That depends on where the revenue stream is. If they can sell you a disk with 99% of the movie on it, and then, for free or a micropayment, let you log onto their server to get enough to decrypt what you have and watch it, then broadband costs more than it is worth. What it comes down to is: are the companies selling bandwidth or are they selling movies? Once they decide where the profit margin is, they'll decide which they're selling. Or, they'll sell you both and charge you for both, if that's the most profitable model. But, in any case, they want you online because it's likely the more attached to them you are, the more money they can extract from you.
It's also a delaying action until the time when they can reasonably expect to sell video playback devices that are always connected to a network, at which point they can do crypto exchange of passwords with a remote server and the consumer is, officially, screwed. It's just that right now not enough consumers will buy stuff that demands connectivity before it'll work.
I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that, on the off-chance they were recording it and claimed I'd made a verbal contract with them. It'd be possible to get in really serious trouble if they decided to push it.
I just reply that I'm new and don't know much about the group, but I know someone they should call who DOES know a lot about the internal structure of the company... and give them HR's phone number.
They're doing their research and targetting individuals -- lower-level employees aren't recruited but are asked about their coworkers, their supervisors, asked if they can provide organizational charts. Sometimes the recruiters pretext and claim to be from my company's HR department, asking about recent organizational changes and can they get an updated org chart? So their motives are definitely not wound up with *my* morale or willingness to stay with the company, which is why I believe they're actually recruiters who are just trying to get names.
>I think the people in the world we loosely classify as "right wing" could be better described as those who believe in and desire a caste system for our society, where the "right" kind of people enjoy freedom, democracy, prosperity, etc, and where the "wrong" kind of people are "protected" or "supervised" or whatever other euphemisms for serfdom and slavery are in vogue at the moment.
I'm not disputing your general assertion, that people who try to control what other people say, like the person you're replying to clearly was, are bastards. But -- and I'm saying this as a way left-wing borderline nutjob -- just as many people on the far left do this. The anti-porn activists are half right-wing Christian controlfreaks and half left-wing ultrafeminist controlfreaks. It's the controlfreak that's the problem. Some people believe that nobody should be allowed to talk or think about things they don't like. That's the problem, they're the problem. It has little to do with right/left, and a lot to do with the freedom/authority continuum. I'm way left, but I'm also way freedom, and fundamentally, it's the freedom to talk about anything we want, that gives us the footing to be left or right.
For the record, the system for figuring out who were Bad People and who weren't was scanning the users' information pages, looking for interests that fuzzily matched 'incest' (or 1nc3s+') or 'non-con' or the like. A fairly large number of people -- over 15%, given my random sampling, and that's bigger than it'd seem given that probably half the user accounts are no longer in use -- have changed their interests list to read just 'censorship' or some superset of it. (Censoring-bastard-LJ-admins, logical fallacy, and the like...)
Executive incursions into civil liberties happen, but sometimes, when they go too far, too fast, or they're just discovered suddenly, they get ratcheted right back to where they started. Much of what Bush is doing -- well, much of what the people telling Bush what to do -- is seen explicitly as a reaction to the loss of Presidential power following the Nixon debacle. Nixon screwed up, and many privileges the Executive had assumed or had abused were removed, and oversight was put in place. What Bush's cronies are trying to do is turn back the clock to Eisenhower's time.
But those are small-scale corrections. What you're talking about, the full-fledged descent into fascism, is much nastier because by the time that the problem is apparent, there's no longer any system for correcting the problems, because that system has been ripped out. When the vox populi is silent out of fear, the system's probably no longer closed-loop and there are no limits in how bad it can get.
The scary thing is that at least at the beginning, it's probably not possible to tell whether it's heading down the small-correction route or the big-disaster route, and probably by the time it is, it's already too late in the case that it's the big-disaster route.
Given that this is the same guy who doesn't seem to realize that condoms reduce the risk of contracting AIDS why would we expect him to understand the first thing about net neutrality? As lots of people point out, it's incredibly difficult to get someone to understand something when he's being paid by AT&T to not understand it?
Well, *sort* of. I don't think this is the case any longer, but up until fairly recently, Colorado's way of working with automotive insurance was that in the event of an accident, your insurance paid for damages to your car, and the other driver's insurance paid for damage to the other driver's car. If the other driver was uninsured -- which is illegal, mind you -- your insurance covered uninsured drivers, so paid for injuries to the uninsured driver as well as covering yours. Since bicyclists, pedestrians, skateboarders, scooter-riders, and the like, are uninsured, they were covered under this.
Now that Colorado's gone back to being an at-fault state, the driver at fault's insurance pays for all the damage done to all parties involved. (This has the unintended consequence of adding incentive to lie and/or litigate to avoid being called at-fault, by the way: my brother was run down while riding his bike to work, by a woman who ran a red light, and her police statement said she was crossing a green light and HE ran the red. Thankfully he had lots of witnesses, so she had a really bad day for making a false statement to police. But if he hadn't had witnesses, he would've had a problem, seeing as they had to haul him out in a helicopter with multiple broken bones in his face, which probably would've affected his credibility as a witness.)
Heh. Since I'm vaguely atheist, I hadn't really thought about it, but you're right. I mentally substitute "because that's the way it SHOULD be" for "God would know."
I'm not saying it's a good idea. Personally, I change mine every 5000 miles, although with synthetic oil, BMW claims you can go 15,000 miles, and AmSol claims you can go 25,000 between oil changes.
However, I can tell you from personal experience that it is, indeed, possible to drive a new car 100,000 miles and have it still running at the end.
>We don't feel guilty when there's no risk of being punished,
Speak for yourself. I feel vaguely uncomfortable running stoplights on my bicycle, when it's 3AM and I know there isn't a cop within km of where I am -- because I think that running stoplights is wrong. (Why do I run them? Because my bike won't trigger the traffic detector since it's mostly not metal.)
Some people make the distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures: shame cultures are where morality is mostly external, and society punishes people when they're caught, so they feel badly about being caught, essentially, whereas guilt cultures rely on people feeling badly about what they've done, even if nobody knows.
To paraphrasean old story, a furnituremaker asked a Shaker why they used wooden pegs and beautiful craftsmanship to hold chairs together, even on inside joints where nobody could ever possibly know that they hadn't used glue/nails. The Shaker said, "God would know." That's a guilt culture right there.
We live in the world you propose. Look at cats: are they ever going to develop civilization? Dogs, however... the point being: cooperation, sharing research (violating IP laws!) is behavior intended to further the group's well-being, while at the same time furthering the individual's well-being by being associated with the new-found gains.
To make a long story short: if you look at zero-sum games, and have a large number of players playing zero-sum games repeatedly with one another, players that show altruistic behavior will do very well when playing together -- so well that they will eventually outcompete players that show non-trusting or actively distrusting behavior. So, after a while, you select for altrustic behavior. But at the same time, each individual player always has a strong incentive to behave selfishly, since the benefit to that player might be great enough to offset the future losses from being identified as a non-trustworthy player. This, in a nutshell, is human civilization. We are caught between the desire to cooperate and help one another, because it's a successful strategy under most circumstances, and the desire to make a fast break and run off with all the money, because it's an amazingly successful strategy under some unusual circumstances.
The church I was raised in said, essentially, that the essence of evil was not a personified being but the draw of behavior that helps an individual at a cost to society as a whole. Their view of the world is, essentially, exactly what you're proposing: a world in which being Good is necessarily focussing your efforts on others in an attempt to bootstrap your whole {family,community,world} up to a higher place.
I really became aware of car mechanics when I was reading John Steinbeck's "The Grapes Of Wrath" and the Joads were driving from Oklahoma to California and had to stop because the engine was acting up, so beside the side of the road they pulled the head, pulled the valves, reground (with a hand-file) all the valve stems, and replaced the valve seats, put it back together, and started driving again. Hey, cool -- you can do all your repairs by hand! by the side of the road! rather than using a CNC grinder to get the right relief angle on your valves! But you can't drive from Oklahoma to California without doing basically a complete engine rebuild, which is a lot less cool than being able to rebuild the engine with hand tools is cool.
And they also got about 15,000 miles before you had to regrind all the valves because the valve seats were so soft. And they had negligible oil pressure because the oil pump, such as it was, just splashed oil up onto the main bearing ends and bottoms of the pistons, so if you did anything interesting involving lateral acceleration the engine would oil-starve and the bearings would all start galling. And because of the gravity feed fuel system, you couldn't drive up a hill forwards unless you had an absolutely full tank of gas, so you had to back up the hill.
Yes, it was extremely simple. It was even moderately sturdy for short periods of time. But reliable? compared to modern cars that can go 100,000 miles with *no service* -- not even oil changes -- it was a fiendish monster of horror and misery.
and, having rebuilt a couple flatheads from the 1940's, I don't want to imagine what rebuilding an engine built in 1920 would be like.
I've played with this a bit. It's really difficult to count consistently if you're wearing a headphone that's playing back what you've said with about a one-second delay, so you're hearing 'one' when you're saying 'three'. Likewise I have a neat shirt that has lots of colors and their names written on it, like redpurple, and reading it is somewhat difficult. In contrast, my dad, who was a supergenius (he knew Feynman, in fact) could count, quickly, while multiplying three-digit numbers in his head. (Geek party trick.) It'd usually take him counting to about 30 or so, in fewer seconds, to complete the multiplication, and they weren't just squaring 3 digit numbers, either. Even I can square 3-dig while counting, but I absolutely can't do serious math while counting. So I think there are significant differences in people's ability to assign brain parts to what they're doing.
I think it depends a lot on the crossbow, as well. The heavily fluted armor didn't deflect worth beans, since the flutes caught the bolt head, although its stiffness/weight ratio was excellent. Likewise, there were crossbows out there that had extremely significant kinetic energy in their bolts: 200-kg draw steel prods firing kilogram bolts, would have a good chance of getting through 4mm thick steel, especially the crappy steel they were using at the time. I've read late Industrial Revolution writers who have claimed that until the advent of percussion-cap-based muskets, a talented person with a crossbow or a longbow was still far more effective as a soldier than a person with a matchlock/flintlock, as regards accuracy, deadliness, and rate-of-fire. The problem was just that nobody had the time to spend getting good enough with the older weapons, while you could hand a rifle to a raw recruit and with a week's training you'd have a soldier.
While we're on about history, traditionally speaking this has always been the case for armor. Medieval armors usually have a nice dent or two that is integrated with the armor decoration, because after finishing the breastplate (in the case of plate-type armor) the armorer would put it on and the prospective buyer would test it with any weapon he cared to use. Armorers literally stood behind their work, and the buyer proved it worked (hence, I believe, the etymology of 'bullet-proof' -- the proof was the fact that it had been proven under test.) After the client was satisfied, the armorer would often decorate the armor with gilding and etching, and work the proof point into the design -- many of the fancy armors from the English civil war have dents from firearms serving as the center of a rose, for instance. In an arms museum in Copenhagen, I saw a very small suit of armor made for a child. Apparently, since the armorer couldn't wear it, or maybe to be more generous because it was necessary to make it lighter so a child could wear it, it was insufficient. There's a big ragged hole in the back and a matching big dent in the chest, where a crossbow bolt went through. I've heard the child survived and went on to become a Danish prince (probably not Hamlet, though.)
I'm up in Arvada. There is an old church at 84th and Sheridan that has "COPPER GONE" spraypainted no less than four times on its sides, along with another that says "YOU WILL BE THE THIRD PERSON ARRESTED FOR TRESPASSING". There's another house at about 58th that's been sitting empty for about four months, with "COPPER GONE" on the plywood over all the windows. One of my coworkers sometimes has his daughter in with him to work. She's in her teens and spends her time, while she's in his office, stripping old CRT's of their x/y electromagnet coils. I've read that people are ripping the grounding wires off telephone and electrical poles, but haven't seen anyone actually doing it. However, in my neighborhood, none of the old wooden poles have ground wires running down lower than about 12 feet from the ground.
The wire-return thing is just appalling. However, it might manage to come in handy, in a way: a while back I rewired my house with nice 6 gauge wire running from the replaced electrical box to my oven. I went over to Greybar and ordered 75' of 6-3 wire, and when I got it home, realized they'd given me three-wire, not three-conductor-plus-ground, which is what everyone else in the world knows to deliver when someone orders 6-3. And of course they wouldn't take a cut wire return, so now I have an $85 spool of 6-2 wire sitting in my garage. But since that was four years ago, I might be able to recoup that loss. That'd be awfully nice.
it sez: small blimp, R/C motors, and an anti-aircraft gun mounted on it, for the slow-moving drones, and one of those nifty R/C jets for the fast-moving ones. It could be called the Battle Of Britain.
>Within my lifetime, copper is going to head towards being VERY valuable.
In my neighborhood, in suburban Denver, if a house looks abandoned for more than about two weeks, people break in to strip out the copper. Abandoned buildings that are due to be demolished always have big "NO COPPER" or "COPPER ALREADY GONE" spraypainted across the front. And for a Darwin Award, a guy here got electrocuted a couple months back because he tried to strip the copper out of a running powerline transformer. When the police responded to the call, he was dead... and the copper was gone.
I have the occasional argument, such as it is, with friends about the superiority of the metric system over the imperial system. Of course, the whole argument is based on a false premise, because the imperial system *is* the metric system, just using funny units, since A: the metric system is the only system of weights and measures approved by the US congress for use in trade, in 1865, and B: the imperial system has been based on the metric system since 1893. But all that aside, it's fun to ask: which weighs more, an ounce of gold, an ounce of lead, or an ounce of mercury? Mercury, because it's measured in fluid ounces, being a liquid, and a fluid ounce of mercury weighs something near a pound. An ounce of gold, which is measured in troy ounces, weighs about 25% more than an ounce of lead, which is measured in avoirdupois ounces.
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That depends on where the revenue stream is. If they can sell you a disk with 99% of the movie on it, and then, for free or a micropayment, let you log onto their server to get enough to decrypt what you have and watch it, then broadband costs more than it is worth. What it comes down to is: are the companies selling bandwidth or are they selling movies? Once they decide where the profit margin is, they'll decide which they're selling. Or, they'll sell you both and charge you for both, if that's the most profitable model. But, in any case, they want you online because it's likely the more attached to them you are, the more money they can extract from you.
It's also a delaying action until the time when they can reasonably expect to sell video playback devices that are always connected to a network, at which point they can do crypto exchange of passwords with a remote server and the consumer is, officially, screwed. It's just that right now not enough consumers will buy stuff that demands connectivity before it'll work.
I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that, on the off-chance they were recording it and claimed I'd made a verbal contract with them. It'd be possible to get in really serious trouble if they decided to push it.
I just reply that I'm new and don't know much about the group, but I know someone they should call who DOES know a lot about the internal structure of the company... and give them HR's phone number.
They're doing their research and targetting individuals -- lower-level employees aren't recruited but are asked about their coworkers, their supervisors, asked if they can provide organizational charts. Sometimes the recruiters pretext and claim to be from my company's HR department, asking about recent organizational changes and can they get an updated org chart? So their motives are definitely not wound up with *my* morale or willingness to stay with the company, which is why I believe they're actually recruiters who are just trying to get names.
GCC? Excel macros? using Word to create cross-site-scripting-attack webpages? Just using IE with ActiveX enabled?
>I think the people in the world we loosely classify as "right wing" could be better described as those who believe in and desire a caste system for our society, where the "right" kind of people enjoy freedom, democracy, prosperity, etc, and where the "wrong" kind of people are "protected" or "supervised" or whatever other euphemisms for serfdom and slavery are in vogue at the moment.
I'm not disputing your general assertion, that people who try to control what other people say, like the person you're replying to clearly was, are bastards. But -- and I'm saying this as a way left-wing borderline nutjob -- just as many people on the far left do this. The anti-porn activists are half right-wing Christian controlfreaks and half left-wing ultrafeminist controlfreaks. It's the controlfreak that's the problem. Some people believe that nobody should be allowed to talk or think about things they don't like. That's the problem, they're the problem. It has little to do with right/left, and a lot to do with the freedom/authority continuum. I'm way left, but I'm also way freedom, and fundamentally, it's the freedom to talk about anything we want, that gives us the footing to be left or right.
It's not incest. It's sibling revelry!
For the record, the system for figuring out who were Bad People and who weren't was scanning the users' information pages, looking for interests that fuzzily matched 'incest' (or 1nc3s+') or 'non-con' or the like. A fairly large number of people -- over 15%, given my random sampling, and that's bigger than it'd seem given that probably half the user accounts are no longer in use -- have changed their interests list to read just 'censorship' or some superset of it. (Censoring-bastard-LJ-admins, logical fallacy, and the like...)
Executive incursions into civil liberties happen, but sometimes, when they go too far, too fast, or they're just discovered suddenly, they get ratcheted right back to where they started. Much of what Bush is doing -- well, much of what the people telling Bush what to do -- is seen explicitly as a reaction to the loss of Presidential power following the Nixon debacle. Nixon screwed up, and many privileges the Executive had assumed or had abused were removed, and oversight was put in place. What Bush's cronies are trying to do is turn back the clock to Eisenhower's time.
But those are small-scale corrections. What you're talking about, the full-fledged descent into fascism, is much nastier because by the time that the problem is apparent, there's no longer any system for correcting the problems, because that system has been ripped out. When the vox populi is silent out of fear, the system's probably no longer closed-loop and there are no limits in how bad it can get.
The scary thing is that at least at the beginning, it's probably not possible to tell whether it's heading down the small-correction route or the big-disaster route, and probably by the time it is, it's already too late in the case that it's the big-disaster route.
Given that this is the same guy who doesn't seem to realize that condoms reduce the risk of contracting AIDS why would we expect him to understand the first thing about net neutrality? As lots of people point out, it's incredibly difficult to get someone to understand something when he's being paid by AT&T to not understand it?
Well, *sort* of. I don't think this is the case any longer, but up until fairly recently, Colorado's way of working with automotive insurance was that in the event of an accident, your insurance paid for damages to your car, and the other driver's insurance paid for damage to the other driver's car. If the other driver was uninsured -- which is illegal, mind you -- your insurance covered uninsured drivers, so paid for injuries to the uninsured driver as well as covering yours. Since bicyclists, pedestrians, skateboarders, scooter-riders, and the like, are uninsured, they were covered under this.
Now that Colorado's gone back to being an at-fault state, the driver at fault's insurance pays for all the damage done to all parties involved. (This has the unintended consequence of adding incentive to lie and/or litigate to avoid being called at-fault, by the way: my brother was run down while riding his bike to work, by a woman who ran a red light, and her police statement said she was crossing a green light and HE ran the red. Thankfully he had lots of witnesses, so she had a really bad day for making a false statement to police. But if he hadn't had witnesses, he would've had a problem, seeing as they had to haul him out in a helicopter with multiple broken bones in his face, which probably would've affected his credibility as a witness.)
Heh. Since I'm vaguely atheist, I hadn't really thought about it, but you're right. I mentally substitute "because that's the way it SHOULD be" for "God would know."
I'm not saying it's a good idea. Personally, I change mine every 5000 miles, although with synthetic oil, BMW claims you can go 15,000 miles, and AmSol claims you can go 25,000 between oil changes.
However, I can tell you from personal experience that it is, indeed, possible to drive a new car 100,000 miles and have it still running at the end.
>We don't feel guilty when there's no risk of being punished,
Speak for yourself. I feel vaguely uncomfortable running stoplights on my bicycle, when it's 3AM and I know there isn't a cop within km of where I am -- because I think that running stoplights is wrong. (Why do I run them? Because my bike won't trigger the traffic detector since it's mostly not metal.)
Some people make the distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures: shame cultures are where morality is mostly external, and society punishes people when they're caught, so they feel badly about being caught, essentially, whereas guilt cultures rely on people feeling badly about what they've done, even if nobody knows.
To paraphrasean old story, a furnituremaker asked a Shaker why they used wooden pegs and beautiful craftsmanship to hold chairs together, even on inside joints where nobody could ever possibly know that they hadn't used glue/nails. The Shaker said, "God would know." That's a guilt culture right there.
We live in the world you propose. Look at cats: are they ever going to develop civilization? Dogs, however... the point being: cooperation, sharing research (violating IP laws!) is behavior intended to further the group's well-being, while at the same time furthering the individual's well-being by being associated with the new-found gains.
To make a long story short: if you look at zero-sum games, and have a large number of players playing zero-sum games repeatedly with one another, players that show altruistic behavior will do very well when playing together -- so well that they will eventually outcompete players that show non-trusting or actively distrusting behavior. So, after a while, you select for altrustic behavior. But at the same time, each individual player always has a strong incentive to behave selfishly, since the benefit to that player might be great enough to offset the future losses from being identified as a non-trustworthy player. This, in a nutshell, is human civilization. We are caught between the desire to cooperate and help one another, because it's a successful strategy under most circumstances, and the desire to make a fast break and run off with all the money, because it's an amazingly successful strategy under some unusual circumstances.
The church I was raised in said, essentially, that the essence of evil was not a personified being but the draw of behavior that helps an individual at a cost to society as a whole. Their view of the world is, essentially, exactly what you're proposing: a world in which being Good is necessarily focussing your efforts on others in an attempt to bootstrap your whole {family,community,world} up to a higher place.
I really became aware of car mechanics when I was reading John Steinbeck's "The Grapes Of Wrath" and the Joads were driving from Oklahoma to California and had to stop because the engine was acting up, so beside the side of the road they pulled the head, pulled the valves, reground (with a hand-file) all the valve stems, and replaced the valve seats, put it back together, and started driving again. Hey, cool -- you can do all your repairs by hand! by the side of the road! rather than using a CNC grinder to get the right relief angle on your valves! But you can't drive from Oklahoma to California without doing basically a complete engine rebuild, which is a lot less cool than being able to rebuild the engine with hand tools is cool.
And they also got about 15,000 miles before you had to regrind all the valves because the valve seats were so soft. And they had negligible oil pressure because the oil pump, such as it was, just splashed oil up onto the main bearing ends and bottoms of the pistons, so if you did anything interesting involving lateral acceleration the engine would oil-starve and the bearings would all start galling. And because of the gravity feed fuel system, you couldn't drive up a hill forwards unless you had an absolutely full tank of gas, so you had to back up the hill.
Yes, it was extremely simple. It was even moderately sturdy for short periods of time. But reliable? compared to modern cars that can go 100,000 miles with *no service* -- not even oil changes -- it was a fiendish monster of horror and misery.
and, having rebuilt a couple flatheads from the 1940's, I don't want to imagine what rebuilding an engine built in 1920 would be like.
I've played with this a bit. It's really difficult to count consistently if you're wearing a headphone that's playing back what you've said with about a one-second delay, so you're hearing 'one' when you're saying 'three'. Likewise I have a neat shirt that has lots of colors and their names written on it, like redpurple, and reading it is somewhat difficult.
In contrast, my dad, who was a supergenius (he knew Feynman, in fact) could count, quickly, while multiplying three-digit numbers in his head. (Geek party trick.) It'd usually take him counting to about 30 or so, in fewer seconds, to complete the multiplication, and they weren't just squaring 3 digit numbers, either. Even I can square 3-dig while counting, but I absolutely can't do serious math while counting. So I think there are significant differences in people's ability to assign brain parts to what they're doing.
I think it depends a lot on the crossbow, as well. The heavily fluted armor didn't deflect worth beans, since the flutes caught the bolt head, although its stiffness/weight ratio was excellent. Likewise, there were crossbows out there that had extremely significant kinetic energy in their bolts: 200-kg draw steel prods firing kilogram bolts, would have a good chance of getting through 4mm thick steel, especially the crappy steel they were using at the time. I've read late Industrial Revolution writers who have claimed that until the advent of percussion-cap-based muskets, a talented person with a crossbow or a longbow was still far more effective as a soldier than a person with a matchlock/flintlock, as regards accuracy, deadliness, and rate-of-fire. The problem was just that nobody had the time to spend getting good enough with the older weapons, while you could hand a rifle to a raw recruit and with a week's training you'd have a soldier.
While we're on about history, traditionally speaking this has always been the case for armor. Medieval armors usually have a nice dent or two that is integrated with the armor decoration, because after finishing the breastplate (in the case of plate-type armor) the armorer would put it on and the prospective buyer would test it with any weapon he cared to use. Armorers literally stood behind their work, and the buyer proved it worked (hence, I believe, the etymology of 'bullet-proof' -- the proof was the fact that it had been proven under test.) After the client was satisfied, the armorer would often decorate the armor with gilding and etching, and work the proof point into the design -- many of the fancy armors from the English civil war have dents from firearms serving as the center of a rose, for instance. In an arms museum in Copenhagen, I saw a very small suit of armor made for a child. Apparently, since the armorer couldn't wear it, or maybe to be more generous because it was necessary to make it lighter so a child could wear it, it was insufficient. There's a big ragged hole in the back and a matching big dent in the chest, where a crossbow bolt went through. I've heard the child survived and went on to become a Danish prince (probably not Hamlet, though.)
I'm up in Arvada. There is an old church at 84th and Sheridan that has "COPPER GONE" spraypainted no less than four times on its sides, along with another that says "YOU WILL BE THE THIRD PERSON ARRESTED FOR TRESPASSING". There's another house at about 58th that's been sitting empty for about four months, with "COPPER GONE" on the plywood over all the windows.
One of my coworkers sometimes has his daughter in with him to work. She's in her teens and spends her time, while she's in his office, stripping old CRT's of their x/y electromagnet coils.
I've read that people are ripping the grounding wires off telephone and electrical poles, but haven't seen anyone actually doing it. However, in my neighborhood, none of the old wooden poles have ground wires running down lower than about 12 feet from the ground.
The wire-return thing is just appalling. However, it might manage to come in handy, in a way: a while back I rewired my house with nice 6 gauge wire running from the replaced electrical box to my oven. I went over to Greybar and ordered 75' of 6-3 wire, and when I got it home, realized they'd given me three-wire, not three-conductor-plus-ground, which is what everyone else in the world knows to deliver when someone orders 6-3. And of course they wouldn't take a cut wire return, so now I have an $85 spool of 6-2 wire sitting in my garage. But since that was four years ago, I might be able to recoup that loss. That'd be awfully nice.
it sez: small blimp, R/C motors, and an anti-aircraft gun mounted on it, for the slow-moving drones, and one of those nifty R/C jets for the fast-moving ones.
It could be called the Battle Of Britain.
>Within my lifetime, copper is going to head towards being VERY valuable.
In my neighborhood, in suburban Denver, if a house looks abandoned for more than about two weeks, people break in to strip out the copper. Abandoned buildings that are due to be demolished always have big "NO COPPER" or "COPPER ALREADY GONE" spraypainted across the front. And for a Darwin Award, a guy here got electrocuted a couple months back because he tried to strip the copper out of a running powerline transformer. When the police responded to the call, he was dead... and the copper was gone.
I have the occasional argument, such as it is, with friends about the superiority of the metric system over the imperial system. Of course, the whole argument is based on a false premise, because the imperial system *is* the metric system, just using funny units, since A: the metric system is the only system of weights and measures approved by the US congress for use in trade, in 1865, and B: the imperial system has been based on the metric system since 1893.
But all that aside, it's fun to ask: which weighs more, an ounce of gold, an ounce of lead, or an ounce of mercury?
Mercury, because it's measured in fluid ounces, being a liquid, and a fluid ounce of mercury weighs something near a pound. An ounce of gold, which is measured in troy ounces, weighs about 25% more than an ounce of lead, which is measured in avoirdupois ounces.