tax law up so that below a certain poverty line they don't pay any income tax. Make the cut off sensible ($23k or something like that) and then charge eveyone else whatever percentage is needed to balance the budget. No deductions for anything. I think that your will find both the rich and the poor on the same side of the argument when it turns out that that spiffy new bomber added
Make it a law that the budget MUST be balanced unless congress votes by a super majority that for one year the national interest outweighs that law. If they need more then one year then make them vote again for the next year.
Let the news pundents debate loud and long on every station about whether or not this years tax percentage increase from 22.8% to 24.6% is the result of new unavoidable expenses, or pork. Let the majority and minority leaders get on explain just why they need that increase.
Let them get on and brag next year about how they are so wonderfull that they lowered the rate from 24.6% to 24.5%.
They will complain though. I know several liberals and through some kind of fuzzy headed, rationalizing, nonsensical, logic they believe that if you make $100,000 a year and pay $33,000 in taxes you are not paying as much as if you make $50,000 a year and pay $16,500.
I call this the politics of envy. "You have more then the poor downtrodden masses so it's not _FAIR_. You are bad and must be punished for having more."
Nevermind that nowadays anyone with a few brains and the willingness to work really, really hard can have that $100,000.
I know, I know, it makes no sense but these people don't think for themselves anyway. Some pointy headed nitwit has spouted some politicaly correct nonsense to them and they swallow it and spew it back out without processing it at all. They are true believers and get downright hostile if you challange their beliefs with logic. Forget having a rational argument with them. As soon as you make a valid point they start insulting GW instead of attacking your point. (Side note: This insulting GW is the standard noise they make when they are together in a herd and need the comfort of knowing that the herd is there around them, kind of like the way a flock of sheep will bleat to each other. Another Side Note: Most of them are kind of full of themselves and think that they are much much smarter then all those "dumb trailer park types" in the red states. I think that this is part of the reason they are so angry. They can not believe that their guy lost because of those stupid trailer park people. I find this attitude really ugly.
Last week I rented "Around the World in 80 Days", a Disney movie, from Blockbuster Video. It would not play. The previews played ok but it locked up as soon as the movie started. I tried three different DVD players.
So I returned to the store and got a replacement.
After enduring comments about my DVD player being defective, I returned home with a different copy. Same thing...the previews played but the movie did not.
So I returned to the store and got a third copy. This one played ok.
I think that Disney has some serious QA problems.
By the way I looked at the disk serial number on the boxes and Blockbuster put the two copies that didn't work right back on the shelf for someone else to fight with. Way to look after your customers, Blockbuster!
Dilbert's Ultimate House has some good ideas, and some silly ones.
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/duh/
Ideas that I really liked were the home theater room. I just recently got a used presentation projector and we had our first "movie night" this weekend in the living room. We moved the couches and chairs around, took some stuff off of the wall to make a blank spot, popped a bunch of popcorn and invited some of the kids friends over. It was a blast. I am currently trying to figure out how to mount the projector so it is hidden when it is not being used and get some better speakers.
I was given this one because the owner didn't think that it was good for anything.
Dell Latitude laptop
233Mhz PII CPU
64MB ram
2 GB hard disk
Windows 98
I removed the disk drive and added:
20 GB laptop disk drive -- $50
128MB ram -- $10
headphones -- had them already
external Supra Express 56k modem -- had it already
PCMCI 10Mb ethernet card -- had it already
Debian Linux -- free
The battery should be replaced since it only lasts for about 30 minutes but I really don't care about using it in airports and such, I am in front of a computer all the time anyway.
So, for $60 plus the time to set it up I have a machine that I can use when I am in a motel room to surf the internet, check email, play non-graphic or low-graphic games, read, use as a terminal via ssh or ssh+vnc into remote systems, or listen to music.
Note: I originaly installed SUSE but found this machine too slow.
If it is warm and fuzzies for the pointy hair types, then on servers you want RH Enterprise if you have the budget, and one of the RH clones like CentOS or Whitebox if you don't. The bosses always like it if you can tell them you are using "Enterprise Linux" in the data center.
(note: lately Whitebox has been kind of slow with the errata so I have been using CentOS.)
If managment is not involved CentOS is still a good choice or Debian if you want something that is just rock solid and supported forever.
If you want a nice desktop OS I would suggest Mepis. It looks good and there is enough hand holding that your users don't freak out too badly.
(By the way, at home I run Debian, just because I got tired of installing a new Fedora every six months.)
But you don't understand, simply not doing something themselves that they disagree with is not enough for a lot of people. Busybodies, they feel a great need to make sure that no one else can do it either.
I agree with one of the earlier posters who stated that "...I find the RV generators a lot more disruptive then some guy with a laptop..."
I don't really see people sitting around "retired" for thousands of years. To begin with it is the creating and the doing of new things that makes life fun. Those few that retired and sat around would end up ether killing themselves ( on purpose or through lifestyle choices like drugs, etc.) or would get bored enough after a few years to go back to school or start a business or go exploring , or fall in love and start a new family. Remember these are not "old folks" with weak tired bodies. These are people with young energetic bodies. They will not be sitting around in a rocking chair any more then a twenty-something sits around.
There will end up being huge changes in society. Manditory poplulation control becomes unavoidable. Space travel becomes a bigger priority in order to provide new living room and to give society a goal. Money will either become a barrier to long life for the masses if the treatments are expensive or if the treatments are cheap it will become much less importaint since anyone will become wealthy given enough time and compound interest. The idea of marrage will change. I love my wife dearly and can not imagine being without her but living for a thousand years makes the phrase "till death do us part" sound unlikely. Will we still get along in 800 years? Who knows? I expect that it will become common for people to take a break from their marrage for years or even decades at a time but not get divorced becouse their finances and families are too intertwined. They may even still love each other but just need a break. Or perhaps the normal "marrage" will be a contract to live together and raise a family for a set period (Fifty years? That gives enough time for the grand children to grow up.) with prenuptual agreements all the way around.
Thanks.
At least the crappy science shows are good for a laugh. The ones that I REALLY hate are the "reality shows" like "The Bachelor" (cough, hack, gag, vomit on the floor even thinking about it) or The Apprentice (runs screeming into his office
My wife is hooked on a couple of them. The situations are so contrived and so stupid and the people are such greedy, whining, loosers that I can't even stay in the room when they are on. They are that bad!
Over the years I have had 2 cars broken into and one stolen. The first break in the cop took a statement and started to leave. I asked him if he was going to take finger prints or anything so he got out the finger print dust. I don't think that he had ever done it before as he got more dust on the floor and on him then on the dash and never did find a fingerprint. (not even mine)
The second time, they found my car in another city and wanted me to pay the towing charge and the impound charge and were not even interested in solving the crime. In fact they weren't even going to give my car back unless I paid them several hundred dollars. BASTARDS!
The third time I called the cops and got a message that they could not come investigate but that I should leave my report at the beep. ( I shit you not... this was in Portland OR. about 5 years ago.)
Most TV show that suck. CSI sucks too. It is good for a chuckle if you really, really have nothing else to do and are too tired to go play on the internet.
I always get a good laugh out of the magic scanner machine. They rinse a q-tip into a little test tube, put the test tube into a rack, the rack gets roboticaly loaded into a machine, there is a couple of seconds of the sound of a dot matrix printer, and the "tech" says in a serious voice, "It's a piece of rubber from the tire of a 1989 green chevy pickup truck! There were only 1000 of this model produced of which only 17 are still on the road and only one is registered in this state. The owner is the suspects sister!"
At this point they confront the sister who admits that she really was in town after all and she did cut up the body, disolve it in lye, grid up the bones and throw the dust in the Atlantic, "but he was already dead."
Since one of the teeth didn't get ground up all the way they are able to put the tooth back into the magic scanner (cue more dot matrix printer sounds) and show he really died of poisoning on tuesday when the sister said that she saw him alive on wednesday.
They then connect to a national database that tracks the cash purchases of everyone in the country for the last 10 years (here we are treated to the sound of a 9600baud modem, dee,doo,deeeeeeeeee,doooo,dooooooooo!) to show that last August she bought some rat poison when she was in Chicago for a business trip and had an affair with the dead guy.
They confront her again and this time she admits she did it. We get about 20 seconds of the main character finally on a date with the cute scientist from out of town when his pager goes off (no nooky for you) and its time to watch an ad for a new cure for erectile disfunction ( when a quiet time becomes the right time) .
I also have an old laptop from hell. (PII 233) So far the 2 most usefull configurations I have found were.
1) Mimimal RedHat 7.2 install ( not even X) then Ximian Desktop 1 -- This worked GREAT! Fast, looked great, everything worked fine. PCMCIA network cards worked with minimal fuss. 56k modem worked fine. Ximian installed a working X as part of the deps. The machine booted fast and was responsive when I had several things running. Of course since it worked great this option is no longer available.
2) SUSE 9.1 install then use YAST2 to install ICEWM or Blackbox. -- This runs ok, everything works although KDE is slow as molassas. (WTF guys even Win2000 runs rings around KDE on this machine! And don't tell me to tweek KDE for speed I have spent several hours turning everything off I could and KDE is still slow, slow, slow.) ICEWM is quick enough to be useable, Blackbox is a hair quicker but not enough to matter. Neither one is as fast as the old RH7.2/Ximan1 option. The SUSE boot is still very slow but luckly the suspend keys work with SUSE so most of the time I can suspend instead of shutdown. Starting from suspend is pretty quick.
I live in the State of Washington where indian casinos are all over the place. I have to say that the casinos don't help the average indian very much.
The tribal elders get a nice kick back from the big gaming companys ( Trump, etc.) but that doesn't pull the average indian up any. They may get a yearly profit sharing check but that just means that they can have a plasma screen and DirectTV in the single-wide. Few of the actual members of the tribe get good jobs out of the deal. You will see a few dealers that are indians and the pit boss may be an indian but those are not jobs with a future. Not jobs that are going to create a strong middle class in the tribe. Not jobs that are going get their kids interested in collage.
I rarely gamble in them as I find them depressing.
I think that the tribes would do much better for their people if they could get some kind of high tech industry to set up on their land. Some of them own very valuable land like big lots in the middle of Tacoma. (small city to the south)
If the tribal elders could convice Dell or Google or Gateway or Intel or someone like that to lease a building and hire/train/educate the members of the tribe in exchage for a sweetheart deal they would be doing a lot more good for their people then just setting up another casino.