**In the end this boils down to use H, or He. And if He runs out well then we are buggered because we can't just created another base element.... Or we live with the dangers of H.***
Or hot air or methane. BTW, you should be comparing molecular weight rather than the number of protons in the nucleus, No? That means that air -- which is pretty much an 80-20 mixture of N2 and O2 comes in around 29 while Neon -- whose molecule has only one atom -- comes in at 20, so it is a bit lighter than air.
There is a list of lighter than air gases here. Most of them have poor lift and you would not want to use some of them in a blimp anyway for safety reasons. e.g. Hydrogen Cyanide (extremely toxic), Hydrogen Flouride (eats stuff).
Good points. There are a number of things that are presently done by helicopters that could -- at least in theory -- be done more cheaply and safely by lighter than air machines. The problem -- wind. The same winds that would be tremendously helpful in cargo transport (West to East in the mid-latitudes; East to West in equatorial regions can cause a lot of trouble when you are trying to lift logs or machinery or whatever in a specific place and put it down in another specific place. Especially if there is a schedule and penalty payments and guys sitting around on the timeclock waiting.
Really understanding the product and the user is a prerequisite for designing an effective user interface. Unfortunately, it's not sufficient. If you understand the product, but not the user's needs, you end up with 52 buttons with weird labels. If you understand the user's needs, but not the product, you end up with a gadget that won't do half the things the one with 52 buttons will do. If you understand neither, you end up with a typical consumer product.
You also need to have some talent for interface design. And some luck doesn't hurt either.
I'm 99% sure that designing simple, effective interfaces is harder than designing complex interfaces or bad interfaces, not easier. I have my doubts that adding one more incompetent to the design effort based solely on their not knowing much is likely to help as much as the article suggests.
It's a fairly safe bet that you do not read manuals either. If you did, you would know that they are generally produced either by an engineer with negligible communications skills or by a technical writer who has not been given adequate time to understand the device. There are exceptions, but most manuals for modern equipment are even worse than the controls.
Put the blame for bad interface design and documentation where it belongs -- on the folks why produce them.
Of course not. I mean, she draws them because her boss says she has to. But use them? That'd be like... like... That'd be like reading the spec before doing the creative work.
***Granted, I'm not a typical user and run developer tools on my desktop, but even for basic things Linux would fall short***
Fall short of what? Perfection? Of course. Usability? Don't be idiotic. Modern desktop Linuxes are about as usable as Windows. There are some some hardware support and application issues -- how to do US Income Taxes if you are not willing or able to construct a potentially large and complex spreadsheet (Actually TaxAct looks to run OK under Wine I'm not so sure about TaxCut and TurboTax). But Vista has a few hardware and application support issues of its own, now doesn't it?
***... and there ARE bugs, whether fanboys lke to admit it or not***
Of course there are bugs. Are you implying that Windows -- by way of contrast --is bug free? Perhaps you should check out this link subtitled "48167 Days and 23 hours to create CD".
***So instead of allowing ARM mortages, you'd deny 20% of the population any chance to own a house, ensuring that they're forced to rent for their entire life. Yup, you're a leftist dipshit.***
You might want to read up on ARMs. Try this article for starters. The problem here is that in most cases, Adjustable Rate Mortgages are not an opportunity to own a home. More like an opportunity to pay excessive rent for a few years then experience the joys of bankrupcy.
I'll spare you lengthy essay on why this is looks to be a problem for all of us, not just a matter of bad individual choices. Bottom line: One guy makes a bad financial decision. He has a problem. Two million guys and a lot of companies and (apparently) all our financial institutions make bad decisions, We -- all of us -- have a problem. It's already chiseled in stone. We are going to bail the banks out because the alternative -- let them fail -- is worse. We bail them out, and we'd have to be pretty stupid not to constrain them so we don't have to bail them out of the same stupid situation again.
***Wal-Mart has plenty of 19" CRT TVs with digital tuners for about $100.***
I don't do Wal-Mart partly because I disapprove of some of their policies which I think are bad for the country but mostly because their parking lot which routes all foot traffic across the auto entrance/exit traffic is the scariest place in Vermont. But I do go to Best Buy from time to time. They have very few cheap DTV sets. The least expensive I remember seeing was $135 and that was on sale. Most of their sets are $300 and up. Same with Costco. I just checked Walmart.com for "TVs under 19 inches" -- which looks to be the lowest priced catagory. They have three at $285, $233 and $287. http://www.walmart.com/search/browse-ng.do?ic=24_0&ref=125875.331180+500748.500761&catNavId=3996
***The converters are nearly impossible to find (I have an older one) because of the federal government.***
The bungled switch over to digital may be the government's problem, but the lack of converters isn't. According to the "plan" as is it was sold to congress and the public by the industry, the converters should have been available in numbers, and cheap, years ago -- shortly after the first DTV stations hit the air. Didn't happen. The coupon thing was not part of the "plan". It is brand new in response to the failure of the marketplace to deliver the converters. Congress did it to try to ward off guaranteed disaster if the converters weren't ubiquitous and inexpensive by late 2008.
In fairness to the free market, the probable reason that the converters didn't show up is that very few people actually want them since the programming on DTV looks to be largely the same crap that is available on analog. Few people want to spend money to watch reruns of Gilligan's Island that they can see entirely too well for free with analog. It's hard for me to see how HDTV is going to improve the Gilligan/Judge Judy/Wheel of Fortune/Innumerable_commercial experience much. AFICS, the HDTV subset of DTV is largely a bust. I'm guessing that since we don't do over the air porn in the US and there are only a few hours a week of quality art/nature programming over the air at least in most of the US, the only significant body of programming that benefits much from High Definition is sports. I'd bet that fanatical Sports fans and others who actually care about HDTV are probably getting their signals from satellite where they can get more games rather than over the air.
I'm suprised you found a converter at all. Not only are they apparently not in the stores, I've been doing occasional Google searches for several years and have failed to turn up any DTV to NTSC converters at any price. Probably I used the wrong keywords. If you have time, what is the manufacturer and model? Not a big deal, but I'm curious.
***As soon as TV stations themselves begin to worry about whether they will lose watchers, they will simply run commercials explaining to people how they can get *free* converter boxes from the government.***
Have you seen one of those converter boxes? I haven't and I check every time I go to Best Buy or Circuit City. Not that they can't be built or won't eventually show up. But in adequate numbers? Betcha not.
If Digital TV in the US were a project and I were in charge of it, I'd probably have my resume up to date and be actively looking for a new job. It has been late from the start. Roll out has been rescheduled once. We're 13 months from roll-out and there are way more problems than there ought to be:
The digital to analog TV converters that everyone knows are important aren't out there yet.
Many DTV transmitters (most of them here in the Champlain Valley) aren't on the air yet.
The stores are full of expensive digital TV sets, but I can't see much sign that many people are actually buying them. Only one of our friends has one and that is because their living room TV expired and they had to buy a replacement.
Hardly anyone is aware that the changeover is coming.
The economy is looking very green around the gills.
Energy prices are very high.
Mortgages in danger of becoming unavailable for many people -- including many who need to refinance.
Billions -- maybe trillions -- of imaginary dollars are evaporating as real estate prices drop nationwide.
Construction is pretty much dead.
Who will buy a new TV set if their mortgage rate has reset to something they can not afford and there is one buyer for every five houses that folks are trying to unload?
My projections for what they are worth (not much probably):
Chance of a smooth changeover on schedule -- maybe 5%
Chance of a changeover on schedule with a lot of problems -- 25%
Chance of another deferral of rollover -- 30%
Chance of a switch to rolling rollovers where analog is switched off piecemeal as market areas are deemed to be ready -- 20%
Chance that "they" will turn analog TV off and turn it back on to avoid being lynched -- 20%
Energy Storage? No problem. We put this BIG flywheel in your basement. During the day, we use solar produced energy to spin it up. At night we use it to generate electricity. How big does the flywheel have to be? Not my department. I'm the idea guy. Engineering is just down the hall. Ask them. What happens if a bearing fails while the flywheel is spun up? Instant urban renewal. Good for the economy.
***As far as energy production goes, nuclear is one of the least clean sources of energy, right behind burning coal and petrol.***
That's true, but we actually have the technology to build a lot of nuclear plants and the Uranium to fuel them with -- at least for four or five decades. There is no practical way we could displace most hydrocarbon based energy with proven technologies. (Hydro is proven, but is pretty much maxed out in North America, the Pacific and Europe). Basically the world's choices are:
Nuclear
More carbon based energy
Gambling on Wind and Solar which are clearly really not ready yet and may very well leave us stranded. (e.g. What is your plan if the surface winds decide not to blow anywhere in the US for a week? Can't happen? How do you know that?)
More conservation than anyone is likely to be willing to actually implement.
Actually, geothermal, is often rather dirty. Getting rid of mineral laden waste water is a substantial problem for many (not all) geothermal plants. Here's a link http://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm/geothermal.html
***Old Laser printers, on the other hand, tend to last forever. I've had the same HP Laserjet 5P since 1995, and even with heavy daily use, it's showing no signs of breaking or becoming obsolete. As an added bonus, the toner cartridges can last for years on end depending upon how much you print.***
Not only that, but you can buy parts for it if it breaks. Repair parts for Inkjets aren't available. I did manage to conjure up a print head ribbon cable for one of them once, but I was never able to find a source for motherboards which is what mostly failed.
My circa 1990 HP-IIP Laserjet is still working fine although I usually use our Samsung CLP-300 color printer instead nowdays. I've had to repair the HP-IIP a few times.
HP's non-repairable printers; the constant changes in cartridge types (It seemed like every new batch of Inkjets I bought meant stocking yet another cartridge model -- sometimes two new cartridge models); and their expensive, non-refillable by design, ink cartridges finally pushed me over some line. I quit buying ANYTHING from HP. Doubt I will buy an HP product of any sort again... ever.
***(made up time, I have no idea how long the cloud of material existed as just a cloud)***
Not very long at all apparently. It's generally supposed that the sun is about 4.5 billion years old (I've forgotten why we think that, but I do recall that the logic seemed credible.) Every very old meteorite or lunar rock we have dated, dates from about 4.5 billion years ago -- none older. Because of constant reworking of material, very old terrestrial rocks are very rare, but a few microscopic zircons from Australia and Canada are about 4.5 billion years old. So we think that the process of planetary formation probably didn't take all that long. Maybe a few tens of millions of years. Last time I looked, planetary formation was very poorly understood. It's not especially controversial so far as I know -- just poorly understood.
Stars condense. They somehow get to rotating and there is a disk of material around them. Planets somehow organize themselves in the dust cloud. Exactly why stars and their disks rotate is not clear. And exactly how the planets nucleate and accreate material isn't especially clear either. But the doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the broad picture isn't correct. At least not today, A decade from now or five decades from now may be a different story.
***And people in rural areas will most definitely see the difference. I live in a small town (10,000 people) in Iowa...***
Excuse me, but you are NOT really a rural customer and 10,000 is NOT a small town. I live in town of about 8000 and yes we have cable and DSL as well as natural gas, paved streets, sidewalks, street lights, and way too damned many traffic signals. I think we may get fiber in the next decade (but only, I suspect, because the largest surviving industrial plant in New England is about a ten minute walk from the town hall.)
But I worked for a number of years in a genuine small town about ten miles further out from Burlington. Not one inch of cable. No DSL. The FCC's statistics say the town has broadband because the school and a mail order business have managed to conjure up T1 lines, but the folks out there do not have broadband in their homes and aren't likely to get it any time soon.
Regretably, from what I can find out, their experience seems to be more typical of rural America than yours or mine. So I think that the parent post is correct. Rural users won't see much change. They don't have broadband now. They won't have it then.
***The obesity "epidemic" hit in the early 80s. Interestingly enough fructose was massively introduced into the US food supply in the early 80s.***
There are a bunch of problems including a absurd definition of "obesity" that classifies many professional athletes (not just sumo wrestlers) as obese. And even to the extent that Americans are overweight, fructose is far from the only problem. But I agree that fructose in large amounts is very dubious dietary component. The body has mechanisms for dealing with a little bit of fructose. That's why an apple a day will not kill you. But a lot of fructose overloads those mechanisms. It's not entirely clear what the effects are of getting rid of the fructose through alternate metabolic paths, but a lot of people suspect that they are not good.
***And people expect them to make Federalized Healthcare work.***
Well, every other industrialized nation makes national healthcare of some sort work; covers everyone; and pays less per capita to do it. Maybe, just maybe it isn't that hard a problem.
It is worth noting that most health care experts think that Medicare -- federalized healthcare with a lot of holes -- is probably the least screwed up segment of the US medical care system. It probably isn't that the government does things all that well. It's that the private sector seems to be an absolute, unmitigated, and ongoing disaster when it comes to providing health care.
Last time I looked, the US had slightly higher life spans than Cuba. And I'm not sure that I trust the Cuban's bookkeeping completely. OTOH, Cuba does seem to be a remarkable example of what a country -- even a third world country -- can do if it focuses the same sort of attention on health care that the US does on commercial airline safety. They cover everyone; provide first world levels of health; and they do it for $275 per person per year. In the US, $275 per person per year wouldn't cover the costs of mailing all the silly paperwork that gets shipped around to cover an annual physical and a few doctor's visits.
When even the Communists are running circles around us, maybe, just maybe, it's time to recognize that there is a problem with the US healthcare system. The problem is simple. It doesn't f**ing work.
I don't believe that George Washington was ever offered the job of monarch. In fact he discouraged those who suggested it. He resigned his commission at the end of the war a few days after presiding over the disbanding of the continental army. Back then, they did not believe in standing armies -- a concept that, if you ask me, has quite a lot to recommend it although I suppose that's not entirely practical for a nuclear power. Given the legendary inability of the Continental Congress to agree on anything (except electing Washington president) and the large number of Americans who thought that monarchs were a bad idea I doubt that the idea of making Washington king would ever have come to fruition anyway.
***In the Starship troopers he describes a seizure of power by former military (the veterans) when the world neglected them and society was in disrepair,***
You're most likely right. It's been fifty years since I read the book and I only remember it at all because I thought the concept of only granting the franchise to those who were willing to do a little work for it was both interesting and entirely practical. After five decades, I still think so. Maybe we could make public service a requirement for radio and TV personalities dealing in news and current events as well. Might make them better. I doubt anything could make them worse.
***Quite probably, but his main point, which that lesson was supposed to back up, was granting of franchise only on completion of public service. You'd never get that one through.***
Eh, why not? The US political system accepts more peculiar stuff than that every year -- DMCA, prohibition, NAFTA, the War on Drugs, Guantanamo. A few TV ads; a couple of movies; an all out offensive on the talk shows; (and a grandfather clause for the current crop of reprobates). I think it'd be an easy sell.
***As much as I like that story, and its one of my all time favorite books, it starts with the premise that returning soldiers would essentially take over the world and everything would be wonderful thereafter. History has shown quite clearly that every time this occurs things go badly.***
Actually, history pretty much neutral on the subject. Military men are not necessarily either authoritarian or pro-war. Witness Carter (he's an Annapolis graduate and served 7 years on active duty) or Colin Powell who seems to have been the only guy in the top rank of the Bush administration who tried to head off the Iraq fiasco. Not that military men are necessarily the best men to put in charge. Some -- Washington, Eisenhower -- did pretty well. Some didn't.
As I recall, Heinlein was quite specific that public service was not limited to military service. OTOH, public service is not a guarantee of quality. I have trouble imagining either our current Dear Leader or his predecessor signing up for any job where their precious ass was likely to get shot at, but, I'm quite sure the Clinton at least would have found a (safe) way to check off the Public Service requirement.
***It's not just the title, but to the article summary as well. And this is slashdot, when was the last professional Microsoft article here? 1993?***
I dunno. When was the last time Microsoft did anything professional?
I agree that Microsoft would get a lot of abuse in this venue even when they did things well/right. But if you ask me, Microsoft doing things well/right hasn't been much of an issue for quite some years.
***I can't understand why people care how much mileage MY car is getting.***
Because WE (the rest of us) pay for that mostly foreign petroleum you are using in the form of increased prices for everything we buy. And because your car is pumping out more CO2 than it needs to, and there is an excellent chance that the CO2 is going to cost ME money sooner or later.
I shouldn't and don't give a damn what music you listen to; what books you read; whether you use Windows, Mac or Linux; or whether you have sex with consenting sheep. But your lousy gas mileage REALLY IS my business.
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Or hot air or methane. BTW, you should be comparing molecular weight rather than the number of protons in the nucleus, No? That means that air -- which is pretty much an 80-20 mixture of N2 and O2 comes in around 29 while Neon -- whose molecule has only one atom -- comes in at 20, so it is a bit lighter than air.
There is a list of lighter than air gases here. Most of them have poor lift and you would not want to use some of them in a blimp anyway for safety reasons. e.g. Hydrogen Cyanide (extremely toxic), Hydrogen Flouride (eats stuff).
Good points. There are a number of things that are presently done by helicopters that could -- at least in theory -- be done more cheaply and safely by lighter than air machines. The problem -- wind. The same winds that would be tremendously helpful in cargo transport (West to East in the mid-latitudes; East to West in equatorial regions can cause a lot of trouble when you are trying to lift logs or machinery or whatever in a specific place and put it down in another specific place. Especially if there is a schedule and penalty payments and guys sitting around on the timeclock waiting.
You also need to have some talent for interface design. And some luck doesn't hurt either.
I'm 99% sure that designing simple, effective interfaces is harder than designing complex interfaces or bad interfaces, not easier. I have my doubts that adding one more incompetent to the design effort based solely on their not knowing much is likely to help as much as the article suggests.
It's a fairly safe bet that you do not read manuals either. If you did, you would know that they are generally produced either by an engineer with negligible communications skills or by a technical writer who has not been given adequate time to understand the device. There are exceptions, but most manuals for modern equipment are even worse than the controls.
Put the blame for bad interface design and documentation where it belongs -- on the folks why produce them.
Of course not. I mean, she draws them because her boss says she has to. But use them? That'd be like ... like ... That'd be like reading the spec before doing the creative work.
Fall short of what? Perfection? Of course. Usability? Don't be idiotic. Modern desktop Linuxes are about as usable as Windows. There are some some hardware support and application issues -- how to do US Income Taxes if you are not willing or able to construct a potentially large and complex spreadsheet (Actually TaxAct looks to run OK under Wine I'm not so sure about TaxCut and TurboTax). But Vista has a few hardware and application support issues of its own, now doesn't it?
***... and there ARE bugs, whether fanboys lke to admit it or not***
Of course there are bugs. Are you implying that Windows -- by way of contrast --is bug free? Perhaps you should check out this link subtitled "48167 Days and 23 hours to create CD".
You might want to read up on ARMs. Try this article for starters. The problem here is that in most cases, Adjustable Rate Mortgages are not an opportunity to own a home. More like an opportunity to pay excessive rent for a few years then experience the joys of bankrupcy.
I'll spare you lengthy essay on why this is looks to be a problem for all of us, not just a matter of bad individual choices. Bottom line: One guy makes a bad financial decision. He has a problem. Two million guys and a lot of companies and (apparently) all our financial institutions make bad decisions, We -- all of us -- have a problem. It's already chiseled in stone. We are going to bail the banks out because the alternative -- let them fail -- is worse. We bail them out, and we'd have to be pretty stupid not to constrain them so we don't have to bail them out of the same stupid situation again.
I don't do Wal-Mart partly because I disapprove of some of their policies which I think are bad for the country but mostly because their parking lot which routes all foot traffic across the auto entrance/exit traffic is the scariest place in Vermont. But I do go to Best Buy from time to time. They have very few cheap DTV sets. The least expensive I remember seeing was $135 and that was on sale. Most of their sets are $300 and up. Same with Costco. I just checked Walmart.com for "TVs under 19 inches" -- which looks to be the lowest priced catagory. They have three at $285, $233 and $287. http://www.walmart.com/search/browse-ng.do?ic=24_0&ref=125875.331180+500748.500761&catNavId=3996
The bungled switch over to digital may be the government's problem, but the lack of converters isn't. According to the "plan" as is it was sold to congress and the public by the industry, the converters should have been available in numbers, and cheap, years ago -- shortly after the first DTV stations hit the air. Didn't happen. The coupon thing was not part of the "plan". It is brand new in response to the failure of the marketplace to deliver the converters. Congress did it to try to ward off guaranteed disaster if the converters weren't ubiquitous and inexpensive by late 2008.
In fairness to the free market, the probable reason that the converters didn't show up is that very few people actually want them since the programming on DTV looks to be largely the same crap that is available on analog. Few people want to spend money to watch reruns of Gilligan's Island that they can see entirely too well for free with analog. It's hard for me to see how HDTV is going to improve the Gilligan/Judge Judy/Wheel of Fortune/Innumerable_commercial experience much. AFICS, the HDTV subset of DTV is largely a bust. I'm guessing that since we don't do over the air porn in the US and there are only a few hours a week of quality art/nature programming over the air at least in most of the US, the only significant body of programming that benefits much from High Definition is sports. I'd bet that fanatical Sports fans and others who actually care about HDTV are probably getting their signals from satellite where they can get more games rather than over the air.
I'm suprised you found a converter at all. Not only are they apparently not in the stores, I've been doing occasional Google searches for several years and have failed to turn up any DTV to NTSC converters at any price. Probably I used the wrong keywords. If you have time, what is the manufacturer and model? Not a big deal, but I'm curious.
Have you seen one of those converter boxes? I haven't and I check every time I go to Best Buy or Circuit City. Not that they can't be built or won't eventually show up. But in adequate numbers? Betcha not.
If Digital TV in the US were a project and I were in charge of it, I'd probably have my resume up to date and be actively looking for a new job. It has been late from the start. Roll out has been rescheduled once. We're 13 months from roll-out and there are way more problems than there ought to be:
Who will buy a new TV set if their mortgage rate has reset to something they can not afford and there is one buyer for every five houses that folks are trying to unload?
My projections for what they are worth (not much probably):
Energy Storage? No problem. We put this BIG flywheel in your basement. During the day, we use solar produced energy to spin it up. At night we use it to generate electricity. How big does the flywheel have to be? Not my department. I'm the idea guy. Engineering is just down the hall. Ask them. What happens if a bearing fails while the flywheel is spun up? Instant urban renewal. Good for the economy.
That's true, but we actually have the technology to build a lot of nuclear plants and the Uranium to fuel them with -- at least for four or five decades. There is no practical way we could displace most hydrocarbon based energy with proven technologies. (Hydro is proven, but is pretty much maxed out in North America, the Pacific and Europe). Basically the world's choices are:
Actually, geothermal, is often rather dirty. Getting rid of mineral laden waste water is a substantial problem for many (not all) geothermal plants. Here's a link http://www.epa.gov/radiation/tenorm/geothermal.html
Not only that, but you can buy parts for it if it breaks. Repair parts for Inkjets aren't available. I did manage to conjure up a print head ribbon cable for one of them once, but I was never able to find a source for motherboards which is what mostly failed.
My circa 1990 HP-IIP Laserjet is still working fine although I usually use our Samsung CLP-300 color printer instead nowdays. I've had to repair the HP-IIP a few times.
HP's non-repairable printers; the constant changes in cartridge types (It seemed like every new batch of Inkjets I bought meant stocking yet another cartridge model -- sometimes two new cartridge models); and their expensive, non-refillable by design, ink cartridges finally pushed me over some line. I quit buying ANYTHING from HP. Doubt I will buy an HP product of any sort again ... ever.
Not very long at all apparently. It's generally supposed that the sun is about 4.5 billion years old (I've forgotten why we think that, but I do recall that the logic seemed credible.) Every very old meteorite or lunar rock we have dated, dates from about 4.5 billion years ago -- none older. Because of constant reworking of material, very old terrestrial rocks are very rare, but a few microscopic zircons from Australia and Canada are about 4.5 billion years old. So we think that the process of planetary formation probably didn't take all that long. Maybe a few tens of millions of years. Last time I looked, planetary formation was very poorly understood. It's not especially controversial so far as I know -- just poorly understood.
Stars condense. They somehow get to rotating and there is a disk of material around them. Planets somehow organize themselves in the dust cloud. Exactly why stars and their disks rotate is not clear. And exactly how the planets nucleate and accreate material isn't especially clear either. But the doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that the broad picture isn't correct. At least not today, A decade from now or five decades from now may be a different story.
Excuse me, but you are NOT really a rural customer and 10,000 is NOT a small town. I live in town of about 8000 and yes we have cable and DSL as well as natural gas, paved streets, sidewalks, street lights, and way too damned many traffic signals. I think we may get fiber in the next decade (but only, I suspect, because the largest surviving industrial plant in New England is about a ten minute walk from the town hall.)
But I worked for a number of years in a genuine small town about ten miles further out from Burlington. Not one inch of cable. No DSL. The FCC's statistics say the town has broadband because the school and a mail order business have managed to conjure up T1 lines, but the folks out there do not have broadband in their homes and aren't likely to get it any time soon.
Regretably, from what I can find out, their experience seems to be more typical of rural America than yours or mine. So I think that the parent post is correct. Rural users won't see much change. They don't have broadband now. They won't have it then.
Good question. Leads to two more.
You have EIGHT Vista capable computers in your house that were running XP????????????
There are a bunch of problems including a absurd definition of "obesity" that classifies many professional athletes (not just sumo wrestlers) as obese. And even to the extent that Americans are overweight, fructose is far from the only problem. But I agree that fructose in large amounts is very dubious dietary component. The body has mechanisms for dealing with a little bit of fructose. That's why an apple a day will not kill you. But a lot of fructose overloads those mechanisms. It's not entirely clear what the effects are of getting rid of the fructose through alternate metabolic paths, but a lot of people suspect that they are not good.
Well, every other industrialized nation makes national healthcare of some sort work; covers everyone; and pays less per capita to do it. Maybe, just maybe it isn't that hard a problem.
It is worth noting that most health care experts think that Medicare -- federalized healthcare with a lot of holes -- is probably the least screwed up segment of the US medical care system. It probably isn't that the government does things all that well. It's that the private sector seems to be an absolute, unmitigated, and ongoing disaster when it comes to providing health care.
When even the Communists are running circles around us, maybe, just maybe, it's time to recognize that there is a problem with the US healthcare system. The problem is simple. It doesn't f**ing work.
***In the Starship troopers he describes a seizure of power by former military (the veterans) when the world neglected them and society was in disrepair,***
You're most likely right. It's been fifty years since I read the book and I only remember it at all because I thought the concept of only granting the franchise to those who were willing to do a little work for it was both interesting and entirely practical. After five decades, I still think so. Maybe we could make public service a requirement for radio and TV personalities dealing in news and current events as well. Might make them better. I doubt anything could make them worse.
Eh, why not? The US political system accepts more peculiar stuff than that every year -- DMCA, prohibition, NAFTA, the War on Drugs, Guantanamo. A few TV ads; a couple of movies; an all out offensive on the talk shows; (and a grandfather clause for the current crop of reprobates). I think it'd be an easy sell.
***As much as I like that story, and its one of my all time favorite books, it starts with the premise that returning soldiers would essentially take over the world and everything would be wonderful thereafter. History has shown quite clearly that every time this occurs things go badly.***
Actually, history pretty much neutral on the subject. Military men are not necessarily either authoritarian or pro-war. Witness Carter (he's an Annapolis graduate and served 7 years on active duty) or Colin Powell who seems to have been the only guy in the top rank of the Bush administration who tried to head off the Iraq fiasco. Not that military men are necessarily the best men to put in charge. Some -- Washington, Eisenhower -- did pretty well. Some didn't.
As I recall, Heinlein was quite specific that public service was not limited to military service. OTOH, public service is not a guarantee of quality. I have trouble imagining either our current Dear Leader or his predecessor signing up for any job where their precious ass was likely to get shot at, but, I'm quite sure the Clinton at least would have found a (safe) way to check off the Public Service requirement.
I dunno. When was the last time Microsoft did anything professional?
I agree that Microsoft would get a lot of abuse in this venue even when they did things well/right. But if you ask me, Microsoft doing things well/right hasn't been much of an issue for quite some years.
Because WE (the rest of us) pay for that mostly foreign petroleum you are using in the form of increased prices for everything we buy. And because your car is pumping out more CO2 than it needs to, and there is an excellent chance that the CO2 is going to cost ME money sooner or later.
I shouldn't and don't give a damn what music you listen to; what books you read; whether you use Windows, Mac or Linux; or whether you have sex with consenting sheep. But your lousy gas mileage REALLY IS my business.