I don't want flying cars for the masses. Not that they arenb't totally cool, but I don't want Joe Scumbag to get road rage while flying over my house. Flying cars will get banned when a-holes start taking them "off course" (off road in car-speak) and crashing into stuff.
It is almost there. It's called the ASUS Eee PC - a Linux based ultra portable laptop, slated to retail fro $199-399, with flash based storage. Given the current specs, implementing the rest of your idea is not a far leap at all.
Fear is what keeps you from doing dumb shit that might get you hurt or killed. Unless this can be very targeted or shut on/off at will it will have very little effect in the average life of a person. Soldiers and others in high stress and fear jobs may actually do better, but there are many reasons they may do worse. If you aren't afraid of the enemy bullets, you won't duck when they are fired at you. And you might die. THat's a bad course of action on the battlefield.
Fear == good.
When I tell people that they don't need a multi-GHz computer and can use the internet on a 350MHz PC and do all of the basic "real" work of a computer with it, they tend to give me the whatever look and go in for the flashy Dell ads and whatnot. They'd rather spend $400+ at Dell than $40 down at the local computer recycler. I'm glad you have a real sense of value (different than monetary worth) for older machines. I dare say that 80% of people could do everything they need to on an old P2 machine.
And... if you continued to read it, he had to install a 32-bit FireFox and install Flash for that on his 64-bit system. And he also tested 32-bit Ubuntu, and noted the differences in several places.
I read the article and came up to the Flash install section and I did a WTF?! When you browse to a site with Flash in FireFox, it gives you the missing plugin notice. You click that, and it tellS you that Flash isn't installed, would you like to do so? You hit ok, follow the prompts, and ta-da! It works. Why do people still do stuff the hard way? In several places in the article, he tries to do it the hard way (thinking that the easy way doesn't work right, I guess), fails, RTFM, does it the easy way and it works. This a bit late in this thread, but geez. Grandma would look at the top of the page and see the missing plugin notice an click there. She won't figure out that Adobe makes Flash, go find adobe.com, search for the Linux section, download the file, go to a command line and install it. AND SHE DOESN'T HAVE TO!
I'm not claiming that nuclear power does, I'm just pointing out that it is not a part of the normal cycle of energy/heat that the Earth receives. The Earth receives heat on the sunny side, and radiates it on the dark side. Even if a plant or other organism stores some of that energy for later use it will be released back out as either heat and/or work by the plant or organism or anything that consumes it. It's part of a naturally regulated cycle. Burning fossil fuel releases previously stored solar energy. I pointed out that I wasn't going to discuss the effects of CO2 on warming. That's the current debate and not my point. My point is that nuclear power greatly accelerates nuclear decay of radioactive materials and releases heat that adds to and above the regular solar cycle. It isn't just waste heat from the nuclear plant it self, as it also produces the electricity that runs electric motors and generates heat, runs electric heaters and generates heat, etc. The amount of energy in the entire cycle of the Earth is greater with nuclear power than it is with only fossil fuel. It's a very simple concept, and I make no claim about it's effects on the climate. I'm just using it as an example of how to think about the chain of sources that leads up to the energy release that may or may not effect global warming, as the parent of my post wondered.
Also, another point to ponder is that radiocarbon dating is not really valid later that the 1940s because nuclear processes changed the amount of C14 in the atmosphere. Nuclear power is NOT a pure and clean energy source. It's got problems beyond just storage of spent fuels.
Follow the energy train: Wood, coal, oil, gas derive most likely from organic sources and those organic sources are powered by sunlight, eg photosynthesis. Thus the heat released by burning them was already deposited here by the sun and it was captured and stored here by an organic method for later use. It's still a part of the solar cycle, but with the added benefit of that energy being used for the process of life on Earth. Contrast that to nuclear power. That involves concentrating radioactive materials to create a mass that allows the neutron emissions of radioactive decay to accelerate the decay of more of the material and generate heat. Thus it adds to the total heat cycle of the Earth in a much shorter time span that would otherwise be done in the natural decay rate.
Burning organic based fuels CONTINUES the solar energy/heat cycle that powers life on Earth. Running nuclear power plants accelerates radioactive decay and ADDS to the energy/heat cycle at a much faster rate than normal.
Which sounds worse for global warming?
I'm not going to go on about CO2 causing global warming, but if you're so concerned about the effects of energy release then you really need to follow the chain of energy sources that lead up to that release. People who lobby for nuclear power ignore that it adds to the energy cycle rather than converts energy that is already a part of it as with organic sources.
Like I posted originally, you make unfounded accusations. Just after Christmas I built a computer to use as a Linux workstation. P4 HT CPU, nVidia graphics, etc. Everything in it just works. Audio works with no help from me, CD/DVD burning works. If you can't get your stuff to work you have to question what you are using. I think you won't post what you are having trouble with because I'm sure you don't want to admit that what I'm assuming is true, and you're trolling. That said, I'm dropping this thread as it won't anywhere useful unless you really wanted to fix your problems and not just bitch about them.
BTW: your reply to my first comment is easily turned back at you: You couldn't get Linux running (so you claim) so anyone else who does must be liars because Linux hardware support is shitty. It's an empty argument either way you point it.
When someone makes a point of having spent about 14 hours of configuration for simple things, but fails to point out WHAT particular brand/model that those things are that have the problems, then yes I feel they need to clarify. What CD-ROM on earth takes 4 hours of configuration? What video card? What sound card? *I* didn't call you a dumbass, I said grow up and get a life. Most people would have figured out something was terribly wrong with either the hardware or their troubleshooting long before the 14th hour rolled around.
If you've been around Linux for *15 years* your skills should be much better.
You still fail to counteract my point. The poor of the US are much better off than the poor or middle class of other nations, and even the upper class of a few places. The fat cats are not living the high life while the masses suffer in poverty.
There may be the ultra rich on top, but the poor aren't doing bad, and I'm one of them. We own a house, have two vehicles, zero credit debt, and we're under 30 and make well UNDER the median income for our age and household. Anyone who tries to tell me how the "poor" of the US are doing are talking about me and in general they are wrong. The ultra rich in the US aren't the fat cats of capitalism that people talk about because the companies they run don't have employees working for pennies. Just how poor are all those people who work at MS for Bill Gates, eh? How poor are the people at Harpo who work for Oprah? Just because there is a wealthy person at the top, it doesn't automatically follow that those who work for them are poor.
Wait, so that $20 P3 box I bought didn't really work when I loaded Ubuntu on it? Oh, you see, I thought the sound card was detected even on the LiveCD, along with the video functioning (though no 3D accel on the CD) and the CD burner. Oh, and the network worked great, and FireFox asked nicely if I wanted to install the Flash plugin when I went to Google Video, and you know, that Just Worked too. When I installed it the *only* drivers I had to install were for accelerated 3D on the nVidia video card and the mobo sensors for fans and temp. The machine came with a Win98 COA on it, so I dropped it on so I could run a few games on it. It had *N*O* driver for the network card. Ooops. I had to burn off a CDs withe the drivers because Win98 doesn't support USB flash drives... And when that was working I had to find all the drivers for everything else in the machine. Don't forget that it has a sticker that says "Designed for Windows 98" on the front. Linux works better and more reliably on it than the OS it was designed to run.
Grow up, get a life, and stop making stupid unfounded accusations.
"On the other hand, you couldn't care less about the actual employees who would have been paid pennies an hour to do all the hard work while the fat cat owners reaped virtually all the profits and benefits. By all means, let's cry for the wealthy and powerful land and business owners who had their property unfairly confiscated from them by communist governments, but never mind the people who actually worked did all the hard work for them while barely eking out enough pay to support their poverty level standard of living."
Why does everyone make it out that capitalists who runs companies make huge profits while those who work under them work for pennies? How many American companies pay above the minimum wage? If capitalism was all about being on top and making money while stamping on those below you and giving them a pittance then every American company would have a single millionaire at it's top and a bunch of peasants on the bottom. It must be too bad for those who draw the fat cat conclusion that the poor of the US are the most well off poor on the planet, and even have better quality of life than the middle or upper class of other nations. The comes our huge middle class who work for much higher wages than minimum. The fat cat capitalist theory is grounded in nothing but rhetoric.
Communist and Socialist CPEs have a major failing: they can't predict all problems, and they can't react as fast to them as a free market. Thus, when problems arise: drought, natural disaster, etc. The govt has to get it's big stupid bureaucracy in motion to get changes in place. It also allows people to hide behind that bureaucracy and let problems develop that shouldn't, Chernobyl, Aral Sea, waste and pollution of cosmodromes.
Also, theft of technology, like the 8080 clone called the KP580. The PDP11 clones. The Shuttle clone Buran... The Soviets needed a lot of Western tech to be productive in the modern world, so it couldn't be simple luck and mismanagement that caused their downfall.;)
Private parties can do as they please. You have *NO* constitutional right to say what you want on their services. It may not be "nice" to do, but no one can stop them from doing this.
Your right may vary by state, though.
Pay $199 for XP and it's on the shelves for almost 6 years. Now you can pay $399 for Vista, and it'll only be out 2.5 years. Does that mean that Vienna will cost $799 and only be out for 18 months before the next version comes out?;)
Right click on the file and it'll pop up a contextual menu with the top two choices as "Open" and "Open with...". If you select "Open with..." it'll show you what the default program is to open that type of file, and what other apps you have installed that might be able to do it. You will have TextEdit on your system, as the AC already pointed out, and it will edit.txt and.rtf. It will also edit.html, as it's just plain text. You lose at computing by doing it the HARD WINDOWS WAY. If you need to do something, try to do it. Don't go looking for an app to do something simple, like you would on a PC (ie unzip a file).
Of course Mac makes makeup, not computers. Apple makes computers.;) I bought a Mac mini from Apple. I still wonder why people can't use "Mac mini" and call it "mini Mac" "macmini" "Mac Mini" etc. Is it a Thinkpad Lenovo? Is it an Inspiron Dell? Is it a Sonyvaio? It's not hard to keep straight.
Why, oh why, do drug makers not realize that if you don't TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOUR DRUG IS FOR that they may not know if they really should "Ask you doctor about X"? How many doctors have to explain what all the new drugs are for to people who can't figure it out from the ads? An extra 5 seconds of ad time used to clarify what the drugs does doesn't sound like a waste of air time to me.
Quite true. However, if the person breaths that smoke then it is not second hand, it is first hand and would thus be first hand unfiltered smoke. That totally kills part of the point of the grandparent post and others of second hand smoke being worse than first hand. The smoker still breaths some of that unfiltered smoke too, probably more due to being in closer proximity to the burning cigarette. Thus, it's not going to be any worse for somebody second hand than it is for the person holding the cigarette (who breathes in a whole lot more smoke overall, filtered or not).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want flying cars for the masses. Not that they arenb't totally cool, but I don't want Joe Scumbag to get road rage while flying over my house. Flying cars will get banned when a-holes start taking them "off course" (off road in car-speak) and crashing into stuff.
It is almost there. It's called the ASUS Eee PC - a Linux based ultra portable laptop, slated to retail fro $199-399, with flash based storage. Given the current specs, implementing the rest of your idea is not a far leap at all.
Fear is what keeps you from doing dumb shit that might get you hurt or killed. Unless this can be very targeted or shut on/off at will it will have very little effect in the average life of a person. Soldiers and others in high stress and fear jobs may actually do better, but there are many reasons they may do worse. If you aren't afraid of the enemy bullets, you won't duck when they are fired at you. And you might die. THat's a bad course of action on the battlefield. Fear == good.
When I tell people that they don't need a multi-GHz computer and can use the internet on a 350MHz PC and do all of the basic "real" work of a computer with it, they tend to give me the whatever look and go in for the flashy Dell ads and whatnot. They'd rather spend $400+ at Dell than $40 down at the local computer recycler. I'm glad you have a real sense of value (different than monetary worth) for older machines. I dare say that 80% of people could do everything they need to on an old P2 machine.
And... if you continued to read it, he had to install a 32-bit FireFox and install Flash for that on his 64-bit system. And he also tested 32-bit Ubuntu, and noted the differences in several places.
;)
Thanks, please drive through.
I read the article and came up to the Flash install section and I did a WTF?! When you browse to a site with Flash in FireFox, it gives you the missing plugin notice. You click that, and it tellS you that Flash isn't installed, would you like to do so? You hit ok, follow the prompts, and ta-da! It works. Why do people still do stuff the hard way? In several places in the article, he tries to do it the hard way (thinking that the easy way doesn't work right, I guess), fails, RTFM, does it the easy way and it works. This a bit late in this thread, but geez. Grandma would look at the top of the page and see the missing plugin notice an click there. She won't figure out that Adobe makes Flash, go find adobe.com, search for the Linux section, download the file, go to a command line and install it. AND SHE DOESN'T HAVE TO!
I'm not claiming that nuclear power does, I'm just pointing out that it is not a part of the normal cycle of energy/heat that the Earth receives. The Earth receives heat on the sunny side, and radiates it on the dark side. Even if a plant or other organism stores some of that energy for later use it will be released back out as either heat and/or work by the plant or organism or anything that consumes it. It's part of a naturally regulated cycle. Burning fossil fuel releases previously stored solar energy. I pointed out that I wasn't going to discuss the effects of CO2 on warming. That's the current debate and not my point. My point is that nuclear power greatly accelerates nuclear decay of radioactive materials and releases heat that adds to and above the regular solar cycle. It isn't just waste heat from the nuclear plant it self, as it also produces the electricity that runs electric motors and generates heat, runs electric heaters and generates heat, etc. The amount of energy in the entire cycle of the Earth is greater with nuclear power than it is with only fossil fuel. It's a very simple concept, and I make no claim about it's effects on the climate. I'm just using it as an example of how to think about the chain of sources that leads up to the energy release that may or may not effect global warming, as the parent of my post wondered.
Also, another point to ponder is that radiocarbon dating is not really valid later that the 1940s because nuclear processes changed the amount of C14 in the atmosphere. Nuclear power is NOT a pure and clean energy source. It's got problems beyond just storage of spent fuels.
Follow the energy train: Wood, coal, oil, gas derive most likely from organic sources and those organic sources are powered by sunlight, eg photosynthesis. Thus the heat released by burning them was already deposited here by the sun and it was captured and stored here by an organic method for later use. It's still a part of the solar cycle, but with the added benefit of that energy being used for the process of life on Earth. Contrast that to nuclear power. That involves concentrating radioactive materials to create a mass that allows the neutron emissions of radioactive decay to accelerate the decay of more of the material and generate heat. Thus it adds to the total heat cycle of the Earth in a much shorter time span that would otherwise be done in the natural decay rate.
Burning organic based fuels CONTINUES the solar energy/heat cycle that powers life on Earth. Running nuclear power plants accelerates radioactive decay and ADDS to the energy/heat cycle at a much faster rate than normal.
Which sounds worse for global warming?
I'm not going to go on about CO2 causing global warming, but if you're so concerned about the effects of energy release then you really need to follow the chain of energy sources that lead up to that release. People who lobby for nuclear power ignore that it adds to the energy cycle rather than converts energy that is already a part of it as with organic sources.
Is it me or does the headline read wrong? Maybe I'm reading too fast.
Now some senator is going to blather about this...
In criminal law, maybe. But under Civil law, silence can be taken as admission of guilt.
Like I posted originally, you make unfounded accusations. Just after Christmas I built a computer to use as a Linux workstation. P4 HT CPU, nVidia graphics, etc. Everything in it just works. Audio works with no help from me, CD/DVD burning works. If you can't get your stuff to work you have to question what you are using. I think you won't post what you are having trouble with because I'm sure you don't want to admit that what I'm assuming is true, and you're trolling. That said, I'm dropping this thread as it won't anywhere useful unless you really wanted to fix your problems and not just bitch about them.
BTW: your reply to my first comment is easily turned back at you: You couldn't get Linux running (so you claim) so anyone else who does must be liars because Linux hardware support is shitty. It's an empty argument either way you point it.
When someone makes a point of having spent about 14 hours of configuration for simple things, but fails to point out WHAT particular brand/model that those things are that have the problems, then yes I feel they need to clarify. What CD-ROM on earth takes 4 hours of configuration? What video card? What sound card? *I* didn't call you a dumbass, I said grow up and get a life. Most people would have figured out something was terribly wrong with either the hardware or their troubleshooting long before the 14th hour rolled around.
If you've been around Linux for *15 years* your skills should be much better.
You still fail to counteract my point. The poor of the US are much better off than the poor or middle class of other nations, and even the upper class of a few places. The fat cats are not living the high life while the masses suffer in poverty.
_ States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_in_the_United
There may be the ultra rich on top, but the poor aren't doing bad, and I'm one of them. We own a house, have two vehicles, zero credit debt, and we're under 30 and make well UNDER the median income for our age and household. Anyone who tries to tell me how the "poor" of the US are doing are talking about me and in general they are wrong. The ultra rich in the US aren't the fat cats of capitalism that people talk about because the companies they run don't have employees working for pennies. Just how poor are all those people who work at MS for Bill Gates, eh? How poor are the people at Harpo who work for Oprah? Just because there is a wealthy person at the top, it doesn't automatically follow that those who work for them are poor.
Wait, so that $20 P3 box I bought didn't really work when I loaded Ubuntu on it? Oh, you see, I thought the sound card was detected even on the LiveCD, along with the video functioning (though no 3D accel on the CD) and the CD burner. Oh, and the network worked great, and FireFox asked nicely if I wanted to install the Flash plugin when I went to Google Video, and you know, that Just Worked too. When I installed it the *only* drivers I had to install were for accelerated 3D on the nVidia video card and the mobo sensors for fans and temp. The machine came with a Win98 COA on it, so I dropped it on so I could run a few games on it. It had *N*O* driver for the network card. Ooops. I had to burn off a CDs withe the drivers because Win98 doesn't support USB flash drives... And when that was working I had to find all the drivers for everything else in the machine. Don't forget that it has a sticker that says "Designed for Windows 98" on the front. Linux works better and more reliably on it than the OS it was designed to run.
Grow up, get a life, and stop making stupid unfounded accusations.
"On the other hand, you couldn't care less about the actual employees who would have been paid pennies an hour to do all the hard work while the fat cat owners reaped virtually all the profits and benefits. By all means, let's cry for the wealthy and powerful land and business owners who had their property unfairly confiscated from them by communist governments, but never mind the people who actually worked did all the hard work for them while barely eking out enough pay to support their poverty level standard of living."
Why does everyone make it out that capitalists who runs companies make huge profits while those who work under them work for pennies? How many American companies pay above the minimum wage? If capitalism was all about being on top and making money while stamping on those below you and giving them a pittance then every American company would have a single millionaire at it's top and a bunch of peasants on the bottom. It must be too bad for those who draw the fat cat conclusion that the poor of the US are the most well off poor on the planet, and even have better quality of life than the middle or upper class of other nations. The comes our huge middle class who work for much higher wages than minimum. The fat cat capitalist theory is grounded in nothing but rhetoric.
Communist and Socialist CPEs have a major failing: they can't predict all problems, and they can't react as fast to them as a free market. Thus, when problems arise: drought, natural disaster, etc. The govt has to get it's big stupid bureaucracy in motion to get changes in place. It also allows people to hide behind that bureaucracy and let problems develop that shouldn't, Chernobyl, Aral Sea, waste and pollution of cosmodromes. Also, theft of technology, like the 8080 clone called the KP580. The PDP11 clones. The Shuttle clone Buran... The Soviets needed a lot of Western tech to be productive in the modern world, so it couldn't be simple luck and mismanagement that caused their downfall. ;)
Private parties can do as they please. You have *NO* constitutional right to say what you want on their services. It may not be "nice" to do, but no one can stop them from doing this. Your right may vary by state, though.
Pay $199 for XP and it's on the shelves for almost 6 years. Now you can pay $399 for Vista, and it'll only be out 2.5 years. Does that mean that Vienna will cost $799 and only be out for 18 months before the next version comes out? ;)
Don't tell me you've never seen a hippie lose it and go nucking futz?!
There is an option in TextEdit, Shift-Comand-T, that switches between plain text and rich text. (also under Format - Make Plain Text/Make Rich Text)
Right click on the file and it'll pop up a contextual menu with the top two choices as "Open" and "Open with...". If you select "Open with..." it'll show you what the default program is to open that type of file, and what other apps you have installed that might be able to do it. You will have TextEdit on your system, as the AC already pointed out, and it will edit .txt and .rtf. It will also edit .html, as it's just plain text. You lose at computing by doing it the HARD WINDOWS WAY. If you need to do something, try to do it. Don't go looking for an app to do something simple, like you would on a PC (ie unzip a file).
Of course Mac makes makeup, not computers. Apple makes computers. ;) I bought a Mac mini from Apple. I still wonder why people can't use "Mac mini" and call it "mini Mac" "macmini" "Mac Mini" etc. Is it a Thinkpad Lenovo? Is it an Inspiron Dell? Is it a Sonyvaio? It's not hard to keep straight.
Why, oh why, do drug makers not realize that if you don't TELL PEOPLE WHAT YOUR DRUG IS FOR that they may not know if they really should "Ask you doctor about X"? How many doctors have to explain what all the new drugs are for to people who can't figure it out from the ads? An extra 5 seconds of ad time used to clarify what the drugs does doesn't sound like a waste of air time to me.
Quite true. However, if the person breaths that smoke then it is not second hand, it is first hand and would thus be first hand unfiltered smoke. That totally kills part of the point of the grandparent post and others of second hand smoke being worse than first hand. The smoker still breaths some of that unfiltered smoke too, probably more due to being in closer proximity to the burning cigarette. Thus, it's not going to be any worse for somebody second hand than it is for the person holding the cigarette (who breathes in a whole lot more smoke overall, filtered or not).