Infrastructure is far, far more valuable to these people than a disposable handout. People have a remarkable ability to better their own situation, given an honest chance and some education.
Is this saying businesses should let the IT people choose what kind of equipment gets put in other departments, or perhaps that we get to streamline inefficient processes?
It basically sounds like they want to turn IT into pseudo-management, which may not be such a terrible idea, given the logical nature of IT. That essentially boils down to: they want people who can think logically and have lots of knowledge to plan the way things are done. Shocking concept.
I used to think that way, but I'm starting to wonder just what would happen if the FCC let AT&T do whatever they want. Companies like Google and Verizon have deep pockets and lots of infrastructure; what would happen if they quit using AT&T's lines? It might actually force a shakeup in the infrastructure, and as long as we can keep from getting proprietary new protocols and more government involvement along the way, it would be a really good thing.
I only half-know what I'm saying, so please point out any big holes.
What you should have said is "We're never going to get people out of personal transport." People, especially here in the US, are independent creatures. They prefer personal transportation to mass, and personal right now happens to be gas.
Why don't we have electric cars yet? There was even a recent article here about all these people making their own because they're tired of waiting. In order to cut gas consumption, we must relax regulations on battery technology and allow more nuclear power plants.
Yeah, you could get Congress to pass some new law trying to force people to use the current generation of near-useless hybrids, but government-mandated research is historically slow and expensive, and if there is dirt-cheap electricity, some enterprising person will make a solution.
I'd have opened it and found out exactly what was sloshing around. I bet it could have been screwed back in place.
Personally, I'm a big Newegg fan (I'm enjoying a new LCD that arrived from them yesterday), but there is a good deal of risk when buying Open Box items. I'm surprised they offer any kind of support at all for that kind of stuff. Disclaimer: I bought my GeForce open box, and it it worked but with a weird problem. I didn't send it to Newegg, I sent it back to MSI.
On the other hand, I've had nothing but good from them concerning new merchandise. Once I bought a $10 IDE to USB adapter and thought it was broken, and the cust. service person said it wasn't worth me paying $5 to ship it back. A new one arrived soon after (and it wasn't ground shipping either). A few days later I figured out that it was MY problem and contacted them again, but they said to just keep it (and sent me a link to their resellerratings.com entry:P).
I especially appreciate calling and talking to people who are obviously native English speakers and who have at least a basic grasp of technology.
All that said, buying local is sometimes cheaper/faster, but when BestBuy charges an outlandish $35 for a firewire cable, I'm just going to go buy a $9 one from Newegg that includes a spring winder (those are really cool btw). When I tack on some CD-Rs I was going to have to buy anyway it means I'm not paying $6 for shipping the cable. (Yes, I realize that's exactly what Newegg tries to get customers to do, but I'm happy nonetheless).
Just a note: as a small-network admin, I like Google Updater (since things like Google Earth and sometimes Picasa are in use). Just one less thing to have to think about. Well, I am annoyed by the auto-start thing (which I always remove). I wish vendors would get a clue about that.
Upload it to YouTUBE, and if it gets popular buy some real hosting ( http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ is pay-for-use with good load scaling) and put some Google ads on it and pull the YouTUBE version. If it's truly popular you'll make a small profit.
I'm not sure of the best way to put it on your page. I'd just use SUPER to stuff it into an MP4, which will then either download or be automatically streamed via Quicktime (I have to applaud Apple for that piece of cleverness).
Just tell folks they might not be able to get their five hundred million channels of garbage from DirectTV or Dish Network and there'll be plenty of funding.
There's aren't a ton of ways to put satellites into orbit. Yes, I know Japan and Europe launch stuff too, but most people have at least a little national pride.
Or, we could just let Congress battle this out and concentrate on private technology in the meantime. Private enterprise has always gone farther than government, but we need to act now to prevent Congress from making a mountain of red tape (if they haven't already) that would hamper new developments.
That piece is written with a very strong bias, and I was very disturbed over it until I read other news sources. According to other sources, the police did indeed have a warrant and they confiscated items such as "PVC pipe, chicken wire and duct tape. The RNC Welcoming Committee wanted to lock themselves together in human barricades called ''sleeping dragons.'' Also included in the raids were knives, flammable liquids, five-gallon buckets of urine, homemade caltrops (which are devices used to puncture bus tires), bolt cutters, sledgehammers, protective padding and plastic buckets that were cut into shields."
The problem is that we're quickly losing the ability to think and act for ourselves. Britain is a perfect picture of what happens when you follow that road. A lot of British I talk to simply can't comprehend why you ought to carry a gun, pay for your own healthcare, or prefer terrorists over big brother. We don't seem to realize that our freedoms are being eroded by a pressure-washer congress. Just yesterday there was that Slashdot article about wind power advocating that the Feds mandate/fund a new electrical grid. Uncle Sam is already worse than broke. Quit aggravating the problem.
I was listening to an old Ronald Reagan broadcast the other day, and he talked about how Social Security initially promised that you'd never pay more than $.03 on the dollar. What a laugh. Social Security is looking to pay out trillions more than it has in coming years, and guess who will pay the bill? You'd make more money if your put your retirement into a savings account than into Social Security.
Also, the FDIC is slowly but surely ruining our financial economy. Why do you think lenders gave out so many subprime loans? Because the owners know that whatever happens, they are personally immune. Why do people no longer care to ensure that the S&L's they put their money in are financially sound? Because they know that they are immune, all this thanks to the FDIC, which Congress paid $166 billion to bail out in '89. Folks, there is no such thing as free lunch. Unless we can get the government to quit fiddling with the economy and loosen the grip of the environmentalists on the energy resources we already posses within out borders, we are going to continue to fall.
You'd think that after 200 years we'd get the idea; the best market is a market left alone. It actually works. We didn't get where we are by relying on Uncle Sam to bail us out of everything. Look at a chart of per cent deviation in business activity. Things go up and down and up and down, and then there is a sudden boom in 1928. By the end of 1929 deviation is negative, and by '32 it's almost -50%. Then it rises steadily until '38, when it falls nearly as low as it did in '32. We recovered from the depression in spite of the New Deal, not because of it.
Now Congress is looking to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, simply because they control half of America's mortgages (~$10 trillion) . No company is "too big" to let fail. If we continue to reward financial irresponsibility, it will only get worse in the future. True, it wouldn't be pretty if something that huge fell flat, but postponing it will only make the future worse.
It's high time we quit turning to Congress to solve our problems. We need real, long-term solutions to problems. Our children should not have to reap the fruits of our irresponsibility.
It's a good thing that we don't have that kind of faith in the feds. (See my sig.)
There are certainly private companies that would build new plants. They can actually be built from start to finish in less than 10 years if the construction is allowed to continue at a regular pace (it's not - it always gets stopped and started by environmentalists and usually shut down). I had a lengthy conversation with an engineer who told several stories of such companies. Last year there was also a big local flap about some company trying to produce fuel rods here in my state, but I think it got sunk by the NIMBYs.
Random interesting fact: GE made a whole neighborhood of houses (as a PR demonstration) that each had their own personal reactor. It worked fine till the feds shut it down.
You're assuming that we can harvest all that energy - solar panels and windmills all over everything. What will happen with the widescale use of geothermal heating? How much will the earth's temperature decrease? Let's slow down all the wind and cool the earth. That sounds like a great way to save the environment!
Are you proposing that the solar panels are being used to power nuclear reactors that create matter?
If not, go back to Junior High and review your physics book because you probably cheated on that final test or you would have failed..
If I'm not proposing that "solar panels are being used to power nuclear reactors that create matter" I'm wrong? Even after rereading that several times and trying to guess typos, I still can't fathom what you're talking about.
You're assuming that we can harvest all that energy - solar panels and windmills all over everything. What will happen with the widescale use of geothermal heating? How much will the earth's temperature decrease? Let's slow down all the wind and cool the earth. That sounds like a great way to save the environment!
I don't understand why nuclear is automatically relegated to the back burner. It is the only source of power that doesn't ultimately rely on the sun, and if you're allowed to recycle the spent fuel rods it produces very little waste. France, which recycles, stores all of their waste in a single room. 80% of France's electricity is nuclear.
Also, the amount of radiation produced from a modern nuclear power plant is very, very small. You'll receive less radiation standing in the shadow of the plant than standing out in the sun. For comparison, living within 50 miles of a coal-fired plant will give you about 0.03 millirems of exposure a year, whereas being within 50 miles of a nuclear plant gives you 0.009. A smoke detector gives 0.008, and an airline flight gives about 1 per 1,000 miles flown.
Other than the risk of deliberate damage to a plant (e.g. terrorists), I don't understand why nuclear is so terrible.
Google has been a media darling for a long time. Now that they are finally out of the whiz-bang stage, you're ready to say they're going downhill? No, they've just gotten just about all of the internet that they can, and they are now waiting (and actively pushing) for mobile internet so they can do it all over again.
I'm personally all for trying to expand the economy itself instead of making a complete monopoly (and Google can't get much stronger without becoming a monopoly).
Now we all just get to sit and wait until wireless matures and Google takes over it. I'm speculating they'll start pushing platform-neutral stuff big-time after that (which may mean overt Linux pushing). They can't compete well with MS's enterprise dominance until they've dislodged Windows, but the wireless apple is much riper at the moment.
I heartily agree. I've updated quite a few people's computers to FF3 from FF2, and most of them didn't even know FF3 existed or why they should bother upgrading.
Personally, I think major version upgrades should be an option in the updater - when you press Update manually, it should give you an option to upgrade automatically. It should also notify you of major updates during minor updates until you check a "don't tell me again" box.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I'm very interested to see how different these fossils are from modern plants. I'm betting about zilch.
Atheism is believe in one's self.
It's because it was all covered with water at one point.
Perhaps it's just me, but I'm not so sure egalitarian is better for a site like Slashdot. :P
Infrastructure is far, far more valuable to these people than a disposable handout. People have a remarkable ability to better their own situation, given an honest chance and some education.
I doubt launching a few satellites is more costly than building power plants and laying copper all over the same area the satellites will cover.
Ick, I also seem to have shocking grammar today...
Is this saying businesses should let the IT people choose what kind of equipment gets put in other departments, or perhaps that we get to streamline inefficient processes?
It basically sounds like they want to turn IT into pseudo-management, which may not be such a terrible idea, given the logical nature of IT. That essentially boils down to: they want people who can think logically and have lots of knowledge to plan the way things are done. Shocking concept.
I used to think that way, but I'm starting to wonder just what would happen if the FCC let AT&T do whatever they want. Companies like Google and Verizon have deep pockets and lots of infrastructure; what would happen if they quit using AT&T's lines? It might actually force a shakeup in the infrastructure, and as long as we can keep from getting proprietary new protocols and more government involvement along the way, it would be a really good thing.
I only half-know what I'm saying, so please point out any big holes.
What you should have said is "We're never going to get people out of personal transport." People, especially here in the US, are independent creatures. They prefer personal transportation to mass, and personal right now happens to be gas.
Why don't we have electric cars yet? There was even a recent article here about all these people making their own because they're tired of waiting. In order to cut gas consumption, we must relax regulations on battery technology and allow more nuclear power plants.
Yeah, you could get Congress to pass some new law trying to force people to use the current generation of near-useless hybrids, but government-mandated research is historically slow and expensive, and if there is dirt-cheap electricity, some enterprising person will make a solution.
I'd have opened it and found out exactly what was sloshing around. I bet it could have been screwed back in place.
Personally, I'm a big Newegg fan (I'm enjoying a new LCD that arrived from them yesterday), but there is a good deal of risk when buying Open Box items. I'm surprised they offer any kind of support at all for that kind of stuff. Disclaimer: I bought my GeForce open box, and it it worked but with a weird problem. I didn't send it to Newegg, I sent it back to MSI.
On the other hand, I've had nothing but good from them concerning new merchandise. Once I bought a $10 IDE to USB adapter and thought it was broken, and the cust. service person said it wasn't worth me paying $5 to ship it back. A new one arrived soon after (and it wasn't ground shipping either). A few days later I figured out that it was MY problem and contacted them again, but they said to just keep it (and sent me a link to their resellerratings.com entry :P).
I especially appreciate calling and talking to people who are obviously native English speakers and who have at least a basic grasp of technology.
All that said, buying local is sometimes cheaper/faster, but when BestBuy charges an outlandish $35 for a firewire cable, I'm just going to go buy a $9 one from Newegg that includes a spring winder (those are really cool btw). When I tack on some CD-Rs I was going to have to buy anyway it means I'm not paying $6 for shipping the cable. (Yes, I realize that's exactly what Newegg tries to get customers to do, but I'm happy nonetheless).
Somebody mod the parent up.
Just a note: as a small-network admin, I like Google Updater (since things like Google Earth and sometimes Picasa are in use). Just one less thing to have to think about. Well, I am annoyed by the auto-start thing (which I always remove). I wish vendors would get a clue about that.
Upload it to YouTUBE, and if it gets popular buy some real hosting ( http://nearlyfreespeech.net/ is pay-for-use with good load scaling) and put some Google ads on it and pull the YouTUBE version. If it's truly popular you'll make a small profit.
I'm not sure of the best way to put it on your page. I'd just use SUPER to stuff it into an MP4, which will then either download or be automatically streamed via Quicktime (I have to applaud Apple for that piece of cleverness).
Don't forget that Firefox is scheduled to get a major Javascript boost this fall, which seems to be a primary goal of Google across the board.
Just tell folks they might not be able to get their five hundred million channels of garbage from DirectTV or Dish Network and there'll be plenty of funding.
There's aren't a ton of ways to put satellites into orbit. Yes, I know Japan and Europe launch stuff too, but most people have at least a little national pride.
Or, we could just let Congress battle this out and concentrate on private technology in the meantime. Private enterprise has always gone farther than government, but we need to act now to prevent Congress from making a mountain of red tape (if they haven't already) that would hamper new developments.
That piece is written with a very strong bias, and I was very disturbed over it until I read other news sources. According to other sources, the police did indeed have a warrant and they confiscated items such as "PVC pipe, chicken wire and duct tape. The RNC Welcoming Committee wanted to lock themselves together in human barricades called ''sleeping dragons.'' Also included in the raids were knives, flammable liquids, five-gallon buckets of urine, homemade caltrops (which are devices used to puncture bus tires), bolt cutters, sledgehammers, protective padding and plastic buckets that were cut into shields."
Now while I do think this raid was extreme and unconstitutional, it isn't nearly as terrible as salon.com made it out to be.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/259223
http://www.thedickinsonpress.com/ap/index.cfm?page=view&id=D92SNM600
Yes, but then they will learn something and be more careful in future. Freedom isn't free.
Ok, Outlook Express. They both use a large glob files to store everything.
The problem is that we're quickly losing the ability to think and act for ourselves. Britain is a perfect picture of what happens when you follow that road. A lot of British I talk to simply can't comprehend why you ought to carry a gun, pay for your own healthcare, or prefer terrorists over big brother. We don't seem to realize that our freedoms are being eroded by a pressure-washer congress. Just yesterday there was that Slashdot article about wind power advocating that the Feds mandate/fund a new electrical grid. Uncle Sam is already worse than broke. Quit aggravating the problem.
I was listening to an old Ronald Reagan broadcast the other day, and he talked about how Social Security initially promised that you'd never pay more than $.03 on the dollar. What a laugh. Social Security is looking to pay out trillions more than it has in coming years, and guess who will pay the bill? You'd make more money if your put your retirement into a savings account than into Social Security.
Also, the FDIC is slowly but surely ruining our financial economy. Why do you think lenders gave out so many subprime loans? Because the owners know that whatever happens, they are personally immune. Why do people no longer care to ensure that the S&L's they put their money in are financially sound? Because they know that they are immune, all this thanks to the FDIC, which Congress paid $166 billion to bail out in '89. Folks, there is no such thing as free lunch. Unless we can get the government to quit fiddling with the economy and loosen the grip of the environmentalists on the energy resources we already posses within out borders, we are going to continue to fall.
You'd think that after 200 years we'd get the idea; the best market is a market left alone. It actually works. We didn't get where we are by relying on Uncle Sam to bail us out of everything. Look at a chart of per cent deviation in business activity. Things go up and down and up and down, and then there is a sudden boom in 1928. By the end of 1929 deviation is negative, and by '32 it's almost -50%. Then it rises steadily until '38, when it falls nearly as low as it did in '32. We recovered from the depression in spite of the New Deal, not because of it.
Now Congress is looking to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, simply because they control half of America's mortgages (~$10 trillion) . No company is "too big" to let fail. If we continue to reward financial irresponsibility, it will only get worse in the future. True, it wouldn't be pretty if something that huge fell flat, but postponing it will only make the future worse.
It's high time we quit turning to Congress to solve our problems. We need real, long-term solutions to problems. Our children should not have to reap the fruits of our irresponsibility.
It's a good thing that we don't have that kind of faith in the feds. (See my sig.)
There are certainly private companies that would build new plants. They can actually be built from start to finish in less than 10 years if the construction is allowed to continue at a regular pace (it's not - it always gets stopped and started by environmentalists and usually shut down). I had a lengthy conversation with an engineer who told several stories of such companies. Last year there was also a big local flap about some company trying to produce fuel rods here in my state, but I think it got sunk by the NIMBYs.
Random interesting fact: GE made a whole neighborhood of houses (as a PR demonstration) that each had their own personal reactor. It worked fine till the feds shut it down.
You're assuming that we can harvest all that energy - solar panels and windmills all over everything. What will happen with the widescale use of geothermal heating? How much will the earth's temperature decrease? Let's slow down all the wind and cool the earth. That sounds like a great way to save the environment!
Are you proposing that the solar panels are being used to power nuclear reactors that create matter?
If not, go back to Junior High and review your physics book because you probably cheated on that final test or you would have failed..
If I'm not proposing that "solar panels are being used to power nuclear reactors that create matter" I'm wrong? Even after rereading that several times and trying to guess typos, I still can't fathom what you're talking about.
You're assuming that we can harvest all that energy - solar panels and windmills all over everything. What will happen with the widescale use of geothermal heating? How much will the earth's temperature decrease? Let's slow down all the wind and cool the earth. That sounds like a great way to save the environment!
I don't understand why nuclear is automatically relegated to the back burner. It is the only source of power that doesn't ultimately rely on the sun, and if you're allowed to recycle the spent fuel rods it produces very little waste. France, which recycles, stores all of their waste in a single room. 80% of France's electricity is nuclear.
Also, the amount of radiation produced from a modern nuclear power plant is very, very small. You'll receive less radiation standing in the shadow of the plant than standing out in the sun. For comparison, living within 50 miles of a coal-fired plant will give you about 0.03 millirems of exposure a year, whereas being within 50 miles of a nuclear plant gives you 0.009. A smoke detector gives 0.008, and an airline flight gives about 1 per 1,000 miles flown.
Other than the risk of deliberate damage to a plant (e.g. terrorists), I don't understand why nuclear is so terrible.
Source: http://www.entergy-nuclear.com/content/resource_library/IPEC_EP/ComparisonRadiation.pdf
Google has been a media darling for a long time. Now that they are finally out of the whiz-bang stage, you're ready to say they're going downhill? No, they've just gotten just about all of the internet that they can, and they are now waiting (and actively pushing) for mobile internet so they can do it all over again.
I'm personally all for trying to expand the economy itself instead of making a complete monopoly (and Google can't get much stronger without becoming a monopoly).
Now we all just get to sit and wait until wireless matures and Google takes over it. I'm speculating they'll start pushing platform-neutral stuff big-time after that (which may mean overt Linux pushing). They can't compete well with MS's enterprise dominance until they've dislodged Windows, but the wireless apple is much riper at the moment.
I heartily agree. I've updated quite a few people's computers to FF3 from FF2, and most of them didn't even know FF3 existed or why they should bother upgrading.
Personally, I think major version upgrades should be an option in the updater - when you press Update manually, it should give you an option to upgrade automatically. It should also notify you of major updates during minor updates until you check a "don't tell me again" box.