In Norway, you can get 22 Mb/s from some cable providers. MultiKabel is a prime example. That's a solid throughput of 2 to 3 MB/s. And even then you presume that WiFi can only be used for internet. Note that 11n is meant for home and office use. Maybe you could broaden your views a bit? Ka-ching!
IANAL, and I'm really curious about this: How much evidence would be necessary to convict them on something akin to endangering the public by releasing notebooks that they knew could combust in a literal fireball?
I'm really hoping there is at least some legal protocol to protect consumer's from things like this that are rushed out the door at the (potential) expense of people's lives, other than class action suits.
Greenbaum said her husband and father intend to challenge AOL's plans to dig on the family's property and search the family's 3,000-square-foot home. She said AOL's lawyer notified the family that the company intends to use bulldozers and geological teams to hunt for gold and platinum on their property.
AOL said it will try to accommodate Hawke's parents by not being too obtrusive.
As if bulldozers weren't obtrusive when they're tearing up your yard?
Is it possible for AOL to do anything even more stupid? Are they trying to set a record for stuipd things in a month? Never have the mighty fallen so far.
The movie doesn't sound so far fetched now, does it?
I'm no expert but two of my best friends are a physicist and a mechanical engineer. Both follow the space program and both say that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's science with little to no possibility to explore new options.
Plenty of guys in the X Prize world are saying the same thing. So before I visit a museum, I'd look into varied options from some of today's best minds based upon current or evolving technologies.
Then again, if NASA was scrapped tomorrow, or maybe shelved for a few decades until space flight is cheaper, safer and more feasible, I wouldn't care. We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?
I'd rather throw that money are universities and I bet you money, society will benefit considerably more.
It's not that people don't look to old mainframe solutions for things, they do, it's that often what was feasable on those wasn't on normal hardware, until receantly. There was no reason for chip makers to waste silicon on virtualization hardware on desktops until fairly receantly, there just wasn't a big desktop virtualization market. Computers are finally powerful to the point that it's worth doing.
It's no supprise that large, extremely expensive computers get technology before home computers do. You give me $20 million to build something with, I can make it do a lot. You give me $2000, it's going to have to be scaled way back, even with economies of scale.
You see the same thing with 3D graphics. Most, perhaps even all, the features that come to 3D cards were done on high end visualizaiton systems first. It's not that the 3D companies didn't think of them, it's that they couldn't do it. The orignal Voodoo card wasn't amazing in that it did 3D, it was much more limited than other thigns on the market. It was amazing in that it did it at a price you could afford for a home system. 3dfx would have loved to have a hardware T&L engine, AA features, procedural textures, etc, there just wasn't the silicon budget for it. It's only with more developments that this kind of thing has become feasable.
So I really doubt Intel didn't do something like VT because they thought IBM was wrong on the 360, I think rather they didn't do it because it wasn't feasable or marketable on desktop chips.
Keeping your inbox empty (and generally being organized) is a skill that some people have naturally, and others don't. Those that don't, can learn it quite easily.
It always amazes me when I see people who are incredibly disorganized, have to expend so much effort to find things, who basically are always just one big mistake away from burnout, when they could learn some basic organization skills and work SO much more efficiently.
And for some reason these people say that being disorganized is being "creative" or something like that. Uh? Unless you're some kind of performance artist whose medium is a desk, papers, and computer, you should learn to focus your creativity in your work or whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish. I've seen the studios of famous artists who paint crazy, disorganized, abstract paintings.. they are often neat and clean and all the tools, like brushes and paints, are in a row, ready to use. These people have learned to focus their energy on their work, and not trying to find the Cadmium Yellow in that pile on the floor.
Another thing about being disorganized: it keeps you from scaling. Limits the number of projects you can do or the hobbies you can keep track of. What a drag.
Personally I recommend the Do It, Defer It, Delegate It, Delete It routine (found in Getting Things Done and other books). Just practice it for a month and see if doesn't make your life a little bit smoother to see that empty inbox.
The inbox should be used for NEW, UNREAD MESSAGES ONLY!
Even this article gives the impression that a messy inbox is just a "lifestyle choice", or something your parents taught you. Forget it. An organized inbox, desk, computer, etc., will almost always win over a sloppy one. So stop blaming your genes or your parents or the clock and GET ORGANIZED. Especially if you work with me.:-)
Who needs Soviet-style internal passports when they can not only GPS-track your cell phone, but can also track how fast you are moving. Here comes version 2.0: it automatically calls the police and tells them approximately where they will need to be to catch you based on your current speed and direction!
Has anyone ever noticed how the PC industry is not like other industries - eg cell phones which are all fragmented and incompatable and the user is mostly locked out from the hardware, or even laptops - try buying a laptop case and building your own at home. Try taking a tire off a chevy and putting it on a ford, or the breaks, or even the engine.
The PC industry is the way it is because IBM just assumed they could patent the interfaces - when they couldn't. When people started to copy them, billions and billions of dollars worth of lawsuits started to fly all over the place. IBM against Compaq, Intel aganst AMD - inspite of great effort and costs, they were given no rights to impose patents over the interface. Maybe this was a failure for IBM and Intel, but it created a nuclear explosion of business, commerce, opportunity, and R&D for the rest of us.
The moral of the story is that patnets do not help R&D and do not help finance R&D, they help lock out competition, and force the industry to fragment and center around a licensing model (which is good for lawyers and bad for engineers) instead of a service model (which is good for engineers, but bad for monopolies).
The bad photoshop work isn't really the story here. It's just what got him fired from Reuters. In one example [blogspot.com] and yet another [powerlineblog.com], this photographer is acting more as a Hezbollah propaganda operative than a news photographer. He was responsible for one of the most used photos from Qana with the dead child being held up, and as recently as yesterday had a picture on Page 1 of the NYT of an injured Lebonese civilian. He's basically the Peter Parker of Lebanon. It's wouldn't be hard to get the best photos if you were working with the terrorists who control the region!
I have been using Verizon's EVDO service by putting a pcmcia card into a pci-pcmcia adapter in my server, and enabling dhcp to share the connection out to other machines. I guess USB would be convenient for somebody, but most portable devices have a pcmcia slot... postowned ftw?
Wow. Mod parent funny. This is really a funny comment. Funny enough that I wasted one of my allotted two troll comments (since i'm -1 start) on this post.
Circular orbits are the lowest energy state. Thus, tidal forces cause the system to gradually lose energy until it settles into a circular orbit. When you add up the 1/r potential of gravity and the repulsive 1/r^2 centrifugal potential, you get a function with a nice minimum which is the radius of a circular orbit. The reason that elliptical orbits occur is because the period of the orbit exactly matches the period of oscillations around the minimum potential. Thus when you go around once, you end up right back where you started and get a closed, elliptical orbit. (Note that this is true only for Newtonian mechanics. Once you take General Relativity into account, the periods aren't the same and orbits precess. We can directly observe this in the orbit of Mercury as a perhelion shift of 43 arcseconds/century.)
Hire a professional (or become one)
on
Managing Site Growth?
·
· Score: 0, Informative
What is the best way for a low-income, non-professional, but enthusiastic web designer/administrator like myself to manage site growth as it leaves the realm of just-for-fun?
Unfortunately, the only answers are either hire a professional, or become one.
"Scalable" and "customized" are two things that when put together simply require a professional. And quite a lot of people calling themselves "professional" can't handle it, either.
Now, by "professional" I don't necessarily mean a degreed guy who makes at least $X thousand a year with Y years of experience. What I mean is, you're stepping into the domain where you can't hardly acquire the experience and skills necessary with anything less than full dedication usually brought on by having a job in the relevant domain.
There is, however, one other possibility for you to consider. If you analyze your needs and the available packages for your type of website, you may find that you can drop the "customized" aspect of it, if you can find a project close enough to your needs to require only minimal customization, perhaps even no actual code customization. Then you just need to import the data, and you will presumably have satisfied yourself that this package can meet your performance needs.
If the website you are referring to is the "OmniNerd" site you have a link to, then I would imagine this should be feasible. There are a lot of "news" packages, free and otherwise, and at least on first blush I don't see anything particularly unique about it. It looks an awful lot like slash, although from what I've heard that's not the easiest thing to customize. (slash hackers feel free to comment.)
Really, there's no excuse nowadays to start a new web framework from scratch, and your first impulse if your hack-job is starting to come apart at the seams should be to change to one of the umpteen bajillion tested, performant frameworks. Depending on your skill levels, which you did anything but talk up, you may even be missing basic pieces like caching, which is pretty important on a site like that. Non-professionals should not attempt to write website caching routines. Unless you want to go insane. (It's not that it's hard to write... it's that it's hard to get correct, and debugging cache problems are close to sheer hell.)
Here is my perspective. I've been watching that channel here in the US for years. I watched it as ZDTV for about a year or two. Here is what I can tell you about the history of the channel.
When it was ZDTV, it was very different. It was all computers (Ziff Davis, after all). They had some of the shows that existed up until recently (The Screen Savers being the prime example). But they also had other programming. I remember a show that showed nothing but computer generated animation that people could send in. A user content show, it was ahead of it's time. It also showed some very neat stuff (as companies would send in neat stuff too to show what they could do). This was how I first found Animusic.
Later, the network changed it's name to TechTV. Not much really changed that I remember. This is the time frame that I remember shows like Fresh Gear (which may have been there before) which was a great gadget review show (TVs, DVD Players, Digital Cameras, random gadgets, etc). I can't remember if X-Play was part of ZDTV or not, but I know it was there during TechTV.
Now it is somewhere in this timeframe that I found out about G4 and I really wanted that channel. An all video game channel, that would be cool. But I had DirecTV (which is where I watched ZDTV/TechTV) and Comcast (which didn't carry G4). I later got to see the channel just a little bit on someone's digital cable and it still looked neat (all I got to see was Cinematech, which was cool).
Now during the TechTV days things changed. I remember Call For Help dumped Leo later during this time (I think CFH was a ZDTV show). The Screen Savers was still their headliner program. Other shows later came on including Invent This! (showed inventors, their inventions, how they came up with it, etc... a fantastic show), Anime Unleashed (showed Anime, both good and bad), and a few other good shows. There were some slips during this time (like trying to turn daytime into a CNN of computer news).
Then G4 decided to buy them. I thought that would be good. I wanted to see G4. I was a little worried (I seem to remember things being better during the ZDTV days, but I can't tell you why). It took about 1 day (and I'm being generous) to figure out what an unmitigated disaster this was. I later found out why G4 bought TechTV.
G4 had no shows people would watch, and was terrible. TechTV was a nice little network and had loyal viewers. What better way to start building your empire than buying out a "rival" and destroying them.
So G4 quickly removed everything on TechTV except a handful of shows. The Screen Savers was still there (I think), although it quickly became Attack of the Show. X-Play stayed on (which is better than ANY show on G4), but they did change their set and now I get the feeling the network big-wigs are trying to infuse the show with more "anime-hip-hop-coolness". All the other great little shows were gone. Fresh Gear was killed. Invent This (which was about a year old, at most) was killed.
So what did we get? Cinematech (a decent of waste of a half-hour, sometimes). We also got Icons (interesting profiles some times, but took it's self way to serious), Cheat (unwatchable), Filter (half intersting, with the worlds most annoying hostess), and that's about it. That's all that came over, that I can think of. Oh, Arena (I don't want to watch other people play FPSes with an annoying commentary by a drill-seargent-wannabe).
Now G4 seems to be trying to become SpikeTV. Now I should note that SpikeTV was much better as whatever it was before, which was much better as TNN. But now G4 has ST:TNG (good), Trek 2.0 (good show, made unwatchable by shot-gunning as many tickers and flashing things on the screen as possible), Totally Outrageous Behavior (immature caught-on-tape), Fastlane (never seen it, no intention to), Brainiac (look! we do cool science stuff and act like immature idiots), Ed The Sock's Night Party ("One angry sock puppet and his blazing hot redhead co-host get down and dir
Someday all these cities are going to realize that wireless (b/g at least) was never ever designed to be deployed on such a scale and, really, works so pathetically horrible that I feel sorry for anyone using it.
10-1 in about a decade we'll here stories about how these things were fraught with corruption, never worked right, waste of taxpayer money, etc, etc.
Voice of experience.. I spent years at an ISP that tried to sell wireless and man, it just never ever works right for this type of thing (others in the industry will probably confirm this) without spending a whole lot of cash.
When President Bush veto'd the bill that was supported by both the House and the Senate that would have allowed for federal funding of embryonic stem cells (something that even the conservative Senate Majority Leader and would-be-Presidential hopeful Bill Frist-- who is a doctor supported), I put up a video on YouTube of Michael J. Fox (who has early onset Parkinson's disease, one of the several disorders doctors and medical scientists are now fairly sure that they can treat with embryonic stem cells, based on results from overseas) who was discussing the situation on ABC's Good Morning America the day before.
Apparently so many people thought the video was kind of moving, since Fox couldn't sit still in his chair and was thrashing about through the entire interview because his Parkinson's was so bad, that it made the front page of Digg.com. You can check out the video on YouTube here.
For the record, my grandfather died after a long struggle with Parkinson's earlier this year and I'm in favor of federal funding of embryonic stem cell research-- like more than 70 percent of Americans. The cells in question (some 400,000 of them) are being discarded en masse from in vitro fertilization labs anyways, so it's a choice between either letting them get thrown away-- or using them for research that could save lives.
The President says he thinks that ECS research constitutes the taking of a human life ("murder"). If that's true then why doesn't he work to outlaw all ECS research ("murder"), instead of letting it happen with private funding? He's caught between his own rhetoric and a hard place.
I'm embarking on a bit of farming; what I want to know is is this so called stem cell research advanced genetic engineering, which is actually advanced farming using artifical selection? The things I've found out about farming so far is that smaller animals reproduce faster, and cause exponential population growth faster. Animals are cannibalistic if you forget to feed them. The females eat mostly plants, the males eat meat. In a litter of 9, there's 8 regular looking animals that appear to be a mix of the parents, and a ninth animal that appears completely different. I did some research online about this, and it may or may not be called 'chimera', perhaps in reference to that this other animal may mutate into an animal with two heads, although I haven't gotten one of those yet.
The ethical debate on stem cells, in particular human stem cells, may be about doing this fast reproduction experiements on humans. This is probably unethical, if in fact people want to start genetically engineering humans, I'm not sure if that's a good idea. On the other hand, we could get faster reproducing, smarter, stronger humans from doing such experiments. If there's some other reason to experiment on very young (1-8 weeks after conception) humans, I'd love to hear about it in a practical way. I read something about growing organ replacements this way...and I guess it's okay, we routinely kill babies prior to birth...
"What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?"
First thought...more educated and informed than the masses of sheeples?
Seriously, I think a lot of us feel the same way and see that we aren't on a slippery slope any more. We are plummeting down a sheer drop off. The way I see it the government and big business will control more and more of our every day life as we lose more and more privacy and individual choices. Some of us will get sick of it and cash out and go live off the grid in the most remote boondocks we can find and some of us will suffer in relative silence and reminisce over the "good old days" before we lost so much of our privacy and constitutional rights. Others will never notice they lost anything. Maybe there will be another American revolution some day to try and put back into place a government whose altruistic ideals can be effected indefinitely. Hell, 200+ years is pretty good when looked at in the big picture of history but eventually power and money corrupt those who should be looking out for the good of everyone. I guess this sounds kind of defeatist but take the federal minimum wage as an example. How come 30 million people have to try to live on $5.15 an hour? How are their voices not heard? How are our voices not heard?
Money talks and the politicians and big business have the money.
Suck it, queer. That's what you deserve. a -1 moderation for being a TOOLCASE. Read the frickin article first and not the summary. Nice tryng to fp for karma. DIDNT WOKR DID IT!?!? IDIOT
Slashdot Mirror
In Norway, you can get 22 Mb/s from some cable providers. MultiKabel is a prime example. That's a solid throughput of 2 to 3 MB/s. And even then you presume that WiFi can only be used for internet. Note that 11n is meant for home and office use. Maybe you could broaden your views a bit? Ka-ching!
For more info, check out this article!
IANAL, and I'm really curious about this: How much evidence would be necessary to convict them on something akin to endangering the public by releasing notebooks that they knew could combust in a literal fireball?
I'm really hoping there is at least some legal protocol to protect consumer's from things like this that are rushed out the door at the (potential) expense of people's lives, other than class action suits.
Lick my salted balls. Eat feces for dessert.
Is it possible for AOL to do anything even more stupid? Are they trying to set a record for stuipd things in a month? Never have the mighty fallen so far.
The movie doesn't sound so far fetched now, does it? I'm no expert but two of my best friends are a physicist and a mechanical engineer. Both follow the space program and both say that money and politics have firmly grounded NASA in 1960's science with little to no possibility to explore new options.
Plenty of guys in the X Prize world are saying the same thing. So before I visit a museum, I'd look into varied options from some of today's best minds based upon current or evolving technologies.
Then again, if NASA was scrapped tomorrow, or maybe shelved for a few decades until space flight is cheaper, safer and more feasible, I wouldn't care. We've thrown tens of billions of dollars on a pride issue, and what have we gotten in return? How much more do we know about the universe?
I'd rather throw that money are universities and I bet you money, society will benefit considerably more.
It's not that people don't look to old mainframe solutions for things, they do, it's that often what was feasable on those wasn't on normal hardware, until receantly. There was no reason for chip makers to waste silicon on virtualization hardware on desktops until fairly receantly, there just wasn't a big desktop virtualization market. Computers are finally powerful to the point that it's worth doing.
It's no supprise that large, extremely expensive computers get technology before home computers do. You give me $20 million to build something with, I can make it do a lot. You give me $2000, it's going to have to be scaled way back, even with economies of scale.
You see the same thing with 3D graphics. Most, perhaps even all, the features that come to 3D cards were done on high end visualizaiton systems first. It's not that the 3D companies didn't think of them, it's that they couldn't do it. The orignal Voodoo card wasn't amazing in that it did 3D, it was much more limited than other thigns on the market. It was amazing in that it did it at a price you could afford for a home system. 3dfx would have loved to have a hardware T&L engine, AA features, procedural textures, etc, there just wasn't the silicon budget for it. It's only with more developments that this kind of thing has become feasable.
So I really doubt Intel didn't do something like VT because they thought IBM was wrong on the 360, I think rather they didn't do it because it wasn't feasable or marketable on desktop chips.
Keeping your inbox empty (and generally being organized) is a skill that some people have naturally, and others don't. Those that don't, can learn it quite easily.
:-)
It always amazes me when I see people who are incredibly disorganized, have to expend so much effort to find things, who basically are always just one big mistake away from burnout, when they could learn some basic organization skills and work SO much more efficiently.
And for some reason these people say that being disorganized is being "creative" or something like that. Uh? Unless you're some kind of performance artist whose medium is a desk, papers, and computer, you should learn to focus your creativity in your work or whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish. I've seen the studios of famous artists who paint crazy, disorganized, abstract paintings.. they are often neat and clean and all the tools, like brushes and paints, are in a row, ready to use. These people have learned to focus their energy on their work, and not trying to find the Cadmium Yellow in that pile on the floor.
Another thing about being disorganized: it keeps you from scaling. Limits the number of projects you can do or the hobbies you can keep track of. What a drag.
Personally I recommend the Do It, Defer It, Delegate It, Delete It routine (found in Getting Things Done and other books). Just practice it for a month and see if doesn't make your life a little bit smoother to see that empty inbox.
The inbox should be used for NEW, UNREAD MESSAGES ONLY!
Even this article gives the impression that a messy inbox is just a "lifestyle choice", or something your parents taught you. Forget it. An organized inbox, desk, computer, etc., will almost always win over a sloppy one. So stop blaming your genes or your parents or the clock and GET ORGANIZED. Especially if you work with me.
Who needs Soviet-style internal passports when they can not only GPS-track your cell phone, but can also track how fast you are moving. Here comes version 2.0: it automatically calls the police and tells them approximately where they will need to be to catch you based on your current speed and direction!
Has anyone ever noticed how the PC industry is not like other industries - eg cell phones which are all fragmented and incompatable and the user is mostly locked out from the hardware, or even laptops - try buying a laptop case and building your own at home. Try taking a tire off a chevy and putting it on a ford, or the breaks, or even the engine.
The PC industry is the way it is because IBM just assumed they could patent the interfaces - when they couldn't. When people started to copy them, billions and billions of dollars worth of lawsuits started to fly all over the place. IBM against Compaq, Intel aganst AMD - inspite of great effort and costs, they were given no rights to impose patents over the interface. Maybe this was a failure for IBM and Intel, but it created a nuclear explosion of business, commerce, opportunity, and R&D for the rest of us.
The moral of the story is that patnets do not help R&D and do not help finance R&D, they help lock out competition, and force the industry to fragment and center around a licensing model (which is good for lawyers and bad for engineers) instead of a service model (which is good for engineers, but bad for monopolies).
The bad photoshop work isn't really the story here. It's just what got him fired from Reuters. In one example [blogspot.com] and yet another [powerlineblog.com], this photographer is acting more as a Hezbollah propaganda operative than a news photographer. He was responsible for one of the most used photos from Qana with the dead child being held up, and as recently as yesterday had a picture on Page 1 of the NYT of an injured Lebonese civilian. He's basically the Peter Parker of Lebanon. It's wouldn't be hard to get the best photos if you were working with the terrorists who control the region!
-=PostOwnership Commission=-
I have been using Verizon's EVDO service by putting a pcmcia card into a pci-pcmcia adapter in my server, and enabling dhcp to share the connection out to other machines. I guess USB would be convenient for somebody, but most portable devices have a pcmcia slot... postowned ftw?
Wow, IPv6, now using base-27?
Wow. Mod parent funny. This is really a funny comment. Funny enough that I wasted one of my allotted two troll comments (since i'm -1 start) on this post.
Circular orbits are the lowest energy state. Thus, tidal forces cause the system to gradually lose energy until it settles into a circular orbit. When you add up the 1/r potential of gravity and the repulsive 1/r^2 centrifugal potential, you get a function with a nice minimum which is the radius of a circular orbit. The reason that elliptical orbits occur is because the period of the orbit exactly matches the period of oscillations around the minimum potential. Thus when you go around once, you end up right back where you started and get a closed, elliptical orbit. (Note that this is true only for Newtonian mechanics. Once you take General Relativity into account, the periods aren't the same and orbits precess. We can directly observe this in the orbit of Mercury as a perhelion shift of 43 arcseconds/century.)
"Scalable" and "customized" are two things that when put together simply require a professional. And quite a lot of people calling themselves "professional" can't handle it, either.
Now, by "professional" I don't necessarily mean a degreed guy who makes at least $X thousand a year with Y years of experience. What I mean is, you're stepping into the domain where you can't hardly acquire the experience and skills necessary with anything less than full dedication usually brought on by having a job in the relevant domain.
There is, however, one other possibility for you to consider. If you analyze your needs and the available packages for your type of website, you may find that you can drop the "customized" aspect of it, if you can find a project close enough to your needs to require only minimal customization, perhaps even no actual code customization. Then you just need to import the data, and you will presumably have satisfied yourself that this package can meet your performance needs.
If the website you are referring to is the "OmniNerd" site you have a link to, then I would imagine this should be feasible. There are a lot of "news" packages, free and otherwise, and at least on first blush I don't see anything particularly unique about it. It looks an awful lot like slash, although from what I've heard that's not the easiest thing to customize. (slash hackers feel free to comment.)
Really, there's no excuse nowadays to start a new web framework from scratch, and your first impulse if your hack-job is starting to come apart at the seams should be to change to one of the umpteen bajillion tested, performant frameworks. Depending on your skill levels, which you did anything but talk up, you may even be missing basic pieces like caching, which is pretty important on a site like that. Non-professionals should not attempt to write website caching routines. Unless you want to go insane. (It's not that it's hard to write... it's that it's hard to get correct, and debugging cache problems are close to sheer hell.)
Here is my perspective. I've been watching that channel here in the US for years. I watched it as ZDTV for about a year or two. Here is what I can tell you about the history of the channel.
When it was ZDTV, it was very different. It was all computers (Ziff Davis, after all). They had some of the shows that existed up until recently (The Screen Savers being the prime example). But they also had other programming. I remember a show that showed nothing but computer generated animation that people could send in. A user content show, it was ahead of it's time. It also showed some very neat stuff (as companies would send in neat stuff too to show what they could do). This was how I first found Animusic.
Later, the network changed it's name to TechTV. Not much really changed that I remember. This is the time frame that I remember shows like Fresh Gear (which may have been there before) which was a great gadget review show (TVs, DVD Players, Digital Cameras, random gadgets, etc). I can't remember if X-Play was part of ZDTV or not, but I know it was there during TechTV.
Now it is somewhere in this timeframe that I found out about G4 and I really wanted that channel. An all video game channel, that would be cool. But I had DirecTV (which is where I watched ZDTV/TechTV) and Comcast (which didn't carry G4). I later got to see the channel just a little bit on someone's digital cable and it still looked neat (all I got to see was Cinematech, which was cool).
Now during the TechTV days things changed. I remember Call For Help dumped Leo later during this time (I think CFH was a ZDTV show). The Screen Savers was still their headliner program. Other shows later came on including Invent This! (showed inventors, their inventions, how they came up with it, etc... a fantastic show), Anime Unleashed (showed Anime, both good and bad), and a few other good shows. There were some slips during this time (like trying to turn daytime into a CNN of computer news).
Then G4 decided to buy them. I thought that would be good. I wanted to see G4. I was a little worried (I seem to remember things being better during the ZDTV days, but I can't tell you why). It took about 1 day (and I'm being generous) to figure out what an unmitigated disaster this was. I later found out why G4 bought TechTV.
G4 had no shows people would watch, and was terrible. TechTV was a nice little network and had loyal viewers. What better way to start building your empire than buying out a "rival" and destroying them.
So G4 quickly removed everything on TechTV except a handful of shows. The Screen Savers was still there (I think), although it quickly became Attack of the Show. X-Play stayed on (which is better than ANY show on G4), but they did change their set and now I get the feeling the network big-wigs are trying to infuse the show with more "anime-hip-hop-coolness". All the other great little shows were gone. Fresh Gear was killed. Invent This (which was about a year old, at most) was killed.
So what did we get? Cinematech (a decent of waste of a half-hour, sometimes). We also got Icons (interesting profiles some times, but took it's self way to serious), Cheat (unwatchable), Filter (half intersting, with the worlds most annoying hostess), and that's about it. That's all that came over, that I can think of. Oh, Arena (I don't want to watch other people play FPSes with an annoying commentary by a drill-seargent-wannabe).
Now G4 seems to be trying to become SpikeTV. Now I should note that SpikeTV was much better as whatever it was before, which was much better as TNN. But now G4 has ST:TNG (good), Trek 2.0 (good show, made unwatchable by shot-gunning as many tickers and flashing things on the screen as possible), Totally Outrageous Behavior (immature caught-on-tape), Fastlane (never seen it, no intention to), Brainiac (look! we do cool science stuff and act like immature idiots), Ed The Sock's Night Party ("One angry sock puppet and his blazing hot redhead co-host get down and dir
Someday all these cities are going to realize that wireless (b/g at least) was never ever designed to be deployed on such a scale and, really, works so pathetically horrible that I feel sorry for anyone using it.
10-1 in about a decade we'll here stories about how these things were fraught with corruption, never worked right, waste of taxpayer money, etc, etc.
Voice of experience.. I spent years at an ISP that tried to sell wireless and man, it just never ever works right for this type of thing (others in the industry will probably confirm this) without spending a whole lot of cash.
When President Bush veto'd the bill that was supported by both the House and the Senate that would have allowed for federal funding of embryonic stem cells (something that even the conservative Senate Majority Leader and would-be-Presidential hopeful Bill Frist-- who is a doctor supported), I put up a video on YouTube of Michael J. Fox (who has early onset Parkinson's disease, one of the several disorders doctors and medical scientists are now fairly sure that they can treat with embryonic stem cells, based on results from overseas) who was discussing the situation on ABC's Good Morning America the day before.
Apparently so many people thought the video was kind of moving, since Fox couldn't sit still in his chair and was thrashing about through the entire interview because his Parkinson's was so bad, that it made the front page of Digg.com. You can check out the video on YouTube here.
For the record, my grandfather died after a long struggle with Parkinson's earlier this year and I'm in favor of federal funding of embryonic stem cell research-- like more than 70 percent of Americans. The cells in question (some 400,000 of them) are being discarded en masse from in vitro fertilization labs anyways, so it's a choice between either letting them get thrown away-- or using them for research that could save lives.
The President says he thinks that ECS research constitutes the taking of a human life ("murder"). If that's true then why doesn't he work to outlaw all ECS research ("murder"), instead of letting it happen with private funding? He's caught between his own rhetoric and a hard place.
I'm embarking on a bit of farming; what I want to know is is this so called stem cell research advanced genetic engineering, which is actually advanced farming using artifical selection? The things I've found out about farming so far is that smaller animals reproduce faster, and cause exponential population growth faster. Animals are cannibalistic if you forget to feed them. The females eat mostly plants, the males eat meat. In a litter of 9, there's 8 regular looking animals that appear to be a mix of the parents, and a ninth animal that appears completely different. I did some research online about this, and it may or may not be called 'chimera', perhaps in reference to that this other animal may mutate into an animal with two heads, although I haven't gotten one of those yet.
The ethical debate on stem cells, in particular human stem cells, may be about doing this fast reproduction experiements on humans. This is probably unethical, if in fact people want to start genetically engineering humans, I'm not sure if that's a good idea. On the other hand, we could get faster reproducing, smarter, stronger humans from doing such experiments. If there's some other reason to experiment on very young (1-8 weeks after conception) humans, I'd love to hear about it in a practical way. I read something about growing organ replacements this way...and I guess it's okay, we routinely kill babies prior to birth...
"What's a guy that doesn't even consider himself paranoid to think of the current state of affairs?"
First thought...more educated and informed than the masses of sheeples?
Seriously, I think a lot of us feel the same way and see that we aren't on a slippery slope any more. We are plummeting down a sheer drop off. The way I see it the government and big business will control more and more of our every day life as we lose more and more privacy and individual choices. Some of us will get sick of it and cash out and go live off the grid in the most remote boondocks we can find and some of us will suffer in relative silence and reminisce over the "good old days" before we lost so much of our privacy and constitutional rights. Others will never notice they lost anything. Maybe there will be another American revolution some day to try and put back into place a government whose altruistic ideals can be effected indefinitely. Hell, 200+ years is pretty good when looked at in the big picture of history but eventually power and money corrupt those who should be looking out for the good of everyone. I guess this sounds kind of defeatist but take the federal minimum wage as an example. How come 30 million people have to try to live on $5.15 an hour? How are their voices not heard? How are our voices not heard?
Money talks and the politicians and big business have the money.
BALLS.
Suck it, queer. That's what you deserve. a -1 moderation for being a TOOLCASE. Read the frickin article first and not the summary. Nice tryng to fp for karma. DIDNT WOKR DID IT!?!? IDIOT
...was a prostitute. She sucks hard and long, like your twin sister. SUck it long and hard slashdong
You suck!
Good DAY, sir!
Caught you. Suck my ball nuts. Queer.
Because my schlong is shaped like a rocket, I am the direct descendant of Werner von Braun's Redstone Rocket.
Suck that!