Ummm, Actually we only own our research until we try to publish it, at which point the Journal publisher owns our research. Nothing gets accepted until a transfer of copyright form is completed.
Lovely. We've become a third-world banana republic, printing irrelevancies on our stamps to raise funds by selling them to collectors. This used to be the province of places such as Trinidad and Tabago or Bora Bora. My mailbox is so full of subsidized corporate junk that I can barely find the bills, while my mail-carrier won't deliver in winter unless I shovel the snow around the mailbox in a federally-approved fashion as otherwise they'd have to get out of their golf-carts. The entire purpose of the post-office (deliver the mail, anywhere in the country) seems to have been forgotten.
They should have to offer nothing but Richard Nixon stamps for two years in penance, and publish the Postmaster-General's home number while they're at it.
And what's wrong with an XServe in the SMB space? RAID'd disks, or use the XServe RAID (or any other disk cabinet) externally, redundant power, space and power efficient design. If you need something to live with the office, then a MacPro, comparable in price to a PC of the same class, does the same job at the cost of more physical space. I've run academic sites that would qualify as small business computing (15 to 50 users, central storage and print, independent desktops running common environment), and we would have considered $3500 for the base machine, plus another $3500 for disks and a tape backup quite acceptable. I built a few of those machines, and after fighting the heat and support issues, bought the $3500 machines from HP and IBM which are still in service, years after I've departed. When i talked to the group, they haven't had a service call in on them yet, either, just like after being run hard for three years (I do HPC, so most of the machines run 24/7 doing heavy floating point and thrashing the disks with several gig scratch files) I haven't made a call on any of my XServes.
I and others have said this before; real businesses buy real hardware with real service contracts, because their data is worth more than the marginal cost of the cheapest machine they can find at NewEgg. The price difference between the $1500 machine that you're demanding, and the existing $2500 machine that they sell, is minimal, and can be written off on taxes.
No, but it does have a million little graphical panels, many of them with useful help or hints on the screen, which allows someone moderately familiar with unixese to set one up quickly. I'm running them as a compute cluster as well as networked desktops, which has necessitated setting up everything from LDAP and NSF (don't ask) to DNS, NetBoot, and Sun Grid Engine. Kerberos came along free for the ride with the LDAP config. Easiest Unix machine I've ever set up, and easy to maintain. The remote monitoring tools are a pleasure, where the GUI actually makes a difference. (it's nice to see at a glance that machine 7 has thrown a warning light because fan 6 is running slow). The only real problem is that ARD runs through VNC (at least it did for Version 2,which is what I'm still at), so it's deathly slow compared to either X11 or RemoteDesktop.
In the SMB space, they really seem to have a winner. Maybe I just never took heavy enough drugs to grok Win2K3, but I could never make it work as smoothly as OS-X server does. It's not Solaris, but it'll do.
No, actually I am saying that they both should be called on it, but given the general tone around here, rather than be set upon by hordes of crypto-libertarians for not mentioning democratic perfidies, I picked one that particularly rankles me. You'll notice, however, that I didn't have a list, which I certainly could have had I had the spleen to remember Bush-I, Reagan, some of Ford, RMN, and various nut-job congressmen over the years.
Personally, I feel that as long as reasonable precautions are taken for the president's physical safety, then GWB, et al., should have to put up with what LBJ did. They should have to see hordes of disapproving protesters as their motorcade causes traffic snarls for hours. They should have audiences which are not hand-picked for docility, and have to answer real questions. There should be an amendment to the amendment for presidential succession that allows removing them for incompetence, and prevents them from pardoning members of their administrations enmeshed in ongoing investigations. It still bugs me that the Iran-Contra gang was allowed to slither away without ever giving a full accounting of what exactly they'd been up to.
You know, the cops could cut out the middle man by just going into the station house break room, punching someone, a riot breaks out, and then more cops come in and give everyone a beat-down, after which everyone goes home.
We really should make a more efficient government a higher priority.
Just to be even-handed, wasn't it Clinton who caged protesters off in areas where he'd never have to see them? Something along the lines of "you have the right to free speech, but you don't have the right for anybody to hear you".
But no, you're probably right, that this admin is working hard to rise to Nixonian levels.
I see; so the government should be allowed to waste its investment in you (a mixture of public education and publically-financed research which boiled down into your current skill-set and cirriculum, even if you taught yourself from books at Amazon (can't use those nasty, publically-funded libraries if you want small government)), future productivity and contributions to overall economic health, as well as allowing you to involuntarily remove your support from your dependents, just so it can be smaller for some theoretical reason? We should allow you to deny yourself access to healthcare, so that if you catch some strain of Tuberculosis with overtones of Ebola (yes, I know, bacterium versus virus, rhetorical pathogen here) you can give it to everyone, including the sanitation workers who will show up to remove your carcass, rather than provide some public level of health-care? Frankly, the societal cost of insuring you is minor compared to the cost of allowing you to infect and therefore involuntarily remove others from the workforce.
Let's remember that some aspects of the modern welfare state in Europe arose not because of altruistic feelings, but because the government realized that since they lived in a dangerous neighborhood, having a scrawny, sickly, underfed population to draw upon for national defense and industrial production was simply a bad idea. Public education is based upon enabling the largest number of potential contributors to intellectual capital. You do not deserve to starve to death, simply because of the potential you are denying society, versus what it has put into providing the environment which allowed you to get to where you are. Note, this also means that if you are capable of fundamental insights in quantum mechanics, you do not really have a right to go be a beach-combing slacker either, unless you are willing to so completely remove yourself from society so that you take nothing from it, to match the nothing you're contributing.
The government should be small only when the governed are small. Our government is currently large and expensive, because many formerly useful programs have been allowed to linger past their time, while others have been stymied by truculent 'citizens'. We could be a lot more effective for less money with the current one if we admitted an outsized military is an invitation to adventurism, and the road to Soviet-Style collapse, or the purpose of government agencies is not perpetuation of the agency. We shouldn't be looking into shrinking it for theoretical reasons, but for practical ones that involving paying for functions that do not contribute to our overall health and civilization. The experience with, ahem, charities, since 2000 is that too many have a sectarian agenda and are willing to use unsound data, methods, and wishful thinking to promote their agenda at the expense of society at large. If we allow for more charities to take over the function of governmental agencies, then they're going to have to be run like governmental agencies, with transparent budgets, methodologies based on evidence, -blind employment policies, and minimum standards. Amazingly, in that system they begin to look like governmental agencies, but with even lower efficiency.
That libertarian mindset leads to Hobbes, "Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
And that's the pity. Nobody with talent will touch ST for a decade at least, and the Powers That Be aren't going to listen when someone comes along and wants to give Joe Haldeman's anti-war "Forever War" the full-scale treatment. FW was (allegedly) Haldeman's response to ST, inflected by the different wars that were the formative events for the two authors, and a much better response to the militaristic original. I like Starship Troopers as a book, and I'll admit, I was hoping for more time spent in the History and Moral Philosophy class for the film. On the other hand, just the first third of Forever War (training through first mission ambiguity and disillusionment), would be an appropriate response to the current culture. If someone was willing to treat the material seriously, you could end up with a good "we have some issues here...." film along the lines of Full Metal Jacket or Three Kings.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you... Then they raze your cities, plow salt into your fields, and leave you as an warning to others.
It's not as catchy, but frequently more accurate. Somewhere at Redmond, some people with very large budgets are thinking, "Linux Delendo Est".
No, it's a million lines because the team writing it couldn't figure out what features they didn't want. The fact that they somehow managed to use OO-type abstractions while continuing to code in strict f77 was the source of amazement.
Its more modern forms, such as F95, aren't bad at all. All the power of C++ as far as numerics goes, a consistent and sane syntax (complex variables and operations are just there, not reimplemented by every programmer in their own unique way), modern control and data structures, and easy to read. (Translation: doesn't look like line-noise )
It remains popular due to backwards compatibility, and the ease of writing numeric code with it.
As for other uses, I've seen cgi-bin scripts written in F77, and a million-line massively-parallel quantum-chemistry package in an object-oriented fashion using F77. In the hands of modern compilers, it is an amazing language.
If you look at the pictures, and interpolate a little, it's about the size of a minicooper or Daimler Smart car. Translation: road pizza in the US, and you might as well rip out the back seats because you'll never get four average Americans in there. It's basically a golf-cart for Taxi purposes.
So, while the PTB could be suppressing these inventions, in many cases there are legitimate reasons they aren't adopted, which boil down to: the number of people who actually want one isn't enough for a giant like GM to make them profitably. There are often other issues, which include that while 200km to 300km sounds like a long distance, it's basically a week of commuting, and that if you only live 7-10 miles from your job. (you do plan on coming home each night, right?) If you live farther, then you have to hope the air-recharging infrastructure is in place (or that you can bring a portable pump along). This also cuts out quick jaunts to see the 'rents, hit the beach, etc, which are farther away than 300km.
They're a great idea for intra-city taxi service, but aren't going to fly in spread-out suburbia.
George Carlin had a routine about that 30 years ago, when he said that since he felt that killing people was more obscene than sex, he wanted to replaced the word Kill with F* on all of those old movies.
"We gonna F* you Sherriff...,but we're gonna F* you Slooooowwwww."
Take the previous poster's link to the U. Arizona website, http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/">ImpactE ffects, plug in some numbers, take the averages for density, angle of impact, and verlocity, and get the following results at 200KM/124 Miles: (this would be what happens in Pittsburgh/Philly if you splat Harrisburg)
Dense rock, 500M, sedimentary hit: not a lot at 124 miles, at 62 miles 2nd degree burns and trees ignite
Dense rock, 1000M, sedimentary hit: at 124 miles same as 62 miles above. at 62 miles clothes, plywood, trees, grass ignite, non-reinforced buildings destroyed from mixture of seismic and overpressure
Comet, 1000M, sedimentary hit: at 124 miles not so much building damage, but clothes, etc, catch fire and 90% of trees blown down.
You'll also notice that all of these energies are around 150 Gigatons, which is substantially larger than anything we ever set off. Further effects will include airborne particulates which will shade the sun, probably causing crop failures. We'll also note that a 1KM rock impact will basically flatten an area the size of PA, upstate NY, and western MD. A big comet hit will still cause 2nd degree burns out to at least Columbus and NYC, as well as structural and agricultural damage.
That's why we care. The probability is low, but the damage is (excuse me) astronomical, and we know it's happened before. Tunguska really should be all the reason we need to keep track of these things. A comet (probably) like Tunguska is actually preferable, since it isn't going to throw nearly as much ejecta into the atmosphere. You'll remember the cooler summers we got after Pinatubo; a big stone or Ni/Fe meteorite is going to be an order of magnitude worse.
Having what would once have been called a melancholic personality, and been through variations on your theme, a few thoughts:
Firstly, living in Upstate, half your problem at the moment may be simply that it's dark and cold this time of year. You need, seriously, to make an effort to get out and meet people, or at least be somewhere where people are having lives and demonstrating some kind of energy. If you're near where you went to college, and it's full of people from the City, then spending some time on the local coffee-house/gallery/bar scene isn't all bad, as long as you don't spend too much time with depressing and defeated locals. Don't be afraid of seeing a doctor, and checking into antidepressants either, if you're having motivational problems. Don't make your situation worse by letting a depressing gig depress you to the point you can't function, making the whole scene worse. There's a lot to be said for Upstate, including that while you can get to the City fairly easily, housing is cheap, and if you start a business, there are tax-favored zones and lots of available facilities at reasonable rates. Drag a couple more City-dwellers in on it, and you may get something rolling.
OTOH, it's time to start planning your next move. Moving is hard, staying put it easy, but some times it's time to go. Look for a new gig, plan your own business, become a contractor for a year (a former boss of mine, high in the University IT world, did that once for a couple years between director-level jobs at a pair of major private U's.) Whatever you do, unemployment is not cool, unless you really have a goal of becoming a downwardly-mobile slacker, ending up in a Van Down by the River. (and if you went to school where I suspect you did, the whole blasted county is going to flood when this snow melts anyway) Moving back in with your parents isn't either. I know people do it, but the only way to do it now is if you have a job, and you need a temporary crash spot that's within commuting distance of your job. The job had better be worth it, too. Partly you want to keep the habit of working, and partly you need to keep up public appearances that you're not a useless drain on society. Sharks are right; keep moving or else.
Finally, if you really can't make yourself find the good side of where you live, and you really need to live in the City, then go. I had a job for years that was a decent job in theory, but my coworkers and the commute were ruining my physical and mental health. Now I'm freezing in the dark of Upstate, but haven't been this contented in a decade. I'm an obligate East-coaster, and therefore can drive anywhere that I care about (City, Philly, Jersey Shore), in 3-5 hours, and still have access to the museums of Rochester/Syracuse, the Great Lakes, and the mountains. I spent too many years hating where I lived, and trying to convince myself that the job compensated. If you have this problem, then give it a real try, but admit that you may be, at least at this stage of your life, too acclimated to your own small piece of turf to be happy elsewhere. Make sure it's that, and not just post-graduation, "oh my god I've got to act like an adult now", but if it is, don't deny it.
Just an ugly thought, man. Michael Dell, Naked, Petrified, and Covered in Grits (he is in Texas), on the front of their web-page. You'd better hope for *lots* of grits.
As one of those people who actually remembers Buzz Aldrin, et al. (which would make me depressingly close in age to your parents, *sigh*), may I say that I and my friends were raised on the dream that by now Astronauts would not be heros, but rather clean-cut Ralph Kramdens, driving the daily Kennedy to Moonbase Alpha shuttle. There was supposed to be an orbiting Port Elizabeth (without the slums), and the beginnings of exploitation of asteroids and the moon for resources. We expected a frontier.
What we all either didn't know (what can I say, we were kids, it was the 70s, and the adults thought disco was a good idea), or forgot, was that the entire space race was a PR stunt, with no goal other than bragging rights over the Soviets. We got to the moon, brought back some rocks, played golf, and tooled around in the ultimate dune-buggy while taking pictures, and that was enough. We need, in other words, an opponent too big to threaten militarily, who is also technologically close to par (so they can compete), with an ideology which is anathema to middle-america. Alternately, we need a big rock moving at high velocity to strike somewhere obvious, and remind people why ignoring the big room outside our atmosphere is a bad idea.
Until then, as far as manned exploration goes: In the words of Apollo 17's commander, "Ok, Let's get this mother out of here"
Fedora core is also evolving rapidly, while RHEL has had its feed nailed to the floor. Check your closet; tie-dye and combat boots, Fedora. Blue suit and wingtips, RHEL. A sewing machine, bolt of cloth, and a box of fasteners, Gentoo.
Actually, a couple of seasons of your favorite show in disk would be about the same as those vouchers. Can I take "Firefly" and two seasons of "nova" instead?
Not really. Very few losers of gladatorial contests got to have second "careers" as D-list celebraties. The Romans never got around to the pop-psyche culture, where killing the losers would have been considered bad for their self-esteem.
So *that* is what the Romans have ever done for us.
Guys, guys, it's Illinois. This is not a technical decision, and if it's run like when I lived there, Linux lost because you guys aren't organized enough to kick in 5 bucks each to make sure the right decision got made. There's an old Mike Royko column where he discusses how the ERA lost in Illinois, and a state rep told him that for what the advocates spent on advertisements, posters, etc, they could have used it the time-honored Chicago way, and not only passed the amendment, but he could have gotten them at least a bridge as well.
So, now you have a goal. Take up a collection, and get Linux adopted at the state government level, and get the Debian Memorial Bridge in Joliet while you're at it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ummm, Actually we only own our research until we try to publish it, at which point the Journal publisher owns our research. Nothing gets accepted until a transfer of copyright form is completed.
Lovely. We've become a third-world banana republic, printing irrelevancies on our stamps to raise funds by selling them to collectors. This used to be the province of places such as Trinidad and Tabago or Bora Bora. My mailbox is so full of subsidized corporate junk that I can barely find the bills, while my mail-carrier won't deliver in winter unless I shovel the snow around the mailbox in a federally-approved fashion as otherwise they'd have to get out of their golf-carts. The entire purpose of the post-office (deliver the mail, anywhere in the country) seems to have been forgotten.
They should have to offer nothing but Richard Nixon stamps for two years in penance, and publish the Postmaster-General's home number while they're at it.
And what's wrong with an XServe in the SMB space? RAID'd disks, or use the XServe RAID (or any other disk cabinet) externally, redundant power, space and power efficient design. If you need something to live with the office, then a MacPro, comparable in price to a PC of the same class, does the same job at the cost of more physical space. I've run academic sites that would qualify as small business computing (15 to 50 users, central storage and print, independent desktops running common environment), and we would have considered $3500 for the base machine, plus another $3500 for disks and a tape backup quite acceptable. I built a few of those machines, and after fighting the heat and support issues, bought the $3500 machines from HP and IBM which are still in service, years after I've departed. When i talked to the group, they haven't had a service call in on them yet, either, just like after being run hard for three years (I do HPC, so most of the machines run 24/7 doing heavy floating point and thrashing the disks with several gig scratch files) I haven't made a call on any of my XServes.
I and others have said this before; real businesses buy real hardware with real service contracts, because their data is worth more than the marginal cost of the cheapest machine they can find at NewEgg. The price difference between the $1500 machine that you're demanding, and the existing $2500 machine that they sell, is minimal, and can be written off on taxes.
No, but it does have a million little graphical panels, many of them with useful help or hints on the screen, which allows someone moderately familiar with unixese to set one up quickly. I'm running them as a compute cluster as well as networked desktops, which has necessitated setting up everything from LDAP and NSF (don't ask) to DNS, NetBoot, and Sun Grid Engine. Kerberos came along free for the ride with the LDAP config. Easiest Unix machine I've ever set up, and easy to maintain. The remote monitoring tools are a pleasure, where the GUI actually makes a difference. (it's nice to see at a glance that machine 7 has thrown a warning light because fan 6 is running slow). The only real problem is that ARD runs through VNC (at least it did for Version 2,which is what I'm still at), so it's deathly slow compared to either X11 or RemoteDesktop.
In the SMB space, they really seem to have a winner. Maybe I just never took heavy enough drugs to grok Win2K3, but I could never make it work as smoothly as OS-X server does. It's not Solaris, but it'll do.
I can't find the cartoon online, but about last summer Utne Reader ran a small cartoon of a sheep with a human face, and the caption,
"And With Help From the Transpecies Movement, Mary Became a Little Lamb"
In all seriousness, Sheep get prion diseases, which advance rather quickly. Am I going to have to be ready to put down my coworkers due to Scrapie?
Neither. They'll all have matching black wool and berets, and become fine-arts majors expressing their individuality.
No, actually I am saying that they both should be called on it, but given the general tone around here, rather than be set upon by hordes of crypto-libertarians for not mentioning democratic perfidies, I picked one that particularly rankles me. You'll notice, however, that I didn't have a list, which I certainly could have had I had the spleen to remember Bush-I, Reagan, some of Ford, RMN, and various nut-job congressmen over the years.
Personally, I feel that as long as reasonable precautions are taken for the president's physical safety, then GWB, et al., should have to put up with what LBJ did. They should have to see hordes of disapproving protesters as their motorcade causes traffic snarls for hours. They should have audiences which are not hand-picked for docility, and have to answer real questions. There should be an amendment to the amendment for presidential succession that allows removing them for incompetence, and prevents them from pardoning members of their administrations enmeshed in ongoing investigations. It still bugs me that the Iran-Contra gang was allowed to slither away without ever giving a full accounting of what exactly they'd been up to.
You know, the cops could cut out the middle man by just going into the station house break room, punching someone, a riot breaks out, and then more cops come in and give everyone a beat-down, after which everyone goes home.
We really should make a more efficient government a higher priority.
And you're surprised because.....
Just to be even-handed, wasn't it Clinton who caged protesters off in areas where he'd never have to see them? Something along the lines of "you have the right to free speech, but you don't have the right for anybody to hear you".
But no, you're probably right, that this admin is working hard to rise to Nixonian levels.
I see; so the government should be allowed to waste its investment in you (a mixture of public education and publically-financed research which boiled down into your current skill-set and cirriculum, even if you taught yourself from books at Amazon (can't use those nasty, publically-funded libraries if you want small government)), future productivity and contributions to overall economic health, as well as allowing you to involuntarily remove your support from your dependents, just so it can be smaller for some theoretical reason? We should allow you to deny yourself access to healthcare, so that if you catch some strain of Tuberculosis with overtones of Ebola (yes, I know, bacterium versus virus, rhetorical pathogen here) you can give it to everyone, including the sanitation workers who will show up to remove your carcass, rather than provide some public level of health-care? Frankly, the societal cost of insuring you is minor compared to the cost of allowing you to infect and therefore involuntarily remove others from the workforce.
Let's remember that some aspects of the modern welfare state in Europe arose not because of altruistic feelings, but because the government realized that since they lived in a dangerous neighborhood, having a scrawny, sickly, underfed population to draw upon for national defense and industrial production was simply a bad idea. Public education is based upon enabling the largest number of potential contributors to intellectual capital. You do not deserve to starve to death, simply because of the potential you are denying society, versus what it has put into providing the environment which allowed you to get to where you are. Note, this also means that if you are capable of fundamental insights in quantum mechanics, you do not really have a right to go be a beach-combing slacker either, unless you are willing to so completely remove yourself from society so that you take nothing from it, to match the nothing you're contributing.
The government should be small only when the governed are small. Our government is currently large and expensive, because many formerly useful programs have been allowed to linger past their time, while others have been stymied by truculent 'citizens'. We could be a lot more effective for less money with the current one if we admitted an outsized military is an invitation to adventurism, and the road to Soviet-Style collapse, or the purpose of government agencies is not perpetuation of the agency. We shouldn't be looking into shrinking it for theoretical reasons, but for practical ones that involving paying for functions that do not contribute to our overall health and civilization. The experience with, ahem, charities, since 2000 is that too many have a sectarian agenda and are willing to use unsound data, methods, and wishful thinking to promote their agenda at the expense of society at large. If we allow for more charities to take over the function of governmental agencies, then they're going to have to be run like governmental agencies, with transparent budgets, methodologies based on evidence, -blind employment policies, and minimum standards. Amazingly, in that system they begin to look like governmental agencies, but with even lower efficiency.
That libertarian mindset leads to Hobbes, "Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. "
And that's the pity. Nobody with talent will touch ST for a decade at least, and the Powers That Be aren't going to listen when someone comes along and wants to give Joe Haldeman's anti-war "Forever War" the full-scale treatment. FW was (allegedly) Haldeman's response to ST, inflected by the different wars that were the formative events for the two authors, and a much better response to the militaristic original. I like Starship Troopers as a book, and I'll admit, I was hoping for more time spent in the History and Moral Philosophy class for the film. On the other hand, just the first third of Forever War (training through first mission ambiguity and disillusionment), would be an appropriate response to the current culture. If someone was willing to treat the material seriously, you could end up with a good "we have some issues here...." film along the lines of Full Metal Jacket or Three Kings.
USMC.
First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you... Then they raze your cities, plow salt into your fields, and leave you as an warning to others.
It's not as catchy, but frequently more accurate. Somewhere at Redmond, some people with very large budgets are thinking, "Linux Delendo Est".
No, it's a million lines because the team writing it couldn't figure out what features they didn't want. The fact that they somehow managed to use OO-type abstractions while continuing to code in strict f77 was the source of amazement.
Its more modern forms, such as F95, aren't bad at all. All the power of C++ as far as numerics goes, a consistent and sane syntax (complex variables and operations are just there, not reimplemented by every programmer in their own unique way), modern control and data structures, and easy to read. (Translation: doesn't look like line-noise )
It remains popular due to backwards compatibility, and the ease of writing numeric code with it.
As for other uses, I've seen cgi-bin scripts written in F77, and a million-line massively-parallel quantum-chemistry package in an object-oriented fashion using F77. In the hands of modern compilers, it is an amazing language.
If you look at the pictures, and interpolate a little, it's about the size of a minicooper or Daimler Smart car. Translation: road pizza in the US, and you might as well rip out the back seats because you'll never get four average Americans in there. It's basically a golf-cart for Taxi purposes.
So, while the PTB could be suppressing these inventions, in many cases there are legitimate reasons they aren't adopted, which boil down to: the number of people who actually want one isn't enough for a giant like GM to make them profitably. There are often other issues, which include that while 200km to 300km sounds like a long distance, it's basically a week of commuting, and that if you only live 7-10 miles from your job. (you do plan on coming home each night, right?) If you live farther, then you have to hope the air-recharging infrastructure is in place (or that you can bring a portable pump along). This also cuts out quick jaunts to see the 'rents, hit the beach, etc, which are farther away than 300km.
They're a great idea for intra-city taxi service, but aren't going to fly in spread-out suburbia.
George Carlin had a routine about that 30 years ago, when he said that since he felt that killing people was more obscene than sex, he wanted to replaced the word Kill with F* on all of those old movies.
"We gonna F* you Sherriff...,but we're gonna F* you Slooooowwwww."
Not the worst approach to old John Wayne movies.
Take the previous poster's link to the U. Arizona website, http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/">ImpactE ffects, plug in some numbers, take the averages for density, angle of impact, and verlocity, and get the following results at 200KM/124 Miles: (this would be what happens in Pittsburgh/Philly if you splat Harrisburg)
Dense rock, 500M, sedimentary hit: not a lot at 124 miles, at 62 miles 2nd degree burns and trees ignite Dense rock, 1000M, sedimentary hit: at 124 miles same as 62 miles above. at 62 miles clothes, plywood, trees, grass ignite, non-reinforced buildings destroyed from mixture of seismic and overpressure Comet, 1000M, sedimentary hit: at 124 miles not so much building damage, but clothes, etc, catch fire and 90% of trees blown down.
You'll also notice that all of these energies are around 150 Gigatons, which is substantially larger than anything we ever set off. Further effects will include airborne particulates which will shade the sun, probably causing crop failures. We'll also note that a 1KM rock impact will basically flatten an area the size of PA, upstate NY, and western MD. A big comet hit will still cause 2nd degree burns out to at least Columbus and NYC, as well as structural and agricultural damage.
That's why we care. The probability is low, but the damage is (excuse me) astronomical, and we know it's happened before. Tunguska really should be all the reason we need to keep track of these things. A comet (probably) like Tunguska is actually preferable, since it isn't going to throw nearly as much ejecta into the atmosphere. You'll remember the cooler summers we got after Pinatubo; a big stone or Ni/Fe meteorite is going to be an order of magnitude worse.
Having what would once have been called a melancholic personality, and been through variations on your theme, a few thoughts:
Firstly, living in Upstate, half your problem at the moment may be simply that it's dark and cold this time of year. You need, seriously, to make an effort to get out and meet people, or at least be somewhere where people are having lives and demonstrating some kind of energy. If you're near where you went to college, and it's full of people from the City, then spending some time on the local coffee-house/gallery/bar scene isn't all bad, as long as you don't spend too much time with depressing and defeated locals. Don't be afraid of seeing a doctor, and checking into antidepressants either, if you're having motivational problems. Don't make your situation worse by letting a depressing gig depress you to the point you can't function, making the whole scene worse. There's a lot to be said for Upstate, including that while you can get to the City fairly easily, housing is cheap, and if you start a business, there are tax-favored zones and lots of available facilities at reasonable rates. Drag a couple more City-dwellers in on it, and you may get something rolling.
OTOH, it's time to start planning your next move. Moving is hard, staying put it easy, but some times it's time to go. Look for a new gig, plan your own business, become a contractor for a year (a former boss of mine, high in the University IT world, did that once for a couple years between director-level jobs at a pair of major private U's.) Whatever you do, unemployment is not cool, unless you really have a goal of becoming a downwardly-mobile slacker, ending up in a Van Down by the River. (and if you went to school where I suspect you did, the whole blasted county is going to flood when this snow melts anyway) Moving back in with your parents isn't either. I know people do it, but the only way to do it now is if you have a job, and you need a temporary crash spot that's within commuting distance of your job. The job had better be worth it, too. Partly you want to keep the habit of working, and partly you need to keep up public appearances that you're not a useless drain on society. Sharks are right; keep moving or else.
Finally, if you really can't make yourself find the good side of where you live, and you really need to live in the City, then go. I had a job for years that was a decent job in theory, but my coworkers and the commute were ruining my physical and mental health. Now I'm freezing in the dark of Upstate, but haven't been this contented in a decade. I'm an obligate East-coaster, and therefore can drive anywhere that I care about (City, Philly, Jersey Shore), in 3-5 hours, and still have access to the museums of Rochester/Syracuse, the Great Lakes, and the mountains. I spent too many years hating where I lived, and trying to convince myself that the job compensated. If you have this problem, then give it a real try, but admit that you may be, at least at this stage of your life, too acclimated to your own small piece of turf to be happy elsewhere. Make sure it's that, and not just post-graduation, "oh my god I've got to act like an adult now", but if it is, don't deny it.
Good luck.
Just an ugly thought, man. Michael Dell, Naked, Petrified, and Covered in Grits (he is in Texas), on the front of their web-page. You'd better hope for *lots* of grits.
As one of those people who actually remembers Buzz Aldrin, et al. (which would make me depressingly close in age to your parents, *sigh*), may I say that I and my friends were raised on the dream that by now Astronauts would not be heros, but rather clean-cut Ralph Kramdens, driving the daily Kennedy to Moonbase Alpha shuttle. There was supposed to be an orbiting Port Elizabeth (without the slums), and the beginnings of exploitation of asteroids and the moon for resources. We expected a frontier.
What we all either didn't know (what can I say, we were kids, it was the 70s, and the adults thought disco was a good idea), or forgot, was that the entire space race was a PR stunt, with no goal other than bragging rights over the Soviets. We got to the moon, brought back some rocks, played golf, and tooled around in the ultimate dune-buggy while taking pictures, and that was enough. We need, in other words, an opponent too big to threaten militarily, who is also technologically close to par (so they can compete), with an ideology which is anathema to middle-america. Alternately, we need a big rock moving at high velocity to strike somewhere obvious, and remind people why ignoring the big room outside our atmosphere is a bad idea.
Until then, as far as manned exploration goes: In the words of Apollo 17's commander, "Ok, Let's get this mother out of here"
Fedora core is also evolving rapidly, while RHEL has had its feed nailed to the floor. Check your closet; tie-dye and combat boots, Fedora. Blue suit and wingtips, RHEL. A sewing machine, bolt of cloth, and a box of fasteners, Gentoo.
Actually, a couple of seasons of your favorite show in disk would be about the same as those vouchers. Can I take "Firefly" and two seasons of "nova" instead?
Not really. Very few losers of gladatorial contests got to have second "careers" as D-list celebraties. The Romans never got around to the pop-psyche culture, where killing the losers would have been considered bad for their self-esteem.
So *that* is what the Romans have ever done for us.
Guys, guys, it's Illinois. This is not a technical decision, and if it's run like when I lived there, Linux lost because you guys aren't organized enough to kick in 5 bucks each to make sure the right decision got made. There's an old Mike Royko column where he discusses how the ERA lost in Illinois, and a state rep told him that for what the advocates spent on advertisements, posters, etc, they could have used it the time-honored Chicago way, and not only passed the amendment, but he could have gotten them at least a bridge as well.
So, now you have a goal. Take up a collection, and get Linux adopted at the state government level, and get the Debian Memorial Bridge in Joliet while you're at it.