Having moved away from Michigan a few years before, I never went, but it does seem ill conceived. As one commenter said, for a fraction of that amount of money, they could have put together the world’s best auto museum, with many classic cars, to rival or even exceed the Ford museum in Dearborn, and it might still be there. Government in action.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Computer Problem Update
Just in case anyone was curious as to the resolution of my computer issues, I haven’t had a hiccup since I swapped the memory sticks with each other. I still can’t get into the BIOS, though, not that I have any immediate need to. I can live with it as is for a while.
How Bad Can The Oil Spill Get?
Alan Boyle has the latest.
The Next Revolution In Electronics
Graphene? What happens when we get terahertz processors?
We Control The Horizontal
We control the analog output.
OK, I don’t get it. I don’t take the input for my audio receiver and recording devices from my television — it comes from my satellite receiver. Functionally, the television is just a video monitor. Are they saying that they’ll be cutting off analog output on the satellite receivers/cable boxes as well?
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, I think I understand now. They’re saying “set top-boxes,” so I guess that means the cable box (though apparently satellites are going to be a separate issue). That would probably also apply to digital fiber from Verizon or AT&T. And the sets that are affected are the ones without digital inputs? I still don’t see how this prevents piracy, unless you don’t have HDMI or other digital inputs to your DVD recorder.
Three Reasons
Youtube shouldn’t take down the Downfall parodies.
Computer Problems
I’m running Fedora 11 on my primary desktop. The mobo is a couple years old. Lately, it’s started randomly freezing, or occasionally shutting itself down without warning. I was going to run memtest on it, but I can’t even get into the BIOS to change the boot sequence. I hit “del” repeatedly during boot, but it ignores me and always goes to the hard drive. Does anyone have any suggestions (other than just upgrading the board, processor and memory, which I’m considering…)?
[Wednesday morning update]
For those asking, no, it is not a wireless keyboard.
And so far, I’ve had no problems since swapping the memory sticks.
What Do Dietary Supplements…?
…have to do with finance regulation?
One of the Dems I’d love to see get booted out this November is Henry Waxman. Unfortunately, some of the most destructive politicians (e.g., Waxman, Frank) are in the safest seats. That’s not a coincidence, of course. The safer your seat (or at least the perception of safety), the more outrageous the behavior.
A Facebook Problem
Jonah has one:
Is it bad form to “un-friend” folks I don’t know personally and send them to the fan page? It seems awfully rude. But I have actual longtime 3-Dimensional friends who can’t “friend” me because I hit the limit.
I don’t have that problem, not just because I’m not as popular and well-known (and debonair) as Jonah, but because I take Facebook friending almost (but not quite) as seriously as meatspace friending. I don’t Facebook friend people that I don’t know and have not interacted with (at least on line, if not in flesh and blood)– to do so would seem to make the term “friend” meaningless. The only exceptions are if we have a high number of mutual friends, or if someone takes the trouble to write a note with the friend request explaining who they are and why they want to be friends, which doesn’t happen very much (about three times, in my experience).
That said, it wouldn’t have to be rude if you explained why. I would think that most would understand. It might be nice to have a script that would be autogenerated when you did it to provide the explanation. It would be a pain to have to cut and paste it for each unfriending. And never having unfriended someone, I’m not even sure that such an explanation is an option, short of actually sending them a Facebook message, which would be a royal PITA. I don’t think you’re automatically alerted if you’re unfriended (it’s happened to me once, and I didn’t receive any notice of it — I just noticed one day that they were no longer my Facebook friend, or rather, I wasn’t theirs). So I guess if you unfriend a lot of people, some of them will notice, and some of those will ask for an explanation. I guess something else to do would be to put up a notice on your wall warning the general Facebook friendom that some of them were about to become unfriended, with an explanation why and a request not to take it personally.
Demand Pull
War has probably advanced technology more than any other human endeavor, except when it comes to communications technology. There the driver has always been porn.