I haven’t posted recently (yet again) but this time I’m unsure if I want to keep going with the project. The story gets better and better, but the problem lies in one of the species I invented. They’re like centaurs but with an anthropomorphic torso and they’re like canines not horses. They’re not furries, they’re a separate species with a culture and stuff. But, I will not go forward if it’s just going to provide fuel for the gay furry community, which I find repulsive. So I’m holding off.
Caring for the Environment
I haven’t encountered anyone with this opinion, but I am curious if anyone thinks that caring for the environment is retarded, as if it were a kind of charity to small woodland creatures. The woodland creatures can take care of themselves as long as we let them. Caring for the environment is not charity. It’s mandatory. To put it bluntly, if we don’t care the the environment, we’ll starve to death. It’s that simple, and it’s that serious.
Readers might be sheltered from this, but on the whole our civilization is pretty fucked unless we get our act together. Fossil fuels are an integral part of everything. Food is made with fertilizer from fossil fuels. That food is transported with fossil fuels. When oil runs out, which it most likely will during my lifetime, developing countries will starve. Also, there won’t be any more plastic or consumer goods from China. We’ll have money but it won’t do any good since there will be nothing to buy.
Comment on Caring for the Environment
Robot ship day
Tomorrow the robot our team made will be shipped to a warehouse. I will choose this moment to reflect on my FIRST experience.
Our team is kind of falling out of favor. Our school is full of people who think it’s cool but aren’t interested, and the interest is vital. We don’t have much of that here. I became convinced that some of my team members were hopeless on multiple occasions. I’m not blaming anyone, it could be my fault for not being able to inspire them. But I feel like even if I did, I’d still have to hold their hand the whole way. And I’m not a babysitter, I’m an engineer. And our school is one of the best in the country, supposedly, and it’s always scared me. If this is one of the best, what must the others be like?
This program has certainly given me passion and experience in engineering and science. I feel some confidence that I could solve "the world’s problems"… but I feel no motivation to do so. We didn’t make those problems on purpose, they were merely a result of everyone trying to get everything they possibly could out of life, without thought to long term consequences or the reality of necessity. I don’t feel like sharing the benefits of a solution with people like this. If we’re going to fix the problems we really ought to fix the troublemakers first…and I don’t see why it’s worth it. I’d be saving a civilization with the arrogance to assume it owns the place when it doesn’t. And so far, we don’t deserve to own it.
Race
Talking about race is racist. There are no races, only stereotypes to be proven wrong. We should not be fighting for racial equality but for making the concept obsolete.
If an organization hand-picks its members based purely on their qualifications, and the races are not distributed according to the population’s demographics, this signifies something about society and not the organization. If this organization were to intentionally admit certain people to maintain an "equal opportunity" workforce, this just as racist.
Some people complain about certain fields being dominated by certain races when they are only accepting the qualifying candidates, which may have a tendency to be of one heritage or another. If a certain race is taking over the medical field it is likely because they are better doctors.
Webcomic
I stopped posting at http://ede.steveneaton.com/ three years ago. Since then my ideas about the story have changed a lot. I recently started working on this, and my new work can be found here. At some point I’ll move this into the main folder and put the old one on archive.
Society of Fail
Today, I read an article in the news about Microsoft entering financial trouble. This got me thinking about our so-called recession. Businesses are a major part in Microsoft’s revenue, and they are apparently hesitating about upgrading their equipment, which is causing some grief. But, the recession is recursive in a way. People stop buying as much, so companies enter trouble and cut budgets. This causes people to fall into hard times, and stop buying as much. I guess I should not be surprised that our economy is inherently unstable… but sheesh.
It would seem our economy is based on continuous growth, and the spring is drying up. But has it? Really, I think the spring has just moved elsewhere and no one wants to move. We’ve built everything up on the wrong ideals, and these things are failing. Perhaps new companies, individuals, and ideas will take their place. There is so much we could do, and so much to be done, but no one wants to make the leap. People of future generations will say, "What were they thinking???"
And we can’t just say, "Oh, it will be over soon," because there is no end in sight. There have been recessions before, yes, but now we have 6.5 billion people on the line, a boom created by oil. It is unsettling to think that since some fertilizers are petroleum-based, the plants grown from it are part petrol, and we eat these plants. Not only does oil power everything we do, we’re MADE of it. When there is no more oil left, one can but shudder to think of the events to follow. Does everything collapse into chaos, in a bizarre man-made mass extinction created by our immense stupidity? Or will a more elegant solution rush to fill in its place?
Utopia 3
In my last "Utopia" post I discuss the pitfalls of democracy and suggested a form of constitutional monarchy. I came up with another idea
"Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."
-Winston Churchill
Since it is so difficult to determine the best government, I thought of a government which would act as an experiment to test governments. The states would be the "test samples," and the federal government the manager of the experiment. Each state would have to be given a lot of independence. Periodically, the most successful one would be permitted to preside over the country since they are doing the best. Success in this case might have to be based not on current capital but their projection of future capital. Selling all of the resources in your possession leads to an immediate profit but you will most decidedly not be able to produce anything later.
My original idea was similar to this, but after thinking of the system as an experiment I thought the monarchy was too constraining.
Network issues
My laptop runs vista, and I normally have it connected over wireless. The behavior of the connection has always been very strange with our home network, but others work fine. I think it might have worked correctly a long time ago, but for the longest time file sharing has been extremely slow. For some reason it would not connect at all unless HP Wireless Assistant was running. I also had to supply an IP adress and gateway information in order for it to connect properly. Recently the internet started being slow too.
So I sought to fix the problem. I disabled a bunch of things in McAffee, and I tweaked autotuninglevel and a bunch of other stuff but it didn’t work. I literally spent over an hour on multiple days fiddling with the stupid thing. I updated the broadcom driver and HPWA, which didn’t help.
My dad also has a vista laptop, which works perfectly. I looked at its totally normal settings. I realized that a Dell laptop did not have stupid HP process running on it. So I killed a few of those – namely HPWA and HpqToaster. Connection speed went up and the computer connected faster. For some reason, keeping hpqWmiEx was better. Then, I finally tried something new. I disabled IPv6 and both link-layer topology widgets and the connection became about six times faster. WHAT.
Tower defense game
One of the things I’ve been wokring on recently is a tower defense game. After enjoying Plants vs. Zombies and desktop defense, I decided I wanted to contribute my own, a flash game. So far, it works well although I structured it like Plants vs. Zombies and now I’m thinking that’s not the best way to go for my game. Plants vs. Zombies has a very simple layout, and I was planning to have richer strategy in mine.
Middle College
In my school district, there is a concurrent enrollment program where you take all classes at the nearby community college. So here I am, sitting in the library typing on my laptop. So far, it’s been fun but I’m not allowed on the high school campus, which is going to hamper my efforts at maintaining the robotics club.
The college classes and environment have been pleasing so far. The students here are much more serious and many things are more flexible. There is an element of freedom. Except, I’m spending it bored in the library. I will have to work on things to do when homework is done.
