Seriously dude, do you think doctors are the kind of people who give a shit about somebody's hands? Amputees are lucky to get the hooks. (But you shouldn't wonder about the "incredibly lifelike dildos" and the "Fleshlight"!)
Great! I can just imagine a new PsyOps tactic in Afghanistan.
Spraying the aroma of slowly simmering meat all over a suspected Al Queda camp. Cover a whole mountainside or carpet (bomb) an entire valley with the sweet smell of roasting meat.
Instead of “Daisy Cutter” munitions, spread dissension among the opposing side by starving them out (or requiring them to get much better mobile kitchens to run their recruiting.)
That’ll drive the enemy mad trying to figure out where the ovens are.
and disproportionately HUGE and involve crucifixion as to render all such judgments unenforceable. (Except under Sharia law. Those fuckers make up a charge and a punishment that bear no relation to reality...)
Get an obviously worse judgment than Bernie Madoff.
I say lets sentence to immediate death and lets sentence her children to indentured servitude for 150 years. (Clearly unconstitutional!)
In 2020 its going to be "3D TV is using up all of our capacity" and they STILL won't have used up everything that's buried NOW.
The problem is that we're forcing them to upgrade their processing equipment to handle the extra load THIRTY years before its past obsolete (and there's not a whole lot to break on a Switch.)
The accountants at NyNex (remember NyNex, before they merger with GE Telecommunications and became Verizon,) had figured that the equipment that they were buying in 1995 was going to be amortized over 10 years, that's 2005, (it was bought and paid for from the profits on ADSL [and you can kiss the money we paid in for decades for "infrastructure improvement" goodbye.])
Unfortunately, the switching equipment is not going to be enough to last until 2025. They'll have to upgrade ahead of schedule.
That is how, and why, ISP transfer money across fiber ownership barriers.
ISP1 (say Comcast) charges ISP2 (say Cox) for every MB of data they have to carry for a customer of ISP2 requesting it.
It gets hairy when it is propagated across the entire network (bottlenecks represent lost revenue for some and windfall profits for some others) and then if ISP2 is also serving up data for a customer of ISP1.
The accounting rules are very simple.
Keeping track of every single packet that shuffled between source and destination is a logistical nightmare, but doable and done every second of everyday of every billing cycle.
You'd be written in and out of the "history" books.
Zinoviev died, and was written out.
Trotski was murdered in Mexico, and was written out.
Hundreds and thousands were written out of existence, their tombstones chiseled clean.
That was one of the points in 1984.
Control the books and you control the history of a people. Winston Smith job was working as a "redactor", part of the problem, even as he sought, and failed, to find a solution.
People who could recite the history of the lottery numbers chosen at what date could be counted on not to remember that a partner one day was an enemy the next, basically Stalin's form of control, a paranoid/schizophrenic view of humanity where the "others" are all pawns to be played and discarded.(Saddam Hussein was a Stalinist in more ways that one.)
The Gulags were filled with them, and ultimately the cemeteries were filled with imaginary adversaries, by the venial the opportunistic; the survivors who felt less shame at their survival than they felt for their victims.
Tell them that you remember the [ad] because it was the shortest and didn't bore you like all the other ones for whatever-the-heck they were advertising.
Do that a few times and you'll be subjected to endless repetitions of [ad].
Hulu did that for a while when they were starting up.
Now they claim that when you "click on yes or no" they're going to use your feedback to make the ads more "relevant" to you.
I call BS on that crap. If they were paying any attention to me at all, I'd tell them and make the ads more "relevant" to myself. (Like "Don't waste your client's money if he's a poof processor cause I can't digest any of it.") A pass/fail about an ad is a waste of time downstream when some ad agency peon tries to make any sense of this "feedback."
I no longer care. I just mute the fuckers, pause the ad if I want to go for a crap, and ignore it.
Just don't load up too many ads or I'll turn you off, just like I threw away my TV set, years before the digital switch-over.
to get publicly humiliated by the TSA. That would be AWESOME slave training and public humiliation. (Its for reals peeps.)
I'm just waiting for the first internet porno shot at a TSA line to come out (complete with moaning, groaning, [Sleepless In Seattle style,] and "shamefaced with embarrassment" done for FREE courtesy of the airlines and the TSA. It can even be shot in 720P video for nothing with a Flip HD video cam. WOW. What has the TSA wrought?)
If I should ever fly again, I'm personally going to go through making as much loud moaning, crying, histrionics and really weird whimpers as I can manage (trying not to burst out laughing right in the video camera.)
Luckily, for the TSA's officers, I'm planning to take the train.
They SAY they're open but most people don't give a crap.
The point that those companies have set themselves up so that they don't have to compete against each other but can instead all "rise with the tide."
None of the software I wrote since 1976 has ever escaped the clutches of the companies I developed it for.
Most of the software I wrote actually deserved it. (I am unashamedly blowing my own horn but I was damn good. That's why some of it survives even now. [That, and the fact that payroll software needs "legal" status , AKA expensive and time consuming blessing by hordes of corporate lawyers. {Some of that shit may be around until they stop mainframe emulation.:-}]]
The push to the internet was over ("I've got email, right?") but the web got started in 1995 while Gates was the hands-on leader of Microsoft.
Gates got Microsoft turned around from a "navel gazing" OS and software development/stealing/buying/killing company(1) into a web facing company "on a dime!"
He saw the threat of his OS and Office apps marginalization because he'd been doing the same kind of shit to his "competition" since 1986.
In comparison Balmer is the janitor who's in charge of turning out the lights after everyone's gone home after calling it a day.
Balmer was the schmuck who decided to break antitrust laws and murder Netscape while calling it "lively proof of the viability of the software industry" and forcing them into a war of attrition on the browser and the server.
Netscape couldn't out last Microsoft's deeper cash reserves.
IIS went through revision after revision until IIS was almost as usable as Apache.
Explorer went through revision after revision until Netscape was dead, starved for funds while the antitrust trial was happening.
Then Microsoft stopped development on the web browser front dead, where it has pretty much stayed since. (That's a long time, ever in pre-internet years.)
HTML 5.x is definitely NOT a Microsoft initiative.
Gates no longer cares about the game.
He's won and he wants to get off the field because the stink of the corpses of everybody who ever got in the way, from Digital Research to QuarterDesk to...
Unless you a poor African who's dying of something ugly, he don't wanna know about you.
1) The transcripts from the antitrust trials are available on the Web.
Businesses, hardware buyers A.K.A. Microsoft's installed customer base, only make software changes when absolutely FORCED to.
I was working at a financial services firm which still had O/S2 boxes handling their fax communications YEARS after IBM has stopped selling O/S2. Its called "If it ain't #$^ing broke, don't #$^ing fix it!" As long as the hardware/software could handle (send/receive/OCR faxes, it was going to stay inviolate. For all I know, the machines are still there, chugging away...
Windows buyers, mostly businesses, don't upgrade because upgrades hurt them in the pocket book. They LIKE not having to spend money. They LIKE having equipment going well past its amortization date. (Otherwise, NO building in New York City would be older than 30 years. Goodbye most of the skyline.)
Since home Windows boxes are always on the verge of chaotic collapse, and are bought by people whith the same motivation as the businesses that employ them, and seeing all of the problems IT has keeping Windows boxes running, its a rare person with enough guts to do an upgrade. (Oh, that driver no longer works. #$@&!!)
OS X buyers, mostly consumers (what my SysAdmin friend calls LUSERS,) upgrade and gladly pay for the pleasure. I have bought OS X 10.1 to 10.6 and I've mostly enjoyed the experience. (I finished my career in management after years in object-oriented financial software development.)
Linux users (see comment above,) are die hard dependency chasers.:-)
Hardware can come from anywhere, specially the consumer devices which are extremely price sensitive, but you can't/don't want to/ export consumer data.
Would you store all those credit card numbers and transaction records on foreign soil?
Would you store all of those apps, tunes, movies etc. on foreign soil?
Now imagine you live on foreign soil...
Look for Apple store roll-outs in other countries to be preceded by data warehouse expansion as Apple gets more and more involved with using the 'net for content distribution.
Apple will store statistical data for sales world-wide but will keep the financial and transaction data local to each jurisdiction.
Its a matter of accounting and accountability. You don't want to risk any merging or co-mingling of data.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously dude, do you think doctors are the kind of people who give a shit about somebody's hands? Amputees are lucky to get the hooks. (But you shouldn't wonder about the "incredibly lifelike dildos" and the "Fleshlight"!)
The "skin" on the robot can be virtually anything so...
How 'bout giving the "actress du jour" some extra publicity?
It could be colored (and multi-colored at that,) a nice Navii blue.
In fact, it could be giving war news from the war zone. "She done blowed up real good!"
Why use a human being at all?
We could get our financial news from "Goofy©(TM)®", describing the Wall street latest melt down that has just wiped out your life's savings.
How about "Donald Duck©(TM)®" giving us the political news from Washington? His quacking would make as much sense as the politi-pundits we're subjected to without having to be understandable.
We can get "Quick Draw McGraw©(TM)®" giving us the police report?
Tech news? Get "George Jetson©(TM)®" to act it out for us.
Who needs a robot when we can do it in CG?
They ban everyone for every reason unless and until they are given a reason why not.
The major difference between them (Wahabi) and the Taliban is that the Saud family have had money since the fifties.
I find the same mechanisms of oppressive paternalism are also occurring in North Korea, Burma(Myanmar) Indonesia,
Same (un)reasoning attitude.
Same appeal to the irrational.
Same hatred/fear of everything and everybody.
Great! I can just imagine a new PsyOps tactic in Afghanistan.
Spraying the aroma of slowly simmering meat all over a suspected Al Queda camp. Cover a whole mountainside or carpet (bomb) an entire valley with the sweet smell of roasting meat.
Instead of “Daisy Cutter” munitions, spread dissension among the opposing side by starving them out (or requiring them to get much better mobile kitchens to run their recruiting.)
That’ll drive the enemy mad trying to figure out where the ovens are.
and disproportionately HUGE and involve crucifixion as to render all such judgments unenforceable. (Except under Sharia law. Those fuckers make up a charge and a punishment that bear no relation to reality...)
Get an obviously worse judgment than Bernie Madoff.
I say lets sentence to immediate death and lets sentence her children to indentured servitude for 150 years. (Clearly unconstitutional!)
Needless to say, parole is not an option.
Its not Cerf's fault that we stuck with short sighted cretins for accountants (But I repeat myself.)
capacity already in the ground...
In 2020 its going to be "3D TV is using up all of our capacity" and they STILL won't have used up everything that's buried NOW.
The problem is that we're forcing them to upgrade their processing equipment to handle the extra load THIRTY years before its past obsolete (and there's not a whole lot to break on a Switch.)
The accountants at NyNex (remember NyNex, before they merger with GE Telecommunications and became Verizon,) had figured that the equipment that they were buying in 1995 was going to be amortized over 10 years, that's 2005, (it was bought and paid for from the profits on ADSL [and you can kiss the money we paid in for decades for "infrastructure improvement" goodbye.])
Unfortunately, the switching equipment is not going to be enough to last until 2025. They'll have to upgrade ahead of schedule.
I say fuck the accountants.
They've been screwing us since the 1980s.
That is how, and why, ISP transfer money across fiber ownership barriers.
ISP1 (say Comcast) charges ISP2 (say Cox) for every MB of data they have to carry for a customer of ISP2 requesting it.
It gets hairy when it is propagated across the entire network (bottlenecks represent lost revenue for some and windfall profits for some others) and then if ISP2 is also serving up data for a customer of ISP1.
The accounting rules are very simple.
Keeping track of every single packet that shuffled between source and destination is a logistical nightmare, but doable and done every second of everyday of every billing cycle.
You'd be written in and out of the "history" books.
Zinoviev died, and was written out.
Trotski was murdered in Mexico, and was written out.
Hundreds and thousands were written out of existence, their tombstones chiseled clean.
That was one of the points in 1984.
Control the books and you control the history of a people. Winston Smith job was working as a "redactor", part of the problem, even as he sought, and failed, to find a solution.
People who could recite the history of the lottery numbers chosen at what date could be counted on not to remember that a partner one day was an enemy the next, basically Stalin's form of control, a paranoid/schizophrenic view of humanity where the "others" are all pawns to be played and discarded.(Saddam Hussein was a Stalinist in more ways that one.)
The Gulags were filled with them, and ultimately the cemeteries were filled with imaginary adversaries, by the venial the opportunistic; the survivors who felt less shame at their survival than they felt for their victims.
Tell them that you remember the [ad] because it was the shortest and didn't bore you like all the other ones for whatever-the-heck they were advertising.
Do that a few times and you'll be subjected to endless repetitions of [ad].
Hulu did that for a while when they were starting up.
Now they claim that when you "click on yes or no" they're going to use your feedback to make the ads more "relevant" to you.
I call BS on that crap. If they were paying any attention to me at all, I'd tell them and make the ads more "relevant" to myself. (Like "Don't waste your client's money if he's a poof processor cause I can't digest any of it.") A pass/fail about an ad is a waste of time downstream when some ad agency peon tries to make any sense of this "feedback."
I no longer care. I just mute the fuckers, pause the ad if I want to go for a crap, and ignore it.
Just don't load up too many ads or I'll turn you off, just like I threw away my TV set, years before the digital switch-over.
Hold your nose and pull the lever.
Marketing surveys suffer from remarkably selective attention; sort of like asking "When did you stop beating your wife?" reveals a certain prejudice.
Instead of noticing that we loathe any and all of the ads, they are going to ask: "Which one did you enjoy the most?"
This assumes that we enjoyed any of the ads.
We don't, but that's not what they're measuring is it...
"If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I still have a Handspring Visor.
congress critterz.
No more running through a privileged line to get where ever.
That should take care of a lot of problems. Just make it THEIR problems too.
I can guarantee the TSA would be shot down before the next congress adjourns.
to get publicly humiliated by the TSA. That would be AWESOME slave training and public humiliation. (Its for reals peeps.)
I'm just waiting for the first internet porno shot at a TSA line to come out (complete with moaning, groaning, [Sleepless In Seattle style,] and "shamefaced with embarrassment" done for FREE courtesy of the airlines and the TSA. It can even be shot in 720P video for nothing with a Flip HD video cam. WOW. What has the TSA wrought?)
If I should ever fly again, I'm personally going to go through making as much loud moaning, crying, histrionics and really weird whimpers as I can manage (trying not to burst out laughing right in the video camera.)
Luckily, for the TSA's officers, I'm planning to take the train.
Its like the "No Agenda" [ http://www.noagendashow.com/ ] song: "Trains good, planes bad..."
Ass wads...
They SAY they're open but most people don't give a crap.
The point that those companies have set themselves up so that they don't have to compete against each other but can instead all "rise with the tide."
None of the software I wrote since 1976 has ever escaped the clutches of the companies I developed it for.
Most of the software I wrote actually deserved it. (I am unashamedly blowing my own horn but I was damn good. That's why some of it survives even now. [That, and the fact that payroll software needs "legal" status , AKA expensive and time consuming blessing by hordes of corporate lawyers. {Some of that shit may be around until they stop mainframe emulation. :-}]]
Payroll was boring but it paid the bills.
The push to the internet was over ("I've got email, right?") but the web got started in 1995 while Gates was the hands-on leader of Microsoft.
Gates got Microsoft turned around from a "navel gazing" OS and software development/stealing/buying/killing company(1) into a web facing company "on a dime!"
He saw the threat of his OS and Office apps marginalization because he'd been doing the same kind of shit to his "competition" since 1986.
In comparison Balmer is the janitor who's in charge of turning out the lights after everyone's gone home after calling it a day.
Balmer was the schmuck who decided to break antitrust laws and murder Netscape while calling it "lively proof of the viability of the software industry" and forcing them into a war of attrition on the browser and the server.
Netscape couldn't out last Microsoft's deeper cash reserves.
IIS went through revision after revision until IIS was almost as usable as Apache.
Explorer went through revision after revision until Netscape was dead, starved for funds while the antitrust trial was happening.
Then Microsoft stopped development on the web browser front dead, where it has pretty much stayed since. (That's a long time, ever in pre-internet years.)
HTML 5.x is definitely NOT a Microsoft initiative.
Gates no longer cares about the game.
He's won and he wants to get off the field because the stink of the corpses of everybody who ever got in the way, from Digital Research to QuarterDesk to ...
Unless you a poor African who's dying of something ugly, he don't wanna know about you.
1) The transcripts from the antitrust trials are available on the Web.
Puerto Rico. Madre de dios.
A good Québecois curse would take longer that a SIG to write.
"Hostie de tabarnacle de calice de maudit chien sale de batard de joual vert de Criss de ... Chu d'bonne humeur, maudit torieux."
Québecois love chaining one curse into the next. You get the idea. :-)
"Microsoft could exploit by becoming the first vendor to make peace with everyone."
Balmer's idea of making peace with everyone is called "a smokin' crater."
The man throws chairs and runs around like a demented ape yelling "Developers" over and over.
The playbook at Microsoft reads like "von Brauchitsch guide to Poland" or Sun Tsu' "Art of War"
Businesses, hardware buyers A.K.A. Microsoft's installed customer base, only make software changes when absolutely FORCED to.
I was working at a financial services firm which still had O/S2 boxes handling their fax communications YEARS after IBM has stopped selling O/S2. Its called "If it ain't #$^ing broke, don't #$^ing fix it!" As long as the hardware/software could handle (send/receive/OCR faxes, it was going to stay inviolate. For all I know, the machines are still there, chugging away...
Windows buyers, mostly businesses, don't upgrade because upgrades hurt them in the pocket book. They LIKE not having to spend money. They LIKE having equipment going well past its amortization date. (Otherwise, NO building in New York City would be older than 30 years. Goodbye most of the skyline.)
Since home Windows boxes are always on the verge of chaotic collapse, and are bought by people whith the same motivation as the businesses that employ them, and seeing all of the problems IT has keeping Windows boxes running, its a rare person with enough guts to do an upgrade. (Oh, that driver no longer works. #$@&!!)
OS X buyers, mostly consumers (what my SysAdmin friend calls LUSERS,) upgrade and gladly pay for the pleasure. I have bought OS X 10.1 to 10.6 and I've mostly enjoyed the experience. (I finished my career in management after years in object-oriented financial software development.)
Linux users (see comment above,) are die hard dependency chasers. :-)
Different strokes for different folks.
Ton vocabulaire te marque comme un Français où un Wallon. (J'ai étudié les jurons. :-)
There is a thing called a volume control.
In fact I have volume controls on my MacBook Pro AND on my speakers.
Wow, who'd have thought of it... Obviously, not you.
Hardware can come from anywhere, specially the consumer devices which are extremely price sensitive, but you can't/don't want to/ export consumer data.
Would you store all those credit card numbers and transaction records on foreign soil?
Would you store all of those apps, tunes, movies etc. on foreign soil?
Now imagine you live on foreign soil...
Look for Apple store roll-outs in other countries to be preceded by data warehouse expansion as Apple gets more and more involved with using the 'net for content distribution.
Apple will store statistical data for sales world-wide but will keep the financial and transaction data local to each jurisdiction.
Its a matter of accounting and accountability. You don't want to risk any merging or co-mingling of data.
The OP asked "Is there a square meter of the Earth's surface that hasn't been flown over and photographed in the last month?"
The answer is NO, by several sources, down to a resolution of less than 3 inches.
Just because you don't have access to it because you can't find better than KH-11 imagery doesn't mean that the imagery doesn't exist.
I have seen embarrassing photos of infamous people sunning themselves, from 490 miles away. :-)