I need my car keys, I call a number and this loon screams at me that they're under my dresser or something like that, sprinkled with expletives and mutterings about the John Birch Society, Freemasons, and IRS and I have my keys just like that. Of course, the Psychotic Friends Network isn't for everyone, but it doesn't involve RFIDs and notoriously insecure web systems either.
As for thinking about them, well it's generally not a good idea to concentrate too much on someone you're about to kill. The more you think about them the more real and human they become.
This is what separates normal people from sociopaths and it isn't a good thing to head down that road. You should think about what you're doing, who you're doing it to, and be able to do it anyways and deal with the thoughts of it later. This is what it is to fight in the most limited way and not come to enjoying the killing, but only do what is necessary when necessary. Dehumanizing objectification has allowed people throughout history to do things to people that they ordinarily would never have done.
Welcome to the world of wired communications. Judging by your comment, it sounds like you've never had a dialup or DSL connection. While typical dialup problems were noise on the line, the world of DSL is (was) a fun one. I provisioned DSL circuits for a regional (Maine through virginia / East coast) ISP back in the late 90's. We would often spend months trying to get Covad/Northpoint/NAS to get Verizon to install circuits, only to learn that either the loop was too long, or that the line was poor quality and they wouldn't install a new one. Often, it'd be ridiculous things like Verizon installing the line at the wrong building, or wrong floor, or the tech was scared of a dog and didn't install it. Some people don't realize how good things have gotten lately since the cable companies have taken the bulk of broadband control.
I work for a DSL company now and we still have issues with Verizon. Their own personnel aver that they are NO LONGER MAINTAINING THEIR OWN COPPER AT ALL. Their only push is FIOS. They deliver circuits perfectly and right after the metallic loop tests they foul the line before leaving the premises to mess with us. They close line orders without ever delivering the loops. They make us pay above and beyond the delivery charge for three successive trouble tickets, each one being escalated two or three times, just to get ONE responsible tech to call in from the premises and do a proper acceptance test.
They still interrupt our services at random and often play games with demarcation judgements, sometimes delivering to extended demarcs and other times only to MPOE and yet at the same time claiming control of internal wiring from MPOE to extended demarc and refusing us access to do the wiring they refuse to do themselves and state is our responsibility. Verizon has ZERO fear of legal reprocussions either criminally or civilly and make no mistake, another administration of Democrats would make no difference over the present Republicans. The propensity of this government no matter who is in power is to let Ma Bell drag her big dead arse out of the grave and shake her booty ominously at the consumer, threatening to sit on them and crush the interest in broadband right out of them.
The cable companies are far from perfect, but I've never gotten such value and attention to overall package evolution as from my cable company. They've kneecapped the local telco with 15x2Mbps cable modem service long long before they even get all the regulatory approval for new fiber infrastructure build-out (by the time the telco gets all the construction stuff out of way, the already in-place cable system need only have a few upgrades to existing equipment to kick me to better than 50Mbps each way), they deliver on TV where the phone company uses a DBS company I once worked for (and learned from inside to despise for their utter mediocrity), and they deliver to me high quality phone service with all the bells and whistles for a fraction of what the telco gives me.
By the way, back in the 90s they weren't Verizon, they were Bell Atlantic North or Bell Atlantic South still up until 2000 or so. We just called them BA-North or more often BS.
In Star Trek, the shields were not magnetic but like other such technology manipulations of gravity and spacetime. From the POV of a particle headed for the shield, it would appear the whole ship moved out of the way and from the POV of the ship, that the particle moved aside. The active deflector array to the front did a combination of this and energizing of debris ahead to break it up, ionize it, push aside easier. Larger objects had to be avoided altogether but gas and dust could be dealt with which otherwise would be instant destroyers of a ship moving at high speed.
Read the Star Trek the Next Generation Technical Manual. Then go and Google for terms such as Alcubierre, Hutchison effect, crystal channeling charged particles, etc. You can see it is almost as if we have a really good idea of what we need to do to get there, but not the technical reproducible specifics. As if something unconscious is trying to get through to us.
Maybe someday someone will think, "hmmmm, if the electrostatic field is in the way of fusion, maybe instead of overpowering it with magnetic or gravitational means, we could find a way to cancel out the fields to let the particles merge easily... Hmmmm..."
Those "powers" will be in place for the next White House occupant.
I've said this for years and no one ever believes it. They believe the liberal claptrap that only Republicans ever violate our rights and the principles of this nation. NO SUCH THING IS TRUE. ALL politicians seek to conserve power to themselves, to attract power to themselves, to serve themselves. It is simply that the liberals have a better sounding pile of claptrap to sell. The end result is always the same: every weakening of our system in favor of statism over the individual results in an opening to further weaken it by the next opportunistic self-aggrandizing set of idiots.
The liberals are anti-porn for the political correctness angle from their feminist branch. The conservatives are anti-porn from the moral correctness angle from their fundamentalist branch. BOTH sides have horribly anti-freedom ideas that have great amounts in common and they all boil down to them, the politically avaricious, being in power and us being with none. And they do it by selling us fear. Fear of terrorism, fear of sexism, fear of immorality, fear of racism, fear, fear, fear. Above all, they sell us a way to avoid taking responsibility for our lives. They sell us guilt. They sell us the idea that the world is full of evil things, that we caused it all, and that if we just hand over the power to them, they will hide our guilt, at least until the next time they need to use it against us.
Global warming, pornography, tobacco, crime, hunger, terrorism, etc. You name it, everything brought to you in the way of rule by crisis and fear thereof is a an evil lie and myth wrapped in convenient facts and seasoned with half-truths from someone else's point of view.
They sell us temporary absolution and enable self-denial.
We don't take care of our kids, teach them about sex and death and the world, and we let the state raise them in the public schools. We let the television raise them at home. And we encourage each other to believe that we do the best job possible under impossible conditions with their tacit cooperation. We simply find scapegoats de jure to blame for it not actually working right. We clap ourselves on the back saying the spate of Internet predators is someone else's fault and not that we have handed off our nation to a Lord of the Flies existance. All in the name of we the people not holding on to the responsibility that goes with the power of individual will and self determination and they the avaricious gaining the power, for if you will not accept the responsibility, you will not hold the power with which it goes.
a game will come out on Windows that simulates Linux within it and someone will run it on Cedega on Linux and create a rip in spacetime.
In the meantime, I see no point in emulating Windows guts on Linux just to play games. I'll stick with XP for that. When the Linux community gets its head out of its rear regarding making money being evil, intellectual property ownership being evil, corporate regimentation in product development via economically sustainable business investment, and mere polite cooperation and gets something going on *nix comparable to Active X, because OpenGL AIN'T it, then we can see about games on Linux.
Until then, XP is where it is at. Sad that an OS platform like Linux which is not nearly so heavily loaded right at the finish of booting to a GUI desktop as Windows is and Vista even more so, cannot get out of its own way. This property of DOS, dedication to the task at hand with all else shoved out of the way, was what made Doom rock compared to the best of early Windows games. Linux can do this and still multitask. XP pretty much sort of agrees to cooperate and Vists basically says screw you, the OS and every damn tchtochke code piece MS could toss in comes first no matter what and your needs dead last.
Wake up Linux idiots! Time to shine, time to seize the day! Don't make the mistake the Macintosh cultists took! Seize victory from the jaws of defeat and not the other way around. Make gaming on the Linux platform family easy, fast, and mind blowing.
For pete's sake, just with OpenGL the Really Slick Screensavers rock. The proper nVidia drivers make Tux Racer fly. And yet you still maintain a Windows box for freaking Rainbox Six!
and it's no small secret that the general belief is that they're headed towards allowing the patenting of mere imaginary concepts without ever having worked out what they are. Invent something by putting two words together, like "marsupial reinspection" and no doubt within a couple years you could have Scott Adams write some very funny and clever doubletalk or just compile something from the use of one of those business phraseology generator sites, and patent it.
Given that the faster things degrade, the faster they will tend to from then on, one can see the USPTO allowing people to patent themselves, their names, and their clothing choices and the voices in their heads.
Obviously, we've found the last of those people who went missing off the rolls at the end of the psychiatric hospital deinstitutionalization movement in the 70s and the Apple "look and feel" debacle was my first clue. All the USPTO needs now are meds, comfortable surroundings, and quite a load of therapists. Unfortunately, this very idea has already been patented and congress is unwilling to allocate the funds to pay the use license saying they'd be better spent finding out what possessed anyone to elect them in the first place, never mind hire the loons at the USPTO.
to power that nanotool kit that my wife got me for Xmas. Have you seen the prices for a new recharger from Home Depot for them? Now I can recharge them for practically nothing every time I misplace the scanning electron microscope I have to keep the things in. Hear that DeWalt? Can you feel that, huh?!
G. Harry Stine. Model rocketry saint and in his latter days, a fan of Coanda Effect and even more kooky things. You're slowly being vindicated Harry. I owe you much. Rest well.
That's what we're becoming. So totally wrapped up in the idea that we have some sort of "right" to exist that after engaging in hundreds of years of logical scientific inquiry, finding mountains of evidence that the planet's weather is dynamic, vibrant, and above all fickle, that there are regular up and down periods of cold and hot, we then turn a blind eye to it and against everything we just spent all that time digging up, and proclaim that the world should always have been exactly as it was on June 17, 1931, in Passaic, NJ or something to that effect, and that we must move Heaven and Earth to make it stay that way.
Of course, I'm sure the ancestors of the present day people thought that as they watched the Earth begin to thaw from the last ice age, and the oceans rose to cover the continental shelves and give rise to the planet-wide myths about a globe covering flood. Except, they didn't have scientific evidence in huge piles of books showing that this sort of thing happens all the time regardless of what the bipedal monkeys are up to.
It has been warmer than this in the past. Much warmer. It has been colder than this in the past. Much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities. And we know that there is NOTHING we can do at our present technological level about it. So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we've only had this supposedly evil technology for only less than.0003 of that time?
Because the global warming is real and there are people in this world and always have been who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them. And so they trot out to us a false premise, that we are totally responsible for an actually natural occurence in the long span of planetary history, and another one that they can save us from ourselves if only we give them the reigns of power. Seems like the phoney-baloney oil crisis that never happened in the 70s, the phoney-baloney global starvation crisis that never happened in the 60s, the phoney-baloney Communist scare of the 50s that was horsehockey, and ten million other crises.
It seems on the surface that we are supremely full of ourselves and yet in truth we are terribly dubious, completely without hope, and utterly given to embracing our own fallibility. There is no faith in ourselves in this idea that we caused global warming and still none in the idea that we can stop it. Only false hollow beliefs put forth to enrich the power of others.
Have faith in our progress and our natures that we are not so bad as we would think and as others would posit. We have greatness unknown and unmatched simply waiting to be explored. Once we dreamed of exploring the universe and doing so in style and comfort where now we dream simply of returning to primitive conditions lest Mother Earth shrug us off in anger over our insolence. Mother Earth is a nonentity and the physics of the world merely uncaring and indifferent to us. We cannot make the world stay in steady state, we can only live around it, and we are supremely capable of doing it. It was never of question if we can, but if we will.
There are problems with how we treat the environment, but growing the power of the state over the power of the individual, regressing to dreary primitive states, embracing inanities like hemp and bio diesel, and forgetting all the wonderous things we've thought up in the past to overcome each problem in turn, is to turn our back on being human, and all the best things about that. We can solve the problems and there need be no doom and gloom, and the solutions need not involve handing more power over to those who have far too much already and not nearly the wisdom to know what to properly do with it.
G-d here. I know this will probably sound really provacative and really, I don't want it to, but I felt I should probably speak up and clarify something.
I own your ass and all cells in it, so patents are right out. Besides, I wanted you to love and help each other and making inventive smart people trying to to do that pay even to do the research sounds, well, exceedingly mercenary even for you.
Granted I rarely say anything, but we're getting to the point that you might wipe yourselves out tomorrow and I'd rather that you not so the more eyes on this stuff, the better.
Trust me on that. Now go outside and play nice with each other. There's a good monkey.
Saying Firefly or Serenity were without depth at all would be an understatement on the order of saying neutron star matter might be heavy.
Serenity and Firefly were way way way overblown and simply because of the Buffy link through Whedon. I have run into way too many people who want to argue with me the greatness and sociological implications of that millieu who otherwise could not comprehend ONE episode of ANY series of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or even Stargate SG-1. Nevermind ever have read even something as simple and amusing as Douglas Adams never mind Piers Anthony or Larry Niven. But Buffy? They could recite every line from every episode. It was Whedon's thing, so Firefly and Serenity must be the coolest thing in sci-fi ever.
Excuse me while I hurl.
Anyhow, there's a small laundry list that true serious Star Wars fans know almost by heart of all the quick and sly references to predecessor films in Star Wars. Before Quentin Tarantino was doing it, Lucas did it, and it was done wonderfully, especially for the time when we weren't getting really good sci-fi movies at the big screen and with Viet Nam over and no further excuses immediately at hand for self-flagellation, the public needed something else to get their attention.
Star Wars did it well and turned our attention to a whole new set of possibilities we weren't really considering in movies.
You can hardly say that Serenity did that. As far as I can see, the big deal is that it is from Whedon, giving it a Buffy connection, and it has a crazy butt kicking girl and mutant cannibals and that guy from WKRP dies in it.
You really haven't thought of the flood of Sci-Fi channel movies we're going to be hit with?
"Sci-Fi Channel presents, Spelunker. A team of Martian astronauts are ordered into a Martian cave, and encounter more than they're ready for. With Paris Hilton, Pauly Shore, Michael Shanks, and Lance Henriksen."
My definition certainly isn't that, but it is insanely counterproductive and can only damage their reputation further when the supposed new OS needs almost twice the resources of the previous one and does not really anything new that the other one can't with a little bit of third party payware, shareware, and freeware, and do it faster and more efficiently.
Linux as a vibrant robust OS bites by comparison to XP given all that you must do to wring anything out of your pricey graphics card, and work with video and audio on it as easy as you would on XP. Vista is making Linux look like OSX more and more without the Linux community every getting the Beryl/Compiz thing straightened out, getting anyone at all in the PC game authoring community to move to it, getting a good solid efficient graphics API built, etc. Linux is doing NOTHING new and looking better and better every moment all because Microsoft has boned up Vista so badly and continues to.
I keep wondering if I'm taking crazy pills for Microsoft not to notice how badly they are doing themselves and their customer base a disservice.
Every time this subject comes up, people pipe up that we need to stop consuming, stop using power.
Well, I don't intend to go back to living in a world of horse flop in the streets, coal in my stove, pumping water every day from a well a half mile away. Nor should I. Nor should anyone else.
What is flabbergasting is that the same crowd that joneses for Star Trek all the time is so fast to posit that we need to live simply so that others may simply live. If there's anything Trek should have taught you is that life is not a zero sum game, mankind can design and reason its way out of situations it creates, and there are more than enough resources to go around and you just need to figure out what they are and how to use them.
We are truly stupid if we turn backwards right when we figure out how to do high efficiency fusion, store energy as extra mass, and other off the wall things we've cooked up in sci-fi but haven't gotten around to figuring out in the basic physics departments. We will be condeming all future generations to poverty of not only economy, but morality and ethics, because with poverty of nations go all those things we so hate in our pasts: war, slavery, conquest, exploitation, disease, starvation. We have more than enough of those things left now. We have been fighting damn hard to change ourselves for a long time. To rise from that horrid muck.
There's a difference between being more efficient and doing an about face in our march forward. And getting things done from building pyramids to cities needs energy of one kind or another. We can't simply stop using energy. We can make things use less and still use. We cannot stop using.
Damn us all now if we reflexively retreat from advancement now like idiot children. Damn us to hell.
as sooner or later someone in basic physics will figure out that electric fields can be negated and fusion pulled off without massive systems and we'll just use the nuclear fission stuff for long term batteries sort of like a car battery, car engine, and gas tank. Turn the key five hundred years later and the reactor kicks right up with a couple hundred gigawatts.
Good luck with the warranty on the transmission though.
That's the problem with crony capitalism. In the long run, don't expect great things out of an economy where a sound investment always starts with courting the right officials.
This is and always has been true, yet equally ignored purposefully whenever a city here in the USA wants "revitalize downtown" and the local press runs articles on the new mom and pop independent businesses and their travails against Wal-Mart and so forth, but mentions not at all the businesses that have always been there, but whose owners will not bow and scrape for the local pols and give them money and free promotion every campaign.
We have crony capitalism right here in the USA. Not as forceful as former police states, but certainly every bit as odious and disturbing and anti-organic.
It depends on who "owns" the CPE. The partner or the CLEC. Migrations from one to the other are problematic in many many ways. As far as Covad service, well, when you have problems, I hope you enjoy talking to techs at an outsource company in India who are culturally polite to the point of seeming infuriatingly stony to Americans, and more doggedly pathologically script-driven than the California twits from @Home. You do remember, "so your modem is flashing? Have you reloaded Netscape?" don't you?
Or you can stay with Speakeasy and let their poor saps deal with that, insulating you with a more familiar brand of totally unhelpful.
simple harmonics. Planetary atmospheres, even as dynamic as this, still have whole cloth properties like a single solid material in some respects and one of those is that it will support density waves of varying frequencies over varying distances. That the planet is round doesn't mean there would be some infinite number of angles. It can easily have a very few and they are reinforced by the conditions that started them.
That south pole one has a somewhat rounded hexagon near the center if you look carefully.
Nothing unusual to see here. Simple physics. Come to think of it, if the universe were a hypersphere and the big bang were to set the whole vibrating, then what would multidimension spherical harmonics cause the distribution of mass in the universe to look like? Perhaps like loops and voids all helter skelter about in a way the from our POV seems without rhyme or reason?
Later on, someone will think, "hmmm... iron, hemoglobin... let me think... oxygen carried to fuel cells for oxidation of fuel..."
"Mommy, Billy stabbed my laptop to death! It won't move or play Christina Aguillera anymore! No, it wasn't the music that killed it. Bobby, I am sooo poking you in the eyePod!"
it was also reckoned that running older hardware that didn't eat much power could also save energy. Collectors of old IMSAI rigs perked up immediately but were let down when it was explained they would go back as far as those solar-powered Casio calculators that all the most annoying people played music on and no farther if only so as not to cross the dreaded 8-track line. Retro people everywhere were confused because they couldn't quite remember which decade those were from and bit their lips furtively as they swapped anxious glances between their Atari 2600s and their Commodore 64s.
I went on and fired up my dual-core Windows rig knowing that although it might cost me more electricity, I didn't have to worry about recompiling anything every week when my favorite MMORPG issued their regular patches.
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I need my car keys, I call a number and this loon screams at me that they're under my dresser or something like that, sprinkled with expletives and mutterings about the John Birch Society, Freemasons, and IRS and I have my keys just like that. Of course, the Psychotic Friends Network isn't for everyone, but it doesn't involve RFIDs and notoriously insecure web systems either.
As for thinking about them, well it's generally not a good idea to concentrate too much on someone you're about to kill. The more you think about them the more real and human they become.
This is what separates normal people from sociopaths and it isn't a good thing to head down that road. You should think about what you're doing, who you're doing it to, and be able to do it anyways and deal with the thoughts of it later. This is what it is to fight in the most limited way and not come to enjoying the killing, but only do what is necessary when necessary. Dehumanizing objectification has allowed people throughout history to do things to people that they ordinarily would never have done.
Welcome to the world of wired communications. Judging by your comment, it sounds like you've never had a dialup or DSL connection. While typical dialup problems were noise on the line, the world of DSL is (was) a fun one. I provisioned DSL circuits for a regional (Maine through virginia / East coast) ISP back in the late 90's. We would often spend months trying to get Covad/Northpoint/NAS to get Verizon to install circuits, only to learn that either the loop was too long, or that the line was poor quality and they wouldn't install a new one. Often, it'd be ridiculous things like Verizon installing the line at the wrong building, or wrong floor, or the tech was scared of a dog and didn't install it. Some people don't realize how good things have gotten lately since the cable companies have taken the bulk of broadband control.
I work for a DSL company now and we still have issues with Verizon. Their own personnel aver that they are NO LONGER MAINTAINING THEIR OWN COPPER AT ALL. Their only push is FIOS. They deliver circuits perfectly and right after the metallic loop tests they foul the line before leaving the premises to mess with us. They close line orders without ever delivering the loops. They make us pay above and beyond the delivery charge for three successive trouble tickets, each one being escalated two or three times, just to get ONE responsible tech to call in from the premises and do a proper acceptance test.
They still interrupt our services at random and often play games with demarcation judgements, sometimes delivering to extended demarcs and other times only to MPOE and yet at the same time claiming control of internal wiring from MPOE to extended demarc and refusing us access to do the wiring they refuse to do themselves and state is our responsibility. Verizon has ZERO fear of legal reprocussions either criminally or civilly and make no mistake, another administration of Democrats would make no difference over the present Republicans. The propensity of this government no matter who is in power is to let Ma Bell drag her big dead arse out of the grave and shake her booty ominously at the consumer, threatening to sit on them and crush the interest in broadband right out of them.
The cable companies are far from perfect, but I've never gotten such value and attention to overall package evolution as from my cable company. They've kneecapped the local telco with 15x2Mbps cable modem service long long before they even get all the regulatory approval for new fiber infrastructure build-out (by the time the telco gets all the construction stuff out of way, the already in-place cable system need only have a few upgrades to existing equipment to kick me to better than 50Mbps each way), they deliver on TV where the phone company uses a DBS company I once worked for (and learned from inside to despise for their utter mediocrity), and they deliver to me high quality phone service with all the bells and whistles for a fraction of what the telco gives me.
By the way, back in the 90s they weren't Verizon, they were Bell Atlantic North or Bell Atlantic South still up until 2000 or so. We just called them BA-North or more often BS.
this means the hating of Vista is stronger then the hating of previos OSs.
I can feel your hatred... It makes you strong... Gives you focus... A powerful Sith Lord you will become!
...oh hell, yes I am nitpicking.
In Star Trek, the shields were not magnetic but like other such technology manipulations of gravity and spacetime. From the POV of a particle headed for the shield, it would appear the whole ship moved out of the way and from the POV of the ship, that the particle moved aside. The active deflector array to the front did a combination of this and energizing of debris ahead to break it up, ionize it, push aside easier. Larger objects had to be avoided altogether but gas and dust could be dealt with which otherwise would be instant destroyers of a ship moving at high speed.
Read the Star Trek the Next Generation Technical Manual. Then go and Google for terms such as Alcubierre, Hutchison effect, crystal channeling charged particles, etc. You can see it is almost as if we have a really good idea of what we need to do to get there, but not the technical reproducible specifics. As if something unconscious is trying to get through to us.
Maybe someday someone will think, "hmmmm, if the electrostatic field is in the way of fusion, maybe instead of overpowering it with magnetic or gravitational means, we could find a way to cancel out the fields to let the particles merge easily... Hmmmm..."
Just musing...
But have you given thought to the slippery slope?
Those "powers" will be in place for the next White House occupant.
I've said this for years and no one ever believes it. They believe the liberal claptrap that only Republicans ever violate our rights and the principles of this nation. NO SUCH THING IS TRUE. ALL politicians seek to conserve power to themselves, to attract power to themselves, to serve themselves. It is simply that the liberals have a better sounding pile of claptrap to sell. The end result is always the same: every weakening of our system in favor of statism over the individual results in an opening to further weaken it by the next opportunistic self-aggrandizing set of idiots.
The liberals are anti-porn for the political correctness angle from their feminist branch. The conservatives are anti-porn from the moral correctness angle from their fundamentalist branch. BOTH sides have horribly anti-freedom ideas that have great amounts in common and they all boil down to them, the politically avaricious, being in power and us being with none. And they do it by selling us fear. Fear of terrorism, fear of sexism, fear of immorality, fear of racism, fear, fear, fear. Above all, they sell us a way to avoid taking responsibility for our lives. They sell us guilt. They sell us the idea that the world is full of evil things, that we caused it all, and that if we just hand over the power to them, they will hide our guilt, at least until the next time they need to use it against us.
Global warming, pornography, tobacco, crime, hunger, terrorism, etc. You name it, everything brought to you in the way of rule by crisis and fear thereof is a an evil lie and myth wrapped in convenient facts and seasoned with half-truths from someone else's point of view.
They sell us temporary absolution and enable self-denial.
We don't take care of our kids, teach them about sex and death and the world, and we let the state raise them in the public schools. We let the television raise them at home. And we encourage each other to believe that we do the best job possible under impossible conditions with their tacit cooperation. We simply find scapegoats de jure to blame for it not actually working right. We clap ourselves on the back saying the spate of Internet predators is someone else's fault and not that we have handed off our nation to a Lord of the Flies existance. All in the name of we the people not holding on to the responsibility that goes with the power of individual will and self determination and they the avaricious gaining the power, for if you will not accept the responsibility, you will not hold the power with which it goes.
a game will come out on Windows that simulates Linux within it and someone will run it on Cedega on Linux and create a rip in spacetime.
In the meantime, I see no point in emulating Windows guts on Linux just to play games. I'll stick with XP for that. When the Linux community gets its head out of its rear regarding making money being evil, intellectual property ownership being evil, corporate regimentation in product development via economically sustainable business investment, and mere polite cooperation and gets something going on *nix comparable to Active X, because OpenGL AIN'T it, then we can see about games on Linux.
Until then, XP is where it is at. Sad that an OS platform like Linux which is not nearly so heavily loaded right at the finish of booting to a GUI desktop as Windows is and Vista even more so, cannot get out of its own way. This property of DOS, dedication to the task at hand with all else shoved out of the way, was what made Doom rock compared to the best of early Windows games. Linux can do this and still multitask. XP pretty much sort of agrees to cooperate and Vists basically says screw you, the OS and every damn tchtochke code piece MS could toss in comes first no matter what and your needs dead last.
Wake up Linux idiots! Time to shine, time to seize the day! Don't make the mistake the Macintosh cultists took! Seize victory from the jaws of defeat and not the other way around. Make gaming on the Linux platform family easy, fast, and mind blowing.
For pete's sake, just with OpenGL the Really Slick Screensavers rock. The proper nVidia drivers make Tux Racer fly. And yet you still maintain a Windows box for freaking Rainbox Six!
and it's no small secret that the general belief is that they're headed towards allowing the patenting of mere imaginary concepts without ever having worked out what they are. Invent something by putting two words together, like "marsupial reinspection" and no doubt within a couple years you could have Scott Adams write some very funny and clever doubletalk or just compile something from the use of one of those business phraseology generator sites, and patent it.
Given that the faster things degrade, the faster they will tend to from then on, one can see the USPTO allowing people to patent themselves, their names, and their clothing choices and the voices in their heads.
Obviously, we've found the last of those people who went missing off the rolls at the end of the psychiatric hospital deinstitutionalization movement in the 70s and the Apple "look and feel" debacle was my first clue. All the USPTO needs now are meds, comfortable surroundings, and quite a load of therapists. Unfortunately, this very idea has already been patented and congress is unwilling to allocate the funds to pay the use license saying they'd be better spent finding out what possessed anyone to elect them in the first place, never mind hire the loons at the USPTO.
Onward goes the spiral.
to power that nanotool kit that my wife got me for Xmas. Have you seen the prices for a new recharger from Home Depot for them? Now I can recharge them for practically nothing every time I misplace the scanning electron microscope I have to keep the things in. Hear that DeWalt? Can you feel that, huh?!
G. Harry Stine. Model rocketry saint and in his latter days, a fan of Coanda Effect and even more kooky things. You're slowly being vindicated Harry. I owe you much. Rest well.
Oh, and by the way, it is not "piracy." It is not even like piracy. It is data duplication. We should call it that.
Speak for yourself matey! I gots me iPatch and iParrot!
That's what we're becoming. So totally wrapped up in the idea that we have some sort of "right" to exist that after engaging in hundreds of years of logical scientific inquiry, finding mountains of evidence that the planet's weather is dynamic, vibrant, and above all fickle, that there are regular up and down periods of cold and hot, we then turn a blind eye to it and against everything we just spent all that time digging up, and proclaim that the world should always have been exactly as it was on June 17, 1931, in Passaic, NJ or something to that effect, and that we must move Heaven and Earth to make it stay that way.
.0003 of that time?
Of course, I'm sure the ancestors of the present day people thought that as they watched the Earth begin to thaw from the last ice age, and the oceans rose to cover the continental shelves and give rise to the planet-wide myths about a globe covering flood. Except, they didn't have scientific evidence in huge piles of books showing that this sort of thing happens all the time regardless of what the bipedal monkeys are up to.
It has been warmer than this in the past. Much warmer. It has been colder than this in the past. Much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities. And we know that there is NOTHING we can do at our present technological level about it. So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we've only had this supposedly evil technology for only less than
Because the global warming is real and there are people in this world and always have been who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them. And so they trot out to us a false premise, that we are totally responsible for an actually natural occurence in the long span of planetary history, and another one that they can save us from ourselves if only we give them the reigns of power. Seems like the phoney-baloney oil crisis that never happened in the 70s, the phoney-baloney global starvation crisis that never happened in the 60s, the phoney-baloney Communist scare of the 50s that was horsehockey, and ten million other crises.
It seems on the surface that we are supremely full of ourselves and yet in truth we are terribly dubious, completely without hope, and utterly given to embracing our own fallibility. There is no faith in ourselves in this idea that we caused global warming and still none in the idea that we can stop it. Only false hollow beliefs put forth to enrich the power of others.
Have faith in our progress and our natures that we are not so bad as we would think and as others would posit. We have greatness unknown and unmatched simply waiting to be explored. Once we dreamed of exploring the universe and doing so in style and comfort where now we dream simply of returning to primitive conditions lest Mother Earth shrug us off in anger over our insolence. Mother Earth is a nonentity and the physics of the world merely uncaring and indifferent to us. We cannot make the world stay in steady state, we can only live around it, and we are supremely capable of doing it. It was never of question if we can, but if we will.
There are problems with how we treat the environment, but growing the power of the state over the power of the individual, regressing to dreary primitive states, embracing inanities like hemp and bio diesel, and forgetting all the wonderous things we've thought up in the past to overcome each problem in turn, is to turn our back on being human, and all the best things about that. We can solve the problems and there need be no doom and gloom, and the solutions need not involve handing more power over to those who have far too much already and not nearly the wisdom to know what to properly do with it.
The world will shrug. We will move with it.
G-d here. I know this will probably sound really provacative and really, I don't want it to, but I felt I should probably speak up and clarify something.
I own your ass and all cells in it, so patents are right out. Besides, I wanted you to love and help each other and making inventive smart people trying to to do that pay even to do the research sounds, well, exceedingly mercenary even for you.
Granted I rarely say anything, but we're getting to the point that you might wipe yourselves out tomorrow and I'd rather that you not so the more eyes on this stuff, the better.
Trust me on that. Now go outside and play nice with each other. There's a good monkey.
-The Creator
Saying Firefly or Serenity were without depth at all would be an understatement on the order of saying neutron star matter might be heavy.
Serenity and Firefly were way way way overblown and simply because of the Buffy link through Whedon. I have run into way too many people who want to argue with me the greatness and sociological implications of that millieu who otherwise could not comprehend ONE episode of ANY series of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or even Stargate SG-1. Nevermind ever have read even something as simple and amusing as Douglas Adams never mind Piers Anthony or Larry Niven. But Buffy? They could recite every line from every episode. It was Whedon's thing, so Firefly and Serenity must be the coolest thing in sci-fi ever.
Excuse me while I hurl.
Anyhow, there's a small laundry list that true serious Star Wars fans know almost by heart of all the quick and sly references to predecessor films in Star Wars. Before Quentin Tarantino was doing it, Lucas did it, and it was done wonderfully, especially for the time when we weren't getting really good sci-fi movies at the big screen and with Viet Nam over and no further excuses immediately at hand for self-flagellation, the public needed something else to get their attention.
Star Wars did it well and turned our attention to a whole new set of possibilities we weren't really considering in movies.
You can hardly say that Serenity did that. As far as I can see, the big deal is that it is from Whedon, giving it a Buffy connection, and it has a crazy butt kicking girl and mutant cannibals and that guy from WKRP dies in it.
Not seeing how this ranks as anywhere near best.
And anyway, caves on Mars are cool.
You really haven't thought of the flood of Sci-Fi channel movies we're going to be hit with?
"Sci-Fi Channel presents, Spelunker. A team of Martian astronauts are ordered into a Martian cave, and encounter more than they're ready for. With Paris Hilton, Pauly Shore, Michael Shanks, and Lance Henriksen."
My definition certainly isn't that, but it is insanely counterproductive and can only damage their reputation further when the supposed new OS needs almost twice the resources of the previous one and does not really anything new that the other one can't with a little bit of third party payware, shareware, and freeware, and do it faster and more efficiently.
Linux as a vibrant robust OS bites by comparison to XP given all that you must do to wring anything out of your pricey graphics card, and work with video and audio on it as easy as you would on XP. Vista is making Linux look like OSX more and more without the Linux community every getting the Beryl/Compiz thing straightened out, getting anyone at all in the PC game authoring community to move to it, getting a good solid efficient graphics API built, etc. Linux is doing NOTHING new and looking better and better every moment all because Microsoft has boned up Vista so badly and continues to.
I keep wondering if I'm taking crazy pills for Microsoft not to notice how badly they are doing themselves and their customer base a disservice.
I'm keeping XP Pro SP2 for the forseeable future.
...it is really going to suck, climbing up on the damn roof every time I want to watch a football game.
Every time this subject comes up, people pipe up that we need to stop consuming, stop using power.
Well, I don't intend to go back to living in a world of horse flop in the streets, coal in my stove, pumping water every day from a well a half mile away. Nor should I. Nor should anyone else.
What is flabbergasting is that the same crowd that joneses for Star Trek all the time is so fast to posit that we need to live simply so that others may simply live. If there's anything Trek should have taught you is that life is not a zero sum game, mankind can design and reason its way out of situations it creates, and there are more than enough resources to go around and you just need to figure out what they are and how to use them.
We are truly stupid if we turn backwards right when we figure out how to do high efficiency fusion, store energy as extra mass, and other off the wall things we've cooked up in sci-fi but haven't gotten around to figuring out in the basic physics departments. We will be condeming all future generations to poverty of not only economy, but morality and ethics, because with poverty of nations go all those things we so hate in our pasts: war, slavery, conquest, exploitation, disease, starvation. We have more than enough of those things left now. We have been fighting damn hard to change ourselves for a long time. To rise from that horrid muck.
There's a difference between being more efficient and doing an about face in our march forward. And getting things done from building pyramids to cities needs energy of one kind or another. We can't simply stop using energy. We can make things use less and still use. We cannot stop using.
Damn us all now if we reflexively retreat from advancement now like idiot children. Damn us to hell.
Slashdot "editors" do not "edit" submissions.
Seems high time to change the name to something that reflects what they actually do do.
Slashdot "bystanders" do not "edit" submissions.
I think that fixes it.
as sooner or later someone in basic physics will figure out that electric fields can be negated and fusion pulled off without massive systems and we'll just use the nuclear fission stuff for long term batteries sort of like a car battery, car engine, and gas tank. Turn the key five hundred years later and the reactor kicks right up with a couple hundred gigawatts.
Good luck with the warranty on the transmission though.
That's the problem with crony capitalism. In the long run, don't expect great things out of an economy where a sound investment always starts with courting the right officials.
This is and always has been true, yet equally ignored purposefully whenever a city here in the USA wants "revitalize downtown" and the local press runs articles on the new mom and pop independent businesses and their travails against Wal-Mart and so forth, but mentions not at all the businesses that have always been there, but whose owners will not bow and scrape for the local pols and give them money and free promotion every campaign.
We have crony capitalism right here in the USA. Not as forceful as former police states, but certainly every bit as odious and disturbing and anti-organic.
It depends on who "owns" the CPE. The partner or the CLEC. Migrations from one to the other are problematic in many many ways. As far as Covad service, well, when you have problems, I hope you enjoy talking to techs at an outsource company in India who are culturally polite to the point of seeming infuriatingly stony to Americans, and more doggedly pathologically script-driven than the California twits from @Home. You do remember, "so your modem is flashing? Have you reloaded Netscape?" don't you?
Or you can stay with Speakeasy and let their poor saps deal with that, insulating you with a more familiar brand of totally unhelpful.
Your choice. Welcome to it.
simple harmonics. Planetary atmospheres, even as dynamic as this, still have whole cloth properties like a single solid material in some respects and one of those is that it will support density waves of varying frequencies over varying distances. That the planet is round doesn't mean there would be some infinite number of angles. It can easily have a very few and they are reinforced by the conditions that started them.
That south pole one has a somewhat rounded hexagon near the center if you look carefully.
Nothing unusual to see here. Simple physics. Come to think of it, if the universe were a hypersphere and the big bang were to set the whole vibrating, then what would multidimension spherical harmonics cause the distribution of mass in the universe to look like? Perhaps like loops and voids all helter skelter about in a way the from our POV seems without rhyme or reason?
Later on, someone will think, "hmmm... iron, hemoglobin... let me think... oxygen carried to fuel cells for oxidation of fuel..."
"Mommy, Billy stabbed my laptop to death! It won't move or play Christina Aguillera anymore! No, it wasn't the music that killed it. Bobby, I am sooo poking you in the eyePod!"
it was also reckoned that running older hardware that didn't eat much power could also save energy. Collectors of old IMSAI rigs perked up immediately but were let down when it was explained they would go back as far as those solar-powered Casio calculators that all the most annoying people played music on and no farther if only so as not to cross the dreaded 8-track line. Retro people everywhere were confused because they couldn't quite remember which decade those were from and bit their lips furtively as they swapped anxious glances between their Atari 2600s and their Commodore 64s.
I went on and fired up my dual-core Windows rig knowing that although it might cost me more electricity, I didn't have to worry about recompiling anything every week when my favorite MMORPG issued their regular patches.