Let's presume you get this treatment and have a potential for a 1000 year lifespan. Let's go one step further and presume you're a successful person who through thrift and luck is able to achieve a financial nest-egg that eliminates the need to work for money and allows for some amount of leisure spending.
After 200 odd years, won't you have "seen it all"? Trips to all continents, all attractions, every museum, etc?
What about your spouse?
If you don't make enough for a permanent retirement, will you "retire" for a few years and then head off to college again? Get a new degree and start a new career?
To me this raises the same questions that extended use of the anti-narcolepsy drug modafinil raises -- how much capacity does the human mind have for experience?
...is one of the great tax inequities. Tax only income up to a certain level...
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the FICA tax ceiling been in place unchanged for 30+ years? And in that same time, high wage earners who USED to pay into FICA year round now stop doing so at some point in the fall (or earlier), essentially shielding some of their income from taxes and denying FICA some of the payroll taxes it used to get, at least on an inflation adjusted basis?
To me, raising the FICA ceiling or eliminating it completely would adjust contributions to better match whatever actuarial model was used in the first place.
Amazing! "Free pussy" and brains switch off!
on
MyDoom Strikes Again
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I'm continually amazed by how quickly people turn their brains off when "free pussy" is in the air..
What accounts for the continuing popularity of the "classic rock" format, then? I'll wager it made some sense in the (early) 1980s when some of the bands that fit this format actually put out new records, toured and looked like something other than Dorian Gray's portrait.
My wife and I were at a restaurant and the muzak being played was a string of classic rock songs; we wondered if anyone noticed that the music they were listening to was in some cases nearly 40 years old. I can't remember the widespread popularity of 40 year old music in 1985, other than an AM station that played Glenn Miller type music that even MY parents wouldn't listen to, and they were born in '35.
Even today bands like Aerosmith, Elton John, Rolling Stones, etc are STILL featured on TV or other SuperMegaPopStar events. It makes you wonder if we need to wait 20 years for them all to finally die off before something else will replace them, besides the continual churn in the narrow top 10 category.
I'm not kidding. You'll see them both in your spouse, yourself, your child, and see them reflected in anecdotes from other parents about them, their spouses and children.
I'm willing to say that some are socialization driven, but not all of them. Some of them HAVE to be based on physical differences, whether its neurological, hormone-driven psychological changes, or something originating in physical differences.
Plus, there's the cross-cultural differences in gender. How to account for $remote_tribal_people having gender differences and specilializations if there's not some physical basis for it?
Tivo needs (needed?) to not view its hardware as a mere commodity to be given away, but instead as a platform for innovation in and of itself. I'd consider buying a new Tivo if they did something else more interesting, such as allow for storage expansion via Firewire, DVD burners via Firewire, fast ethernet connectivity, etc.
That there has been no compelling reason for a geek to buy new Tivo hardware since I bought my standalone S2 in 2002 is pretty shameful (I don't have DirecTV, so HDDirecTivo isn't an option). It's super shameful that they won't have a CableCard HDTivo until 2006.
Dunno if a hardware move would help now, but hurrying along the CableCard-enabled HD Tivo would sure help.
Tivo also needs to keep their software moving forward; why not an IMDB tie-in (and hence, Amazon) to the details of a show on now playing? Leverage IMDB & broadband to provide me more show info. Use Amazon to generate DVD sales and comissions. This might sound too commercial, but it could be done at least as tastefully as the ads on the main menu.
And add a "geek" mode where we can have access to greater preferences and more recorder control (logical and/or searhces, 'don't ever record', on and on...)
Tivo spends too much time BSing around with features not core to the experience (Tivo2Go, HMO).
In order to do licensed development of HDMI components (on the sending or receiving end), it runs about 30k... for the licensing alone! After that of course you have the joys of per unit costs, which we don't care about so much.
Is Hollywood greed killing Hollywood greed?
Are they actually greedy enough to want to not only license their DRM technology to people who would actually implement it, thus stifling their ability to completely cripple fair use?
Or is this a subtle way that electronics companies accomplish this -- engage Hollywood in DRM technology, settle on standard, quietly charge big bucks to hardware developers knowing full well they won't adopt your does-nothing-other-technology-can't-but-DRM, continue using cheaper/easier/DRM-less technologies, continue selling tons of copy-enabled (at least somewhat) technology to eager consumers?
Or is this just one of those "barrier to entry" fees that keeps HDMI development kits out of the hands of small players and off eBay so that its secrets stay secret longer?
Now that I've said that, how is this not a legal issue for Cisco? Surely the FBI, DEA, and assorted other federal agencies would be all over Cisco if they were helping Colombian drug cartels in any way whatsoever. How do they "get away" with it?
The same way they "get away" with furthering Chinese censorship.
Amen! Your last point, although valid, lacks any historical presidence of ever taking place. We have rarely ever decreased to penalty for a 'crime' that is on the books, (except for prohibition).
This really isn't true. Historically cattle rustling and horse stealing were capital offenses. I'd be surprised if a first time cattle rustler even went to jail for more than six months, the same with horse stealing.
Legislators even saw the light to some extent with marijuana decriminalization in the 1970s -- what was once a guaranteed jail sentence for small amounts of pot is now a traffic-ticket offense. Of course this is counterbalanced with the extreme federal sentencing for other aspects of drug posession.
I think what we're seeing today is the beginning of the end of the "tough on crime" initiatives that began in the early 80s as an antitode for the increases in crime in the late 70s. Historically we began "reforming" instead of "punishing" criminals in the 1950s and by the mid-70s the demographics of the baby boom produced a lot of crime and a lot of public outrage at the "revolving door" of the prison system.
By the early 80s, polticians were eagerly lining up to vote on measures that made life without parole a common punishment. When the legislators discovered that judicial sentencing discretion wasn't implementing this mandate, they (temporarily, at least) eliminated this as well and we got to where we are now.
I think that the economic pressures of this are starting to show (if not the lack of rationality). When you jail 1 in 20(?) people, it costs money. A lot of money. Unfortunately we probably still aren't smart enough to figure out that some people SHOULD be jailed for a long time for both retribution and public safety (robbery, rape, assault, murder, kidnapping) and some people really shouldn't (most drug posession charges).
We'll either figure out that permanently jailing a significant portion of the population is at the very least economically untenable or we'll use terrorism and the war on $arbitrary_social_paranoia to just continue sliding into a police state.
* We can't see the light on the victimless crime of drug consumption and insist on sending people growing pot to prison for 20 years.
* "Tough on crime" legislators have implemented such corrections gems as "3 strikes and you're out" so that a shoplifter who takes 3 items from 3 departments in a store gets nailed with 3 counts of shoplifting and goes to prison for life as a career criminal.
* The same legislators have also implemented manditory sentencing (which the Supreme Court just modified), requiring the above pot grower's wife to be considered a co-conspirator and sent to jail for 20 years, whether she knew he was growing it or not.
NONE Of this makes punishing the organized fraud known as spam some kind of exercise in penalty escalation. Computer hijacking, relay hijacking, falsifying information deceptive advertising, ineffective products, fake products, undelivered products -- at what point is punishing people for stealing wrong? Because someone can sit in their basement and do it on a computer doesn't make it any less impactful or less deserving of punishment.
Criminal punishments involving prison time have to be meted out at least initially so that the people involved won't just chalk up civil fines as the price of doing business and keep doing it.
Spam involves criminal activity (fraud at the least). It involves many people (mail-senders, product suppliers, and some legitimate businesses like credit card processors, banks, and ISPs).
Smells like a Racketerr-Influenced Corrupt Organization to me. Anyone even remotely involved gets a ticket to the proverbial Federal PMITA prison for 20 years, $100k in fines.
These penalties and a wide net are all that can influence spam.
Mother Jones? The Nation? On the mainstreem side, perhaps the Atlantic Monthly or the New Yorker, although the latter doesn't do that much in-depth investigative journalism.
All cynacism aside, even the Wall Street Journal is known for occasionally biting the hand that feeds it.
And you have to give some credit to journalists and editors; at some of the major newsweeklies and national papers, they don't have a problem with pissing off big money and take the "firewall" between the editorial side and the business side seriously.
Plus this is one of the populist issues that really pisses people off.
But more generally I will cede to you the idea that corporate ownership of the media generally means weak coverage of corporate America when there's any at all.
Does it come as a surprise that our business class would be interested in forcing software onto people they "have" to run so that they can collect information and enrich themselves?
Does it come as a surprise that our business class generally believes that a removing consumer choice and privacy are a good thing?
I'm kind of waiting for a significant investigative peice in the media spyware, spam and its relationship with more "traditional" businesses whose only real motivation for staying out of that space is their reputation.
1) Very compact and portable form factor display, keyboard and mouse. A huge bonus if its an actual laptop, too.
2) When the laptop is obsolete as a computer, it's still a usable display, keyboard and mouse combination.
I've tossed more laptops than I care to remember, but would keep them all (well, at least the 800x600 ones) if they could be used as displays at the very least.
Most rack environments I've been around have been both short on available rack units and in need of a test/management PC, especially if diagnosing something that required client connectivity. They're also usually short on space period, meaning that if you're lucky you can scrunch up on the floor or immediately out on the hallway. If not, you're doing a lot of running around. And usually the flakiest ones have the least amount of space and have removed their displays and keyboards from the rack, too.
A laptop that could be a monitor/keyboard/mouse AND a PC at the same time would be a godsend in those environments. At 1 U it would easily fit. It would also remain valuable for a long time as a compact one-device KVM for years after its computing ability went obsolete.
I've always wondered what "extra" circuitry was involved in doing this. It can't be much.
Um...you do realize they're blackmailing him, right?
You do realize that blackmail was/is one of the most effective tools available to most intelligence services for turning people, don't you? Usually it's along the lines of "give us X or we tell everyone you're gay/having an affair/a pedophile/etc".
Makes 'em hard to trust, but I'd imagine that some guy caught in the act and hired by the secret service is kept on a leash so tight the ASPCA has complaints.
I'll agree with you, but I think it might be an example of the Feds "doing something" just to hit tick boxes on the Administration's agenda. "Spam, check. Christian values, check."
If they were REALLY serious about doing this we'd have a serious FBI/FTC RICO sting operation that would take down some ISPs, some credit card merchant processors, and a whole bunch of other "legitimate" people in addition to the spammers.
This would have the net effect of cutting off the "air supply" of the spam industry by scaring away those people who make money off of spam businesses.
This kind of blustering, while it feels encouraging, really is about appearing to do something about (a) spam and (b) defending traditional moral values, not about actually accomplishing anything.
I didn't think that this inteface really had anything to do with this.
But it gave me the chance to ask on a low-traffic/. article related to laptops about my favorite missing feature, the ability to use the laptop display as a monitor. And while we're at it, why not the ability to use a laptop's hardware as an entire KVM?
Where I think it would be truly useful is in a rack situation where a generic PC would be handy and where you'd waste space with a traditional KVM solution. Racking another PC would be a waste of space/money, and the laptop itself would eliminate the need for KVM.
I'd love to be able to use my laptop as a monitor for either analog or VGA-type video signals. Does anyone make a laptop that allows you to input video to the LCD display? I know there are analog input solutions via USB or Firewire, but nothing that lets me use the LCD display as a display independent of the CPU.
What do you *really* get, though? Is it just bikini shots of that admittedly buxom gal? Or are we really gonna get full-fledged, Hustler-magazine quality nude shots of her? Close ups of her pussy, ass, tits, etc? Perhaps a finger stuck in? Do you get to decide?
The other thing that occured to me from browsing that category is that those are just some clothed shots from an alt.binaries.amateur series and that it's not really nudies from his girlfriend.
Perhaps a more compelling auction would be actual sex, but that might be hard to get past Ebay's rules. He's certainly _implying_ that they're nudie shots.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's presume you get this treatment and have a potential for a 1000 year lifespan. Let's go one step further and presume you're a successful person who through thrift and luck is able to achieve a financial nest-egg that eliminates the need to work for money and allows for some amount of leisure spending.
After 200 odd years, won't you have "seen it all"? Trips to all continents, all attractions, every museum, etc?
What about your spouse?
If you don't make enough for a permanent retirement, will you "retire" for a few years and then head off to college again? Get a new degree and start a new career?
To me this raises the same questions that extended use of the anti-narcolepsy drug modafinil raises -- how much capacity does the human mind have for experience?
...is one of the great tax inequities. Tax only income up to a certain level...
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the FICA tax ceiling been in place unchanged for 30+ years? And in that same time, high wage earners who USED to pay into FICA year round now stop doing so at some point in the fall (or earlier), essentially shielding some of their income from taxes and denying FICA some of the payroll taxes it used to get, at least on an inflation adjusted basis?
To me, raising the FICA ceiling or eliminating it completely would adjust contributions to better match whatever actuarial model was used in the first place.
I'm continually amazed by how quickly people turn their brains off when "free pussy" is in the air..
What accounts for the continuing popularity of the "classic rock" format, then? I'll wager it made some sense in the (early) 1980s when some of the bands that fit this format actually put out new records, toured and looked like something other than Dorian Gray's portrait.
My wife and I were at a restaurant and the muzak being played was a string of classic rock songs; we wondered if anyone noticed that the music they were listening to was in some cases nearly 40 years old. I can't remember the widespread popularity of 40 year old music in 1985, other than an AM station that played Glenn Miller type music that even MY parents wouldn't listen to, and they were born in '35.
Even today bands like Aerosmith, Elton John, Rolling Stones, etc are STILL featured on TV or other SuperMegaPopStar events. It makes you wonder if we need to wait 20 years for them all to finally die off before something else will replace them, besides the continual churn in the narrow top 10 category.
I'm not kidding. You'll see them both in your spouse, yourself, your child, and see them reflected in anecdotes from other parents about them, their spouses and children.
I'm willing to say that some are socialization driven, but not all of them. Some of them HAVE to be based on physical differences, whether its neurological, hormone-driven psychological changes, or something originating in physical differences.
Plus, there's the cross-cultural differences in gender. How to account for $remote_tribal_people having gender differences and specilializations if there's not some physical basis for it?
Tivo needs (needed?) to not view its hardware as a mere commodity to be given away, but instead as a platform for innovation in and of itself. I'd consider buying a new Tivo if they did something else more interesting, such as allow for storage expansion via Firewire, DVD burners via Firewire, fast ethernet connectivity, etc.
That there has been no compelling reason for a geek to buy new Tivo hardware since I bought my standalone S2 in 2002 is pretty shameful (I don't have DirecTV, so HDDirecTivo isn't an option). It's super shameful that they won't have a CableCard HDTivo until 2006.
Dunno if a hardware move would help now, but hurrying along the CableCard-enabled HD Tivo would sure help.
Tivo also needs to keep their software moving forward; why not an IMDB tie-in (and hence, Amazon) to the details of a show on now playing? Leverage IMDB & broadband to provide me more show info. Use Amazon to generate DVD sales and comissions. This might sound too commercial, but it could be done at least as tastefully as the ads on the main menu.
And add a "geek" mode where we can have access to greater preferences and more recorder control (logical and/or searhces, 'don't ever record', on and on...)
Tivo spends too much time BSing around with features not core to the experience (Tivo2Go, HMO).
In order to do licensed development of HDMI components (on the sending or receiving end), it runs about 30k... for the licensing alone! After that of course you have the joys of per unit costs, which we don't care about so much.
Is Hollywood greed killing Hollywood greed?
Are they actually greedy enough to want to not only license their DRM technology to people who would actually implement it, thus stifling their ability to completely cripple fair use?
Or is this a subtle way that electronics companies accomplish this -- engage Hollywood in DRM technology, settle on standard, quietly charge big bucks to hardware developers knowing full well they won't adopt your does-nothing-other-technology-can't-but-DRM, continue using cheaper/easier/DRM-less technologies, continue selling tons of copy-enabled (at least somewhat) technology to eager consumers?
Or is this just one of those "barrier to entry" fees that keeps HDMI development kits out of the hands of small players and off eBay so that its secrets stay secret longer?
Now that I've said that, how is this not a legal issue for Cisco? Surely the FBI, DEA, and assorted other federal agencies would be all over Cisco if they were helping Colombian drug cartels in any way whatsoever. How do they "get away" with it?
The same way they "get away" with furthering Chinese censorship.
Amen! Your last point, although valid, lacks any historical presidence of ever taking place. We have rarely ever decreased to penalty for a 'crime' that is on the books, (except for prohibition).
This really isn't true. Historically cattle rustling and horse stealing were capital offenses. I'd be surprised if a first time cattle rustler even went to jail for more than six months, the same with horse stealing.
Legislators even saw the light to some extent with marijuana decriminalization in the 1970s -- what was once a guaranteed jail sentence for small amounts of pot is now a traffic-ticket offense. Of course this is counterbalanced with the extreme federal sentencing for other aspects of drug posession.
I think what we're seeing today is the beginning of the end of the "tough on crime" initiatives that began in the early 80s as an antitode for the increases in crime in the late 70s. Historically we began "reforming" instead of "punishing" criminals in the 1950s and by the mid-70s the demographics of the baby boom produced a lot of crime and a lot of public outrage at the "revolving door" of the prison system.
By the early 80s, polticians were eagerly lining up to vote on measures that made life without parole a common punishment. When the legislators discovered that judicial sentencing discretion wasn't implementing this mandate, they (temporarily, at least) eliminated this as well and we got to where we are now.
I think that the economic pressures of this are starting to show (if not the lack of rationality). When you jail 1 in 20(?) people, it costs money. A lot of money. Unfortunately we probably still aren't smart enough to figure out that some people SHOULD be jailed for a long time for both retribution and public safety (robbery, rape, assault, murder, kidnapping) and some people really shouldn't (most drug posession charges).
We'll either figure out that permanently jailing a significant portion of the population is at the very least economically untenable or we'll use terrorism and the war on $arbitrary_social_paranoia to just continue sliding into a police state.
Was Appleworks available before the //e came out? I thought it was a //e package.
We have a supersized prison population because:
* We can't see the light on the victimless crime of drug consumption and insist on sending people growing pot to prison for 20 years.
* "Tough on crime" legislators have implemented such corrections gems as "3 strikes and you're out" so that a shoplifter who takes 3 items from 3 departments in a store gets nailed with 3 counts of shoplifting and goes to prison for life as a career criminal.
* The same legislators have also implemented manditory sentencing (which the Supreme Court just modified), requiring the above pot grower's wife to be considered a co-conspirator and sent to jail for 20 years, whether she knew he was growing it or not.
NONE Of this makes punishing the organized fraud known as spam some kind of exercise in penalty escalation. Computer hijacking, relay hijacking, falsifying information deceptive advertising, ineffective products, fake products, undelivered products -- at what point is punishing people for stealing wrong? Because someone can sit in their basement and do it on a computer doesn't make it any less impactful or less deserving of punishment.
Criminal punishments involving prison time have to be meted out at least initially so that the people involved won't just chalk up civil fines as the price of doing business and keep doing it.
Spam involves criminal activity (fraud at the least). It involves many people (mail-senders, product suppliers, and some legitimate businesses like credit card processors, banks, and ISPs).
Smells like a Racketerr-Influenced Corrupt Organization to me. Anyone even remotely involved gets a ticket to the proverbial Federal PMITA prison for 20 years, $100k in fines.
These penalties and a wide net are all that can influence spam.
1) A CableCard compatible TV tuner with HD support. I would have bought one yesterday for this alone.
2) Digital audio out.
3) Component video out (perhaps not needed if your TV supports DVI).
4) SVideo/composite video in.
5) Inlcuded remote control that drove a decent "iTV" application that could do basic Tivo-like functions.
Mother Jones? The Nation? On the mainstreem side, perhaps the Atlantic Monthly or the New Yorker, although the latter doesn't do that much in-depth investigative journalism.
All cynacism aside, even the Wall Street Journal is known for occasionally biting the hand that feeds it.
And you have to give some credit to journalists and editors; at some of the major newsweeklies and national papers, they don't have a problem with pissing off big money and take the "firewall" between the editorial side and the business side seriously.
Plus this is one of the populist issues that really pisses people off.
But more generally I will cede to you the idea that corporate ownership of the media generally means weak coverage of corporate America when there's any at all.
Does it come as a surprise that our business class would be interested in forcing software onto people they "have" to run so that they can collect information and enrich themselves?
Does it come as a surprise that our business class generally believes that a removing consumer choice and privacy are a good thing?
I'm kind of waiting for a significant investigative peice in the media spyware, spam and its relationship with more "traditional" businesses whose only real motivation for staying out of that space is their reputation.
..in this isn't remote admin or even rack admin.
1) Very compact and portable form factor display, keyboard and mouse. A huge bonus if its an actual laptop, too.
2) When the laptop is obsolete as a computer, it's still a usable display, keyboard and mouse combination.
I've tossed more laptops than I care to remember, but would keep them all (well, at least the 800x600 ones) if they could be used as displays at the very least.
Most rack environments I've been around have been both short on available rack units and in need of a test/management PC, especially if diagnosing something that required client connectivity. They're also usually short on space period, meaning that if you're lucky you can scrunch up on the floor or immediately out on the hallway. If not, you're doing a lot of running around. And usually the flakiest ones have the least amount of space and have removed their displays and keyboards from the rack, too.
A laptop that could be a monitor/keyboard/mouse AND a PC at the same time would be a godsend in those environments. At 1 U it would easily fit. It would also remain valuable for a long time as a compact one-device KVM for years after its computing ability went obsolete.
I've always wondered what "extra" circuitry was involved in doing this. It can't be much.
It's like so many other things that people in the government (typically the security apparatus) can do that citizens can't.
The advantage that blackmail has, however, is that with the right leverage, your subject is unlikely to be able to do anything about it.
Of course the downside is that blackmailers have a high rate of early death.
Um...you do realize they're blackmailing him, right?
You do realize that blackmail was/is one of the most effective tools available to most intelligence services for turning people, don't you? Usually it's along the lines of "give us X or we tell everyone you're gay/having an affair/a pedophile/etc".
Makes 'em hard to trust, but I'd imagine that some guy caught in the act and hired by the secret service is kept on a leash so tight the ASPCA has complaints.
I'll agree with you, but I think it might be an example of the Feds "doing something" just to hit tick boxes on the Administration's agenda. "Spam, check. Christian values, check."
If they were REALLY serious about doing this we'd have a serious FBI/FTC RICO sting operation that would take down some ISPs, some credit card merchant processors, and a whole bunch of other "legitimate" people in addition to the spammers.
This would have the net effect of cutting off the "air supply" of the spam industry by scaring away those people who make money off of spam businesses.
This kind of blustering, while it feels encouraging, really is about appearing to do something about (a) spam and (b) defending traditional moral values, not about actually accomplishing anything.
Alright, simmer down.
/. article related to laptops about my favorite missing feature, the ability to use the laptop display as a monitor. And while we're at it, why not the ability to use a laptop's hardware as an entire KVM?
I didn't think that this inteface really had anything to do with this.
But it gave me the chance to ask on a low-traffic
Where I think it would be truly useful is in a rack situation where a generic PC would be handy and where you'd waste space with a traditional KVM solution. Racking another PC would be a waste of space/money, and the laptop itself would eliminate the need for KVM.
I'd love to be able to use my laptop as a monitor for either analog or VGA-type video signals. Does anyone make a laptop that allows you to input video to the LCD display? I know there are analog input solutions via USB or Firewire, but nothing that lets me use the LCD display as a display independent of the CPU.
Insertable USB solves the form-factor problem, but what about the bandwidth problem?
That's totally hilarious!
What do you *really* get, though? Is it just bikini shots of that admittedly buxom gal? Or are we really gonna get full-fledged, Hustler-magazine quality nude shots of her? Close ups of her pussy, ass, tits, etc? Perhaps a finger stuck in? Do you get to decide?
The other thing that occured to me from browsing that category is that those are just some clothed shots from an alt.binaries.amateur series and that it's not really nudies from his girlfriend.
Perhaps a more compelling auction would be actual sex, but that might be hard to get past Ebay's rules. He's certainly _implying_ that they're nudie shots.
"Please mention placement code 36D when ordering."