"The only way it'll go anywhere is if some funeral home directors manage to guilt and manipulate grieving relations into buying the damn things."
That's the plan. First we get the egomaniacs, the we get the 'early adopters' then we get the middle class housewives.
By that time, we shouldn't want to enter a cemetary without a set of blinders and some ear-plugs.
What a scene that would have made in
on
Video Tombstones
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· Score: 1
Minority Report.
I can just picture a picture where all those 'retinal' recognizers pump targeted ads at you. But it would instead take place in a cemetary and it would consist of dead people tryng to sell you shit.
"You know [name here] when I was alive, I could realy have used [product here]. Well, its not to late for you."
After an hour of walking around, I can pretty much narrow this to [brank of scotch here].
I want to be encased nude in a block of lucite.
on
Video Tombstones
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· Score: 1
Just to bug the "bourgeois". I intend to serve as an anatomy lesson for all the kiddies' for years while their stuck-up prudish mothers shield their eyes and walk quickly.
Hopefully, it'll be years before I start to decompose. I want an X-Rated grave after a big Baccanalean orgy as a send off.
Hell. Name a venereal disease after me.:-)
Thanks. It just hit me and I started
on
Video Tombstones
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· Score: 1
laughing out loud. I'm sure the other cubicle farm denizens are convinced I'm crazy.
I can't even think about it without breaking into a 'coughing fit.' Everybody here must think I've got emphasima or some 'orible wheezing didease.
document on the Company comptroller's desk and since I can read upside down, I looked up at him and announced that I was quitting, effective immediately.
It was an announcement that we were to be saddled with a new head of IT who was getting the job because he sold us a bill of goods, had gotten us into a mess in the first place, (I knew he was the nephew of some muckity-muck at [censored]) and that he was starting on Monday.
I left that afternoon, with a letter of recommendation, (I was friends with the head of HR, only back then it was called payroll,) found a job that afternoon, and never looked back.
He didn't want the job and upon arriving he fired everybody, from the chief analyst who was a pleasant enough co-worker, to the data entry clerks.
I was already working for somebody else but all of the other employees weren't so lucky.
Sometimes the boss is a 'bungie cord' boss who gets parachuted in on you and when neither him nor you want him there, the results are just awful.
He was an idiot, an arrogant prick, a blow-hard, a bad manager, an incompetent and he was 'forced' into the job because he'd bankruped his own company so he had nothing better and the Corporate big-wig who'd made the mistake of buying his crap in the first place just couldn't admit it.
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind " by Julian Jaynes, until 50 thousand years ago, we were selfish little animals and then things started to s-l-o-w-l-y change.
If you were to meet somebody from 500 years ago, they would strike you as having a very odd, inconsistant basis for their beliefs and you'd have a very hard time not being repelled by them.
Jaynes wrote that our not so distant ancestors were ALL psychopaths. (He argues that early Greeks, Roman, Norse and most civilizations were all run by psychopaths.)
Is it any wonder that many people are still showing the lack of empathy required to be a socially well adjusted person?
If you have socio-psychopaths at the top, they infect the entire culture. The only people who will be attracted to work for socio-psychopaths are themselves socio-psychopaths.
The rest of the employees end up quitting, one at a time while the socip-psychopaths subordinates behave in reprehensible ways to 'achieve' goals that were deemed 'good' by the top management.
I was writing their names and then I thought better of it. Some of them were outright criminals. Some were merely 'ego puff balls' or incompetent unqualified 'artistes' playing in a hard engineering role.
I would have been the last one to leave...
But your 'Mauricio Roman' would have been broke, divorced and in jail.
I've become wylier, a lot more effective and a lot more vindictive over the years, working for PHBs and other lower forms of life. I never get mad but I do get even... eventually... once I'm clear of any fallout caused by the legal and/or justice system.
tell you that it really doesn't matter to the strip whether I read it on paper or online.
It matters to me, sometimes I also like to read the sunday New York Times and get a 'sunlit moment of "Pottery Barn"/"Martha Stewart" suburban living', but it matters not to the strip.
Sometimes I reread a strip in two differing light environments because I am curious as to the effect that has on my appreaciation. When I read "Maus" the second time, I made it a point to sit on the throne in a 'dimmed' bathroom. It was even more depressing. The first time was on those 'Martha Stewart Living' brightly lit days.
Much of what I read comes from the web and exclusively because the artists couldn't get space on a dead tree to put up a "Wanted" poster.
In some cases, I can see the wisdom of that, the 'artsts' have nothing to say and can't draw worth a dan. But in other cases, it just that the 'product' just doesn't fit into existing marketing categories.
ever since I learned that the funny dull gray squiggles represented sounds.
I was reading "Tintin" "Spirou" "Modeste & PonPon" both the books and the magazine form. The European "Bande Illustre" has always been much more than the English saturday morning "comix for the kids". (Though the first strip was "Mutt & Jeff" and that was basically 'coded' race results. How far from never-never-land can you get.)
Then I discovered English. Marvel and DC comics weer a staple but I missed the sheer breadth of subjects in European comics (so I read them too.)
I think that the Web's biggest contribution to the graphic style of writing is the sheer number of artists that can be presented.
Its not like Marvel and DC comics which have a given standard and a given 'Stan Lee' art style and everything you draw has to be at that level.
With web comics, you find a huge variety of art styles (and they artist is free to experiment and change incrementally or drastically) subjects and 'media' going from scanned 'flat art' to animation to full 3D rendering (though I have yet to find a fully rendered strip that can carry the day. You meed to have a story that demands to be fully rendered.)
Yes there is a lot of jejeune crap out there but there is a lot more stuff that is actually very good and would not be reachable otherwise because it doesn't fit some publisher's pre-existing formulaic mould.
As much as they would like very much to have a stable OS (OS X, Linux, BSD. any stable OS, dag nabbit,) they have developped software on their own for their own purposes (Microsoft doesn't make everything, ya kno',) and their budgets don't allow for the kinds of redeployment costs associated with a new OS or even a new version of an old OS. (The roll out costs to Microsoft's clients dwarfs the cost of the OS. If only it wasn't a POS.)
I was working at a client's who were heart-broken when WinNT got end-of-lifes. They had to gear up for deployment of 20 or 30 THOUSAND systems to Win2K...
And poor ol' Microsoft can't upgrade the APIs like they need to because of clients like mine. (Which is why also Linux is having a hard time getting in. It has to WORK from the 'get go.')
Fuck the GUI, its the API that are the hold up.
And as long as Windows can't change the APIs they don't have the lattitude to change the OS so stupid shit like this worm can't happen.
If Linux can deliver APIs that are the same as Windows, its got it made. Until then, its out in the cold.
over my bed with a pillow in its hands, ready to smother me in my sleep if it decides that it doesn't like the way I snore.
As for calling Bush a Libertarian president. You must be on drugs.
He's taken all the liberties, but you don't have a lick more than you did when he took office. In fact you have a lot less. They've passed the Patriot and Patriot II acts and buried a whole lot of shit in other bills.
They have been anti-technology since the invertion of the piano roll. They have fought, and lost, their Luddite crusade against every technological advance.
They are caught between their desire for an infinite source of revenue, limited by the number of hours in a day times the number of ears out there, and their need/desire for us NOT TO LISTEN and therefore forget what we just heard.
But music is a communal activity. Its not just consumption of crap in an elevator. It is played by somebody and listened to by somebody else.
They're pissed that my memory of a performance is enhanced by technological means. They don't give a crap about what that performance is of. They only know that when I listen to my music* they're not getting paid.
The CD was okay as long as they were in control of the means of production, and able to charge what ever they thought the market would bear, but now that I can media-shift digital recordings, I don't need them AT ALL.
The **AAs are running scared and scared people with weapons are the worst in almost any situation.
iTunes is a sea change because the cost of distribution, which the RIAA always controlled, are virtually nil.
I record my music to DVDs anyway. CDs are too SMALL for my collection. (CD ~650MBytes, DVD ~4.5GByte. I've got over 800 DCs and 400 vynil albums. Guess what I'm backing up my computer to? Right...)
*) Note why MS and Real and any other subscription service is doomed to a smaller market share. Its MY music. I bought the recording becuse I wanted it to become MY music. I don't like to spend my money listening to their music (like I have to in an elevator.)
And, because WE go and look, Googling for products when we need them, the sites we find are garanteed a sale.
This gets into media studies but I believe that the future of broad casting is NO future.
What I suspect will happen is that we will have specialized content aggregators that we look at, like we used to look at car magazines for cars and audio magazines for audio components.
But instead of magazines which were mostly waste, we will be able to focus in on what we want, a couple of sites, possibly a podcast or two, backed up by some blogs.
Then we'll be in a position to buy.
Problem with that 'trend' is that its going to put a lot of people 'on the slag heap' of history.
They didn't need to implant anything. (Biometrics gone bad.)
You could try staring into a high powered laser with both eyes, one after another, but that's an extreme solution. (And even at that, they could read you regardless. You'd have to be deaf to ignore the ads.)
Slashdot Mirror
You might be the first person to discover an Alien life form.
Of course, your award would be post-humous.
What a fucking utopian moron.
If I was you, I'd pick out a three wide by six long by six deep right now.
You retire at sixty five, your money runs out by seventy or seventy five.
Who'd want to pay for your ass now, never mind at 175.
"The only way it'll go anywhere is if some funeral home directors manage to guilt and manipulate grieving relations into buying the damn things."
That's the plan. First we get the egomaniacs, the we get the 'early adopters' then we get the middle class housewives.
By that time, we shouldn't want to enter a cemetary without a set of blinders and some ear-plugs.
Minority Report.
I can just picture a picture where all those 'retinal' recognizers pump targeted ads at you. But it would instead take place in a cemetary and it would consist of dead people tryng to sell you shit.
"You know [name here] when I was alive, I could realy have used [product here]. Well, its not to late for you."
After an hour of walking around, I can pretty much narrow this to [brank of scotch here].
Just to bug the "bourgeois". I intend to serve as an anatomy lesson for all the kiddies' for years while their stuck-up prudish mothers shield their eyes and walk quickly.
:-)
Hopefully, it'll be years before I start to decompose. I want an X-Rated grave after a big Baccanalean orgy as a send off.
Hell. Name a venereal disease after me.
laughing out loud. I'm sure the other cubicle farm denizens are convinced I'm crazy.
I can't even think about it without breaking into a 'coughing fit.' Everybody here must think I've got emphasima or some 'orible wheezing didease.
document on the Company comptroller's desk and since I can read upside down, I looked up at him and announced that I was quitting, effective immediately.
It was an announcement that we were to be saddled with a new head of IT who was getting the job because he sold us a bill of goods, had gotten us into a mess in the first place, (I knew he was the nephew of some muckity-muck at [censored]) and that he was starting on Monday.
I left that afternoon, with a letter of recommendation, (I was friends with the head of HR, only back then it was called payroll,) found a job that afternoon, and never looked back.
He didn't want the job and upon arriving he fired everybody, from the chief analyst who was a pleasant enough co-worker, to the data entry clerks.
I was already working for somebody else but all of the other employees weren't so lucky.
Sometimes the boss is a 'bungie cord' boss who gets parachuted in on you and when neither him nor you want him there, the results are just awful.
He was an idiot, an arrogant prick, a blow-hard, a bad manager, an incompetent and he was 'forced' into the job because he'd bankruped his own company so he had nothing better and the Corporate big-wig who'd made the mistake of buying his crap in the first place just couldn't admit it.
"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind " by Julian Jaynes, until 50 thousand years ago, we were selfish little animals and then things started to s-l-o-w-l-y change.
If you were to meet somebody from 500 years ago, they would strike you as having a very odd, inconsistant basis for their beliefs and you'd have a very hard time not being repelled by them.
Jaynes wrote that our not so distant ancestors were ALL psychopaths. (He argues that early Greeks, Roman, Norse and most civilizations were all run by psychopaths.)
Is it any wonder that many people are still showing the lack of empathy required to be a socially well adjusted person?
Influence of the corporate culture.
If you have socio-psychopaths at the top, they infect the entire culture. The only people who will be attracted to work for socio-psychopaths are themselves socio-psychopaths.
The rest of the employees end up quitting, one at a time while the socip-psychopaths subordinates behave in reprehensible ways to 'achieve' goals that were deemed 'good' by the top management.
The World Bank is an example.
I was writing their names and then I thought better of it. Some of them were outright criminals. Some were merely 'ego puff balls' or incompetent unqualified 'artistes' playing in a hard engineering role.
... eventually... once I'm clear of any fallout caused by the legal and/or justice system.
I would have been the last one to leave...
But your 'Mauricio Roman' would have been broke, divorced and in jail.
I've become wylier, a lot more effective and a lot more vindictive over the years, working for PHBs and other lower forms of life. I never get mad but I do get even
tell you that it really doesn't matter to the strip whether I read it on paper or online.
It matters to me, sometimes I also like to read the sunday New York Times and get a 'sunlit moment of "Pottery Barn"/"Martha Stewart" suburban living', but it matters not to the strip.
Sometimes I reread a strip in two differing light environments because I am curious as to the effect that has on my appreaciation. When I read "Maus" the second time, I made it a point to sit on the throne in a 'dimmed' bathroom. It was even more depressing. The first time was on those 'Martha Stewart Living' brightly lit days.
Much of what I read comes from the web and exclusively because the artists couldn't get space on a dead tree to put up a "Wanted" poster.
In some cases, I can see the wisdom of that, the 'artsts' have nothing to say and can't draw worth a dan. But in other cases, it just that the 'product' just doesn't fit into existing marketing categories.
ever since I learned that the funny dull gray squiggles represented sounds.
I was reading "Tintin" "Spirou" "Modeste & PonPon" both the books and the magazine form. The European "Bande Illustre" has always been much more than the English saturday morning "comix for the kids". (Though the first strip was "Mutt & Jeff" and that was basically 'coded' race results. How far from never-never-land can you get.)
Then I discovered English. Marvel and DC comics weer a staple but I missed the sheer breadth of subjects in European comics (so I read them too.)
I think that the Web's biggest contribution to the graphic style of writing is the sheer number of artists that can be presented.
Its not like Marvel and DC comics which have a given standard and a given 'Stan Lee' art style and everything you draw has to be at that level.
With web comics, you find a huge variety of art styles (and they artist is free to experiment and change incrementally or drastically) subjects and 'media' going from scanned 'flat art' to animation to full 3D rendering (though I have yet to find a fully rendered strip that can carry the day. You meed to have a story that demands to be fully rendered.)
Yes there is a lot of jejeune crap out there but there is a lot more stuff that is actually very good and would not be reachable otherwise because it doesn't fit some publisher's pre-existing formulaic mould.
I worry about you...
who hasn't looked at the price in years and who thinks his time is worth nothing.
you know why they go with old tech.
:-)
It not just that they'e cheap bastards (though they probably are.) Its the APIs.
If you can get Linux systems that can implement those same APIs, they're in. Microsoft isn't everybody's darlin' by a long shot.
And I'm sure the Chief of the Boat who got stopped dead in the water by the divide by zero error in WinNT would disagree with your last statement.
and the like are all in a hard place.
As much as they would like very much to have a stable OS (OS X, Linux, BSD. any stable OS, dag nabbit,) they have developped software on their own for their own purposes (Microsoft doesn't make everything, ya kno',) and their budgets don't allow for the kinds of redeployment costs associated with a new OS or even a new version of an old OS. (The roll out costs to Microsoft's clients dwarfs the cost of the OS. If only it wasn't a POS.)
I was working at a client's who were heart-broken when WinNT got end-of-lifes. They had to gear up for deployment of 20 or 30 THOUSAND systems to Win2K...
And poor ol' Microsoft can't upgrade the APIs like they need to because of clients like mine. (Which is why also Linux is having a hard time getting in. It has to WORK from the 'get go.')
Fuck the GUI, its the API that are the hold up.
And as long as Windows can't change the APIs they don't have the lattitude to change the OS so stupid shit like this worm can't happen.
If Linux can deliver APIs that are the same as Windows, its got it made. Until then, its out in the cold.
over my bed with a pillow in its hands, ready to smother me in my sleep if it decides that it doesn't like the way I snore.
As for calling Bush a Libertarian president. You must be on drugs.
He's taken all the liberties, but you don't have a lick more than you did when he took office. In fact you have a lot less. They've passed the Patriot and Patriot II acts and buried a whole lot of shit in other bills.
The way of the future is exremely dark...
You're assuming that IPv6 enabled devices aren't able to broadcast their IP addresses.
And you'd better be walking by yourself and making like you're talking into a cell phone.
How long 'till we can't turn off the cell phone?
They have been anti-technology since the invertion of the piano roll. They have fought, and lost, their Luddite crusade against every technological advance.
They are caught between their desire for an infinite source of revenue, limited by the number of hours in a day times the number of ears out there, and their need/desire for us NOT TO LISTEN and therefore forget what we just heard.
But music is a communal activity. Its not just consumption of crap in an elevator. It is played by somebody and listened to by somebody else.
They're pissed that my memory of a performance is enhanced by technological means. They don't give a crap about what that performance is of. They only know that when I listen to my music* they're not getting paid.
The CD was okay as long as they were in control of the means of production, and able to charge what ever they thought the market would bear, but now that I can media-shift digital recordings, I don't need them AT ALL.
The **AAs are running scared and scared people with weapons are the worst in almost any situation.
iTunes is a sea change because the cost of distribution, which the RIAA always controlled, are virtually nil.
I record my music to DVDs anyway. CDs are too SMALL for my collection. (CD ~650MBytes, DVD ~4.5GByte. I've got over 800 DCs and 400 vynil albums. Guess what I'm backing up my computer to? Right...)
*) Note why MS and Real and any other subscription service is doomed to a smaller market share. Its MY music. I bought the recording becuse I wanted it to become MY music. I don't like to spend my money listening to their music (like I have to in an elevator.)
And, because WE go and look, Googling for products when we need them, the sites we find are garanteed a sale.
This gets into media studies but I believe that the future of broad casting is NO future.
What I suspect will happen is that we will have specialized content aggregators that we look at, like we used to look at car magazines for cars and audio magazines for audio components.
But instead of magazines which were mostly waste, we will be able to focus in on what we want, a couple of sites, possibly a podcast or two, backed up by some blogs.
Then we'll be in a position to buy.
Problem with that 'trend' is that its going to put a lot of people 'on the slag heap' of history.
A study of the buggy-whip makers is in order.
They didn't need to implant anything. (Biometrics gone bad.)
You could try staring into a high powered laser with both eyes, one after another, but that's an extreme solution. (And even at that, they could read you regardless. You'd have to be deaf to ignore the ads.)
I mean really... As to what they saw while the were surfing... What business is it of mine? I DON'T CARE OR EVEN WANT TO KNOW!
This is 'political correctness' taken to a ridiculous, extreme conclusion.
That page has the most self-serving rewriting pack of lies I have ever seen.
My entire CS course pre-dates the micro-computer and every language, from Fortran to Lisp predates Microsoft founders by YEARS!
What a bunch of lying bunch of sons of bitches.
"Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2005 and provide the ability to edit posts?"
/.
That would make it a wiki. Not