I expect (and want?) a certain amount of iconoclastic thinking to keep things fresh, but the cynicism has reached the point where those who we would most expect to have respect for values, institutions and laws, such as our corporate leadership and politicians, openly flaunt them. The corporate executives are the worst, IMHO, as they basically advertise the idea that obeying the law and rules is for rubes and suckers.
I know they are generally poor countries and the military advantage of nukes must seem appealing, but they could create WAY, WAY more nuisance for Americans if they would devote those resources to basically Pirate Bay-ing everything copy protected. It'd be hilarious if within hours of a new you-can't-copy-it scheme came out if pirated versions were available along with free tools and FAQs for making your own copies or subversion devices.
IIRC, this idea was also (better?) expressed in some science fiction novel I can't remember -- although it was China that basically ruined IP protections.
I think what the space program lacks now is that grand, unifying sense of adventure. Getting there and seeing what's out there are the kind of thing EVERYBODY can get behind -- there's no specific religious, political or racial bias to outer space exploration.
One thing we've stopped figuring out and stopped doing due our own personal greed are the grand, public gestures of government that provide some kind of bigger purpose. People stopped what they were doing to watch the NASA launches and the Apollo missions; literally -- cars pulled over to listen to the radio, people gathered round and took in its majesty. Kids wanted to be astronauts. It looked like we were *going somewhere* as a civilization.
Now we've sharpened our pencil and realized the "better" science is robots, shuttle missions and other non-inspiring projects designed by bean counters, not visionaries. And what do we have? An underfunded, bureaucratic NASA seen as a cash soak and a civilization bent on narcissism, egocentric enrichment and sectarian bias.
I say, send guys to the moon and beyond. Yes, it's expensive (think of the good engineering jobs!), yes the science isn't as "good" as your robots and deep space cameras, but my god, we could USE the civilization-enhancing awe and purpose. North Korea and Iran lambasting our cultural decline? OK fine, but we're reaching for the stars, not getting lost fighting the unwinnable.
I agree that its criminal, but anyone who deals with this knows that you MAKE SURE you negotiate for "above the line" or "pre-expense" percentages of gross, guaranteed $x of the initial gross BEFORE expenses and marketing, as well as pre-production "commitment" fees of about half of what you want to make on the entire project. The latter is most important as it says nothing can even begin production until you get paid.
However it would be really funny to see a few people get charged with felonies for fraud and share a cell with Bernie Madoff.
Haven't they done cross-cultural studies that tie attractiveness to specific physical characteristics that appear linked to successful child bearing & rearing? Specific bust/waist ratios, etc? Wouldn't it make some kind of sense that the body would invest more resources in a reproductive partner though to be a better child bearer?
The study *I* want to read isn't "Why do hot girls get fucked more?" --- we know that, but we don't know why we put up with all the narcissism and bitchy attitude for the nominal improvement in sex and a palpable dent in our wallets.
Spoken like someone who's never had a shitty lay from a hot girl...
I think there's some folk wisdom beyond the obvious "sour grapes" rationalization. In my experience, many attractive women have a tendency towards narcissism, egomania and a sense of entitlement. *If* she deems you worthy enough to fuck you, that decision is about all the effort she'll put into the entire experience -- you're just supposed to be some grateful and in awe you won't need her to suck your dick or otherwise engage.
Look at the Paris Hilton sex tape -- in many scenes, she's entirely vacant and almost passive while Solomon hammers away with a pretty decent bit of equipment. She's more obsessed with her own appearance, like she's posing.
Now, are all attractive women head cases? No, and the ones that are I'm usually willing to believe are victims of a society that REWARDS superficial beauty and encourages the narcissism, and aren't pathologically evil. And in some cases, sex with a hot girl does have its own internal narcissistic reward that colors the sex and makes it "better". But I think there's enough to link beauty and psychology to make it a phenomenon that can be found out there.
Surprisingly less common is the idea that plain/ugly girls are great lays. The logic being that they have to be better lays because they can't coast on their looks. Probably also nominally true, but probably less so since many less attractive people are more socially withdrawn and less unlikely to be available, plus the demotivating factor of bad looks may be stronger than the motivating factor of good looks.
Didn't some third party long distance providers create services called "Whatver" and "You Choose" and "I don't care", so that when people were asked for a carrier and said those things they actually got a carrier with that name (who also charged $.25/minute)?
It's funny, but before I got my iPhone I was about to pull the string on a super compact digital camera to keep in the car/laptop bag for those times where I want to take a photo. I already have a decent digital camera for camera purposes, but its too big to lug around and my wife also uses it as well, meaning I can't hang onto it 24/7.
The photos on my iPhone were so much better than my old phone and once I got a 3GS I've largely given up on another camera. I miss zoom and the quality of a real camera, but for incidental pictures the iPhone does "good enough" for me.
That sounds cool. How did you get the adapter kit to make it into a desktop display?
I've always thought it would be useful if laptops had a sort of "reverse" mode for their VGA interfaces that would allow you to use the laptop screen as a display for another device.
It would certainly keep the price of otherwise unusable P3 laptops up as they could continue life as LCD displays.
Where does the punter get the ubiquitous web access? Is he buying the Chrome Netbook from a cell carrier (at a discount) with a 2 year contract for EVDO/3G access? Is he expected to already own that kind of data dongle? What does he do where there's no coverage or all the visible 802.11 APs are locked down?
IMHO the big breakthrough from this new "OS" has to be offline web access where you sync your apps and some of your storage between the device and "the web". Maybe in 2020 internet access will be cheap and ubiquitous enough that an XTerm-network-access kind of "computer" makes sense, but in 2010 it's extremely limited. It works at the iPhone level where data demands are limited now, but it gets harder as you climb the application sophistication ladder and you need continuous fast access to the server end.
I can see why Google has been pushing hard for open spectrum and open access rules, but until you get down that road it makes a device that REQUIRES interactive, high speed internet access seem a little speculative.
Ha! That's the first thing I thought of -- LDS linguists as intelligence moles at the NSA, able (required?) to report back to the LDS leadership council what they find.
FWIW, I have had a great time in Utah. Despite their weird liquor laws, I never had any problem buying or getting served liquor in any restaurant. The roads were good, the skiiing better, and almost no riffraff to be found late night in SLC.
I don't care how many wives they have, as long as they're not porking 15 year olds.
It seems to work fine and I don't notice any additional ads, and when it does update there almost always seems to be something "new" that has been added.
My take is that Gladwell is post-peak and he knows it.
IIRC his last book got kind of panned, and I don't know if the one before that was super well received, either, and the last thing he wants is someone else with "big, revolutionary & daring ideas" shoving him out of the spotlight.
I mean, if that happens, he's just another loudmouth with an iPhone and a bunch of opinions.
Gladwell's "big" ideas and how-smart-am-I delivery I think will be non-starters in a world of 15% unemployment. They may keep going over big among the faux intelligentsia still capable of affording $6 lattes and Kindles, but won't mean shit to those of us sharecropping the back yard.
I hated the cut in the middle of songs, although I don't remember any "good" songs being cut, usually it was mid-album lamers that got cut.
The upside to 8 track was the infinite play capability; critical for those 1970s pot smoking sessions when everyone got too mellow to get up and change the music. Of course this was also the downside, waking up at 4 AM to switch off the Nth playthrough of "Led Zeppelin IV".
Outside is where I have the best luck! I run a half-dozen for external lighting and they all work fine, some running 12+ hours a day, all surviving -20F without any problems.
Inside, CFLs make me crazy. Some fixtures they burn out in constantly, others they work fine, for no apparent reason. I use them if the fixture allows, but in some places it doesn't work (dimmables suck, and quite a large number of existing and even new fixtures are too fucking small).
The best part is up-lamping a fixture to a "100w equivilent" where it normally would only support 60w. Since they consume less power than a 60, you don't have to worry about a fire (just fit!).
Will they standardize on the interface and how its used, though?
For example, my iPhone, as much as I love it, could be claimed to be "USB standard" for power. It comes with a wall brick with a USB-A female jack. The gotcha is the proprietary Apple dock connector cable with a USB-A male end on it. IMHO, this is a standards dodge, even if it is mildly helpful in terms of sourcing power without carrying the brick, too.
If USB is going to be a standard, the device itself needs a female USB jack (micro-B seems to be the new standard standard they're heading towards) usable on its own, WITHOUT the $25 proprietary vendor cable to interface with USB. Vendors can keep including their own proprietary interfaces, too, but it's not really a standard unless the device includes a standard connector.
We also need to avoid the bullshit where the "standard" interface has a cable with a bunch of embedded logic (whether analog or digital) that makes it *look* standard but doesn't actually work with a standard cable.
My guess is vendors will never give up the guilty lock-in pleasures of their nonstandard connectors or the revenue they get from selling $2 cables for $25.
The problem is, fraud is generally more about a one-time theft than duping you into buying inferior goods. When the snake-oil salesman came to town selling his potions, he promised they would work if you took them for 7 days, but he made sure to leave after about 5 days. He didn't care about selling you the same potion over and over, he only needed to sell it to you ONCE.
You're right that market forces will eventually hurt the sellers of inferior goods, but that's not the kind of "fraud" that's most common.
I think some of the smarter scammers have realized that they can take the $2 come-on and the $100 initial renewal essentially forever with no government interference if they are prompt and responsive about canceling subscriptions after that.
It's the scammers who think they can get away with the $2 and many months of the $100 renewals that seem to bring in the government, eventually.
But remember, the scammers alone aren't making money on this. Banks, merchant account providers, etc. all make a cut and work against making these kinds of scams harder to pull off.
I've long argued that spamming/internet fraud operations should be taken down with RICO-style prosecutions that include all the "legitimate" business entities that wink-wink-nudge-nudge participate in the fraud associated with spam. SOMEBODY has to process the credit cards used to buy penis pills, transfer monies, provide hosting, etc. MANY of these entities realize they are dealing with someone less than above board but don't care (or charge more!) and supply services anyway.
Once a few major ISPs, hosting companies, and banks are tied in publicly AND find their senior executives that approved these deals in the dock answering charges they will quickly stop doing business with the "marginal" internet, and the ones who remain will charge such a percentage that there really won't be any money in it anymore.
It's kind of tiresome to watch fraud happen and keep hearing "we can't do anything about it" as if Joe Fraudster were operating out of the back of his car solo without any cooperation. The other thing I like about a RICO prosecution is that the fines and jail sentences were designed around crushing the mafia -- 10 years in prison and $25,000 fines *per count*.
Let's assume that there are an assload of bad aftermarket batteries out there (I'm not convinced there are, I have an aftermarket I bought to use with my Panasonic(!) Lumix camera and it works fine; btw, I love the camera, and David Pogue seems to like Panasonic cameras, too. Anyway...).
If Panasonic ends up with a lot of warranty work, customer service, etc related to these bad batteries, they may actually end up having to charge more for their cameras and/or accessories to cover the cost of the technical support related to bad third party batteries. If they restrict them to Panasonic only batteries, perhaps they will eliminate an expensive support issue that might actually allow them to sell batteries for less, or at least not raise prices as fast.
I'm sure this train of thought has more holes than a collandar, but what we don't know (but assume anyway) is that Panasonic is lying and they only want to do this to clean up selling extra batteries. I'd like to believe in the bogeyman, too, but maybe there is some justification that will streamline their products use/support that actually makes it cheaper/easier to support.
(I'm sure that lame memory cards are much bigger issue, and I'd guess that generally speaking the lithium cells in third party batteries are probably from the same limited number of manufacturers as the Panasonics. But hey, I'm trying to be optimistic...)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the better solution is getting out of your apartment once in a while.
I expect (and want?) a certain amount of iconoclastic thinking to keep things fresh, but the cynicism has reached the point where those who we would most expect to have respect for values, institutions and laws, such as our corporate leadership and politicians, openly flaunt them. The corporate executives are the worst, IMHO, as they basically advertise the idea that obeying the law and rules is for rubes and suckers.
I know they are generally poor countries and the military advantage of nukes must seem appealing, but they could create WAY, WAY more nuisance for Americans if they would devote those resources to basically Pirate Bay-ing everything copy protected. It'd be hilarious if within hours of a new you-can't-copy-it scheme came out if pirated versions were available along with free tools and FAQs for making your own copies or subversion devices.
IIRC, this idea was also (better?) expressed in some science fiction novel I can't remember -- although it was China that basically ruined IP protections.
I think what the space program lacks now is that grand, unifying sense of adventure. Getting there and seeing what's out there are the kind of thing EVERYBODY can get behind -- there's no specific religious, political or racial bias to outer space exploration.
One thing we've stopped figuring out and stopped doing due our own personal greed are the grand, public gestures of government that provide some kind of bigger purpose. People stopped what they were doing to watch the NASA launches and the Apollo missions; literally -- cars pulled over to listen to the radio, people gathered round and took in its majesty. Kids wanted to be astronauts. It looked like we were *going somewhere* as a civilization.
Now we've sharpened our pencil and realized the "better" science is robots, shuttle missions and other non-inspiring projects designed by bean counters, not visionaries. And what do we have? An underfunded, bureaucratic NASA seen as a cash soak and a civilization bent on narcissism, egocentric enrichment and sectarian bias.
I say, send guys to the moon and beyond. Yes, it's expensive (think of the good engineering jobs!), yes the science isn't as "good" as your robots and deep space cameras, but my god, we could USE the civilization-enhancing awe and purpose. North Korea and Iran lambasting our cultural decline? OK fine, but we're reaching for the stars, not getting lost fighting the unwinnable.
I agree that its criminal, but anyone who deals with this knows that you MAKE SURE you negotiate for "above the line" or "pre-expense" percentages of gross, guaranteed $x of the initial gross BEFORE expenses and marketing, as well as pre-production "commitment" fees of about half of what you want to make on the entire project. The latter is most important as it says nothing can even begin production until you get paid.
However it would be really funny to see a few people get charged with felonies for fraud and share a cell with Bernie Madoff.
e. I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Haven't they done cross-cultural studies that tie attractiveness to specific physical characteristics that appear linked to successful child bearing & rearing? Specific bust/waist ratios, etc? Wouldn't it make some kind of sense that the body would invest more resources in a reproductive partner though to be a better child bearer?
The study *I* want to read isn't "Why do hot girls get fucked more?" --- we know that, but we don't know why we put up with all the narcissism and bitchy attitude for the nominal improvement in sex and a palpable dent in our wallets.
Spoken like someone who's never had a shitty lay from a hot girl...
I think there's some folk wisdom beyond the obvious "sour grapes" rationalization. In my experience, many attractive women have a tendency towards narcissism, egomania and a sense of entitlement. *If* she deems you worthy enough to fuck you, that decision is about all the effort she'll put into the entire experience -- you're just supposed to be some grateful and in awe you won't need her to suck your dick or otherwise engage.
Look at the Paris Hilton sex tape -- in many scenes, she's entirely vacant and almost passive while Solomon hammers away with a pretty decent bit of equipment. She's more obsessed with her own appearance, like she's posing.
Now, are all attractive women head cases? No, and the ones that are I'm usually willing to believe are victims of a society that REWARDS superficial beauty and encourages the narcissism, and aren't pathologically evil. And in some cases, sex with a hot girl does have its own internal narcissistic reward that colors the sex and makes it "better". But I think there's enough to link beauty and psychology to make it a phenomenon that can be found out there.
Surprisingly less common is the idea that plain/ugly girls are great lays. The logic being that they have to be better lays because they can't coast on their looks. Probably also nominally true, but probably less so since many less attractive people are more socially withdrawn and less unlikely to be available, plus the demotivating factor of bad looks may be stronger than the motivating factor of good looks.
Didn't some third party long distance providers create services called "Whatver" and "You Choose" and "I don't care", so that when people were asked for a carrier and said those things they actually got a carrier with that name (who also charged $.25/minute)?
It's funny, but before I got my iPhone I was about to pull the string on a super compact digital camera to keep in the car/laptop bag for those times where I want to take a photo. I already have a decent digital camera for camera purposes, but its too big to lug around and my wife also uses it as well, meaning I can't hang onto it 24/7.
The photos on my iPhone were so much better than my old phone and once I got a 3GS I've largely given up on another camera. I miss zoom and the quality of a real camera, but for incidental pictures the iPhone does "good enough" for me.
That sounds cool. How did you get the adapter kit to make it into a desktop display?
I've always thought it would be useful if laptops had a sort of "reverse" mode for their VGA interfaces that would allow you to use the laptop screen as a display for another device.
It would certainly keep the price of otherwise unusable P3 laptops up as they could continue life as LCD displays.
Where does the punter get the ubiquitous web access? Is he buying the Chrome Netbook from a cell carrier (at a discount) with a 2 year contract for EVDO/3G access? Is he expected to already own that kind of data dongle? What does he do where there's no coverage or all the visible 802.11 APs are locked down?
IMHO the big breakthrough from this new "OS" has to be offline web access where you sync your apps and some of your storage between the device and "the web". Maybe in 2020 internet access will be cheap and ubiquitous enough that an XTerm-network-access kind of "computer" makes sense, but in 2010 it's extremely limited. It works at the iPhone level where data demands are limited now, but it gets harder as you climb the application sophistication ladder and you need continuous fast access to the server end.
I can see why Google has been pushing hard for open spectrum and open access rules, but until you get down that road it makes a device that REQUIRES interactive, high speed internet access seem a little speculative.
It was a different time back then. You could kill a man for stealing your horse and people looked down on you if you didn't.
That prosecution has to be about the worst use of government funds ever. It makes the Iraq war look like a responsible use of government money.
Do you think she goes home at night and talks to her family about her tireless sacrifice in the never ending struggle against evildoers?
Ha! That's the first thing I thought of -- LDS linguists as intelligence moles at the NSA, able (required?) to report back to the LDS leadership council what they find.
FWIW, I have had a great time in Utah. Despite their weird liquor laws, I never had any problem buying or getting served liquor in any restaurant. The roads were good, the skiiing better, and almost no riffraff to be found late night in SLC.
I don't care how many wives they have, as long as they're not porking 15 year olds.
Are you sure about that?
It seems to work fine and I don't notice any additional ads, and when it does update there almost always seems to be something "new" that has been added.
My take is that Gladwell is post-peak and he knows it.
IIRC his last book got kind of panned, and I don't know if the one before that was super well received, either, and the last thing he wants is someone else with "big, revolutionary & daring ideas" shoving him out of the spotlight.
I mean, if that happens, he's just another loudmouth with an iPhone and a bunch of opinions.
Gladwell's "big" ideas and how-smart-am-I delivery I think will be non-starters in a world of 15% unemployment. They may keep going over big among the faux intelligentsia still capable of affording $6 lattes and Kindles, but won't mean shit to those of us sharecropping the back yard.
I hated the cut in the middle of songs, although I don't remember any "good" songs being cut, usually it was mid-album lamers that got cut.
The upside to 8 track was the infinite play capability; critical for those 1970s pot smoking sessions when everyone got too mellow to get up and change the music. Of course this was also the downside, waking up at 4 AM to switch off the Nth playthrough of "Led Zeppelin IV".
Outside is where I have the best luck! I run a half-dozen for external lighting and they all work fine, some running 12+ hours a day, all surviving -20F without any problems.
Inside, CFLs make me crazy. Some fixtures they burn out in constantly, others they work fine, for no apparent reason. I use them if the fixture allows, but in some places it doesn't work (dimmables suck, and quite a large number of existing and even new fixtures are too fucking small).
The best part is up-lamping a fixture to a "100w equivilent" where it normally would only support 60w. Since they consume less power than a 60, you don't have to worry about a fire (just fit!).
Will they standardize on the interface and how its used, though?
For example, my iPhone, as much as I love it, could be claimed to be "USB standard" for power. It comes with a wall brick with a USB-A female jack. The gotcha is the proprietary Apple dock connector cable with a USB-A male end on it. IMHO, this is a standards dodge, even if it is mildly helpful in terms of sourcing power without carrying the brick, too.
If USB is going to be a standard, the device itself needs a female USB jack (micro-B seems to be the new standard standard they're heading towards) usable on its own, WITHOUT the $25 proprietary vendor cable to interface with USB. Vendors can keep including their own proprietary interfaces, too, but it's not really a standard unless the device includes a standard connector.
We also need to avoid the bullshit where the "standard" interface has a cable with a bunch of embedded logic (whether analog or digital) that makes it *look* standard but doesn't actually work with a standard cable.
My guess is vendors will never give up the guilty lock-in pleasures of their nonstandard connectors or the revenue they get from selling $2 cables for $25.
The problem is, fraud is generally more about a one-time theft than duping you into buying inferior goods. When the snake-oil salesman came to town selling his potions, he promised they would work if you took them for 7 days, but he made sure to leave after about 5 days. He didn't care about selling you the same potion over and over, he only needed to sell it to you ONCE.
You're right that market forces will eventually hurt the sellers of inferior goods, but that's not the kind of "fraud" that's most common.
I think some of the smarter scammers have realized that they can take the $2 come-on and the $100 initial renewal essentially forever with no government interference if they are prompt and responsive about canceling subscriptions after that.
It's the scammers who think they can get away with the $2 and many months of the $100 renewals that seem to bring in the government, eventually.
But remember, the scammers alone aren't making money on this. Banks, merchant account providers, etc. all make a cut and work against making these kinds of scams harder to pull off.
I've long argued that spamming/internet fraud operations should be taken down with RICO-style prosecutions that include all the "legitimate" business entities that wink-wink-nudge-nudge participate in the fraud associated with spam. SOMEBODY has to process the credit cards used to buy penis pills, transfer monies, provide hosting, etc. MANY of these entities realize they are dealing with someone less than above board but don't care (or charge more!) and supply services anyway.
Once a few major ISPs, hosting companies, and banks are tied in publicly AND find their senior executives that approved these deals in the dock answering charges they will quickly stop doing business with the "marginal" internet, and the ones who remain will charge such a percentage that there really won't be any money in it anymore.
It's kind of tiresome to watch fraud happen and keep hearing "we can't do anything about it" as if Joe Fraudster were operating out of the back of his car solo without any cooperation. The other thing I like about a RICO prosecution is that the fines and jail sentences were designed around crushing the mafia -- 10 years in prison and $25,000 fines *per count*.
Could it possibly lead to cheaper batteries?
Let's assume that there are an assload of bad aftermarket batteries out there (I'm not convinced there are, I have an aftermarket I bought to use with my Panasonic(!) Lumix camera and it works fine; btw, I love the camera, and David Pogue seems to like Panasonic cameras, too. Anyway...).
If Panasonic ends up with a lot of warranty work, customer service, etc related to these bad batteries, they may actually end up having to charge more for their cameras and/or accessories to cover the cost of the technical support related to bad third party batteries. If they restrict them to Panasonic only batteries, perhaps they will eliminate an expensive support issue that might actually allow them to sell batteries for less, or at least not raise prices as fast.
I'm sure this train of thought has more holes than a collandar, but what we don't know (but assume anyway) is that Panasonic is lying and they only want to do this to clean up selling extra batteries. I'd like to believe in the bogeyman, too, but maybe there is some justification that will streamline their products use/support that actually makes it cheaper/easier to support.
(I'm sure that lame memory cards are much bigger issue, and I'd guess that generally speaking the lithium cells in third party batteries are probably from the same limited number of manufacturers as the Panasonics. But hey, I'm trying to be optimistic...)
"...Ralsky acknowledges he is facing up to 87 months in A FEDERAL, POUND-ME-IN-THE-ASS prison..."
There, fixed it.