>With the approach the MPAA applies, bars, clubs, etc. would be shut down when a couple patrons are arrested for drug dealing
You don't mean like the recently passed US law that holds event organizers liable to felony convictions if people smoke pot at the event in question, do you?
I'm in the same metro area as you. I have Qwest DSL through Front Range Internet (because I already was using FRII as my ISP.) FRII's cost was $20/mo for dialup. Upgrading to 256k DSL was another $15/mo on my Qwest bill. I wouldn't mind a straight $30/mo broadband. But I wouldn't pay AOL ten cents to pull me out of quicksand...
They tried. In the early-mid-1990's Radio Shack opened a technical arm called TechAmerica, including a few storefronts and a huge webpresence. I could walk into their store and say "I want a 7408" and the guy would say "do you really, or do you want a 74F08?" They even offered ADC's... in different resolutions.
Guess what? It failed. Massively. Nobody wanted that kind of service. Those few of us who actually build stuff order it from Jameco, and everyone else wants cellphones and cheap plastic crap. TechAmerica was gone *before* the dotcom disaster, as I recall.
Too bad. I used to have three good electronics stores within 30 km. Now I have none.
Like the other reply said: *bacteria* die almost immediately at high temperatures, but spores survive a short boiling. Thes guys say three minutes.
As they mention, the problem is that boiling does nothing for removing horrible tastes or toxic chemicals, which is where reverse osmosis and evaporation/condensation really start to shine.
All the sterilization equipment I've used has relied on pressurized steam. That does a pretty good job, but it's not at all clear that it'll stop prions, which, again, reverse osmosis or distillation will handle.
It's probably related: I've found that when I take people out to Moab, Utah, and ride the Slickrock trail on my bike, it works MUCH better for first-timers if we get there in the evening, go out and ride a short segment, go eat dinner, and go ride the whole thing the next day, than if they just try and ride the whole thing in the morning, at the same time they would've without the intro. It gives the brain a chance to prepare. That's just the most obvious example I've noticed, but I've seen the same thing in teaching fencing and in learning some flying stuff: do something easy but related, sleep, then go back and try it again and the improvement is really amazing, much moreso than if you tried something in the morning and then again that evening.
If you had any details about that French airplane I'd really like to hear about it. Most of the time crankshafts (except for rotaries like the RX7) are nothing near straight, by their very function. Airplanes with prop speed reduction, like the WWII Airacobra, had cannons firing down the prop driveshaft, but it was neither a crank nor colinear with it. But they did all sorts of weird stuff during WWI so I wouldn't be surprised to find out someone had figured out something I've never heard of.
There are a bunch of companies making Wankel rotary engines. Mazda is just the only one doing it for cars.
For what it's worth, I loathed LOTR because I'd read the books about 8 times back in the '70's and '80's and thought the elisions in the film were awful. However, there ARE spectacular renditions of books that are utterly different: as mentioned previously, Blade Runner is a spectacular movie, very different from the book, and The Princess Bride likewise. Both are superb books, superb movies, which show only some relationship to one another.
I have a 41CV in my flight bag: I've programmed it to act like an aviation calculator. It's very nice. Typing alpha stuff on it is kind of slow... My carry-around calculator is an HP15C, though. It's programmable (kind of) and very conveniently sized, it's RPN, I've memorized the key positions so I can use and program it without looking at it, and best of all it's run through a grand total of two sets of batteries since I got it in 1984. (No, it's not solar-powered.)
wow, here's some great stuff on the 9830. I didn't know it had 15K of memory, or that it could support a 1.5M hard drive. I remember the audio tape storage, though, and recording a program in the middle of a tape of Handel's Messiah and putting it in the stereo to play. This page calls it the first Personal Computer ever, but says it was actually released in late 1972, not 1971, as I remember. (Of course, I was like two at the time...) It also has a good picture of a segment of the display, which was a 7x5 not a 9x5. When it ran for a while it always filled the room with that old HP smell, of hot circuit boards but specifically HP boards. Other companies smelled different.
I realized the fundamental difference between cat people and the rest of us when listening to my girlfriend talk about her cat with her mother.
Normal person: "my cat leaves hair all over my clothes, every time I try and read a newspaper the cat comes over and sits right where I'm trying to read, and it wakes me up in the middle of the night meowing because it's forgotten where its foodbowl is. Stupid cat."
Cat person: "my cat leaves hair all over my clothes, every time I try and read a newspaper the cat comes over and sits right where I'm trying to read, and it wakes me up in the middle of the night meowing because it's forgotten where its foodbowl is. Isn't that CUUUUUUUUTE?"
I'm not joking: she said the second sentence more or less word-for-word. That's when I started reading more about cognitive dissonance and other pathologic coping strategies.
An HP 9830 "desktop" computer. It had an integral thermal printer, and the two together weighed about 80 pounds. It had no processor: it was entirely TTL. The screen was a fiber optic display consisting of about 30 9x5 arrays, so it could display one line of text. It had 1K of memory, I believe, and ran a primitive version of BASIC called (informally) Rocky Mountain BASIC, which was an HP standard in the '70's. I think it was released in 1970, and we got ours in 1974, on loan from dad's work. We kept it until the early '80's, when we upgraded to a Series 80 which actually had a DISPLAY and GRAPHICS and stuff. I think the 9830 was the first full-keyboard desktop computer ever produced. It certainly was HP's first.
I don't think anyone can truthfully say they haven't been influenced by ads -- negative influence ("I *hate* Tom Shane and his stupid damn jewelry store") is influence.
With that said, every one of the items you've mentioned, I'd say I've found out through personal research (my car) or from odd interactions (car and house insurance because they were the insurers of someone who hit me and they were so much nicer than MY insurance I switched, for instance.) But that's just anecdotal: we ARE merchandising. It has affected every aspect of our lives, whether we like it or not. Read "Commodify Your Dissent" or anything by Neil Postman for more details, particularly "How To Watch The TV News".
The parent didn't make it quite clear. You don't know which sheep is the bellwether unless you've been observing them for a looooooong time, and then you figure out which sheep is the one that the others are following, and you attach the bell for YOUR convenience, so that if you need them to go somewhere you can go encourage that specific sheep to do what you want, and the others will follow. They're not following the bell, they're following the sheep. YOU (as a shepherd) are following the bell.
The point of the book is that humans probably act the same way, and in this particular case there was a stupid, annoying office clerk who was doing kind of dumb stuff that the protagonist of the book saw other people doing, later, so she realized that the person was a human bellwether. Unfortunately, by that time she'd quit and gone somewhere else without having been belled.
It's a good book, like all the stuff she's written.
How about one every 40 days? Coz that's roughly how long it takes for us to kill the same number of people with automobiles that died in the planes and the towers. I don't see Bush invading Detroit to seize and destroy their Weapons Of Mass Destruction, though. We've been killing off 25,000-40,000 people a year for decades with cars, and not only are we not fighting it, we're raising speed limits because we've decided that the death rate is okay and since it was dropping with widespread use of seatbelts and airbags, we, as a country, figured we'd raise it right back up again by driving faster. Convenience is more important than killing people, so yeah, I'd say we can very well afford to ignore a terrorist attack or two.
This isn't about the people who died -- not for the people changing the laws, or ignoring them, it's not. It's about a power grab. There is always an uneasy tension between those who hold the power and those who elected the powerholders. Now that the electorate is scared, it gives the powerholders leeway to push as far as they can, and their ability to push is leveraged by new surveillance techniques.
Well said. I just posted on another/. thread, that the best way to pacify people is to give them something to lose.
As far as the 'before we revolt' thing, as one of my friends says: "Run out into the street with guns in both hands. If there's nobody else out on the streets waving guns, go back inside and wait a while before doing it again." And then he says, "I remember when that joke used to be funny..."
Now I'm stepping into the range of religion-racism: the underlying message of Christianity is, or SHOULD be, to love your fellow human being and to treat other people the way you wish to be treated; there is AFAIK only one specific incident of Jesus acting violently in the Bible, when he stormed the temple and chased out the money-changers with a bullwhip. In marked contrast, Mohammed's first act as a divine person -- again AFAIK -- was to call up an army to storm, occupy, and destroy a town that had treated him badly. Not to say there's not plenty of that kind of action in the Old Testament of the Bible (which Islam shares, to a large extent, with Christianity) but I think there are some fundamental differences between the teachings of Jesus and Mohammed as regards peace and pacifism.
Maybe. I think it's more like those 50 year old women you see in bars, wearing the Harley t-shirts and yelling about how they went to Lollapalooza and screwed Geoff Tate or something.
But Islam was the voice of moderation for the first five hundred years of its existence: it was the intellectual bright light of the Western world until the 1600's Renaissance in Europe. During the Middle Ages, Islam kept and studied the old Greek texts the Christians were burning, did really good research into math, chemistry, and anatomy, and generally acted like they were the only reasonable path towards higher learning. They're not in the terrible twos: it's like (a very small group of) Islam has regressed to an earlier more horrible time.
If a bunch of Christians in the US started burning down buildings (rather than just picketing films they find offensive, like they did for The Last Temptation Of Christ) they'd be treated like Eric Randolph has been: hunted down, arrested, lose their jobs, their houses... but when you're living in tarpaper shacks you don't have the money to purchase, in a society where other people can't afford to sue you for violating the civil rights they don't have anyway, what's to lose by burning down some buildings?
To put it another way, the single best way of pacifying a community is giving people something to lose. Nothing turns someone who doesn't think deeply into a peaceful person as quickly as possessions.
Not that anyone will read this but I know one definite chimera and another probable. My cousin's daughter has 1/4 (roughly) of the cells in her body with an extra bit of one chromosome: she's 1/4th Down's Syndrome. She looks a little bit odd, is hyperflexible (can put her legs behind her back, the way some people can put their ankles behind their neck only moreso), has to wear enormous glasses, and lags a tiny bit behind her peers in school, but is reading, writing, and generally acting just like a normal kid. I also dated a woman who looked like two closely-related but different people depending on which side of her you were standing: different eye colors, different leg lengths, slightly different hair color, differently-sized breasts, and it was my assumption that she is a bilateral chimera, which is *really* rare. But I suspect that chimeras in general aren't all that rare: it's just almost impossible to tell unless there are either pathologies (trisomy 22, like my cousin's child) or physical localization of the chimeric tissue (like my ex-gf.) On which general subject, I've read articles claiming that large localized albinism, like Cruella DeVille's white strand of hair (which both my great-grandmother and grandmother had) are a type of chimera where there was a mutation in a cell early on in development, that resulted in a localized area grown from that cell. Not a true chimera insofar as there's not actually a different set of DNA from inheritance (which is actually the case with my cousin's child as well, now that I think of it.)
I'm curious who you're using. I'm in west Denver, using FRII as my ISP, but they have a deal with Qwest for DSL so my DSL shows up on the Qwest phone bill. I'd like to write Qwest a really nasty little note along the lines of "your service so far has been relatively acceptable, but if I hear one word about you starting to charge content providers money to deliver high-speed content to me, I'll be gone so fast your head will spin" but in order to do that effectively I better have some options besides just Comcast to list. Someone who can provide independent DSL would give me some maneuvering room. It's not unlikely that I'm out of other DSLAM ranges because I live in a crappy neighborhood, but at least there's a possibility.
My gf's 13 years younger than me. It's worked well for almost 3 years now. But she's clearly not done growing, emotionally: she's a kid in some ways. It has its problems. And there's social pressure against it. It's not like people whisper and point: I look a lot younger than I am and she looks older than she is. But when people find out they usually react by saying a lot of negative things. My grandparents -- both sets -- had about the same age difference, but for whatever reason it was completely acceptable in the 1920's, and my grandmother has said (when she thought I wasn't in hearing range) that she doesn't see how anyone could date someone that much younger, which kind of amuses/confuses me.
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>With the approach the MPAA applies, bars, clubs, etc. would be shut down when a couple patrons are arrested for drug dealing
You don't mean like the recently passed US law that holds event organizers liable to felony convictions if people smoke pot at the event in question, do you?
I'm in the same metro area as you. I have Qwest DSL through Front Range Internet (because I already was using FRII as my ISP.) FRII's cost was $20/mo for dialup. Upgrading to 256k DSL was another $15/mo on my Qwest bill. I wouldn't mind a straight $30/mo broadband. But I wouldn't pay AOL ten cents to pull me out of quicksand...
They tried. In the early-mid-1990's Radio Shack opened a technical arm called TechAmerica, including a few storefronts and a huge webpresence. I could walk into their store and say "I want a 7408" and the guy would say "do you really, or do you want a 74F08?" They even offered ADC's ... in different resolutions.
Guess what? It failed. Massively. Nobody wanted that kind of service. Those few of us who actually build stuff order it from Jameco, and everyone else wants cellphones and cheap plastic crap. TechAmerica was gone *before* the dotcom disaster, as I recall.
Too bad. I used to have three good electronics stores within 30 km. Now I have none.
Like the other reply said: *bacteria* die almost immediately at high temperatures, but spores survive a short boiling.
Thes guys say three minutes.
As they mention, the problem is that boiling does nothing for removing horrible tastes or toxic chemicals, which is where reverse osmosis and evaporation/condensation really start to shine.
All the sterilization equipment I've used has relied on pressurized steam. That does a pretty good job, but it's not at all clear that it'll stop prions, which, again, reverse osmosis or distillation will handle.
It's probably related: I've found that when I take people out to Moab, Utah, and ride the Slickrock trail on my bike, it works MUCH better for first-timers if we get there in the evening, go out and ride a short segment, go eat dinner, and go ride the whole thing the next day, than if they just try and ride the whole thing in the morning, at the same time they would've without the intro. It gives the brain a chance to prepare. That's just the most obvious example I've noticed, but I've seen the same thing in teaching fencing and in learning some flying stuff: do something easy but related, sleep, then go back and try it again and the improvement is really amazing, much moreso than if you tried something in the morning and then again that evening.
If you had any details about that French airplane I'd really like to hear about it. Most of the time crankshafts (except for rotaries like the RX7) are nothing near straight, by their very function. Airplanes with prop speed reduction, like the WWII Airacobra, had cannons firing down the prop driveshaft, but it was neither a crank nor colinear with it. But they did all sorts of weird stuff during WWI so I wouldn't be surprised to find out someone had figured out something I've never heard of.
There are a bunch of companies making Wankel rotary engines. Mazda is just the only one doing it for cars.
As one of my friends says, never underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx truck full of DVD's.
For what it's worth, I loathed LOTR because I'd read the books about 8 times back in the '70's and '80's and thought the elisions in the film were awful. However, there ARE spectacular renditions of books that are utterly different: as mentioned previously, Blade Runner is a spectacular movie, very different from the book, and The Princess Bride likewise. Both are superb books, superb movies, which show only some relationship to one another.
I have a 41CV in my flight bag: I've programmed it to act like an aviation calculator. It's very nice. Typing alpha stuff on it is kind of slow... My carry-around calculator is an HP15C, though. It's programmable (kind of) and very conveniently sized, it's RPN, I've memorized the key positions so I can use and program it without looking at it, and best of all it's run through a grand total of two sets of batteries since I got it in 1984. (No, it's not solar-powered.)
wow, here's some great stuff on the 9830. I didn't know it had 15K of memory, or that it could support a 1.5M hard drive. I remember the audio tape storage, though, and recording a program in the middle of a tape of Handel's Messiah and putting it in the stereo to play. This page calls it the first Personal Computer ever, but says it was actually released in late 1972, not 1971, as I remember. (Of course, I was like two at the time...) It also has a good picture of a segment of the display, which was a 7x5 not a 9x5. When it ran for a while it always filled the room with that old HP smell, of hot circuit boards but specifically HP boards. Other companies smelled different.
I realized the fundamental difference between cat people and the rest of us when listening to my girlfriend talk about her cat with her mother.
Normal person: "my cat leaves hair all over my clothes, every time I try and read a newspaper the cat comes over and sits right where I'm trying to read, and it wakes me up in the middle of the night meowing because it's forgotten where its foodbowl is. Stupid cat."
Cat person: "my cat leaves hair all over my clothes, every time I try and read a newspaper the cat comes over and sits right where I'm trying to read, and it wakes me up in the middle of the night meowing because it's forgotten where its foodbowl is. Isn't that CUUUUUUUUTE?"
I'm not joking: she said the second sentence more or less word-for-word. That's when I started reading more about cognitive dissonance and other pathologic coping strategies.
And I still think cats are stupid.
An HP 9830 "desktop" computer. It had an integral thermal printer, and the two together weighed about 80 pounds. It had no processor: it was entirely TTL. The screen was a fiber optic display consisting of about 30 9x5 arrays, so it could display one line of text. It had 1K of memory, I believe, and ran a primitive version of BASIC called (informally) Rocky Mountain BASIC, which was an HP standard in the '70's. I think it was released in 1970, and we got ours in 1974, on loan from dad's work. We kept it until the early '80's, when we upgraded to a Series 80 which actually had a DISPLAY and GRAPHICS and stuff. I think the 9830 was the first full-keyboard desktop computer ever produced. It certainly was HP's first.
I don't think anyone can truthfully say they haven't been influenced by ads -- negative influence ("I *hate* Tom Shane and his stupid damn jewelry store") is influence.
With that said, every one of the items you've mentioned, I'd say I've found out through personal research (my car) or from odd interactions (car and house insurance because they were the insurers of someone who hit me and they were so much nicer than MY insurance I switched, for instance.) But that's just anecdotal: we ARE merchandising. It has affected every aspect of our lives, whether we like it or not. Read "Commodify Your Dissent" or anything by Neil Postman for more details, particularly "How To Watch The TV News".
The parent didn't make it quite clear. You don't know which sheep is the bellwether unless you've been observing them for a looooooong time, and then you figure out which sheep is the one that the others are following, and you attach the bell for YOUR convenience, so that if you need them to go somewhere you can go encourage that specific sheep to do what you want, and the others will follow. They're not following the bell, they're following the sheep. YOU (as a shepherd) are following the bell.
The point of the book is that humans probably act the same way, and in this particular case there was a stupid, annoying office clerk who was doing kind of dumb stuff that the protagonist of the book saw other people doing, later, so she realized that the person was a human bellwether. Unfortunately, by that time she'd quit and gone somewhere else without having been belled.
It's a good book, like all the stuff she's written.
How about one every 40 days? Coz that's roughly how long it takes for us to kill the same number of people with automobiles that died in the planes and the towers. I don't see Bush invading Detroit to seize and destroy their Weapons Of Mass Destruction, though. We've been killing off 25,000-40,000 people a year for decades with cars, and not only are we not fighting it, we're raising speed limits because we've decided that the death rate is okay and since it was dropping with widespread use of seatbelts and airbags, we, as a country, figured we'd raise it right back up again by driving faster. Convenience is more important than killing people, so yeah, I'd say we can very well afford to ignore a terrorist attack or two.
This isn't about the people who died -- not for the people changing the laws, or ignoring them, it's not. It's about a power grab. There is always an uneasy tension between those who hold the power and those who elected the powerholders. Now that the electorate is scared, it gives the powerholders leeway to push as far as they can, and their ability to push is leveraged by new surveillance techniques.
We need a Right To Privacy Amendment.
Well said. I just posted on another /. thread, that the best way to pacify people is to give them something to lose.
As far as the 'before we revolt' thing, as one of my friends says:
"Run out into the street with guns in both hands. If there's nobody else out on the streets waving guns, go back inside and wait a while before doing it again."
And then he says, "I remember when that joke used to be funny..."
>Had she not wanted to be disruptive she would have not worn the shirt at all.
I can't imagine that a topless middle-aged woman would be anything but very disruptive.
(I already got a +5 interesting today so I can afford to go for low humor.)
Well, no WONDER a quick google search didn't find anything on him. Sheesh. Thank you. I must not be taking enough memory pills.
Now I'm stepping into the range of religion-racism: the underlying message of Christianity is, or SHOULD be, to love your fellow human being and to treat other people the way you wish to be treated; there is AFAIK only one specific incident of Jesus acting violently in the Bible, when he stormed the temple and chased out the money-changers with a bullwhip. In marked contrast, Mohammed's first act as a divine person -- again AFAIK -- was to call up an army to storm, occupy, and destroy a town that had treated him badly. Not to say there's not plenty of that kind of action in the Old Testament of the Bible (which Islam shares, to a large extent, with Christianity) but I think there are some fundamental differences between the teachings of Jesus and Mohammed as regards peace and pacifism.
Maybe. I think it's more like those 50 year old women you see in bars, wearing the Harley t-shirts and yelling about how they went to Lollapalooza and screwed Geoff Tate or something.
But Islam was the voice of moderation for the first five hundred years of its existence: it was the intellectual bright light of the Western world until the 1600's Renaissance in Europe. During the Middle Ages, Islam kept and studied the old Greek texts the Christians were burning, did really good research into math, chemistry, and anatomy, and generally acted like they were the only reasonable path towards higher learning. They're not in the terrible twos: it's like (a very small group of) Islam has regressed to an earlier more horrible time.
If a bunch of Christians in the US started burning down buildings (rather than just picketing films they find offensive, like they did for The Last Temptation Of Christ) they'd be treated like Eric Randolph has been: hunted down, arrested, lose their jobs, their houses... but when you're living in tarpaper shacks you don't have the money to purchase, in a society where other people can't afford to sue you for violating the civil rights they don't have anyway, what's to lose by burning down some buildings?
To put it another way, the single best way of pacifying a community is giving people something to lose. Nothing turns someone who doesn't think deeply into a peaceful person as quickly as possessions.
Not that anyone will read this but I know one definite chimera and another probable. My cousin's daughter has 1/4 (roughly) of the cells in her body with an extra bit of one chromosome: she's 1/4th Down's Syndrome. She looks a little bit odd, is hyperflexible (can put her legs behind her back, the way some people can put their ankles behind their neck only moreso), has to wear enormous glasses, and lags a tiny bit behind her peers in school, but is reading, writing, and generally acting just like a normal kid. I also dated a woman who looked like two closely-related but different people depending on which side of her you were standing: different eye colors, different leg lengths, slightly different hair color, differently-sized breasts, and it was my assumption that she is a bilateral chimera, which is *really* rare. But I suspect that chimeras in general aren't all that rare: it's just almost impossible to tell unless there are either pathologies (trisomy 22, like my cousin's child) or physical localization of the chimeric tissue (like my ex-gf.) On which general subject, I've read articles claiming that large localized albinism, like Cruella DeVille's white strand of hair (which both my great-grandmother and grandmother had) are a type of chimera where there was a mutation in a cell early on in development, that resulted in a localized area grown from that cell. Not a true chimera insofar as there's not actually a different set of DNA from inheritance (which is actually the case with my cousin's child as well, now that I think of it.)
I'm curious who you're using. I'm in west Denver, using FRII as my ISP, but they have a deal with Qwest for DSL so my DSL shows up on the Qwest phone bill. I'd like to write Qwest a really nasty little note along the lines of "your service so far has been relatively acceptable, but if I hear one word about you starting to charge content providers money to deliver high-speed content to me, I'll be gone so fast your head will spin" but in order to do that effectively I better have some options besides just Comcast to list. Someone who can provide independent DSL would give me some maneuvering room. It's not unlikely that I'm out of other DSLAM ranges because I live in a crappy neighborhood, but at least there's a possibility.
My gf's 13 years younger than me. It's worked well for almost 3 years now. But she's clearly not done growing, emotionally: she's a kid in some ways. It has its problems. And there's social pressure against it. It's not like people whisper and point: I look a lot younger than I am and she looks older than she is. But when people find out they usually react by saying a lot of negative things. My grandparents -- both sets -- had about the same age difference, but for whatever reason it was completely acceptable in the 1920's, and my grandmother has said (when she thought I wasn't in hearing range) that she doesn't see how anyone could date someone that much younger, which kind of amuses/confuses me.