Here in Seattle, I'm getting 25/25 mbit internet & telephone over fiber without caps for about $100.:)
Sure, our internet isn't as good as yours.. and our skiing isn't as good as yours.. and we can't get lutefisk except at christmastime.. but I'm sure there must be some reason that I live here instead of Norway, just let me think about it some longer.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic...asshole.
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
Bingo, that's the first thing I noticed too. It's hardly doing it at lower cost if somebody gave you an expensive GPS unit and you don't figure it's value in to the cost of the project.. The Project Icarus guys used things they had lying around, but factored their value into the cost of the project. This is a more honest approach.
My assumption is that their SpotGPS unit is MORE expensive (not less) than the cellphone used in project icarus. The only real innovation here is that they used a soft-cooler instead of a styrofoam.. and also they said that their parachute failed and the equipment was OK anyways.
The basics of his famous blog entry (which it seems has since been removed from his blog archive?):
I have to admit, the rising tide of venom about the lateness of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS has gotten pretty discouraging. Emails, message boards, blogs, LJ comments, everywhere I look (and lots of places where I don't), people seem to be attacking me, defending me, using me as a bad example of something or other, whatever.
I can and do avoid most of the online discussions, although I do regularly get emails from people eager to point out the latest URL where DANCE and I are being hashed over. I can do that, and I can screen the trollish comments here on LJ, but there's no avoiding the emails.
Some of you are angry about the miniatures, the swords, the resin busts, the games. You don't want me "wasting time" on those, or talking about them here.
Some of you are angry that I watch football during the fall. You don't want me "wasting time" on the NFL, or talking about it here.
Some of you hate my other projects. You don't want me co-editing WARRIORS or the Vance anthology or STAR-CROSSED LOVERS or any of the other projects I'm doing with my old friend Gardner Dozois, and you get angry when I post about them here.
For reasons I don't quite comprehend, the people who hate those projects seem to hate WILD CARDS even more. You really don't want me working on that, "wasting time" on that, and posting about it here.
Some of you don't want me attending conventions, teaching workshops, touring and doing promo, or visiting places like Spain and Portugal (last year) or Finland (this year). More wasting time, when I should be home working on A DANCE WITH DRAGONS.
After all, as some of you like to point out in your emails, I am sixty years old and fat, and you don't want me to "pull a Robert Jordan" on you and deny you your book.
Okay, I've got the message. You don't want me doing anything except A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE. Ever. (Well, maybe it's okay if I take a leak once in a while?)
Mod parent up. Seriously, he'll be lucky if he finishes this before he reaches his 80's. If he spent the same effort actually writing the Song of Ice & Fire books that he puts into writing his blog everyday, the thing would be done already. These books are the best fantasy-fiction I have ever read (although a bit dark), but these books are super low on the author's priority list.. He even went so far as to tear into his fans on his blog, saying he doesn't owe us anything... I think we'll be LUCKY if he pulls a Jordan (that is to say, leaves enough outline and material for a follow-on author to finish the story after he dies)... I think it is FAR more likely that this will be the last book that we see in the series, leaving this really amazing series stranded.
What a load of crap. You sit on your computer all day and have probably never even been to any wilderness, it's easy to say with hindsight what you would do.
Ah, Ad Hominem. Must mean that you can't argue any of my points so you attack me personally.
Just because you sit on your computer all day & have never even seen any wilderness, do not assume that is who I am.
And every single person who has ever broken an arm or leg, or sprained an ankle or cut themselves or fallen off a ladder, is just stupid, as there are no accidents, only deliberately stupid decisions.
Are you saying that BY ACCIDENT, you could turn off the paved road and drive until your are stuck up to your axles in snow on a logging road on your way to another state? If you can do these things by accident, I'd say you should pay a great deal more attention to your driving. These are decisions. This is not the same as falling off a ladder.
It's possible that the unfortunate Mr Kim didn't have your in-depth knowledge of plants and was unaware that they were poisonous.
True. However, here's a couple of tips that will help you wherever you happen to be:
1) If it is winter, and there are berries that the birds aren't eating, then don't eat them.
2) If you aren't sure if a berry can be eaten, don't eat it.
Bullshit. Be careful with your generalizations. This could not have happened to me and here is why:
1) I would never have turned off the paved road on my way to ANOTHER STATE
2) I would most certainly never have decided to drive down a snow covered logging road in the winter
3) If I had somehow managed to become as stuck as James Kim (which requires a giant leap of stupidity), I would have IMMEDIATELY attempted to hike out while my strength was still good. I'm talking first thing in the morning.
4) If I had gotten to the point that I was hiking out... I would have followed the road. I would most certainly not have attempted to go overland without map or compass.
5) I would have AT NO POINT eaten any poisonous berries.
In nature, every bad decision counts. If you insist on stacking enough bad decisions on top of bad decisions, sooner or later you will die.
Nah, you're an offroad truck enthusiast that likes to use a radio and has a nasty chip on his shoulder. And yes, of course I know how to completely disassemble and rebuild and re-engineer a truck.
Parts of this are very insightful.. As a new ham (and a real one, I should add... My first HF rig was a Swan 500 that was broken when it was given to me... It does 400w on 40m now, enough to blow the doors off those riceboxes)..
I've really noticed that there are two camps in ham radio. The "hams" and the "operators". There seem to be a great many "operators" that want to know nothing about experimenting, aren't interested in opening their radio up to tinker with it (It's so expensive, I don't want to break it!).. If everything doesn't come out of the cardboard box working exactly as expected, they review it as 'crap' and return it. Real hams know that nothing works right to begin with, and sets about to making it work for _him_. I have a friend who is very solidly an operator, and is often 'bored' with ham radio. I think that emcomm is something that operators do to keep from being bored, so that they have 'something interesting' to do with those shiny ricebox 2m/440 radios & HT's. As a later poster stated, at least they are using the frequencies, so more power to them.
So we're to rely on electric-powered ham radios instead, across a finite number of channels? Ham radios can provide a useful service, but the messianic complex some of their proponents adopt is obnoxious.
Firstly, amateur radio does not use "Channels". It is not a channelized service. The bottom line is that amateur radio is still the only worldwide communications method that does not require any infrastructure whatsoever. This is an inherently useful thing in the event of infrastructure failure.
My introduction to computers was the Commodore 64 that I grew up with. The floppy-drive cost exactly as much as the computer itself did. My first PC was an IBM PC-XT, the 8088 replaced by the NEC V20, with a 20mb MFM harddrive, 640kb RAM and a Color Graphics Adapter. Dual half-height floppy drives as well! My dad brought home my first 1200 baud modem from a guy at work, a Hayes Smartmodem, and via this beauty met other like minded individuals. One of whom had an 80mb RLL drive and 8 MEGABYTES of ram 386DX. I couldn't believe this thing. What could you need so much computer for? It was insane. I was savagely jealous, though, since he was experimenting with "Linux" which in those days arrived on a giant pile of floppy disks marked with the runes "YGGDRASIL" and required compiling...
You might still be able to process it into B&W. I don't know how this would be done with K-14, but I recently found a roll of K-12 in an ancient camera (Undevelopable for a VERY long time, even at Dwayne's) and developed using D-19 and this process:
http://lavender.fortunecity.com/lavender/569/k12bwnegdev.html
the US spent a relatively small amount arming the terrorists in Afghanistan, forcing the USSR to spend a lot more to maintain their occupation.
Don't forget what that got us, though. That man that we placed on the cover of Time Magazine, that man that our president said was "The Moral equivalent of our founding fathers".. That man orchestrated an attack on our country that destroyed the world trade center and killed an astonishing number of our countrymen one fall morning. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours
Slashdot Mirror
Here in Seattle, I'm getting 25/25 mbit internet & telephone over fiber without caps for about $100. :)
Sure, our internet isn't as good as yours.. and our skiing isn't as good as yours.. and we can't get lutefisk except at christmastime.. but I'm sure there must be some reason that I live here instead of Norway, just let me think about it some longer.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic...asshole.
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
(George Carlin)
Bingo, that's the first thing I noticed too. It's hardly doing it at lower cost if somebody gave you an expensive GPS unit and you don't figure it's value in to the cost of the project.. The Project Icarus guys used things they had lying around, but factored their value into the cost of the project. This is a more honest approach. My assumption is that their SpotGPS unit is MORE expensive (not less) than the cellphone used in project icarus. The only real innovation here is that they used a soft-cooler instead of a styrofoam.. and also they said that their parachute failed and the equipment was OK anyways.
Right. But if you put the caps-lock on, then all the characters on the screen went lower case. :D
Did you by any chance post that with a Commodore 64? I notice the 40 column display width and lack of capitals..
I have to admit, the rising tide of venom about the lateness of A DANCE WITH DRAGONS has gotten pretty discouraging. Emails, message boards, blogs, LJ comments, everywhere I look (and lots of places where I don't), people seem to be attacking me, defending me, using me as a bad example of something or other, whatever. I can and do avoid most of the online discussions, although I do regularly get emails from people eager to point out the latest URL where DANCE and I are being hashed over. I can do that, and I can screen the trollish comments here on LJ, but there's no avoiding the emails. Some of you are angry about the miniatures, the swords, the resin busts, the games. You don't want me "wasting time" on those, or talking about them here. Some of you are angry that I watch football during the fall. You don't want me "wasting time" on the NFL, or talking about it here. Some of you hate my other projects. You don't want me co-editing WARRIORS or the Vance anthology or STAR-CROSSED LOVERS or any of the other projects I'm doing with my old friend Gardner Dozois, and you get angry when I post about them here. For reasons I don't quite comprehend, the people who hate those projects seem to hate WILD CARDS even more. You really don't want me working on that, "wasting time" on that, and posting about it here. Some of you don't want me attending conventions, teaching workshops, touring and doing promo, or visiting places like Spain and Portugal (last year) or Finland (this year). More wasting time, when I should be home working on A DANCE WITH DRAGONS. After all, as some of you like to point out in your emails, I am sixty years old and fat, and you don't want me to "pull a Robert Jordan" on you and deny you your book. Okay, I've got the message. You don't want me doing anything except A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE. Ever. (Well, maybe it's okay if I take a leak once in a while?)
https://grrumblers.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/quotes-of-the-week-grrm-brandon-sanderson/
Mod parent up. Seriously, he'll be lucky if he finishes this before he reaches his 80's. If he spent the same effort actually writing the Song of Ice & Fire books that he puts into writing his blog everyday, the thing would be done already. These books are the best fantasy-fiction I have ever read (although a bit dark), but these books are super low on the author's priority list.. He even went so far as to tear into his fans on his blog, saying he doesn't owe us anything... I think we'll be LUCKY if he pulls a Jordan (that is to say, leaves enough outline and material for a follow-on author to finish the story after he dies)... I think it is FAR more likely that this will be the last book that we see in the series, leaving this really amazing series stranded.
What a load of crap. You sit on your computer all day and have probably never even been to any wilderness, it's easy to say with hindsight what you would do.
Ah, Ad Hominem. Must mean that you can't argue any of my points so you attack me personally.
Just because you sit on your computer all day & have never even seen any wilderness, do not assume that is who I am.
And every single person who has ever broken an arm or leg, or sprained an ankle or cut themselves or fallen off a ladder, is just stupid, as there are no accidents, only deliberately stupid decisions.
Are you saying that BY ACCIDENT, you could turn off the paved road and drive until your are stuck up to your axles in snow on a logging road on your way to another state? If you can do these things by accident, I'd say you should pay a great deal more attention to your driving. These are decisions. This is not the same as falling off a ladder.
It's possible that the unfortunate Mr Kim didn't have your in-depth knowledge of plants and was unaware that they were poisonous.
True. However, here's a couple of tips that will help you wherever you happen to be:
1) If it is winter, and there are berries that the birds aren't eating, then don't eat them.
2) If you aren't sure if a berry can be eaten, don't eat it.
Bullshit. Be careful with your generalizations. This could not have happened to me and here is why:
1) I would never have turned off the paved road on my way to ANOTHER STATE
2) I would most certainly never have decided to drive down a snow covered logging road in the winter
3) If I had somehow managed to become as stuck as James Kim (which requires a giant leap of stupidity), I would have IMMEDIATELY attempted to hike out while my strength was still good. I'm talking first thing in the morning.
4) If I had gotten to the point that I was hiking out... I would have followed the road. I would most certainly not have attempted to go overland without map or compass.
5) I would have AT NO POINT eaten any poisonous berries.
In nature, every bad decision counts. If you insist on stacking enough bad decisions on top of bad decisions, sooner or later you will die.
Grr, goddamned Slashdot 3.0... I didn't even realize I wasn't logged in and posting AC until after it posted. WTF, slashdot.
Nah, you're an offroad truck enthusiast that likes to use a radio and has a nasty chip on his shoulder.
And yes, of course I know how to completely disassemble and rebuild and re-engineer a truck.
Parts of this are very insightful.. As a new ham (and a real one, I should add... My first HF rig was a Swan 500 that was broken when it was given to me... It does 400w on 40m now, enough to blow the doors off those riceboxes).. I've really noticed that there are two camps in ham radio. The "hams" and the "operators". There seem to be a great many "operators" that want to know nothing about experimenting, aren't interested in opening their radio up to tinker with it (It's so expensive, I don't want to break it!).. If everything doesn't come out of the cardboard box working exactly as expected, they review it as 'crap' and return it. Real hams know that nothing works right to begin with, and sets about to making it work for _him_. I have a friend who is very solidly an operator, and is often 'bored' with ham radio. I think that emcomm is something that operators do to keep from being bored, so that they have 'something interesting' to do with those shiny ricebox 2m/440 radios & HT's. As a later poster stated, at least they are using the frequencies, so more power to them.
So we're to rely on electric-powered ham radios instead, across a finite number of channels? Ham radios can provide a useful service, but the messianic complex some of their proponents adopt is obnoxious.
Firstly, amateur radio does not use "Channels". It is not a channelized service.
The bottom line is that amateur radio is still the only worldwide communications method that does not require any infrastructure whatsoever. This is an inherently useful thing in the event of infrastructure failure.
oblig. Penny Arcade:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/14/
Oblig. Penny-Arcade: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/12/24/
My introduction to computers was the Commodore 64 that I grew up with. The floppy-drive cost exactly as much as the computer itself did. My first PC was an IBM PC-XT, the 8088 replaced by the NEC V20, with a 20mb MFM harddrive, 640kb RAM and a Color Graphics Adapter. Dual half-height floppy drives as well! My dad brought home my first 1200 baud modem from a guy at work, a Hayes Smartmodem, and via this beauty met other like minded individuals. One of whom had an 80mb RLL drive and 8 MEGABYTES of ram 386DX. I couldn't believe this thing. What could you need so much computer for? It was insane. I was savagely jealous, though, since he was experimenting with "Linux" which in those days arrived on a giant pile of floppy disks marked with the runes "YGGDRASIL" and required compiling...
Agreed! So much for 10m opening up this summer like I'd been hoping.
You might still be able to process it into B&W. I don't know how this would be done with K-14, but I recently found a roll of K-12 in an ancient camera (Undevelopable for a VERY long time, even at Dwayne's) and developed using D-19 and this process: http://lavender.fortunecity.com/lavender/569/k12bwnegdev.html
Interesting if true. Citation?
What if I like being groped ? ok seriously now, what will happen if I tell the TSA personnel that I am enjoying the pat down ?
Then some poor dumb highschool-dropout has an even shittier day at work than he was having previously.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." --George Carlin
the US spent a relatively small amount arming the terrorists in Afghanistan, forcing the USSR to spend a lot more to maintain their occupation.
Don't forget what that got us, though. That man that we placed on the cover of Time Magazine, that man that our president said was "The Moral equivalent of our founding fathers".. That man orchestrated an attack on our country that destroyed the world trade center and killed an astonishing number of our countrymen one fall morning. Terrorism: Theirs and Ours
No, we didn't. They were taken from us. Systematically and by both parties of government.