Rusty Shackleford

A Hasselblad H2 is like $43K at Adorama. :-o :-o :-o :-o

Oh, man, if the Obama administration did anything even remotely like this, the red states would probably melt down in open rebellion. You'd have local "militias" establishing checkpoints at interstate highway crossings into red states.

Answer to the thread: Dayton: Rike's. Truly the Macy's (in the sense of the old flagship Manhattan Macy's store) of the Miami Valley. Especially their Christmas window displays, the elaborate Christmas model train on the 8th floor, and the Tyke's kids department (where little ones could buy their parents stuff for Christmas.) Rike's even had bakeries with their own brand scattered around town.

See my reply (#39) above. Dayton once was a great little city with an exceptional amount of local and corporate pride. Daytonians of my parent's generation felt that the Dayton of their youth (pre-1960, say) was understandable and "reasonable". In its own little box. A mix of cosmopolitan, world class aspirations and real firsts with small town-ness. Cozy. I want to push that concept. Not that it's duplicable today. I think a variety of social and economic pressures in society - even the rise of the two paycheck household in the 60s - blew Dayton's established order of village like small neighborhoods apart at the seams. One big issue was that two paycheck households becoming common in the 1960s considered existing housing stock within the city limits of Dayton to be unacceptably constraining - small houses with small yards. And Dayton had been reined in on the south by Kettering. As for the future... it's a matter of will. Is Dayton considered controllable, tamable enough to make it a desirable business and residence location? So much of Dayton is ghetto and out-of-control.

Re: "genus loci". That phrase got me thinking. Let me throw in a really old self description of Dayton, from the era in the early and mid 20th century in which my parents grew up and started their family in Dayton. This is as close as I can possibly get to how my mom felt about the city. Dayton was a city that was in spirit a large village. "Cozy" in spirit and demeanor. It took care of its own and it sustained its own. I mean through the local industries and the local cultural scene. And Dayton had at one time a united vision of itself. It was a center of (choke, believe it or not) progress, and industry, and ... hope. That things could always be improved and built up. The "big village" idea carried through to neighborhoods like Dayton View or Belmont or Ohmer Park, each of which operated sort of like little villages in their own right with their own distinct downtown shopping districts and their own suburban area. All part of the larger whole. When I grew up in Belmont in the 1960s, Belmont felt like a village that was part of a larger fabric. Things were changing then but it still had that feel. So make of that what you will. That's as close as I can come to my parent's experience of Dayton as a place. By the 1980s, Dayton was foreign and distasteful to my mom due to white flight, neighborhood decline, urban renewal, etc. But she remembered the familiarity of the place from when she was growing up - kind of a small town feel with big city bustle.

Boreal, you're dead on the money as far as I am concerned and thanks for finding that citation. I have noticed that the content that newspapers keep active online has dwindled to stuff like recipes and movie reviews. If you want to read something meaty online in content on most newspapers that is more than 90 days old, you get directed to a pay per article thing. So copying the content cuts into their revenue. That's what I was thinking when this fracas started. Personally, I have always thought it was kind of lazy and lousy style to post articles verbatim. I'd rather that someone summarize the article in their own words and give a link to the article online (which will admittedly be transient). There are too many too many resources available online to detect plagiarism.

Unions became thugs once they consolidated their power. Unions were also responsible for the weekend and the 40 hour work week standard. It would have been nice if some higher power could have said "ok, very nice, you improved social conditions, now please stop existing." Relevant to Dayton, I remember watching TV news films about strikes when I was growing up. Basically these guys would get into the camera and start braying about how rich GM was and how entitled they were. Or they would act like employee stock options were filthy contamination. Basically they just spewed angry and ignorant sounding rants. Generally I think that blue collar people are much smarter than most white collar people about being exploited. IE, you read about IT people who basically live at work or are forced to carry beepers or are forced to train their Indian replacements. The average wrench twisting blue collar type would laugh in the face of the average pasty-white IT guy who's cowering after being yelled at in his cubicle to work the weekend again for no extra pay. But in Dayton and with the auto unions in particular the pushback was utterly out of balance. If those idiots had just chilled out in the 70s we might still have a viable domestic auto industry today.

There are likely 10s of thousands of potentially unsafe posts on this board. The administration needs to consider automated mechanisms to deal with the problem and needs to consider alternative means of coping with the issue, like negotiation, use of protected sections, and possibly non profit reorganization. Users will assuredly not be able to clean up their own posts in any short term. I consider just deleting anything older than 2 years to be effectively caving in to economic bullying.

I just thought of an analog to Dayton. Just as persons without computer or knowledge worker skills have been slowly but inexorably cut out of the economy over the last 20 years - So, too, has the greater Dayton area as an economic player. The Dayton area is not "good with" tech entrepreneurship. I never worked with a Dayton tech company that wasn't somehow stupidly run and abusive. The managements at most software shops in Dayton don't "get" software, online culture or how programmers work. I mean - I probably have tunnel vision here - but it's my livelihood - and it's a pattern that I have seen. So, Dayton is the metro area equivalent of a poor or older person without computer skills. Cut out of the action. Poverty stricken. So, I think in order to rebuild its economy, again I say that Dayton must look to a renaissance of manufacturing. People here will work with their hands. People in a lot of regions won't. I'd say capitalize on that.

It's funny reading this because I've been posting pix here under various "Jeff" handles since 2005, and some of those posts had pix of various live music things, art shows, and festivals. Part of the reason I did that is to show that things do happen in Dayton. And here I read a post like this. I might as well be talking to a stove. Let us be perfectly clear here. Socially, if you find the right groups/cliques, Dayton is wonderful. Culturally Dayton is "up there" for having a vibrant counterculture scene. Great neighborhoods. Great housing stock. Welcoming countryside not too distant. IMO - Virtually EVERYTHING that is now the matter with Dayton comes down to failed and broken dreams, poverty and lack of opportunity. Dayton doesn't come off as a place where a lot *economically* happens. I will cop to that. And new exurban developments like The Browne (sorry, The Greene) and Austin Rd. are sheer vulture economics at work.

You are not far from the truth. :evil: Your observations echo mine. I don't see the region becoming a powerhouse for any kind of intellectual property type concerns (IE, inventions, computers, software, biomedical.) There's just no concerted base of such business interests here. And this is not a cerebral area. People here are at their best when they are in the role of "doers", much more than thinkers. I have worked at enough crappy and misguided software companies that tried to make a go of it in the local area to know that brainwork innovation is not in the genetics of most managers around here. The capital goods and car businesses have pervaded the area too long for that to be viable. One problem that Dayton has is that just about all new business you read about here is almost always at the disconnected, microscopic stage. Some small factory, some software entrepreneur, some AFB contractor with a certain angle, etc. There are people around here who really WANT to live and settle here who are trying to make things happen, but there is simply no spark leading to a fire. On another message board that I run, we recently debated the viability of "DIY" or small scale, retail-level green energy technology. All of the Obama green initiatives are about windmill farms and mega-huge investments in the hundreds of millions. Why couldn't Dayton become a hub for green and energy production technology that is sized for the average homeowner? Magazines like Popular Science and Pop Mechanix used to run articles in the 1970s about DIY energy systems like geothermal/solar heating supplement systems. I just mean that, just as in the case of John Patterson, a visionary has to land in Dayton and decide that X is viable and that X should be based locally. That is about the only thing that I believe could lift Dayton out of its 30 year funk.

The important difference being (and I forgot this point): Dayton became an industrial and technological monoculture: car parts, tires, cash registers. The local business culture revolved around supplication to Delco, GM and "the cash." Monocultures are highly vulnerable to disruption. I think that what made Dayton great also lead to its downfall. If you look at any region that has continued to prosper in a period spanning more than 50 years, it is almost always commercially diversified. I mean, look at your own sig - "Glass City". Well, and Willys Jeep. Sort of a monoculture in Toledo. Same basic thing. Whereas the entire US is not a monoculture in any sense of the word.

OK, at that level you log accesses. Registered user XYZ is continually hitting a certain range of articles. Should be easy to detect and lock out. At the level of activity that you are suggesting, this would look like someone spidering the site, and many sites define that as a violation of usage terms.

As far as what can be done now: I think Dayton has to define a fairly humble, realizable regional goal of economic redevelopment with re-industrialization (yes, I mean that) as a key goal. There are simply no local leaders with vision who want to hang around and build up Dayton. We've got no John Pattersons. They all want to move to Silicon Valley or Atlanta. My mother grew up in the early 20th century and basically was "in love" with the old Dayton of the John Patterson/Delco era. What she told me was that goodwill was one of the key driving elements of the early boom years. When Dayton was built up as an industrial power in the early 20th century, it was into a vacuum. So there were tons of opportunities to differentiate Dayton as, say, the machine shop capital of the world as it was at one time. I personally think that what happened to Dayton is as follows in a nutshell: - Early boom through the war years. - Postwar prosperity and comfort. - Unions - and locals - becoming more entitled-thinking. IE, having a good GM job turns from a good thing into an entitlement. - Oil shocks of 73 and 79 which gives small foreign car makers a beachhead for the first time into the US auto market. Combined with expansion of new technologies (IE, integrated circuits) that threaten local companies like NCR and Monarch Marking and similar places that were sort of the "computers" of the 19th century. - Locals and local leaders at this point believe Dayton's uniqueness and past prosperity are a birthright - figure that things will "bounce back". - Continued erosion through 80s, 90s and present day. I analogize what has happened to Dayton over the years as what happens to many rich families. Grandpa made the family fortune, and the kids never got exposed to the hard knocks or personal trials that give them the wisdom to be able to continue to build up the fortune. All they know how to do is spend. By the third generation after the founding father, the family fortune has become a small trust fund, pretty much evaporated. That, to me, is Dayton's progression over the period 1960-2010 in a nutshell. For this "squandered opportunity" angle I still cling to the example of Lexis-Nexis. They were in a prime position to exploit the internet in 1995 through 2000. Instead, mere college kids in California operating on out of pocket money figured it out on their own (Google, Yahoo.) Lexis-Nexis is a key example of a local economic player with absolutely no vision, just protecting its market.

I believe that some solution other than asking all contributors to edit their articles will be necessary. I took a look around just now and the problem here is just enormous. The only fallback to this is mass deletion. Particularly in the sections under the category "Projects And Transportation", there is a huge abundance of threads that consist primarily of cut and pastes of news articles with very little attribution. No other section relies so heavily on pasted news. And I saw pretty flagrant repeated "violations." My advice - I run a message board that has had major issues with hatred, flamage and aggrieved outside parties: - For the time being, take ALL of certain categories, like the one I mentioned above, private. Private to logged in users, or to users on request, I mean. I assume that SMF has the controls available to make some sections only available to logged in users, and also to further restrict access to a defined list of users. This would make the content in dispute inaccessible to search engines and to outside parties. - Once again, as I said earlier, you probably need a more comprehensive copyright notice, one that acknowledges ownership of other party's content. This may be part of the core issue - that some users who were sloppy about cutting and pasting news articles are doing so on a board that claims global copyright. I personally believe that copyright should lay with the original author of each posting or article, not granted implicitly to UO with no compensation. As far as I am concerned, I own everything I write, even posted here, period. But I am happy to share it here. There may be "Creative Commons" language and insignias that you could use for this. - I really like the idea of a non-profit if it removes the legal threats. A Paypal fund could be set up to finance the work. I'd chuck in a fiver. Once a non profit corporation is rolling, it should not take much to maintain it.

That's a good point. It just gets to be impractical with some of these mega-mondo humongous image threads that contain ~100 images in a line - you're talking about dozens of images that don't display. Again, the installable Firefox add-on called "IE Tab" allows fast switching of a Firefox tab to display using Internet Explorer as the browser. And IE doesn't have this problem. I think "IE Tab" is mainly for web designers and such who want to preview how their site will appear in IE and Firefox without jumping to another browser. In any event, it works great to work around this particular issue.

One word: CLASSY!!! (not)

>> What comes to mind when you hear the word(s) Dayton or Dayton, Ohio? "Home". The "origin point", for me. >> Also- what does Dayton mean to you? Bitterness central. Land of missed opportunities. The inheritor of a proud industrial legacy that was squandered and allowed to diminish for a period of 50+ years. Angry, mean people clinging to dated provincialism for an over the hill place. Home of "zero sum" thinking, as in, that guy needs to get less so I can get more. Hopelessness and despair. Rampant and compulsive repudiation of the past - through urban renewal, highway construction, teardowns, etc. A rootless place - no "there" there. Nobody stays around for more than 3 generations or so. >> Do you see it in a positive light or negative? Currently mostly negative. The past - proud and glorious - the precursor to Silicon Valley and similar boom regions. >> Do you think Dayton has unfulfilled potential? I have been trying to figure that one out for 20+ years! I honestly don't know. We have, for instance, a great undervalued housing stock - but relatively few jobs for people to work at when they live in that housing. We have lots of water and a mild climate. But no demand for those things that can translate into a better economy. >> What do you think Dayton is doing right or doing wrong? I have no idea what Dayton could do to bootstrap itself into even economic "averageness" again. Sorry.

These two remind me of art from the movie Fantastic Planet.

I don't know about the contamination, but when asphalt is laid, a bed of gravel is first put down because you don't asphalt right on top of dirt (frost heaves, etc.) So that top layer of dirt is usually bulldozed away in order to create a perfectly flat surface for the gravel. So, yeah, the ground has been altered in a negative way underneath any structure or parking lot from the act of grading the lot.

I second or third the idea of sandboxing any questionable content in an area that requires login in order to be visible.

Ok, as a specific example. Is this OK? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,19732.msg411811.html#msg411811 How about this? http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php/topic,14880.msg417412.html#msg417412

Uhm... I will shortly review my own stuff. Just a reality check: has anyone on the "management team" here attempted to make contact with this attorney in order to find out if this consortium of newspapers has a list of URLs of the most "offensive" posts? Asking users to help is alright, but the complaint should have specificity and you should indicate that fair use doctrine, as you understand it, applies to abstracted articles. Also you might want to give some thought to amending your copyright language, if indeed it says something like a blanket "Copyright Urbanohio.com". You need to specify that all content authored by outside parties is their copyright. (Just as products will specify that trademarks referenced in their documentation will be indicated as "trademark Bla Bla Co.") I believe it would be to your advantage to acknowledge the complaint and to attempt to buy some time and to get a list of specific complaints so that these attorneys don't force you to take a meataxe to the forum.

The Golden Girls!

Gah, I think you just got screwed! What a ripoff. Try to do a chargeback on your credit card. (One thing: Regsoft.com is simply a billing service and a lot of different shareware vendors sell through it. Your actual beef is with the maker of the software that you used.) Here is a free utility that a German company provides out of utter goodwill: "PC Inspector File Recovery". Its purpose is to recover deleted files from FAT or NTFS partitions. I have experimented with some memory cards and it finds and recovers images that I had deleted *months* ago. http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1