Oh, yes. That's right. Keep track of your daily life and the events therein. Kind of like a diary, really. That way, if anything truly interesting happens in your life, it's recorded into history. Like say, if an 10.5 earthquake were to strike and wipe out the city you live in. Then you (or historians, for that matter) can look back on your life as it was before, what life was like trying to recover from the event, and how your life had changed afterwards.
Personally, I started a blog during a major event at my workplace that happened shortly before I was married. I work at an ISP, and one summer several years ago it was hell on wheels for several months as our servers, our ISP, our telco, and our network all conspired to make our customers' lives difficult. I started to wonder if this sort of thing had happened in the early days of the telephone network, and we had learned through painful experience how this new technology needed to be made better.
Just because occasionally, shit happens in people's lives that really, truly *is* news (say, if I were vacationing in Beruit this past week) and they happen to write about it in their personal journals, does not make them journalists. However, for some bizarre reason professional journalists seem to think that this is the case, and that they're competing with them.
No, at best Livejournal is the diary of Anne Frank. Before it was published. If it had been published (as Livejournal does) as it was happening, I suppose that would have been news or something. But that wouldn't really make Anne Frank a journalist, would it?
So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?
Well, I suppose that all depends on how you define an expensive camera.
$300, while expensive, is not expensive for a camera. Kind of like how $3000 is not expensive for a car.
Expensive cameras generally start at around $900. That's around where professional SLR digital cameras *start*, and go up from there. And believe me, anyone who spends $2000+ on a camera, doesn't fuck around with buying cheap cards. That's in no small part because they need very *large* memory cards to store pictures in RAW format.
"Most of us" don't spend that much money on a camera. Most of us spend around $300-$500. And thus, since we generally don't have a lot of money left over to spend, it's spent on cheap memory cards. Not that it's a big deal these days, since today's cheap memory cards are last week's hella fast and large memory cards. I just picked up a 1 gig SD card that's rated at 133x for $30. And I'm told I could have gotten it at 1/3 that cost elsewhere. Our Canon A80 has a 1x write 256M CF card from 2 years ago, and it was considerably more expensive than that.
The problem with school in America is this nasty tendency towards it being publicly funded. I realized this is a problem when I saw "Jamie Oliver's School Dinners" and the school administration was complaining that the school lunch program was going over budget. Their budget? 37 pence per child. According to XE.com today, that's a grand total of $0.68 USD. People send their kids to school every frickin' day with junk food that costs eight times that, and the school is under pressure from the taxpayers to keep this stupidly low budget?
The problem with public anything is that taxpayers bitch and whine and complain endlessly about how high their taxes are, and the politicians who promise to lower them are the ones that get into office. Consequently, no matter how pure and good the cause being funded by the public is, or how much the public would pay for the service if it weren't public, it will be squeezed into irrelevence by these forces. It could even be described as a tragedy of the commons.
Until you can make a community wireless network large enough to cover > 50% of your market, then you will fail as an ISP. And would you like to take a guess as to how much money *that* will cost? Way more money than people are willing to pay, that's how much. Around here, a single radio license costs somewhere around $100,000.
With the focus in the past few decades on feelings, emotions, and our complete obsession with "our inner child." It's not surprising at all, it's been a while since we cared about some responsibility.
You're clearly one who hasn't RTFA. In said article, they mentioned that the "problem" is one that has been becoming more prevalent over the past century, due not to pop psychology, but to the fact that more and more of us are getting better formal educated long into adulthood.
Honestly, I think it's all crap though. You want to talk about abdication of responsibility by adults and sensation-seeking? Throughout the 19th century, most men drank, and drank hard. Often to the detriment of their families, their jobs, and society as a whole. Today, alcoholism isn't anywhere near as big of a problem. During the 18th century in Europe, it was fashionable for those who could afford it to have their children raised exclusively by nannies, so that the parents could lead lives of wild debauchery and baccanalia.
You want to talk about short cycles of arbitrary fashion? Throughout all of history, human beings have subjected themselves to all manner of torture and mutilation for the benefit of the fashion of the day. From chinese foot-binding to African body piercing and neck-stretching, to the actual flattening of people's skulls (Aztecs, I think).
I don't know what ideal period that TFA's author believes to exist, but I file this entire article under "get off my lawn, you damn kids!" Besides, it's thin on details and proof, and I'm extremely skeptical that there is any real evidence of this effect.
Where was Mom and Dad when the minor went on a date with a 19 year old?
14 year old girls date 19 year olds all the time. It's because the 14 year old girls *like* it that way. And moreover, sexual assaults usually don't result, except in the context of statutory rape.
This issue really rubs a sore spot on me. It's right up there along with that stupid "no means no" campaign, and that stupid "just don't rape" meme I've seen on LiveJournal. The fundamental issue here is that some people get off on hurting other people. For the purpose of brevity, let's call these people... oh, I don't know... maybe "evil".
The difference between the actions of a good person and an evil person under any circumstances in which rape occurs have little to nothing to do with the actions of the victim. A girl could show up on a guy's doorstep 15 minutes after meeting him online, get naked, and if he's a decent guy, she'd have a really good time. If he's a psychopath instead, he'd beat and rape her for six hours before dumping her in an alley. Sure, her behaviour is risky, but she didn't *cause* the rape to happen.
No amount of propaganda to clear up any confusion about when a girl means no, laws to ensure age verification of myspace users, or efforts to make little girls sweet as pie so they don't offend anyone, will fix the problem. What *will* fix the problem is if victims of rape actually press charges and the courts actually convict rapists. Society will be safe from that man for the duration of his sentence, if nothing else.
Of course, articles about "scientists" refuting global warming are a dime a dozen, and go against the plain fact that the vast majority of climate scientists are firmly convinced of its existence.
This is why when I see an article on any controversial subject that uses the term "a lot of scientists" I immediately ask "define 'a lot'". "A lot" can mean 20 or 100, but compared to the 10,000 that contradict them, that's not a lot. Or for instance, there are millions of gay men in America - which sure is a lot, but as a percentage of the population they are a tiny minority.
That sounds remarkably like camp life for people who work in remote areas for the oil, logging or mining operations that my dad has worked for. Except maybe the food was slightly better.
Of course, if you had bothered to google for "origins of spam", "stopping spam", or for that matter just went to spamhaus.org, you would have discovered inside of a half an hour's reading that they've been using that method for the past 5 years.
As for "somehow harnessing zombie machines" who the fuck do you think *makes* the viruses that build the botnets in the first place, hm?
Manually blocking one offending IP address at a time is an exercise in futility and is a boneheaded move that hasn't worked for about 10 years now. Even in the early primitive days of spamming, spammers would lose their internet accounts in a matter of hours, and re-subscribe with the same ISP or another one before the day was done. You may as well block e-mail based on the "From" line in the headers of the message.
The denizens of alt.sysadmin.recovery have made frequent references to the need for blood sacrifices (typically, your own, although sometimes a chicken or a goat would do) in order to get hardware to work properly for the past, oh 10 years or so.
But my guess is that you're too young to know what alt.sysadmin.recovery is, in which case that's a good thing.
Why is it, that every time I hear the words "Oklahoma" and "legislation" in the news, that I have an internal dialogue that goes somewhere along the lines of "Yee haw! Anotha' victory fo' keepin' tha Bad Influenses of tha Autsahd Wuhrld away fram oua cheeld-run! Let's go shoot oua shotguns inna air ta sellebrate!"
In all seriousness, it seems that their solution to any of the state's many social problems is "More Religion!" Because after all, it's worked so well up to this point.
At the same time, "small business" could just as well mean "management incompetence", because it's never grown beyond its tiny slice. Believe me, I work at such a place.
Two things: There's a big difference between net profits and gross sales. They're talking about gross sales. That's the amount of money that we the public spend on the products they produce. A $7 movie ticket is a wee bit smaller than an $80 game. Thus you need 1/10 the audience to produce the same sales numbers.
Second, there's kind of a fake-out, like how the porn industry can rake in as much in sales as the "mainstream" movie industry. How many movie studios are there left? There's about 3 or 4 big ones left after all the mergers. How many porn producers are there? Thousands. Heck, tens of thousands. Porn is cheap to make, and many thousands of titles are released every year. How many game studios are there that make the biggest hits? Dozens of big players like Sony, Nintendo, and EA, and at least hundreds of smaller ones like Pandemic, ID and Ubisoft.
You said: The mainstream media doesn't write much about games because it doesn't appeal much to a mainstream audience.
The article said: Video and PC games are a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry.
I see. So how much do they have to make in sales to *become* mainstream, exactly?
Reminds me of a quote by Green Day's lead singer, back around 1998. "People call us an alternative band. Alternative to *what*? We sold 3 million records last year. That's as mainstream as you can get!"
Slashdot Mirror
What's a journal for again?
Oh, yes. That's right. Keep track of your daily life and the events therein. Kind of like a diary, really. That way, if anything truly interesting happens in your life, it's recorded into history. Like say, if an 10.5 earthquake were to strike and wipe out the city you live in. Then you (or historians, for that matter) can look back on your life as it was before, what life was like trying to recover from the event, and how your life had changed afterwards.
Personally, I started a blog during a major event at my workplace that happened shortly before I was married. I work at an ISP, and one summer several years ago it was hell on wheels for several months as our servers, our ISP, our telco, and our network all conspired to make our customers' lives difficult. I started to wonder if this sort of thing had happened in the early days of the telephone network, and we had learned through painful experience how this new technology needed to be made better.
Just because occasionally, shit happens in people's lives that really, truly *is* news (say, if I were vacationing in Beruit this past week) and they happen to write about it in their personal journals, does not make them journalists. However, for some bizarre reason professional journalists seem to think that this is the case, and that they're competing with them.
No, at best Livejournal is the diary of Anne Frank. Before it was published. If it had been published (as Livejournal does) as it was happening, I suppose that would have been news or something. But that wouldn't really make Anne Frank a journalist, would it?
So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?
Well, I suppose that all depends on how you define an expensive camera.
$300, while expensive, is not expensive for a camera. Kind of like how $3000 is not expensive for a car.
Expensive cameras generally start at around $900. That's around where professional SLR digital cameras *start*, and go up from there. And believe me, anyone who spends $2000+ on a camera, doesn't fuck around with buying cheap cards. That's in no small part because they need very *large* memory cards to store pictures in RAW format.
"Most of us" don't spend that much money on a camera. Most of us spend around $300-$500. And thus, since we generally don't have a lot of money left over to spend, it's spent on cheap memory cards. Not that it's a big deal these days, since today's cheap memory cards are last week's hella fast and large memory cards. I just picked up a 1 gig SD card that's rated at 133x for $30. And I'm told I could have gotten it at 1/3 that cost elsewhere. Our Canon A80 has a 1x write 256M CF card from 2 years ago, and it was considerably more expensive than that.
The problem with school in America is this nasty tendency towards it being publicly funded. I realized this is a problem when I saw "Jamie Oliver's School Dinners" and the school administration was complaining that the school lunch program was going over budget. Their budget? 37 pence per child. According to XE.com today, that's a grand total of $0.68 USD. People send their kids to school every frickin' day with junk food that costs eight times that, and the school is under pressure from the taxpayers to keep this stupidly low budget?
The problem with public anything is that taxpayers bitch and whine and complain endlessly about how high their taxes are, and the politicians who promise to lower them are the ones that get into office. Consequently, no matter how pure and good the cause being funded by the public is, or how much the public would pay for the service if it weren't public, it will be squeezed into irrelevence by these forces. It could even be described as a tragedy of the commons.
What is going to grab anyone's attention more? "We ship quadraphexametaline to your door for a flat rate of $9.99 - click here to order"
:)
Clearly, they're missing out on something here. They need shorter brand names to use instead of chemical names. Like "Roofies" or "Crystal Meth".
That would sell for sure.
even the local catholic church station.
What do you mean *even*? You don't know any Catholics, do you?
Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.
Yeah, you bet! I mean, look at that mass exodus of people who are switching to Linux from Windows, 15 years after the first Windows nerds switched!
... Scarabs. Except that instead of moving *after* they blow up, they jump out of the ground and CHASE AFTER YOU!
*POP!*
AAAAAAAAAAGH!
*KABLOOIE!*
"We have maintained all along that this site is illegal"
So.... instead of bringing criminal charges against the site, they sue instead.
People only sue instead, if they're greedy.
I can think of a reason.
while (1) {
"Hi, I'd like to buy your internet."
"Okay, where do you live?"
"$address outside($smallradius)"
"Oh, we don't have any access there. Sorry."
}
Until you can make a community wireless network large enough to cover > 50% of your market, then you will fail as an ISP. And would you like to take a guess as to how much money *that* will cost? Way more money than people are willing to pay, that's how much. Around here, a single radio license costs somewhere around $100,000.
People who have casual sex rarely break the 15 minute mark.
Well, maybe *you* don't.
Or maybe I'm just weird that way. Oh well.
With the focus in the past few decades on feelings, emotions, and our complete obsession with "our inner child." It's not surprising at all, it's been a while since we cared about some responsibility.
You're clearly one who hasn't RTFA. In said article, they mentioned that the "problem" is one that has been becoming more prevalent over the past century, due not to pop psychology, but to the fact that more and more of us are getting better formal educated long into adulthood.
Honestly, I think it's all crap though. You want to talk about abdication of responsibility by adults and sensation-seeking? Throughout the 19th century, most men drank, and drank hard. Often to the detriment of their families, their jobs, and society as a whole. Today, alcoholism isn't anywhere near as big of a problem. During the 18th century in Europe, it was fashionable for those who could afford it to have their children raised exclusively by nannies, so that the parents could lead lives of wild debauchery and baccanalia.
You want to talk about short cycles of arbitrary fashion? Throughout all of history, human beings have subjected themselves to all manner of torture and mutilation for the benefit of the fashion of the day. From chinese foot-binding to African body piercing and neck-stretching, to the actual flattening of people's skulls (Aztecs, I think).
I don't know what ideal period that TFA's author believes to exist, but I file this entire article under "get off my lawn, you damn kids!" Besides, it's thin on details and proof, and I'm extremely skeptical that there is any real evidence of this effect.
Where was Mom and Dad when the minor went on a date with a 19 year old?
14 year old girls date 19 year olds all the time. It's because the 14 year old girls *like* it that way. And moreover, sexual assaults usually don't result, except in the context of statutory rape.
This issue really rubs a sore spot on me. It's right up there along with that stupid "no means no" campaign, and that stupid "just don't rape" meme I've seen on LiveJournal. The fundamental issue here is that some people get off on hurting other people. For the purpose of brevity, let's call these people... oh, I don't know... maybe "evil".
The difference between the actions of a good person and an evil person under any circumstances in which rape occurs have little to nothing to do with the actions of the victim. A girl could show up on a guy's doorstep 15 minutes after meeting him online, get naked, and if he's a decent guy, she'd have a really good time. If he's a psychopath instead, he'd beat and rape her for six hours before dumping her in an alley. Sure, her behaviour is risky, but she didn't *cause* the rape to happen.
No amount of propaganda to clear up any confusion about when a girl means no, laws to ensure age verification of myspace users, or efforts to make little girls sweet as pie so they don't offend anyone, will fix the problem. What *will* fix the problem is if victims of rape actually press charges and the courts actually convict rapists. Society will be safe from that man for the duration of his sentence, if nothing else.
Of course, articles about "scientists" refuting global warming are a dime a dozen, and go against the plain fact that the vast majority of climate scientists are firmly convinced of its existence.
This is why when I see an article on any controversial subject that uses the term "a lot of scientists" I immediately ask "define 'a lot'". "A lot" can mean 20 or 100, but compared to the 10,000 that contradict them, that's not a lot. Or for instance, there are millions of gay men in America - which sure is a lot, but as a percentage of the population they are a tiny minority.
That sounds remarkably like camp life for people who work in remote areas for the oil, logging or mining operations that my dad has worked for. Except maybe the food was slightly better.
Wow. That's a rather impressive body of work.
Of course, if you had bothered to google for "origins of spam", "stopping spam", or for that matter just went to spamhaus.org, you would have discovered inside of a half an hour's reading that they've been using that method for the past 5 years.
As for "somehow harnessing zombie machines" who the fuck do you think *makes* the viruses that build the botnets in the first place, hm?
Manually blocking one offending IP address at a time is an exercise in futility and is a boneheaded move that hasn't worked for about 10 years now. Even in the early primitive days of spamming, spammers would lose their internet accounts in a matter of hours, and re-subscribe with the same ISP or another one before the day was done. You may as well block e-mail based on the "From" line in the headers of the message.
iPods are made in China by women who work 15 hours/day, make $50/month, and have to pay half of that right back to the company for housing and food.
I don't know about you, but I sure wish that my living expenses were $25 a month. Heck, I wish they were only half of my income!
I hadn't realised this was so common.
The denizens of alt.sysadmin.recovery have made frequent references to the need for blood sacrifices (typically, your own, although sometimes a chicken or a goat would do) in order to get hardware to work properly for the past, oh 10 years or so.
But my guess is that you're too young to know what alt.sysadmin.recovery is, in which case that's a good thing.
Why is it, that every time I hear the words "Oklahoma" and "legislation" in the news, that I have an internal dialogue that goes somewhere along the lines of "Yee haw! Anotha' victory fo' keepin' tha Bad Influenses of tha Autsahd Wuhrld away fram oua cheeld-run! Let's go shoot oua shotguns inna air ta sellebrate!"
In all seriousness, it seems that their solution to any of the state's many social problems is "More Religion!" Because after all, it's worked so well up to this point.
That means they've removed "rape" from the archaic "burn, rape and pillage" meme.
Sunset Plaza?
No, Broadway St.
Um, what the fuck? There's a place down the street from me called "The Spy Store" where you can buy all this and body armour too.
This is lameness beyond compare.
Riiiight.
At the same time, "small business" could just as well mean "management incompetence", because it's never grown beyond its tiny slice. Believe me, I work at such a place.
Two things: There's a big difference between net profits and gross sales. They're talking about gross sales. That's the amount of money that we the public spend on the products they produce. A $7 movie ticket is a wee bit smaller than an $80 game. Thus you need 1/10 the audience to produce the same sales numbers.
Second, there's kind of a fake-out, like how the porn industry can rake in as much in sales as the "mainstream" movie industry. How many movie studios are there left? There's about 3 or 4 big ones left after all the mergers. How many porn producers are there? Thousands. Heck, tens of thousands. Porn is cheap to make, and many thousands of titles are released every year. How many game studios are there that make the biggest hits? Dozens of big players like Sony, Nintendo, and EA, and at least hundreds of smaller ones like Pandemic, ID and Ubisoft.
You said: The mainstream media doesn't write much about games because it doesn't appeal much to a mainstream audience.
The article said: Video and PC games are a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry.
I see. So how much do they have to make in sales to *become* mainstream, exactly?
Reminds me of a quote by Green Day's lead singer, back around 1998. "People call us an alternative band. Alternative to *what*? We sold 3 million records last year. That's as mainstream as you can get!"
When one company yoinks business right out from under another company's nose, then the latter company is losing.
Unless it's Microsoft. That's not called "Eating Microsoft's lunch". That's called "doing Microsoft's research for them".