Quite a while ago now, one Sunday, the local paper's horoscopes must have gone on the blink because every star sign said exactly the same thing. Thinking this was hillarious we cut it out and pinned it up on the notice board in the kitchen. Months went by and ever so often I would notice guests reading their stars, and occasionally they'd ask, "why do you have these out of date horoscopes up here?"
"look carefully," I'd reply
"Um, okay..." and they'd carefully reread their own horoscope. Some people noticed that the stars were 'out of date' but almost no-one noticed that the stars were all the same. The only conclusion I could draw from this is that no-one ever reads other people's stars, only their own.
I have a few email addresses that get some hundreds of spam per day. I am happy to adjust my mail server to redirect these to your email address if you like. I tried redirecting it to spamcop but they only accept forwards, not redirercts so instead of the spam i just got hundreds of spamcop error notices. but go to my website, use the email address listed on there to contact me directly and I will make the changes to divert as much of my spam as I can to you. you'll be doing me a huge favour.
well to continue your analogy, I'd be pretty horrified if my neighbour, and her mates, reduced my house to rubble, and then handed control of my land over to some local street thugs who then started growing opium on it, raping me, my wife and kids, and banning any women/girls in what remains of the house from going to school.
Setting up a transfer function is a good idea. A lof of the music (CDs) I have were given to me as gifts over the years. How can I buy an album for a friend via the iTMS? I think such a system, whereby I could transfer the ownership of the files, would boost sales as the gift giving market is huge after all. Also, what happens to my music library when I am dead? How can I leave my music to my loved ones?
My Girlfriend, Caroline, was surfing a jobs site last year and she's no hacker let me tell you, but she managed somehow to get into an area where she had full access to the administrative tools and could edit people's CVs, upload new word docs in their place, edit people's names and passworrds etc etc. I took a look, as she said "check this out, it's letting me edit their details." It was some poorly thrown togehter.asp site. So she wrote to the company concerned with some screen snaps and explained as close as she could remember what she had done. Caroline never received a reply. But at least the feds are not after her. - also just a thought, could we now say he's Adrian "on the" Lamo. boom boom.
Having read the comments above I took a good look at the chart and decided to fix it. Sure - blatant karma whoring perhaps, but read on. I have moved the hit count into its own column, saved it as CSV and (here's where it gets silly) I decided to look up each song in Gnutella and chart the guntella hit count against the RIAA hit count.
I am happy to present my results in the form of a new spreadsheet, a CSV file and a GIF formatted graph. I am too hungover, and too rotten a statistician, to draw any conclusions. Enjoy.
robots have already displaced people. what have they done about it so far? automatic weapons are not everywhere. for example here in my house, not a single automatic weapon. no shortage of robots tho... and hell i still get a cleaner to come in one a week cos quite honestly i could employ her for a year and still spend less than it costs to buy a dyson vacuum cleaner. and so far a robot can't iron my shirts, get the washing out of the washing machine (a robot), or scrub my toilet floor. and if one could, well my cleaner could go back to her old job - she was a school teacher until the government here closed over half the schools in a fit of economic rationalism.
wha wah macs are too expensive, bsd is dying, pigs are flying, george bush is a nice guy.
you can buy an iBook for under US$1k, or if you want to you can buy a G4 powerbook with all the nice things you need like airport and bluetooth, dvd burner etc etc for about us$2.5k (about eu2000 or so) - hardly big bucks. Mine paid for itself with one contract. I say spend the money and get a machine that you love to sit in front of all day, that won;t break if you drop it, that works right out of the box, and that makes people go "ooh" when you pull it out of your backpack. If you have to work in front of a screen it should look as good as possible - and that's worth spending a little more than building your own PC of of parts you scrounged from a rubbish bin somewhere. The cost of a PC/Mac is trivial compared to the cost of the software anyway, unless you are some sort of software pirate that is.
If all it takes to drive americans to blow themselves up is a better dishwasher then honestly, it would have happened, or perhaps it's only cos so far robots have been taking so called "women's work" that we are yet to see this start happening. In the middle east it took decades of violent oppression before people started taking out 'innocent' lives by wiring themselves up with a semtex-vest, but all it's gonna take for you is to have your menial labor done by machine? - Why didn't peeople revolt against slaves then? I mean they used to do all the menial work, and no-one was blowing themselves up in cafes over that now were they. The robots are coming, and you just have not noticed. auto-tellers, EZ-Pay highway tolls, washing machines, spray painters, mars explorers - these things do work people do not want to do, or physically can not do. Stop whining and learn some skills that robots are not going to take so quickly.
After all, all we need is food shelter and water. Most of those we can make for ourselves, today at least...
I don't want to build my own home, carry my own water from the well, or hunt and grow my own food, and I don't see how doing so makes me a better person, or more human. I want to lounge on the beach reading a new James Ellroy book. Now that's a task a robot will never take away from me. Sure it may be bringing me my next long-island iced tea, but the pleasure of reading will be mine.
You could replace your wife with a baby making robot
I am forced to quote the great Monty Python's "The Life of Brian"... Where's the foetus going to gestate? you going to keep it in a box?
Seriously if that's the scariest 'robot future' you can dream up you should read more distopian fiction. Child-bearing is not a job to be replaced by a machine, it's a biological function. Sure the caesararian section may be performed by a robot, and the baby's first breath-inducing smack may be administered by machine, but the job of raising the child will still be up to you and your partner.
yeah I just read on news.google.com that this has just been canned. Thinking about it, they spent us$600k on what loooks to me to be 5 web pages. Someone is walking away with some sweet cash methinks. I mean here's the plan
Build ludicrous website using govt-pork money
site is revealed before anyone can actually register
site is shut down by people with more common sense
...
profits (to someone who just hacked together 5 web pages for 600k)
Now I happen to have the source code for a working re-insurance exchange and figure there's precious little difference between that and a terror-futures exchange. perhaps I'll built it, and add a section where suicidal people can be matched up with 'causes' - and then we can all bet on the outcomes. woohoo. the world just gets madder every day. i note there is no match yet for whois terrorxchange.com. anyone want to back this idea with some real money?
You and Ned Ludd - haha and look what happened to him. If you are really going to start shooting the robots who replace you then you'd better save your pennies for the inevitable law-suits, both criminal and civil, that turn your life into a living hell. Then you will be free to rant at your new 'girlfriend' as he's pushing your chin into the prison sink and busting his caps in your ass.
forcing people to do machine's work is dehumanising for the people. Better to get used to a liesure focussed society now. Unless you wanna start employing dish washers, clothes washers and so forth, or hand washing things in a nearby river (fun for those downstream).
like the unabomber said "you can not separate the good parts of technolgy from the bad." and "You can not predict the long term effects of any new technology." The robots are coming and you'd better get used to the idea.
Well you are riight that I don't have much of a clue about what username i may have provided to gnutella. i haven't. there is no setting, preference or option that asks for a username unless I have paid for the client.
I guess I live a sheltered life, not having used windows much, and not really being a p2p fanatic anyway. I am confused i guess because the p2p client software I do use (legitamately of course - see higher posts) does not ask for a username. it seems crazy to me that any p2p sopftware would ask for a username if it aims to protect its users anyway. but judging by the responses i am getting to this thread it seems that windows p2p clients do ask for a username. i have no way to tell if this is the case, not knowing anyone silly enough to use windows' based p2p clients anyway. but as you infer, what the hell would i know anyway. I'm just a mac-using, java coding, frequent-flying, wifi-abusing no good sonofabitch.
Hmm what is this username that identifies me on my given network i wonder? I don't enter a username to connect to any of the wifi networks I connect to. I am quite nomadic and tend to flit from network to network. say hypothtically i was sharing my music library - who's to say it's me sharing the music and not one of the many other people on the same IP as me?
By the way, I'd lay off whatever drugs you're on - you have the coherency of Mr.Bush;-)
Damn, I am not even on any drugs - merely high on life. oh wait i did share a litre of white wine with a few people at lunch and I did try an experimental cherry fanta. perhaps that's what led to my general incoherancy. But hell, that's the first time anyone has ever compared me to the great satan himself.
What is a file sharing username? I mean I know one can in theory pay for software like Aquisition (or whetever gnutella etc client you care to use) but for me, paying for software I am only ever going to use to pinch music seems redundant, especially when that also then involves somehow tagging my activity with a username. Note I am not saying that I do actually pirate music - all the music I download is independently produced and downloaded with the permission of the copyright owner - go on prove i am lying you RIAA fuckers. also you have no jurisdiction over me - i do all my downloading from public access wifi outside the land of the great satan so fuck you ahahahahahahahahaaaa.
I was asked to build a commercial b2b exchange a few years back and simultaneously to that I had been devoting a lot of energy to thinking about building a better app-server based around xml, jini and javaspaces. So when approached I said yes - as long as I can pick the development team and get cut in on the deal. In retrospect I would have not gone for the equity but that's a political issue not a technical one.
I put together a small team of people I knew who were also interested in the same general thing, and who were all fleeing like lemmings from the boo.com meltdown, and we thrashed out a rough design and worked out a budget and, issues of funding and business admin aside - sheesh startups - we built a bespoke sattelite reinsurance exchange based on cocoon, tomcat, apache server, outrigger and the jini1.0 stuff. we built it in three layers. the first, as the end result was to be a web app, was in retrospect not dissimilar to apache struts but tied cocoon to the javaspace (you can see more detail on this at O'Reilly's OnJava site) and used xsl to render the pages. The little bit of bespoke code we wrote to shuffle objects between cocoon and the space we dubbed Crudlet and declared it to be open source targeted, and registered crudlet.org. The package name was org.crudlet. The next layer provided the generic b2b exchange and negotiation layer. We called it tennis because it represented a series of exchanges across a net. It too provided very generic functions and so was also open source targeted as org.curdlet.tennis as it builds on crudlet. The final layer contains the actual business knowledge - What is an offer of capacity on M$300 worth of Ariane 5 launch. What's the launch schedule for the next few years etc etc. What's a reinsurer? These things all went into a com.risk2risk package that extended the classes in tennis and crudlet and was considered to be proprietary to the company.
We recruited developers from the various OSS projects we used when we could, and made ot very clear to new recurits how the code layers were structured. We also got complete approval from the Board of Directors to pursue this strategy. The fact that I was one of three like-minded technical directors also helped of course. But we were well outnumbered by the suits who were very sceptical at first. A further project grew out of the team - a kind of javasapce backed version of hibernate or castor - called javastore but it never really went anywhere.
Much of what we open sourced was rapidly superceeded by things like Struts and Hibernate and Karajan (which grew out of crudlet) and when the whole reinsurance industry melted down post Sept 11 2001 and the whole project was put on ice by the investors, the only code that was really iced was the proprietary layer. The developers showed incredible loyalty, committing bug fixes on their very last day of work that kind of thing, and I still keep in touch with many of them.
The business arguments were all around costs. OSS == cheaper. Developers will work for less if they get to keep their code after the project is done. Developers can be excited by things other than money. As long as the basic rate is comfortable for them, and that's always a subjective matter. Sure there are other good reasons for OSS, security, corporate tranparancy and accounability, due dilligence etc, but the bottom line with investors is always the bottom line. Anything else is just woolly for most of these people. Also the ethos of open source permeated the team - everyone worked on the inside of a huge oval shaped ring of desks. lots of power mac g4s running osx, a nice rack with some great hardware in it, a groovy office in soho, cvs servers, a network admin who loved his job. and everyone being paid to write code 90% of which they would get to keep afterwards.
I think "the office" was considerable more sublime than this book. I only saw it once on a sort of marathon DVD 'the office' fest and it's about as funny as TV can get. I think I may have actually vomited from laughing so hard. They really captured the various 'office personality types' perfectly in that show and I am eager for a second series if such a thing is possible.
The scene where the have the fire drill and the boss and his assitant carry the only wheechair bound employee halfway down the fire stairs then the drill is called off so they just leave here there half way down the stairs while they head off to the pub just had me in stitches. I mean i know it's sort of evil but honestly it was such a funny scene. the germans would use the term 'schadenfreude'.
I am so with you there. I would love a decent version of Project for OSX. I have beenmaking do with a very buggy bit of shareward called PMX on osx for a while and on some ways it is an improvement over project in that it is so simple, but it's so damn buggy it drives me nuts. On the visio side have you looked at OmniGraffle Pro? That rocks serious ass and is Visio file format compatable. but yeah - apple should do something radical with project managament software - something that combines project management with peer2peer - such that people can put their hands up for tasks, not just be assigned them, and the gantt charts become living interactive views of the project, not wall charts.
Here's a better idea. In the spirit of "no taxation without representation" I propose a system wherby everyone is required by law to to vote (even prisoners and people with the same name as convicted criminals), but you need pay no tax if the party you voted for did not get elected. In this way a majority of the people still have to pay tax. Of course this applies to human beings only - corporations can't vote and still have to pay tax, but to bring them into line they too should pay tax on their incomes, not just on their profits.
FTSOC: Throw in deductions for reinvestements in R&D, both for corporations and people, and allow deductions for monies paid out as salaries to people who also pay income tax to negate the double-dipping. Then get rid of all consumption taxes on essential or socially beneficial items like education, books, software, fresh food, prescription medicines and medical fees, 3rd party, property and life insurance, and pump up or introduce consumption taxes on cigarettes, gambling machines, petrol/diesel (with deductions allowed for professional drivers, farmers and the like), firearms and ammunition, alcohol, 'lifestyle' drugs etc. The total tax pool would be about the same as it is now and the world would be a happier place.
Yeah like Iraq might have been developing WMD and might have handed them over to trevorists. The RIAA are just playing follow the leader here. and yes these are sad times.
ps and amazingly on-topic: in soviet russia it was not the kgb who informed on you, it was your own family.
Slashdot Mirror
kazaa, and several others in one client.
"look carefully," I'd reply
"Um, okay..." and they'd carefully reread their own horoscope. Some people noticed that the stars were 'out of date' but almost no-one noticed that the stars were all the same. The only conclusion I could draw from this is that no-one ever reads other people's stars, only their own.
cheers
dave
Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Flies, or Lord of the Dance? - apologies to alan partridge.
well to continue your analogy, I'd be pretty horrified if my neighbour, and her mates, reduced my house to rubble, and then handed control of my land over to some local street thugs who then started growing opium on it, raping me, my wife and kids, and banning any women/girls in what remains of the house from going to school.
well just to try it out, i did a google for "cooking with macintosh apples" and got many very appropriate responses. then i tried a google for "cooking with an apple macintosh" and also got appropriate respponses. google works. hooray. so let's try a google for "apple macintosh growing" yep, that's about right, and "growing macintosh apples", not bad either.
I think you meant spelling nazis.
rotflmao - like the Congo you mean? Or Iraq? or Venezuela? oh you are too funny.
The money we spend in the community, from equipment to services to goods, helps everyone.
heard of Trickle Down Economics? It's a sham.
Setting up a transfer function is a good idea. A lof of the music (CDs) I have were given to me as gifts over the years. How can I buy an album for a friend via the iTMS? I think such a system, whereby I could transfer the ownership of the files, would boost sales as the gift giving market is huge after all.
Also, what happens to my music library when I am dead? How can I leave my music to my loved ones?
My Girlfriend, Caroline, was surfing a jobs site last year and she's no hacker let me tell you, but she managed somehow to get into an area where she had full access to the administrative tools and could edit people's CVs, upload new word docs in their place, edit people's names and passworrds etc etc. I took a look, as she said "check this out, it's letting me edit their details." It was some poorly thrown togehter .asp site. So she wrote to the company concerned with some screen snaps and explained as close as she could remember what she had done. Caroline never received a reply. But at least the feds are not after her.
-
also just a thought, could we now say he's Adrian "on the" Lamo. boom boom.
I am happy to present my results in the form of a new spreadsheet, a CSV file and a GIF formatted graph. I am too hungover, and too rotten a statistician, to draw any conclusions. Enjoy.
robots have already displaced people. what have they done about it so far? automatic weapons are not everywhere. for example here in my house, not a single automatic weapon. no shortage of robots tho... and hell i still get a cleaner to come in one a week cos quite honestly i could employ her for a year and still spend less than it costs to buy a dyson vacuum cleaner. and so far a robot can't iron my shirts, get the washing out of the washing machine (a robot), or scrub my toilet floor. and if one could, well my cleaner could go back to her old job - she was a school teacher until the government here closed over half the schools in a fit of economic rationalism.
you can buy an iBook for under US$1k, or if you want to you can buy a G4 powerbook with all the nice things you need like airport and bluetooth, dvd burner etc etc for about us$2.5k (about eu2000 or so) - hardly big bucks. Mine paid for itself with one contract. I say spend the money and get a machine that you love to sit in front of all day, that won;t break if you drop it, that works right out of the box, and that makes people go "ooh" when you pull it out of your backpack. If you have to work in front of a screen it should look as good as possible - and that's worth spending a little more than building your own PC of of parts you scrounged from a rubbish bin somewhere. The cost of a PC/Mac is trivial compared to the cost of the software anyway, unless you are some sort of software pirate that is.
After all, all we need is food shelter and water. Most of those we can make for ourselves, today at least...
I don't want to build my own home, carry my own water from the well, or hunt and grow my own food, and I don't see how doing so makes me a better person, or more human. I want to lounge on the beach reading a new James Ellroy book. Now that's a task a robot will never take away from me. Sure it may be bringing me my next long-island iced tea, but the pleasure of reading will be mine.You could replace your wife with a baby making robot
I am forced to quote the great Monty Python's "The Life of Brian"... Where's the foetus going to gestate? you going to keep it in a box?Seriously if that's the scariest 'robot future' you can dream up you should read more distopian fiction. Child-bearing is not a job to be replaced by a machine, it's a biological function. Sure the caesararian section may be performed by a robot, and the baby's first breath-inducing smack may be administered by machine, but the job of raising the child will still be up to you and your partner.
Now here's something scary for you.
Now I happen to have the source code for a working re-insurance exchange and figure there's precious little difference between that and a terror-futures exchange. perhaps I'll built it, and add a section where suicidal people can be matched up with 'causes' - and then we can all bet on the outcomes. woohoo. the world just gets madder every day. i note there is no match yet for whois terrorxchange.com. anyone want to back this idea with some real money?
forcing people to do machine's work is dehumanising for the people. Better to get used to a liesure focussed society now. Unless you wanna start employing dish washers, clothes washers and so forth, or hand washing things in a nearby river (fun for those downstream).
like the unabomber said "you can not separate the good parts of technolgy from the bad." and "You can not predict the long term effects of any new technology." The robots are coming and you'd better get used to the idea.
I guess I live a sheltered life, not having used windows much, and not really being a p2p fanatic anyway. I am confused i guess because the p2p client software I do use (legitamately of course - see higher posts) does not ask for a username. it seems crazy to me that any p2p sopftware would ask for a username if it aims to protect its users anyway. but judging by the responses i am getting to this thread it seems that windows p2p clients do ask for a username. i have no way to tell if this is the case, not knowing anyone silly enough to use windows' based p2p clients anyway. but as you infer, what the hell would i know anyway. I'm just a mac-using, java coding, frequent-flying, wifi-abusing no good sonofabitch.
By the way, I'd lay off whatever drugs you're on - you have the coherency of Mr.Bush ;-)
Damn, I am not even on any drugs - merely high on life. oh wait i did share a litre of white wine with a few people at lunch and I did try an experimental cherry fanta. perhaps that's what led to my general incoherancy. But hell, that's the first time anyone has ever compared me to the great satan himself.
What is a file sharing username? I mean I know one can in theory pay for software like Aquisition (or whetever gnutella etc client you care to use) but for me, paying for software I am only ever going to use to pinch music seems redundant, especially when that also then involves somehow tagging my activity with a username. Note I am not saying that I do actually pirate music - all the music I download is independently produced and downloaded with the permission of the copyright owner - go on prove i am lying you RIAA fuckers. also you have no jurisdiction over me - i do all my downloading from public access wifi outside the land of the great satan so fuck you ahahahahahahahahaaaa.
I put together a small team of people I knew who were also interested in the same general thing, and who were all fleeing like lemmings from the boo.com meltdown, and we thrashed out a rough design and worked out a budget and, issues of funding and business admin aside - sheesh startups - we built a bespoke sattelite reinsurance exchange based on cocoon, tomcat, apache server, outrigger and the jini1.0 stuff. we built it in three layers. the first, as the end result was to be a web app, was in retrospect not dissimilar to apache struts but tied cocoon to the javaspace (you can see more detail on this at O'Reilly's OnJava site) and used xsl to render the pages. The little bit of bespoke code we wrote to shuffle objects between cocoon and the space we dubbed Crudlet and declared it to be open source targeted, and registered crudlet.org. The package name was org.crudlet. The next layer provided the generic b2b exchange and negotiation layer. We called it tennis because it represented a series of exchanges across a net. It too provided very generic functions and so was also open source targeted as org.curdlet.tennis as it builds on crudlet. The final layer contains the actual business knowledge - What is an offer of capacity on M$300 worth of Ariane 5 launch. What's the launch schedule for the next few years etc etc. What's a reinsurer? These things all went into a com.risk2risk package that extended the classes in tennis and crudlet and was considered to be proprietary to the company.
We recruited developers from the various OSS projects we used when we could, and made ot very clear to new recurits how the code layers were structured. We also got complete approval from the Board of Directors to pursue this strategy. The fact that I was one of three like-minded technical directors also helped of course. But we were well outnumbered by the suits who were very sceptical at first. A further project grew out of the team - a kind of javasapce backed version of hibernate or castor - called javastore but it never really went anywhere.
Much of what we open sourced was rapidly superceeded by things like Struts and Hibernate and Karajan (which grew out of crudlet) and when the whole reinsurance industry melted down post Sept 11 2001 and the whole project was put on ice by the investors, the only code that was really iced was the proprietary layer. The developers showed incredible loyalty, committing bug fixes on their very last day of work that kind of thing, and I still keep in touch with many of them.
The business arguments were all around costs. OSS == cheaper. Developers will work for less if they get to keep their code after the project is done. Developers can be excited by things other than money. As long as the basic rate is comfortable for them, and that's always a subjective matter. Sure there are other good reasons for OSS, security, corporate tranparancy and accounability, due dilligence etc, but the bottom line with investors is always the bottom line. Anything else is just woolly for most of these people. Also the ethos of open source permeated the team - everyone worked on the inside of a huge oval shaped ring of desks. lots of power mac g4s running osx, a nice rack with some great hardware in it, a groovy office in soho, cvs servers, a network admin who loved his job. and everyone being paid to write code 90% of which they would get to keep afterwards.
The scene where the have the fire drill and the boss and his assitant carry the only wheechair bound employee halfway down the fire stairs then the drill is called off so they just leave here there half way down the stairs while they head off to the pub just had me in stitches. I mean i know it's sort of evil but honestly it was such a funny scene. the germans would use the term 'schadenfreude'.
See also Come Friendly Bombs and fall on Slough - it isn't fit for humans now.".
I will probably buy this book though, as i love a laugh.
I am so with you there. I would love a decent version of Project for OSX. I have beenmaking do with a very buggy bit of shareward called PMX on osx for a while and on some ways it is an improvement over project in that it is so simple, but it's so damn buggy it drives me nuts. On the visio side have you looked at OmniGraffle Pro? That rocks serious ass and is Visio file format compatable. but yeah - apple should do something radical with project managament software - something that combines project management with peer2peer - such that people can put their hands up for tasks, not just be assigned them, and the gantt charts become living interactive views of the project, not wall charts.
FTSOC: Throw in deductions for reinvestements in R&D, both for corporations and people, and allow deductions for monies paid out as salaries to people who also pay income tax to negate the double-dipping. Then get rid of all consumption taxes on essential or socially beneficial items like education, books, software, fresh food, prescription medicines and medical fees, 3rd party, property and life insurance, and pump up or introduce consumption taxes on cigarettes, gambling machines, petrol/diesel (with deductions allowed for professional drivers, farmers and the like), firearms and ammunition, alcohol, 'lifestyle' drugs etc. The total tax pool would be about the same as it is now and the world would be a happier place.
and the you'll be able to play mariokarts again. ahh mariokarts the best game ever invented.
ps and amazingly on-topic: in soviet russia it was not the kgb who informed on you, it was your own family.