There has never been any reason to think that just because a trait evolves into much of the population that it will reach all of the population. Your videos are probably of the population missing these, and other genes, that increase mental ability.
The intelligent are now protecting the stupid in much the same way mankind has protected cattle. The stupid tend to breed with other stupid while the intelligent tend to breed with other intelligent people. At some point this should lead to a split in the species as the two groups evolve in different directions. Still it'd take quite a change to make the two groups incompatible for mating so you'll likely see the occasional mix.
Stupid people tend to breed faster than intelligent people but they also tend to live less healthy lifes which probably increases their mortality rate. I'd still imagine stupid people produce more children that live long enough to themselves reproduce than intelligent people though. To bad this topic is taboo because it'd be pretty interesting to study.
In the meantime - geeks unite and breed! Don't let the moron inherit the Earth! The fewer children you have the more likely they'll be wage slaves to stupid people. Fight back - have sex (with yourself doesn't count)!
I'd suggest investing it automated drilling machines that can bore tunnels in rock and fuse the tunnel walls to be air tight. At least then you could automate building of most of the colony with a minimal of hassle. Maybe harvest the drilled out rock to make into glass that could be used to construct above ground areas for growing food. Get THAT much working and I'll be interested to see how they work out enviromental and life support issues.
Euros and Dollars are the same basic concept. That doesn't make them identical in principal or practice. DUC is just my personal retake of digital currency.
They may as well tax us for/. karma.;)
*shrugs* Any way around it I will refuse to cooperate with any sort of taxation bullshit. I doubt for my tiny system it'll ever be an issue but if it was I'd not be willing to pay the damn government one damn cent. If the system became successful enough for it to matter then I'd move everything off-shore (myself included) to some country that didn't snoop so much.
Mostly though it's a system to avoid the hassles of dealing with credit cards, checks, and real money which isn't well suited for real life. No transaction fees, simple to use API and user interface, etc. It's amazing that a decade into widespread Net use that we still have no better sollution for the common problem of buying and selling online. Mostly due to really poorly thought out digital currency concepts from the mid-90's. e-gold wouldn't be so bad if their user interface wasn't so horrible. PayPal used to be ok (sort of) but has sucked since eBay bought them.
If you can't make money from something in the first decade then you probably never will. The way the system works being wealthy might buy a company a few more years but not much and most would probably write off anything that hadn't had become profitable as not being worth marketing.
Besides there is no reason you can't make money from something that is in PD. Quite a few copies of Mark Twain novels still seem to be sold.
Actually you get around 1000 credits for US$1. Pennies aren't small enough for decent micropayments, naming it after real money has possible legal ramifications, I don't want the system tied to US currency as I might want non-US users, and most of all.. cus I just felt like it.
Actually, I don't call them credits. In my system they are called duce's (Digital Universal Currency Entity) with a duck (Digital Universal Currency Kilo) being the amount I'd relate to a euro or a dollar. Not that it really makes any difference what you call them.;)
IMO I'm way underpaid (~$15,000/yr). Given I have more than a decade of experience, am always up-to-date with new technologies, am very versatile, make an effort to keep my code clean and well documented, and am creative. But I like the people I work with so I guess for now it's worth it. If I am offered a job that'd be more fun and pay better then I'll switch. I don't have a family so I'd rather have the low stress job with people I like than a high paying job.
Besides, Las Vegas IT jobs typically pay very poorly despite the high cost of living. Main frame experience, Unix/Linux experience, Mac experience, Windows experience, coding experience, graphic design experience, db experience, project management experience, etc add up to making slightly more than minimum wage. Not very motivational.;)
My newest concept though is in making a lot of micro-businesses that each net me at least $100/month and require very little effort to maintain. For web-based businesses and businesses where I get the ball rolling and then let my partners handle the majority of the work I can handle dozens of them. A few dozen such sources of income each bringing in at least $100/month and I don't need to work on anything except keeping the businesses alive and creating new micros. Get some going well enough and people will buy them off of me for a hefty fee. Or so goes the theory.;)
Overage bandwidth costs me about US$.50/GB so it's not that much. If I stay within my 1500GB/mo alloted bandwidth then it's only about US$.08/GB for bandwidth including the server. Still I was using more than $50/day in bandwidth before I decided to start charging.
This same argument has been raging for years among Final Fantasy fans. Some like the Cartoonish manga style of FF7 while some (like myself) perfer the realism of FF8. I think FF9 was an especially good job at combining these two looks. Realism with style is possible. It's like looking at Chinese landscapes. They are sort of super realistic. They look real but at the same time tend to have features that aren't really found in real life (impossibly steep hills). A lot of anime does take this route with realistic bodies and backgrounds but with exaggerated facial features. It's all a balance. You should stick to a games tradition but for these game families that have existed for decades they have to find a way to evolve to the times or they'll be left behind. 3D realism seems to be the thing right now but adding some surrealistic touches can be good.
I just let users buy credits (that can be used on any site supporting my system) and let users transfer credits from that pool. When they run out then they can't access any of the using sites without buying more credits. *shrugs* Seems easy enough. Usually sites charge about $.01/Kb. Dunno if I could make the system profitable for me as the service provider though. I thought about making it so credits could be used for other stuff though and providing free store/auction sites that only work with credits. Use the micropayments to hook in a client base.
Maybe if you're a db admin instead of a programmer. If you write the application layer then simply make it do what you need. Duh.
If you want things to be atomic then turn on transactions or simply design your program better.
I handle all kinds of db stuff with millions of records and all kinds of interesting interactions and funny enough I never get corrupt data. You rely to much on the db. You probably code in some lame language like Visual Basic too.
As long as you code a single frontend to the db that is accessable from all apps via a standard emthod (like XML-RPC or SOAP) there is no reason to put that logic in the db. Again doing so is bad because it steals performance from the DB which is harder to replicate across multiple machines than some service written in Python, Java, or whatever. Also it's not a very good idea from a security point of view to allow direct access to your DB for every random app and user you might have on your network. Going through a proxy layer screens out the majority of paths an attack could come through.
Transfering data between machines shouldn't be that big a task as gigabit (or better) ethernet is affordable and with some planning you can implement caching of many queries. (Example, it'd be stupid of/. to run the query that checks what stories are newest for every single hit from every single user. Caching would let them only rerun that query every few minutes.) Doing a lot of unneeded processing in the db will slow things down more than transfering a little more data.
But of course it just depends exactly what you're doing. I've used stored procedures, big ass table joins, and all the other stuff I suggest not doing because sometimes those are the best solutions.:)
I write my db code to abstract all my queries away from the rest of my program. You access the queries I've writen via a XML-RPC interface. That way if you need to switch db all you have to do is rewrite your queries and none of your app code needs to change.
Issues like speed, resource usage, sql features, etc really don't matter very much as for 99% of db applications it just makes no difference at all and for the 1% it does then you'd better hire someone that knows the differences in dbs without having to look it up on Slashdot.
Most of the time it is better just to use the basics. I see people doing EVERYTHING in the db. Stored procedures, adding 1 + 1, massice complicated joins that'd be easy to do in anything other than SQL, etc. A big mistake. The db is the single hardest portion of your application server to replicate and load balance (even with the db supporting things like clustering). It's better to write your glue code in a normal language and just abstract that glue code as a sepperate service and use the db just for storing and retrieving data.
I think DRM isn't going to die until we begin producing enough non-DRM open content movies and music that can compare favorably with the crap coming out of Hollywood. Without the challenge of competition they have no reason to worry about consumer revolt.
As such I'm thinking of making an open content movie that is something like Sneakers combined with Seinfeld. A movie that is about the daily, and slightly weird, life of geeks as they work to produce an open content movie they expect nobody wiull ever actually watch. Silly enough concept for a movie?;)
I'm simply boycotting all these players and (obviously as I won't have a player) all the movies using these new discs. I'm tired of having my rights taken away for the stuff I purchase legally. Remove the DRM and region codes or I won't buy one. I have thousands of DVD movies I've bought.. but I did so only after CSS was cracked. If these new setups prove not to be crackable or stop functioning when you play a cracked movie then I won't buy one.
Funding archives as well as the national library system would be a great use of the money.
Having copies of every copyrighted work archived should be a requirement for a copyright. If a work is worth protecting then it's worth saving for future generations.
As it is I'm all for projects like the Internet Archive as it seems so much information and history of our current times are going to be lost given there is no archive requirement and a good majority of our culture exists in digital form only. It's really a shame that all the programs, videos, music, images, etc aren't able to be archived too. Sure 80% of it is probably crap but that leaves a lot of stuff that is good and to future generations even crap could be useful to them. Look how excited our historians get when they find a kids toy from a past culture. Maybe someday a future historian might feel that way about finding a ripped N'Sync song and some porn pics from today. By not saving such things we are robbing future generations. Even worse that we're not saving the really useful stuff.
I've experimented some with collecting the Internet myself. I've thought about writing the data to aluminum discs that would last a lot longer than electronic or optical media. It'd be awesome if all copyrighted digital works were saved in that way and archived.
I won't buy one until the DRM is cracked. That's what I did with DVDs. If it isn't cracked then I'll never buy one. Big loss for them. I own thousands of legally purchased DVDs - many expensive collectors versions. I hope other end-users protest and refuse to buy this crap too.
I'll spend my money towards funding opensource movie development before I'll spend it on movies and hardware that tell me how I can use what I've purchased.
I think this formula works for seeing how much a copyright would cost on the nth year of holding the copyright. Where y is the number of years and c is the cost of the yearly copyright fee. Pretty simple. It appears that the original granted 14 years wouldn't be to unaffordable for most content owners but by the 21st year most content holders would probably let go. I doubt even Mickey Mouse would be worth holding on to for more than 30 years. Not many copyrights would be worth $500,000,000 a year but those that were would be a good boost of income for the govt.
I think any work that wants copyright protection should have to file an unencrypted ver with the lib of congress if they are going to release mostly drm versions.
I have the ongoing sad feeling that being ruled by monarchs has been replaced by being ruled by corporations. To me that is even more scary because there is no one person (or small group) that if removed would allow a new power structure to be put into place. We have a distributed, disorganized, schizo overlord now. Is this really an improvement?
No doubt that is why movie companies are incorrectly telling kids that all copying is illegal and immoral. I hate that they are plastering such bullshit as ads in the trailers before a movie and even onto the DVD. Even worse is when they insert that concept into the movies themselves so they can't easily be edited out. That's just wrong to lie to kids so that when they grow up you can get your way in how laws are passed.
I've seen several of these ads and Disney movies seem to always have them now.
I like the idea of having copyrights start off at $1 for the first year and double each year there after. That way copyrights will naturally expire as soon as they aren't profitable enough to be worth maintaining and yet anyone would be able to afford to file their copyright. And I do think copyrights should have to be filed to be valid! Nonsense like having everything I write being automatically copyrighted is just stupid. They should have to be filed and filed again every year (with some reasonable grace period).
If this is genetic and can spread to offspring they'd no doubt find it dangerous to them. If it could be made to spread through sharing of body fluids it'd be even more frightening to them. If they could figure all that out, make sure it's safe, and then release it on the populace it could be a major turning point in human evolution.
What about in other animals though? You could have a prize cow that you ate over and over again. Not very nice to the cow but an interesting idea. Or a dog that even when hit by a car repeatedly would still be your good old pet.
*shrugs* If we outgrow this planet we can just go to other planets. Maybe population overgrowth is what we need to force us to make the jump to other worlds. If there are to many of us then it'd be worth the risks and hassles to colonize space. If you could regenerate wouldn't you be more willing to take risks anyway?
Besides if we are all GM people then maybe people would complain less about GM food so we'd have more food to go around. Water and air aren't likely to become serious issues for quite a while even if people lived much longer.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL we have female geeks too. Surely they will like the male geeks if those geeks will just shower now and then.
There has never been any reason to think that just because a trait evolves into much of the population that it will reach all of the population. Your videos are probably of the population missing these, and other genes, that increase mental ability.
The intelligent are now protecting the stupid in much the same way mankind has protected cattle. The stupid tend to breed with other stupid while the intelligent tend to breed with other intelligent people. At some point this should lead to a split in the species as the two groups evolve in different directions. Still it'd take quite a change to make the two groups incompatible for mating so you'll likely see the occasional mix.
Stupid people tend to breed faster than intelligent people but they also tend to live less healthy lifes which probably increases their mortality rate. I'd still imagine stupid people produce more children that live long enough to themselves reproduce than intelligent people though. To bad this topic is taboo because it'd be pretty interesting to study.
In the meantime - geeks unite and breed! Don't let the moron inherit the Earth! The fewer children you have the more likely they'll be wage slaves to stupid people. Fight back - have sex (with yourself doesn't count)!
I'd suggest investing it automated drilling machines that can bore tunnels in rock and fuse the tunnel walls to be air tight. At least then you could automate building of most of the colony with a minimal of hassle. Maybe harvest the drilled out rock to make into glass that could be used to construct above ground areas for growing food. Get THAT much working and I'll be interested to see how they work out enviromental and life support issues.
Euros and Dollars are the same basic concept. That doesn't make them identical in principal or practice. DUC is just my personal retake of digital currency.
/. karma. ;)
They may as well tax us for
*shrugs* Any way around it I will refuse to cooperate with any sort of taxation bullshit. I doubt for my tiny system it'll ever be an issue but if it was I'd not be willing to pay the damn government one damn cent. If the system became successful enough for it to matter then I'd move everything off-shore (myself included) to some country that didn't snoop so much.
Mostly though it's a system to avoid the hassles of dealing with credit cards, checks, and real money which isn't well suited for real life. No transaction fees, simple to use API and user interface, etc. It's amazing that a decade into widespread Net use that we still have no better sollution for the common problem of buying and selling online. Mostly due to really poorly thought out digital currency concepts from the mid-90's. e-gold wouldn't be so bad if their user interface wasn't so horrible. PayPal used to be ok (sort of) but has sucked since eBay bought them.
If you can't make money from something in the first decade then you probably never will. The way the system works being wealthy might buy a company a few more years but not much and most would probably write off anything that hadn't had become profitable as not being worth marketing.
Besides there is no reason you can't make money from something that is in PD. Quite a few copies of Mark Twain novels still seem to be sold.
Actually you get around 1000 credits for US$1. Pennies aren't small enough for decent micropayments, naming it after real money has possible legal ramifications, I don't want the system tied to US currency as I might want non-US users, and most of all.. cus I just felt like it.
;)
Actually, I don't call them credits. In my system they are called duce's (Digital Universal Currency Entity) with a duck (Digital Universal Currency Kilo) being the amount I'd relate to a euro or a dollar. Not that it really makes any difference what you call them.
IMO I'm way underpaid (~$15,000/yr). Given I have more than a decade of experience, am always up-to-date with new technologies, am very versatile, make an effort to keep my code clean and well documented, and am creative. But I like the people I work with so I guess for now it's worth it. If I am offered a job that'd be more fun and pay better then I'll switch. I don't have a family so I'd rather have the low stress job with people I like than a high paying job.
;)
;)
Besides, Las Vegas IT jobs typically pay very poorly despite the high cost of living. Main frame experience, Unix/Linux experience, Mac experience, Windows experience, coding experience, graphic design experience, db experience, project management experience, etc add up to making slightly more than minimum wage. Not very motivational.
My newest concept though is in making a lot of micro-businesses that each net me at least $100/month and require very little effort to maintain. For web-based businesses and businesses where I get the ball rolling and then let my partners handle the majority of the work I can handle dozens of them. A few dozen such sources of income each bringing in at least $100/month and I don't need to work on anything except keeping the businesses alive and creating new micros. Get some going well enough and people will buy them off of me for a hefty fee. Or so goes the theory.
Overage bandwidth costs me about US$.50/GB so it's not that much. If I stay within my 1500GB/mo alloted bandwidth then it's only about US$.08/GB for bandwidth including the server. Still I was using more than $50/day in bandwidth before I decided to start charging.
This same argument has been raging for years among Final Fantasy fans. Some like the Cartoonish manga style of FF7 while some (like myself) perfer the realism of FF8. I think FF9 was an especially good job at combining these two looks. Realism with style is possible. It's like looking at Chinese landscapes. They are sort of super realistic. They look real but at the same time tend to have features that aren't really found in real life (impossibly steep hills). A lot of anime does take this route with realistic bodies and backgrounds but with exaggerated facial features. It's all a balance. You should stick to a games tradition but for these game families that have existed for decades they have to find a way to evolve to the times or they'll be left behind. 3D realism seems to be the thing right now but adding some surrealistic touches can be good.
I just let users buy credits (that can be used on any site supporting my system) and let users transfer credits from that pool. When they run out then they can't access any of the using sites without buying more credits. *shrugs* Seems easy enough. Usually sites charge about $.01/Kb. Dunno if I could make the system profitable for me as the service provider though. I thought about making it so credits could be used for other stuff though and providing free store/auction sites that only work with credits. Use the micropayments to hook in a client base.
Maybe if you're a db admin instead of a programmer. If you write the application layer then simply make it do what you need. Duh.
If you want things to be atomic then turn on transactions or simply design your program better.
I handle all kinds of db stuff with millions of records and all kinds of interesting interactions and funny enough I never get corrupt data. You rely to much on the db. You probably code in some lame language like Visual Basic too.
As long as you code a single frontend to the db that is accessable from all apps via a standard emthod (like XML-RPC or SOAP) there is no reason to put that logic in the db. Again doing so is bad because it steals performance from the DB which is harder to replicate across multiple machines than some service written in Python, Java, or whatever. Also it's not a very good idea from a security point of view to allow direct access to your DB for every random app and user you might have on your network. Going through a proxy layer screens out the majority of paths an attack could come through.
/. to run the query that checks what stories are newest for every single hit from every single user. Caching would let them only rerun that query every few minutes.) Doing a lot of unneeded processing in the db will slow things down more than transfering a little more data.
:)
Transfering data between machines shouldn't be that big a task as gigabit (or better) ethernet is affordable and with some planning you can implement caching of many queries. (Example, it'd be stupid of
But of course it just depends exactly what you're doing. I've used stored procedures, big ass table joins, and all the other stuff I suggest not doing because sometimes those are the best solutions.
I write my db code to abstract all my queries away from the rest of my program. You access the queries I've writen via a XML-RPC interface. That way if you need to switch db all you have to do is rewrite your queries and none of your app code needs to change.
Issues like speed, resource usage, sql features, etc really don't matter very much as for 99% of db applications it just makes no difference at all and for the 1% it does then you'd better hire someone that knows the differences in dbs without having to look it up on Slashdot.
Most of the time it is better just to use the basics. I see people doing EVERYTHING in the db. Stored procedures, adding 1 + 1, massice complicated joins that'd be easy to do in anything other than SQL, etc. A big mistake. The db is the single hardest portion of your application server to replicate and load balance (even with the db supporting things like clustering). It's better to write your glue code in a normal language and just abstract that glue code as a sepperate service and use the db just for storing and retrieving data.
I think DRM isn't going to die until we begin producing enough non-DRM open content movies and music that can compare favorably with the crap coming out of Hollywood. Without the challenge of competition they have no reason to worry about consumer revolt.
;)
As such I'm thinking of making an open content movie that is something like Sneakers combined with Seinfeld. A movie that is about the daily, and slightly weird, life of geeks as they work to produce an open content movie they expect nobody wiull ever actually watch. Silly enough concept for a movie?
I'm simply boycotting all these players and (obviously as I won't have a player) all the movies using these new discs. I'm tired of having my rights taken away for the stuff I purchase legally. Remove the DRM and region codes or I won't buy one. I have thousands of DVD movies I've bought.. but I did so only after CSS was cracked. If these new setups prove not to be crackable or stop functioning when you play a cracked movie then I won't buy one.
Funding archives as well as the national library system would be a great use of the money.
Having copies of every copyrighted work archived should be a requirement for a copyright. If a work is worth protecting then it's worth saving for future generations.
As it is I'm all for projects like the Internet Archive as it seems so much information and history of our current times are going to be lost given there is no archive requirement and a good majority of our culture exists in digital form only. It's really a shame that all the programs, videos, music, images, etc aren't able to be archived too. Sure 80% of it is probably crap but that leaves a lot of stuff that is good and to future generations even crap could be useful to them. Look how excited our historians get when they find a kids toy from a past culture. Maybe someday a future historian might feel that way about finding a ripped N'Sync song and some porn pics from today. By not saving such things we are robbing future generations. Even worse that we're not saving the really useful stuff.
I've experimented some with collecting the Internet myself. I've thought about writing the data to aluminum discs that would last a lot longer than electronic or optical media. It'd be awesome if all copyrighted digital works were saved in that way and archived.
How so? You could still file if you wanted to.
I won't buy one until the DRM is cracked. That's what I did with DVDs. If it isn't cracked then I'll never buy one. Big loss for them. I own thousands of legally purchased DVDs - many expensive collectors versions. I hope other end-users protest and refuse to buy this crap too.
I'll spend my money towards funding opensource movie development before I'll spend it on movies and hardware that tell me how I can use what I've purchased.
I think this formula works for seeing how much a copyright would cost on the nth year of holding the copyright. Where y is the number of years and c is the cost of the yearly copyright fee. Pretty simple. It appears that the original granted 14 years wouldn't be to unaffordable for most content owners but by the 21st year most content holders would probably let go. I doubt even Mickey Mouse would be worth holding on to for more than 30 years. Not many copyrights would be worth $500,000,000 a year but those that were would be a good boost of income for the govt.
c = 1 * ( 2 ^ ( y - 1 ) )
I think any work that wants copyright protection should have to file an unencrypted ver with the lib of congress if they are going to release mostly drm versions.
I have the ongoing sad feeling that being ruled by monarchs has been replaced by being ruled by corporations. To me that is even more scary because there is no one person (or small group) that if removed would allow a new power structure to be put into place. We have a distributed, disorganized, schizo overlord now. Is this really an improvement?
No doubt that is why movie companies are incorrectly telling kids that all copying is illegal and immoral. I hate that they are plastering such bullshit as ads in the trailers before a movie and even onto the DVD. Even worse is when they insert that concept into the movies themselves so they can't easily be edited out. That's just wrong to lie to kids so that when they grow up you can get your way in how laws are passed.
I've seen several of these ads and Disney movies seem to always have them now.
I like the idea of having copyrights start off at $1 for the first year and double each year there after. That way copyrights will naturally expire as soon as they aren't profitable enough to be worth maintaining and yet anyone would be able to afford to file their copyright. And I do think copyrights should have to be filed to be valid! Nonsense like having everything I write being automatically copyrighted is just stupid. They should have to be filed and filed again every year (with some reasonable grace period).
If this is genetic and can spread to offspring they'd no doubt find it dangerous to them. If it could be made to spread through sharing of body fluids it'd be even more frightening to them. If they could figure all that out, make sure it's safe, and then release it on the populace it could be a major turning point in human evolution.
What about in other animals though? You could have a prize cow that you ate over and over again. Not very nice to the cow but an interesting idea. Or a dog that even when hit by a car repeatedly would still be your good old pet.
*shrugs* If we outgrow this planet we can just go to other planets. Maybe population overgrowth is what we need to force us to make the jump to other worlds. If there are to many of us then it'd be worth the risks and hassles to colonize space. If you could regenerate wouldn't you be more willing to take risks anyway?
Besides if we are all GM people then maybe people would complain less about GM food so we'd have more food to go around. Water and air aren't likely to become serious issues for quite a while even if people lived much longer.