Would you like to participate in an experiment? Good! On the count of three, throw your e-reader at the wall. I'll throw a printed book at the wall. Does yours still work? Mine does! Now drop your other e-reader (since the first one was smashed against a wall, destroying it) into a tub of water, I'll drop my book in, too. Does your e-reader still work at all? No? My book is pretty wet, but I'm sure I can dry it out, and while it's ruined, I can still read it. Next, we need a time machine to go 10 years into the future. I'm being nice because I have books much older than that. In 10 year will your e-reader still work? Probably not. Oops, the battery in your e-reader died and won't charge! You can't read anything now until either the new battery arrives and charges, or your e-reader is sent for service and returns. Meanwhile my nice printed book requires only I be able to see it, and I can read it.
I'm being funny, but I'm also being serious, and I think I made some of my points. Additionally, you're an outlier: you don't use your e-reader the way corporations want you to, they want you to allow them to have control over your content, even if you "bought" it, and they want all 'open file formats' to be declared illegal and people using/posessing them to be considered 'pirates'. They want to be able to yank away your content, paid for or not, or edit it at will, and (according to TFA) now they want to add your specific reading habits to the very personal profile they're building on YOU.
Enjoy your e-reader for now. If they have their way, you will not be allowed to use it in any way other than what they want you to. I'd even go so far as to say if they had their way, we would 'own' nothing, everything (including your e-reader) would be a rental or a lease, and they'd retain 100% ownership of it, and you'd be liable, perhaps criminally, for using it in any way they don't like, and to hell with what you want. Meanwhile there will always be a market for printed books, which I will continue to read and enjoy for decades to come, free of any censorship, legal issues, anyone taking them away from me, breakdowns, battery issues, or anything else that comes with e-readers.
To be 100% fair about it, I think e-readers are probably best used for magazines, newspapers, and textbooks (this last because they are often updated in small ways, and being able to do that on the fly would save lots of people lots of money) because these things are very temporary in nature, and I'm sure that students would love to not have to spend thousands on books and have to carry them all around with them all day long. If I found myself in that position, I'd welcome one, but for novels or anything I want to keep? I prefer printed books.
One last thing: You can't send your e-book off to the author and have him autograph it, now can you?;-)
What do you expect? He's becoming a cultural icon instead of just a government whistle-blower; he's being re-made by the public-at-large as the poster-child for surveillance on this planet. Under that sort of pressure do you think that you could remain unchanged by it, and more to the point, retain your humility? Most people would not, humans being humans. Ignore the "tone" of what he said there, and just concentrate on the message, because he's right: Corporate culture and governments are indoctrinating the newer generations to believe that privacy is something sought after only by criminals and others who are doing something to be ashamed of, and that it's right and normal to "share" everything about your life with everyone. I can't even begin to imagine how much this is going to damage the psyche of humanity over the long term because it is not normal or natural to live that way.
Well, now.. as if I didn't feel totally justified intially at eschewing e-books and e-book readers entirely, I now feel completely vindicated against anyone who scoffed at my choice to remain with printed books. You people who chose e-books over printed books feeling nice and snuggly-cozy now, knowing that not only can your "content" be altered or deleted at will by the publisher, but that even how you read your e-books is being recorded, analyzed, and monitized? You feeling violated at all, yet? You should.
Many of us are disturbed by the idea of automated facial recognition being coupled with all the video surveillance that's becoming more and more prevalent in public places, to track us wherever we go, and that's bad enough. Now you're telling us that they're taking it to the next level and developing automated video profiling software? Is the world of Minority Report just around the corner?
If you're actually saying that you'd be 100% comfortable knowing that a battery pack is all that's standing between you and oblivion, then you're either a liar or a fool.
The only way to obtain 100% safety from being hacked by a government agency, as well as anyone else, is to place an air gap between your system(s) and the public Internet. Think of it like trying to protect your house from burglars breaking in: The best you can do is slow them down. Given enough time, skill, and resources, any burglar can defeat any security arrangement in any house. Same goes for your computers. Therefore there is an implied level of risk involved if you wish to continue using the internet, and if you cannot accept that risk, even after taking reasonable precautions against your system(s) being compromised by whoever might wish to, then you must re-evaluate whether or not it's worth it to you to continue using the internet at all. Now, some people are going to flame me for saying this, because they're convinced that life cannot continue without internet access, but that's simply not true, just ask anyone who was an adult about 25 years ago how they managed to get along without the World Wide Web (hint: they got along just fine without it).
Yeah, I'd be scared half out of my mind most of the time if I had to have one of these keeping me alive. I work with electronics and know enough to know what can go wrong. There would have to be redundancies built into the system.
I've often said that when times get tough, you find out what people are really like; when times are good and everyone has plenty, then it's easy to be nice, and courteous, and generous, but when times get tough, you find out who's really like that, and who's just been putting on a false face. In this case what we discover from tough times is who's actually smart, and who's actually dumb as a box of rocks. Splitting up California would wreck havoc with everyone in the former State, and would likely throw the entire U.S. into chaos, and all for the greed and lust for power of (excuse my using an over-used metaphor) the 1%. What they'd actually be doing is very transparent: Leave behind the poorer parts of the former California, so the rich don't have to be "burdened" by them anymore. For the northernmost parts of the State, you may as well just merge it with Oregon in that case, so you can have one larger state full of poor people living in relatively rural areas, all without anywhere near enough jobs to keep them all housed, clothed, and fed. Give the central valley a new spanish name, so the people who live and work there, working the fields, will feel more at home. I don't think I need to go on, you all get the picture, probably without my help in the first place. Of course like all rich despots this wouldn't go like they planned, the northern State could cut off all the water they've been sending to the south and hold it for ransom, jacking the price way up, and the central state could make the food they're growing so expensive that even the richest would be shocked at their grocery bill.
How many times is the world going to have to go through this nonsense before apparently technologically illiterate politicians get the message that filtering/censoring the Internet does not work? It's been tried time and time again and the results are the same every single time!
Nations have been spying on each other for thousands of years before we had the Internet, wireless telephone service, or even wired landline service for that matter, how the hell did you do your goddamned jobs back then!? Also, stating the obvious here: You do not need to spy on every goddamned one of us you fucking hacks! Get your noses out of our lives you sonofabitch!
If I understand the Quran correctly, if what it says was strictly enforced, you'd be "invited" to convert to Islam, and if you refused you could eventually be killed.
But the question is, why is it so difficult for some people and for others, they just never had to worry about it?
An interesting data point from my own learning curve transitioning from not track what I ate to measuring and tracking everything: How the little things can be not so little. For instance, something I used to love to eat was cinnamon raison toast with butter. Then you realize, as you weigh the amount of butter you've been putting on two pieces of the aforementioned toast, that 300kcal of butter looking like almost nothing! Some foods have massive amounts of calories hiding in them, and if you didn't see it for yourself you wouldn't believe it. Restaurants, especially fast food, fought for decades against publishing any nutritional data, then fought again against putting it right on the menu boards, because they knew that what they were serving you was very high overall in calories and are more interested in maintaining their client base than their client's long-term health. Things like maltodextrin, which is a common food additive, is 100% carbohydrate, and I can mix hundreds and hundreds of calories of the stuff into almost anything and you won't even taste it, because it has almost no taste to it. Even healthy foods like peas, beans, and especially nuts, are very calorically-dense, and unless you know this and are measuring what you're eating of them, you can unwittingly eat hundreds of calories of them. The worst part is that many people don't want to know, they just want to keep eating foods they like and not be guilt-ridden over it -- but then they complain about how fat they are and want a magic pill to make it go away, or get liposuction, or something else drastic.
I'm sure I'm old enough to be your father, and I almost wish I was because you're apparently in dire need of some discipline and a little history lesson of your own. Were you even born anytime during the 1980's? I think not. You might want to not comment on things you weren't around for.
You're an Anonymous Coward so you're unlikely to see this, but I'll post it anyway: Do you keep accurate track of everything you eat every single day? Are you 100% honest with yourself on what, how much, and how many calories about everything that passes your lips, every single day? Are you avoiding eating anything that you can't at least know the caloric content of? If the answer is "no" then you're sabotaging yourself. Also do you still ride at least a hundred miles a week? If not then all your training was for nothing. Fitness is a lifestyle, not a trip from point "A" to point "B"; you can NEVER stop, or you'll revert back to being fat.
Bodies do work differently
No, they do not. Thermodynamics is thermodynamics; you burn more than you eat, you lose weight, period.
Well, I'm sorry you've been ill, but I also challenge you to explain to me (and everyone else reading this thread) what it is that's happened to you that you can't do any sort of exercise of any kind. The reason why is I know people who have lost the use of their legs, yet they ride a bicycle that is hand-cranked instead of leg powered; they even race these contraptions. These people are made of solid heavy metal so far as I'm concerned, and I have the utmost respect for how hard-core they are. So please, explain to us what is wrong with you that you can't do any exercise of any kind.
Do you keep accurate track of everything you eat every single day without fail, and avoid eating anything you can't at least know the caloric content of? Are you completely honest with yourself about what and how much you're eating every single day? Perhaps not. I also think that your "dancing" isn't burning anywhere near as many calories as you think it does, and that perhaps you're eating/drinking things when you go out "dancing" that have way more calories in them than you think they do.
I was over 300 pounds, I have worked myself down to under 200 pounds, I do have sub-10% bodyfat now, I do participate in a competitive endurance-based sport, and I've been like this for 5 years, so under your rules I am qualified to say: You are not doing everything you can do, you are not trying hard enough, and you are in denial. Deal with it.
Your diet is a perpetual thing, not something you do for a little while to lose weight. Eat healthy, be healthy. Drugs and short term adjustments in what you eat aren't going to do shit.
This. You can shovel pills down someone's throat all you want, and sure, they'll lose all sorts of weight, but if they're not building the life habits necessary to maintain their weight, they'll stuff their faces with shitty food all over again, and gain the weight back in a matter of months. The very fact that people want a Magic Pill to make them lose the caboose is evidence that they lack the skills, knowledge, and personal discipline necessary to successfully control their own weight. These people need to be told the truth: Losing weight takes work to achieve, and it takes real change of your lifestyle and habits to maintain, and most of all it takes stark honesty with yourself about what you eat and drink, who you are, and how you live your life.
Oh, and before anyone starts attacking me with the "thin privilege" and "fat hatred" crap: I used to weigh greater than 300 pounds once upon a time, had completely ruined my knees, and just didn't give a damn anymore. It took years, but I'm below 200 pounds, can leg press more than 3 times my bodyweight, and participate in a competitive endurance sport, and it was a damned hard road getting to where I am full of wrong turns and hard lessons, so don't sit there and tell me you've "tried everything", or "it's your genetics", or "it's impossible!", or any of the other excuses I see day after day after day. Don't sit there and claim you can be "healthy at any size", because that's utter bullshit. Stop trying to turn your sloth and lack of discipline into some sort of twisted virtue, because it most certainly is not! They say "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt", and your denial of the problem and it's implications is also going to wreck your children's lives as they grow up thinking it's OK to ruin their bodies, and being sabotaged by the poor dietary choices you make for them when they have no choice in the matter but to eat what is put in front of them.
So please, stop being in denial, stop ruining your health, stop ruining your bodies, and stop passing on your lack of discipline and poor choices to the next generation. It's all on you.
__________________________________________
Yes, I gave everyone both barrels with this one. Can't handle the truth? Not my problem. Deal with it.
Don't talk down to me like I'm some doddering old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
What you don't seem to realize is that just because broadcast radio isn't playing what you want to hear right now doesn't mean that it hasn't done so in the past. Also, just because the stations in your market are all playing garbage pop music doesn't mean that all broadcast radio stations are playing that. Where I live there is every genre of music you could imagine on FM broadcast radio. Move to where the food is, pal.
You people have no idea what you're loading onto your phones or what it's doing with your data and your life!
Why isn't there more comprehensive oversight of these apps before they're released to the public? Can't they require the source code be submitted to the 'app stores', and proofread to prevent this sort of thing from happening?
Slashdot Mirror
Would you like to participate in an experiment? Good!
;-)
On the count of three, throw your e-reader at the wall. I'll throw a printed book at the wall. Does yours still work? Mine does!
Now drop your other e-reader (since the first one was smashed against a wall, destroying it) into a tub of water, I'll drop my book in, too. Does your e-reader still work at all? No? My book is pretty wet, but I'm sure I can dry it out, and while it's ruined, I can still read it.
Next, we need a time machine to go 10 years into the future. I'm being nice because I have books much older than that. In 10 year will your e-reader still work? Probably not.
Oops, the battery in your e-reader died and won't charge! You can't read anything now until either the new battery arrives and charges, or your e-reader is sent for service and returns. Meanwhile my nice printed book requires only I be able to see it, and I can read it.
I'm being funny, but I'm also being serious, and I think I made some of my points. Additionally, you're an outlier: you don't use your e-reader the way corporations want you to, they want you to allow them to have control over your content, even if you "bought" it, and they want all 'open file formats' to be declared illegal and people using/posessing them to be considered 'pirates'. They want to be able to yank away your content, paid for or not, or edit it at will, and (according to TFA) now they want to add your specific reading habits to the very personal profile they're building on YOU.
Enjoy your e-reader for now. If they have their way, you will not be allowed to use it in any way other than what they want you to. I'd even go so far as to say if they had their way, we would 'own' nothing, everything (including your e-reader) would be a rental or a lease, and they'd retain 100% ownership of it, and you'd be liable, perhaps criminally, for using it in any way they don't like, and to hell with what you want. Meanwhile there will always be a market for printed books, which I will continue to read and enjoy for decades to come, free of any censorship, legal issues, anyone taking them away from me, breakdowns, battery issues, or anything else that comes with e-readers.
To be 100% fair about it, I think e-readers are probably best used for magazines, newspapers, and textbooks (this last because they are often updated in small ways, and being able to do that on the fly would save lots of people lots of money) because these things are very temporary in nature, and I'm sure that students would love to not have to spend thousands on books and have to carry them all around with them all day long. If I found myself in that position, I'd welcome one, but for novels or anything I want to keep? I prefer printed books.
One last thing: You can't send your e-book off to the author and have him autograph it, now can you?
What do you expect? He's becoming a cultural icon instead of just a government whistle-blower; he's being re-made by the public-at-large as the poster-child for surveillance on this planet. Under that sort of pressure do you think that you could remain unchanged by it, and more to the point, retain your humility? Most people would not, humans being humans. Ignore the "tone" of what he said there, and just concentrate on the message, because he's right: Corporate culture and governments are indoctrinating the newer generations to believe that privacy is something sought after only by criminals and others who are doing something to be ashamed of, and that it's right and normal to "share" everything about your life with everyone. I can't even begin to imagine how much this is going to damage the psyche of humanity over the long term because it is not normal or natural to live that way.
Well, now.. as if I didn't feel totally justified intially at eschewing e-books and e-book readers entirely, I now feel completely vindicated against anyone who scoffed at my choice to remain with printed books. You people who chose e-books over printed books feeling nice and snuggly-cozy now, knowing that not only can your "content" be altered or deleted at will by the publisher, but that even how you read your e-books is being recorded, analyzed, and monitized? You feeling violated at all, yet? You should.
It sounds like a clumsy and problem-prone technology to me, and I predict it won't get past the proof-of-concept stage of development.
Many of us are disturbed by the idea of automated facial recognition being coupled with all the video surveillance that's becoming more and more prevalent in public places, to track us wherever we go, and that's bad enough. Now you're telling us that they're taking it to the next level and developing automated video profiling software? Is the world of Minority Report just around the corner?
That has nothing to do with it.
If you're actually saying that you'd be 100% comfortable knowing that a battery pack is all that's standing between you and oblivion, then you're either a liar or a fool.
The only way to obtain 100% safety from being hacked by a government agency, as well as anyone else, is to place an air gap between your system(s) and the public Internet. Think of it like trying to protect your house from burglars breaking in: The best you can do is slow them down. Given enough time, skill, and resources, any burglar can defeat any security arrangement in any house. Same goes for your computers. Therefore there is an implied level of risk involved if you wish to continue using the internet, and if you cannot accept that risk, even after taking reasonable precautions against your system(s) being compromised by whoever might wish to, then you must re-evaluate whether or not it's worth it to you to continue using the internet at all. Now, some people are going to flame me for saying this, because they're convinced that life cannot continue without internet access, but that's simply not true, just ask anyone who was an adult about 25 years ago how they managed to get along without the World Wide Web (hint: they got along just fine without it).
Yeah, I'd be scared half out of my mind most of the time if I had to have one of these keeping me alive. I work with electronics and know enough to know what can go wrong. There would have to be redundancies built into the system.
I've often said that when times get tough, you find out what people are really like; when times are good and everyone has plenty, then it's easy to be nice, and courteous, and generous, but when times get tough, you find out who's really like that, and who's just been putting on a false face. In this case what we discover from tough times is who's actually smart, and who's actually dumb as a box of rocks. Splitting up California would wreck havoc with everyone in the former State, and would likely throw the entire U.S. into chaos, and all for the greed and lust for power of (excuse my using an over-used metaphor) the 1%. What they'd actually be doing is very transparent: Leave behind the poorer parts of the former California, so the rich don't have to be "burdened" by them anymore. For the northernmost parts of the State, you may as well just merge it with Oregon in that case, so you can have one larger state full of poor people living in relatively rural areas, all without anywhere near enough jobs to keep them all housed, clothed, and fed. Give the central valley a new spanish name, so the people who live and work there, working the fields, will feel more at home. I don't think I need to go on, you all get the picture, probably without my help in the first place. Of course like all rich despots this wouldn't go like they planned, the northern State could cut off all the water they've been sending to the south and hold it for ransom, jacking the price way up, and the central state could make the food they're growing so expensive that even the richest would be shocked at their grocery bill.
This guy needs to be slapped.
China has a "Product safety agency"? Really? It must only apply to imports, not exports.
How many times is the world going to have to go through this nonsense before apparently technologically illiterate politicians get the message that filtering/censoring the Internet does not work? It's been tried time and time again and the results are the same every single time!
Nations have been spying on each other for thousands of years before we had the Internet, wireless telephone service, or even wired landline service for that matter, how the hell did you do your goddamned jobs back then!? Also, stating the obvious here: You do not need to spy on every goddamned one of us you fucking hacks! Get your noses out of our lives you sonofabitch!
Should I expect violence? Condemnation? Whatever.
If I understand the Quran correctly, if what it says was strictly enforced, you'd be "invited" to convert to Islam, and if you refused you could eventually be killed.
But the question is, why is it so difficult for some people and for others, they just never had to worry about it?
An interesting data point from my own learning curve transitioning from not track what I ate to measuring and tracking everything: How the little things can be not so little. For instance, something I used to love to eat was cinnamon raison toast with butter. Then you realize, as you weigh the amount of butter you've been putting on two pieces of the aforementioned toast, that 300kcal of butter looking like almost nothing! Some foods have massive amounts of calories hiding in them, and if you didn't see it for yourself you wouldn't believe it. Restaurants, especially fast food, fought for decades against publishing any nutritional data, then fought again against putting it right on the menu boards, because they knew that what they were serving you was very high overall in calories and are more interested in maintaining their client base than their client's long-term health. Things like maltodextrin, which is a common food additive, is 100% carbohydrate, and I can mix hundreds and hundreds of calories of the stuff into almost anything and you won't even taste it, because it has almost no taste to it. Even healthy foods like peas, beans, and especially nuts, are very calorically-dense, and unless you know this and are measuring what you're eating of them, you can unwittingly eat hundreds of calories of them. The worst part is that many people don't want to know, they just want to keep eating foods they like and not be guilt-ridden over it -- but then they complain about how fat they are and want a magic pill to make it go away, or get liposuction, or something else drastic.
Amimojo sounds like he is full of shit and is scraping the bottom for any excuse.
Sadly, I would tend to agree with you.
I'm sure I'm old enough to be your father, and I almost wish I was because you're apparently in dire need of some discipline and a little history lesson of your own. Were you even born anytime during the 1980's? I think not. You might want to not comment on things you weren't around for.
Do you keep accurate track of everything you eat every single day? Are you 100% honest with yourself on what, how much, and how many calories about everything that passes your lips, every single day? Are you avoiding eating anything that you can't at least know the caloric content of? If the answer is "no" then you're sabotaging yourself. Also do you still ride at least a hundred miles a week? If not then all your training was for nothing. Fitness is a lifestyle, not a trip from point "A" to point "B"; you can NEVER stop, or you'll revert back to being fat.
Bodies do work differently
No, they do not. Thermodynamics is thermodynamics; you burn more than you eat, you lose weight, period.
Well, I'm sorry you've been ill, but I also challenge you to explain to me (and everyone else reading this thread) what it is that's happened to you that you can't do any sort of exercise of any kind. The reason why is I know people who have lost the use of their legs, yet they ride a bicycle that is hand-cranked instead of leg powered; they even race these contraptions. These people are made of solid heavy metal so far as I'm concerned, and I have the utmost respect for how hard-core they are. So please, explain to us what is wrong with you that you can't do any exercise of any kind.
Do you keep accurate track of everything you eat every single day without fail, and avoid eating anything you can't at least know the caloric content of? Are you completely honest with yourself about what and how much you're eating every single day? Perhaps not. I also think that your "dancing" isn't burning anywhere near as many calories as you think it does, and that perhaps you're eating/drinking things when you go out "dancing" that have way more calories in them than you think they do.
I was over 300 pounds, I have worked myself down to under 200 pounds, I do have sub-10% bodyfat now, I do participate in a competitive endurance-based sport, and I've been like this for 5 years, so under your rules I am qualified to say: You are not doing everything you can do, you are not trying hard enough, and you are in denial. Deal with it.
Sometimes the holes that we dig for ourselves are too deep to get out of.
That's just another way of saying "I've tried everything!" or "It's not my fault, it's my genetics!" or "It's not my fault, it's my thyroid!".
Oh, and it's apples and oranges to compare obesity with heroine addiction.
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, friend.
Your diet is a perpetual thing, not something you do for a little while to lose weight. Eat healthy, be healthy. Drugs and short term adjustments in what you eat aren't going to do shit.
This.
You can shovel pills down someone's throat all you want, and sure, they'll lose all sorts of weight, but if they're not building the life habits necessary to maintain their weight, they'll stuff their faces with shitty food all over again, and gain the weight back in a matter of months. The very fact that people want a Magic Pill to make them lose the caboose is evidence that they lack the skills, knowledge, and personal discipline necessary to successfully control their own weight. These people need to be told the truth: Losing weight takes work to achieve, and it takes real change of your lifestyle and habits to maintain, and most of all it takes stark honesty with yourself about what you eat and drink, who you are, and how you live your life.
Oh, and before anyone starts attacking me with the "thin privilege" and "fat hatred" crap: I used to weigh greater than 300 pounds once upon a time, had completely ruined my knees, and just didn't give a damn anymore. It took years, but I'm below 200 pounds, can leg press more than 3 times my bodyweight, and participate in a competitive endurance sport, and it was a damned hard road getting to where I am full of wrong turns and hard lessons, so don't sit there and tell me you've "tried everything", or "it's your genetics", or "it's impossible!", or any of the other excuses I see day after day after day. Don't sit there and claim you can be "healthy at any size", because that's utter bullshit. Stop trying to turn your sloth and lack of discipline into some sort of twisted virtue, because it most certainly is not! They say "Denial ain't just a river in Egypt", and your denial of the problem and it's implications is also going to wreck your children's lives as they grow up thinking it's OK to ruin their bodies, and being sabotaged by the poor dietary choices you make for them when they have no choice in the matter but to eat what is put in front of them.
So please, stop being in denial, stop ruining your health, stop ruining your bodies, and stop passing on your lack of discipline and poor choices to the next generation. It's all on you.
__________________________________________
Yes, I gave everyone both barrels with this one. Can't handle the truth? Not my problem. Deal with it.
Today we have this thing called the internet
Don't talk down to me like I'm some doddering old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
What you don't seem to realize is that just because broadcast radio isn't playing what you want to hear right now doesn't mean that it hasn't done so in the past. Also, just because the stations in your market are all playing garbage pop music doesn't mean that all broadcast radio stations are playing that. Where I live there is every genre of music you could imagine on FM broadcast radio. Move to where the food is, pal.
You people have no idea what you're loading onto your phones or what it's doing with your data and your life!
Why isn't there more comprehensive oversight of these apps before they're released to the public? Can't they require the source code be submitted to the 'app stores', and proofread to prevent this sort of thing from happening?