And the first things we'd recognize as computers were analog/mechanical devices.... unless you count abacuses, of course.
Er, the first things we'd recognize as computers were really primitive -- they used vacuum tubes (discounting abacuses, slide rules, and mechanical calculators).
Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that's pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.
If ENIAC was a computer (and I posit that by today's standards, it wasn't) then my first computer was a slide rule.
It has nothing to do with value. It has to do with investors thinking that "hey, the world economy tanked, they're not gonna need as much oil as we thought they would". Exxon and Apple are probably both good investments, but I'm glad oil tanked. Gasoline will be cheaper next week, and I have to drive.
Yeah, you can sell the iPad to buy... dude, that joke sucked. Sorry. Pot will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no pot, but that meme just doesn't work with oil and iPads.
I had an iPad once. The iDoctor made me wear it after my iSurgery.
Not every place on earth is like the US where you pretty much need a car to collect your mail.
My car threw a serpentine belt last Thursday. My legs hurt now! But, er, how are they going to truck those groceries to the store across the street form you without fuel? Upload them from their iPods?
That's true. I got rid of my credit and debit cards a long time ago, and pay cash for almost everything. Haven't been on social media since MySpace, But my info is still mostly out there. Most of my friends and family are on FB.
However, I'm on G+ now; there are six other guys on G+ with the same name as me.
Ironically (or stupidly? I simply don't care) I've been putting large amounts of my life online for over ten years. Lots of folks have found it amusing; yeah, I'll be putting it in book form Real Soon Now. At least when I put stuff on the internet, the lies (if they are indeed fiction, I ain't telling) are my own and not somebody else lying about me.
Support the Innocence Project. Now incarcerated former Illinois Governor George Ryan stopped executions in Illinois when it was found that half of the men on Illinois' death row were innocent. The legislature has since abolished the death penalty here for the same reason, but there are still folks in prison who have been framed.
Citizens need to keep governments on tight leashes, rather than the other way around.
1. I've been working since I was 16, that was 1968. Worked my way through college. Tell me, why should government have "borrowed" from SS and why should it have anything to do with the budget? SS is a completely different tax,
2. The worst is when poor people vote democrat because they're too stupid to see through the party lies.
I don't vote party, I vote candidate. My voting history in Presidential elections: R D R R R D D D LP (would have voted Green if they hadn't run a maniac)
It isn't "I just know these smart guys we're electing will make us all millionaires just like the rich people we hate!" it's more like "how about they pay their fair share?" When I was young the average CEO earned ten times what the lowest paid employee made. Today the CEO makes four hundred times what the lowest paid employee earns! It isn't the middle class that's greedy, it's the rich. We just want to make ends meet. They want MORE MORE MORE.
The average middle class person's wages have stagnated, even dropped, while the rich (who control the wealth the middle class creates, as well as controlling the government) have skyrocketed.
Kindles and nooks count; they are indeed books. They're proofread and edited and don't have nearly as many stupid errors as saying "I'll loose my dog" when you really mean "I'll lose my dog". Everybody makes typos, but when your typo changes the meaning of what you say, you have a problem. And when you don't know the difference between there, their, and they're you just look stupid.
The tea party isn't "fiscally conservative" (see the link in chill's comment in that journal for more borrow-and-spend tea party congressmen), unless your definition of "conservative" is "I don't want to pay taxes". You trust someone who has huge personal debt that he's not paying off while he's spending extravagantly (like on sea cruises) to be conservative with someone else's money? I sure don't.
Raising taxes slows economic growth--proven fact.
I've seen no evidence of that -- but it depends on whose taxes you raise or cut. Cut taxes on the middle class and they'll spend the extra money on goods and services, which will in fact improve the economy. That happened during Clinton's Presidency (credit to Congress, not him). My taxes went down. Raise their taxes and they won't buy that new car. Cut taxes on the rich and they'll gamble it on the Wall Street Casino which affects the average American negatively; an example, gasoline futures. The more cash poured into gasoline futures, the higher the price of gasoline, the less money Joe Sixpack has to spend on TVs and beer. The Bush tax cuts sure didn't help the economy -- at least not the economies of the middle class, who saw stagnant wages and high unemployment afterwards. And when Joe Sixpack can't afford a case of Budweiser, Auggie Busch can't sell as much beer and no way is he going to hire more people to work in his brewery; he'll lay them off, making even fewer able to afford his beer.
Say you have a spendthrift wife named George who maxes out all the credit cards and leaves you with a huge debt, and you divorce her. The interest on the debts is huge, what do you do? First, you cut your spending -- but you can only cut so much. You stop eating out, eat more chicken, put off buying that new TV, etc. But it isn't enough, what do you do? A responsible person will get a second job to pay of his ex-wife's debt. In the government's case, that second job is more taxes. But you don't tax the middle class more, you will indeed harm the economy -- the middle class spends their money. You tax those who can afford the taxes, whoi do very little for the economy in relation to what they're paid. Ford doesn't create wealth in the boardroom, it's created on the factory floor. The boardroom is needed, as are the accountants and lawyers, but the cars themselves are the wealth, created by the Joe Sixpacks making those cars.
I do agree that there are a whole lot of places to cut -- pork, war, foreign aid. If they legalized psychoactive drugs they'd save tons on law enforcement, courts, incarceration and the taxes would help the defecit.
But money needs to be spent on our crumbling infrastructure. That isn't expenditure, that's investment. Money spent on education is likewise investment.
In my grandfather's day (he was born in 1894) only the rich paid federal income taxes, and they still managed to pay for WWI. Today, federal taxes are lower than they've been in 60 years, so how can anybody complain that they're too high?
Hmmm, the median is usually at the top of the bell while the mean may be to the left or right (further down), correct? Take income, for example; I make just about the median income, so I sit at the top of the curve, while the rich and poor are on the right and left (with the left sloping upwards and right sloping downwards).
Just as soon as the audiophile industry hears about this they'll go batshit insane. Something that is 1) new 2) expensive 3) combines tubes and anything else will be simply irresistible to them.
I know, you jest, but judging from TFA they're only talking about the diamond transistors being able to withstand heat like tubes do.
Musicians use tube amps because tubes overload differently than transistors; the wave distortion is different. Overload a transistor or a tube with a sine wave and both will produce a square wave, but the tube's "square wave" will have rounded corners while the a transistor will have the top chopped off cleanly, making it more like a true square wave.
However, you're right about one thing -- audiophiles are gullible.
You and the GP are both misunderstanding "digital" and "analog". The first digital computers used vaccuum tubes; the first digital computer was patented in 1946. The first useable transistor was made in 1954 (wikipedia article on transistors).
"Digital" usually refers to computers using the binary number system, while analog refers to circuits using an analogy; a potentiometer is an analog component. Transistor radios were analog circuits, and in the 1960s there were analog computers using transistors. In fact, you can construct an analog computer using nothing but a battery, two potentiometers, and an analog voltmeter, although it's really more of an electric slide rule than a computer. But there were sophisticated analog computers that would actually use fractions rather than binary math which output to a CRT (CRTs are tubes, too).
Tubes and transistors both serve pretty much the same purpose. The biggest difference (aside from size) is transistors can handle physical shock without harm, while tubes can handle high temperatures and voltages without harm. Tubes break, overheat or electrically overload a transistor and it will "break".
You can fit a building full of vacuum tube circuits in a single integrated circuit. That computer on your desk would take acres, even square miles, of vacuum tubes to perform the same function.
Nanotech promises even smaller scales. This diamond tech sounds like it could provide the benefits of both tubes and transistors (which work completely different from each other).
LOL, I wouldn't mind "dildocrat" at all, since I'm not a Democrat. I don't vote party, I vote candidate. I've never voted straight party ticket in my life, and usually choose the Republican ballot during primaries. But I hate ideologues and hypocrites, and most of the tea party who are so against Federal debt have tons of personal debt.
Bringing Social Security and Medicare into the budget debate is incredibly disingenuous; they are funded by completely separate taxes, and by God I'll vote against any candidate who wants to mess with them. If you're going to bring Social Security into the budget debate than tax the Koch brothers the same 7% I pay.
I voted against Clinton when he was first elected, voted for his re-election partly because he was balancing his budget. He was a far better President than Obama or Carter, but Bush did more damage to this country than anyone I've seen in my life. He is history's only US President who left office with fewer jobs than when he was elected. Where were the jobs cutting taxes on the rich were supposed to produce? Where was the tea party when Bush turned Clinton's balanced budget into history's (at the time) biggest deficit? Why are they so against repealing the "temporary" tax cuts to the rich when it's obvious those cuts not only didn't serve their intended purpose? Why are they so anti-tax when Federal tax rates are lower than they've been in sixty years? Liars and thieves deserve hard language; indeed, they deserve far worse.
While I'm all for protecting our rights, changing the system to everybody is protected, and making sure our votes count, let's not kid ourselves, we're still just whining about our first world problems of not having enough luxuries. Even if unemployed these day, we still have it an order of magnitude better than our grandparents in the great depression, probably even if they had a job.
My dad grew up during the depression, born in 1931. Will Rogers famously said during the depression, "a recession is when your neighbor's out of work. A depression is when YOU'RE out of work." We have it better not because of the economy, but because of technology. I can remember when my mom's brother built a bathroom on my grandparents' house; grandpa still used the outhouse after the bathroom was installed!
My dad grew up without electricity and running water not because they couldn't afford the bill, but because it wasn't available. He still has no computer or cell phone -- "I lived 80 years without it, I don't need it now" (I hope I never get to be like that).
I don't miss what I never had, but get me dependant on it and you're going to have to fight me to take it away. I lived 45 years without internet or a cell phone, now I don't know how we did without it.
What's troubling to me is, if I think I'm downloading The Station's "Fingertips", I'm far more likely to download Stevie Wonder's completely different song with the same name, even if I may loathe Wonder's music.
Yet another of the RIAA's tools against lost revenue; revenue lost to their competition. TFA (either disingenuously, ignorantly, or stupidly) claims this is a loss to the economy, which is an unmitigated lie. The economy loses NOTHING when you download. When you download that copy of Photoshop that you could no way in hell afford, how has Adobe lost anything?
AND, Piracy generates revenue. As Doctorow says in the forward to one of his books (which I read for free), nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. He credits his standing as a New York Times best seller to the fact that he gives his books away for free on boingboing.
I was at the library yesterday. I checked out Charles Portis' "True Grit" and Fred Pohl's "All The Lives He Led" (I thought Pohl was dead, but he's still writing, this is a new book), two DVDs and two CDs, and it cost me the price of gas to drive two miles. Did Portis and Pohl lose any money because I'm not paying to read their books?
I have dozens of books by Isaac Asimov. Without libraries, I'd never have bought a single one of them. I see no difference whatever between the internet and the library, especially since my library doesn't have to even own a book for me to check it out; there are interlibrary loans.
Thanks, kids, Now I feel REALLY old. I was 31 when I first got on line, that was in 1983 on Compuserve. To tell the truth, it was pretty useless -- but so were both of my computers, a TS-1000 and a TRS-80 MC10, neither of which had any decent software I didn't write myself. I sold a little software for the MC10 after putting a classified in (IIRC) Byte Magazine. God but getting Compuserve cancelled was hard!
I was on BBSes around 88 or 89 after I bought a used IBM-XT. That and shareware got me into computer games.
Back then you couldn't get on the internet without a credit card, and we were dirt poor and didn't have one. In '97 Family Video offered internet access, unlimited access for $12 per month and you could pay cash, and they weren't kidding about unlimited. It came with hosting, and I abused the hell out of it with my 33.6 modem. I made web pages for my favorite games, and some teenager emailed me asking if I played Quake. Of course I played Quake! He encouraged me to make a Quake page; I guess I was good at it, because I got emails about my Road Rash site from people who thought it was EA's site.
The Quake site was the one I abused Family Video with. I uploaded patches, skins, maps, you name it. FV's servers must have been pretty fast, because some folks told me they'd wait until I uploaded a patch because it would download faster.
I was pretty proud of that site. A couple months after starting it I submitted an article to Planet Quake, who posted it with a link to my site and it really took off after that. Everybody was linking me; Blue's News would have a link every couple of weeks or so. I got to where I spent a lot more time on the site than playing Quake!
My youngest, Patty, was a fan of online Roger Rabbit, and one day she came to me with wide etes and said "dad, did you know you were famous?" Seems a lot of the kids were my fans!
Man, I had a lot of fun back then, especially after I had a boss who discovered I was doing things at work that people earning three times what I was couldn't, and got me a big promotion and raise. So we bought a big house on 7th street, Evil-X went to school and pretty much didn't spend any time at all with the kids and me, and she wound up moving out.
Yeah, I'm putting the Paxil Diaries in book form. I promise! For you who aren't acquainted, I'd joined/. (which started about the same time as the Springfield Fragfest, my Quake site) but didn't post much; I was too busy with Quake. After Evil-X moved out I started posting diaries on K5; that was the Paxil Diaries. They were about music, reefer, drinking, and unsuccessfully chasing women.
Patty and Leila are still big into gaming; Patty's assistant manager of a GameStop now. Tell her "hi" if you see her, she's the hot 24 year old with a treble clef tattood on one arm and a bass clef on the other. Her picture's on my Google+ page.
Most of you guys are probably not much older than them, and a lot of you are even younger. No, I won;t tell you to get off my lawn. Especially if you hand me a beer or a lit joint.
Dude, be glad I commented in this thread*. I have 13 mod points and I'm in a bad mood and I intend to mod anybody who doesn't know the difference between your and you're, there, their, and they're, lose and loose, etc. as "flambait -- because if it pisses me off, it's flamebait. IMO aliterates don't belong on slashdot -- read a book once in a while.
To misqoote Twain, "an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate".
Now someone please mod me offtopic, because I am.
* even though you're already +4 and it wouldn't have made any difference
If I hit a brick wall, I'd rather be in my '02 Concorde. The brick wall won't kill or maim you, the car's interior will. Your skylark had no crumple zones, no air bags, no shoulder harness. The dash wasn't even padded! If you were wearing your seat belt you'd live, but you'd be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life from the broken spine.
Plus, it's easier to avoid the brick wall in the first place. That big heavy Buick handled like utter shit and had no ABS.
And it got maybe 13 MPG on the highway. My car's just as roomy and I got 36 MPG doing 50 with a donut spare once, and I usually get 27-32 depending on wind and terrain.
...and didn't pay the bill to the FAA and loose MORE money in not getting airfare taxes.
I don't think you said what you thought you said. If they'd loosed the money, the FAA wouldn't have shut down. As Google says, "did you mean lose?" Seems to me that the airlines should be prosecuted for fraud for collecting and keeping money that was supposed to go to the government. Collecting those fees (taxes!) was thievery.
Sorry, I'm already in a bad mood and the aliteracy struck a raw nerve. I'm misusing the word "aliteracy" here, or perhaps redefining it -- reading nothing but the internet isn't reading.
I'm in a bad mood precisely because of this topic. Stupid teabaggers. Look, I'm 59 years old and Federal taxes are lower than they've been in my entire life! The Tea Party was started by the unpatriotic billionaire Koch brothers, and idiot low class and middle class dimwits are all for taking away the Social Security and Medicaid that I've been paying into all my life so the rich sociopaths can be even richer.
How's that 401k looking now, you dumb kids?
That's enough ranting for now, I'm off to a different topic. I ranted about this very thing in my journal yesterday and the day before. It pisses me off that the dimwitted teabaggers want to help the billionaires steal even more of my money. I've been to the ballot box and the soap box, there are two more boxes left. The Koch brothers better have some damned good security; I'm not armed, but most guys my age are.
Wake up, people. And get off the internet and read a book; I'm in the middle of Fred Pohl's newest one right now ("All the Lives He Led", published this year).
I just hope congress will do something instead of blaming each other.
Both sides are at fault. But I covered that in Thursday's journal.
Some friends of mine solved that problem over ten years ago. A bank of CFLs will put off as much light as a high pressure sodium lamp at 1/5 the wattage, and without having to use the extra electricity to cool the grow room. The weed grew just as fast and was just as tasty and potent as the HPS lamps produced.
Slashdot Mirror
And the first things we'd recognize as computers were analog/mechanical devices. ... unless you count abacuses, of course.
Er, the first things we'd recognize as computers were really primitive -- they used vacuum tubes (discounting abacuses, slide rules, and mechanical calculators).
I didn't grow up with computers, computers grew up with me.
If ENIAC was a computer (and I posit that by today's standards, it wasn't) then my first computer was a slide rule.
It has nothing to do with value. It has to do with investors thinking that "hey, the world economy tanked, they're not gonna need as much oil as we thought they would". Exxon and Apple are probably both good investments, but I'm glad oil tanked. Gasoline will be cheaper next week, and I have to drive.
Damn, fifteen mod points and I had to comment! Someone please mod him up and me down ("no bonus" buttons don't seem to work).
Yeah, you can sell the iPad to buy... dude, that joke sucked. Sorry. Pot will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no pot, but that meme just doesn't work with oil and iPads.
I had an iPad once. The iDoctor made me wear it after my iSurgery.
Not every place on earth is like the US where you pretty much need a car to collect your mail.
My car threw a serpentine belt last Thursday. My legs hurt now! But, er, how are they going to truck those groceries to the store across the street form you without fuel? Upload them from their iPods?
That's true. I got rid of my credit and debit cards a long time ago, and pay cash for almost everything. Haven't been on social media since MySpace, But my info is still mostly out there. Most of my friends and family are on FB.
However, I'm on G+ now; there are six other guys on G+ with the same name as me.
Ironically (or stupidly? I simply don't care) I've been putting large amounts of my life online for over ten years. Lots of folks have found it amusing; yeah, I'll be putting it in book form Real Soon Now. At least when I put stuff on the internet, the lies (if they are indeed fiction, I ain't telling) are my own and not somebody else lying about me.
example
Support the Innocence Project. Now incarcerated former Illinois Governor George Ryan stopped executions in Illinois when it was found that half of the men on Illinois' death row were innocent. The legislature has since abolished the death penalty here for the same reason, but there are still folks in prison who have been framed.
Citizens need to keep governments on tight leashes, rather than the other way around.
1. I've been working since I was 16, that was 1968. Worked my way through college. Tell me, why should government have "borrowed" from SS and why should it have anything to do with the budget? SS is a completely different tax,
2. The worst is when poor people vote democrat because they're too stupid to see through the party lies.
I don't vote party, I vote candidate. My voting history in Presidential elections:
R
D
R
R
R
D
D
D
LP (would have voted Green if they hadn't run a maniac)
It isn't "I just know these smart guys we're electing will make us all millionaires just like the rich people we hate!" it's more like "how about they pay their fair share?" When I was young the average CEO earned ten times what the lowest paid employee made. Today the CEO makes four hundred times what the lowest paid employee earns! It isn't the middle class that's greedy, it's the rich. We just want to make ends meet. They want MORE MORE MORE.
The average middle class person's wages have stagnated, even dropped, while the rich (who control the wealth the middle class creates, as well as controlling the government) have skyrocketed.
Kindles and nooks count; they are indeed books. They're proofread and edited and don't have nearly as many stupid errors as saying "I'll loose my dog" when you really mean "I'll lose my dog". Everybody makes typos, but when your typo changes the meaning of what you say, you have a problem. And when you don't know the difference between there, their, and they're you just look stupid.
The tea party isn't "fiscally conservative" (see the link in chill's comment in that journal for more borrow-and-spend tea party congressmen), unless your definition of "conservative" is "I don't want to pay taxes". You trust someone who has huge personal debt that he's not paying off while he's spending extravagantly (like on sea cruises) to be conservative with someone else's money? I sure don't.
Raising taxes slows economic growth--proven fact.
I've seen no evidence of that -- but it depends on whose taxes you raise or cut. Cut taxes on the middle class and they'll spend the extra money on goods and services, which will in fact improve the economy. That happened during Clinton's Presidency (credit to Congress, not him). My taxes went down. Raise their taxes and they won't buy that new car. Cut taxes on the rich and they'll gamble it on the Wall Street Casino which affects the average American negatively; an example, gasoline futures. The more cash poured into gasoline futures, the higher the price of gasoline, the less money Joe Sixpack has to spend on TVs and beer. The Bush tax cuts sure didn't help the economy -- at least not the economies of the middle class, who saw stagnant wages and high unemployment afterwards. And when Joe Sixpack can't afford a case of Budweiser, Auggie Busch can't sell as much beer and no way is he going to hire more people to work in his brewery; he'll lay them off, making even fewer able to afford his beer.
Say you have a spendthrift wife named George who maxes out all the credit cards and leaves you with a huge debt, and you divorce her. The interest on the debts is huge, what do you do? First, you cut your spending -- but you can only cut so much. You stop eating out, eat more chicken, put off buying that new TV, etc. But it isn't enough, what do you do? A responsible person will get a second job to pay of his ex-wife's debt. In the government's case, that second job is more taxes. But you don't tax the middle class more, you will indeed harm the economy -- the middle class spends their money. You tax those who can afford the taxes, whoi do very little for the economy in relation to what they're paid. Ford doesn't create wealth in the boardroom, it's created on the factory floor. The boardroom is needed, as are the accountants and lawyers, but the cars themselves are the wealth, created by the Joe Sixpacks making those cars.
I do agree that there are a whole lot of places to cut -- pork, war, foreign aid. If they legalized psychoactive drugs they'd save tons on law enforcement, courts, incarceration and the taxes would help the defecit.
But money needs to be spent on our crumbling infrastructure. That isn't expenditure, that's investment. Money spent on education is likewise investment.
In my grandfather's day (he was born in 1894) only the rich paid federal income taxes, and they still managed to pay for WWI. Today, federal taxes are lower than they've been in 60 years, so how can anybody complain that they're too high?
Hmmm, the median is usually at the top of the bell while the mean may be to the left or right (further down), correct? Take income, for example; I make just about the median income, so I sit at the top of the curve, while the rich and poor are on the right and left (with the left sloping upwards and right sloping downwards).
Shine on, you crazy benzine?
(Damn, if that ain't a nerd joke I don't know what is)
Just as soon as the audiophile industry hears about this they'll go batshit insane. Something that is 1) new 2) expensive 3) combines tubes and anything else will be simply irresistible to them.
I know, you jest, but judging from TFA they're only talking about the diamond transistors being able to withstand heat like tubes do.
Musicians use tube amps because tubes overload differently than transistors; the wave distortion is different. Overload a transistor or a tube with a sine wave and both will produce a square wave, but the tube's "square wave" will have rounded corners while the a transistor will have the top chopped off cleanly, making it more like a true square wave.
However, you're right about one thing -- audiophiles are gullible.
You and the GP are both misunderstanding "digital" and "analog". The first digital computers used vaccuum tubes; the first digital computer was patented in 1946. The first useable transistor was made in 1954 (wikipedia article on transistors).
"Digital" usually refers to computers using the binary number system, while analog refers to circuits using an analogy; a potentiometer is an analog component. Transistor radios were analog circuits, and in the 1960s there were analog computers using transistors. In fact, you can construct an analog computer using nothing but a battery, two potentiometers, and an analog voltmeter, although it's really more of an electric slide rule than a computer. But there were sophisticated analog computers that would actually use fractions rather than binary math which output to a CRT (CRTs are tubes, too).
Tubes and transistors both serve pretty much the same purpose. The biggest difference (aside from size) is transistors can handle physical shock without harm, while tubes can handle high temperatures and voltages without harm. Tubes break, overheat or electrically overload a transistor and it will "break".
You can fit a building full of vacuum tube circuits in a single integrated circuit. That computer on your desk would take acres, even square miles, of vacuum tubes to perform the same function.
Nanotech promises even smaller scales. This diamond tech sounds like it could provide the benefits of both tubes and transistors (which work completely different from each other).
Liars, hypocrites, and thieves deserve harsh language, and honest people aren't offended by it. Your conscience bothering you, son?
LOL, I wouldn't mind "dildocrat" at all, since I'm not a Democrat. I don't vote party, I vote candidate. I've never voted straight party ticket in my life, and usually choose the Republican ballot during primaries. But I hate ideologues and hypocrites, and most of the tea party who are so against Federal debt have tons of personal debt.
Bringing Social Security and Medicare into the budget debate is incredibly disingenuous; they are funded by completely separate taxes, and by God I'll vote against any candidate who wants to mess with them. If you're going to bring Social Security into the budget debate than tax the Koch brothers the same 7% I pay.
I voted against Clinton when he was first elected, voted for his re-election partly because he was balancing his budget. He was a far better President than Obama or Carter, but Bush did more damage to this country than anyone I've seen in my life. He is history's only US President who left office with fewer jobs than when he was elected. Where were the jobs cutting taxes on the rich were supposed to produce? Where was the tea party when Bush turned Clinton's balanced budget into history's (at the time) biggest deficit? Why are they so against repealing the "temporary" tax cuts to the rich when it's obvious those cuts not only didn't serve their intended purpose? Why are they so anti-tax when Federal tax rates are lower than they've been in sixty years? Liars and thieves deserve hard language; indeed, they deserve far worse.
While I'm all for protecting our rights, changing the system to everybody is protected, and making sure our votes count, let's not kid ourselves, we're still just whining about our first world problems of not having enough luxuries. Even if unemployed these day, we still have it an order of magnitude better than our grandparents in the great depression, probably even if they had a job.
My dad grew up during the depression, born in 1931. Will Rogers famously said during the depression, "a recession is when your neighbor's out of work. A depression is when YOU'RE out of work." We have it better not because of the economy, but because of technology. I can remember when my mom's brother built a bathroom on my grandparents' house; grandpa still used the outhouse after the bathroom was installed!
My dad grew up without electricity and running water not because they couldn't afford the bill, but because it wasn't available. He still has no computer or cell phone -- "I lived 80 years without it, I don't need it now" (I hope I never get to be like that).
I don't miss what I never had, but get me dependant on it and you're going to have to fight me to take it away. I lived 45 years without internet or a cell phone, now I don't know how we did without it.
What's troubling to me is, if I think I'm downloading The Station's "Fingertips", I'm far more likely to download Stevie Wonder's completely different song with the same name, even if I may loathe Wonder's music.
Yet another of the RIAA's tools against lost revenue; revenue lost to their competition. TFA (either disingenuously, ignorantly, or stupidly) claims this is a loss to the economy, which is an unmitigated lie. The economy loses NOTHING when you download. When you download that copy of Photoshop that you could no way in hell afford, how has Adobe lost anything?
AND, Piracy generates revenue. As Doctorow says in the forward to one of his books (which I read for free), nobody ever lost money from piracy, but many artists have starved from obscurity. He credits his standing as a New York Times best seller to the fact that he gives his books away for free on boingboing.
I was at the library yesterday. I checked out Charles Portis' "True Grit" and Fred Pohl's "All The Lives He Led" (I thought Pohl was dead, but he's still writing, this is a new book), two DVDs and two CDs, and it cost me the price of gas to drive two miles. Did Portis and Pohl lose any money because I'm not paying to read their books?
I have dozens of books by Isaac Asimov. Without libraries, I'd never have bought a single one of them. I see no difference whatever between the internet and the library, especially since my library doesn't have to even own a book for me to check it out; there are interlibrary loans.
The RIAA and MPAA are the real pirates.
If my neighbors loose their connections, it doesn't matter if I lose mine, I can use theirs.
Thanks, kids, Now I feel REALLY old. I was 31 when I first got on line, that was in 1983 on Compuserve. To tell the truth, it was pretty useless -- but so were both of my computers, a TS-1000 and a TRS-80 MC10, neither of which had any decent software I didn't write myself. I sold a little software for the MC10 after putting a classified in (IIRC) Byte Magazine. God but getting Compuserve cancelled was hard!
I was on BBSes around 88 or 89 after I bought a used IBM-XT. That and shareware got me into computer games.
Back then you couldn't get on the internet without a credit card, and we were dirt poor and didn't have one. In '97 Family Video offered internet access, unlimited access for $12 per month and you could pay cash, and they weren't kidding about unlimited. It came with hosting, and I abused the hell out of it with my 33.6 modem. I made web pages for my favorite games, and some teenager emailed me asking if I played Quake. Of course I played Quake! He encouraged me to make a Quake page; I guess I was good at it, because I got emails about my Road Rash site from people who thought it was EA's site.
The Quake site was the one I abused Family Video with. I uploaded patches, skins, maps, you name it. FV's servers must have been pretty fast, because some folks told me they'd wait until I uploaded a patch because it would download faster.
I was pretty proud of that site. A couple months after starting it I submitted an article to Planet Quake, who posted it with a link to my site and it really took off after that. Everybody was linking me; Blue's News would have a link every couple of weeks or so. I got to where I spent a lot more time on the site than playing Quake!
My youngest, Patty, was a fan of online Roger Rabbit, and one day she came to me with wide etes and said "dad, did you know you were famous?" Seems a lot of the kids were my fans!
Man, I had a lot of fun back then, especially after I had a boss who discovered I was doing things at work that people earning three times what I was couldn't, and got me a big promotion and raise. So we bought a big house on 7th street, Evil-X went to school and pretty much didn't spend any time at all with the kids and me, and she wound up moving out.
Yeah, I'm putting the Paxil Diaries in book form. I promise! For you who aren't acquainted, I'd joined /. (which started about the same time as the Springfield Fragfest, my Quake site) but didn't post much; I was too busy with Quake. After Evil-X moved out I started posting diaries on K5; that was the Paxil Diaries. They were about music, reefer, drinking, and unsuccessfully chasing women.
Patty and Leila are still big into gaming; Patty's assistant manager of a GameStop now. Tell her "hi" if you see her, she's the hot 24 year old with a treble clef tattood on one arm and a bass clef on the other. Her picture's on my Google+ page.
Most of you guys are probably not much older than them, and a lot of you are even younger. No, I won;t tell you to get off my lawn. Especially if you hand me a beer or a lit joint.
Dude, be glad I commented in this thread*. I have 13 mod points and I'm in a bad mood and I intend to mod anybody who doesn't know the difference between your and you're, there, their, and they're, lose and loose, etc. as "flambait -- because if it pisses me off, it's flamebait. IMO aliterates don't belong on slashdot -- read a book once in a while.
To misqoote Twain, "an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate".
Now someone please mod me offtopic, because I am.
* even though you're already +4 and it wouldn't have made any difference
If I hit a brick wall, I'd rather be in my '02 Concorde. The brick wall won't kill or maim you, the car's interior will. Your skylark had no crumple zones, no air bags, no shoulder harness. The dash wasn't even padded! If you were wearing your seat belt you'd live, but you'd be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life from the broken spine.
Plus, it's easier to avoid the brick wall in the first place. That big heavy Buick handled like utter shit and had no ABS.
And it got maybe 13 MPG on the highway. My car's just as roomy and I got 36 MPG doing 50 with a donut spare once, and I usually get 27-32 depending on wind and terrain.
...and didn't pay the bill to the FAA and loose MORE money in not getting airfare taxes.
I don't think you said what you thought you said. If they'd loosed the money, the FAA wouldn't have shut down. As Google says, "did you mean lose?" Seems to me that the airlines should be prosecuted for fraud for collecting and keeping money that was supposed to go to the government. Collecting those fees (taxes!) was thievery.
Sorry, I'm already in a bad mood and the aliteracy struck a raw nerve. I'm misusing the word "aliteracy" here, or perhaps redefining it -- reading nothing but the internet isn't reading.
I'm in a bad mood precisely because of this topic. Stupid teabaggers. Look, I'm 59 years old and Federal taxes are lower than they've been in my entire life! The Tea Party was started by the unpatriotic billionaire Koch brothers, and idiot low class and middle class dimwits are all for taking away the Social Security and Medicaid that I've been paying into all my life so the rich sociopaths can be even richer.
How's that 401k looking now, you dumb kids?
That's enough ranting for now, I'm off to a different topic. I ranted about this very thing in my journal yesterday and the day before. It pisses me off that the dimwitted teabaggers want to help the billionaires steal even more of my money. I've been to the ballot box and the soap box, there are two more boxes left. The Koch brothers better have some damned good security; I'm not armed, but most guys my age are.
Wake up, people. And get off the internet and read a book; I'm in the middle of Fred Pohl's newest one right now ("All the Lives He Led", published this year).
I just hope congress will do something instead of blaming each other.
Both sides are at fault. But I covered that in Thursday's journal.
I'm on the left side of the "math nerd" curve, and on the right of the "normal people" curve.
but can you disguise grow op lights as a server?
Some friends of mine solved that problem over ten years ago. A bank of CFLs will put off as much light as a high pressure sodium lamp at 1/5 the wattage, and without having to use the extra electricity to cool the grow room. The weed grew just as fast and was just as tasty and potent as the HPS lamps produced.