I've noticed this as well. Most people in #linux (regardless of which network) are BOFH wannabes, and the culture in there perpetuates this to the point that even newbies do it. Most of the time, you get such smarmy remarks because the people handing them out don't know what the hell they're talking about either.
On the undernet, #freebsd and #freebsdhelp operators have traditionally taken the view that if you're going to tell someone to RTFM, put it thusly: "The question you ask is too complicated to be answered here. See the manual at http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx." Unlike the enormously retarded "fuck off luser," or "RTFM," it's actually *helpful,* even though it amounts to the same thing. I wish that more people in #linux would take that advice instead of actively trying to be jerks.
and 50 percent less power usage, due to decreased electrical leakage. Longer battery life for laptops,
Battery life for laptops has always been 2 hours. It will always be 2 hours. This is the minimum we'll put up with, and thus we'll invariably find ways to suck up the power until it *is* two hours. Much like how we're so very willing to load bloatware on our computers until windows takes 5 minutes to load. Any more, and we'll think it's too long. Any less and we'll think there's room to spare.
Heh. Is it really spelled "Zathruss?" I always thought it was spelled "Zathrus." Or maybe I'm confusing him with his brothers, also named "Zathruss," and the other one, named "Zaathrus."
Perhaps they haven't even leaked it at all. Do YOU have a copy of The Two Towers? Can you even find one? I wouldn't put it past them to pretend to leak something and then cry blue murder to the press, the police, and the senate. But maybe I'm just paranoid.:)
The DVD is out for "A beautiful mind." This movie is an excellent portrayal of Schizophrenia. Watching the movie, *you* actually believe that the hero's fantasies are reality. Of course, movies are an excellent medium for this because they work through the magic of suspension of disbelief and you essentially immerse yourself in a fantasy world for two hours.
Myself, after watching this movie I could totally understand what a schizophrenic goes through and why they would resist tooth and nail, letting go of their fantastic hallucinations. Not only are these hallucinations as real to them as reality is, but the fact of the matter is that some of the people they imagine could well be their best friends. Not to mention the other nasty side effects of the drugs that make them go away.
Why not build a series of microwave repeaters or such, bring the cable to the shore then broadcast the rest of the way? A couple of reasons:
3. Where's the power to come from? There isn't any local grid to plug in to and as the Canadians & Siberians will attest running long power lines across extreme latitudes is difficult (no grounding, lots of electromagnetic effects from aural storms, etc.) Solar won't work for a few months a year plus there's the buildup problem, burning hydrocarbons wouldn't be allowed plus would require regular refueling, and radiothermal seems very unlikely.
You forgot wind power. If I recall correctly, Antarctica is the windiest place on earth, and as such would be an ideal place for wind generation, assuming your generators can withstand the environment that is.:)
There would likely be communications blackouts when power isn't available, (storing electricity is a bitch at the best of times, doubly so when your batteries freeze) but probably not nearly as much of a problem as current solutions, especially if power requirements are low.
Adjusting the dishes might not be as hard as you think, especially since the direction and rate of movement would be known. If you really like, you can have your repeaters report their position every X hours with GPS so that the other towers will know where to point automatically. Also, the beam of radiation is focused about as much as a flashlight, so it's not like it's excruciatingly important when a station moves a few centimeters to the right. Omnidirectional repeaters would be less of a hassle in this instance, but you'd need more of them or you wouldn't exactly have a high speed connection at the end.:)
However, I'm guessing that this has either already been done, or it's already been thought of and discarded because of some kind of impracticality. More than likely it's too much of a pain in the ass to fix when things break down, or it's too complex and thus breaks down more often. This solution seemed pretty obvious to me, and I'm not even close to being an engineer.
Also, I can't see that such a device would help establish the cause of accidents. I have been in a couple of near misses where the only safe way out is to put your foot to the floor - but what would an insurance company say if they saw this information from a black box?
I had the misfortune of witnessing a serious car accident last winter. Some guy in a small sedan tried to beat the light at an intersection and T-boned an SUV as it made a left turn in the dedicated lane.
What would the black box in the sedan say? 5 seconds before the collision, the driver floored it as it headed southbound at the intersection of Commercial Drive and East Hastings. In the SUV? 5 seconds before the collision, it was sitting at the intersection in the left turn lane eastbound on East Hastings and 1 second before the collision calmly pulled into the intersection to make a left turn.
The big question is "what did the lights say?" Even I don't know. I wasn't paying attention to that at the time. And if the clocks on the lights (they'll likely have logs somewhere) are off even by a few seconds, you can't use that very well. Typically though, I wouldn't doubt they'd be off by a few minutes, making whatever logs they kept totally useless compared with the gps systems in the cars.
Heh. What I liked most was how in a lot of the pictures, you see someone following on a bike. You'd think that that would be a better way to get gas milage.
More interesting, is that none of the cyclists are wearing helmets, but the drivers are. At 30 mph, even if you hit a brick wall in one of these things, you're just going to bump a knee, really. It looks like they would save on gas milage if they ditched the 5lb helmets.:)
Let's face it. Security is a friggin' boring job. I know people who have done it. About the only thing that keeps it from driving the people doing it completely insane with boredom is the benefit of zooming in the cameras on women with lots of cleavage showing.
So you can imagine how this software will be abused.
How big would it have to be to knock the moon from its orbit?
How big? Oh, probably about 1/8 to 1/4 the mass of the moon, at a minimum, and I'm not even bothering to do the math. Think of a freight train in a head-on collision with a fully-loaded 18 wheeler. Even if the truck is moving at about 150 miles an hour, the people on the train won't feel much more than a bit of a jolt. Assuming the engineer doesn't apply the brakes, the train isn't going to slow down much either. This is the sort of impact with the moon that you can expect from a body small enough to escape our notice for the past 150 years.
It's worth noting that a body even as small as 1/8th the size of the moon would have to be a pretty damn big comet, and it certainly won't be any asteroid that we don't already know about. And even then, there isn't a whole heck of a lot we could ever do about it. The amount of energy required to move it out of the way would be far in excess of anything that we could ever produce.
This is exactly what I say to people who have a problem with this movie. (and that's always the reason they have a problem with this movie, clearly they're not terribly imaginative.)
I haven't noticed anyone taking note of the fact that this sort of technology is probably around 50 years old or more.
Pilots have been using signal strength and direction of radio beacons (including radio stations, actually) to figure their position for at least that amount of time. The instrument is called ADF, for Automatic Direction Finder, for those who want to know about it.
Implementing it in a PDA is kind of neat, but not exactly ground-breaking.
Personally, I think global warming is at best, improbable. But that doesn't mean we should go ahead and churn out thick black columns of smoke from coal burning smokestacks. I think that our use of fossil fuels doesn't have a global effect, but rather a local one that is even more disastrous than some far-off, dystopian prediction based on data fit to a curve that's iffy at best.
The really funny thing is that this disaster is happening now, and we don't even notice it, because it's so pervasive as to be "normal." I'm sorry, but it shouldn't be normal for kids to grow up with asthma and serious allergies.
The clerics issued a fatwa (holy edict) against piracy, saying it is "the worst type of theft and prohibited by Islam."
It seems that when they say "piracy" they're thinking in terms of the sort of theft that happens on the high seas - where generally pirates board ships, kill all the men, rape all the women (and then throw them overboard), take the children as slaves, and subsequently sell the ship and its accompanying valuables. This is indeed the worst kind of theft. Completely unlike breaking software licenses (and it's worth noting that when you buy software, you basically buy a box of air with the hopes that there's something inside that you can find useful - the contract that you sign by opening the box (?) negates even that.) by giving a copy away to a friend for free, annoying the company that made it because they counted their chickens before they hatched.
Clearly, there's been some kind of misunderstanding here.:)
Re:He will never be found! Erh....
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Tracking Mafiaboy
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· Score: 2
This is easy.
Mussolini used to be a journalist. He proved that you can directly contradict yourself in different articles and noone would ever notice. Well, not enough people to matter, anyway.
Re:article illustrated something about family...
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Tracking Mafiaboy
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· Score: 2
You know, I'm a model example of what good people are supposed to be. I don't do drugs, I don't shoplift, I don't disrupt the infrastructure of the internet, I don't even cheat on my taxes.
And I wasn't exactly the scourge of society when I was 15 either. But damned if I didn't try, just to fit in with everyone else. Because in high school, the coolest people are either the the punks who're tougher than everyone else but aren't bright enough to know their own shortcomings, or the snobby Beautiful People who aren't bright enough to know their own shortcomings. My high school wasn't big enough to have a significant number of Beautiful People and thus anyone who qualified were torn down by the much more numerous punks. And of course, so was everyone else, and as a defence mechanism, most of the kids I grew up with did their best to prove that they were tougher, meaner, and more evil than the next guy.
So while the real punks almost invariably have a far-from-desirable home life, you're bound to see tons of wannabe punks trying to keep the real punks away by appearing to be real punks, thus the problem at hand with otherwise fine, upstanding people shoplifting, indulging in any number of recreational pharmaceuticals, and beating up the small fry after school. This sort of thing is what makes school resemble a maximum security prison.
It wasn't until I got the job I've got now that I realized what sysadmins really do. Sysadmins don't just keep the servers stable and build new ones. They don't just change lost passwords and nuke the accounts of low-life spammers. I could have done all that when I didn't have any experience in sysadminning at all.
Sysadmins make work go away. We automate things. We make paperwork a thing of the past. We make it so that the damn secretary can change account passwords and nuke accounts. We make managing information a breeze, not a chore. We make billing and accounting the job of one person, not ten. We are modern day wizards who work magic for hire. The systems we use aren't the reason for our existance, they are the actuators of our magic.
And what happens when all the work gets automated away? We keep automating. Making it easier, faster, better. We make it more reliable, more secure, more redundant. If all a sysadmin does is wait for something to fail, then he's either not a sysadmin, or he's not doing his job. And then he wonders why managment scrutinizes his salary and lays him off at the first chance they get.
I highly recommend that anyone considering a career as a sysadmin, should at least once get a job where either there's never been a sysadmin (and thus they have huge mounds of paperwork somewhere that need to be done away with) or get a job on the ground floor where everything needs to be started from scratch. Maybe someday, when everything is perfect and runs itself, you can strike a deal with your boss where you can work on call with a retainer or something, (after all, even though you're doing nothing now, you're the only one that knows anything about how it all works) and move on to the next job - ensuring that you're getting paid more than your boss thinks you are. After a few years, you would probably be able to make a living off the part-time stuff.
I work as a sysadmin for a small ISP. Like, a really tiny ISP. Like me and four other guys. This is a problem because if we don't all do the tech support, we'll have to hire other people to do it, which would cost us more money and cause us to sink. About the only reason I actually agree to do this is because the boss is also doing it.
However, in any typical day I generally get nothing done at all, because it's either so busy on the phones that I legitimately can't get anything done, or it's just busy enough that I'm spending about 20 minutes or more to get back into my groove and I'm being interrupted by a phone call ten minutes after that. By some miracle however, I'm actually able to get things done that need to be done on occasion. Sometimes it gets done by putting in overtime, and some other times it gets done at home, but much of the time it actually gets done at work. I sometimes marvel at this fact. (like now!;)
Heh. The scary thing is that this describes almost exactly what my college days were like. The thing of it is though that I never took any drugs to acheive this state of constant 26 hour days. Unfortunately, since the rest of the world has to work with only 24 hours in a day, it only takes a couple weeks to get completely fucked up to where you closely resemble the living dead as you go off to whatever class happens to occur at 2pm and you have no idea even what the subject was at 3:30.
I doubt the large amounts of cola helped either. This would probably be a good explanation as to why I didn't fare so well in college too, among other things like depression and the medication I was taking to combat both that and the insomnia.
The problem is that capitalism is like life itself. If there is *anywhere* it could possibly grow and reproduce itself, no matter how tenuously or under what horrible conditions, it will. A *perfect* example of this is spam. Spammers are the sleaziest, slimiest, lowest bottom feeders on the planet. But if it wasn't profitable, it wouldn't exist. And since it is, it breeds. All that you have to do is give some scumbag a niche and he'll exploit it to its fullest extent. The fact that you avoid that niche only serves to make it that much bigger for that scumbag to exploit. Does this fact by extension make it ethical to exploit that niche so that someone else doesn't? No. But the fact of the matter remains that someone, somewhere *will* make a lot of money exploiting that niche, whereas you have to work much harder in your crowded but moral niche.
It's the way of children and teenagers to protect themselves by being tougher than the next guy. In the adult world however, the only place that this will do you any good is in prison. Grownups instead use the power of the state and society, because that power is much much greater than any individual ever could be, and it is used in a way that is civilized, orderly and (usually)fair.
A device like this where the GPS function would be activated if and only if the user requests assistance puts the power of the state at your fingertips, and would be a great tool for those who need such close protection. It would be like having a police officer within earshot when you scream for help.
Of course, there is the potential for abuse. How would we know that the GPS is not on *all* the time? Because people are smart occasionally, and should someone find out that these devices are being abused, there'd be hell to pay for the state, believe me!:)
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed this as well. Most people in #linux (regardless of which network) are BOFH wannabes, and the culture in there perpetuates this to the point that even newbies do it. Most of the time, you get such smarmy remarks because the people handing them out don't know what the hell they're talking about either.
On the undernet, #freebsd and #freebsdhelp operators have traditionally taken the view that if you're going to tell someone to RTFM, put it thusly: "The question you ask is too complicated to be answered here. See the manual at http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx." Unlike the enormously retarded "fuck off luser," or "RTFM," it's actually *helpful,* even though it amounts to the same thing. I wish that more people in #linux would take that advice instead of actively trying to be jerks.
You want to beat on spammers using spews.org? And here I thought you linked to some quite violent imagery involving a steel pipe and some quick lime.
and 50 percent less power usage, due to decreased electrical leakage. Longer battery life for laptops,
Battery life for laptops has always been 2 hours. It will always be 2 hours. This is the minimum we'll put up with, and thus we'll invariably find ways to suck up the power until it *is* two hours. Much like how we're so very willing to load bloatware on our computers until windows takes 5 minutes to load. Any more, and we'll think it's too long. Any less and we'll think there's room to spare.
Heh. Is it really spelled "Zathruss?" I always thought it was spelled "Zathrus." Or maybe I'm confusing him with his brothers, also named "Zathruss," and the other one, named "Zaathrus."
Perhaps they haven't even leaked it at all. Do YOU have a copy of The Two Towers? Can you even find one? I wouldn't put it past them to pretend to leak something and then cry blue murder to the press, the police, and the senate. But maybe I'm just paranoid. :)
The DVD is out for "A beautiful mind." This movie is an excellent portrayal of Schizophrenia. Watching the movie, *you* actually believe that the hero's fantasies are reality. Of course, movies are an excellent medium for this because they work through the magic of suspension of disbelief and you essentially immerse yourself in a fantasy world for two hours.
Myself, after watching this movie I could totally understand what a schizophrenic goes through and why they would resist tooth and nail, letting go of their fantastic hallucinations. Not only are these hallucinations as real to them as reality is, but the fact of the matter is that some of the people they imagine could well be their best friends. Not to mention the other nasty side effects of the drugs that make them go away.
2 Radio Repeaters
:)
:)
Why not build a series of microwave repeaters or such, bring the cable to the shore then broadcast the rest of the way? A couple of reasons:
3. Where's the power to come from? There isn't any local grid to plug in to and as the Canadians & Siberians will attest running long power lines across extreme latitudes is difficult (no grounding, lots of electromagnetic effects from aural storms, etc.) Solar won't work for a few months a year plus there's the buildup problem, burning hydrocarbons wouldn't be allowed plus would require regular refueling, and radiothermal seems very unlikely.
You forgot wind power. If I recall correctly, Antarctica is the windiest place on earth, and as such would be an ideal place for wind generation, assuming your generators can withstand the environment that is.
There would likely be communications blackouts when power isn't available, (storing electricity is a bitch at the best of times, doubly so when your batteries freeze) but probably not nearly as much of a problem as current solutions, especially if power requirements are low.
Adjusting the dishes might not be as hard as you think, especially since the direction and rate of movement would be known. If you really like, you can have your repeaters report their position every X hours with GPS so that the other towers will know where to point automatically. Also, the beam of radiation is focused about as much as a flashlight, so it's not like it's excruciatingly important when a station moves a few centimeters to the right. Omnidirectional repeaters would be less of a hassle in this instance, but you'd need more of them or you wouldn't exactly have a high speed connection at the end.
However, I'm guessing that this has either already been done, or it's already been thought of and discarded because of some kind of impracticality. More than likely it's too much of a pain in the ass to fix when things break down, or it's too complex and thus breaks down more often. This solution seemed pretty obvious to me, and I'm not even close to being an engineer.
Heh. That reminds me of a billboard from The Weather Network (the Canadian version):
"Written, produced, and directed by God."
Also, I can't see that such a device would help establish the cause of accidents. I have been in a couple of near misses where the only safe way out is to put your foot to the floor - but what would an insurance company say if they saw this information from a black box?
I had the misfortune of witnessing a serious car accident last winter. Some guy in a small sedan tried to beat the light at an intersection and T-boned an SUV as it made a left turn in the dedicated lane.
What would the black box in the sedan say? 5 seconds before the collision, the driver floored it as it headed southbound at the intersection of Commercial Drive and East Hastings. In the SUV? 5 seconds before the collision, it was sitting at the intersection in the left turn lane eastbound on East Hastings and 1 second before the collision calmly pulled into the intersection to make a left turn.
The big question is "what did the lights say?" Even I don't know. I wasn't paying attention to that at the time. And if the clocks on the lights (they'll likely have logs somewhere) are off even by a few seconds, you can't use that very well. Typically though, I wouldn't doubt they'd be off by a few minutes, making whatever logs they kept totally useless compared with the gps systems in the cars.
Sure, actually it's like Microsoft holding an uptime contest with minix on a 286.
Namely, the configuration in question will never sell, so by all means advertise the impracticality of it!
Heh. What I liked most was how in a lot of the pictures, you see someone following on a bike. You'd think that that would be a better way to get gas milage.
:)
More interesting, is that none of the cyclists are wearing helmets, but the drivers are. At 30 mph, even if you hit a brick wall in one of these things, you're just going to bump a knee, really. It looks like they would save on gas milage if they ditched the 5lb helmets.
Let's face it. Security is a friggin' boring job. I know people who have done it. About the only thing that keeps it from driving the people doing it completely insane with boredom is the benefit of zooming in the cameras on women with lots of cleavage showing.
So you can imagine how this software will be abused.
Or, alternatively, you could get mugged over a bunch of ones with the current money.
:)
Besides, you guys have heard of Interac, right?
How big would it have to be to knock the moon from its orbit?
How big? Oh, probably about 1/8 to 1/4 the mass of the moon, at a minimum, and I'm not even bothering to do the math. Think of a freight train in a head-on collision with a fully-loaded 18 wheeler. Even if the truck is moving at about 150 miles an hour, the people on the train won't feel much more than a bit of a jolt. Assuming the engineer doesn't apply the brakes, the train isn't going to slow down much either. This is the sort of impact with the moon that you can expect from a body small enough to escape our notice for the past 150 years.
It's worth noting that a body even as small as 1/8th the size of the moon would have to be a pretty damn big comet, and it certainly won't be any asteroid that we don't already know about. And even then, there isn't a whole heck of a lot we could ever do about it. The amount of energy required to move it out of the way would be far in excess of anything that we could ever produce.
--
If I had moderator points, I'd mod you up.
This is exactly what I say to people who have a problem with this movie. (and that's always the reason they have a problem with this movie, clearly they're not terribly imaginative.)
I haven't noticed anyone taking note of the fact that this sort of technology is probably around 50 years old or more.
Pilots have been using signal strength and direction of radio beacons (including radio stations, actually) to figure their position for at least that amount of time. The instrument is called ADF, for Automatic Direction Finder, for those who want to know about it.
Implementing it in a PDA is kind of neat, but not exactly ground-breaking.
Personally, I think global warming is at best, improbable. But that doesn't mean we should go ahead and churn out thick black columns of smoke from coal burning smokestacks. I think that our use of fossil fuels doesn't have a global effect, but rather a local one that is even more disastrous than some far-off, dystopian prediction based on data fit to a curve that's iffy at best.
The really funny thing is that this disaster is happening now, and we don't even notice it, because it's so pervasive as to be "normal." I'm sorry, but it shouldn't be normal for kids to grow up with asthma and serious allergies.
The clerics issued a fatwa (holy edict) against piracy, saying it is "the worst type of theft and prohibited by Islam."
:)
It seems that when they say "piracy" they're thinking in terms of the sort of theft that happens on the high seas - where generally pirates board ships, kill all the men, rape all the women (and then throw them overboard), take the children as slaves, and subsequently sell the ship and its accompanying valuables. This is indeed the worst kind of theft. Completely unlike breaking software licenses (and it's worth noting that when you buy software, you basically buy a box of air with the hopes that there's something inside that you can find useful - the contract that you sign by opening the box (?) negates even that.) by giving a copy away to a friend for free, annoying the company that made it because they counted their chickens before they hatched.
Clearly, there's been some kind of misunderstanding here.
This is easy.
Mussolini used to be a journalist. He proved that you can directly contradict yourself in different articles and noone would ever notice. Well, not enough people to matter, anyway.
You know, I'm a model example of what good people are supposed to be. I don't do drugs, I don't shoplift, I don't disrupt the infrastructure of the internet, I don't even cheat on my taxes.
And I wasn't exactly the scourge of society when I was 15 either. But damned if I didn't try, just to fit in with everyone else. Because in high school, the coolest people are either the the punks who're tougher than everyone else but aren't bright enough to know their own shortcomings, or the snobby Beautiful People who aren't bright enough to know their own shortcomings. My high school wasn't big enough to have a significant number of Beautiful People and thus anyone who qualified were torn down by the much more numerous punks. And of course, so was everyone else, and as a defence mechanism, most of the kids I grew up with did their best to prove that they were tougher, meaner, and more evil than the next guy.
So while the real punks almost invariably have a far-from-desirable home life, you're bound to see tons of wannabe punks trying to keep the real punks away by appearing to be real punks, thus the problem at hand with otherwise fine, upstanding people shoplifting, indulging in any number of recreational pharmaceuticals, and beating up the small fry after school. This sort of thing is what makes school resemble a maximum security prison.
It wasn't until I got the job I've got now that I realized what sysadmins really do. Sysadmins don't just keep the servers stable and build new ones. They don't just change lost passwords and nuke the accounts of low-life spammers. I could have done all that when I didn't have any experience in sysadminning at all.
Sysadmins make work go away. We automate things. We make paperwork a thing of the past. We make it so that the damn secretary can change account passwords and nuke accounts. We make managing information a breeze, not a chore. We make billing and accounting the job of one person, not ten. We are modern day wizards who work magic for hire. The systems we use aren't the reason for our existance, they are the actuators of our magic.
And what happens when all the work gets automated away? We keep automating. Making it easier, faster, better. We make it more reliable, more secure, more redundant. If all a sysadmin does is wait for something to fail, then he's either not a sysadmin, or he's not doing his job. And then he wonders why managment scrutinizes his salary and lays him off at the first chance they get.
I highly recommend that anyone considering a career as a sysadmin, should at least once get a job where either there's never been a sysadmin (and thus they have huge mounds of paperwork somewhere that need to be done away with) or get a job on the ground floor where everything needs to be started from scratch. Maybe someday, when everything is perfect and runs itself, you can strike a deal with your boss where you can work on call with a retainer or something, (after all, even though you're doing nothing now, you're the only one that knows anything about how it all works) and move on to the next job - ensuring that you're getting paid more than your boss thinks you are. After a few years, you would probably be able to make a living off the part-time stuff.
I work as a sysadmin for a small ISP. Like, a really tiny ISP. Like me and four other guys. This is a problem because if we don't all do the tech support, we'll have to hire other people to do it, which would cost us more money and cause us to sink. About the only reason I actually agree to do this is because the boss is also doing it.
;)
However, in any typical day I generally get nothing done at all, because it's either so busy on the phones that I legitimately can't get anything done, or it's just busy enough that I'm spending about 20 minutes or more to get back into my groove and I'm being interrupted by a phone call ten minutes after that. By some miracle however, I'm actually able to get things done that need to be done on occasion. Sometimes it gets done by putting in overtime, and some other times it gets done at home, but much of the time it actually gets done at work. I sometimes marvel at this fact. (like now!
Heh. The scary thing is that this describes almost exactly what my college days were like. The thing of it is though that I never took any drugs to acheive this state of constant 26 hour days. Unfortunately, since the rest of the world has to work with only 24 hours in a day, it only takes a couple weeks to get completely fucked up to where you closely resemble the living dead as you go off to whatever class happens to occur at 2pm and you have no idea even what the subject was at 3:30.
I doubt the large amounts of cola helped either. This would probably be a good explanation as to why I didn't fare so well in college too, among other things like depression and the medication I was taking to combat both that and the insomnia.
The problem is that capitalism is like life itself. If there is *anywhere* it could possibly grow and reproduce itself, no matter how tenuously or under what horrible conditions, it will. A *perfect* example of this is spam. Spammers are the sleaziest, slimiest, lowest bottom feeders on the planet. But if it wasn't profitable, it wouldn't exist. And since it is, it breeds. All that you have to do is give some scumbag a niche and he'll exploit it to its fullest extent. The fact that you avoid that niche only serves to make it that much bigger for that scumbag to exploit. Does this fact by extension make it ethical to exploit that niche so that someone else doesn't? No. But the fact of the matter remains that someone, somewhere *will* make a lot of money exploiting that niche, whereas you have to work much harder in your crowded but moral niche.
It's the way of children and teenagers to protect themselves by being tougher than the next guy. In the adult world however, the only place that this will do you any good is in prison. Grownups instead use the power of the state and society, because that power is much much greater than any individual ever could be, and it is used in a way that is civilized, orderly and (usually)fair.
:)
A device like this where the GPS function would be activated if and only if the user requests assistance puts the power of the state at your fingertips, and would be a great tool for those who need such close protection. It would be like having a police officer within earshot when you scream for help.
Of course, there is the potential for abuse. How would we know that the GPS is not on *all* the time? Because people are smart occasionally, and should someone find out that these devices are being abused, there'd be hell to pay for the state, believe me!