Wasn't Timothy McVeigh a Boy Scout? Or Jeffrey Dalmer? Or Charles Manson? They teach boy scouts more than just how to spot gay scout masters. The idea that only ex-Boy Scouts should carry guns is stupid.
It's the second amendment that protects the First. Ban the second amendment, and you might as well set fire to the whole Bill of Rights. "From time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson
If Commodore had replaced the Motorola 68000 with a MOS 65xxx CPU, they could have got the chips essentially for free, and reduced the Amiga's selling price to around $500. That's just slightly more than how much a C64 cost in 1987 ($200), and it's likely Amiga would have sold like gangbusters to people desiring an advanced machine.
Unfortunately Commodore had lost Jack Tramel, who recognized the value of using a self-built computer chips.
Rome depopulated African wildstock??? Hardly. The animals that were present in 1 A.D. are still there today. The Romans did not drive anything to extinction.
My point: Imagine if today's world only had 1/2 a billion humans. Would we even be having this discussion about global warming? Nope. The problem would not exist.
Volkswagen will be selling a 240 MPG car in 2010. Granted it only carries two people, but still that's a step in the right direction. For driving to work-and-back that's all a person really needs.
>>>Well, then we'd be burning trees much, much faster than they could replenish.
The obvious solution is to not do that: Only burn trees at the rate where they can be replaced. Nuclear power is only a solution until the uranium runs-out, so it is only a temporary fix.
Solar power is probably a good way to supplement the tree-burning for electricity production.
Another annoyance was the lack of software. I couldn't find a good web browser for my 2.4 kbit/s Amiga 500, and although I had a fully-functional browser for my Mac, it was still lacking the engineering software demanded by my job. So "turning to the evil empire" of Windoze was the easiest solution.
If you want a REAL challenge, forgot cobol. Try programming an Atari 2600 gaming console. You have just 128 bytes of RAM to create a playable video game. (No that was not a typo... 128 bytes.)
I tried it once. I gave up. It gave me new respect for the original Atari geniuses who created playable versions of Space Invaders, Missile Command, Cosmic Ark, and Jr. Pacman, and turned a cheap console into the #1 system of its day (1977-to-1984).
>>>I didn't say it was particularly awful machine, I said that it wasn't particularly revolutionary.
Well if you're going to take that debating tactic, I will use the same tactic: I never said the IBM PC was revolutionary. You've setup a strawman argument, rather than address what I actually said in my original post. (I used the word "remarkable" meaning worthy of notice in 1981, not revolutionary.):-)
>>>Yes, but the innovative PCs (in the generic sense) back then were those like the Commodore Amiga- not IBM's!
No shit sherlock.;-) I agree 100%. But once again, I direct you to my original post: I never called the 1981 PC a revolution. Please read more carefully. Thank you.
I looked-up the history of MP3 players. You're right: iPod wasn't the first but it was pretty early. If wikipedia is accurate, iPod was only the second to use a hard drive, and the first to use a 1.8" nanodrive to achieve a pocket-sized form factor. Apple did have an advantage with its loyal Macintosh base.
>>>the PC soon cornered the lion's share of the home computer market
I'm not sure "soon" is the appropriate moniker. Even though the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, it was still not the number one computer system. The Atari 400/800 was dominant during the early 80s, followed by the Commodore 64 in 1983, 84, 85, and 86. The C=64 went on to sell 30 million units (equal to the number of Atari 2600 and Nintendo ES game consoles sold during that same era), and became virtually a home appliance for most people.
The PC and clones did not take-over the top slot until 1987.
>>>Playing DVDs on Linux that required proprietary codecs has been a source of much pain.
This is why I gave-up on proprietary OSes. I enjoyed experimenting with "nonstandard" systems like Commodore, Amiga, and Macintosh back when I was an unemployed student, but now that I'm a fulltime wage slave, I simply lack the free hours. I want my system to just work, and too many times I ran into issues where my Amiga or Mac could not support the latest audio or video downloads.
So in 1998 I gave up & switched to the default standard that nearly-everyone else was using - Windoze.
Calm down. I was just being tactful. In 1981, I probably would have bought an Atari 800 versus an IBM, but I can understand why corporations would have preferred the IBM since it ran faster with more memory (especially important for accounting). In 1981 IBM PC was a respectable machine, even though I would not have bought one for myself.
The Apple II was also a decent computer, but Atari had the #1 console at that time, and I'm a gamer so that's why I would have bought Atari instead of Apple. The Atari had somewhere around 64 color variations, 4 sprites, and a primitive noise generator (all-important for a decent game of Missile Command). If I had waited until 1982, then I would have bought the Commodore 64 (more sprites and music-quality sound).
Bringing this back to the present:
Today's PCs are boring compared to the multitude of choices we had back in the 80s. Back then companies were willing to innovate and try new things. Nowadays only Apple still continues that tradition (example:iPod) where Microsoft does not.
Not all of the dead rainforest is "eaten" by bacteria. Some of it does get buried underground where it remains untouched. Millions of years into the future, our descendants will be able to dig-up coal or oil from those locations.
Of course millions of years is a long time to wait. Which is why it's not practical to use trees to store CO2.
What we need to do is switch to CARBON NEUTRAL sources like living trees. The trees absorb the CO2. We burn the trees. The CO2 is released and absorbed by the next generation of trees. (Same with biofuels like soybean-diesel.)
No more global warming.
Another solution is to have fewer human beings (like China does with its one-child per family to shrink population). Not a popular solution, but we never heard the Roman Empire or ancient C'hin Empire worry about fuel shortages or melting ice caps. That's because there were only 1/2 billion people..... lots of room and fuel for everybody. Nature wasn't impacted.
Most of today's fuel and global warming issues are simply a byproduct of overpopulation: Too many people gobbling-up too many resources. If we continue down this road, the next major problem won't be "How do we fuel our cars?" but "How do we fuel our bodies" as food shortages run rampant in the U.S. and E.U. (Sorry I don't buy the Asimovian future of an Earth sustaining 50 billion people.)
One thing's for sure: We've come a long way from the days when the IBM PC was represented by Charlie Chaplin:
- Chaplin was artistic. - Chaplin was energetic. - Chaplin was a rebel.
The original IBM PC was a remarkable invention, but the modern version of IBM/microsoft PC is certainly no Charlie Chaplin. Of all the machines I've owned, this Pentium 4 clone is the dullest and least exciting. It has no personality; it's just another appliance. (Oh and before somebody steps-in and starts spouting about what a PC can do --- that's only because those features were invented by more-advanced machines like Commodore, Amiga, and Apple who were the first to create the multimedia computer. Had those companies not existed & pushed for innovation, we'd still be using boring monochrome monitors with sounds consisting of "beep" and "boop".)
"Nobody will ever need more than 0.64 megabyte." - Bill Gates
Troy (proud owner of Atari, Commodore 64, Amiga 500, and Macintosh Quadra computers; not-so-proud owner of a generic blackbox PC)
I've been saying it since 2000: Hanging chads may not be perfect, but at least there's a paper trail that can be reviewed. That's not true with the computer black boxes.
In my State we had a very simple scantron sheet. You made your mark, ran it through a counting machine, and deposited it into a sealed box. This provided two levels of verification: The quick-and-easy electronic tally, plus an actual handcount of every individual ballot. Each verified the other. It was a nearly-perfect system, and foolish politicians abandoned it.
(Well, maybe not so foolish. I suspect politicians really don't want a tamper-proof system.)
The actual pirates spoke late Middle English and early Modern. So basically they spake like Chaucer (Wann Aprille mit his soottes shorres) or Shakespeare (Toe bay orrrrr note toe bay, dat ist dey qvest-teeon), albeit less poetic and more common man.
Some of dose scurvy Scots still spake like dey pirates: "Yalp oot a hay nanny-nanny, and drank up me haarties, yo ho!"
>>>Because the purpose of an undergraduate university education is not to get a person a job
Propaganda. And you believed it. Instead of blindly swallowing whatever the college/university feeds you, THINK for yourself. What is the REALITY? ----- 99.9% of people go to college with one single goal in mind - To get a better job than flipping burgers or working in a factory.
The purpose of college is to serve what 99.9% of these customers desire - job skills. Even the colleges acknowledge this when they survey industry and say, "What skills do you need in your future employees?" Penn State University recently performed that survey, and the result led to the creation of a whole new program called "Information Technologies" to churn-out technically-skilled managers.
Modern colleges are factories producing skilled employees for corporations.
>>>If the guys at NVIDIA who designed their chip packaging would have been more chemists instead of electrical engineers....
In every example you listed, you support my original claim that General Chemistry 101 should be required, but you still fail to explain why *organic* chemistry is needed. Not one of your examples requires an understanding of organics.
In most cases, like my own "Commonwealth of Pennsylvania", it's just a name. But originally the name meant exactly what it said: Everybody shared the same wealth, which in colonial society meant "common sharing of food". That style was quickly abandoned because it was discovered that some lazy people refused to work in the field, and yet they still got the reward (free food) off the backs of their industrious neighbors.
Now my state operates on the idea of individual wealth - you work, you keep what you earn. Wealth is kept separately for each person or family, except in a few cases like the Dole for the homeless.
Actually the Civil War is not the main cause of today's over-reaching Congress. The "Commerce clause" and the U.S. Supreme Court is the main problem. The U.S.S.C. has interpreted the commerce clause in such a way that Congress can now regulate almost anything it wants. That happened during the Depression (1930-40s), and the decision allows Congress to tell you how much wheat you can or cannot grow in your own backyard. Clearly this was not what the Framers intended when they gave the U.S. the power to regulate interstate commerce. What I grow in my backyard is INTRAstate commerce and should not involve Congress at all. It should be the Pennsylvania government that regulates that.
It would be roughly equivalent to the European Parliament telling British citizens how much food they can grow for their own personal consumption. Clearly that's not part of the EU's mandate, and it's not part of the U.S.' constitution either.
The U.S. Supreme Court already ruled in a similar case that an owner of "XYZmall.com" did not infringe upon the actual XYZ Mall when he purchased that domain several years earlier & created an informative site about its future construction (for other local residents interested in shopping there).
They declared the right to free speech trumps trademark.
I think the real question should be: "Is this Organic Chem RELEVANT to the job of being a ______? (insert career)" I'm an electrical engineer, and I had to take Organic Chem. Why?!?!? My job consists of wires, resistors, and gate arrays... not a single protein or amino in sight.
I can understand taking basic Chem 101 or Physics 101 or History 101 to gain an understanding of these subjects, but I don't see any value in taking any higher-level courses unless those courses have actual use for that person's future job as an Engineer or Doctor. I consider my time spent in Organic Chemistry a complete waste of money (approximately $3000 of tuition).
(Of course that may be the point - a college is a business after all - any chance to gain more money out of the customers' wallets, even if that means requiring not-needed classes.)
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Wasn't Timothy McVeigh a Boy Scout? Or Jeffrey Dalmer? Or Charles Manson? They teach boy scouts more than just how to spot gay scout masters. The idea that only ex-Boy Scouts should carry guns is stupid.
It's the second amendment that protects the First.
Ban the second amendment, and you might as well set fire to the whole Bill of Rights.
"From time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson
First they took our weapons.
Then they took away our right of free speech.
Next they took us to the cotton plantation & called us "property".
First they took our guns.
Then they took away our right of free speech.
Next they took us to the cotton plantation to work the fields.
If Commodore had replaced the Motorola 68000 with a MOS 65xxx CPU, they could have got the chips essentially for free, and reduced the Amiga's selling price to around $500. That's just slightly more than how much a C64 cost in 1987 ($200), and it's likely Amiga would have sold like gangbusters to people desiring an advanced machine.
Unfortunately Commodore had lost Jack Tramel, who recognized the value of using a self-built computer chips.
Rome depopulated African wildstock??? Hardly. The animals that were present in 1 A.D. are still there today. The Romans did not drive anything to extinction.
My point: Imagine if today's world only had 1/2 a billion humans. Would we even be having this discussion about global warming? Nope. The problem would not exist.
Volkswagen will be selling a 240 MPG car in 2010. Granted it only carries two people, but still that's a step in the right direction. For driving to work-and-back that's all a person really needs.
>>>Well, then we'd be burning trees much, much faster than they could replenish.
The obvious solution is to not do that: Only burn trees at the rate where they can be replaced. Nuclear power is only a solution until the uranium runs-out, so it is only a temporary fix.
Solar power is probably a good way to supplement the tree-burning for electricity production.
My old Windows 98 laptop plays MP3s just fine.
Another annoyance was the lack of software. I couldn't find a good web browser for my 2.4 kbit/s Amiga 500, and although I had a fully-functional browser for my Mac, it was still lacking the engineering software demanded by my job. So "turning to the evil empire" of Windoze was the easiest solution.
Dear younglings (or oldlings):
If you want a REAL challenge, forgot cobol. Try programming an Atari 2600 gaming console. You have just 128 bytes of RAM to create a playable video game. (No that was not a typo... 128 bytes.)
I tried it once.
I gave up.
It gave me new respect for the original Atari geniuses who created playable versions of Space Invaders, Missile Command, Cosmic Ark, and Jr. Pacman, and turned a cheap console into the #1 system of its day (1977-to-1984).
>>>I didn't say it was particularly awful machine, I said that it wasn't particularly revolutionary.
Well if you're going to take that debating tactic, I will use the same tactic: I never said the IBM PC was revolutionary. You've setup a strawman argument, rather than address what I actually said in my original post. (I used the word "remarkable" meaning worthy of notice in 1981, not revolutionary.) :-)
>>>Yes, but the innovative PCs (in the generic sense) back then were those like the Commodore Amiga- not IBM's!
No shit sherlock. ;-) I agree 100%. But once again, I direct you to my original post: I never called the 1981 PC a revolution. Please read more carefully. Thank you.
I looked-up the history of MP3 players. You're right: iPod wasn't the first but it was pretty early. If wikipedia is accurate, iPod was only the second to use a hard drive, and the first to use a 1.8" nanodrive to achieve a pocket-sized form factor. Apple did have an advantage with its loyal Macintosh base.
>>>the PC soon cornered the lion's share of the home computer market
I'm not sure "soon" is the appropriate moniker. Even though the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, it was still not the number one computer system. The Atari 400/800 was dominant during the early 80s, followed by the Commodore 64 in 1983, 84, 85, and 86. The C=64 went on to sell 30 million units (equal to the number of Atari 2600 and Nintendo ES game consoles sold during that same era), and became virtually a home appliance for most people.
The PC and clones did not take-over the top slot until 1987.
>>>Apple is applying for a patent on Intelliscreen's concept
So to summarize:
Apple is slowly but surely turning into Microsoft - a megalith that steals smaller companies' ideas. How predictable.
>>>Playing DVDs on Linux that required proprietary codecs has been a source of much pain.
This is why I gave-up on proprietary OSes. I enjoyed experimenting with "nonstandard" systems like Commodore, Amiga, and Macintosh back when I was an unemployed student, but now that I'm a fulltime wage slave, I simply lack the free hours. I want my system to just work, and too many times I ran into issues where my Amiga or Mac could not support the latest audio or video downloads.
So in 1998 I gave up & switched to the default standard that nearly-everyone else was using - Windoze.
Calm down. I was just being tactful. In 1981, I probably would have bought an Atari 800 versus an IBM, but I can understand why corporations would have preferred the IBM since it ran faster with more memory (especially important for accounting). In 1981 IBM PC was a respectable machine, even though I would not have bought one for myself.
The Apple II was also a decent computer, but Atari had the #1 console at that time, and I'm a gamer so that's why I would have bought Atari instead of Apple. The Atari had somewhere around 64 color variations, 4 sprites, and a primitive noise generator (all-important for a decent game of Missile Command). If I had waited until 1982, then I would have bought the Commodore 64 (more sprites and music-quality sound).
Bringing this back to the present:
Today's PCs are boring compared to the multitude of choices we had back in the 80s. Back then companies were willing to innovate and try new things. Nowadays only Apple still continues that tradition (example:iPod) where Microsoft does not.
Not all of the dead rainforest is "eaten" by bacteria. Some of it does get buried underground where it remains untouched. Millions of years into the future, our descendants will be able to dig-up coal or oil from those locations.
Of course millions of years is a long time to wait. Which is why it's not practical to use trees to store CO2.
What we need to do is switch to CARBON NEUTRAL sources like living trees. The trees absorb the CO2. We burn the trees. The CO2 is released and absorbed by the next generation of trees. (Same with biofuels like soybean-diesel.)
No more global warming.
Another solution is to have fewer human beings (like China does with its one-child per family to shrink population). Not a popular solution, but we never heard the Roman Empire or ancient C'hin Empire worry about fuel shortages or melting ice caps. That's because there were only 1/2 billion people..... lots of room and fuel for everybody. Nature wasn't impacted.
Most of today's fuel and global warming issues are simply a byproduct of overpopulation: Too many people gobbling-up too many resources. If we continue down this road, the next major problem won't be "How do we fuel our cars?" but "How do we fuel our bodies" as food shortages run rampant in the U.S. and E.U. (Sorry I don't buy the Asimovian future of an Earth sustaining 50 billion people.)
One thing's for sure: We've come a long way from the days when the IBM PC was represented by Charlie Chaplin:
- Chaplin was artistic.
- Chaplin was energetic.
- Chaplin was a rebel.
The original IBM PC was a remarkable invention, but the modern version of IBM/microsoft PC is certainly no Charlie Chaplin. Of all the machines I've owned, this Pentium 4 clone is the dullest and least exciting. It has no personality; it's just another appliance. (Oh and before somebody steps-in and starts spouting about what a PC can do --- that's only because those features were invented by more-advanced machines like Commodore, Amiga, and Apple who were the first to create the multimedia computer. Had those companies not existed & pushed for innovation, we'd still be using boring monochrome monitors with sounds consisting of "beep" and "boop".)
"Nobody will ever need more than 0.64 megabyte." - Bill Gates
Troy (proud owner of Atari, Commodore 64, Amiga 500, and Macintosh Quadra computers; not-so-proud owner of a generic blackbox PC)
I've been saying it since 2000: Hanging chads may not be perfect, but at least there's a paper trail that can be reviewed. That's not true with the computer black boxes.
In my State we had a very simple scantron sheet. You made your mark, ran it through a counting machine, and deposited it into a sealed box. This provided two levels of verification: The quick-and-easy electronic tally, plus an actual handcount of every individual ballot. Each verified the other. It was a nearly-perfect system, and foolish politicians abandoned it.
(Well, maybe not so foolish. I suspect politicians really don't want a tamper-proof system.)
TRIVIA:
The actual pirates spoke late Middle English and early Modern. So basically they spake like Chaucer (Wann Aprille mit his soottes shorres) or Shakespeare (Toe bay orrrrr note toe bay, dat ist dey qvest-teeon), albeit less poetic and more common man.
Some of dose scurvy Scots still spake like dey pirates:
"Yalp oot a hay nanny-nanny, and drank up me haarties, yo ho!"
(ducking and running)
>>>Because the purpose of an undergraduate university education is not to get a person a job
Propaganda. And you believed it. Instead of blindly swallowing whatever the college/university feeds you, THINK for yourself. What is the REALITY? ----- 99.9% of people go to college with one single goal in mind - To get a better job than flipping burgers or working in a factory.
The purpose of college is to serve what 99.9% of these customers desire - job skills. Even the colleges acknowledge this when they survey industry and say, "What skills do you need in your future employees?" Penn State University recently performed that survey, and the result led to the creation of a whole new program called "Information Technologies" to churn-out technically-skilled managers.
Modern colleges are factories producing skilled employees for corporations.
>>>If the guys at NVIDIA who designed their chip packaging would have been more chemists instead of electrical engineers....
In every example you listed, you support my original claim that General Chemistry 101 should be required, but you still fail to explain why *organic* chemistry is needed. Not one of your examples requires an understanding of organics.
In most cases, like my own "Commonwealth of Pennsylvania", it's just a name. But originally the name meant exactly what it said: Everybody shared the same wealth, which in colonial society meant "common sharing of food". That style was quickly abandoned because it was discovered that some lazy people refused to work in the field, and yet they still got the reward (free food) off the backs of their industrious neighbors.
Now my state operates on the idea of individual wealth - you work, you keep what you earn. Wealth is kept separately for each person or family, except in a few cases like the Dole for the homeless.
Actually the Civil War is not the main cause of today's over-reaching Congress. The "Commerce clause" and the U.S. Supreme Court is the main problem. The U.S.S.C. has interpreted the commerce clause in such a way that Congress can now regulate almost anything it wants. That happened during the Depression (1930-40s), and the decision allows Congress to tell you how much wheat you can or cannot grow in your own backyard. Clearly this was not what the Framers intended when they gave the U.S. the power to regulate interstate commerce. What I grow in my backyard is INTRAstate commerce and should not involve Congress at all. It should be the Pennsylvania government that regulates that.
It would be roughly equivalent to the European Parliament telling British citizens how much food they can grow for their own personal consumption. Clearly that's not part of the EU's mandate, and it's not part of the U.S.' constitution either.
Stupid, stupid supreme court justices.
The U.S. Supreme Court already ruled in a similar case that an owner of "XYZmall.com" did not infringe upon the actual XYZ Mall when he purchased that domain several years earlier & created an informative site about its future construction (for other local residents interested in shopping there).
They declared the right to free speech trumps trademark.
I think the real question should be: "Is this Organic Chem RELEVANT to the job of being a ______? (insert career)" I'm an electrical engineer, and I had to take Organic Chem. Why?!?!? My job consists of wires, resistors, and gate arrays... not a single protein or amino in sight.
I can understand taking basic Chem 101 or Physics 101 or History 101 to gain an understanding of these subjects, but I don't see any value in taking any higher-level courses unless those courses have actual use for that person's future job as an Engineer or Doctor. I consider my time spent in Organic Chemistry a complete waste of money (approximately $3000 of tuition).
(Of course that may be the point - a college is a business after all - any chance to gain more money out of the customers' wallets, even if that means requiring not-needed classes.)