To me, that sounds like the definition of hell. But then, I still have reclusive tendencies (not nearly as bad as they used to be) and get thoroughly worn out just being around a lot of people for an extended time. And I really don't like people sitting or walking around behind me; it drives me insane. I'm the guy that always sat in the back of the classroom and never sits at tables in restaurants, only in booths.
The place I work has cubicles, but at least in my department, it's not a giant cube farm. Instead, we have a total of six cubes tucked away in a corner, and the manager has a no-door office. The rest of the area is a test rig and workshop. I even got the facilities guys to remove the fluorescenet tube above my desk, adding to the cave quality. When we need to talk, we either talk over the cube walls or go to the common area with the whiteboard. Sticking everyone together in one space would just lead to shouting matches. Besides, most of the work we do (engineering) isn't stuff that really benefits from having people in each others' faces all the time.
Cramming everyone together in an open space doesn't work well for all occupations.
A 100% death tax is essential for a fair and equal society
Care to explain that one a little better? If someone went out and earned that money, and then decided to save it instead of buying hookers and blow and iGadgets, and then they get run over by a bus one day, the government should just come take that money that they earned and saved? Hell, let's take his car, and his house, and everything else he owns, too. Shame on him for not spending every cent he had and for owning a few things!
Unless your definition of a "fair and equal society" is "everyone has the same thing"...
Copyright is a separate matter entirely. I'm talking physical things, assets, cash... not IP.
But don't you know that those ships are primed to explode at any time and take out entire cities? And even when they don't explode they're spewing radiation and making mutant animals and irradiating poor people?
Think of the children!
In reality, the legal costs from fighting lawsuits, conducting study after environmental study, and the countries that pretty much ban anything nuclear-powered from entering their ports pretty much shoot this idea down. I'd love to see nuclear-powered freighters, surface combatants, and domestic power stations... but too many people have irrational reactions to the "n-word" for that to happen.
I'm sorry to say this, but sharing right-wing viewpoint on taxes and social programs - namely, that the poor should shoulder the majority of the tax burden and die rather than get any support - does make you an asshole.
"You want poor people to pay everything and then die?" Yeah, nice way to simplify and stereotype, you smug asshole. Perhaps instead of extrapolating to an extreme and assuming you know what I meant, you could have actually asked for an explanation. But since I'm a nice guy, I'm going to give you one anyway.
Believe it or not, there are more views on taxes than just "make the 'rich' pay everything" and "make the 'poor' pay everything". Objecting to one does not imply the other. Now, my view on taxes is this:
First, the singular purpose of taxes is to raise money for government activities. That purpose is not to enforce social policy, it is not to punish those you dislike or are envious of, it is not to reward those you like, and it is not to steer an economy towards whatever biased goal you have that supports the previous items.
Second, because taxes are collected by force, the government has obligations to spend that money efficiently and to not take in more than is necessary to fund its operations. (This presumes that spending is efficient and not wasteful, which is a separate matter that the government is obligated to hold to as well) Therefore, taxes should be set not by what will maximize revenue, but instead by what will meet the income requirements--ie, they should be set only to take in the minimum needed to fulfill obligations.
Third, in accordance with rules 1 and 2, allocation of taxes among the population is not to be determined by who you think "deserves" to pay more because they need to be punished, or by who you think "deserves" a break because you feel sorry for them. Instead, each person is obligated to pay something in taxes, to contribute something, even if it's just a small token amount, to the operation of the government. The allocation of tax rates should be simple, with no breaks or exceptions, and minimize the relative burden and disruption to both individuals and the economy.
All of this means, basically, that taxes should be as low as possible while still allowing government to do its job. You will probably wind up with a so-called "progressive" tax, to a degree, but the tax brackets should be set rationally instead of arbitrarily or by emotional drives to help some people out and punish others. This is what upsets me about a lot of the tax debates these days; too much of it is driven not by economics or the necessities of government, but rather by favoritism and that basic human desire* to drag others down.
With regard to social programs, the current execution of them bothers me far more than the basic idea behind most of them. To me, a government program that is designed to offer temporary assistance to otherwise able individuals who have run into a period of bad luck is fine. A program that provides care and assistance for those who truly can't care for themselves and can't get help elsewhere is fine. But programs that allow able people to remain dependent on them indefinitely (and not carry their own weight) really bother me. I have no sympathy for people who are able to work but choose not to. I have negative sympathy for those who claim they don't have enough money to feed themselves or their children, but then use their government "assistance" to free up funds for booze, cigarettes, drugs, flashy toys, etc.
Further, even the programs that are acceptable need to be efficient, and they should also be effective. The US spends hundreds of billions of dollars, year after year after year after year after year, on programs that are supposed to "eliminate poverty". But the problem persists, and they don't really seem to be working. I'd expect to at least see some improvem
Or, we can look for an answer that doesn't paint most of us as backwards hyper-religious hicks... I know that (especially from the outside) it certainly seems like we are from all the news coverage and wacky stories, but most people here who are religious follow a gentler, kinder, more accepting version.
The "religious right" is a fairly small minority, but a very vocal one with higher turnout numbers than average. Unfortunately, those of us who share [i]some[/i] views considered right wing (eg, my views on taxes, many social programs, and guns) get lumped together with those assholes, even though we also support plenty of those things that they don't (gay rights, fair and unbiased policies for legal immigration, upholding of true freedom of speech, separation of church and state, etc).
Anyway, I'm getting off-topic. I would suggest that a non-religious reason for not giving up or resigning ourselves is just a "don't ever give up" mentality.
The trick for this application (and I don't know if MIT solved it or not) isn't the concept, which is obvious to almost anyone with an engineering or technical background. Rather, it's the implementation that will make it big. Anyone can hook up a desalinization system to solar cells; what you need to be able to do for this situation is make it cheap, light, mass-producible, rugged, reliable, and easy to operate and maintain.
We could solve a lot of problems by teaching people like you to think of big-picture logistical issues associated with real-world problems instead of jumping on the "lets bash this guy for being 'wasteful' so we can feel better about how 'socially conscious' we are" bandwagon.
30L/day/person isn't unreasonable at all for a disaster relief scenario--if anything, it might be on the low side. I know it makes you feel good to assume GP is talking about luxuries of washing cars and green lawns and long hot showers, but if you're going to try to bash him on the grounds of "not thinking about what the people really need" you really need to think outside the box of "how much water do I drink in a normal, sedentary, climate-controlled day?"
Remember, this device is planned for use in disaster relief operations. You have a lot of things to worry about, like:
Drinking water - When you have a disaster on the scale of Haiti, Katrina, etc. you're going to have a lot of people who have been trapped or otherwise isolated from fresh water, and are severely dehydrated. You will also have rescue and medical workers performing very strenuous physical activity, quite possibly in very hot and humid conditions. People like these are going to need a lot more than the "three liters a day" that some other posters have mentioned. I don't know how much experience you have doing that kind of work, but I've done some disaster cleanup and first responder work in hot and humid locations. I once went through over a gallon of water (about 4L for you metric types) on a single extrication call on the side of the highway in mid-July. All we did was pull the guy out of the car, board and collar him, take vitals, and put down absorbent pads to soak up spilled gasoline, and just doing that took a full gallon to get rid of dehydration symptoms--and I'd been well-hydrated before that point.
Cooking - In a major disaster relief effort, you'll probably see field kitchens preparing basic staple foods. Many of those foods, like rice, require clean water for preparation. You'll also need water for cleaning the cooking equipment.
Cleaning - You need clean water if you're going to be cleaning things. I'm not talking about luxurious hot showers or keeping new SUVs sparkling and shiny. Instead, I'm talking about the basic handwashing, bathing, and hygiene habits that help prevent the spread of some really nasty diseases. Or the laundering of field hospital linens and steam sterilization of surgical instruments, or irrigation of wounds to flush out debris. Or washing off days of accumulated mud, dirt, and other nastier things from people that have been trapped in buildings, or those who helped pull them out. You also have to account for some amount of vehicle cleaning and maintenance; the helicopters, aircraft, bulldozers, trucks, and other equipment do need to at least have dirt and mud washed off on occasion so they can continue to function, and except for a few special cases, you can't really do that with salt water--you'll corrode them out very quickly.
Also, bear in mind that it is sound engineering planning practice to provide some form of margin in an estimate. If you're planning for a disaster relief scenario, you don't base your plans on the absolute minimum of supplies needed for survival when things are functioning normally. Instead, you add margin to account for spillage, leaks, mechanical trouble, evaporation, and so on. It's far, far better to have extra water available than not enough.
So next time, give the poster the benefit of the doubt and try to examine his post before you accuse him of making assumptions and being narrow-minded.
Or, maybe you could pull your head out of your ass and wipe the smug off of it. A number like 30L/day isn't just "oh, I feel like drinking a lot of water and taking nice long showers". If you're in a disaster relief setting, you need to account for a lot more than just basic drinking water for otherwise healthy and not super-active people. You're going to be dealing with very dehydrated people, either because they've been trapped for days with no drinkable water, or they have a disease (cholera maybe?) that requires lots of fluids, or they are working their asses off doing rescue and support work and need to replenish fluids lost through sweat. You have medical needs for the water--cleaning and sterilizing linens and instruments, irrigating wounds, replacing fluids lost, and so on. You need water for food prep--rice takes water to cook, for example. If you're planning for contingencies it's always good to make conservative estimates and account for things beyond the bare minimum of water required to stay alive.
And even in situations that aren't disaster areas, wouldn't it be nice if we could supply more water than the absolute bare minimum to people? Maybe you could actually be useful and try to figure out how something like this could improve the lives of people instead of trying to come up with reasons to bash someone else.
Re:It is free as in freedom but not free as in bee
on
Desktop Linux Is Dead
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· Score: 1
That's why I gave up trying to learn Ubuntu. I started using Windows back in the 3.1 days and managed to get pretty good at making it do what I wanted.
Then, I decided to make a home server, and wanted to use a Linux flavor to keep costs down. I installed Ubuntu, and immediately hit problems. Every single thing I wanted to do (set up shared folders, make the UPS work, encrypt hard drive, etc) took hours of poring over forum posts and different websites. The UPS still doesn't work. And forget about making backups or running server-side applications like a music player or FTP host. After 100+ hours of messing with Ubuntu, my server is nothing more than a glorified network drive.
I just don't have the time to spend learning it and making it do what I wanted. All I want to be able to do at this point is make regular backups to a regular external HD (much less an encrypted one), but I can't even figure that out.
And finally, to hell with the command line. I gave that up with Windows 95 and never looked back.
The basic presentation is, though the Tools --> Options screen isn't quite set up the same way. Customizing the toolbars is also kind of a pain compared to the MS product (I thought the add button, move up/down interface had gone away around 2002?).
There's also some minor annoyances with OOo that bug me enough to not really switch from 2003: * No "draw borders" functionality in the spreadsheet program (and the addon/plugin kinda sucks). Doing cell borders is a pain in OOo but very easy in Excel. * The big purple lightbulb box that pops up all the time. It's not as bad as Clippy (which is the first thing I disable after turning off "automatically highlight entire word" and enabling "always show full menus"), but still bothersome. * Asking me every single time whether I want to delete everything in the cell, or just the formula, or the formatting, or...
It's less that, and more the belief that human life is the lowest on the planet, and every little bug and weed has priority. They're up there with the voluntary extinction movement--an evolutionary dead end.
Chernobyl wasn't a case of neglect or ignorance. It was the equivalent of drinking a fifth of vodka, cutting your brake lines and e-brake cable, anchoring the gas pedal to the floor, and driving your schoolbus full of children down a mountain road in the middle of a snowstorm.
Part of the reason nuclear plants are so expensive is that any time the word "nuclear" is mentioned, a bunch of people go "ZOMG NUCLEAR!!! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE LIKE THREE CHERNOBYL ISLAND!!1!!ONE!" And then they demand study after study after study after study after study, supposedly to make sure the native grasshopper population isn't inconvenienced or trying to prove that the reactor won't be damaged if a rock the size of Bobby Dodd stadium falls on it, but really just intended to ramp the legal costs up and delay the build so long that it doesn't happen. It's kind of like running a filibuster in Congress, or filing a bunch of groundless patent suits against a competitor--the goal is to stall long enough that the other guy gives up.
Well, that and the way we custom-design every single plant instead of standardizing on one reactor and layout (economy of scale and all that).
You see this stuff happen with "green" energy plants, too; there are protests and studies because solar plants crowd out the native desert life and disrup the ecosystem, wind turbines kill birds and bats, hydroelectric and tidal kill fish, and so on, according to them. It's not as bad with these projects because the only people filing the objections to these tend to be super eco-nuts who basically oppose any kind of energy use or technology and would rather have everyone go back to being hunter-gatherers^W^W vegetarian farmers living in harmony with nature in mud-cake thatch huts.
This guy didn't just "forget" to pay his fee for the year. He had a consistent track record of not paying for several years running. And given that, why the hell would the fire department then believe "oh, I promise I'll pay, honest!" on the scene? I wouldn't trust the word of a guy who lets his son set fire to his house trying to burn leaves, and then repeatedly refuses to pay his bill.
A person inside? Yeah, they'll go in and rescue them, then let it burn once they're out. They won't let someone die over $75. But property can be replaced. And as much as it may upset people, pets and property don't justify the same risks to firefighters' lives that people do.
Well, another thing they could have done was use an existing EELV with appropriate safety modifications rather than try to design a brand-new rocket from parts. But that doesn't keep favored political districts happy.
The whole "you're behind on schedule and over budget" thing reminds me of the phrase "don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining". A big reason the program is behind schedule and over budget is because it was never properly funded in the first place. They're whacking their star athlete in the kneecaps with a lead pipe and then complaining because he's not running very fast.
If there's any political or monetary incentive for this research to be published then I state it and have immediately won the argument.
Immediate attack on the parent poster's political affiliation... obviously the party that he belongs to (judging by this one issue, even though I don't know where he stands on others) is absolutely full of complete psychos and want to do all kinds of other bad things that will destroy civilization as we know it. And they completely fulfill the most extreme version of every stereotype about them.
So of course, my party is full of level-headed reasonable people--every single one of them. Everything that we say is perfect and correct, we're as innocent as a newborn baby's ass, and if only our candidate had been elected last time we lost, the world would be full of unicorns that fart rainbows and save children from horrible deaths.
It's one thing to be upset with the film/recording industries for claiming some "right" to inspect all internet traffic, or to secretly place monitoring software on peoples' computers without their knowledge, or for creating invasive DRM schemes that rely on phoning home to work. It's one thing to be angry about making it illegal to format-shift media for your own personal use, or "end-result" patents that only specify a result and not a specific method, or lawsuits filed with no proof that are just intended to extort money from innocent people.
It's quite another to demand some "right" to the works of others, to say that I have a perpetual right to copy, distribute, and use anything you make, for free, just because it exists. Are you going to say that any wood furniture I might make at home isn't mine, that it's freely available to anyone that can come get it? That things belong not to the people who put the time, effort, and their lives towards making them, but to whoever can take it?
I have a pet suspicion that most of these "I have a right to everything you do, for free" types haven't ever had to work to support themselves. It's real easy to sit back and claim that you have a right to everyone else's efforts (and they to yours) when your next meal depends on someone paying you for the work you did for them.
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To me, that sounds like the definition of hell. But then, I still have reclusive tendencies (not nearly as bad as they used to be) and get thoroughly worn out just being around a lot of people for an extended time. And I really don't like people sitting or walking around behind me; it drives me insane. I'm the guy that always sat in the back of the classroom and never sits at tables in restaurants, only in booths.
The place I work has cubicles, but at least in my department, it's not a giant cube farm. Instead, we have a total of six cubes tucked away in a corner, and the manager has a no-door office. The rest of the area is a test rig and workshop. I even got the facilities guys to remove the fluorescenet tube above my desk, adding to the cave quality. When we need to talk, we either talk over the cube walls or go to the common area with the whiteboard. Sticking everyone together in one space would just lead to shouting matches. Besides, most of the work we do (engineering) isn't stuff that really benefits from having people in each others' faces all the time.
Cramming everyone together in an open space doesn't work well for all occupations.
But Argentina doesn't operate any STOVL aircraft, and the only two countries that produce them (UK and US) won't sell.
What might be more interesting is if Brazil purchases it and a Harrier fleet to replace their existing carrier.
A 100% death tax is essential for a fair and equal society
Care to explain that one a little better? If someone went out and earned that money, and then decided to save it instead of buying hookers and blow and iGadgets, and then they get run over by a bus one day, the government should just come take that money that they earned and saved? Hell, let's take his car, and his house, and everything else he owns, too. Shame on him for not spending every cent he had and for owning a few things!
Unless your definition of a "fair and equal society" is "everyone has the same thing"...
Copyright is a separate matter entirely. I'm talking physical things, assets, cash... not IP.
people over here just wouldn't put up with that level of intrusion
Sadly, you could have said the same thing about the US not too long ago.
But don't you know that those ships are primed to explode at any time and take out entire cities? And even when they don't explode they're spewing radiation and making mutant animals and irradiating poor people?
Think of the children!
In reality, the legal costs from fighting lawsuits, conducting study after environmental study, and the countries that pretty much ban anything nuclear-powered from entering their ports pretty much shoot this idea down. I'd love to see nuclear-powered freighters, surface combatants, and domestic power stations... but too many people have irrational reactions to the "n-word" for that to happen.
I'm sorry to say this, but sharing right-wing viewpoint on taxes and social programs - namely, that the poor should shoulder the majority of the tax burden and die rather than get any support - does make you an asshole.
"You want poor people to pay everything and then die?" Yeah, nice way to simplify and stereotype, you smug asshole. Perhaps instead of extrapolating to an extreme and assuming you know what I meant, you could have actually asked for an explanation. But since I'm a nice guy, I'm going to give you one anyway.
Believe it or not, there are more views on taxes than just "make the 'rich' pay everything" and "make the 'poor' pay everything". Objecting to one does not imply the other.
Now, my view on taxes is this:
First, the singular purpose of taxes is to raise money for government activities. That purpose is not to enforce social policy, it is not to punish those you dislike or are envious of, it is not to reward those you like, and it is not to steer an economy towards whatever biased goal you have that supports the previous items.
Second, because taxes are collected by force, the government has obligations to spend that money efficiently and to not take in more than is necessary to fund its operations. (This presumes that spending is efficient and not wasteful, which is a separate matter that the government is obligated to hold to as well) Therefore, taxes should be set not by what will maximize revenue, but instead by what will meet the income requirements--ie, they should be set only to take in the minimum needed to fulfill obligations.
Third, in accordance with rules 1 and 2, allocation of taxes among the population is not to be determined by who you think "deserves" to pay more because they need to be punished, or by who you think "deserves" a break because you feel sorry for them. Instead, each person is obligated to pay something in taxes, to contribute something, even if it's just a small token amount, to the operation of the government. The allocation of tax rates should be simple, with no breaks or exceptions, and minimize the relative burden and disruption to both individuals and the economy.
All of this means, basically, that taxes should be as low as possible while still allowing government to do its job. You will probably wind up with a so-called "progressive" tax, to a degree, but the tax brackets should be set rationally instead of arbitrarily or by emotional drives to help some people out and punish others. This is what upsets me about a lot of the tax debates these days; too much of it is driven not by economics or the necessities of government, but rather by favoritism and that basic human desire* to drag others down.
With regard to social programs, the current execution of them bothers me far more than the basic idea behind most of them. To me, a government program that is designed to offer temporary assistance to otherwise able individuals who have run into a period of bad luck is fine. A program that provides care and assistance for those who truly can't care for themselves and can't get help elsewhere is fine. But programs that allow able people to remain dependent on them indefinitely (and not carry their own weight) really bother me. I have no sympathy for people who are able to work but choose not to. I have negative sympathy for those who claim they don't have enough money to feed themselves or their children, but then use their government "assistance" to free up funds for booze, cigarettes, drugs, flashy toys, etc.
Further, even the programs that are acceptable need to be efficient, and they should also be effective. The US spends hundreds of billions of dollars, year after year after year after year after year, on programs that are supposed to "eliminate poverty". But the problem persists, and they don't really seem to be working. I'd expect to at least see some improvem
Or, we can look for an answer that doesn't paint most of us as backwards hyper-religious hicks... I know that (especially from the outside) it certainly seems like we are from all the news coverage and wacky stories, but most people here who are religious follow a gentler, kinder, more accepting version.
The "religious right" is a fairly small minority, but a very vocal one with higher turnout numbers than average. Unfortunately, those of us who share [i]some[/i] views considered right wing (eg, my views on taxes, many social programs, and guns) get lumped together with those assholes, even though we also support plenty of those things that they don't (gay rights, fair and unbiased policies for legal immigration, upholding of true freedom of speech, separation of church and state, etc).
Anyway, I'm getting off-topic. I would suggest that a non-religious reason for not giving up or resigning ourselves is just a "don't ever give up" mentality.
The trick for this application (and I don't know if MIT solved it or not) isn't the concept, which is obvious to almost anyone with an engineering or technical background. Rather, it's the implementation that will make it big. Anyone can hook up a desalinization system to solar cells; what you need to be able to do for this situation is make it cheap, light, mass-producible, rugged, reliable, and easy to operate and maintain.
We could solve a lot of problems by teaching people like you to think of big-picture logistical issues associated with real-world problems instead of jumping on the "lets bash this guy for being 'wasteful' so we can feel better about how 'socially conscious' we are" bandwagon.
30L/day/person isn't unreasonable at all for a disaster relief scenario--if anything, it might be on the low side. I know it makes you feel good to assume GP is talking about luxuries of washing cars and green lawns and long hot showers, but if you're going to try to bash him on the grounds of "not thinking about what the people really need" you really need to think outside the box of "how much water do I drink in a normal, sedentary, climate-controlled day?"
Remember, this device is planned for use in disaster relief operations. You have a lot of things to worry about, like:
Drinking water - When you have a disaster on the scale of Haiti, Katrina, etc. you're going to have a lot of people who have been trapped or otherwise isolated from fresh water, and are severely dehydrated. You will also have rescue and medical workers performing very strenuous physical activity, quite possibly in very hot and humid conditions. People like these are going to need a lot more than the "three liters a day" that some other posters have mentioned. I don't know how much experience you have doing that kind of work, but I've done some disaster cleanup and first responder work in hot and humid locations. I once went through over a gallon of water (about 4L for you metric types) on a single extrication call on the side of the highway in mid-July. All we did was pull the guy out of the car, board and collar him, take vitals, and put down absorbent pads to soak up spilled gasoline, and just doing that took a full gallon to get rid of dehydration symptoms--and I'd been well-hydrated before that point.
Cooking - In a major disaster relief effort, you'll probably see field kitchens preparing basic staple foods. Many of those foods, like rice, require clean water for preparation. You'll also need water for cleaning the cooking equipment.
Cleaning - You need clean water if you're going to be cleaning things. I'm not talking about luxurious hot showers or keeping new SUVs sparkling and shiny. Instead, I'm talking about the basic handwashing, bathing, and hygiene habits that help prevent the spread of some really nasty diseases. Or the laundering of field hospital linens and steam sterilization of surgical instruments, or irrigation of wounds to flush out debris. Or washing off days of accumulated mud, dirt, and other nastier things from people that have been trapped in buildings, or those who helped pull them out. You also have to account for some amount of vehicle cleaning and maintenance; the helicopters, aircraft, bulldozers, trucks, and other equipment do need to at least have dirt and mud washed off on occasion so they can continue to function, and except for a few special cases, you can't really do that with salt water--you'll corrode them out very quickly.
Also, bear in mind that it is sound engineering planning practice to provide some form of margin in an estimate. If you're planning for a disaster relief scenario, you don't base your plans on the absolute minimum of supplies needed for survival when things are functioning normally. Instead, you add margin to account for spillage, leaks, mechanical trouble, evaporation, and so on. It's far, far better to have extra water available than not enough.
So next time, give the poster the benefit of the doubt and try to examine his post before you accuse him of making assumptions and being narrow-minded.
Or, maybe you could pull your head out of your ass and wipe the smug off of it. A number like 30L/day isn't just "oh, I feel like drinking a lot of water and taking nice long showers". If you're in a disaster relief setting, you need to account for a lot more than just basic drinking water for otherwise healthy and not super-active people. You're going to be dealing with very dehydrated people, either because they've been trapped for days with no drinkable water, or they have a disease (cholera maybe?) that requires lots of fluids, or they are working their asses off doing rescue and support work and need to replenish fluids lost through sweat. You have medical needs for the water--cleaning and sterilizing linens and instruments, irrigating wounds, replacing fluids lost, and so on. You need water for food prep--rice takes water to cook, for example. If you're planning for contingencies it's always good to make conservative estimates and account for things beyond the bare minimum of water required to stay alive.
And even in situations that aren't disaster areas, wouldn't it be nice if we could supply more water than the absolute bare minimum to people? Maybe you could actually be useful and try to figure out how something like this could improve the lives of people instead of trying to come up with reasons to bash someone else.
That's why I gave up trying to learn Ubuntu. I started using Windows back in the 3.1 days and managed to get pretty good at making it do what I wanted.
Then, I decided to make a home server, and wanted to use a Linux flavor to keep costs down. I installed Ubuntu, and immediately hit problems. Every single thing I wanted to do (set up shared folders, make the UPS work, encrypt hard drive, etc) took hours of poring over forum posts and different websites. The UPS still doesn't work. And forget about making backups or running server-side applications like a music player or FTP host. After 100+ hours of messing with Ubuntu, my server is nothing more than a glorified network drive.
I just don't have the time to spend learning it and making it do what I wanted. All I want to be able to do at this point is make regular backups to a regular external HD (much less an encrypted one), but I can't even figure that out.
And finally, to hell with the command line. I gave that up with Windows 95 and never looked back.
The basic presentation is, though the Tools --> Options screen isn't quite set up the same way. Customizing the toolbars is also kind of a pain compared to the MS product (I thought the add button, move up/down interface had gone away around 2002?).
There's also some minor annoyances with OOo that bug me enough to not really switch from 2003:
* No "draw borders" functionality in the spreadsheet program (and the addon/plugin kinda sucks). Doing cell borders is a pain in OOo but very easy in Excel.
* The big purple lightbulb box that pops up all the time. It's not as bad as Clippy (which is the first thing I disable after turning off "automatically highlight entire word" and enabling "always show full menus"), but still bothersome.
* Asking me every single time whether I want to delete everything in the cell, or just the formula, or the formatting, or...
It's less that, and more the belief that human life is the lowest on the planet, and every little bug and weed has priority. They're up there with the voluntary extinction movement--an evolutionary dead end.
And in other news, studies confirm that water is, in fact, wet.
More at 11.
Chernobyl wasn't a case of neglect or ignorance. It was the equivalent of drinking a fifth of vodka, cutting your brake lines and e-brake cable, anchoring the gas pedal to the floor, and driving your schoolbus full of children down a mountain road in the middle of a snowstorm.
Part of the reason nuclear plants are so expensive is that any time the word "nuclear" is mentioned, a bunch of people go "ZOMG NUCLEAR!!! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE LIKE THREE CHERNOBYL ISLAND!!1!!ONE!" And then they demand study after study after study after study after study, supposedly to make sure the native grasshopper population isn't inconvenienced or trying to prove that the reactor won't be damaged if a rock the size of Bobby Dodd stadium falls on it, but really just intended to ramp the legal costs up and delay the build so long that it doesn't happen. It's kind of like running a filibuster in Congress, or filing a bunch of groundless patent suits against a competitor--the goal is to stall long enough that the other guy gives up.
Well, that and the way we custom-design every single plant instead of standardizing on one reactor and layout (economy of scale and all that).
You see this stuff happen with "green" energy plants, too; there are protests and studies because solar plants crowd out the native desert life and disrup the ecosystem, wind turbines kill birds and bats, hydroelectric and tidal kill fish, and so on, according to them. It's not as bad with these projects because the only people filing the objections to these tend to be super eco-nuts who basically oppose any kind of energy use or technology and would rather have everyone go back to being hunter-gatherers^W^W vegetarian farmers living in harmony with nature in mud-cake thatch huts.
Thank you.
Filler filler filler
This guy didn't just "forget" to pay his fee for the year. He had a consistent track record of not paying for several years running. And given that, why the hell would the fire department then believe "oh, I promise I'll pay, honest!" on the scene? I wouldn't trust the word of a guy who lets his son set fire to his house trying to burn leaves, and then repeatedly refuses to pay his bill.
A person inside? Yeah, they'll go in and rescue them, then let it burn once they're out. They won't let someone die over $75. But property can be replaced. And as much as it may upset people, pets and property don't justify the same risks to firefighters' lives that people do.
Well, another thing they could have done was use an existing EELV with appropriate safety modifications rather than try to design a brand-new rocket from parts. But that doesn't keep favored political districts happy.
The whole "you're behind on schedule and over budget" thing reminds me of the phrase "don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining". A big reason the program is behind schedule and over budget is because it was never properly funded in the first place. They're whacking their star athlete in the kneecaps with a lead pipe and then complaining because he's not running very fast.
In case something happens to this one.
So the species can grow.
Or any other reason that doesn't involve meekly rolling over and accepting the end of our race with a whimper.
No, we can't do it right now. But that's all the more reason to be trying to figure out how.
Snarky reply with "whoosh" in large caps, and then advising Francis to lighten up.
Indignant response blasting your use of comma's and making short sentence's, and asserting myself as the expert on grammer.
If there's any political or monetary incentive for this research to be published then I state it and have immediately won the argument.
Immediate attack on the parent poster's political affiliation... obviously the party that he belongs to (judging by this one issue, even though I don't know where he stands on others) is absolutely full of complete psychos and want to do all kinds of other bad things that will destroy civilization as we know it. And they completely fulfill the most extreme version of every stereotype about them.
So of course, my party is full of level-headed reasonable people--every single one of them. Everything that we say is perfect and correct, we're as innocent as a newborn baby's ass, and if only our candidate had been elected last time we lost, the world would be full of unicorns that fart rainbows and save children from horrible deaths.
My thoughts exactly.
It's one thing to be upset with the film/recording industries for claiming some "right" to inspect all internet traffic, or to secretly place monitoring software on peoples' computers without their knowledge, or for creating invasive DRM schemes that rely on phoning home to work. It's one thing to be angry about making it illegal to format-shift media for your own personal use, or "end-result" patents that only specify a result and not a specific method, or lawsuits filed with no proof that are just intended to extort money from innocent people.
It's quite another to demand some "right" to the works of others, to say that I have a perpetual right to copy, distribute, and use anything you make, for free, just because it exists. Are you going to say that any wood furniture I might make at home isn't mine, that it's freely available to anyone that can come get it? That things belong not to the people who put the time, effort, and their lives towards making them, but to whoever can take it?
I have a pet suspicion that most of these "I have a right to everything you do, for free" types haven't ever had to work to support themselves. It's real easy to sit back and claim that you have a right to everyone else's efforts (and they to yours) when your next meal depends on someone paying you for the work you did for them.