Openoffice 2.4 has added the features I wanted and seems to mangle my existing huge documents very little so that I can patch them in a few hours (these are 150 page documents with hundreds of pictures). The smaller documents I only need to change the table of contents and indices column count.
P2P- Azureus.
Sound- Audacity.
Graphics-- still an issue- but Draw looks decent. I need a good pixel editor tho.
Browsing-- Firefox.
Just do not see the point in upgrading again and paying money again. I guess I'll get some $399 PC with Vista or Windows7 but no more $1899 (heck last XP pc was only $1199).
Focusing my dollars on retirement, boardgames, my house--- do not see putting out $3k for a computer each year like I used to.
The person who lives it up in their 18's and 20's. Attends lots of parties with other party animal types and booze. Get's good grades and a degree. Goes straight into a decent job making decent pay with a relatively small college bill and the potential to advance within a corporation.
or engineers
who bust their butts. work long hours on assignments. graduate to jobs with low status and slightly better pay but little chance for advancement.
---
We need to get OVER the perceived status of these positions and stop entering them enough so that their actual prestige (and pay) rises again. There is currently still a gross over-supply since engineers, computer scientists, and so on seem to be stuck in a low status ghetto after (well... and during) college. Back in the 50's it was great to be an engineer or scientists. They were rare, got high pay, and business people were compensated at 1/400th to 1/10th what they are relative to engineers today.
I've had a few times when I felt like folks were mod bombing me.
But it rarely lasted more than a few weeks.
I really don't care... I get the impression a lot of people keep friends and foes here. I think of it a lot more anonymously. Perhaps if folks had avatars or something to remember them by.
I write mostly to think through what I think about the issue at hand. If folks post then I think about what they said and may revise my position. I know I go off half-cocked a lot of the time and when things are going well or badly in real life, it affects my posts here.
Perhaps the apple folks had set up scripts to detect and auto-mod the guy down- however mod points are awarded so randomly, who knows what day you will get them.
A lot of IT people read Heinlein stories when growing up.
His juvenile books are strongly libertarian in philosophy.
At least some other famous book share the philosophy (Weapon Shops of Ishar).
SF books typically have a hero or heroine who succeeds and does wonderful things by their own efforts alone.
IT has a lot of programmers who view themselves as (and who are) heroic figures producing entire systems, utilities, and so on by their own efforts. They just want to be left alone by the organization so they can do magic and be gurus.
It takes a while to realize that every political system is flawed. To realize that every system tends towards oligarchy.
Anyway... geeky, nerdy types couldn't BE the football star or the jock so they read books, played games, and lived in a world where single individuals make a lot of a difference. Where things are fair and evil is punished.
Unfortunately, in the real world 80% (a friend says 90%) of people are untrustworthy and cheat and lie like hell. Evil is not punished frequently. Bad things happen to good people. People tolerate oppression frequently unless it affects them. So any system based on a presumption that people are going to act morally is doomed from the beginning.
Which particular ATI or Nvidia card do you want? Because there are probably a couple dozen. Then there are the secondary brand cards that use ATI or Nvdia chips.
Agreed-- admittedly Ron Paul had little chance of winning, but he was practically erased by both CNN and Fox. Even after getting a higher % of the votes than Guiliani, he was omitted from the debate and Guiliani was a allowed in.
The local "conservative" radio station (i.e. pro wealthy people, anti-abortion types) tore him to pieces from their first question with stuff like "when did you quit beating your wife".
The same thing happens for minor democratic candidates.
I found the dramatic shift at the start of season 3 very jarring and the content repellent. I almost stopped watching the show. High quality but unenjoyable for me (and a big change).
Overall it seems like a decent series and I hope they have a good ending in mind (unlike what happened in B5-- I was like "four years and it ends like this???" (and then they tacked on a 5th season after they were not cancelled after all).
Lots of historical places and events reported in the bible are true.
Some of them are versions of older true stories found in older religions and stories in the region. Some of them are unprovable and indistinguishable from madness.
There is lots of good advice and the christian religion helped it's followers survive and prosper rather than die out so it is overall beneficial to its followers.
However, some things appear very unlikely. It is very unlikely that the entire earth really was flooded underwater and the entire human genome was concentrated through one family within the last 10,000 years.
And it is true that, to this day, a lot of religious people are rabidly anti-science to the point that it is hurting us relative to other societies around the world now. We were very pro-science in the 20s to the 60's and then somehow got off the path and have been losing our edge ever since.
It is also true that some religious people (in power) are complete wack jobs like James Watt (sec interior) who said it was okay to sell of our national parks because the end times were near. (never mind that as a religious person he should have been husbanding the earth- not strip mining and clearing it).
There are crazy people in science and in religion. However, science requires that other people be able to reproduce your results independently. So it corrects bias's and errors over time. Religious truth is more often based on who is the most charismatic, who breeds most prolifically, or who is the most murderous. A religion that increases followers is more true while one that loses followers is less true.
First... if they had a third, they would have used it.
If they had just been "big bombs that killed 200,000 people" they would have probably used them again.
However, it became clear over time that the radiological effects (that everyone was ignorant of) were much nastier than they thought. Once the sheer nastiness of nukes became clear, no one was really ready to use them again.
I'm pretty sure the US arsenal is considerably smaller than Russia's (tho more accurate).
But hey... the main point is-- No major country filled with people of a variety of political bents has ever used a nuke again. In 53 years now. However, there are many terrorist organizations that would use them immediately-- fully knowing what they do.
And the easier it gets to make nukes, the smaller the terrorist organization that can make them.
However- a lot of this has been known since the 1950's. I remember reading in Analog about how to shape the plutonium and how to use dynamite to force it together. The only thing the article pointed out is that the people making the bomb would probably die.... but today we have a lot of kooks willing.. hell HAPPY... to die.
And, of course, when they outlaw paint-ball guns, only terrorists will have paint-ball guns.
The singularity is very close. So many trends towards horribleness. I start to think that the late 50's to late 70's was about as good as it is going to get.
A large portion of the population of africa will be immune to it in under 100 years. And it will still be virulent to the rest of the world -- mostly because the mortality rate in africa has been very high so there is an extreme selective pressure.
Any population... bacteria... humans... deer... will suffer large losses but the survivors will repopulate at a very high rate.
The loss of food is probably more dangerous since we might exterminate ourselves fighting over that last slice of toast.
No. The point of non-proliferation is that unlike the U.S. who used the weapons twice and then stopped because they were horrified, there are a lot of crazy fucks on this planet who know what nukes do and would love to use them.
Nukes and biological warfare are likely end scenarios in our lifetime. As it gets easier and easier to do this kind of thing, smaller and smaller groups can pull it off. I'm certain within my life time some terrorist organization is going to release a deadly flu or enhanced disease into the US using suicidal (or unwitting) humans to transport into the target country.
Do you think the US, Russia, China, or any other rational country is going to use Nukes first again? I think not.
Do you think there are many terrorist organizations that would use nukes if they had them? I think so.
Well we could use Gates... die his hair black and have him grow a little mustache. And he would have to take up painting but suck at it -- or perhaps develop a bad painting program.
Linus seems a little too young, doesn't smoke as much, doesn't drink as much, and lacks the cool british accent Churchill had.
Richard is a bit crazy-- seems more of a pol pot than anything in WWII-- perhaps a japanese type with "fight to the death".
In general I think that Opensource is, to a large extent, a war of large corporations against other large corporations with proprietary software. It's wonderful and we will benefit.
I think if you extend things forward 20 years, word processers, audio editors, video editors and other key tools will all be open source, free, and completely rock. Openoffice just gets better and better. Meanwhile, word is starting to make things worse trying to differentiate themselves from openoffice. In the end-- word processing is a fixed set of functions and all will be implemented.
The investors in AT&T have lost about 10% of their value in the last year. They never recovered from 2001 are still at about 60% of their value then.
This is true for many large corporations today.
The executive class is looting and pillaging corporations at the expense of a) the workers (1 executive pay == 6000 $40k workers) b) the investors (see stock performance above-- think about adding $155 mill in profits that went to one man who took Home depot into the toilet) c) the country (you want them to open in your area- give them no taxes for 10 years-- so they destroy your roads and you pay to fix them-- in many cases the instant the tax breaks end, they leave)
the truly wealthy investors are right now taking huge baths in muni bonds and hedge funds.
The executive class in America is a source of many of our problems today. And they are getting away with it.
There is a new book out-- "The Three Trillion Dollar War".
Basically.. the cost of supporting all the injured vets (who are surviving some pretty horrific injuries compared to past wars) and other cleanup type activities means this war is going to cost us 3 trillion.
I think they are going to stiff the vets for their benefits personally. That's what they usually do.
I've gotten 7 tickets in my life (ruh roh... comedy ticket class here I come again).
I've had 5 policemen who were extremely polite and professional and 2 that were complete jerks despite the fact that I was remaining polite. I donate money to the private policemen's death fund here.
The funniest was when I was with a friend who had a speed detector. The cop had "popped" us and *knew* we were going over 75 in a 65 at night in west texas as were most of the rest of the cars.
But by the time he pulled behind us and painted us (for a good 5 minutes) we were holding solid at 65.
So he pulled us over anyway and inspected the entire car to see if he could find anything wrong (looked at the front a long time for some odd reason) and finally wrote us a warning for 77. That's when I learned that they can't ticket based on "popping" apparently.
He was very polite and professional tho. We saw seven speed traps that night between san antonio and fort stockton. None at all on our return trip 5 days later.
Gave respect for radar detectors for the first time in my life. They really are wonderful in those 110 mile stretches of "nothing" out west.
$19.99 for a movie I'll see once. vs 5 hours of downloading the picture (plus maintaining my ratio... plus occasionally bad movies... plus acceptable but lower resolution than a DVD with occasional embarrassing block glitches).
Hmmm. The download wins.
--- $4.99 for a movie I'll see once. vs 5 hours of downloading the picture (plus maintaining my ratio... plus occasionally bad movies... plus acceptable but lower resolution than a DVD with occasional embarrassing block glitches).
Hmmm. I'll buy it.
--- $20 for "all I can eat rentals" vs 5 hours of downloading the picture (plus maintaining my ratio... plus occasionally bad movies... plus acceptable but lower resolution than a DVD with occasional embarrassing block glitches).
For some reason.. the download wins for me. I like *possessing* a copy of the movie so I can wake up at 4am and watch it.
--- Have I spent the $80 a month I can spend on DVD's and CD's? Yes... then I'll download the rest feeling that I've given my sacrifice of cash to hollywood.
a) compensation levels in hollywood are way above norm. b) most pirated material would not have been purchased at anywhere near retail prices* c) a lot of piracy leads to sales that would not have otherwise occured** d) there are many, many, many forms of entertainment competing for our entertainment time and money***
---
* Filling an ipod at retail- $10,000. This just isn't going to happen. That's after taxes. So that's like taking a $20k cut in pay after taxes. JUST to fill the ipod.
** I was given a pirated band CD. I'd never heard of the band. Now i own one of their CD's, have gone to four of their concerts, and bought two of their T-Shirts from their web site.
*** And most of us will spend most of our time on the cheapest entertainment.
Bob Heinlein and Elron Hubbard were discussing how to make money at the 195(3?) World SF con and decided religion was much more effective. They made a bar bet as to who could found a religion. Heinlein's book was "Stranger in a Strange Land"... Hubbard's book was "Dienetics".
The governor transported them across state lines, wired funds across state lines, muddied the transaction to hide the real purpose of the wire transfer,
oh.. and he also used hookers after building a career prosecuting them.
Wales-- we need to see more data. The IRS will probably be interested in $5k... er... donations that were not reported as income... and the rest of us will be interested in $5k donations that were reported as income at the same time as Merkey alleges.
Slashdot Mirror
EQ is the only thing holding me to Windows now.
Openoffice 2.4 has added the features I wanted and seems to mangle my existing huge documents very little so that I can patch them in a few hours (these are 150 page documents with hundreds of pictures). The smaller documents I only need to change the table of contents and indices column count.
P2P- Azureus.
Sound- Audacity.
Graphics-- still an issue- but Draw looks decent. I need a good pixel editor tho.
Browsing-- Firefox.
Just do not see the point in upgrading again and paying money again. I guess I'll get some $399 PC with Vista or Windows7 but no more $1899 (heck last XP pc was only $1199).
Focusing my dollars on retirement, boardgames, my house--- do not see putting out $3k for a computer each year like I used to.
The person who lives it up in their 18's and 20's.
Attends lots of parties with other party animal types and booze.
Get's good grades and a degree.
Goes straight into a decent job making decent pay with a relatively small college bill and the potential to advance within a corporation.
or engineers
who bust their butts.
work long hours on assignments.
graduate to jobs with low status and slightly better pay but little chance for advancement.
---
We need to get OVER the perceived status of these positions and stop entering them enough so that their actual prestige (and pay) rises again. There is currently still a gross over-supply since engineers, computer scientists, and so on seem to be stuck in a low status ghetto after (well... and during) college. Back in the 50's it was great to be an engineer or scientists. They were rare, got high pay, and business people were compensated at 1/400th to 1/10th what they are relative to engineers today.
I've had a few times when I felt like folks were mod bombing me.
But it rarely lasted more than a few weeks.
I really don't care... I get the impression a lot of people keep friends and foes here. I think of it a lot more anonymously. Perhaps if folks had avatars or something to remember them by.
I write mostly to think through what I think about the issue at hand. If folks post then I think about what they said and may revise my position. I know I go off half-cocked a lot of the time and when things are going well or badly in real life, it affects my posts here.
Perhaps the apple folks had set up scripts to detect and auto-mod the guy down- however mod points are awarded so randomly, who knows what day you will get them.
I am a bit overwhelmed by the 10 mod point level.
A lot of IT people read Heinlein stories when growing up.
His juvenile books are strongly libertarian in philosophy.
At least some other famous book share the philosophy (Weapon Shops of Ishar).
SF books typically have a hero or heroine who succeeds and does wonderful things by their own efforts alone.
IT has a lot of programmers who view themselves as (and who are) heroic figures producing entire systems, utilities, and so on by their own efforts. They just want to be left alone by the organization so they can do magic and be gurus.
It takes a while to realize that every political system is flawed. To realize that every system tends towards oligarchy.
Anyway... geeky, nerdy types couldn't BE the football star or the jock so they read books, played games, and lived in a world where single individuals make a lot of a difference. Where things are fair and evil is punished.
Unfortunately, in the real world 80% (a friend says 90%) of people are untrustworthy and cheat and lie like hell. Evil is not punished frequently. Bad things happen to good people. People tolerate oppression frequently unless it affects them. So any system based on a presumption that people are going to act morally is doomed from the beginning.
Which particular ATI or Nvidia card do you want? Because there are probably a couple dozen.
Then there are the secondary brand cards that use ATI or Nvdia chips.
and the particular game wouldn't matter.
I need this technology-- even if it just works for mouse clicks.
Agreed-- admittedly Ron Paul had little chance of winning, but he was practically erased by both CNN and Fox.
Even after getting a higher % of the votes than Guiliani, he was omitted from the debate and Guiliani was a allowed in.
The local "conservative" radio station (i.e. pro wealthy people, anti-abortion types) tore him to pieces from their first question with stuff like "when did you quit beating your wife".
The same thing happens for minor democratic candidates.
It's really blatant some times.
I found the dramatic shift at the start of season 3 very jarring and the content repellent. I almost stopped watching the show. High quality but unenjoyable for me (and a big change).
Overall it seems like a decent series and I hope they have a good ending in mind (unlike what happened in B5-- I was like "four years and it ends like this???" (and then they tacked on a 5th season after they were not cancelled after all).
Think of the earth as a very large easter island or haiti without UN food aid.
Dumb people create catastrophes too-- they just do it by overbreeding, stripping the entire area of food, and then suffering 99% mortality rates.
Your basic point is extremely valid however.
Lots of historical places and events reported in the bible are true.
Some of them are versions of older true stories found in older religions and stories in the region.
Some of them are unprovable and indistinguishable from madness.
There is lots of good advice and the christian religion helped it's followers survive and prosper rather than die out so it is overall beneficial to its followers.
However, some things appear very unlikely. It is very unlikely that the entire earth really was flooded underwater and the entire human genome was concentrated through one family within the last 10,000 years.
And it is true that, to this day, a lot of religious people are rabidly anti-science to the point that it is hurting us relative to other societies around the world now. We were very pro-science in the 20s to the 60's and then somehow got off the path and have been losing our edge ever since.
It is also true that some religious people (in power) are complete wack jobs like James Watt (sec interior) who said it was okay to sell of our national parks because the end times were near. (never mind that as a religious person he should have been husbanding the earth- not strip mining and clearing it).
There are crazy people in science and in religion. However, science requires that other people be able to reproduce your results independently. So it corrects bias's and errors over time. Religious truth is more often based on who is the most charismatic, who breeds most prolifically, or who is the most murderous. A religion that increases followers is more true while one that loses followers is less true.
First... if they had a third, they would have used it.
If they had just been "big bombs that killed 200,000 people" they would have probably used them again.
However, it became clear over time that the radiological effects (that everyone was ignorant of) were much nastier than they thought. Once the sheer nastiness of nukes became clear, no one was really ready to use them again.
I'm pretty sure the US arsenal is considerably smaller than Russia's (tho more accurate).
But hey... the main point is-- No major country filled with people of a variety of political bents has ever used a nuke again. In 53 years now. However, there are many terrorist organizations that would use them immediately-- fully knowing what they do.
And the easier it gets to make nukes, the smaller the terrorist organization that can make them.
However- a lot of this has been known since the 1950's. I remember reading in Analog about how to shape the plutonium and how to use dynamite to force it together. The only thing the article pointed out is that the people making the bomb would probably die.... but today we have a lot of kooks willing.. hell HAPPY... to die.
For cameras, paint-ball guns are probably best.
And, of course, when they outlaw paint-ball guns, only terrorists will have paint-ball guns.
The singularity is very close. So many trends towards horribleness. I start to think that the late 50's to late 70's was about as good as it is going to get.
Aids is a joke in historical terms.
A large portion of the population of africa will be immune to it in under 100 years. And it will still be virulent to the rest of the world -- mostly because the mortality rate in africa has been very high so there is an extreme selective pressure.
Any population... bacteria... humans... deer... will suffer large losses but the survivors will repopulate at a very high rate.
The loss of food is probably more dangerous since we might exterminate ourselves fighting over that last slice of toast.
No.
The point of non-proliferation is that unlike the U.S. who used the weapons twice and then stopped because they were horrified, there are a lot of crazy fucks on this planet who know what nukes do and would love to use them.
Nukes and biological warfare are likely end scenarios in our lifetime. As it gets easier and easier to do this kind of thing, smaller and smaller groups can pull it off. I'm certain within my life time some terrorist organization is going to release a deadly flu or enhanced disease into the US using suicidal (or unwitting) humans to transport into the target country.
Do you think the US, Russia, China, or any other rational country is going to use Nukes first again? I think not.
Do you think there are many terrorist organizations that would use nukes if they had them? I think so.
Why do you wonder if he feels strongly about Any sufficiently advanced chatbot is indistinguishable from an intelligent being?
(So is your real name Eliza, eln?)
Hmmm.
Well we could use Gates... die his hair black and have him grow a little mustache. And he would have to take up painting but suck at it -- or perhaps develop a bad painting program.
Linus seems a little too young, doesn't smoke as much, doesn't drink as much, and lacks the cool british accent Churchill had.
Richard is a bit crazy-- seems more of a pol pot than anything in WWII-- perhaps a japanese type with "fight to the death".
In general I think that Opensource is, to a large extent, a war of large corporations against other large corporations with proprietary software. It's wonderful and we will benefit.
I think if you extend things forward 20 years, word processers, audio editors, video editors and other key tools will all be open source, free, and completely rock. Openoffice just gets better and better. Meanwhile, word is starting to make things worse trying to differentiate themselves from openoffice. In the end-- word processing is a fixed set of functions and all will be implemented.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=T&t=1y
The investors in AT&T have lost about 10% of their value in the last year.
They never recovered from 2001 are still at about 60% of their value then.
This is true for many large corporations today.
The executive class is looting and pillaging corporations at the expense of
a) the workers (1 executive pay == 6000 $40k workers)
b) the investors (see stock performance above-- think about adding $155 mill in profits that went to one man who took Home depot into the toilet)
c) the country (you want them to open in your area- give them no taxes for 10 years-- so they destroy your roads and you pay to fix them-- in many cases the instant the tax breaks end, they leave)
the truly wealthy investors are right now taking huge baths in muni bonds and hedge funds.
The executive class in America is a source of many of our problems today. And they are getting away with it.
Humans start lying to protect themselves at 3. They start lying to protect others around 5.
I hurt every word I type.
Mousing sucks worse.
I would like a visual rig to move the mouse (look at the screen and the cursor goes there) and a vocal rig for clicking and typing.
This development sounds really exciting.
There is a new book out-- "The Three Trillion Dollar War".
Basically.. the cost of supporting all the injured vets (who are surviving some pretty horrific injuries compared to past wars) and other cleanup type activities means this war is going to cost us 3 trillion.
I think they are going to stiff the vets for their benefits personally. That's what they usually do.
I've gotten 7 tickets in my life (ruh roh... comedy ticket class here I come again).
I've had 5 policemen who were extremely polite and professional and 2 that were complete jerks despite the fact that I was remaining polite. I donate money to the private policemen's death fund here.
The funniest was when I was with a friend who had a speed detector.
The cop had "popped" us and *knew* we were going over 75 in a 65 at night in west texas as were most of the rest of the cars.
But by the time he pulled behind us and painted us (for a good 5 minutes) we were holding solid at 65.
So he pulled us over anyway and inspected the entire car to see if he could find anything wrong (looked at the front a long time for some odd reason) and finally wrote us a warning for 77. That's when I learned that they can't ticket based on "popping" apparently.
He was very polite and professional tho. We saw seven speed traps that night between san antonio and fort stockton. None at all on our return trip 5 days later.
Gave respect for radar detectors for the first time in my life. They really are wonderful in those 110 mile stretches of "nothing" out west.
Let's do the math...
$19.99 for a movie I'll see once.
vs
5 hours of downloading the picture (plus maintaining my ratio... plus occasionally bad movies... plus acceptable but lower resolution than a DVD with occasional embarrassing block glitches).
Hmmm. The download wins.
---
$4.99 for a movie I'll see once.
vs
5 hours of downloading the picture (plus maintaining my ratio... plus occasionally bad movies... plus acceptable but lower resolution than a DVD with occasional embarrassing block glitches).
Hmmm. I'll buy it.
---
$20 for "all I can eat rentals"
vs
5 hours of downloading the picture (plus maintaining my ratio... plus occasionally bad movies... plus acceptable but lower resolution than a DVD with occasional embarrassing block glitches).
For some reason.. the download wins for me. I like *possessing* a copy of the movie so I can wake up at 4am and watch it.
---
Have I spent the $80 a month I can spend on DVD's and CD's?
Yes... then I'll download the rest feeling that I've given my sacrifice of cash to hollywood.
All this ignores the facts that
a) compensation levels in hollywood are way above norm.
b) most pirated material would not have been purchased at anywhere near retail prices*
c) a lot of piracy leads to sales that would not have otherwise occured**
d) there are many, many, many forms of entertainment competing for our entertainment time and money***
---
* Filling an ipod at retail- $10,000. This just isn't going to happen. That's after taxes. So that's like taking a $20k cut in pay after taxes. JUST to fill the ipod.
** I was given a pirated band CD. I'd never heard of the band. Now i own one of their CD's, have gone to four of their concerts, and bought two of their T-Shirts from their web site.
*** And most of us will spend most of our time on the cheapest entertainment.
Today's cult... tomorrow's mainstream religion.
Oft repeated story-- but don't see it here yet.
Bob Heinlein and Elron Hubbard were discussing how to make money at the 195(3?) World SF con and decided religion was much more effective. They made a bar bet as to who could found a religion. Heinlein's book was "Stranger in a Strange Land"... Hubbard's book was "Dienetics".
The rest... is history.
The governor transported them across state lines, wired funds across state lines, muddied the transaction to hide the real purpose of the wire transfer,
oh.. and he also used hookers after building a career prosecuting them.
Wales-- we need to see more data. The IRS will probably be interested in $5k... er... donations that were not reported as income... and the rest of us will be interested in $5k donations that were reported as income at the same time as Merkey alleges.