Strange suggestion from this man Cramer. Very strange. I don't own stock but I thought that for people that do, access to the stock information is crucial. Not that any serious person would rely on the TV for that info. So, people that panic but have no stock don't matter, those with stock will know anyway. Perhaps you rightly called him a clown. Ok, maybe the media can increase the panic of the people that have stock but I would think the serious ones would not be so easily misled.
And why the media has to be so sensationalist anyway? The ratings show us the trend, says the bean counter in the TV corp. But I and Biology say - ok, some behaviour might be kind of addictive. Like being addicted to spices or sugar. For a long time the food manufacturers “outcompeted”each other by ever increasing the concentrations of say, salt in the bread or sugar in the soft beverages. But it’s addiction-type of thing. We are conditioned to crave certain things that came by very rarely for the last few million years. Today they are at hand’s reach in some parts of the world. My biochemistry certainly does not know that food comes every day in any desired quantity and wide variety. And my mum had plenty and good food so it is not “learned in the womb” thing. My body just stocks like crazy. So if I let my guard for few months I am well ahead on the overweight path.
So, you are feeding the public with ever more sensationalism. Until when? Until we all burn out? Besides, I have the feeling that senses, sensations and emotions are more a matter of gradient rather than absolute values, if you get my drift (sure you do, this is/.) We have to start lowering the concentrations slowly but with determination – at the moment we are overhyped and it gets worst all the time. Too much “thermal” noise in the system. Too much “crying wolf” situations that needn’t be. People become insensitive, the system is overloaded. We are high on chemicals, high on emotions and sensationalism, high on everything that we want/crave.
I totally got carried away, didn’t I? Well, it happens
Of course, the aim was to keep their power and perpetuate this inhuman system.
He, I remember my parents advising me not to discuss politics with anyone but them. Ever. And never to talk at school what they told me about politics, history or anything important really. Because always "someone listens". However, to lighten the tone a bit - paradoxically we (the people) were the champions of telling jokes about the authorities, the Party and the leader. It was simply the national favorite past-time. Even jokes that joked about being killed because of telling jokes. We were laughing our heads off! Was it the same in your place?
There was already something after 9/11 in the US - the authorities asking the citizenry to report "suspicious" people - neighbors, strangers, whoever. I thought "oh dear, here we go again!".
BTW, the grammar of my previous post is terrible (normally it is passable)! I am sorry, I was in a hurry and at work...
Hi there! I see you are taking an active interest in this thread and as a fellow former citizen of totalitarian state let me add this:
Do you remember the "fun" we had when those files were opened after 1989? When it turned out that people have been sent to camps because of a single "whistle-blower" ratting to the police? When we discovered that friends, colleagues, neighbors and even relatives were sending "annonimus" reports to the Secret Service? Wasn't that great!! Neighbor wants to fuck your wife - write a report, get you sent to Gulag, profit!! Colleague is too smart and you feel you deserve that promotion - write a report get him fired or locked away, profit!! You just hate the guy for whatever - write report, get him locked, profit!
Before the Social Media era, they collected data through opening regular mail, wiretapping the telephones but most importantly spying on people and instigating regular Joes to spy on other regular Joes. Today, I expect the same level of human nastiness - I expect that a secret database will encourage people to rat on others. I fully expect that westerns would not show greater spirit than we did and will gladly use the opportunity to remove inconvenient people. Not to mention just plain mistakes a-la Buttle - Tuttle (sp?)
My fellow Americans, for your own sake, do not go there!!
What do you mean? Make another account? Post as AC only? I though you cannot change your ID name and cannot delete your account. So...?
And BTW, I would appreciate a more civil tone. I am sure I can beat you on many subjects, where you would be the fucking idiot (don't look at my subscription number, some of us discovered/. after puberty)...Sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on - so many people are cold and unhelpful...
The help articles of/. are interesting and useful but they assume a certain level of prior knowledge which I do not have. Perhaps I should not be here as a lame standard PC user that actually hates programming (sorry, I find it extremely boring)? Yet, my karma suggests that I am appreciated enough...
How difficult it is to have a very small/. space for noobies where such questions can be answered? Mixed economy? The Golden rule? Working in a team? Helping without charging fees? Be fucking nice to people for a change? Does this mean anything to anybody anymore??
If someone (you?) is still willing to further clarify (or mod me "off-topic") - you are welcome. And yes, I have combed through the help files quite a lot (no guarantee that something was missed, of course). And I tried writing to the admins.
Some of us are "blessed" with unique names. All my names are very rare; adding them together zooms in to one person over the whole planet - me.
I was very stupid to subscribe here with one of my real names./. tricked me - I never expected that what I put as "real name" will be my ID on/. I am still grumpy about it....
Genuinely unbiased (on this issue) foreigner (to US) here.
I also noticed the suspicious modding down. In my country this is normal (EU - east Europe). Everyone on public forums knows that there are paid people who promote political ideas and try to suppress the other views. Some of our newspapers introduced simplified modding options recently and they are all abused left right and center. I would be very surprised if such popular and yes, influential site as/. is not targeted by such people.
Last week I got for the first time 15 modpoints and I spent half of them trying to fix what looked like "mob-downmodding" in a couple of discussions. I hope you and I are wrong but I am not holding my breath.
Its either that or you use twice as much energy to reprocess waste into raw material then re-manufacture it (a process called recycling).
But if you recycle you don't need to extract and purify materials for a new one. Are you sure the energy cost of mining and refining is lower than recycling? I am not...and even if it is comparable better use the waste than mine finite resources...
People forget the three "R" and most importantly forget the order which indicates their profitability:
Reduce Reuse Recycle
Sure, recycling is the least effective but still better than manufacturing anew. And all this "planned obsolesce" we discus here works exactly against the most potent "R" - reduce!!
To add my anecdotal experience.
TV "Ruby" made in USSR (29 inch, color), weights 65 kilograms, worked for 30 years with minimal maintenance. TV Orion 4:3 CRT 25 inch, bought early 90-ties, still operational. 16:9 CRT Samsung 31 inch, bought 2003, dies 2008 Panasonic plasma 42 inch, bought 2009 - still working
Kitchen appliances (oven, cooking plates, refrigerator, washing machine) - bought by my parents 6 years before I was born from USSR and Yugoslavia. All are still operational; I am pushing 40 years old!
Kitchen appliances bought in the west around 2002 - washing machine gone, oven gone, refrigerator still operational
PC's - power supplies and motherboards are exchanged with a rate 2:1 compare to other components. MP3 players - pretty tragic - 3 models for 8 years gone. GSM's - goddamn awful (many could barely run for the duration of the subscription - 2 years). Nokia, Simens, Sony Erickson (2 types) and HTC. The one model that worked and still works like a charm is the W810 Sony Erickson Walkman. And even there they planned the obsolesce with the incredibly flimsy (and proprietary) input connector for charging and communication with PC. It is quite difficult to charge it these days.
You might be closer to the truth than you think. The shooting in the labor party youth camp and the time of the blasts (when few are around) - this seems to me like an internal political affair.
- behave like us (virus) and kill us all as competition
or
- are clever to sustain working multi species relations that preserve all and they kill us because we are a plague and want to take all the fucking Universe for ourselves.
Sure there is the infinitesimal chance that we are the first species in space. I am not counting on that.
In fact I believe that Nature imposes a kind of cosmic censorship. You need long time and plenty of resources to colonize. Very likely you need to expand and use your solar system not only one planet. But to reach that point you inevitably must pass the test of sustainability. I also think that evolution is universal process which means that every technological species must have their wild period when power is used most unwise. This is what we have now - rampant destruction and waste and total refusal to take responsibility for our deeds. We took the power, but avoided the responsibility. We will pay for our lack of vision:)
It's the economy though, not some flaw in human nature or some original sin....
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
Northern ConservativeBaptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
And "tax dollars wasted" is something I think you seriously don't understand.
Sorry, it is you who does not understand!
It's simple. The logical extension of your position is that every activity is beneficial for society as long as money changes hands. Which is exactly what is going on in the world during at least the last 100 years. USA is the most startling example of this. In a country where everything is business, you have an incentive to have more of everything. Which is by far the most insane paradigm that exists in the world today.
USA spends the most money for health care, yet you are not (by far) the healthiest nation. You spend the most money to fight crime, yet you are number one in crime among the western world. You fight porn, yet you are the biggest producer and the biggest consumer of porn. The same for drugs. You are also, by far, the most wasteful society on Earth. And let's not even start talking about wars (where HUGE amounts of money change hands, so it is the MOST profitable activity of the US, no?).
There is so much wrong with this approach.
From pure economical considerations all this impoverishes YOU and the other taxpayers while insanely enriching the powerful few. Where is this money comes from? Oh, yhea print some more. What can go wrong?
How about human fulfillment and happiness? In a society where any problem is profitable, the drive is to have more problems of any kind and not to solve them. Again to recapitulate - crime, sickness, wars are more profitable , i.e. more money change hands than when peace, good health and low crime prevail. Just think of all this poor soldiers, generals, policeman, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, weapon manufacturers that will be starving if there were less problems....right?
And much, much worse, from logistical,resource management and ecological point of view this model is nothing less than suicidal for all of us.
Again , for another analogy - this paradigm beats you with one hand on the head (you pay for the beating - taxes) and with the other it sells you Aspirin (you pay A LOT for it too). And at every cycle of problem -"solution", problem -"solution" money changes hands and the top tier of society gets the lion's share (as can be easily proved by looking at your wealth distribution).
My knowledge of the peculiarities and loopholes of the legal system is a bit vague to say the least. Let's hope the judges will deliver high quality justice in this case!
Why everything has to be all about money, money, money?
Yhea, it is very insightful to point the obvious - that the installation cost money. "No free lunch" can always get you some mod points. Please, introduce a mod +1 (conforming and mindlessly parroting the existing paradigm)
----There are many examples of how a gift economy works in modern culture within a mixed economy, such as marriage, family, friendship, kinship, and social network structures.
-----Traditional scientific research can be thought of as an information gift economy. Scientists produce research papers and give them away through journals and conferences. Other scientists freely refer to such papers. All scientists can therefore benefit from the increased pool of knowledge. The original scientists receive no direct benefit from others building on their work, except an increase in their reputation. Failure to cite and give credit to original authors (thus depriving them of reputational effects) is considered improper behavior.[27]
-----In his essay "Homesteading the Noosphere", noted computer programmer Eric S. Raymond opined that open-source software developers have created "a 'gift culture' in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away".[29] Members of the Linux community often speak of their community as a gift economy.[30]
------Millions of articles are available on Wikipedia, a free on-line encyclopedia, and almost none of its innumerable authors and editors receive any direct material reward.[31][32]
I say, give the man custody over the rock for the duration of his life if it is his "lucky charm". Make sure that all hell rains on him if he tries to profit. Include proper clause in his will. Collect after his death. If he dies in a manner that makes the rock non-retrievable (say a boat sinks with him on board), write it off as an act of God and write an article in Nature that moon rocks are not so lucky after all...
I don't know about shows, but the last Planet Earth DVDs were dirt cheap considering how much time, money and effort it took them to make it. I won't be surprised if they did not recover the investment on this one.
I meet with slight hostility every request to lend them for the purpose of copying, even to close friends. Everyone I know can afford the price for this masterpiece. The day I got them from UK Amazon I convinced 3 colleagues to order on the spot.
And that is exactly the crux of the matter. If you want a career go to the US. If you want education go to Europe (both statements are exaggerated, there are exceptions on both sides).
OK, it is time for reckoning. Does anyone believe anymore that money loss is the prime drive of the media distributors? I don't. It is impossible that all of them are fools and do not see that they can only loose.
So, what is the deal? What do they want?
I don't know but my speculation is that it is about control of the internet. They just got a good deal with governments. Our Overlords use false, unprovable claim of money loss, the distributors play along. G'ment installs total control banging the drum (reinforced by the terrorist threat and protection of the kids) . After the scam is executed the scammers give each other favors.
Can anybody think of other possibilities (again I say they can't be all idiots)?
- License fees on cigarettes in the country where I live - 80%. Means every day 4 euro for the treasury from me. - In my company (approx. 200 people) the smokers use slightly LESS sick days per year compared to non-smokers. - I will work until 67 - that's what the state wants - According to my family history and the gleeful predictions of non-smokers I will die before age of 65 - If I get lung cancer "the treatment" that I want consists of 10 euro euthanasia pill if I do it legally and a bit more for nitrogen bottle and a mask if I do it "illegally". Or I can blow all my money for morphine first and then pull the plug.
I am a model citizen from every conceivable point of view - work all life (while paying racket to he government - funny how the most outrageous taxes and fines are for things which are either absolutely necessary like gasoline - addicted to oil, eh? - or biochemically addictive , like alcohol and tobacco) , drop dead without drawing pension.
Slashdot Mirror
Strange suggestion from this man Cramer. Very strange. I don't own stock but I thought that for people that do, access to the stock information is crucial. Not that any serious person would rely on the TV for that info. So, people that panic but have no stock don't matter, those with stock will know anyway. Perhaps you rightly called him a clown. Ok, maybe the media can increase the panic of the people that have stock but I would think the serious ones would not be so easily misled.
And why the media has to be so sensationalist anyway? The ratings show us the trend, says the bean counter in the TV corp. But I and Biology say - ok, some behaviour might be kind of addictive. Like being addicted to spices or sugar. For a long time the food manufacturers “outcompeted”each other by ever increasing the concentrations of say, salt in the bread or sugar in the soft beverages. But it’s addiction-type of thing. We are conditioned to crave certain things that came by very rarely for the last few million years. Today they are at hand’s reach in some parts of the world. My biochemistry certainly does not know that food comes every day in any desired quantity and wide variety. And my mum had plenty and good food so it is not “learned in the womb” thing. My body just stocks like crazy. So if I let my guard for few months I am well ahead on the overweight path.
So, you are feeding the public with ever more sensationalism. Until when? Until we all burn out? Besides, I have the feeling that senses, sensations and emotions are more a matter of gradient rather than absolute values, if you get my drift (sure you do, this is /.) We have to start lowering the concentrations slowly but with determination – at the moment we are overhyped and it gets worst all the time. Too much “thermal” noise in the system. Too much “crying wolf” situations that needn’t be. People become insensitive, the system is overloaded. We are high on chemicals, high on emotions and sensationalism, high on everything that we want/crave.
I totally got carried away, didn’t I? Well, it happens
Of course, the aim was to keep their power and perpetuate this inhuman system.
He, I remember my parents advising me not to discuss politics with anyone but them. Ever. And never to talk at school what they told me about politics, history or anything important really. Because always "someone listens". However, to lighten the tone a bit - paradoxically we (the people) were the champions of telling jokes about the authorities, the Party and the leader. It was simply the national favorite past-time. Even jokes that joked about being killed because of telling jokes. We were laughing our heads off! Was it the same in your place?
There was already something after 9/11 in the US - the authorities asking the citizenry to report "suspicious" people - neighbors, strangers, whoever. I thought "oh dear, here we go again!".
BTW, the grammar of my previous post is terrible (normally it is passable)! I am sorry, I was in a hurry and at work...
Just wait until she loads her rifles! I mean, this is the woman that said to the ruskies "I can see your house from here".
Those crustacean overlords have no chance....
Hi there! I see you are taking an active interest in this thread and as a fellow former citizen of totalitarian state let me add this:
Do you remember the "fun" we had when those files were opened after 1989? When it turned out that people have been sent to camps because of a single "whistle-blower" ratting to the police? When we discovered that friends, colleagues, neighbors and even relatives were sending "annonimus" reports to the Secret Service? Wasn't that great!! Neighbor wants to fuck your wife - write a report, get you sent to Gulag, profit!! Colleague is too smart and you feel you deserve that promotion - write a report get him fired or locked away, profit!! You just hate the guy for whatever - write report, get him locked, profit!
Before the Social Media era, they collected data through opening regular mail, wiretapping the telephones but most importantly spying on people and instigating regular Joes to spy on other regular Joes. Today, I expect the same level of human nastiness - I expect that a secret database will encourage people to rat on others. I fully expect that westerns would not show greater spirit than we did and will gladly use the opportunity to remove inconvenient people. Not to mention just plain mistakes a-la Buttle - Tuttle (sp?)
My fellow Americans, for your own sake, do not go there!!
What do you mean? Make another account? Post as AC only? I though you cannot change your ID name and cannot delete your account. So...?
And BTW, I would appreciate a more civil tone. I am sure I can beat you on many subjects, where you would be the fucking idiot (don't look at my subscription number, some of us discovered /. after puberty)...Sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on - so many people are cold and unhelpful...
The help articles of /. are interesting and useful but they assume a certain level of prior knowledge which I do not have. Perhaps I should not be here as a lame standard PC user that actually hates programming (sorry, I find it extremely boring)? Yet, my karma suggests that I am appreciated enough ...
How difficult it is to have a very small /. space for noobies where such questions can be answered? Mixed economy? The Golden rule? Working in a team? Helping without charging fees? Be fucking nice to people for a change? Does this mean anything to anybody anymore??
If someone (you?) is still willing to further clarify (or mod me "off-topic") - you are welcome. And yes, I have combed through the help files quite a lot (no guarantee that something was missed, of course). And I tried writing to the admins.
Some of us are "blessed" with unique names. All my names are very rare; adding them together zooms in to one person over the whole planet - me.
I was very stupid to subscribe here with one of my real names. /. tricked me - I never expected that what I put as "real name" will be my ID on /. I am still grumpy about it....
But pimples and acne are a sign of very high testosterone levels. Something for the women to think about....
Genuinely unbiased (on this issue) foreigner (to US) here.
I also noticed the suspicious modding down. In my country this is normal (EU - east Europe). Everyone on public forums knows that there are paid people who promote political ideas and try to suppress the other views. Some of our newspapers introduced simplified modding options recently and they are all abused left right and center. I would be very surprised if such popular and yes, influential site as /. is not targeted by such people.
Last week I got for the first time 15 modpoints and I spent half of them trying to fix what looked like "mob-downmodding" in a couple of discussions. I hope you and I are wrong but I am not holding my breath.
Its either that or you use twice as much energy to reprocess waste into raw material then re-manufacture it (a process called recycling).
But if you recycle you don't need to extract and purify materials for a new one. Are you sure the energy cost of mining and refining is lower than recycling? I am not...and even if it is comparable better use the waste than mine finite resources...
People forget the three "R" and most importantly forget the order which indicates their profitability:
Reduce
Reuse
Recycle
Sure, recycling is the least effective but still better than manufacturing anew. And all this "planned obsolesce" we discus here works exactly against the most potent "R" - reduce!!
To add my anecdotal experience.
TV "Ruby" made in USSR (29 inch, color), weights 65 kilograms, worked for 30 years with minimal maintenance.
TV Orion 4:3 CRT 25 inch, bought early 90-ties, still operational.
16:9 CRT Samsung 31 inch, bought 2003, dies 2008
Panasonic plasma 42 inch, bought 2009 - still working
Kitchen appliances (oven, cooking plates, refrigerator, washing machine) - bought by my parents 6 years before I was born from USSR and Yugoslavia. All are still operational; I am pushing 40 years old!
Kitchen appliances bought in the west around 2002 - washing machine gone, oven gone, refrigerator still operational
PC's - power supplies and motherboards are exchanged with a rate 2:1 compare to other components. MP3 players - pretty tragic - 3 models for 8 years gone. GSM's - goddamn awful (many could barely run for the duration of the subscription - 2 years). Nokia, Simens, Sony Erickson (2 types) and HTC. The one model that worked and still works like a charm is the W810 Sony Erickson Walkman. And even there they planned the obsolesce with the incredibly flimsy (and proprietary) input connector for charging and communication with PC. It is quite difficult to charge it these days.
What a shame, what a criminal waste!!
Illegal immigrants? Boarding a plane in UK to immigrate to...?
You might be closer to the truth than you think. The shooting in the labor party youth camp and the time of the blasts (when few are around) - this seems to me like an internal political affair.
Until we meet the aliens, who either
- behave like us (virus) and kill us all as competition
or
- are clever to sustain working multi species relations that preserve all and they kill us because we are a plague and want to take all the fucking Universe for ourselves.
Sure there is the infinitesimal chance that we are the first species in space. I am not counting on that.
In fact I believe that Nature imposes a kind of cosmic censorship. You need long time and plenty of resources to colonize. Very likely you need to expand and use your solar system not only one planet. But to reach that point you inevitably must pass the test of sustainability. I also think that evolution is universal process which means that every technological species must have their wild period when power is used most unwise. This is what we have now - rampant destruction and waste and total refusal to take responsibility for our deeds. We took the power, but avoided the responsibility. We will pay for our lack of vision:)
It's the economy though, not some flaw in human nature or some original sin....
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"
He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"
He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"
Northern ConservativeBaptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.
And "tax dollars wasted" is something I think you seriously don't understand.
Sorry, it is you who does not understand!
It's simple. The logical extension of your position is that every activity is beneficial for society as long as money changes hands. Which is exactly what is going on in the world during at least the last 100 years. USA is the most startling example of this. In a country where everything is business, you have an incentive to have more of everything. Which is by far the most insane paradigm that exists in the world today.
USA spends the most money for health care, yet you are not (by far) the healthiest nation. You spend the most money to fight crime, yet you are number one in crime among the western world. You fight porn, yet you are the biggest producer and the biggest consumer of porn. The same for drugs. You are also, by far, the most wasteful society on Earth. And let's not even start talking about wars (where HUGE amounts of money change hands, so it is the MOST profitable activity of the US, no?).
There is so much wrong with this approach.
From pure economical considerations all this impoverishes YOU and the other taxpayers while insanely enriching the powerful few. Where is this money comes from? Oh, yhea print some more. What can go wrong?
How about human fulfillment and happiness? In a society where any problem is profitable, the drive is to have more problems of any kind and not to solve them. Again to recapitulate - crime, sickness, wars are more profitable , i.e. more money change hands than when peace, good health and low crime prevail. Just think of all this poor soldiers, generals, policeman, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, weapon manufacturers that will be starving if there were less problems....right?
And much, much worse, from logistical,resource management and ecological point of view this model is nothing less than suicidal for all of us.
Again , for another analogy - this paradigm beats you with one hand on the head (you pay for the beating - taxes) and with the other it sells you Aspirin (you pay A LOT for it too). And at every cycle of problem -"solution", problem -"solution" money changes hands and the top tier of society gets the lion's share (as can be easily proved by looking at your wealth distribution).
Meditate on this you should:)
What's wrong with you buddy? I tried to make sense of your post since this is the first time someone at /. uses the F-word on me but i couldn't....
Makes sense!
My knowledge of the peculiarities and loopholes of the legal system is a bit vague to say the least. Let's hope the judges will deliver high quality justice in this case!
Why everything has to be all about money, money, money?
Yhea, it is very insightful to point the obvious - that the installation cost money. "No free lunch" can always get you some mod points. Please, introduce a mod +1 (conforming and mindlessly parroting the existing paradigm)
But you know what - you are surrounded by people giving things for free. Read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
Some excerpts to sharpen your appetite:
----There are many examples of how a gift economy works in modern culture within a mixed economy, such as marriage, family, friendship, kinship, and social network structures.
-----Traditional scientific research can be thought of as an information gift economy. Scientists produce research papers and give them away through journals and conferences. Other scientists freely refer to such papers. All scientists can therefore benefit from the increased pool of knowledge. The original scientists receive no direct benefit from others building on their work, except an increase in their reputation. Failure to cite and give credit to original authors (thus depriving them of reputational effects) is considered improper behavior.[27]
-----In his essay "Homesteading the Noosphere", noted computer programmer Eric S. Raymond opined that open-source software developers have created "a 'gift culture' in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away".[29] Members of the Linux community often speak of their community as a gift economy.[30]
------Millions of articles are available on Wikipedia, a free on-line encyclopedia, and almost none of its innumerable authors and editors receive any direct material reward.[31][32]
I say, give the man custody over the rock for the duration of his life if it is his "lucky charm". Make sure that all hell rains on him if he tries to profit. Include proper clause in his will. Collect after his death. If he dies in a manner that makes the rock non-retrievable (say a boat sinks with him on board), write it off as an act of God and write an article in Nature that moon rocks are not so lucky after all...
Here's Cliipyyyyy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CMmwVRAtaI
Let's go for the whole hog! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_of_the_Dune_universe#Stillsuit
I don't know about shows, but the last Planet Earth DVDs were dirt cheap considering how much time, money and effort it took them to make it. I won't be surprised if they did not recover the investment on this one.
I meet with slight hostility every request to lend them for the purpose of copying, even to close friends. Everyone I know can afford the price for this masterpiece. The day I got them from UK Amazon I convinced 3 colleagues to order on the spot.
And that is exactly the crux of the matter. If you want a career go to the US. If you want education go to Europe (both statements are exaggerated, there are exceptions on both sides).
Telekon says: "Because you'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes ;-)"
No, no, no! That would be the marketing division of Apple/M$oft/Google/...sorry, I mean the Sirius Cybernetics corp.!
OK, it is time for reckoning. Does anyone believe anymore that money loss is the prime drive of the media distributors? I don't. It is impossible that all of them are fools and do not see that they can only loose.
So, what is the deal? What do they want?
I don't know but my speculation is that it is about control of the internet. They just got a good deal with governments. Our Overlords use false, unprovable claim of money loss, the distributors play along. G'ment installs total control banging the drum (reinforced by the terrorist threat and protection of the kids) . After the scam is executed the scammers give each other favors.
Can anybody think of other possibilities (again I say they can't be all idiots)?
I am really tired of this reasoning. Some facts:
- License fees on cigarettes in the country where I live - 80%. Means every day 4 euro for the treasury from me.
- In my company (approx. 200 people) the smokers use slightly LESS sick days per year compared to non-smokers.
- I will work until 67 - that's what the state wants
- According to my family history and the gleeful predictions of non-smokers I will die before age of 65
- If I get lung cancer "the treatment" that I want consists of 10 euro euthanasia pill if I do it legally and a bit more for nitrogen bottle and a mask if I do it "illegally". Or I can blow all my money for morphine first and then pull the plug.
I am a model citizen from every conceivable point of view - work all life (while paying racket to he government - funny how the most outrageous taxes and fines are for things which are either absolutely necessary like gasoline - addicted to oil, eh? - or biochemically addictive , like alcohol and tobacco) , drop dead without drawing pension.