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.. or source color-coordinated headware for the Red-headed League?

with today's HW. Haha, wouldn't that be funny if ten years from now Linux and Minix switched places?

Nah...

'W'isky thought a lot o' that Chink; nobody but me knew how 'e doted on 'im. Couldn't bear 'im out of 'is sight, the derned protoplasm! And w'en 'e came down to this clearin' one day an' found 'im an' me neglectin' our work -- 'im asleep an' me grapplin' a tarantula out of 'is sleeve -- W'isky laid hold of my axe and let us have it, good an' hard! I dodged just then, for the spider bit me, but Ah Wee got it bad in the side an' tumbled about like anything. W'isky was just weighin' me out one w'en 'e saw the spider fastened on my finger; then 'e knew 'e'd make a jackass of 'imself. 'E threw away the axe and got down on 'is knees alongside of Ah Wee, who gave a last little kick and opened 'is eyes -- 'e had eyes like mine -- an' puttin' up 'is hands drew down W'isky's ugly head and held it there w'ile 'e stayed. That wasn't long, for a tremblin' ran through 'im and 'e gave a bit of a moan an' beat the game.'

The problem is, their constituents are corporations, not meat citizens.

Now, I finally understand what this story was about...

"So now you have a mass of uncared-for, uneducated, unemployable poor kids sitting around with basically nothing to do but join up with criminal gangs. "

Conservatives prefer to invest in Government Lethal Chambers, ala The Repairer of Reputations, to investing in Government Schools.

That way the Koch Brothers will be untroubled by restive surplus minimum wage workers while enjoying their ill gotten billions.

As Ayn Rand stated about people who aren't wealthy in her famous book, Atlas Shrugged, "To a gas chamber, go!"

That's the joke, but it's probably true.

We're already talking about the time when humans will have replaceable parts or theoretically live forever (not sure how the brain will deal but anyway). The point is, if you're a civilisation of essentially deathless entities, going about your unfathomable purposes with your friends from other essentially deathless civilisations, you would obviously know there are many, many budding new species out there. And you'd be like, so what?

The "Meat" story by Terry Bisson says it all.
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml

Those aliens might document us, but communicating would be pointless. We can't imagine what kind of mind evolves to psychologically survive for even hundreds of years, let alone thousands or more. What could they say which would have any meaning for us or them? We naturally think we're fabulous, unique and worthwhile, of course we do.

That's why vampire stories are so silly; alive for hundreds of years and still exhibiting the same psychology as most people? Not likely. At least Hancock was suitably depressed after living so long. :)

Terry Bisson's They're Made of Meat

One of my all-time favorites for what it makes you think of the end, somewhat like some of Asimov's stories that were only two or three pages.

To which all I can say is http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml

Death by Scrabble, a short story:

Paging The King In Yellow to this thread...

I hope at least one of these firms is well read enough to have used the Yellow Sign as their logo.

...that is, that they have a product with a high degree of price inelasticity of demand (although record execs don't hvae the sophisticated vocabulary). The problem is they don't realize the cross elasticity of substitute products.

OK, so assume that RIAA member company Three Initial Recording (TIR) have a lock-in recording contract with the hottest band around, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. TIR makes a fistful of buckaroos from every one of HKC CDs they sell. But music from iTunes is a really close substitute, if not a superior replacement; changes in prices of one will affect the sales of the other pretty easily. Raising prices so as not to undercut sales makes sense to TIR.

The problem is, there are other substitutable choices besides CD and iTunes. TIR considers DRM-Rootkitted music disks: consumers don't like those much, but most are easily confused sheep, so the substitutibility is fairly good until ingenious folk at Sysinternals notice. Maybe they try it, maybe not.

There's live concert performances... but that's not a good substitute for most working stiffs who want to listen to the band at any given time of day, and the HKC can only do so many concerts; TIR can live with that.

There's music from other bands; although some folk feel there is no alternative to the HKC's unique sound, others are just as happy listening to Electric Mayhem, who are signed with another RIAA member. Well, it's within the cartel. But the band Disaster Area tends to have a wide overlap in the fan base, and they've not only working with an independent studio, they took pot shots with a sniper rifle at the last TIR contract rep who tried to persuade them to join up. Hmm...

And really, any form of entertainment might be a substitute; cheap, safe, designer hallucinogens might leave everyone just sitting around giggling at their fingers, but the War on Drugs makes most people stay away. Movies are another alternative, but the MPAA has enough overlap and common interest that they're not likely to be a deliberate threat. Books... well, nobody reads those any more. Video games are a growing problem, but they look to be gelling into a cartel pretty soon.

But that leaves the big one: there's pirate copies of the music, in all of their many forms. Recorded live in concert while in the audience. Sketchy dealers on NY sidewalks selling counterfeit CDs. Music ripped to MP3/Ogg/FOO format and traveling over the internet by FTP, HTTP, NNTP, KaZaa, BitTorrent, and the six surviving Gopher sites. Yes, it's illegal... but cheaper, all the way down to free. The extra costs are only to the pirate's self respect (which there's less to lose of each time they give in) and if they get caught. And almost EVERYBODY is doing it.

Some flexibility in pricing might help both Apple and the RIAA, especially if they put more of the long tail up on iTunes (which would probably be the best way to grow revenue), with opportunities for having sales, and making a litte more on the megahits. (Yeah, bands with gold albums probably ought to be going for $1.25 IMHO). But my back-of-the-hand guess is that if the average price (weighted by number of sales) of iTunes song starts rising, there will be more "sales" really lost to piracy, as opposed to the RIAA claimed losses. And with those short-term real losses come longer term erosion to the foundation social mores (EG: piracy=theft=bad) that the music industry is reliant on. And that is something TIR and the other RIAA members aren't factoring in on their economics.

I've been noticing the grammar is improving, and have gotten several that are actually free of all spelling and grammar errors. Like many simple anti-phishing tactics, this one won't work for much longer. Go back and re-read your Bierce.

Short term only. Not trying to deal with such practices that degrade the customer experience (by, for example, making searches harder) makes it easier for competing services that figures out how to address those problems to establish themselves. Of course, barring a software or business methods patent, Ebay could simply re-implement the technique themselves.

The two fundamental reasons that Ebay doesn't deal with this are

• No-one's figured out how to do so effectively yet.
• Once they do figure out how to, people will start gaming the new system.

A Google for water torture "Conan Doyle" gives The Leather Funnel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as fourth result, which must be the story you read..

A Google for water torture inquisition will then give you more details than you probably wanted (once you get past the pr0n).

Now, what was I doing...?

Most *good* sci-fi I see any more is from amatuer or indy writers. Most of what's published in the last few years has been crap, and what's not crap is usually cautionary rather than expectant.

Compare 3001 (Clarke) to 2001 or 2010. 3001 was a boring, unexciting book. What parts were interesting were so cautionary, they weren't fun to read.

Here's a good site with a few amatuer authors.

And othes like The Day of an American Journalist in 2889. Verne predicts, among other, colour photography, videophones and streaming audio news, sort of.