Look, I learned to write well for several reasons. First of all, my mother was an English major and my father is a journalist, so proper English was beaten into me at an early age and to this day, I receive the occasional correction, which I'm happy to accept.
Another reason I write well (and I don't mean shakespeare well or best-selling fiction author well) is that I write a lot and have since I was 16.
But the most important reason, and this is what will make the difference for anyone, is that I want to write well so I work at improving it. You can write all day long every day, but if you don't work to improve your writing, it won't improve. If you don't look up words in the dictionary, read books, and do other things to improve your grammar, vocabulary, and style, you'll just have a lot of bad writing.
The internet, if anything, has shown us that there are millions upon millions of illiterate people on the internet. Some of them write a lot, but they remain illiterate. There are children that think R and U as in "R U there?" are words. Children are incorporating net lingo into their school writings. You can argue that these are augmentations of the language, but I don't believe that they should be considered valid augmentations. I don't want to read newspapers written written in "1337353" (leetese?) or abbreviations (ROFL, BTW, and so forth) and I don't think that anyone that truely cares about the language does either.
English is a language with grammar and spelling rules. The rules exist for a reason. To provide a standard in communication. Without them, you end up with fractured communities that each speak their own variation (which still happens to some degree, but less than it would). This is sort of what happened to Latin. At the point the rules started being ignored, the language started pulling in words from other languages or changing words to fit the community's changing pronunciation. Eventually you end up with completely new languages like Spanish, Portugese, Italian and French.
While these changes take a long time to take place, I'd hate to see English become so fractured. Oh, but I'm rambling. I'll get off my soap box. You guys write however you want.
About 10 years ago I remember a news story about how they were talking about sticking radar of some sort on the front of cars to force them to auto-brake. The idea was that the breaking would depend on your speed (relative to the object(s) in front of you) and the distance to the object(s). It would prevent tailgating and hopefully accidental re-endings. 10 years later....
Actually, mod-bombing works for a while, as I discovered. Then, suddenly, you're no longer given the ability to mod. I got ticked at someone and mod-bombed them for a few weeks. Then it all came to a sudden end about 2 years ago and I haven't been able to mod since. Oh well.
As someone who paid for the book, I feel completely ripped off now. Hell, if I had known it would eventually be free I never would have bought that expensive, overweight door stop.
As for the book itself, I have no doubt the guy's a genius, but like many others, I saw nothing particularly groundbreaking in his work. I just want my money back.
When I was still in school (seems like a million years ago, but it was only about 15 years ago), we only had one assembly language class. That and the two intro courses are the only ones I didn't go to (did the homework, went for the the midterms and finals, got As).
I don't think one semester is really enough assembly language, though. I think people should really have to understnad both assembly language and compiler design, though. I think it's important to understand both, though. As a programmer of a higher level language, you then have a fairly good concept of what's happening to the code you write.
And while I think that's still important now, I don't think it always will be important. In fact, I think over the years, its importants has diminished significantly and will continue to do so.
As an example, when machines were much slower and optimizations far more important, I remember jumping through a lot of hoops to optimize my code so that it would compile more efficiently, or embedding assembly routines for speed. I haven't had to hand code assembly since the mid-90s, though. So it seems to me it's far less important these days simply because machines are so much faster.
My cousin is an immigration attorney and knows nothing about technology, so you can imagine my surprise when I got an e-mail from him the other day saying he used Google's AdWords. His out of pocket expense was $1.50 before it brought him a client. I still haven't looked at it to see how it works, but that's impressive. That's the best deal in advertising I've ever heard of.
And I don't play one on TV. But, I'm as pissed at SCO as any "Linux zealot". MyDoom is written for Windows, so my guess is it was written by a programmer with a good deal of Windows programming experience. If I were writing a virus whose purpose was to DDoS someone, SCO would be my target at the moment. I think it's fair to say they're the most hated company in our industry right now. They've stolen the crown from M$.
But to assume it's a "Linux zealot" is a guess at best, and a bad one at that. I mean, all evidence says it's a Windows programmer. I don't know about Linux programmers, but I do Windows programming (sorry), and I'd have a hell of a time writing a virus for Linux. I could write one for Windows pretty easily, though. I'm sure there are people who are equally familiar with both platforms, but they are probably a small minority.
Here's how you do it cheap. First, buy a ticket to Cancun Mexico. I can pick you up at the airport, and we'll mosey on down to Playa del Carmen. We'll get you a house near mine and you can set up a wireless router with your 2MB/512KB DSL account and I'll be happy to share your bandwidth. $7000 should be plenty.
Sorry, but as others have pointed out, this is a non-story. It's a variation of a Dobsonian design. A real story is the story of John Dobson (short bio here), a monk from San Francisco who designed and built the original Dobsonian telescopes and got people interested in astronomy by taking his telescopes to the streets. Being a monk, he lived in poverty and built his telescope as cheaply as possible. Because he had to continue living in poverty, he was unable to sell them and become rich, so now the bigger telescope makers are making money off of his design.
You wanna run a story about amateur telescopes, that's a good one. Or I could point you to the story of the three guys who ground their own 30" mirror and built a telescope from that. There's a lot of cool stuff being done by amateurs. Sorry, but this isn't that cool compared to most of it.
I lived in Northern Virginia (Reston) and had ComCast for both cable and cable modem. I also had DirecTV for about 8 months. Overall, I LOVED ComCast in comparison on one feature alone, and that's the set-top box software. ComCast's cable box had an excellent, easy-to-use guide that was a hundred times better than DirecTVs. I found DirecTV's interface very annoying to use.
As an example, in the ComCast system, the cable box periodically updates all the programming information and keeps it stored locally. This is an excellent feature. In contrast, if you try to get a program description in DirecTV, it pulls it from the satellite (I assume) and you have to wait for it. Not long, but there was never a wait with the ComCast box.
Further, I like the fact that with the ComCast box, you can still preview your current channel while browsing what's on others. I hated that every time I brought up the guide in DirecTV, it cut my programming.
As for disrupted signal, I experienced it a few times in heavy winds with DirecTV(and the antenna was quite secure). But I don't think I had any fewer drops with ComCast (and they weren't frequent with either).
One disadvantage with the ComCast box is it took longer to come up during a reset (presumably from downloading all the data, possibly other reasons), but this was a very small price to pay for the other features.
Potential discoveries include glycoprotein, which prevents Antarctic fish from freezing...
I wonder if this sort of thing could ever have application in cryogenics of human beings. Right now, my understanding is that cryogenics is a crock because the freezing process causes the cells in the body to, for lack of a better word, explode. I doubt we'll ever encounter technology to undo that. If you could somehow protect the integrity of the cells during the freezing process however, reanimation should be feasible at some point.
Of course, I don't know if the whole cryogenics thing is worthwhile as is. But for space travel, even within our own solar system, it could come in quite handy by reducing the need for perishables (food, water, oxygen) as well as being easier to shield the astronauts from radiation by only having to provide serious shielding in a very confined space.
Anyway, that just seems like a cool possibility some day.
Going public is a major change for a company and while it can bring in a great deal of cash to work with, it also creates a new layer of accountability as well as more strict and public operations. It's not always in a company's best interest to go public and I question if it's in Google's best interest.
From everything I've seen of google, financials don't appear to be their weakness (though maybe it is and it's just not visible). So what do they need the cash for? Sure, the directors will make tons of money from doing it, but is it in the best interest of the company? Do they have acquisitions they want/need to make?
Frankly, Google has done quite well as a private company and I have some concerns about what may happen if they go public. As an example, there are some people that claim Google has unfairly ranked them and have sued. Google is, in many ways, a monopoly in the search business. Were they to go public, these kinds of suits might get further in court as Google would likely be under more scrutiny regarding this. I think Google does a good job of modifying page ranks of people trying to trick the system. I'd hate to see them lose that ability.
There are other areas as well where Google being privately held is an advantage. I could certianly be wrong about some of this. I'm not a corporate attorney nor an accountant, but this is my interpretation.
I just saw a job posting on a website yesterday that specified that they were looking for people who were willing to work at "Indian Salary Levels" and then pointed to an Indian job web site as a reference to find out what "competitive" bids were.
That definitely has me a bit concerned. I'm a programmer and I work out of Mexico, so while I can offer pretty competitive rates, I still expect to get paid well. Unfortunately the market is saturated by programmers, and I believe with time, that will change as programers continue to drop out because of job competition.
Really, my take on it, at least in the States, is that a lot of people went into software to make money. I think now that it's harder to make good money at it, the ones that are going to stick around are going to generally be the ones who really love doing it. Hopefully that will level the market out a bit.
The fact remains that some of us are quite skilled at what we do and that some people, no matter how hard they try, aren't going to be nearly as good as those of us who are in this field because we love the write software and have a natural ability with it. For the same reason, I'll never play guitar like Eddie Van Halen or paint like Van Gogh (and that's not to imply that I think I'm the Eddie Van Halen or Vincent Van Gogh of computer programming).
For most of the time I've been in this field (the last 4 years notwithstanding), most of the programmers were people that really loved it and the ratio of really good programmers to mediocre programers was fairly high. That ratio has reversed in the past few years. When it returns, I suspect the pay will get closer to what we expect as well.
Even here in Mexico, and granted, I live in one of the pricier towns in Mexico, living at Indian pay rates is simply out of the question.
Is it just me, or didn't the decision to let the Hubble die early seem to come awefully quick after President Bush's policy directive? I mean, that's a major decision and it came days after. Clearly not enough time to think it through, and let's face it, in many ways, the Hubble is NASA's most successful public relations program since Apollo. I mean, I hate to say, let's spend millions 'cause the pictures look cool, but think twice before you toss it out.
The Department of Transportation has issued an advisory stating that automobiles are too dangerous and that everyone should just walk wherever they're going. Planning a trip around the world? Get a new pair of GOOD shoes and some swimming trunks.
I remember back in the early days of the web, when it was just becoming popular, that John Dvorak hailed it as the coming of true mass literacy. His belief was that with so many average every day citizens posting web pages, surely this would lead to increased literacy.
It couldn't have been a year later that he retracted that prediction and instead said that the web has proven just how illiterate Americans (and I presume others) are.
Anyway, just thought I'd toss in my little anecdote.
When I was living outside of a small town in Arkansas, I had this same problem. I considered DirecWay but eventually decided not to because of all the downsides involved.
What's really strange is I moved to a small town in Mexico and my options are Dialup, DSL, Cable and wireless. If they can manage that in a small Mexican town, why not a small American town? That's what I can't figure out. Granted, the small Mexican town is about 10 times as populous as the small American town I was living in, but in most ways, it's also 10 times as backwards.
If I were you, I'd talk to your neighbors and collaborate on getting a real connection for your neighborhood like some of the other stories we've seen on that.
I'm a little surprised that nothing was mentioned of the CD-eating fungus which has been discussed here a couple of times before. I have personally been the victim of that fungus and lost somewhere in the area of 20 CDs to it.
I live in Southern Mexico where it's hot and humid most of the year, and these conditions apparently make CDs very vulnerable to the fungus. Given that I don't have any environmentally controlled rooms in which to keep my CDs, what should I do? I'm really concerned that my CD-Rs will be ruined from the higher heat which, for most of the year is in the high 80s to high 90s.
I've considered putting my CDs and CD-Rs in the refrigerator, but I'm not sure how safe that is. Can anyone comment on that? My thought was to put them on a spindle and then place that in a ziplock bag, evacuate as much air as possible, and then stick it in the fridge. Can anyone comment on that? I'm afraid even with a little air in the bag, there will be enough condensation to cause a problem. If someone could give me some good advice on how to handle that, I'd really appreciate it.
For something this "critical", you need technology that won't fail, but will also work in the kind of vast distances you're talking about. I suggest tin cans and string. Of course, you'll have to make sure nobody in the audience brought scissors, but with all the hi-tech anit-terrorism stuff they throw in schools these days, surely nobody can get in with sharp objects.
Okay, now they're sending letters lobbying congress. This is getting so out of hand. But, here's where you and I can actually fight back. If you're involved in open source (or even if you just support it) and you're a U.S. citizen, write your congressperson in support of Open Source. Be polite and be professional. Explain your understanding of the facts and why what SCO is doing is extortion and ask your congressperson to consider the facts before passing legislation.
In particular, point out to said congressperson that to date, no evidence has provided by SCO has survived more than a day's scrutiny by the community. That no court has yet supported any of SCO's allegations, and so on.
Please send snail mail instead of e-mail, if possible. Snail mail is more likely to be read. The great thing about congress is, if you send a lot of letters, they sometimes get the point (though not always, as evidenced by the DMCA among other things).
I live and work in my home in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. I live 4 blocks from the beach and have to somehow manage to get work done with all these women in bikinis passing by all hours of the day. How am I supposed to get anything done? I don't know why I put up with it (and just as I'm typing this, my 4 beautiful German neighbors walked by, so excuse the typos). God my life is hell.
Maybe it's time for the franchise to take a rest. I was a fan of the original series. Then with TNG came out, after the first season, I started to get interested (I think the actors didn't really find their characters until mid-second series).
I know a lot of people enjoyed DS9, though I didn't really care for it that much. I personally enjoyed a number of episodes of Voyager.
But maybe it's time to let things rest for a while. Maybe come back to it in 5 or 10 years with some fresh ideas and in the meantime, let people build up their appetite for it again as well. I think they've just really gotten to the point where their grasping for new story ideas and nothing is really drawing people in to the series. Maybe it's just me. I watched a few episodes of Enterprise. It's not bad, but it's not that great either.
People have high expectations of the Star Trek franchise, and if they're not going to be able to meet those expectations, they ought to let it rest until they can. But that's just my opinion.
You can train yourself to become aware and even control your dreams. It's simple, though not particularly easy. It takes a lot of practice. The hardest part is to avoid what I'd call "newbie" mistakes, such as, suddenly you become aware, so you conjure, say Natalie P. or whomever you seek. Because the moment they appear, you realize you're in complete control. This causes you a great deal of excitement which in turn, wakes you up.
You CAN conjure these images, but you have to work up to it, and you need to be a bit more subtle about it so that you don't get the overexcitement that wakes you.
I did a lot of this in high school and my first two years of college. I began simply by waking up at 3:00am every morning and recording my dreams, then going back to sleep and then recording them again when I woke up again.
After a while, you'll begin becoming more aware of your dreams. At that point, you need to start thinking about taking control. This is usually a few weeks after you've started recording the dreams.
I wish I could still do it. It was a lot of fun. It takes a lot of work to get there, though.
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Look, I learned to write well for several reasons. First of all, my mother was an English major and my father is a journalist, so proper English was beaten into me at an early age and to this day, I receive the occasional correction, which I'm happy to accept.
Another reason I write well (and I don't mean shakespeare well or best-selling fiction author well) is that I write a lot and have since I was 16.
But the most important reason, and this is what will make the difference for anyone, is that I want to write well so I work at improving it. You can write all day long every day, but if you don't work to improve your writing, it won't improve. If you don't look up words in the dictionary, read books, and do other things to improve your grammar, vocabulary, and style, you'll just have a lot of bad writing.
The internet, if anything, has shown us that there are millions upon millions of illiterate people on the internet. Some of them write a lot, but they remain illiterate. There are children that think R and U as in "R U there?" are words. Children are incorporating net lingo into their school writings. You can argue that these are augmentations of the language, but I don't believe that they should be considered valid augmentations. I don't want to read newspapers written written in "1337353" (leetese?) or abbreviations (ROFL, BTW, and so forth) and I don't think that anyone that truely cares about the language does either.
English is a language with grammar and spelling rules. The rules exist for a reason. To provide a standard in communication. Without them, you end up with fractured communities that each speak their own variation (which still happens to some degree, but less than it would). This is sort of what happened to Latin. At the point the rules started being ignored, the language started pulling in words from other languages or changing words to fit the community's changing pronunciation. Eventually you end up with completely new languages like Spanish, Portugese, Italian and French.
While these changes take a long time to take place, I'd hate to see English become so fractured. Oh, but I'm rambling. I'll get off my soap box. You guys write however you want.
About 10 years ago I remember a news story about how they were talking about sticking radar of some sort on the front of cars to force them to auto-brake. The idea was that the breaking would depend on your speed (relative to the object(s) in front of you) and the distance to the object(s). It would prevent tailgating and hopefully accidental re-endings. 10 years later....
Actually, mod-bombing works for a while, as I discovered. Then, suddenly, you're no longer given the ability to mod. I got ticked at someone and mod-bombed them for a few weeks. Then it all came to a sudden end about 2 years ago and I haven't been able to mod since. Oh well.
As someone who paid for the book, I feel completely ripped off now. Hell, if I had known it would eventually be free I never would have bought that expensive, overweight door stop.
As for the book itself, I have no doubt the guy's a genius, but like many others, I saw nothing particularly groundbreaking in his work. I just want my money back.
When I was still in school (seems like a million years ago, but it was only about 15 years ago), we only had one assembly language class. That and the two intro courses are the only ones I didn't go to (did the homework, went for the the midterms and finals, got As).
I don't think one semester is really enough assembly language, though. I think people should really have to understnad both assembly language and compiler design, though. I think it's important to understand both, though. As a programmer of a higher level language, you then have a fairly good concept of what's happening to the code you write.
And while I think that's still important now, I don't think it always will be important. In fact, I think over the years, its importants has diminished significantly and will continue to do so.
As an example, when machines were much slower and optimizations far more important, I remember jumping through a lot of hoops to optimize my code so that it would compile more efficiently, or embedding assembly routines for speed. I haven't had to hand code assembly since the mid-90s, though. So it seems to me it's far less important these days simply because machines are so much faster.
My cousin is an immigration attorney and knows nothing about technology, so you can imagine my surprise when I got an e-mail from him the other day saying he used Google's AdWords. His out of pocket expense was $1.50 before it brought him a client. I still haven't looked at it to see how it works, but that's impressive. That's the best deal in advertising I've ever heard of.
And I don't play one on TV. But, I'm as pissed at SCO as any "Linux zealot". MyDoom is written for Windows, so my guess is it was written by a programmer with a good deal of Windows programming experience. If I were writing a virus whose purpose was to DDoS someone, SCO would be my target at the moment. I think it's fair to say they're the most hated company in our industry right now. They've stolen the crown from M$.
But to assume it's a "Linux zealot" is a guess at best, and a bad one at that. I mean, all evidence says it's a Windows programmer. I don't know about Linux programmers, but I do Windows programming (sorry), and I'd have a hell of a time writing a virus for Linux. I could write one for Windows pretty easily, though. I'm sure there are people who are equally familiar with both platforms, but they are probably a small minority.
Here's how you do it cheap. First, buy a ticket to Cancun Mexico. I can pick you up at the airport, and we'll mosey on down to Playa del Carmen. We'll get you a house near mine and you can set up a wireless router with your 2MB/512KB DSL account and I'll be happy to share your bandwidth. $7000 should be plenty.
Sorry, but as others have pointed out, this is a non-story. It's a variation of a Dobsonian design. A real story is the story of John Dobson (short bio here), a monk from San Francisco who designed and built the original Dobsonian telescopes and got people interested in astronomy by taking his telescopes to the streets. Being a monk, he lived in poverty and built his telescope as cheaply as possible. Because he had to continue living in poverty, he was unable to sell them and become rich, so now the bigger telescope makers are making money off of his design.
You wanna run a story about amateur telescopes, that's a good one. Or I could point you to the story of the three guys who ground their own 30" mirror and built a telescope from that. There's a lot of cool stuff being done by amateurs. Sorry, but this isn't that cool compared to most of it.
I lived in Northern Virginia (Reston) and had ComCast for both cable and cable modem. I also had DirecTV for about 8 months. Overall, I LOVED ComCast in comparison on one feature alone, and that's the set-top box software. ComCast's cable box had an excellent, easy-to-use guide that was a hundred times better than DirecTVs. I found DirecTV's interface very annoying to use.
As an example, in the ComCast system, the cable box periodically updates all the programming information and keeps it stored locally. This is an excellent feature. In contrast, if you try to get a program description in DirecTV, it pulls it from the satellite (I assume) and you have to wait for it. Not long, but there was never a wait with the ComCast box.
Further, I like the fact that with the ComCast box, you can still preview your current channel while browsing what's on others. I hated that every time I brought up the guide in DirecTV, it cut my programming.
As for disrupted signal, I experienced it a few times in heavy winds with DirecTV(and the antenna was quite secure). But I don't think I had any fewer drops with ComCast (and they weren't frequent with either).
One disadvantage with the ComCast box is it took longer to come up during a reset (presumably from downloading all the data, possibly other reasons), but this was a very small price to pay for the other features.
Potential discoveries include glycoprotein, which prevents Antarctic fish from freezing...
I wonder if this sort of thing could ever have application in cryogenics of human beings. Right now, my understanding is that cryogenics is a crock because the freezing process causes the cells in the body to, for lack of a better word, explode. I doubt we'll ever encounter technology to undo that. If you could somehow protect the integrity of the cells during the freezing process however, reanimation should be feasible at some point.
Of course, I don't know if the whole cryogenics thing is worthwhile as is. But for space travel, even within our own solar system, it could come in quite handy by reducing the need for perishables (food, water, oxygen) as well as being easier to shield the astronauts from radiation by only having to provide serious shielding in a very confined space.
Anyway, that just seems like a cool possibility some day.
Going public is a major change for a company and while it can bring in a great deal of cash to work with, it also creates a new layer of accountability as well as more strict and public operations. It's not always in a company's best interest to go public and I question if it's in Google's best interest.
From everything I've seen of google, financials don't appear to be their weakness (though maybe it is and it's just not visible). So what do they need the cash for? Sure, the directors will make tons of money from doing it, but is it in the best interest of the company? Do they have acquisitions they want/need to make?
Frankly, Google has done quite well as a private company and I have some concerns about what may happen if they go public. As an example, there are some people that claim Google has unfairly ranked them and have sued. Google is, in many ways, a monopoly in the search business. Were they to go public, these kinds of suits might get further in court as Google would likely be under more scrutiny regarding this. I think Google does a good job of modifying page ranks of people trying to trick the system. I'd hate to see them lose that ability.
There are other areas as well where Google being privately held is an advantage. I could certianly be wrong about some of this. I'm not a corporate attorney nor an accountant, but this is my interpretation.
I just saw a job posting on a website yesterday that specified that they were looking for people who were willing to work at "Indian Salary Levels" and then pointed to an Indian job web site as a reference to find out what "competitive" bids were.
That definitely has me a bit concerned. I'm a programmer and I work out of Mexico, so while I can offer pretty competitive rates, I still expect to get paid well. Unfortunately the market is saturated by programmers, and I believe with time, that will change as programers continue to drop out because of job competition.
Really, my take on it, at least in the States, is that a lot of people went into software to make money. I think now that it's harder to make good money at it, the ones that are going to stick around are going to generally be the ones who really love doing it. Hopefully that will level the market out a bit.
The fact remains that some of us are quite skilled at what we do and that some people, no matter how hard they try, aren't going to be nearly as good as those of us who are in this field because we love the write software and have a natural ability with it. For the same reason, I'll never play guitar like Eddie Van Halen or paint like Van Gogh (and that's not to imply that I think I'm the Eddie Van Halen or Vincent Van Gogh of computer programming).
For most of the time I've been in this field (the last 4 years notwithstanding), most of the programmers were people that really loved it and the ratio of really good programmers to mediocre programers was fairly high. That ratio has reversed in the past few years. When it returns, I suspect the pay will get closer to what we expect as well.
Even here in Mexico, and granted, I live in one of the pricier towns in Mexico, living at Indian pay rates is simply out of the question.
Is it just me, or didn't the decision to let the Hubble die early seem to come awefully quick after President Bush's policy directive? I mean, that's a major decision and it came days after. Clearly not enough time to think it through, and let's face it, in many ways, the Hubble is NASA's most successful public relations program since Apollo. I mean, I hate to say, let's spend millions 'cause the pictures look cool, but think twice before you toss it out.
The Department of Transportation has issued an advisory stating that automobiles are too dangerous and that everyone should just walk wherever they're going. Planning a trip around the world? Get a new pair of GOOD shoes and some swimming trunks.
I remember back in the early days of the web, when it was just becoming popular, that John Dvorak hailed it as the coming of true mass literacy. His belief was that with so many average every day citizens posting web pages, surely this would lead to increased literacy.
It couldn't have been a year later that he retracted that prediction and instead said that the web has proven just how illiterate Americans (and I presume others) are.
Anyway, just thought I'd toss in my little anecdote.
Obviously SCO has a lot of enemies out there right now, but it's always sad to watch someone stoop to this level.
Yes, it makes me very sad. Can someone hand me a hanky? I think I need some alone time to cry about this.
When I was living outside of a small town in Arkansas, I had this same problem. I considered DirecWay but eventually decided not to because of all the downsides involved.
What's really strange is I moved to a small town in Mexico and my options are Dialup, DSL, Cable and wireless. If they can manage that in a small Mexican town, why not a small American town? That's what I can't figure out. Granted, the small Mexican town is about 10 times as populous as the small American town I was living in, but in most ways, it's also 10 times as backwards.
If I were you, I'd talk to your neighbors and collaborate on getting a real connection for your neighborhood like some of the other stories we've seen on that.
I'm a little surprised that nothing was mentioned of the CD-eating fungus which has been discussed here a couple of times before. I have personally been the victim of that fungus and lost somewhere in the area of 20 CDs to it.
I live in Southern Mexico where it's hot and humid most of the year, and these conditions apparently make CDs very vulnerable to the fungus. Given that I don't have any environmentally controlled rooms in which to keep my CDs, what should I do? I'm really concerned that my CD-Rs will be ruined from the higher heat which, for most of the year is in the high 80s to high 90s.
I've considered putting my CDs and CD-Rs in the refrigerator, but I'm not sure how safe that is. Can anyone comment on that? My thought was to put them on a spindle and then place that in a ziplock bag, evacuate as much air as possible, and then stick it in the fridge. Can anyone comment on that? I'm afraid even with a little air in the bag, there will be enough condensation to cause a problem. If someone could give me some good advice on how to handle that, I'd really appreciate it.
For something this "critical", you need technology that won't fail, but will also work in the kind of vast distances you're talking about. I suggest tin cans and string. Of course, you'll have to make sure nobody in the audience brought scissors, but with all the hi-tech anit-terrorism stuff they throw in schools these days, surely nobody can get in with sharp objects.
Okay, now they're sending letters lobbying congress. This is getting so out of hand. But, here's where you and I can actually fight back. If you're involved in open source (or even if you just support it) and you're a U.S. citizen, write your congressperson in support of Open Source. Be polite and be professional. Explain your understanding of the facts and why what SCO is doing is extortion and ask your congressperson to consider the facts before passing legislation.
In particular, point out to said congressperson that to date, no evidence has provided by SCO has survived more than a day's scrutiny by the community. That no court has yet supported any of SCO's allegations, and so on.
Please send snail mail instead of e-mail, if possible. Snail mail is more likely to be read. The great thing about congress is, if you send a lot of letters, they sometimes get the point (though not always, as evidenced by the DMCA among other things).
I live and work in my home in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. I live 4 blocks from the beach and have to somehow manage to get work done with all these women in bikinis passing by all hours of the day. How am I supposed to get anything done? I don't know why I put up with it (and just as I'm typing this, my 4 beautiful German neighbors walked by, so excuse the typos). God my life is hell.
Maybe it's time for the franchise to take a rest. I was a fan of the original series. Then with TNG came out, after the first season, I started to get interested (I think the actors didn't really find their characters until mid-second series).
I know a lot of people enjoyed DS9, though I didn't really care for it that much. I personally enjoyed a number of episodes of Voyager.
But maybe it's time to let things rest for a while. Maybe come back to it in 5 or 10 years with some fresh ideas and in the meantime, let people build up their appetite for it again as well. I think they've just really gotten to the point where their grasping for new story ideas and nothing is really drawing people in to the series. Maybe it's just me. I watched a few episodes of Enterprise. It's not bad, but it's not that great either.
People have high expectations of the Star Trek franchise, and if they're not going to be able to meet those expectations, they ought to let it rest until they can. But that's just my opinion.
I don't know what you guys are talking about. Those colors all look fine to me. Mars looks exactly like it did when I was last there...
You can train yourself to become aware and even control your dreams. It's simple, though not particularly easy. It takes a lot of practice. The hardest part is to avoid what I'd call "newbie" mistakes, such as, suddenly you become aware, so you conjure, say Natalie P. or whomever you seek. Because the moment they appear, you realize you're in complete control. This causes you a great deal of excitement which in turn, wakes you up.
You CAN conjure these images, but you have to work up to it, and you need to be a bit more subtle about it so that you don't get the overexcitement that wakes you.
I did a lot of this in high school and my first two years of college. I began simply by waking up at 3:00am every morning and recording my dreams, then going back to sleep and then recording them again when I woke up again.
After a while, you'll begin becoming more aware of your dreams. At that point, you need to start thinking about taking control. This is usually a few weeks after you've started recording the dreams.
I wish I could still do it. It was a lot of fun. It takes a lot of work to get there, though.