The point to all this is that the Marine Corps is treated like the red-headed stepson of the Navy, and tech changes in the military are slow, but moreso in the Marine Corps.
A relative of mine who served in the marines in the early 2000's complained about this nagging sensation of impending doom flying around in helicopters that were active since the Vietnam war maintained by people who just got out of high school.
So yeah... Of all the branches it seems that the Marines get the hand-me-downs (and liked it) and the other branches get the best toys.
Actually, on one of the Dirty Jobs (its on Discovery Chanel) episodes where Mike is helping a BBQ owner clean the grease out of the grill and pours it into a big trailer out back.
Mike asks the owner what he does with it and the owner *shrugs* and replies that he sells it to cosmetic companies and assumes they make make-up with it.
That's not greed. It's common sense. However, what people really don't get about it is that by keeping operational costs down, the prices get kept down. So while people's wages may be lower, their costs of living is also lower. Raise the wages, raise the prices. We all make more money but not really because everything costs more.
But what you just described is a deflationary economy.
And if you haven't been paying attention, both the Great Depression and the current crisis were caused by deflation.
And we've had this arguments on other stories... Because people paid less, they buy less things, which leads to the price of products being lower, which means the cost of raw resources gets lower? Which means a good thing? Right?
WRONG
Because the factories already have an inventory of raw resources and the warehouses already have an inventory of product, which means either they keep making products at a loss or lay off workers.
Given the choice, they'll lay off the workers.
Which leads to people who aren't buying anything and hording cash resulting in an increase of deflation because money is going anywhere and the economy shuts down.
Like it or not, inflation and growth must always occur for a functional economy. Hyperinflation and stagnation is another end of the spectrum that we do not want, but usually deflation (aka the great depression) is the ultimate in the "do not want".
It is a problem with death generally. Its a bit like in western culture there are things people prefer not to discuss in polite company like what you do in the toilet but in other cultures people are more open.
I dunno about Europe and Canada, but in US culture we do talk about what we do in the toilet in polite company.
But seriously.... Is there a goth scene in China? And I really understand why the Japanese freak the Chinese out since the majority of the modern and historical culture is based around spirits, ghosts, and the vengeful dead.
This is an important realization for requirements engineering: Don't ask people what they want. To want is to have an anticipation of liking. As people can't tell if they like something because they're used to it, they will often tell you they want something but later don't like what they wanted because, since it's new, they're not familiar with it. So either you give them something familiar with small tweaks or you have to use another way to find what people "really" want.
From a personal perspective, I have noticed this in myself and is one of the reasons I often force myself to listen to internet radio or Pandora rather than listening to my own collection.
Simply listening to my collection only reinforces what I like, but listening to stuff at random may of course put stuff through in which I don't like, but I find stuff I didn't know I liked.;)
The same thing applies to food, movies, and drink.
Left to my own devices, I always order the same food and drink without giving it much thought.
Lately, I try to force myself to pick something at random on the menu simply to explore.
To my surprise, being venturous always results in finding something new, but on occasion I do find myself wishing I didn't waste the money on the produce.
If you walk into a CD store and buy a CD, you pay tax on it. If you buy a CD from Amazon, you are also supposed to pay tax on it (lots of people don't declare it but under the law you are supposed to do it)
You simply will not have a *choice* but to increase taxes in the USA to at least Canadian and possibly Western European levels if you don't deal with it soon enough. (My bet - you won't deal with it soon enough. Americans are nutty when it comes to taxes.) You'll put it off and put it off and then put it off somemore until there is no wiggle room left at all. And then you will point fingers at your politicians - instead of you the voters - which is *precisely* where the blame will lie.
I dunno. Unless someone provides a alternative currency the rest of the world is stuck with the USD and its inflationary policies.
You may say the US needs to raise taxes, but taxes decreases inflation and spurrs deflation so perhaps the lack of taxes is what is currently needed. The debt could go on forever (as long as no one provides an alternative currency) and not really hurt American citizens.
Of course if China decides one day that it wants to let its currency float and switch from a manufacturing to a service and management society, then we'll have problems.
Reduce our standard of living to more sustainable levels (unless you want to keep borrowing from China to support your SoL).
I'd agree with everything you said except for this line here.
Standard of living is not a zero sum gain. The US having a high standard of living does not make some other nation automatically have a lower standard of living.
The main reason the US, Japan, Korea, Europe and other nation have a high standard of living is because of its technology and infrastructure, not its money supply.
Simply paying people more or less does not automatically mean the standard of living will change. Yes money is required to research technology and infrastructure, but technology and infrastructure stream line the process and in effect make everyone more productive with less time spent.
That way people are spending more time enjoying life and not doing extreme manual labor just to eat. That was the whole point of the industrial revolution.
So let's just hope they're abundantly stupid like the aliens in Signs [wikipedia.org] and never take into account the fact that if water kills you on contact, maybe you shouldn't invade a planet covered in mostly water, inhabited by beings made of mostly water. HTF did that movie ever get past the script stage?
On the other hand, it had been running for several years, so I would recommend that if you plan on using an SSD, try to trade it in or upgrade it on a regular basis to avoid this because when they fail, they FAIL!
I dunno. The majority of the time when my standard HDDs have died its either all or nothing and rarely a slow death.
Maybe one out of a hundred drives I had in my lifetime has had bad sectors giving me enough time to backup data.
Most of the time either I boot the system and hear a nasty clicking sound or all of a sudden I'll hear a beep on a the raid and then the drive is pretty much dead as a doorknob.
No warning from SMART or any other sign. Usually not worth spending thousands to get the data recovered since I do backups anyways.
That said, HDD are usually faithful after the first 100 hours of use if you keep them cool enough and the bad ones usually die during the burn in and the rest last for years of use.
Don't know about SSD, but I'm under the impression that they will be more stable regardless.
And as for Keynesian economic theory. It was Keynes himself who suggested that Hoover's tax increases (much the same as Obama's proposed corporate and income tax increase) actually signifigantly lengthened the depression.
Of course taxes increased the length of the depression, because taxes cause deflation by taking money out of the supply.
However, simply cutting taxes would not have fixed the depression.
The problem was a lack of credit and liquidity in order to make people do something with their money. If you had money during the 1930's, chances are you are sitting on it on your mattress or someplace other than a bank.
If it is doing that, instead of being in a bank, it can't be used to give out a loan by the bank and the economy does not move.
Secondly, even if you are willing to put your money in a bank (after they instituted FDIC guarantees), you may be in the large percentage of Americans who did not have an income.
So without government spending there was really no one willing to pay people in which they in turned put it in a bank or put it directly back into the economy with goods and services purchased.
So, the depression was and primarily caused by the collapse of credit and faith in banking which we are seeing now.
The only way to counteract is sadly, inflation. Like it or not, the money supply has to be increased and people have to be forced not so save their money. Sounds strange, but if everyone did sit on their money and not do anything with it, then no one would do anything for each other.
The end goal of capitalism is to have people do and make things for others This is a two way street and someone has to spend money. If people and businesses aren't, then only government spending will resolve it.
I don't like the idea either, but the current system is too far gone to socialism that you can't simply implement a laissez faire at this point because the system currently requires government intervention or would face a complete meltdown.
The GDP of the USA is currently about 40% government spending so you can just say "tonight we stop government spending!" or we would face tantamount revolution and failure of our economy.
So rather than argue "no at every turn" you must suggest that we encourage a gradual change during a time of non-crisis.
If I was one of their shareholders I might have gotten pretty annoyed that they dismissed the MSFT offer out of hand the way they did. What's the future of Yahoo! without a merger?
I don't know about their current future, but I know the future of Yahoo merged with Microsoft would be short lived.
As in... If you didn't sell your shares shortly after the merger, then you would not be receiving much for your investment if you were long term seeing MS only useful option would be to dismantle the company.
Secondly, if I were an MSFT shareholder, I'd be wondering why Microsoft is purchasing a company that duplicates their own services with MS Live.
Or is it just a clockwork orange referenced insult?
Actually, Anthony Burgess mixed a lot of Russian jargon into his novel of Clockwork Orange for one reason or another.
As another poster has mentioned, droog is an actually Russian word.
There are plenty others in Clockwork Orange that to westerners seems made up but he is really borrowing from other languages.
Of course you would never know that if you just watched the Stanley Kubrick film (to be fair is fairly faithful to the book's dialog... minus a few scenes) but if you pick up the novel at the store and read the forward or notes in the back of the book, it explains this.
Remember those days? You had to meet an upload quota on most servers that prohibited leaching so most of us would upload random 10mb txt files... All on dial up.
As more and more bloggers and online news sources lower themselves and write in the inflammatory trolling style of FOX or the SUN in order to get advertising pennies from community participation, punching them in the face with useless WEB 2.0 to boot, loyal readers enter their thirties and stop caring about the circle jerk because the have to prioritize their time better, like having and raising kids
The problem with this that it assumes:
1. There are no more people who are going to be in the age range from 20-30. 2. And that a large part of the 30 sometimes choose to have kids.
As seen in Europe, more and more people are choosing just to not have kids. The same thing is happening in US (just on a smaller scale).
Either way, there are always going to be more 20somethings to fill the game so I don't see why this is a valid point.
Impulse buying! Kinda like that $999 "I'm rich" application or whatever it was. It's typical of...
I once bought iDrink at a bar while drunk in order to pick drinks at random, but once I had it, I didn't like its recommendations and just ordered what I've always ordered.
And then never used the app again after that.
That siad, I bought iCast (funny how they are all iSomething) and I use that all the time to listen to internet Radio. I also use Pandora for something similar.
Oh and that 1Password application... I think all iPhone users would use that program if they knew about it since its the main one that remembers forum passwords and the like.
If the device is really as small as they say, it will be extremely easy to lose every digital thing you value in one careless moment.
This technology should kick-start the backup market as people will have to continually restore all their photos, music and movies every time they leave the last chip somewhere they forget about.
If they get it small enough, you could just implant it in your skin like they do with RDIF chips for pets and other animals.
That way, you can never misplace your data and it can't be stolen.
Of course if you lost your arm, you might loose your data, but I think you would have other issues to worry about at that point.
While you may be able to be in a boat next to the rig legally, you may be trespassing if you get up on the rig structure itself.
Are there oil rigs in international waters? Or are they too far out? I would assume there are some major ones in use as the drive to go deeper is brought on by the last oil crunch, but most liklye still used since they were further out.
An earth devastated by an asteroid is still a much more friendly place to live on then either Moon or Mars. Self sustaining off-world colonies won't happen for many many years to come.
Unless it cracks the earth's mantel resulting in the loss of Earth's magnetic shield which makes earth just as useful as say mars in keeping its atmosphere protected from solar winds.
But it would take a very large object for that, but with space you never know.
Slashdot Mirror
The point to all this is that the Marine Corps is treated like the red-headed stepson of the Navy, and tech changes in the military are slow, but moreso in the Marine Corps.
A relative of mine who served in the marines in the early 2000's complained about this nagging sensation of impending doom flying around in helicopters that were active since the Vietnam war maintained by people who just got out of high school.
So yeah... Of all the branches it seems that the Marines get the hand-me-downs (and liked it) and the other branches get the best toys.
Was he taking a piss?
Actually, on one of the Dirty Jobs (its on Discovery Chanel) episodes where Mike is helping a BBQ owner clean the grease out of the grill and pours it into a big trailer out back.
Mike asks the owner what he does with it and the owner *shrugs* and replies that he sells it to cosmetic companies and assumes they make make-up with it.
So I guess it is a common practice.
That's not greed. It's common sense. However, what people really don't get about it is that by keeping operational costs down, the prices get kept down. So while people's wages may be lower, their costs of living is also lower. Raise the wages, raise the prices. We all make more money but not really because everything costs more.
But what you just described is a deflationary economy.
And if you haven't been paying attention, both the Great Depression and the current crisis were caused by deflation.
And we've had this arguments on other stories... Because people paid less, they buy less things, which leads to the price of products being lower, which means the cost of raw resources gets lower? Which means a good thing? Right?
WRONG
Because the factories already have an inventory of raw resources and the warehouses already have an inventory of product, which means either they keep making products at a loss or lay off workers.
Given the choice, they'll lay off the workers.
Which leads to people who aren't buying anything and hording cash resulting in an increase of deflation because money is going anywhere and the economy shuts down.
Like it or not, inflation and growth must always occur for a functional economy. Hyperinflation and stagnation is another end of the spectrum that we do not want, but usually deflation (aka the great depression) is the ultimate in the "do not want".
It's the job of the OS to manage the details of DNS resolution.
What if the OS isn't doing a good job of it or if the application could simply do it better?
It is a problem with death generally. Its a bit like in western culture there are things people prefer not to discuss in polite company like what you do in the toilet but in other cultures people are more open.
I dunno about Europe and Canada, but in US culture we do talk about what we do in the toilet in polite company.
But seriously.... Is there a goth scene in China? And I really understand why the Japanese freak the Chinese out since the majority of the modern and historical culture is based around spirits, ghosts, and the vengeful dead.
This is an important realization for requirements engineering: Don't ask people what they want. To want is to have an anticipation of liking. As people can't tell if they like something because they're used to it, they will often tell you they want something but later don't like what they wanted because, since it's new, they're not familiar with it. So either you give them something familiar with small tweaks or you have to use another way to find what people "really" want.
From a personal perspective, I have noticed this in myself and is one of the reasons I often force myself to listen to internet radio or Pandora rather than listening to my own collection.
Simply listening to my collection only reinforces what I like, but listening to stuff at random may of course put stuff through in which I don't like, but I find stuff I didn't know I liked. ;)
The same thing applies to food, movies, and drink.
Left to my own devices, I always order the same food and drink without giving it much thought.
Lately, I try to force myself to pick something at random on the menu simply to explore.
To my surprise, being venturous always results in finding something new, but on occasion I do find myself wishing I didn't waste the money on the produce.
Now if I could only get myself to travel more...
If you walk into a CD store and buy a CD, you pay tax on it.
If you buy a CD from Amazon, you are also supposed to pay tax on it (lots of people don't declare it but under the law you are supposed to do it)
Not if you live in Delaware.
Of course you'd have to live in Delaware.
You simply will not have a *choice* but to increase taxes in the USA to at least Canadian and possibly Western European levels if you don't deal with it soon enough. (My bet - you won't deal with it soon enough. Americans are nutty when it comes to taxes.) You'll put it off and put it off and then put it off somemore until there is no wiggle room left at all. And then you will point fingers at your politicians - instead of you the voters - which is *precisely* where the blame will lie.
I dunno. Unless someone provides a alternative currency the rest of the world is stuck with the USD and its inflationary policies.
You may say the US needs to raise taxes, but taxes decreases inflation and spurrs deflation so perhaps the lack of taxes is what is currently needed. The debt could go on forever (as long as no one provides an alternative currency) and not really hurt American citizens.
Of course if China decides one day that it wants to let its currency float and switch from a manufacturing to a service and management society, then we'll have problems.
Reduce our standard of living to more sustainable levels (unless you want to keep borrowing from China to support your SoL).
I'd agree with everything you said except for this line here.
Standard of living is not a zero sum gain. The US having a high standard of living does not make some other nation automatically have a lower standard of living.
The main reason the US, Japan, Korea, Europe and other nation have a high standard of living is because of its technology and infrastructure, not its money supply.
Simply paying people more or less does not automatically mean the standard of living will change. Yes money is required to research technology and infrastructure, but technology and infrastructure stream line the process and in effect make everyone more productive with less time spent.
That way people are spending more time enjoying life and not doing extreme manual labor just to eat. That was the whole point of the industrial revolution.
So let's just hope they're abundantly stupid like the aliens in Signs [wikipedia.org] and never take into account the fact that if water kills you on contact, maybe you shouldn't invade a planet covered in mostly water, inhabited by beings made of mostly water. HTF did that movie ever get past the script stage?
Maybe they were from the B-Ark.
No. The aliens... Not the script writers.
On the other hand, it had been running for several years, so I would recommend that if you plan on using an SSD, try to trade it in or upgrade it on a regular basis to avoid this because when they fail, they FAIL!
I dunno. The majority of the time when my standard HDDs have died its either all or nothing and rarely a slow death.
Maybe one out of a hundred drives I had in my lifetime has had bad sectors giving me enough time to backup data.
Most of the time either I boot the system and hear a nasty clicking sound or all of a sudden I'll hear a beep on a the raid and then the drive is pretty much dead as a doorknob.
No warning from SMART or any other sign. Usually not worth spending thousands to get the data recovered since I do backups anyways.
That said, HDD are usually faithful after the first 100 hours of use if you keep them cool enough and the bad ones usually die during the burn in and the rest last for years of use.
Don't know about SSD, but I'm under the impression that they will be more stable regardless.
I would like to add...
"Capitalism is a polite way of getting people to do things voluntarily without forcing them."
Without the "getting to do things" part, then capitalism is a big as failure as communism.
And as for Keynesian economic theory. It was Keynes himself who suggested that Hoover's tax increases (much the same as Obama's proposed corporate and income tax increase) actually signifigantly lengthened the depression.
Of course taxes increased the length of the depression, because taxes cause deflation by taking money out of the supply.
However, simply cutting taxes would not have fixed the depression.
The problem was a lack of credit and liquidity in order to make people do something with their money. If you had money during the 1930's, chances are you are sitting on it on your mattress or someplace other than a bank.
If it is doing that, instead of being in a bank, it can't be used to give out a loan by the bank and the economy does not move.
Secondly, even if you are willing to put your money in a bank (after they instituted FDIC guarantees), you may be in the large percentage of Americans who did not have an income.
So without government spending there was really no one willing to pay people in which they in turned put it in a bank or put it directly back into the economy with goods and services purchased.
So, the depression was and primarily caused by the collapse of credit and faith in banking which we are seeing now.
The only way to counteract is sadly, inflation. Like it or not, the money supply has to be increased and people have to be forced not so save their money. Sounds strange, but if everyone did sit on their money and not do anything with it, then no one would do anything for each other.
The end goal of capitalism is to have people do and make things for others This is a two way street and someone has to spend money. If people and businesses aren't, then only government spending will resolve it.
I don't like the idea either, but the current system is too far gone to socialism that you can't simply implement a laissez faire at this point because the system currently requires government intervention or would face a complete meltdown.
The GDP of the USA is currently about 40% government spending so you can just say "tonight we stop government spending!" or we would face tantamount revolution and failure of our economy.
So rather than argue "no at every turn" you must suggest that we encourage a gradual change during a time of non-crisis.
If I was one of their shareholders I might have gotten pretty annoyed that they dismissed the MSFT offer out of hand the way they did. What's the future of Yahoo! without a merger?
I don't know about their current future, but I know the future of Yahoo merged with Microsoft would be short lived.
As in... If you didn't sell your shares shortly after the merger, then you would not be receiving much for your investment if you were long term seeing MS only useful option would be to dismantle the company.
Secondly, if I were an MSFT shareholder, I'd be wondering why Microsoft is purchasing a company that duplicates their own services with MS Live.
Seems like a waste of time and money to me.
Or is it just a clockwork orange referenced insult?
Actually, Anthony Burgess mixed a lot of Russian jargon into his novel of Clockwork Orange for one reason or another.
As another poster has mentioned, droog is an actually Russian word.
There are plenty others in Clockwork Orange that to westerners seems made up but he is really borrowing from other languages.
Of course you would never know that if you just watched the Stanley Kubrick film (to be fair is fairly faithful to the book's dialog... minus a few scenes) but if you pick up the novel at the store and read the forward or notes in the back of the book, it explains this.
According to the Ten Ton Hammer preview, this game features rampant kill stealing and quite possibly the worst community of any MMO, ever.
I hate to say this, but a lot of people like drama.
And not the BBC kind... The one with women in too much makeup with orange skin arguing over inane shit in Los Angles kind.
Its what America needs.
No sorry, 9gb really isn't that big for any game these days...
My Warhammer Online directory is around 12gb and my original Dawn of War is about 20gb (to be fair its with all the expansions)
I was kind of surprised on the size of DoW2 running around 3gb.
The only thing that's changed is the protocols.
Anon FTP for the win!
Remember those days? You had to meet an upload quota on most servers that prohibited leaching so most of us would upload random 10mb txt files... All on dial up.
Google => Yahoo, AltaVista, etc..
I used Hotbot you insensitive clod!
If by beautiful you mean trivial for spammers or anyone else who knows the first thing about google to get around, then yes.
that is why i always use my email address as formated:
can+you-guess+which_folder+is@my-email.com.myhome.notreally-arealwebpage.com
As more and more bloggers and online news sources lower themselves and write in the inflammatory trolling style of FOX or the SUN in order to get advertising pennies from community participation, punching them in the face with useless WEB 2.0 to boot, loyal readers enter their thirties and stop caring about the circle jerk because the have to prioritize their time better, like having and raising kids
The problem with this that it assumes:
1. There are no more people who are going to be in the age range from 20-30.
2. And that a large part of the 30 sometimes choose to have kids.
As seen in Europe, more and more people are choosing just to not have kids. The same thing is happening in US (just on a smaller scale).
Either way, there are always going to be more 20somethings to fill the game so I don't see why this is a valid point.
Impulse buying! Kinda like that $999 "I'm rich" application or whatever it was. It's typical of ...
I once bought iDrink at a bar while drunk in order to pick drinks at random, but once I had it, I didn't like its recommendations and just ordered what I've always ordered.
And then never used the app again after that.
That siad, I bought iCast (funny how they are all iSomething) and I use that all the time to listen to internet Radio. I also use Pandora for something similar.
Oh and that 1Password application... I think all iPhone users would use that program if they knew about it since its the main one that remembers forum passwords and the like.
If the device is really as small as they say, it will be extremely easy to lose every digital thing you value in one careless moment.
This technology should kick-start the backup market as people will have to continually restore all their photos, music and movies every time they leave the last chip somewhere they forget about.
If they get it small enough, you could just implant it in your skin like they do with RDIF chips for pets and other animals.
That way, you can never misplace your data and it can't be stolen.
Of course if you lost your arm, you might loose your data, but I think you would have other issues to worry about at that point.
While you may be able to be in a boat next to the rig legally, you may be trespassing if you get up on the rig structure itself.
Are there oil rigs in international waters? Or are they too far out? I would assume there are some major ones in use as the drive to go deeper is brought on by the last oil crunch, but most liklye still used since they were further out.
An earth devastated by an asteroid is still a much more friendly place to live on then either Moon or Mars. Self sustaining off-world colonies won't happen for many many years to come.
Unless it cracks the earth's mantel resulting in the loss of Earth's magnetic shield which makes earth just as useful as say mars in keeping its atmosphere protected from solar winds.
But it would take a very large object for that, but with space you never know.