5.5% is something like half the profit margin for the small merchant I'm working for. Not only that, 2CO by and large does not work with Central American banks (or many other countries). Most of the world is not in either the US or the UK. Shocking, I know. If you can tell me a real alternative to PayPal here in Costa Rica, I will implement it tomorrow.
There's a lot of fine print on the 2CO site, btw, 5.5% is more like a minimum fee.
Why yes, I did type that with my tongue. How did you know?
I prefer concision and precision in writing, but time rarely permits me to really polish a slashdot post. Whereas you obviously stayed up all night writing that one.:P
There is no such thing as a good form of patriotism, unless it is dissent. The US has plundered the world to enrich an astonishingly small minority, and you're saying it's okay because a dollar or two fell into the science bucket along the way? Our contributions fo human suffering dwarf our contributions to knowledge. Patriotism is evil, just one more way to deny our common humanity and place ourselves above others.
Allow me to quote:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
America has nothing to be proud of. We are tyrants, criminals, and murderers all, not to mention the way we've polluted the earth so that our children's children will curse our names. Altruistic patriotism? The third world thanks you for your most benign munificence. It's a thin shroud to drag over two centuries of violent imperialism; you delude none but yourself, and display only conceit. You have allowed yourself to fall into comfortable ignorance, an ignorance of the world outside your borders, an ignorance not only free from want or suffering but free from their conception. The world entire is brimming with pain, and has no use for armchair altruism or fools who rest on the laurels of others and naively hope for change. They sow the wind, that shall yet reap the whirlwind.
All right, I'll bite. I'm curious. What exactly is it that Microsoft Office gets done? Besides lock your data into a proprietary format. I don't use it myself, so I'm sure there's *some* use for it that I'm not aware of, but here's some of the technologies I use instead.
I only use a word processor to generate blog posts, fiction, and documents where I don't care about layout too strongly, since it's sort of inherent in a word processor that they will adjust the layout somewhat before e.g. printing it. There's very little reason to save in either.docx or.doc as far as I am aware, since the former does not currently conform to the OOXML format and the latter is more akin to a memory dump of Word.
For text that I really don't care about, I use a text editor. I also use this for small notes to myself, or simple lists. I don't need my notes indexed, thank you, grep will do just fine.
For layout documents, I generally use Scribus, InDesign, Inkscape, or Illustrator, and save in svg or pdf, dependent on whether or not I want a working format or a presentation format. If I can count on being the only one to edit it, or that any collaborators will be using the same software, it makes sense to use each program's native format. For bitmaps I use GIMP and Photoshop, and generally prefer GIMP, except for the name and the text-related tools. It runs on more systems that I use, and takes far less time to download and install, and similarly uses a fraction of the disk space. I usually have the most recent version of Adobe's software on a disk.
For my own personal artwork I have found a nice balance of features in the painting program MyPaint, which runs on Linux and Windows.
I do not generate 3D images or models, or animation, or music. Neither, as far as I'm aware, does Office.
I create web pages with Netbeans or Bluefish, or a text editor. If I did not know how to write markup I suppose I might have more use for Word. Similarly, for storing and retrieving and processing data I use a database and a scripting language, or XML if I don't need a full-on database. For keeping track of financial data, an accounting program or package is useful for even small projects, and vital for any business-related endeavor.
I've used web-based email since hotmail became available. I have no idea what, given all of the above, Outlook would be useful to me for. It seems like an adequate if bloated email application, though I've never enjoyed trying to move data out of it.
That's my current toolset. I'm not particularly attached to any of them, and obviously quite used to using both the tools at hand and, when I have the luxury, the best tool for the job. Office has not to date been in the latter category in my experience. Why is Office a good tool? At what task does it uniquely excel at? What combination of features am I missing out on?
It became popular, which widened the bell curve and probably lowered the average IQ (not by a lot, let's not flatter ourselves unnecessarily). We have a couple of capital-T Trolls here, APK and MichaelKristopeit, and it's always been unclear what the role of the editor is supposed to be since they don't appear to do shit. The GNAA contingent seems to have died down. Neither of us are submitting articles, it seems, and likely not participating in the firehose (there being no real incentive to do so).
Seems like business as usual to me. A change in management couldn't hurt: you know, maybe someone interested in promoting the site, improving the quality, and completely redesigning the site to support unicode and generate valid html.
More on topic, turbulence is indeed the right answer to this "problem". Thanks for posting, +1 Informative.
You are incorrect, if you explicitly state "I am invoking my fifth amendment right to refuse to incriminate myself" you will be asked no further questions. With Berguis v. Thompkins the USSC ruled that continued silence was not indicative of a refusal to answer incriminating questions. Police officers find that if they go at it for long enough you'll confess, which is why we have Miranda rights/the Fifth Amendment to begin with. We need a more populist Supreme Court, let's start with getting rid of FPTP voting and let the change bubble upwards.
Man, do you ever have a big Point. You're so right, baby, I'm in awe of your sexy brain. Stroke that Point for me, oh yeah, do it!
I realize it's important to your ego to get the last word in here, thereby 'winning' the 'argument'. It's nice that you can put yourself up as Defender of the Concept of Libraries, too, slapping me in the face with your big tangential Point. Since you don't have the self awareness to be embarrassed about doing this, let's add some negative feedback to this loop.
Furthermore, if you live in an area that isn't developed enough for libraries or bookstores then you don't need to worry about any of this in the first place and have more important issues to deal with, like finding food to eat and shelter.
I just love reading this line. No, go on, tell me about how a lack of libraries implies a lack of food or shelter. You can eat books? I've slept in a library before, maybe that counts. Such a gem. Don't worry, we'll come back to it.
People used libraries... for countless generations...
You tell 'em, grandpa. People used horses for countless generations too. If that analogy wasn't clear, get better contacts. Wait, I mean LASIK. Wait, I mean bifocals. If they were good enough for Ben Franklin...
Just because most of us live in a digital age does not mean that libraries are some how magically no longer sources of information.
Now, what's funny about this is that it's purely a reading comprehension issue. Because the original thing that I said was that 'good sources of information are rare', which obviously doesn't apply to libraries, where everything that contains information is magically free from error or bias. But then I made it explicit that libraries contain media, and media contains information, trying to convey that (e.g.) good authors are rare, and you persist in excluding the middle. This is necessary to escape the fact that there are few benefits to physical media and many downsides. The biggest one being that books on shelves cannot be revised, which leads to libraries containing many volumes of obsolete information. Librarians certainly don't read all their volumes, so a good librarian is only marginally better than their cataloging system. The librarians I've most recently been hanging out with had a book-a-week club. They read The Kite Runner and Water for Elephants. Clearly they know better than the engineering student what book he needs.
Yes, as you put it, they be less 'convenient' beacuse you actually have to get off your ass and go out side for a change,
I'll tell you the funny part in a minute, but for the record, that was kind of my whole point about libraries.
but that does not negate their effectiveness if you actually go there.
Which is not to say that other factors are involved that might actually degrade the utility of libraries, such as obsolete texts. Now c'mon, let's hear something about how all these disrespectful youngsters are so much worse than back in your day.
( If others are so tied up with themselves and want instant gratification to the point that they cant plan head enough to even go to the library then your statement is a sad commentary on the current state of society if you ask me. "me me me me, now now now" )
awwww yeaaaaaah! woo! Ad hominem, non sequitur, non sequitur, ad hominem. It's like a grumpy old man's fail sandwich.
Oh, my favorite part is coming up again.
Furthermore, if you live in an area that isn't developed enough for libraries or bookstores then you don't need to worry about any of this in the first place and have more important issues to deal with, like finding food to eat and shelter.
It gets better every time.
So the place I'm from is Alaska, where we had a library but no bookstore, and the place I'm in now
I had to check Wikipedia, but my memory was indeed incorrect, I had thought the PS1 had come out afterwards. You offer an improved estimate of video game size, what does that include? emulators+roms? Neo Geo? Sega Saturn? Virtual Boy? ColecoVision, to pick a random second generation platform? I'm curious.
If my estimate was correct to an order of magnitude, that's all I was shooting for.
They have neither libraries nor property taxes in the part of the world that I am currently living. The former is indeed regrettable but I don't really have the time it takes to find books at a library in any case.
You seem to be living in an analog world. I presume you must have money enough to buy books and games with, and space to put all these things as well, and a settled habitation. A few tens of gigabytes of disk space is a much safer assumption, I think.
I'm too young to have heard of Avalon Hill or "1776", and too mobile for the rest: a digital nomad. For the last few months I've traded civilization and the luxury of superfluous property for warm Costa Rican beaches. There are days when I regret that choice, but not many.
Libraries and book stores are not sources of information. They are sources of books. Books are sources of information, and my statement holds. I don't know about you, but I have many more things to do than to visit a library every time I want to know something, and I lack both the funds as well as the storage space required to outfit an extended personal library. You also fail to consider that either I or the original questioner might not live in the parts of the world which are developed enough to have things like libraries or bookstores.
I hope this clears up any problems of comprehension that you have disguised as a patronizing rhetorical question.
The biggest challege I faced living without a home internet connection was a lack of reference materials. A text dump of wikipedia is a good start, but also grab anything you have a professional interest in, e.g. all the O'Reilly books. Also a good home repair guide, your car manual, outdoor survival guide, medical texts, home chemistry book, cookbooks, karma sutra, and if you can get a dump of instructables or about.com or wikihow, you're probably pretty good. A general selection of science, art, literature, and philosophy texts should also not go amiss. For fiction, take a dump of Project Gutenberg and/or some large ebook torrents. Calibre is software designed to manage ebooks, specifically in relation to ebook readers, which it excels at, but it is also an excellent way to catelogue a large quantity of ebooks.
If you're into games, the biggest N64 rom was 64 MB (Conker's Bad Fur Day, Resident Evil), so every game and game system manufactured before the introduction of the Playstation should only be in the tens of gigabytes.
It almost goes without saying that you should store information about your online contacts.
It's difficult to predict what information you'll need. Good sources of information are rare, it's wise to have a technical library with a high degree of redundancy, i.e. multiple books on the same subject, especially if it is a subject of high interest or importance (e.g. emergency medicine). Data redundancy isn't a bad idea either.
Neither option decreases response time significantly, especially when compared to talking to someone (irrespective of whether that person is on a cell or sitting next to the driver). Cannabinoids are a normal part of brain function. The LD50 of marijuana is not physically reachable. Vaporizers eliminate basically all adverse medical effects of marijuana.
Exact brain chemistry varies from individual to individual, but I've never 'tripped' on weed, and while it's not completely unheard of, it is not a common effect for the majority of people. Your experiences are not typical. I also question whether you've taken true hallucinogens, so as to have a basis for comparison.
Many people recognized the US housing and.com bubbles before they burst. When the gold price crashes, you can dig up this comment and apologies.
You're placing way too much faith in humanity's predictive power. We consistently overestimate it. Saying gold will crash is no more predictive, in fact, than saying it will snow in Phoenix. The when and the why are chaotic, and in the case of financial markets and other systems more complicated than snowflakes, fundamentally unknowable.
I have no idea other than naive delusion what would make you think that the actions of any individual human are predictable, let alone the collective actions of the species. I'm sorry if your financial ideas depend on humans being in any part rational actors.
An argument for Unpredictability in Markets Major premise: Chaotic systems (those which exhibit turbulent behavior) are unpredictable. This is mathematically true. Minor premise: Financial markets are chaotic systems. Benoit Mandelbrot is generally considered to have mathematically proven this. Conclusion: Financial markets are unpredictable.
If you want to argue with Mandelbrot, you should read his book.
A bubble describes the social phenomena of the price of something rising because people believing it will continue to rise based on recent experience.
A meaningless definition. Bubbles are defined in retrospect, i.e. the stock takes a nose dive, at which point you will construct a narrative that says it was supposed to happen.
Just like the weather you can predict where markets will probably be a few days from now, but there is no way to predict exactly where it will be five years from now.
I'm glad you understood the analogy. You don't seem to consider the conclusions though. Markets are less predictable than the weather; with weather systems all the inputs are known. Global Warming is an unpredictable emergent effect of random behavior. The analogous events in financial markets would be any market crash, and these unsurprisingly occur far more often than GW. Worse, with weather systems there are fundamental physical limits on their effects, there are no such fundamental limitations with financial systems. Further Reading Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb
The value of anything is purely subjective. Value is only defined in terms of social phenomena. There is no such thing as a 'bubble'. Bubbles are an attempt to rationalize events by fitting a narrative to them (see also all sports commentary).
Value is random and turbulent, as are all markets. Markets are fundamentally unpredictable in the same sense that the weather is. There are no 'safe' investments, at any time. There are no oracles, there is no God, there is no solution to the halting problem. We are all simply waiting for a Black Swan to kill us.
Quit school. Read Shakespeare on your own. Work as a programmer (you wanted to learn languages, right?) or a translator until you figure out what you *really* want to go to school for (theatre?).
You should also emigrate, there are better countries than Canada to be poor in.
Getting odd jobs and bare subsistence wages is not living the dream, it is preventing you from doing what you love. Money does not equal happiness, but you tell me that after the late shift at Starbucks.
You have a 'natural right' to be paid for your work? How interesting. One imagines this right must also be granted in perpetuity, or else it's not much of a natural right, is it? Is there any sort of bar to this, can I lift pencils and call it work and expect to be paid forever? I can write stories or music (and do) if you insist; maybe you can explain why it's just artists and writers that get on this gravy train. To be quite honest, it doesn't sound terribly like capitalism, but I'm sure we can get slashdot to rally around this idea--it applies to code, too? Or just natural language writing? Do androids have this natural right? Do marketing droids? Ad writers, if it's an especially good ad?
Maybe you'd be surprised as to what the rest of the world thinks of as a 'natural right'. As far as I know, in America and most other parts of the world, all you have is the right to try to get paid for your work. We'll even throw you a few bones, like a limited form of exclusivity on new things you make, and a regulatory and social environment that tries to (in theory) prevent existing business interests from crushing the new guys. At the moment, the rest of us feel that those bones have been enlarged overmuch.
Also, we created this high speed way to replicate information globally. Since the marginal cost of copying has become zero, trying to charge for individual copies of information (as if there's scarcity) has become a fool's game. Unless you make it prohibitively expensive in terms of either time and money, people will copy whatever they like. Despite the efforts of many motivated corporations, there is no technical means to ensure that content will not be pirated. To quote Schneier, "trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet." The best efforts have lasted only a few years, while copyright law extends for decades. The chances of any content remaining relevant for the duration of the copyright placed upon it are as close to zero as can be imagined, and the pace of change still appears to be accelerating.
If you don't like any of this, you are in the wrong profession. If you can't compete in this market, don't make excuses, find a different way to make money. Don't be too upset though; haven't you heard that almost no one can make a living as a writer? Just accept that that means you. By all means keep writing, of course; it's a skill like any other. Blogging might even make you more money: look at Doctorow and that Julie&Julia woman.
Godzilla and Fukushima: life imitates art? I like reading old soviet humor. Here's a few Chernobyl jokes; maybe in a few months they can be Fukushima jokes.
An old man and his grandson look at the river from the shore. "Grandpa, is this place called Chernobyl? Is it true here was once a nuclear plant?" "Yes, my boy," the grandfather said and patted the boy on the boy's head. "And did it explode one day?" "Yes, my boy," and the grandfather patted the boy's second head.
"Grandpa, look, there is ball rolling." "It's not a ball, it's a hedgehog from Chernobyl."
"Is it true, that you may eat meat from Chernobyl?" "You have to eat it. But the feces must be buried in concrete 5 ft deep in the earth."
"Grandpa, look at this light bulb! Its blue light is so pretty!" "It's not a bulb. It's a bottle of milk from Chernobyl."
"Grandpa, thank you very much for the gift, this pet snake." "It's not a snake, baby. It's a cat from Chernobyl."
Most ISPs find it simple to use DHCP, hence there are no user credentials (and no calls to Support about lost passwords). DSL is much more likely to both use PPPoE and provide dial-up access (PPP used to be mandatory for DSL), but it's always been a bit of a pain, so you'll also find cases where ISPs use PPPoE but let any username/password combination connect.
Other than simplicity, there are few reasons to use DHCP, but I seem to remember when I was in Verizon DSL Support Hell that most of the calls were password-related. There is a significant financial incentive not to use passwords.
You could call the 'kill switch' the final revocation of the first amendment. What form would the revolt take? We generally lack arms to march on Washington and overthrow the Senate, so probably we should heed Lessig's call and start participating in the Constitutional Convention. I favor many of the ideas in metagovernment, and I think with concerted effort they could be spread to the greater polity.
We have noted many flaws in our societal structure. Some of these stem from our tax code, some from our expansion of corporate rights, and others from our basic system of voting and representation. Additionally, the rise of the internet is changing every part of society and how we interact with each other. Now is the time to design the next government, and above all make sure it is designed as best we know how to promote equality and sound decision-making.
The more art education you have, the less commentary you need. The more time you spend actually trying to mix paints and combine them on a canvas, the less art education you need. Commentary is mostly trivia, knowledge of low utility. Knowledge of painting is very practical, but rather narrow in scope.
It sounds like you need an education. If you were to be unaware of any major sphere of human endeavor, art would seem safest, but ignorance is rarely innocuous. Google is the simplest way to acquire specific knowledge of any painting, but your local library would be the recommended resource for educational material. The color representation in print tends to be better, although the gamut is usually smaller.
Slashdot Mirror
5.5% is something like half the profit margin for the small merchant I'm working for. Not only that, 2CO by and large does not work with Central American banks (or many other countries). Most of the world is not in either the US or the UK. Shocking, I know. If you can tell me a real alternative to PayPal here in Costa Rica, I will implement it tomorrow.
There's a lot of fine print on the 2CO site, btw, 5.5% is more like a minimum fee.
Why yes, I did type that with my tongue. How did you know?
I prefer concision and precision in writing, but time rarely permits me to really polish a slashdot post. Whereas you obviously stayed up all night writing that one. :P
There is no such thing as a good form of patriotism, unless it is dissent. The US has plundered the world to enrich an astonishingly small minority, and you're saying it's okay because a dollar or two fell into the science bucket along the way? Our contributions fo human suffering dwarf our contributions to knowledge. Patriotism is evil, just one more way to deny our common humanity and place ourselves above others.
Allow me to quote:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
America has nothing to be proud of. We are tyrants, criminals, and murderers all, not to mention the way we've polluted the earth so that our children's children will curse our names. Altruistic patriotism? The third world thanks you for your most benign munificence. It's a thin shroud to drag over two centuries of violent imperialism; you delude none but yourself, and display only conceit. You have allowed yourself to fall into comfortable ignorance, an ignorance of the world outside your borders, an ignorance not only free from want or suffering but free from their conception. The world entire is brimming with pain, and has no use for armchair altruism or fools who rest on the laurels of others and naively hope for change. They sow the wind, that shall yet reap the whirlwind.
All right, I'll bite. I'm curious. What exactly is it that Microsoft Office gets done? Besides lock your data into a proprietary format. I don't use it myself, so I'm sure there's *some* use for it that I'm not aware of, but here's some of the technologies I use instead.
I only use a word processor to generate blog posts, fiction, and documents where I don't care about layout too strongly, since it's sort of inherent in a word processor that they will adjust the layout somewhat before e.g. printing it. There's very little reason to save in either .docx or .doc as far as I am aware, since the former does not currently conform to the OOXML format and the latter is more akin to a memory dump of Word.
For text that I really don't care about, I use a text editor. I also use this for small notes to myself, or simple lists. I don't need my notes indexed, thank you, grep will do just fine.
For layout documents, I generally use Scribus, InDesign, Inkscape, or Illustrator, and save in svg or pdf, dependent on whether or not I want a working format or a presentation format. If I can count on being the only one to edit it, or that any collaborators will be using the same software, it makes sense to use each program's native format. For bitmaps I use GIMP and Photoshop, and generally prefer GIMP, except for the name and the text-related tools. It runs on more systems that I use, and takes far less time to download and install, and similarly uses a fraction of the disk space. I usually have the most recent version of Adobe's software on a disk.
For my own personal artwork I have found a nice balance of features in the painting program MyPaint, which runs on Linux and Windows.
I do not generate 3D images or models, or animation, or music. Neither, as far as I'm aware, does Office.
I create web pages with Netbeans or Bluefish, or a text editor. If I did not know how to write markup I suppose I might have more use for Word. Similarly, for storing and retrieving and processing data I use a database and a scripting language, or XML if I don't need a full-on database. For keeping track of financial data, an accounting program or package is useful for even small projects, and vital for any business-related endeavor.
I've used web-based email since hotmail became available. I have no idea what, given all of the above, Outlook would be useful to me for. It seems like an adequate if bloated email application, though I've never enjoyed trying to move data out of it.
That's my current toolset. I'm not particularly attached to any of them, and obviously quite used to using both the tools at hand and, when I have the luxury, the best tool for the job. Office has not to date been in the latter category in my experience. Why is Office a good tool? At what task does it uniquely excel at? What combination of features am I missing out on?
WTF happened to /.
It became popular, which widened the bell curve and probably lowered the average IQ (not by a lot, let's not flatter ourselves unnecessarily). We have a couple of capital-T Trolls here, APK and MichaelKristopeit, and it's always been unclear what the role of the editor is supposed to be since they don't appear to do shit. The GNAA contingent seems to have died down. Neither of us are submitting articles, it seems, and likely not participating in the firehose (there being no real incentive to do so).
Seems like business as usual to me. A change in management couldn't hurt: you know, maybe someone interested in promoting the site, improving the quality, and completely redesigning the site to support unicode and generate valid html.
More on topic, turbulence is indeed the right answer to this "problem". Thanks for posting, +1 Informative.
You are incorrect, if you explicitly state "I am invoking my fifth amendment right to refuse to incriminate myself" you will be asked no further questions. With Berguis v. Thompkins the USSC ruled that continued silence was not indicative of a refusal to answer incriminating questions. Police officers find that if they go at it for long enough you'll confess, which is why we have Miranda rights/the Fifth Amendment to begin with. We need a more populist Supreme Court, let's start with getting rid of FPTP voting and let the change bubble upwards.
Thank you for contributing to the discussion. I recommend reading my replies to the two other people that said that exact same thing. Have a nice day.
Man, do you ever have a big Point. You're so right, baby, I'm in awe of your sexy brain. Stroke that Point for me, oh yeah, do it!
I realize it's important to your ego to get the last word in here, thereby 'winning' the 'argument'. It's nice that you can put yourself up as Defender of the Concept of Libraries, too, slapping me in the face with your big tangential Point. Since you don't have the self awareness to be embarrassed about doing this, let's add some negative feedback to this loop.
Furthermore, if you live in an area that isn't developed enough for libraries or bookstores then you don't need to worry about any of this in the first place and have more important issues to deal with, like finding food to eat and shelter.
I just love reading this line. No, go on, tell me about how a lack of libraries implies a lack of food or shelter. You can eat books? I've slept in a library before, maybe that counts. Such a gem. Don't worry, we'll come back to it.
People used libraries ... for countless generations...
You tell 'em, grandpa. People used horses for countless generations too. If that analogy wasn't clear, get better contacts. Wait, I mean LASIK. Wait, I mean bifocals. If they were good enough for Ben Franklin...
Just because most of us live in a digital age does not mean that libraries are some how magically no longer sources of information.
Now, what's funny about this is that it's purely a reading comprehension issue. Because the original thing that I said was that 'good sources of information are rare', which obviously doesn't apply to libraries, where everything that contains information is magically free from error or bias. But then I made it explicit that libraries contain media, and media contains information, trying to convey that (e.g.) good authors are rare, and you persist in excluding the middle. This is necessary to escape the fact that there are few benefits to physical media and many downsides. The biggest one being that books on shelves cannot be revised, which leads to libraries containing many volumes of obsolete information. Librarians certainly don't read all their volumes, so a good librarian is only marginally better than their cataloging system. The librarians I've most recently been hanging out with had a book-a-week club. They read The Kite Runner and Water for Elephants. Clearly they know better than the engineering student what book he needs.
Yes, as you put it, they be less 'convenient' beacuse you actually have to get off your ass and go out side for a change,
I'll tell you the funny part in a minute, but for the record, that was kind of my whole point about libraries.
but that does not negate their effectiveness if you actually go there.
Which is not to say that other factors are involved that might actually degrade the utility of libraries, such as obsolete texts. Now c'mon, let's hear something about how all these disrespectful youngsters are so much worse than back in your day.
( If others are so tied up with themselves and want instant gratification to the point that they cant plan head enough to even go to the library then your statement is a sad commentary on the current state of society if you ask me. "me me me me, now now now" )
awwww yeaaaaaah! woo! Ad hominem, non sequitur, non sequitur, ad hominem. It's like a grumpy old man's fail sandwich.
Oh, my favorite part is coming up again.
Furthermore, if you live in an area that isn't developed enough for libraries or bookstores then you don't need to worry about any of this in the first place and have more important issues to deal with, like finding food to eat and shelter.
It gets better every time.
So the place I'm from is Alaska, where we had a library but no bookstore, and the place I'm in now
I had to check Wikipedia, but my memory was indeed incorrect, I had thought the PS1 had come out afterwards. You offer an improved estimate of video game size, what does that include? emulators+roms? Neo Geo? Sega Saturn? Virtual Boy? ColecoVision, to pick a random second generation platform? I'm curious.
If my estimate was correct to an order of magnitude, that's all I was shooting for.
They have neither libraries nor property taxes in the part of the world that I am currently living. The former is indeed regrettable but I don't really have the time it takes to find books at a library in any case.
You seem to be living in an analog world. I presume you must have money enough to buy books and games with, and space to put all these things as well, and a settled habitation. A few tens of gigabytes of disk space is a much safer assumption, I think.
I'm too young to have heard of Avalon Hill or "1776", and too mobile for the rest: a digital nomad. For the last few months I've traded civilization and the luxury of superfluous property for warm Costa Rican beaches. There are days when I regret that choice, but not many.
Libraries and book stores are not sources of information. They are sources of books. Books are sources of information, and my statement holds. I don't know about you, but I have many more things to do than to visit a library every time I want to know something, and I lack both the funds as well as the storage space required to outfit an extended personal library. You also fail to consider that either I or the original questioner might not live in the parts of the world which are developed enough to have things like libraries or bookstores.
I hope this clears up any problems of comprehension that you have disguised as a patronizing rhetorical question.
The biggest challege I faced living without a home internet connection was a lack of reference materials. A text dump of wikipedia is a good start, but also grab anything you have a professional interest in, e.g. all the O'Reilly books. Also a good home repair guide, your car manual, outdoor survival guide, medical texts, home chemistry book, cookbooks, karma sutra, and if you can get a dump of instructables or about.com or wikihow, you're probably pretty good. A general selection of science, art, literature, and philosophy texts should also not go amiss. For fiction, take a dump of Project Gutenberg and/or some large ebook torrents. Calibre is software designed to manage ebooks, specifically in relation to ebook readers, which it excels at, but it is also an excellent way to catelogue a large quantity of ebooks.
If you're into games, the biggest N64 rom was 64 MB (Conker's Bad Fur Day, Resident Evil), so every game and game system manufactured before the introduction of the Playstation should only be in the tens of gigabytes.
It almost goes without saying that you should store information about your online contacts.
It's difficult to predict what information you'll need. Good sources of information are rare, it's wise to have a technical library with a high degree of redundancy, i.e. multiple books on the same subject, especially if it is a subject of high interest or importance (e.g. emergency medicine). Data redundancy isn't a bad idea either.
Neither option decreases response time significantly, especially when compared to talking to someone (irrespective of whether that person is on a cell or sitting next to the driver). Cannabinoids are a normal part of brain function. The LD50 of marijuana is not physically reachable. Vaporizers eliminate basically all adverse medical effects of marijuana.
Exact brain chemistry varies from individual to individual, but I've never 'tripped' on weed, and while it's not completely unheard of, it is not a common effect for the majority of people. Your experiences are not typical. I also question whether you've taken true hallucinogens, so as to have a basis for comparison.
Many people recognized the US housing and .com bubbles before they burst. When the gold price crashes, you can dig up this comment and apologies.
You're placing way too much faith in humanity's predictive power. We consistently overestimate it. Saying gold will crash is no more predictive, in fact, than saying it will snow in Phoenix. The when and the why are chaotic, and in the case of financial markets and other systems more complicated than snowflakes, fundamentally unknowable.
I have no idea other than naive delusion what would make you think that the actions of any individual human are predictable, let alone the collective actions of the species. I'm sorry if your financial ideas depend on humans being in any part rational actors.
An argument for Unpredictability in Markets
Major premise: Chaotic systems (those which exhibit turbulent behavior) are unpredictable. This is mathematically true.
Minor premise: Financial markets are chaotic systems. Benoit Mandelbrot is generally considered to have mathematically proven this.
Conclusion: Financial markets are unpredictable.
If you want to argue with Mandelbrot, you should read his book.
A bubble describes the social phenomena of the price of something rising because people believing it will continue to rise based on recent experience.
A meaningless definition. Bubbles are defined in retrospect, i.e. the stock takes a nose dive, at which point you will construct a narrative that says it was supposed to happen.
Just like the weather you can predict where markets will probably be a few days from now, but there is no way to predict exactly where it will be five years from now.
I'm glad you understood the analogy. You don't seem to consider the conclusions though. Markets are less predictable than the weather; with weather systems all the inputs are known. Global Warming is an unpredictable emergent effect of random behavior. The analogous events in financial markets would be any market crash, and these unsurprisingly occur far more often than GW. Worse, with weather systems there are fundamental physical limits on their effects, there are no such fundamental limitations with financial systems.
Further Reading
Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb
Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot
The value of anything is purely subjective. Value is only defined in terms of social phenomena. There is no such thing as a 'bubble'. Bubbles are an attempt to rationalize events by fitting a narrative to them (see also all sports commentary).
Value is random and turbulent, as are all markets. Markets are fundamentally unpredictable in the same sense that the weather is. There are no 'safe' investments, at any time. There are no oracles, there is no God, there is no solution to the halting problem. We are all simply waiting for a Black Swan to kill us.
For any discussion in which BitCoins are mentioned, the first person to say the words 'inherent value' loses. Call it Nakamoto's Law.
Quit school. Read Shakespeare on your own. Work as a programmer (you wanted to learn languages, right?) or a translator until you figure out what you *really* want to go to school for (theatre?).
You should also emigrate, there are better countries than Canada to be poor in.
Getting odd jobs and bare subsistence wages is not living the dream, it is preventing you from doing what you love. Money does not equal happiness, but you tell me that after the late shift at Starbucks.
You have a 'natural right' to be paid for your work? How interesting. One imagines this right must also be granted in perpetuity, or else it's not much of a natural right, is it? Is there any sort of bar to this, can I lift pencils and call it work and expect to be paid forever? I can write stories or music (and do) if you insist; maybe you can explain why it's just artists and writers that get on this gravy train. To be quite honest, it doesn't sound terribly like capitalism, but I'm sure we can get slashdot to rally around this idea--it applies to code, too? Or just natural language writing? Do androids have this natural right? Do marketing droids? Ad writers, if it's an especially good ad?
Maybe you'd be surprised as to what the rest of the world thinks of as a 'natural right'. As far as I know, in America and most other parts of the world, all you have is the right to try to get paid for your work. We'll even throw you a few bones, like a limited form of exclusivity on new things you make, and a regulatory and social environment that tries to (in theory) prevent existing business interests from crushing the new guys. At the moment, the rest of us feel that those bones have been enlarged overmuch.
Also, we created this high speed way to replicate information globally. Since the marginal cost of copying has become zero, trying to charge for individual copies of information (as if there's scarcity) has become a fool's game. Unless you make it prohibitively expensive in terms of either time and money, people will copy whatever they like. Despite the efforts of many motivated corporations, there is no technical means to ensure that content will not be pirated. To quote Schneier, "trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet." The best efforts have lasted only a few years, while copyright law extends for decades. The chances of any content remaining relevant for the duration of the copyright placed upon it are as close to zero as can be imagined, and the pace of change still appears to be accelerating.
If you don't like any of this, you are in the wrong profession. If you can't compete in this market, don't make excuses, find a different way to make money. Don't be too upset though; haven't you heard that almost no one can make a living as a writer? Just accept that that means you. By all means keep writing, of course; it's a skill like any other. Blogging might even make you more money: look at Doctorow and that Julie&Julia woman.
Please consider using <em> or <strong> tags instead of capitalization. Your post was otherwise excellent.
Godzilla and Fukushima: life imitates art?
I like reading old soviet humor. Here's a few Chernobyl jokes; maybe in a few months they can be Fukushima jokes.
An old man and his grandson look at the river from the shore.
"Grandpa, is this place called Chernobyl? Is it true here was once a nuclear plant?"
"Yes, my boy," the grandfather said and patted the boy on the boy's head.
"And did it explode one day?"
"Yes, my boy," and the grandfather patted the boy's second head.
"Grandpa, look, there is ball rolling."
"It's not a ball, it's a hedgehog from Chernobyl."
"Is it true, that you may eat meat from Chernobyl?"
"You have to eat it. But the feces must be buried in concrete 5 ft deep in the earth."
"Grandpa, look at this light bulb! Its blue light is so pretty!"
"It's not a bulb. It's a bottle of milk from Chernobyl."
"Grandpa, thank you very much for the gift, this pet snake."
"It's not a snake, baby. It's a cat from Chernobyl."
captioned images on a forum thread
Most ISPs find it simple to use DHCP, hence there are no user credentials (and no calls to Support about lost passwords). DSL is much more likely to both use PPPoE and provide dial-up access (PPP used to be mandatory for DSL), but it's always been a bit of a pain, so you'll also find cases where ISPs use PPPoE but let any username/password combination connect.
Other than simplicity, there are few reasons to use DHCP, but I seem to remember when I was in Verizon DSL Support Hell that most of the calls were password-related. There is a significant financial incentive not to use passwords.
I haven't been everywhere, but PPPoE/A tends to be the exception rather than the rule.
You could call the 'kill switch' the final revocation of the first amendment. What form would the revolt take? We generally lack arms to march on Washington and overthrow the Senate, so probably we should heed Lessig's call and start participating in the Constitutional Convention. I favor many of the ideas in metagovernment, and I think with concerted effort they could be spread to the greater polity.
We have noted many flaws in our societal structure. Some of these stem from our tax code, some from our expansion of corporate rights, and others from our basic system of voting and representation. Additionally, the rise of the internet is changing every part of society and how we interact with each other. Now is the time to design the next government, and above all make sure it is designed as best we know how to promote equality and sound decision-making.
The more art education you have, the less commentary you need. The more time you spend actually trying to mix paints and combine them on a canvas, the less art education you need. Commentary is mostly trivia, knowledge of low utility. Knowledge of painting is very practical, but rather narrow in scope.
It sounds like you need an education. If you were to be unaware of any major sphere of human endeavor, art would seem safest, but ignorance is rarely innocuous. Google is the simplest way to acquire specific knowledge of any painting, but your local library would be the recommended resource for educational material. The color representation in print tends to be better, although the gamut is usually smaller.