Do what the soda fans do and make your own. All you need is a CO2 tank and some hoses and fittings. Then you can use any 2-liter bottle to make more soda water whenever you want, basically for free once you've bought the stuff to make it.
There is bottled water then there is bottled water. I refer of course to the Perrier class of bottled water vs the Hinkley-Schmidt class. The Perrier class is a lot more expensive and certainly a waste.
The point of drinking Perrier water is not to drink water, because it's not simple tap water. The gas and flavor is why people drink it. It is all about how Perrier is different from tap water that makes it interesting. I started drinking Perrier at about age 10 because I liked it, and my family was dirt poor so it wasn't something we had laying around.
Now as an adult, I have long since made my own carbonated water because it turned out the plain fizzy water is what I liked most of all. I've got three-year supply of carbon dioxide gas in a tank not 10 feet from me. I take this habit very seriously.
I have 70Mbps high speed cable it but has a 350Gb cap
90Mbps and 300Gb cap. Only had it for about 21 days last month, having just gotten it installed. Still almost hit 300 and that was with only two movies and one hour TV episode on Prime video. No Netflix. No torrenting.
The more bandwidth you have, the higher the quality of the stream. And wow it does look great but wow it gobbles up data like crazy.
They don't want to support Chromecast and Apple TV because they are competitors to the Fire TV (except, they aren't really) and then they have the balls to outright lie about why, even when everybody knows damn well what they are doing.
I'm henceforth going to throw the Amazon apps off my Android phone and when my Prime sub comes up for renewal, I'll bury that sucker and let it rot.
Amazon's job in this world should be to provide a place to buy almost anything without regard to bullshit pissing matches like this. But it does seem like pissing is what they spend a lot of time doing AT Amazon. Someday somebody new will come along and take that company down a few notches just as Amazon took down so many others. Nothing lasts forever, especially when you act like a bully.
Anyway, this is all moot anyway. For MY needs, the Fire TV, chromecast and Apple TV all FAIL to deliver the content I want. Roku does have it, so guess which box I own? Hint: it's not the Fire. I've never like iTunes so none of my content is in it, and so, I have no use at all for an Apple TV. It's irrelevant to me. Chromecast, meh ok but still doesn't do what the Roku does. None of them do. It's that simple and there isn't even a war or battle or choice. There's one choice and wow it works fine so not like a choice of one is a problem.
Amazon I think wastes too damn much of their energy on doing what everyone else is doing mainly because they want to be me-too players. But it's a lot of ego and flops like the stupid Fire phone and only an occasional hit like the Kindle and Echo. Amazon does e-tailing better than anyone and warehouse logistics and robots like very few. If they stuck only to those things, they'd be doing just fine.
Or maybe they don't use radio the way we do. We've got a whole planet here full of millions of life forms and only one of them ever discovered and harnessed radio, and then only very recently. So it appears life doesn't need radio to thrive.
Humans use it because we have a need to tell our old campfire stories at a distance, and because we like to or need to talk to each other. There is no reason to suspect another species would have these same needs. None of our nearly identical genetic cousins have these needs and they're 99% the same as us. What would aliens, nothing like us, do? Well probably not what we do.
So basically, SETI makes some big assumptions that aliens would be using radio the same way we do and there is just no logical basis for that assumption.
Snowden's theory is pointless as well because there is no way to prove or disprove it. If the aliens are encrypting we may not be able to detect it. And if we can't detect it, we can't say it's there or not. So Snowden is automatically right so long as no signal in the clear is detected. Heck he's automatically right for any signal unless it happens to be in some goofball human code format like ROT13 or some such thing AND we can run the right decoder on it to get the latest Zeta Reticuli warez or b(.)_(.)bz
Updating these expensive machines will be a hard sell to cities and towns used to spending money on machines like loaders and dump trucks and dozers that last for decades and only leave service when they are so broken down, they cannot possibly be used any more. Look at vehicle auctions for used municipal equipment and you'll see some horror shows that were considered "just fine" weeks before the auction.
Contrast with a voting machine used maybe twice a year for ten years. How is THAT used up and worn out? It spends nearly ALL of the time folded up and stored somewhere. It should be like new.
Not. Burglar hit my home this summer and got around my alarm system. The dog sat there and did nothing. Not a damn thing. One fucking job and the dog didn't do it.
I can forgive the alarm system failure. We missed a sensor area. I'm angry. But that dog eats and sleeps and craps and hangs around and demands expensive canned food and yet she can be bothered to defend the house? For that I am betrayed.
if you're gonna rely on a security system that licks its own ass and can be bothered to do a thing to stop intruders, well I hope that works out for you.
I've got a fancy security system, IP cameras, and a dog. And a burglar still got in this summer. The alarm didn't trip. The dog didn't bite and the cameras, well, he laughed at them. What finally stopped this guy was me coming home to him inside my house and punching him in the face a few times.
This is a long way of saying even the best systems can be bypassed. If a human spent a lot of time planning it out, somebody else will come along and go "poke" and unravel it all.
As for Linux, there is a time and a place for open source and there is a time and a place to get stuff vetted and tested by decades of professional security installers. You'd be FAR better off to leverage all of that research and real-world experience and just do it that way. Further advice:
Get an alarm with wireless monitoring. You will want 4G or LTE wireless. The ubiquitous 3G monitoring systems are being phased out by the cell carriers and it makes no sense to spend any money on a 3G module at this point. 4G wireless modules are affordable anyway.
Get motion detection. This is where my system failed because I have too many pets. I relied on point of entry and glass break and the burglar simply jimmied open a locked window without breaking it, and then smartly didn't open a door to try to carry away his loot. He was using the same window. Get motion detection, Get rid of the pets. Don't rely on locked windows, use large screws or lag bolts to secure them through the window frame. Won't be seen, can be removed to open the window, but won't be vulnerable.
The Honeywell/Ademco alarms are what I would suggest. The parts and sensors are very proven and are used by professional installers but are still inexpensive and easy to DIY install and you can have "root" access to the box to program it how you like, and pay little for an independent company to monitor it for you.
The neat thing is that the sensors can be bought on ebay or Amazon without any trouble. So you are free to source from where you wish.
The Honeywell systems won't stop the CIA from getting in but they will work against normal threats.
But it emphatically is NOT the only life we know exists. Look around you. Aside from humans, the Earth is teeming, crawling, swimming and covered in and by maybe a billion different species. That's life as we know it.
However, out of ALL of those billions of species, only one has ever invented complicated languages or radio, as far as we know. Us. So when we look out there for signals from ET, we are in fact really looking for signals from another us, just like the article says. The problem is, if One in billions of species here developed radio, then the odds are dramatically against this sort of thing happening here or anywhere else. Life will exist. It's everywhere here. But it doesn't have radio.
So basically, we are looking out in the cosmos seeking to find an identical situation as the one that ALMOST didn't even happen here, statistically speaking. This is the problem. We are looking for us. But look around: the Earth alone is covered in life "not like us" so the odds are any life out there is probably also not like us. And if life out there isn't into radio or TV, our radio telescopes will never see it.
Look, the keys are one thing but focusing on them misses the big picture. The LOCK -any lock of any kind- is of NO VALUE AT ALL.
To open any luggage with plastic zipper, all you need is an ink pen. Try this. Take a plastic zipper on a backpack or suitcase (does not matter). Take the ink pen and the sharp end HARD into the zipper. POP it's open and you can pilfer ALL YOU WANT. Now, to hide the evidence, merely run the zipper slider around a few times to restore the seal. Done. No keys needed. No tools either which might be suspicious. Only an ink pen which everybody has.
Got laid off yesterday from an IT job I'd had for almost 15 years. Small company so I did a lot of things, from hardware to software to physical security, to sweeping the floors to to taking boxes of mail to the post office at midnight. If it needed to be done, I was the guy to get,
So now this middle-aged man is suddenly out of work and looking at an IT field that is already vastly different than it was even five years ago much less fifteen. I don't have a clue what I am going to do. What I know how to do is of rapidly decreasing value and/or there are kids who will do it cheaper.
I have no idea what I am going to do. Savings and severance will carry for a while but I've got to make a pivot to do something entirely different which pays well. My job may be gone but naturally the bills aren't.
Much of what people think of when they think about Star Trek's grand concepts of the Federation of Planets and many other things were ideas thought up by Gene Coon, not Roddenberry. Bob Justman also had a hand in those ideas, as did D.C. Fontana and many others tossing in various tidbits.
The book series "These are the voayges" go into extreme detail of who thought up what, which writers and directors invented things taken for canon and so on.
An awful lot of Trek lore taken for granted happened by accident or because Coon or Justman were trying to save money. There was no grand political scheme running behind the scenes. It was all about how to tell a story without having to actually show it. So they invented stuff that could be dialog.
The idea of having a "Starbase" came from the need to show planets per NBC but cheaply so it could be a redressed existing set, and then script mentions there's more than one base. Viola you've expanded the Star Trek universe without having to show it. Coon was a master of this stuff, dropping in mention of the Federation to explain away another loose end. He freaking invented it as a throwaway script change.
Fontana in turn made the characters who we know them to be and kept the thing going in the right direction. She was the bullshit detector and derailed a lot of crap that would have made the show into a joke. Roddenberry mostly sat around and screwed starlets and offered up lousy script rewrites.
The OTHER unsung hero of Star Trek is Lucille Ball, who went to bat for the show many times to keep it funded, until doing so help cost her ownership of the company. She gave her all for Star Trek, Nobody remembers it.
These Are The Voyages books are very highly recommended for anyone who wants to know what really happened and how, It is a lot like seeing how sausage or laws are made but it's important to see how hard these people worked and what they put into the show.
The A-10 does one job, and there are several other aircraft that do different jobs.
The A-10 only does "one job" because that's all it's been allowed to do. However it has on occasion gone outside the box with devastating results against a variety of primary ground targets not in a CAS role, and it could also be used against maritime targets in the same way. The A-10 has demonstrated devastating anti-aircraft ability as well, with at least one known air-to-air kill. This is an area that could easily be expanded: no known aircraft can survive the A-10's gun. It is the most powerful dogfight cannon ever put in the air.
That's the key: very few things used in war or on a battlefield could resist that gun. The A-10 is likely to be a formidable platform if it was allowed to do more than CAS. Let it hit buildings, vehicles, ships and boats, and aircraft. All the A-10 needs is freedom to shoot anything that needs to be engaged.
In my youth, I was a voracious reader of Scifi and it is still my area of choice in reading and other forms of entertainment.
But I've never given two shits about the Hugo awards so hearing there's a dispute among several factions about.... something that isn't entirely clear, just made me realize I still don't give a shit about the Hugo awards and by extension I care even less about the people upset about it. My life up to now has been just fine in blissful ignorance of the entire thing. I suspect a lot of other people have gotten along just fine too.
And if that is the case, if people can lead meaningful lives without knowing about the Hugo dispute, then do the Hugo awards need to exist at all? Not existing would solve everybody's problems all at once.
Why are extortionist's victims falling for this? The information is OUT there.:Lots of people have copies now. If you are dumb enough to pay off one extortionist, so what, there will be five or twenty more lined up also wanting money.
If your info is in there and going to cause you trouble, oh well. Paying extortion on top of that is just dumb.
All three of my PCs run Windows 10 and 16GB, with an SSD for boot. Windows itself needs about 4GB to run happily. Windows 7 suffered below 4. Windows 8.1 was OK with 4 but happier with more. 10 is even happier with 4. So 4 is what I would call base.
8 if planning to run programs or do much of anything. Games or Chrome will suck this up.
16 is what I run, because I run virtual machines from time to time and each one gets 4GB dedicated ram. No matter what I do, or which PC I happen to be on, I always have enough for the VM to run without compromise. Currently the VMs are Windows 7 Pro so 4GB is just what they need.
16 also comes in handy for gaming -two of the boxes have late model 4GB Nvidia GPUs so there's really very little I cannot run. Also do occasional video editing in Sony Vegas Pro 13 which makes heavy use of the GPU ans system memory for rendering. So all in all, 16 is where I want to be.
You make Google sound like a bad guy but how is this REALLY any different than AT&T or Comcast supplying a router and using information gleaned from it? Because both of them supply routers right now for their respective internet services, although you can choose to use your own in both cases.
Whatever you do, your connection eventually gets to their network where they monitor it anyway. Short of an encrypted tunnel (assuming it hasn't been cracked) they're going to know what you are doing.
For Google fiber, allegedly coming soon to my neighborhood, Google supplies a custom fiber router box. The rest is the same: what I do has to cross their network so they're gonna know what I am doing, to some extent. Just like any other ISP.
Indeed. A forgotten accomplishment and suggest that the A-10 could have been used against aircraft (which would be obliterated if hit by an A-10), ships, buildings, railroads, really all sorts things.
It's also cheap and reliable, loved by our pilots and deeply feared by our enemies. Hell, it's even feared by our side: before 9/11, one of the THE big news conspiracy things running in the news was about an American A-10 pilot who took off and disappeared into the Rockies with a fully loaded A-10. Reporters were practically crapping in their pants about what kind of new Oklahoma City someone could pull off with an A-10. I suspect many of them expected it to pop up at any moment and blow away Pocatello Idaho, or something. It was a Big Deal story.
And then 9/11 happened and everyone forgot about the missing A-10 or the shark attacks live on the news which was the other big story that summer.
The A-10 was eventually found, crashed into a mountain. Sadly. But it was of course what everybody with a brain had expected. No conspiracies. No pending attacks on grain silos. Just the loss of an airman and his A-10.
Why would carriers be unhappy? They aren't in the business of selling wifi, except perhaps AT&T, but even so, all of them went into paid hotspots KNOWING wifi was unregulated and effectively open to anyone to use, including advancements that obsolete existing wifi.
Broadcasters might be upset but this is a great time to remind them and everyone else that the airwaves in the US are owned by the FCC. All the TV and radio stations and cell phone bands and so on are merely licensed to use their assigned spots, but they don't OWN it. They merely lease it.
So the FCC is within its rights to look at other ways to use the things the FCC owns. If the broadcasters and other users don't like it, they can simply do something else for a business.
Um, as a cord cutter who fired satellite some time back, here is where I get my content now that I no longer have satellite: I don't.
It turns out nothing offered by cable or satellite is actually all that essential. I've managed just fine without it. Sure I watch a lot less TV but this is fine too. Last time I checked, I had over 60 OTA TV channels plus Netflix, Amazon Prime and whatever else my Roku has. I'm fine with this.
As for what will happen to all these companies, well by and large all these companies and channels and the broadcast networks don't actually MAKE most of the things they air. Nope they merely buy the shows from production companies and studios who are the ones actually making it, hiring the actors and crews and so on.
The TV networks are really just middlemen distributors who exist mainly because nobody had yet invented a better way to get shows in front of viewers. You had to have local TV stations and later cable channels. But NOW, you no longer need any of that. So it won't really matter if those networks die off and take with them large numbers of unprofitable TV stations who would not exist at all except for network subsidies.
Worst bug we ever ran across was a program that absolutely would not work as soon as anyone looked at it to see if it was working or just to observe the GUI. If you did that, it broke. So we spent a LOT of time trying to run it, debug it, rerun it, and no matter what we did it never worked right as long as someone was looking.
But the moment you stopped looking, locked that PC and walked away, the program would run fine on files dropped into the appropriate input hot folder. It would happily do its thing and give you good results in an output folder.
Look at it, however, and it blew up immediately.
We spent a LOT of time trying to fix this, however it's not a product we made. So there's a limit.
We did finally realize the program is licensed only for the PC where it is installed. If you remote into it, the program sees the remote client as if it's the installed machine which has no license and thus it runs in kind of a suicide mode. When you stop looking at it and drop the remote connection, the license assignment returns to normal and the program runs again.
I documented and discovered all of this and solved a major headache for our company, because we had to have this software working. I unlocked the secret and got it working. My FUCKING BOSS stole credit for the discovery and promptly began parading around like she thought of the solution.
Which is funny because guess who they called next time it broke? Me. I know it inside and out, now.
Cannot wait for the epic dashcam crash videos as INSANE Russian and Chinese drivers hit Canadian and American roads. It's going to be teeth, hair, and eyeballs ALL over the road.
All that fear about Mexican truck drivers is nothing compared to what's gonna happen with this.
Whoa, modern physics is never incorrect? Any science that claims to be perfect is inherently flawed because our current state of science and knowledge certainly isn't complete in any area. We may think we have a pretty good understanding of things but there is absolutely no way we've got it nailed with a flawless understanding. It's not possible.
The only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know what we don't know.
And 50 or 100 years from now someone will look back on what we think we know right now and laugh at how silly and naive we were. And in 1000 years, what we know right now will be a joke if anyone even remembers it.
The BD-10 kill rate was worse, which is a shame because the design looks amazing. A supersonic private jet made of plywood? Yeah it worked out kinda like you might expect.
Sad.
On the other hand, Bede's machines did fly unlike Moller's stuff that's been "almost ready" for 50 years.
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Do what the soda fans do and make your own. All you need is a CO2 tank and some hoses and fittings. Then you can use any 2-liter bottle to make more soda water whenever you want, basically for free once you've bought the stuff to make it.
Plenty of how-to videos on Youtube. Here's one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There is bottled water then there is bottled water. I refer of course to the Perrier class of bottled water vs the Hinkley-Schmidt class. The Perrier class is a lot more expensive and certainly a waste.
The point of drinking Perrier water is not to drink water, because it's not simple tap water. The gas and flavor is why people drink it. It is all about how Perrier is different from tap water that makes it interesting. I started drinking Perrier at about age 10 because I liked it, and my family was dirt poor so it wasn't something we had laying around.
Now as an adult, I have long since made my own carbonated water because it turned out the plain fizzy water is what I liked most of all. I've got three-year supply of carbon dioxide gas in a tank not 10 feet from me. I take this habit very seriously.
I have 70Mbps high speed cable it but has a 350Gb cap
90Mbps and 300Gb cap. Only had it for about 21 days last month, having just gotten it installed. Still almost hit 300 and that was with only two movies and one hour TV episode on Prime video. No Netflix. No torrenting.
The more bandwidth you have, the higher the quality of the stream. And wow it does look great but wow it gobbles up data like crazy.
They don't want to support Chromecast and Apple TV because they are competitors to the Fire TV (except, they aren't really) and then they have the balls to outright lie about why, even when everybody knows damn well what they are doing.
I'm henceforth going to throw the Amazon apps off my Android phone and when my Prime sub comes up for renewal, I'll bury that sucker and let it rot.
Amazon's job in this world should be to provide a place to buy almost anything without regard to bullshit pissing matches like this. But it does seem like pissing is what they spend a lot of time doing AT Amazon. Someday somebody new will come along and take that company down a few notches just as Amazon took down so many others. Nothing lasts forever, especially when you act like a bully.
Anyway, this is all moot anyway. For MY needs, the Fire TV, chromecast and Apple TV all FAIL to deliver the content I want. Roku does have it, so guess which box I own? Hint: it's not the Fire. I've never like iTunes so none of my content is in it, and so, I have no use at all for an Apple TV. It's irrelevant to me. Chromecast, meh ok but still doesn't do what the Roku does. None of them do. It's that simple and there isn't even a war or battle or choice. There's one choice and wow it works fine so not like a choice of one is a problem.
Amazon I think wastes too damn much of their energy on doing what everyone else is doing mainly because they want to be me-too players. But it's a lot of ego and flops like the stupid Fire phone and only an occasional hit like the Kindle and Echo. Amazon does e-tailing better than anyone and warehouse logistics and robots like very few. If they stuck only to those things, they'd be doing just fine.
Or maybe they don't use radio the way we do. We've got a whole planet here full of millions of life forms and only one of them ever discovered and harnessed radio, and then only very recently. So it appears life doesn't need radio to thrive.
Humans use it because we have a need to tell our old campfire stories at a distance, and because we like to or need to talk to each other. There is no reason to suspect another species would have these same needs. None of our nearly identical genetic cousins have these needs and they're 99% the same as us. What would aliens, nothing like us, do? Well probably not what we do.
So basically, SETI makes some big assumptions that aliens would be using radio the same way we do and there is just no logical basis for that assumption.
Snowden's theory is pointless as well because there is no way to prove or disprove it. If the aliens are encrypting we may not be able to detect it. And if we can't detect it, we can't say it's there or not. So Snowden is automatically right so long as no signal in the clear is detected. Heck he's automatically right for any signal unless it happens to be in some goofball human code format like ROT13 or some such thing AND we can run the right decoder on it to get the latest Zeta Reticuli warez or b(.)_(.)bz
Updating these expensive machines will be a hard sell to cities and towns used to spending money on machines like loaders and dump trucks and dozers that last for decades and only leave service when they are so broken down, they cannot possibly be used any more. Look at vehicle auctions for used municipal equipment and you'll see some horror shows that were considered "just fine" weeks before the auction.
Contrast with a voting machine used maybe twice a year for ten years. How is THAT used up and worn out? It spends nearly ALL of the time folded up and stored somewhere. It should be like new.
Not. Burglar hit my home this summer and got around my alarm system. The dog sat there and did nothing. Not a damn thing. One fucking job and the dog didn't do it.
I can forgive the alarm system failure. We missed a sensor area. I'm angry. But that dog eats and sleeps and craps and hangs around and demands expensive canned food and yet she can be bothered to defend the house? For that I am betrayed.
if you're gonna rely on a security system that licks its own ass and can be bothered to do a thing to stop intruders, well I hope that works out for you.
I've got a fancy security system, IP cameras, and a dog. And a burglar still got in this summer. The alarm didn't trip. The dog didn't bite and the cameras, well, he laughed at them. What finally stopped this guy was me coming home to him inside my house and punching him in the face a few times.
This is a long way of saying even the best systems can be bypassed. If a human spent a lot of time planning it out, somebody else will come along and go "poke" and unravel it all.
As for Linux, there is a time and a place for open source and there is a time and a place to get stuff vetted and tested by decades of professional security installers. You'd be FAR better off to leverage all of that research and real-world experience and just do it that way. Further advice:
Get an alarm with wireless monitoring. You will want 4G or LTE wireless. The ubiquitous 3G monitoring systems are being phased out by the cell carriers and it makes no sense to spend any money on a 3G module at this point. 4G wireless modules are affordable anyway.
Get motion detection. This is where my system failed because I have too many pets. I relied on point of entry and glass break and the burglar simply jimmied open a locked window without breaking it, and then smartly didn't open a door to try to carry away his loot. He was using the same window. Get motion detection, Get rid of the pets. Don't rely on locked windows, use large screws or lag bolts to secure them through the window frame. Won't be seen, can be removed to open the window, but won't be vulnerable.
The Honeywell/Ademco alarms are what I would suggest. The parts and sensors are very proven and are used by professional installers but are still inexpensive and easy to DIY install and you can have "root" access to the box to program it how you like, and pay little for an independent company to monitor it for you.
The neat thing is that the sensors can be bought on ebay or Amazon without any trouble. So you are free to source from where you wish.
The Honeywell systems won't stop the CIA from getting in but they will work against normal threats.
But it emphatically is NOT the only life we know exists. Look around you. Aside from humans, the Earth is teeming, crawling, swimming and covered in and by maybe a billion different species. That's life as we know it.
However, out of ALL of those billions of species, only one has ever invented complicated languages or radio, as far as we know. Us. So when we look out there for signals from ET, we are in fact really looking for signals from another us, just like the article says. The problem is, if One in billions of species here developed radio, then the odds are dramatically against this sort of thing happening here or anywhere else. Life will exist. It's everywhere here. But it doesn't have radio.
So basically, we are looking out in the cosmos seeking to find an identical situation as the one that ALMOST didn't even happen here, statistically speaking. This is the problem. We are looking for us. But look around: the Earth alone is covered in life "not like us" so the odds are any life out there is probably also not like us. And if life out there isn't into radio or TV, our radio telescopes will never see it.
Look, the keys are one thing but focusing on them misses the big picture. The LOCK -any lock of any kind- is of NO VALUE AT ALL.
To open any luggage with plastic zipper, all you need is an ink pen. Try this. Take a plastic zipper on a backpack or suitcase (does not matter). Take the ink pen and the sharp end HARD into the zipper. POP it's open and you can pilfer ALL YOU WANT. Now, to hide the evidence, merely run the zipper slider around a few times to restore the seal. Done. No keys needed. No tools either which might be suspicious. Only an ink pen which everybody has.
One demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Got laid off yesterday from an IT job I'd had for almost 15 years. Small company so I did a lot of things, from hardware to software to physical security, to sweeping the floors to to taking boxes of mail to the post office at midnight. If it needed to be done, I was the guy to get,
So now this middle-aged man is suddenly out of work and looking at an IT field that is already vastly different than it was even five years ago much less fifteen. I don't have a clue what I am going to do. What I know how to do is of rapidly decreasing value and/or there are kids who will do it cheaper.
I have no idea what I am going to do. Savings and severance will carry for a while but I've got to make a pivot to do something entirely different which pays well. My job may be gone but naturally the bills aren't.
Much of what people think of when they think about Star Trek's grand concepts of the Federation of Planets and many other things were ideas thought up by Gene Coon, not Roddenberry. Bob Justman also had a hand in those ideas, as did D.C. Fontana and many others tossing in various tidbits.
The book series "These are the voayges" go into extreme detail of who thought up what, which writers and directors invented things taken for canon and so on.
An awful lot of Trek lore taken for granted happened by accident or because Coon or Justman were trying to save money. There was no grand political scheme running behind the scenes. It was all about how to tell a story without having to actually show it. So they invented stuff that could be dialog.
The idea of having a "Starbase" came from the need to show planets per NBC but cheaply so it could be a redressed existing set, and then script mentions there's more than one base. Viola you've expanded the Star Trek universe without having to show it. Coon was a master of this stuff, dropping in mention of the Federation to explain away another loose end. He freaking invented it as a throwaway script change.
Fontana in turn made the characters who we know them to be and kept the thing going in the right direction. She was the bullshit detector and derailed a lot of crap that would have made the show into a joke. Roddenberry mostly sat around and screwed starlets and offered up lousy script rewrites.
The OTHER unsung hero of Star Trek is Lucille Ball, who went to bat for the show many times to keep it funded, until doing so help cost her ownership of the company. She gave her all for Star Trek, Nobody remembers it.
These Are The Voyages books are very highly recommended for anyone who wants to know what really happened and how, It is a lot like seeing how sausage or laws are made but it's important to see how hard these people worked and what they put into the show.
The A-10 does one job, and there are several other aircraft that do different jobs.
The A-10 only does "one job" because that's all it's been allowed to do. However it has on occasion gone outside the box with devastating results against a variety of primary ground targets not in a CAS role, and it could also be used against maritime targets in the same way. The A-10 has demonstrated devastating anti-aircraft ability as well, with at least one known air-to-air kill. This is an area that could easily be expanded: no known aircraft can survive the A-10's gun. It is the most powerful dogfight cannon ever put in the air.
That's the key: very few things used in war or on a battlefield could resist that gun. The A-10 is likely to be a formidable platform if it was allowed to do more than CAS. Let it hit buildings, vehicles, ships and boats, and aircraft. All the A-10 needs is freedom to shoot anything that needs to be engaged.
In my youth, I was a voracious reader of Scifi and it is still my area of choice in reading and other forms of entertainment.
But I've never given two shits about the Hugo awards so hearing there's a dispute among several factions about.... something that isn't entirely clear, just made me realize I still don't give a shit about the Hugo awards and by extension I care even less about the people upset about it. My life up to now has been just fine in blissful ignorance of the entire thing. I suspect a lot of other people have gotten along just fine too.
And if that is the case, if people can lead meaningful lives without knowing about the Hugo dispute, then do the Hugo awards need to exist at all? Not existing would solve everybody's problems all at once.
Why are extortionist's victims falling for this? The information is OUT there. :Lots of people have copies now. If you are dumb enough to pay off one extortionist, so what, there will be five or twenty more lined up also wanting money.
If your info is in there and going to cause you trouble, oh well. Paying extortion on top of that is just dumb.
All three of my PCs run Windows 10 and 16GB, with an SSD for boot. Windows itself needs about 4GB to run happily. Windows 7 suffered below 4. Windows 8.1 was OK with 4 but happier with more. 10 is even happier with 4. So 4 is what I would call base.
8 if planning to run programs or do much of anything. Games or Chrome will suck this up.
16 is what I run, because I run virtual machines from time to time and each one gets 4GB dedicated ram. No matter what I do, or which PC I happen to be on, I always have enough for the VM to run without compromise. Currently the VMs are Windows 7 Pro so 4GB is just what they need.
16 also comes in handy for gaming -two of the boxes have late model 4GB Nvidia GPUs so there's really very little I cannot run. Also do occasional video editing in Sony Vegas Pro 13 which makes heavy use of the GPU ans system memory for rendering. So all in all, 16 is where I want to be.
You make Google sound like a bad guy but how is this REALLY any different than AT&T or Comcast supplying a router and using information gleaned from it? Because both of them supply routers right now for their respective internet services, although you can choose to use your own in both cases.
Whatever you do, your connection eventually gets to their network where they monitor it anyway. Short of an encrypted tunnel (assuming it hasn't been cracked) they're going to know what you are doing.
For Google fiber, allegedly coming soon to my neighborhood, Google supplies a custom fiber router box. The rest is the same: what I do has to cross their network so they're gonna know what I am doing, to some extent. Just like any other ISP.
This new router sounds no worse.
Indeed. A forgotten accomplishment and suggest that the A-10 could have been used against aircraft (which would be obliterated if hit by an A-10), ships, buildings, railroads, really all sorts things.
It's also cheap and reliable, loved by our pilots and deeply feared by our enemies. Hell, it's even feared by our side: before 9/11, one of the THE big news conspiracy things running in the news was about an American A-10 pilot who took off and disappeared into the Rockies with a fully loaded A-10. Reporters were practically crapping in their pants about what kind of new Oklahoma City someone could pull off with an A-10. I suspect many of them expected it to pop up at any moment and blow away Pocatello Idaho, or something. It was a Big Deal story.
And then 9/11 happened and everyone forgot about the missing A-10 or the shark attacks live on the news which was the other big story that summer.
The A-10 was eventually found, crashed into a mountain. Sadly. But it was of course what everybody with a brain had expected. No conspiracies. No pending attacks on grain silos. Just the loss of an airman and his A-10.
Why would carriers be unhappy? They aren't in the business of selling wifi, except perhaps AT&T, but even so, all of them went into paid hotspots KNOWING wifi was unregulated and effectively open to anyone to use, including advancements that obsolete existing wifi.
Broadcasters might be upset but this is a great time to remind them and everyone else that the airwaves in the US are owned by the FCC. All the TV and radio stations and cell phone bands and so on are merely licensed to use their assigned spots, but they don't OWN it. They merely lease it.
So the FCC is within its rights to look at other ways to use the things the FCC owns. If the broadcasters and other users don't like it, they can simply do something else for a business.
Um, as a cord cutter who fired satellite some time back, here is where I get my content now that I no longer have satellite: I don't.
It turns out nothing offered by cable or satellite is actually all that essential. I've managed just fine without it. Sure I watch a lot less TV but this is fine too. Last time I checked, I had over 60 OTA TV channels plus Netflix, Amazon Prime and whatever else my Roku has. I'm fine with this.
As for what will happen to all these companies, well by and large all these companies and channels and the broadcast networks don't actually MAKE most of the things they air. Nope they merely buy the shows from production companies and studios who are the ones actually making it, hiring the actors and crews and so on.
The TV networks are really just middlemen distributors who exist mainly because nobody had yet invented a better way to get shows in front of viewers. You had to have local TV stations and later cable channels. But NOW, you no longer need any of that. So it won't really matter if those networks die off and take with them large numbers of unprofitable TV stations who would not exist at all except for network subsidies.
Worst bug we ever ran across was a program that absolutely would not work as soon as anyone looked at it to see if it was working or just to observe the GUI. If you did that, it broke. So we spent a LOT of time trying to run it, debug it, rerun it, and no matter what we did it never worked right as long as someone was looking.
But the moment you stopped looking, locked that PC and walked away, the program would run fine on files dropped into the appropriate input hot folder. It would happily do its thing and give you good results in an output folder.
Look at it, however, and it blew up immediately.
We spent a LOT of time trying to fix this, however it's not a product we made. So there's a limit.
We did finally realize the program is licensed only for the PC where it is installed. If you remote into it, the program sees the remote client as if it's the installed machine which has no license and thus it runs in kind of a suicide mode. When you stop looking at it and drop the remote connection, the license assignment returns to normal and the program runs again.
I documented and discovered all of this and solved a major headache for our company, because we had to have this software working. I unlocked the secret and got it working. My FUCKING BOSS stole credit for the discovery and promptly began parading around like she thought of the solution.
Which is funny because guess who they called next time it broke? Me. I know it inside and out, now.
Cannot wait for the epic dashcam crash videos as INSANE Russian and Chinese drivers hit Canadian and American roads. It's going to be teeth, hair, and eyeballs ALL over the road.
All that fear about Mexican truck drivers is nothing compared to what's gonna happen with this.
Whoa, modern physics is never incorrect? Any science that claims to be perfect is inherently flawed because our current state of science and knowledge certainly isn't complete in any area. We may think we have a pretty good understanding of things but there is absolutely no way we've got it nailed with a flawless understanding. It's not possible.
The only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know what we don't know.
And 50 or 100 years from now someone will look back on what we think we know right now and laugh at how silly and naive we were. And in 1000 years, what we know right now will be a joke if anyone even remembers it.
The BD-10 kill rate was worse, which is a shame because the design looks amazing. A supersonic private jet made of plywood? Yeah it worked out kinda like you might expect.
Sad.
On the other hand, Bede's machines did fly unlike Moller's stuff that's been "almost ready" for 50 years.
Tossing them out an airlock, they would probably live for 20-30 seconds. They'll suffocate long before heat or cold or radiation kills them.
As was said of the man you went insane and ripped out his own entrails in a fit of madness, "He lived long enough to regret his actions"