Have the information engraved onto stainless steel plates, which you then store in a safety deposit box. Permanent storage medium, fire-proof, tamper-proof, and stored in a secure location. If someone wanted to destroy them, they'd have to go to quite a bit of trouble to do so.
Is there some reason you're insisting on being Mister Crankypants Rain-on-my-parade guy? Did you not have your coffee yet today? Or did you forget to take your meds this morning? Got turned down and laughed at by that girl you were interested in so you're taking it out on everyone else?
Maybe we'll discover a way of creating three-dimensional objects that have zero mass. Imagine something with the strength of the strongest alloys, but zero measurable mass. You'd have to add conventional matter to them as ballast, just to keep them from floating away! You could build massive structures from it, and they'd have a fraction of the mass of conventional buildings. You could have bicycles that weigh only a couple pounds. The possibilities would be endless, it would revolutionize everything.
That's the amount of time it'll take for hackers to exploit some weakness in the system and start playing bumper-cars with rush-hour traffic at highway speeds.
See, I'm a privacy advocate (to put it mildly; look at my past comments) but I was happy to have them install the smartmeters because it means I can keep the sideyard gate locked all the time, and I know that anybody coming on to the property is either invited or a trespasser. Additionally I needn't worry about whether or not the meter is being read properly this way. If I find the data is being used improperly, I'd likely just buy or build a jammer for it, and make them install a conventional meter when they can no longer receive data.
It's a potential privacy issue because your power usage can be tracked more or less in real-time, so your living habits could theoretically be extrapolated from your utility usage, especially if it's electric power usage as well as natural gas usage.
Well, then in the end they won't get any money from me. If the Internet turns into that, then I'll just say "fuck this" and cancel it. I don't have cable TV now (by choice) and I certainly had a life before the Internet. I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment, either. If they really want to kill the Golden Goose, go ahead and let them try, but I don't think so.
Oh for fuck's sake.. I wasn't being nostalgic, damnit, I was being theoretical!
Humans are capable of some pretty amazing things.. but they're also capable of some of the most senseless, animalistic, disappointing things imaginable. What I was referring to was a theoretical human race that actually rises above the stupid animal they tend to be!
Corporate culture has brainwashed people into believing that you can't have a happy, healthy, productive life without being "connected" to everyone else 100% of the time through online services and smartphone. The irony is that people are even less connected to each other than they've ever been, since everything online is just an illusion of that. Words on a page and pictures on a screen can't ever take the place of actual face-to-face interaction with other human beings. The sooner people come back around to that very basic fact, the better off everyone will be.
When times get tough, you find out what people are really like. When you're living in times of plenty-for-all, it's easy for people to be kind and generous. The truly good, nice people won't change much, if at all, but the rest? The pretty mask and the kid-gloves come off. Businesses are run by people, and they reflect who those people really are.
Really? I don't hear anything from you and people like you other than "Give up, it's inevitable". I refuse to accept that, and I'm not alone, either. If you could see what I see, you'd be ranting, too.
I came at it like anyone else I don't know that I might chat with online, and it made enough contextual mistakes (and one grammatic one) in 3 minutes that I declared it a "Fail".
If people don't make it abundantly clear that datamining them and invading their privacy is not acceptable, then those practices are just going to keep being expanded and expanded until one day we've all got cameras in every room of our houses and have ZERO privacy because everyone will have voted away their right to it one way or another, and if you're one of those people that have already given up and claim that it's "too late" then I'm here to tell you YOU ARE WRONG!
MOST OF YOU have been giving away your privacy and your private information to faceless corporations for years now, and most of you have also been so thoroughly indoctrinated by these corporations that you don't even begin to understand that 'privacy' is valuable, it's yours, and you should protect it! I am proud to say I do not own a smartphone, nor do I wish to. My phone has no GPS. I do not use the internet access on it. I am not part of the damned botnet. I really wish the rest of you would wake up and listen to me and to what this man has to say!
Am I the only one who is struck by the irony of that statement? Remember that military funding was behind the initial research and development of the Internet we use today. It's almost as if they allowed the private sector to spend their time and energy to develop and expand it for them, so they could again use it for their own purposes..
I suspect they can't make it for under $20,000 because they're not making several hundred thousand of them per year in multiple plants across the world like the major auto manufacturers do. Maybe if they were able to partner with an existing car company they might be able to pull off a price-point closer to that, but the big manufacturers clearly aren't interested in doing that, they'd rather drive small start-ups like Tesla out of business.
Fuck that shit. I'd rather be unemployed and homeless than put up with that kind of crap. I'll go to the goddamn bathroom whenever I feel the need. Human rights, damnit!
This. Until they demonstrate that they not only know and understand your wishes in the matter, you must personally monitor what they're doing and seeing on the internet, and that means limiting the hours they can access the internet to when you're around to be monitoring them. If you use some software product to do your parenting for you, then you're surrendering your right to raise your children with your values to some group of strangers who will decide for you what is and is not appropriate for children to access on the internet -- and that includes the fallout from their mistakes, as well as their intentional distortions of that. If you can't deal with either option then don't let them use the internet until they're 18 and you're not responsible for them anymore.
Seriously, you have my sympathy if that's what you're stuck with. Not that Comcast or anyone else is much better, though. I'm glad I cancelled cable about 5 months ago and put an antenna on the roof, and anything special I want to watch, I can watch online for free or for very little -- and nobody is screwing with my TiVo. (Yes, I know, TiVo has code that allows them to do the same damned thing, but they haven't been stupid enough to actually enable it).
If all else fails: The U.S. built the goddamn Internet in the first place, and we can RE-build it if necessary. Let them have their damned walled gardens for all we care. What if we say "Don't care, fuck you" and go on about our business? I think the populace of the countries that say they want this will have something radically different to say if they find themselves cut off from the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Have the information engraved onto stainless steel plates, which you then store in a safety deposit box. Permanent storage medium, fire-proof, tamper-proof, and stored in a secure location. If someone wanted to destroy them, they'd have to go to quite a bit of trouble to do so.
Is there some reason you're insisting on being Mister Crankypants Rain-on-my-parade guy? Did you not have your coffee yet today? Or did you forget to take your meds this morning? Got turned down and laughed at by that girl you were interested in so you're taking it out on everyone else?
Maybe we'll discover a way of creating three-dimensional objects that have zero mass. Imagine something with the strength of the strongest alloys, but zero measurable mass. You'd have to add conventional matter to them as ballast, just to keep them from floating away! You could build massive structures from it, and they'd have a fraction of the mass of conventional buildings. You could have bicycles that weigh only a couple pounds. The possibilities would be endless, it would revolutionize everything.
That's the amount of time it'll take for hackers to exploit some weakness in the system and start playing bumper-cars with rush-hour traffic at highway speeds.
See, I'm a privacy advocate (to put it mildly; look at my past comments) but I was happy to have them install the smartmeters because it means I can keep the sideyard gate locked all the time, and I know that anybody coming on to the property is either invited or a trespasser. Additionally I needn't worry about whether or not the meter is being read properly this way. If I find the data is being used improperly, I'd likely just buy or build a jammer for it, and make them install a conventional meter when they can no longer receive data.
It's a potential privacy issue because your power usage can be tracked more or less in real-time, so your living habits could theoretically be extrapolated from your utility usage, especially if it's electric power usage as well as natural gas usage.
they want this to look more like cable TV systems
Well, then in the end they won't get any money from me. If the Internet turns into that, then I'll just say "fuck this" and cancel it. I don't have cable TV now (by choice) and I certainly had a life before the Internet. I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment, either. If they really want to kill the Golden Goose, go ahead and let them try, but I don't think so.
Oh for fuck's sake.. I wasn't being nostalgic, damnit, I was being theoretical!
Humans are capable of some pretty amazing things.. but they're also capable of some of the most senseless, animalistic, disappointing things imaginable. What I was referring to was a theoretical human race that actually rises above the stupid animal they tend to be!
Because they have been brainwashed into believing that their lives aren't "complete" without those things!
Corporate culture has brainwashed people into believing that you can't have a happy, healthy, productive life without being "connected" to everyone else 100% of the time through online services and smartphone. The irony is that people are even less connected to each other than they've ever been, since everything online is just an illusion of that. Words on a page and pictures on a screen can't ever take the place of actual face-to-face interaction with other human beings. The sooner people come back around to that very basic fact, the better off everyone will be.
In a better world, we're more than just slightly smarter animals. More and more that's all people seem to be, is animals.
Adapt to what?
"Me and mine first, and fuck everyone else", that's what. Basic animal survival instincts, sans-humanity.
When times get tough, you find out what people are really like. When you're living in times of plenty-for-all, it's easy for people to be kind and generous. The truly good, nice people won't change much, if at all, but the rest? The pretty mask and the kid-gloves come off. Businesses are run by people, and they reflect who those people really are.
Really? I don't hear anything from you and people like you other than "Give up, it's inevitable". I refuse to accept that, and I'm not alone, either. If you could see what I see, you'd be ranting, too.
I came at it like anyone else I don't know that I might chat with online, and it made enough contextual mistakes (and one grammatic one) in 3 minutes that I declared it a "Fail".
If people don't make it abundantly clear that datamining them and invading their privacy is not acceptable, then those practices are just going to keep being expanded and expanded until one day we've all got cameras in every room of our houses and have ZERO privacy because everyone will have voted away their right to it one way or another, and if you're one of those people that have already given up and claim that it's "too late" then I'm here to tell you YOU ARE WRONG!
MOST OF YOU have been giving away your privacy and your private information to faceless corporations for years now, and most of you have also been so thoroughly indoctrinated by these corporations that you don't even begin to understand that 'privacy' is valuable, it's yours, and you should protect it! I am proud to say I do not own a smartphone, nor do I wish to. My phone has no GPS. I do not use the internet access on it. I am not part of the damned botnet. I really wish the rest of you would wake up and listen to me and to what this man has to say!
Am I the only one who is struck by the irony of that statement? Remember that military funding was behind the initial research and development of the Internet we use today. It's almost as if they allowed the private sector to spend their time and energy to develop and expand it for them, so they could again use it for their own purposes..
I suspect they can't make it for under $20,000 because they're not making several hundred thousand of them per year in multiple plants across the world like the major auto manufacturers do. Maybe if they were able to partner with an existing car company they might be able to pull off a price-point closer to that, but the big manufacturers clearly aren't interested in doing that, they'd rather drive small start-ups like Tesla out of business.
If an asteroid on trajectory to hit the Earth is within the Moon's orbit, we're 100% screwed no matter how many lasers they shoot at it.
Fuck that shit. I'd rather be unemployed and homeless than put up with that kind of crap. I'll go to the goddamn bathroom whenever I feel the need. Human rights, damnit!
This. Until they demonstrate that they not only know and understand your wishes in the matter, you must personally monitor what they're doing and seeing on the internet, and that means limiting the hours they can access the internet to when you're around to be monitoring them. If you use some software product to do your parenting for you, then you're surrendering your right to raise your children with your values to some group of strangers who will decide for you what is and is not appropriate for children to access on the internet -- and that includes the fallout from their mistakes, as well as their intentional distortions of that. If you can't deal with either option then don't let them use the internet until they're 18 and you're not responsible for them anymore.
Seriously, you have my sympathy if that's what you're stuck with. Not that Comcast or anyone else is much better, though. I'm glad I cancelled cable about 5 months ago and put an antenna on the roof, and anything special I want to watch, I can watch online for free or for very little -- and nobody is screwing with my TiVo.
(Yes, I know, TiVo has code that allows them to do the same damned thing, but they haven't been stupid enough to actually enable it).
If that's the case, then why not just go back to listening to broadcast radio? Isn't HD Radio at least as good?
If all else fails: The U.S. built the goddamn Internet in the first place, and we can RE-build it if necessary. Let them have their damned walled gardens for all we care. What if we say "Don't care, fuck you" and go on about our business? I think the populace of the countries that say they want this will have something radically different to say if they find themselves cut off from the rest of the world.