Compared to the other OS's for similar hardware of the time, DOS was certainly an OS. And you forget that at the time, a lot of software was written to access hardware directly.
To say that MS-DOS was not a "serious entry into the OS market" is like saying that the Model-T was not a serious entry to the auto market. Sure there were better cars, but the model-T shaped the industry.
Give me an example of what was alternatives that IBM ignored when it chose MS-DOS for the IBM PC. And why they were better (for the target market) than MS-DOS.
I can only think of one OS that was truely better at the time for personal computing, and that was OS-9 (not Mac OS-9)... but I'm not sure that it could have been ported to the Intel 8080 as it was written entirely in assembly and wasn't ported to any other processors until 2 years later in 1983 and not to Intel until 1989.
Sure there were tons of interesting things happening in the personal computing OS space in those days... but when IBM went shopping, there were not really that many choices that would have made good business sense. CP/M would have been the best choice, as it was the most popular... but they wouldn't sign the papers IBM required... hence the reason Gates bought QDOS (a CPM like OS) and renamed it MS-DOS in the first place.
So technically there was nothing for intel processors that was better, and the only os that made better business sense wouldn't sell... that left MS-DOS.
I will agree that MS could have greatly improved on MS-DOS and didn't, favoring compatibility over capability... but don't forget that tons of software of the time was proprietary so it didn't make sense to break compatibility to favor features.
I think if anything, it's IBM's fault for coming into the scene before a decent OS had been ported to intel processors. Hell QNX was only a year later and put DOS to shame... but in technology, it rarely pays to wait.
Again, your spouting your beliefs about what an OS should be capable of as though they are the definition of the word.
When you can convince me that you can run an MS-DOS application without DOS, then I will agree with you... but as far as I know, most DOS applications depended upon DOS. So it wasn't a boot loader.
It didn't do a spectacular job, and was crap by today's standards, but it most certainly was an OS unless you butcher the definition.
I would agree with your assessment too. So it's two processes at work:
1. Abused technical users pursue, improve, and advocate alternatives. 2. Typical users aren't particularly attracted to the product.
The first one has created an alternative, the second has created a bunch of potential converts. The result is that Linux and OSX are attracting more attention.
The greater force at work against Microsoft is really the cost of computer hardware. As hardware prices drop, the software becomes a larger percentage so the Windows tax is a much larger percentage of the whole cost of the system. Additionally, corporations are not seeing the gains they used to by upgrading hardware and software... so they are stagnating with older equipment and XP. Finally, the market is basically saturated, and there is little room for new growth in the bloated OS arena... especially as distributed computing and small network devices are the hot items and desktops and full featured laptops are less important to spend money on.
Windows 95 was not MS's first "serious entry into the OS market".
MS-DOS was a very "serious entry" into the OS market, as was windows 3.0, 3.1, and NT. In fact, I still support an old NT 4 server that predates the release of Windows 95.
Please don't let your inexperience confuse you. Millions of offices ran on Novell, DOS, Lotus, and Wordperfect long before Windows 95 came along.
Sure those early operating systems weren't anything compared to the UNIX workstations of the day, but neither were the computers they were running on.
Also, you don't seem to realize that there is nothing that says that an OS has to have certain features to be a good OS.
MS-DOS was a very good OS for standalone workstations where only one user was going to be interacting with the system and only running one application. The early PC's were not really capable of much more anyway, so DOS did what it was intended to do, and did it well enough at the time.
Even though I hate to admit it, Microsoft has brought far more to the industry than you give it credit for. I wish that someone had provided some viable competition all these years to force Microsoft to innovate a bit more, but they pushed the industry fairly well for a monopoly. They didn't really have to, they could have stretched their releases apart by years more than they did and made even more money. Upgrades have never been a big money maker for MS, it's bundling with new pc's they depend upon anyway when people are replacing their computers every couple of years.
Microsoft isn't losing because of Linux, it's losing because of Microsoft.
Essentially, if MS dominated the industry by creating the BEST product, then they wouldn't have a problem. Their problem is simply that their target customer isn't willing to be abused any longer. That and the of years of abuse have pushed millions of victims to contribute to the creation and improvement of alternatives to Microsoft.
Surely you could... might have to make some design adjustments but I can't see why you couldn't use a cap to smooth out some of the (imperceptible) flicker that makes the LEDs dimmer.
However, you would need on cap for every LED... and the result may not be worth the effort. There are surely cheaper ways. Like buying a controller with more outputs, increasing the number of LED's that can be illuminated at the same time, thus increasing the amount of time that can be spent illuminating each LED.
The Obama Administration did not explain their actions, and they may not be what so many of the/. crowd would like to think.
Obama has always been about a smooth transition and letting go of past distractions. Yes what happened under Bush was horrible, but let's just let it drop and move forward.
Also, the action by the Administration lawyers doesn't show support for Bush policies, but support for the way the Bush legal team was handling the case. I'm no laywer, but it appears the government simply wants a stay on decision of a lower court until an appeal can be lodged and decided. A perfectly reasonable request in my book, even if you want the government to lose the case.
I say, give it time before you jump to conclusions.
I work in a windows shop... but we have a standard install on our computers. Our internal Windows distribution... we even have a version control system for it.
At home, I begin with Ubuntu's distro, then add and remove packages from outside Ubuntu's control... creating my own "distro".
Essentially, they are doing the same thing that they would do anyway if they used redhat or ubuntu. They will start with an existing distro and review packages as they are released and decide if they would like to deploy them to their users. They will tweak the default settings, and maybe try and make it conform to some ideals that are important to them. Sure they could do it and still call it a customized Ubuntu or Redhat install. But it's just easier to give it a name and manage it from the top... like my shop does with our windows machines.
Only if they release it ouside their organization. So if this is the Official Russian distro, and is only used by Russian Government computers, then it is perfectly valid within the GPL.
Now if they make it public and distribute it, the are supposed to provide the source. My guess is that they wouldn't distribute it if they wanted to keep some of it secret anyway. If they wanted to distribute it, they would want the source available as it would allow their work to be improved upon... keeping their development costs low.
It's ignorance like yours that caused the US to stop producing nuclear power to begin with... and to stop improving it.
People shot down nuclear because it doesn't burn anything... that's what bothers people, if they could burn it and dump the waste into the air where they can't see it anymore they wouldn't mind it. If people had given nuclear a chance, we'd actually have less waste to deal with than we do now as surely someone would have bought it up to extract energy from as it would be cheaper than mining more uranium.
When coal technology was young, people would burn it in their fireplace... it was in efficient, had tons and tons of waste ash to deal with, and it polluted. After a few hundred years of scientific research, and coal has become much cleaner, far more efficient, and though still a dirty fuel most people accept it as a viable energy source in the near term. Research into using nuclear energy for something other than a bomb didn't begin in earnest until 1945 (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf54.htm) and the US stopped building plants in the 70's; concept to ~20% of current US energy consumption with less than 40 years of research. Just imagine if we had been producing and improving large scale nuclear plants for those 40 years, the rest of the world has and they have made some huge improvements in reprocessing waste, efficiency, and safety.
I agree... going electronic will fix none of the major issues directly... but it will have drastic secondary effects.
For example. If my medical records are electronic and easily transported, second opinions will be more common... who knows, perhaps insurance companies will require that procedures over a certain value or with a certain risk factor have their (digital) files sent to another doctor (across the internet) for a consult... perhaps saving lives and certainly reducing the risk of malpractice claims for unnecessary procedures.
I think there two things that need to be fixed first, they are cheap and would prove that the government is actually concerned about our health. 1. Outlaw the advertisement of prescription-only products except in trade journals and other materials that target doctors and medical industry professionals. I am tired of hearing people say things like "I'm gonna try 'insert drug name here' next, it sounds like what I need". 2. Require all antibiotics to be given in a single dose, preferably as an injection, unless there is an overwhelming reason why they shouldn't... it's scary to imagine what kind of super-bugs we can expect tomorrow due to patients not completing their thousand pill course on a regular 4 a day schedule as prescribed.
Sometimes it's not right vs. wrong. The story was that mom was sleeping when this happened. I don't know the circumstances, but perhaps this kid was torn between waking his mom up who he felt deserved the sleep (worked all night or something), and driving himself to school. Sure he knew it was wrong to drive, but he loved his mom so much and she looked so exhausted that he didn't want to bother her. Or maybe he knew that he was going to get in trouble for missing the bus, so he thought he might save himself by driving to school.
At 6, most kids have trouble making decisions about severity of two wrongs, or weighing risk vs reward.
Must be nice to live where you live... or kinda sad.
I don't pay for TV... and I never will. It's nice to catch a show or two, but it's simply a waste of money in my book. Sure I have a nice HD set and cool mythtv setup for my DVD collection and to timeshift the TV I do watch, but it all comes in OTA.
I live in Detroit, and we have very strong reception in most of the city... so there are a lot of households in all income brackets that use OTA tv for various reasons.
It's possible that you don't see much OTA where you are simply because your area has poor reception. Or because the cable networks are cheap, or perhaps simply because people are ignorant of the fact that OTA Digital TV is so damn good. To say that nobody uses it is just plain WRONG, especially when you head to more rural areas that don't have cable as an option.
1. I never did find a converter box that was completely covered by the coupon... maybe now, but when I ordered the coupons (not knowing they would expire) there wasn't a box out there for $40.
2. I haven't spent a dime on TV/Movie entertainment in years... why should I lay out $80 (now that my coupons are expired).
3. 90 days may seem like a long time... I would argue that in a way it's too long... it's easy to slip them into a drawer and lose track of them when you have 3 months to use them and you don't really need them yet anyway.
4. The fact that the coupons expired was not obvious. I received mine, tore open the envelope, glanced in and saw the cards and set the envelop in my to-do stack... I shopped around for a while here and there and when I finally picked the boxes I wanted I pulled the expired cards out of the envelope... how fair is that.
I think the better solution would be to have the coupons expire 90 days AFTER the transition... that means that everyone who got them has time to use them when they are needed. I got mine the second week they were offered... and never used them because I didn't want to spend $20-$30 dollars on top of the coupon prices for the box I wanted (I had to pay shipping too because I didn't want the box that RatShack was selling).
The coupon program was very poorly thought out. Money was wasted on mail and fancy plastic cards. Expiration dates hurt those who live pay-check to pay-check and have very little expendable income. They did not make it obvious that you had to use them within a certain time. It was just not at all what it should have been.
By the way, there are always people who can jump through the hoops, but because something can be done doesn't mean that it's fair or reasonable to expect everyone to do the same. It's like saying that poor people don't deserve any social assistance because most people can get and hold a job. Just realise that something that is obvious to you might not be to everyone... even savvy and intelligent people have failed to use thier coupons with very reasonable excuses; such as my friend who was deployed to Iraq before he could order his.
I agree and would mod you +1 insightful if I hadn't wanted to comment too (even though this whole thread is OT).
Essentially, Obama is like any other person who excels at a given task. He, like a professional athlete or superstar doctor, lawyer, or burgerflipper, is really good at what he does and people can sense it. What do coaches do with a freshman QB that outperforms the JV or Varsity player... they groom them and advance them as quickly as possible.
His inexperience is not a sign of weakness but a sign of just how good he is. I agree that he hasn't been vetted by the system, and hasn't really done anything of note but advance through the ranks... but look at the kid in your office who keeps getting promoted for simply doing the mundane work better than his peers; you don't need to make waves to prove yourself capable.
Finally, I think that the American people feel that his inexperience also means that his perspective is better. Most politicians spend years accomplishing next to nothing and over time they come to accept it as "just the way things are". Obama is still young and idealistic enough to think that he can make things happen (at least that's how people see him).
Do I think Obama is going to do anything particularly remarkable... no. Not any more than any other President could with a lot of popular support and a large majority in Congress. What Obama will do (I believe) is rally the people, and essentially wield the American people as a tool to push his adjenda... while making the people feel like they have power over their government.
I am a true Republican that voted Obama... for two reasons. I believe that the American people need to be reminded of THEIR power in government. And I believe that the Social Conservative party that pretends to be the Republican party has destroyed our two party system. Why can't I vote for a smaller government and states rights anymore?
Visit every small office you can find near home, tell them that you are willing to come in every Monday (or tuesday, etc.) and serve as their dedicated IT person for that day or half day. Tell them you don't want to be 1099'd but instead want to be a part time employee, in exchange for a regular schedule and the reduction in risk that 1099 work entails, you would be willing to take a far lower wage than their current on call guy.
So your giving them the benifit of having an in house IT guy who's not going to over bill, no going to make unnecessary recommendations in hopes of profiting.
I did this for a couple of years while I was in school... it works great. Most small business owners network with other small business owners, and you will turn down more offers than you'd imagine. Pick one who has a good health package and agree to work in exchange for healthcare. All together, most of my employers were out less than 10K per year, far less than they spent when they called the "geek squad" or their $100/hr consultants.
Do you agree that security does NOT require the forfeiture of civil liberties? I want my country, my community, and my family to be secure... but I want it without forfeiting the rights and freedoms that make our country great. I cannot think of a situation where a person's civil liberties NEED to be sacrificed for the sake of security, however our government seems to keep using security as a way to take our freedoms.
I would like to know if you have given some thought to shifting the commissions' focus to protecting our civil liberties rather than trading them for a false sense of security.
Civil liberties, such as the ones that protect us from government spying on the people, that allow us to communicate freely and openly, that allow us to assemble publicly or in secret, and that once made the US a haven for business and people alike have been so compromised by repeated use of fear-and-take (promote fear, take a freedom) that I am concerned that your commission might be more interested in deciding what the next thing for us to be afraid should be than you are about making us genuinely safer.
Do you see your position as one of protector of government interests or the people's interests? I feel funny saying that because our government is supposed to be for, by, and of the people... however recent trends have shown that there is polarity between government interests and the peoples interests (such as the bail out of banks).
Please take the time to think about your commissions' role and objectives... it's so easy to focus on the problem when it comes to computer security and typically that only leads to very narrow solutions that have catastrophic secondary effects.
To even remotely suggest that biofuels are no better than fossil fuels shows just how ignorant of the subject you are.
A fossil fuel is typically millions of years old and is essentially sequestered carbon... if we don't use it it just sits there inert.
A bio-fuel is carbon that is actively part of our carbon cycle... it is temporarily in solid form, but in time it will be a gas again where it will get absorbed by a plant and made solid again. Essentially, using a bio-fuel is carbon neutral while a fossil fuel is carbon positive.
This is the reason that bio-fuels are the future.
Now as to sources for bio-fuels, I will agree that the greedy have pushed bio-fuel production without care for the cost. There are many responsible sources for bio-fuels. For example, if corn stalks could be used, or weeds grown on fallow fields, or algae grown in polluted waterways, or seaweed grown in oxygen depleted lakes. All of these sources would have a positive impact on the environment and or society. The use of corn stalks alone would encourage the growth of corn while not competing for the grain itself, which would make most corn producing countries have huge surpluses... effectively allowing corn to be nearly free, completely subsidized by bio-fuel production.
All of the uses above, except perhaps the algae, require some advances to be made in converting cellulose to fuel with a net positive yield that leaves room for profit. It will be done someday.
Using waste products, such as cooking oil, coffee grounds (as the article describes), straw, human and/or animal waste, etc. are all very positive things if they can be done without creating new problems. Don't let some of the stupid things that greed has made people do in the past (corn ethanol for example) fool you about the future of bio-fuels. Until a environmentally friendly, safe, and much higher capacity capacitor is introduced, electric cars aren't good for much more than commuter vehicles. Don't get me started on how far we have to go to make hydrogen happen. Bio-fuels are real, we have them and can continue to slowly replace fossil fuels as new methods of making fuel from waste products are created. Everything else is the someday, bio-fuels are something we can work on today.
Why do debates about technology always get reduced to the size of one's package. What difference does the size of one's package make when it comes to pleasing your intended audience? So your car is faster, your phone is smarter, and your house is bigger... my package is smaller so ha!
(perhaps it's our effort to make everything smaller that has caused the decline in masculinity talked about earlier today)
Why not just say that data centers are using heat exchangers and outside air to cool their computer rooms.
All the stupid wheel is is a heat exchanger like any other. Many types of heat exchangers allow the inclusion of outside air, though I would think it would be better to keep your computer room air closed from the outside if it is possible.
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So it's half an OS? If not an OS, what is it?
Compared to the other OS's for similar hardware of the time, DOS was certainly an OS. And you forget that at the time, a lot of software was written to access hardware directly.
To say that MS-DOS was not a "serious entry into the OS market" is like saying that the Model-T was not a serious entry to the auto market. Sure there were better cars, but the model-T shaped the industry.
Give me an example of what was alternatives that IBM ignored when it chose MS-DOS for the IBM PC. And why they were better (for the target market) than MS-DOS.
I can only think of one OS that was truely better at the time for personal computing, and that was OS-9 (not Mac OS-9)... but I'm not sure that it could have been ported to the Intel 8080 as it was written entirely in assembly and wasn't ported to any other processors until 2 years later in 1983 and not to Intel until 1989.
Sure there were tons of interesting things happening in the personal computing OS space in those days... but when IBM went shopping, there were not really that many choices that would have made good business sense. CP/M would have been the best choice, as it was the most popular... but they wouldn't sign the papers IBM required... hence the reason Gates bought QDOS (a CPM like OS) and renamed it MS-DOS in the first place.
So technically there was nothing for intel processors that was better, and the only os that made better business sense wouldn't sell... that left MS-DOS.
I will agree that MS could have greatly improved on MS-DOS and didn't, favoring compatibility over capability... but don't forget that tons of software of the time was proprietary so it didn't make sense to break compatibility to favor features.
I think if anything, it's IBM's fault for coming into the scene before a decent OS had been ported to intel processors. Hell QNX was only a year later and put DOS to shame... but in technology, it rarely pays to wait.
Again, your spouting your beliefs about what an OS should be capable of as though they are the definition of the word.
When you can convince me that you can run an MS-DOS application without DOS, then I will agree with you... but as far as I know, most DOS applications depended upon DOS. So it wasn't a boot loader.
It didn't do a spectacular job, and was crap by today's standards, but it most certainly was an OS unless you butcher the definition.
I would agree with your assessment too. So it's two processes at work:
1. Abused technical users pursue, improve, and advocate alternatives.
2. Typical users aren't particularly attracted to the product.
The first one has created an alternative, the second has created a bunch of potential converts. The result is that Linux and OSX are attracting more attention.
The greater force at work against Microsoft is really the cost of computer hardware. As hardware prices drop, the software becomes a larger percentage so the Windows tax is a much larger percentage of the whole cost of the system. Additionally, corporations are not seeing the gains they used to by upgrading hardware and software... so they are stagnating with older equipment and XP. Finally, the market is basically saturated, and there is little room for new growth in the bloated OS arena... especially as distributed computing and small network devices are the hot items and desktops and full featured laptops are less important to spend money on.
Windows 95 was not MS's first "serious entry into the OS market".
MS-DOS was a very "serious entry" into the OS market, as was windows 3.0, 3.1, and NT. In fact, I still support an old NT 4 server that predates the release of Windows 95.
Please don't let your inexperience confuse you. Millions of offices ran on Novell, DOS, Lotus, and Wordperfect long before Windows 95 came along.
Sure those early operating systems weren't anything compared to the UNIX workstations of the day, but neither were the computers they were running on.
Also, you don't seem to realize that there is nothing that says that an OS has to have certain features to be a good OS.
MS-DOS was a very good OS for standalone workstations where only one user was going to be interacting with the system and only running one application. The early PC's were not really capable of much more anyway, so DOS did what it was intended to do, and did it well enough at the time.
Even though I hate to admit it, Microsoft has brought far more to the industry than you give it credit for. I wish that someone had provided some viable competition all these years to force Microsoft to innovate a bit more, but they pushed the industry fairly well for a monopoly. They didn't really have to, they could have stretched their releases apart by years more than they did and made even more money. Upgrades have never been a big money maker for MS, it's bundling with new pc's they depend upon anyway when people are replacing their computers every couple of years.
Microsoft isn't losing because of Linux, it's losing because of Microsoft.
Essentially, if MS dominated the industry by creating the BEST product, then they wouldn't have a problem. Their problem is simply that their target customer isn't willing to be abused any longer. That and the of years of abuse have pushed millions of victims to contribute to the creation and improvement of alternatives to Microsoft.
Surely you could... might have to make some design adjustments but I can't see why you couldn't use a cap to smooth out some of the (imperceptible) flicker that makes the LEDs dimmer.
However, you would need on cap for every LED... and the result may not be worth the effort. There are surely cheaper ways. Like buying a controller with more outputs, increasing the number of LED's that can be illuminated at the same time, thus increasing the amount of time that can be spent illuminating each LED.
The Obama Administration did not explain their actions, and they may not be what so many of the /. crowd would like to think.
Obama has always been about a smooth transition and letting go of past distractions. Yes what happened under Bush was horrible, but let's just let it drop and move forward.
Also, the action by the Administration lawyers doesn't show support for Bush policies, but support for the way the Bush legal team was handling the case. I'm no laywer, but it appears the government simply wants a stay on decision of a lower court until an appeal can be lodged and decided. A perfectly reasonable request in my book, even if you want the government to lose the case.
I say, give it time before you jump to conclusions.
I work in a windows shop... but we have a standard install on our computers. Our internal Windows distribution... we even have a version control system for it.
At home, I begin with Ubuntu's distro, then add and remove packages from outside Ubuntu's control... creating my own "distro".
Essentially, they are doing the same thing that they would do anyway if they used redhat or ubuntu. They will start with an existing distro and review packages as they are released and decide if they would like to deploy them to their users. They will tweak the default settings, and maybe try and make it conform to some ideals that are important to them. Sure they could do it and still call it a customized Ubuntu or Redhat install. But it's just easier to give it a name and manage it from the top... like my shop does with our windows machines.
Only if they release it ouside their organization. So if this is the Official Russian distro, and is only used by Russian Government computers, then it is perfectly valid within the GPL.
Now if they make it public and distribute it, the are supposed to provide the source. My guess is that they wouldn't distribute it if they wanted to keep some of it secret anyway. If they wanted to distribute it, they would want the source available as it would allow their work to be improved upon... keeping their development costs low.
Not if you scale it beyond a certain level... as stated in the article, the author feels that this particular arrangement allows for good intensity.
You could, theoretically, use capacitors to increase the intensity.
Additionally, if you wanted to use multiple or a more powerful controller you could do that too.
Like with any electronic design, there are sacrifices to be made to keep things simple.
It's ignorance like yours that caused the US to stop producing nuclear power to begin with... and to stop improving it.
People shot down nuclear because it doesn't burn anything... that's what bothers people, if they could burn it and dump the waste into the air where they can't see it anymore they wouldn't mind it. If people had given nuclear a chance, we'd actually have less waste to deal with than we do now as surely someone would have bought it up to extract energy from as it would be cheaper than mining more uranium.
When coal technology was young, people would burn it in their fireplace... it was in efficient, had tons and tons of waste ash to deal with, and it polluted. After a few hundred years of scientific research, and coal has become much cleaner, far more efficient, and though still a dirty fuel most people accept it as a viable energy source in the near term. Research into using nuclear energy for something other than a bomb didn't begin in earnest until 1945 (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf54.htm) and the US stopped building plants in the 70's; concept to ~20% of current US energy consumption with less than 40 years of research. Just imagine if we had been producing and improving large scale nuclear plants for those 40 years, the rest of the world has and they have made some huge improvements in reprocessing waste, efficiency, and safety.
Do yourself a favor, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power with an open mind... you will be convinced, as I was.
I agree... going electronic will fix none of the major issues directly... but it will have drastic secondary effects.
For example. If my medical records are electronic and easily transported, second opinions will be more common... who knows, perhaps insurance companies will require that procedures over a certain value or with a certain risk factor have their (digital) files sent to another doctor (across the internet) for a consult... perhaps saving lives and certainly reducing the risk of malpractice claims for unnecessary procedures.
I think there two things that need to be fixed first, they are cheap and would prove that the government is actually concerned about our health.
1. Outlaw the advertisement of prescription-only products except in trade journals and other materials that target doctors and medical industry professionals. I am tired of hearing people say things like "I'm gonna try 'insert drug name here' next, it sounds like what I need".
2. Require all antibiotics to be given in a single dose, preferably as an injection, unless there is an overwhelming reason why they shouldn't... it's scary to imagine what kind of super-bugs we can expect tomorrow due to patients not completing their thousand pill course on a regular 4 a day schedule as prescribed.
Sometimes it's not right vs. wrong. The story was that mom was sleeping when this happened. I don't know the circumstances, but perhaps this kid was torn between waking his mom up who he felt deserved the sleep (worked all night or something), and driving himself to school. Sure he knew it was wrong to drive, but he loved his mom so much and she looked so exhausted that he didn't want to bother her. Or maybe he knew that he was going to get in trouble for missing the bus, so he thought he might save himself by driving to school.
At 6, most kids have trouble making decisions about severity of two wrongs, or weighing risk vs reward.
Certainly don't delay things... fix the damn coupon program... allow those with expired coupons to re-apply and get new ones.
Must be nice to live where you live... or kinda sad.
I don't pay for TV... and I never will. It's nice to catch a show or two, but it's simply a waste of money in my book. Sure I have a nice HD set and cool mythtv setup for my DVD collection and to timeshift the TV I do watch, but it all comes in OTA.
I live in Detroit, and we have very strong reception in most of the city... so there are a lot of households in all income brackets that use OTA tv for various reasons.
It's possible that you don't see much OTA where you are simply because your area has poor reception. Or because the cable networks are cheap, or perhaps simply because people are ignorant of the fact that OTA Digital TV is so damn good. To say that nobody uses it is just plain WRONG, especially when you head to more rural areas that don't have cable as an option.
1. I never did find a converter box that was completely covered by the coupon... maybe now, but when I ordered the coupons (not knowing they would expire) there wasn't a box out there for $40.
2. I haven't spent a dime on TV/Movie entertainment in years... why should I lay out $80 (now that my coupons are expired).
3. 90 days may seem like a long time... I would argue that in a way it's too long... it's easy to slip them into a drawer and lose track of them when you have 3 months to use them and you don't really need them yet anyway.
4. The fact that the coupons expired was not obvious. I received mine, tore open the envelope, glanced in and saw the cards and set the envelop in my to-do stack... I shopped around for a while here and there and when I finally picked the boxes I wanted I pulled the expired cards out of the envelope... how fair is that.
I think the better solution would be to have the coupons expire 90 days AFTER the transition... that means that everyone who got them has time to use them when they are needed. I got mine the second week they were offered... and never used them because I didn't want to spend $20-$30 dollars on top of the coupon prices for the box I wanted (I had to pay shipping too because I didn't want the box that RatShack was selling).
The coupon program was very poorly thought out. Money was wasted on mail and fancy plastic cards. Expiration dates hurt those who live pay-check to pay-check and have very little expendable income. They did not make it obvious that you had to use them within a certain time. It was just not at all what it should have been.
By the way, there are always people who can jump through the hoops, but because something can be done doesn't mean that it's fair or reasonable to expect everyone to do the same. It's like saying that poor people don't deserve any social assistance because most people can get and hold a job. Just realise that something that is obvious to you might not be to everyone... even savvy and intelligent people have failed to use thier coupons with very reasonable excuses; such as my friend who was deployed to Iraq before he could order his.
I agree and would mod you +1 insightful if I hadn't wanted to comment too (even though this whole thread is OT).
Essentially, Obama is like any other person who excels at a given task. He, like a professional athlete or superstar doctor, lawyer, or burgerflipper, is really good at what he does and people can sense it. What do coaches do with a freshman QB that outperforms the JV or Varsity player... they groom them and advance them as quickly as possible.
His inexperience is not a sign of weakness but a sign of just how good he is. I agree that he hasn't been vetted by the system, and hasn't really done anything of note but advance through the ranks... but look at the kid in your office who keeps getting promoted for simply doing the mundane work better than his peers; you don't need to make waves to prove yourself capable.
Finally, I think that the American people feel that his inexperience also means that his perspective is better. Most politicians spend years accomplishing next to nothing and over time they come to accept it as "just the way things are". Obama is still young and idealistic enough to think that he can make things happen (at least that's how people see him).
Do I think Obama is going to do anything particularly remarkable... no. Not any more than any other President could with a lot of popular support and a large majority in Congress. What Obama will do (I believe) is rally the people, and essentially wield the American people as a tool to push his adjenda... while making the people feel like they have power over their government.
I am a true Republican that voted Obama... for two reasons. I believe that the American people need to be reminded of THEIR power in government. And I believe that the Social Conservative party that pretends to be the Republican party has destroyed our two party system. Why can't I vote for a smaller government and states rights anymore?
Visit every small office you can find near home, tell them that you are willing to come in every Monday (or tuesday, etc.) and serve as their dedicated IT person for that day or half day. Tell them you don't want to be 1099'd but instead want to be a part time employee, in exchange for a regular schedule and the reduction in risk that 1099 work entails, you would be willing to take a far lower wage than their current on call guy.
So your giving them the benifit of having an in house IT guy who's not going to over bill, no going to make unnecessary recommendations in hopes of profiting.
I did this for a couple of years while I was in school... it works great. Most small business owners network with other small business owners, and you will turn down more offers than you'd imagine. Pick one who has a good health package and agree to work in exchange for healthcare. All together, most of my employers were out less than 10K per year, far less than they spent when they called the "geek squad" or their $100/hr consultants.
Sir,
Do you agree that security does NOT require the forfeiture of civil liberties? I want my country, my community, and my family to be secure... but I want it without forfeiting the rights and freedoms that make our country great. I cannot think of a situation where a person's civil liberties NEED to be sacrificed for the sake of security, however our government seems to keep using security as a way to take our freedoms.
I would like to know if you have given some thought to shifting the commissions' focus to protecting our civil liberties rather than trading them for a false sense of security.
Civil liberties, such as the ones that protect us from government spying on the people, that allow us to communicate freely and openly, that allow us to assemble publicly or in secret, and that once made the US a haven for business and people alike have been so compromised by repeated use of fear-and-take (promote fear, take a freedom) that I am concerned that your commission might be more interested in deciding what the next thing for us to be afraid should be than you are about making us genuinely safer.
Do you see your position as one of protector of government interests or the people's interests? I feel funny saying that because our government is supposed to be for, by, and of the people... however recent trends have shown that there is polarity between government interests and the peoples interests (such as the bail out of banks).
Please take the time to think about your commissions' role and objectives... it's so easy to focus on the problem when it comes to computer security and typically that only leads to very narrow solutions that have catastrophic secondary effects.
To even remotely suggest that biofuels are no better than fossil fuels shows just how ignorant of the subject you are.
A fossil fuel is typically millions of years old and is essentially sequestered carbon... if we don't use it it just sits there inert.
A bio-fuel is carbon that is actively part of our carbon cycle... it is temporarily in solid form, but in time it will be a gas again where it will get absorbed by a plant and made solid again. Essentially, using a bio-fuel is carbon neutral while a fossil fuel is carbon positive.
This is the reason that bio-fuels are the future.
Now as to sources for bio-fuels, I will agree that the greedy have pushed bio-fuel production without care for the cost. There are many responsible sources for bio-fuels. For example, if corn stalks could be used, or weeds grown on fallow fields, or algae grown in polluted waterways, or seaweed grown in oxygen depleted lakes. All of these sources would have a positive impact on the environment and or society. The use of corn stalks alone would encourage the growth of corn while not competing for the grain itself, which would make most corn producing countries have huge surpluses... effectively allowing corn to be nearly free, completely subsidized by bio-fuel production.
All of the uses above, except perhaps the algae, require some advances to be made in converting cellulose to fuel with a net positive yield that leaves room for profit. It will be done someday.
Using waste products, such as cooking oil, coffee grounds (as the article describes), straw, human and/or animal waste, etc. are all very positive things if they can be done without creating new problems. Don't let some of the stupid things that greed has made people do in the past (corn ethanol for example) fool you about the future of bio-fuels. Until a environmentally friendly, safe, and much higher capacity capacitor is introduced, electric cars aren't good for much more than commuter vehicles. Don't get me started on how far we have to go to make hydrogen happen. Bio-fuels are real, we have them and can continue to slowly replace fossil fuels as new methods of making fuel from waste products are created. Everything else is the someday, bio-fuels are something we can work on today.
Why do debates about technology always get reduced to the size of one's package. What difference does the size of one's package make when it comes to pleasing your intended audience? So your car is faster, your phone is smarter, and your house is bigger... my package is smaller so ha!
(perhaps it's our effort to make everything smaller that has caused the decline in masculinity talked about earlier today)
Shame the article didn't point any of that out.
Why not just say that data centers are using heat exchangers and outside air to cool their computer rooms.
All the stupid wheel is is a heat exchanger like any other. Many types of heat exchangers allow the inclusion of outside air, though I would think it would be better to keep your computer room air closed from the outside if it is possible.
Inconceivable!