757 channels and nothing's on....

And even between myself and my wife, who's much more of a tv addict, I have grave doubts that we watch 12 channels. Unfortunately, one or two of them are part of a bundle (except on DirecTV), or we could get by for less $$.

Cafe choice of channels? That's too hard for the cable companies.... (Hell, give me BBCA and you can take away *every* ESPN channel there is, but I have no choice, I have to pay for them in the bundle.)

                  mark

Given the total one-sidedness of western media on coverage of the Ukraine. "Oooh, he said 'fascist', we've got the cooties!", when one of the three groups of the current government *are* outright right-wing fascists.

Oh, and while you're at it, can someone explain to me how the current government making a military assault on the seperatists is different than the previous *elected* government's use of snipers and the police forces? Oh, that's right, this government's using the military against its own people....

            mark

I mean, other than the big money in the petrochemical industry, and their suckers on their teat, who pretends it's not real, nor human-caused?

And for you suckers who aren't getting money from them, let me ask you this: are you saying that we're *NOT* good enough to work out other sources of energy, and that we're too *dumb* to be able to reengineer the way we do things to cut carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions? Or maybe that you can't wrap your heads around the tech, and so won't be able to make the big bucks from investing in, and inventing, that tech?

So, sorry. Your kids will hate your guts for not doing something... oh, that's right, you don't have any.

Btw, I read that the last quarter, I think, Texas generated 35% of it's *total* electircal use by wind power.

                  mark

Up into the oughts, ISPs were legally common carriers, not liable for the contents of what you put up/sent. This would just be a return to that status... and would be a hell of a lot better for 'Net freedom.

          mark

Or more. Our VW key mostly stopped working. We had the battery changed at the dealers (was that $60?)... and it still wasn't working. They couldn't promise anything else would work, short of going into the receiver in the car, with no estimate on how much *that* might cost.

At least it *does* have a physical key, and they hit us up for another $60? $120? to "reprogram" the car so that we could lock it with the physical key.

Cost of physical key lock: probably $5 for the quantities they buy in.
Cost of radio and computer: probably more than a Raspberry Pi.
Cost of repairs: don't ask.

            mark

Really? I work for a (civilian sector) US gov't agency. Several years ago, one of our Sun/Oracle servers had motherboard problems. It was still under warranty. It took a MONTH for their FE to get out and replace the m/b, and that includes two *weeks* of exchanging emails with a technical support in Chile, who was working on a number of other things, and I couldn't call the guy.... Then there was the in-country engineer... who *ONLY* worked 3rd shift, and the "I'm the manager, I'm taking ownership" that I got, three days in a row, from three different managers.

The US gov't ain't big enough for Larry?

Some companies just don't care. Anyone trying to claim M$ cares?

                mark

...and remember, sometimes, "Go home, go home" (consider the Muppet characters) is the answer.

In my mid-forties, I worked for about two years with a former Baby Bell (now eaten). We were a startup division, meant to be their entry in the long-distance sweepstakes. Management *very* frequently was running on the the apparent idea that you write all this stuff the way they do in the movies, and I heard "whatever it takes" *FAR* too fucking often. And it wasn't my manager, or even my director, it was upper management. I swore I'd never do that again, the week I broke 70 hours; my dba said the same thing the week he broke 80.

After about a year of this, my late wife made semi-serious jokes about suing the company for alienation of affection. Consider your family.

But we were just pikers. Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) treats their folks like consumables/disposable. One young guy - a lot of them, this was their first job out of college, and we had a *LOT* of them - on week did, and I kid you not, he told me 119 hours in one week. They had him in a motel down the road.... He was working for a different, and better, consulting company a year later.

That's crazy. You'll be vastly more productive if you go home and get a night's sleep, and DON'T THINK about work - your subconscious will do a better job of it that way.

Oh, and for the young fools who think this is the way things should be... my "normal" day was 9.5 - 10 hours/day (not counting lunch) - I did that crazy bunch of hours after the architecture team gave a Pronouncement that everyone had to get their prototype makefile modified so that they could do the nightly rebuild of everything, and when I asked where they were going to get the resources for that, they said they'd find it. Now, some teams were building manually, and some with shell scripts, and...so this was a good idea. But from their prototype?. A week later, all our managers got a letter wanting their senior tech person for a week to do it. This was the end of October. The second week in January, I stood up in the every morning meeting, and announced that I had validated their build.

I was the *very* *first* person to get it working. Experience *does* count, kiddies and CEOs, and you get what you pay for.

Oh, and the summer before I left, a friend who's a degreed praticing psychologist said it was her professional opinion that I was that close to clinical burnout... so, seriously, watch yourself, and keep open the option of saying goodbye.

                    mark

I know you don't do anything so twentietch-century as "reading novels", but certainly Doc Smith had force fields in the Skylark of Space, published 1928.

                mark

So, tell me why it is that you can't at least filter this crap? This *ain;t* the way slashdot was even five years ago, much less 10 or 15.

And as for this anon coward: boy, what is this? Your folks aren't reading this, so who are you trying to shock... or are you just going to point out "look what I posted" to the rest of your 15 yr old stupid buddies, who are so tough my cat would send you to the hospital, and you'd never touch him.

Or are you on something that oine of your "cool" buddies got you? You'll probably die before you're 23, having ingested something with, oh, drain cleaner.

Actually, that wouldn't be bad - it would get you out of the shallow end of the gene pool.

Go away, kid, you bother us.

                  mark

Let's see, when I got hired as a programmer in '80, we punched our own cards, and handed them in. As many times as we needed to. By '81? '82? We had time-shared terminals, and entered them online.

And this was a community college in the US.

          mark

Let's see, there's at least tens of thousands of SF anf Fantasy novels out there, maybe hundreds of thousands, and some have won awards as being well worth reading.

But we'll go come up with something that Hollywood producers (IQ == belt size) will understand, who will approach it with the following ideas
    1. We've got Names! We've got SPECIAL EFFECTS! Why would we need plot, continuity, stories worth watching?
                  All we need is EXPLOSIONS!!!
    2. All geeks are all stupid, and they'll watch anything we film, esp. if there's sexy babes and EXPLOSIONS!

            mark "so, when are they going to do, say Bujold's Miles series, or Robinson's Mars series, or...."

Please define "old people". Please define "physical labor".

And please define it in the context of Pete Seeger, a couple of years ago, at 93, splitting his own firewood. Or me, in my sixties, changing my own oil under the vehicle (I know, you don't know *how* to change your oil....)

                mark

I've got that on my router. Let me start by saying this is *NOT* the poster child for F/OSS. In fact, if you aren't seriously into hardware, or systems administration, DON'T! Never in my decades of professional work have I ever seen a project where people would talk about their "favorite builds"... in fact, I'd never *ever* thought of putting those two words together.

I wanted one thing besides gigabit routing: the ASUS I have says it can serve as a prntserver for USB printers. Call ASUS, "oh, not that printer". So three? four? debrickings later, and a month of trying, and asking, and finding by googling, not onlist, I found a build that works.

Most of the time. After somewhere between a day and a couple of weeks of not printing, it forgets about the printer, and I have to reset USB on it (and that was what I found after months of fighting).

I want to upgrade, to make sure I don't have heartbleed on it (but I do have no remote admin, so it should be ok)... but WHAT THE HELL DO I UPGRADE TO? Multiple builders, apparently no regression testing, no formal releases....

                    mark, putting up with it

For those of you here who have actually been around the block a few times, how many black or hispanic kids are there in in your kid's classes, as opposed to when you were a kid?

If you don't live in a city, how integrated is your neighborhood (oh, sorry, I know that (un)real estate agents get the cooties over that word, I meant "ethnically diverse")?

And if you personally can't deal with affirmative action because you think it kept you from getting into a school, or a job, then a) maybe there's another reason, like not enough of either, or b) maybe you *ain't* that good.

                        mark "and no, it won't help me personally"

Corn's incredibly harsh on the soil. It annually needs a lot of fertilizer (that is, modern corn). Biofuels - pretty much everyone before the corn lobby got into it was talking lots of other, easy, fast-growing *weeds*, like switchgrass comes to mind. No fertilizer, etc... I mean, it's a *weed*.

But agribusiness industry (petrochemicals into fertilzer, for example) aren't interested in *that*....

                mark