>The notion that cell phone radiation causes cancer directly, as in through genetic damage, is ludicrous.
I admire the consistency of your arguments, but I would like to see actual data of cell users vs. non users. Your argument seems to be, "Since cell radiation (radio, microwave) is below visible spectrum, it should't be harmful." Well, what makes X-rays harmful? Do we even know?
Microwaves can kill, and microwaves were the idea behind the Japanese death ray of WWII. I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand. What if it came out, that holding a cellphone was the equivalent of sticking your head in a microwave oven?
The cost of giving up cell phones is actually quite low. Take a look at 10 years ago, when basically nobody had one. Were we in a massive recession? (Dot com I guess, but that's mega-lol.) Did the news pontificate about Airplane Bomber X or Y?
I think cellphones are cool. But is there anything about them that is more than just convenience?
They sure as hell don't sound good. And they're expensive as fuck.
Nah, my Netflix queue is a year long. Netflix users are more chilled out than that. If Netflix says "short wait," I get something else. That's the benefit of having access to everything.
Besides, $20/month on Netflix is 3 movies at a time. I pay $9.77. I can blow that on a deli sandwich, and that doesn't last me all month.
It does have a decent library. Heroes, Weeds, and Lost are all recent shows. They also have 30 Rock and The Office.
I could swear they had 2001: A Space Odyssey. I guess they do delete some things. "Last watched by you on 12/21/09." Funny because it's #47 in my queue.
I disagree with the quality, too. Sure, VHS is only like 180 lines, but a brand-new VHS tape was way crisper than broadcast, sometimes cable, and way better than a copy.
The problem is that most VHS players were pretty crappy. I lived in a VHS-centric household, and yet many of our players were 2-head or mono, or both. Just around the time people realized that 4-head stereo was the way to go, DVD came out, and VHS equipment quality went down again.
Also, VHS tapes were sold as "standard" quality or "movie grade." I made a habit of buying the movie-grade tapes until DVD came out, and then they got hard to find.
VHS rentals held up pretty well considering how many times they were played back.
And yet I'm not generally willing to pay for non-physical media. I know the iPod generation is throwing wads of cash at Apple's music store, but they're stupid.
You can sell me an object, with some objective value, or you can sell me a service, such as Netflix. With Netflix (mail or streaming), I'm not paying per movie. Sure, there's a floor to how cheap it can get (about $1), but ultimately I'm paying for access to their library, as fast as I can personally consume it.
Paying for digital copies is the great boondoggle of the 21st century. Mostly because the prices are too high. I'll pay $0.10 for an mp3 but not $0.99. That's just nuts - it's probably cheaper to get the CD. With the artwork. And the CD itself. And the packaging. And the receipt. And the experience of going to the store.
This is nothing new, mr. +5 Insightful. Back in the VHS days, they used to charge $90 per movie on the day of release. Rental stores had to pay it since they wanted new releases. Even though they had to rent it 20-30 times to break even. Prices fell to $20 a few weeks later.
Not exactly. Privacy is as important as it ever was.
Without privacy, you cannot "pull off" anything vs anyone else. You cannot be the first to market a product, because the competitors know what you're going to do.
The lack of privacy is an assault on your being. You have a right to your own thoughts. You have a right to control the information that flows out from your body.
Take a simple example. My grandmother hated being photographed. I have no photographs of her. That was her choice.
Privacy is nothing less than an extension of property ownership since we conquered the Indians. If you take for granted that nobody can steal your CD player, then privacy is just the same.
Kids these days are living in a loosely privatized online world for the sake of convenience. It helps them make friends. The idea that their privacy is important is not diminished by the ease with which we take it from them.
>They, like Commodore, made bad decisions, like sticking with an 8bit CPU for the CoCo3 instead of moving into the 16bit world (except with their PC clones).
How about the fact that Tandy's weren't PC-compatible? I mean, everybody knew the hardware was identical to PC hardware, but it wasn't guaranteed to work. Game boxes listed "IBM" and "Tandy" compatibility separately. Wiki says the keyboard and parallel ports were proprietary. Not all dos versions worked.
It seems the PC sphere is littered with the carcasses of companies that tried to make their hardware proprietary. Tandy, Compaq. IBM succeeded despite their PC business. Same with Apple. Not to mention SGI, Sun, DEC, and every other workstation manufacturer. BeBox and Amiga, nice try. RISC...hey, lets take something that conforms to Moore's law, and make it even cheaper! That's useful...
It's one bright light in an otherwise dismal world, PC architecture is still cheap and agreed-upon.
Who exactly is arguing for community-run nuclear power plants, anyway? People want fuel cells, solar and wind so they can get off the grid, and get over the guilt of contributing to the pollution problem. Distributed power generation is potentially the biggest game changer since gasoline (which, ultimately, was also a massively distributed power generation scheme - see the automobile). Gasoline enabled the suburbs and the settlement of vast interiors of the US.
Distributed electricity generation will probably result in another renaissance of rural development, and ultimately the telecommuting society that was envisioned 10-15 years ago.
Oh, and a "commune in the woods" is also known as a "town." I'm pretty sure that before this plot of land had a desk and a computer, it was full of, you know, trees.
That's all true. We have plenty of coal, and natural gas hasn't been exploited properly (imo). But that's assuming Manhattan isn't underwater by then. I don't think we're running out of fossil fuel so much as we're running out of a place to dump the waste carbon. The third world is practically in a state of revolt over the climate issue and has begun extracting concessions from the likes of us.
I bet it is, actually. If we understood the climate, we could control it to anyone's benefit.
Look at the Sahara desert. It's right on the equator, you tend to assume, oh that part of the Earth is burnt to a crisp. It turns out the Sahara was verdant (source: History channel) just prior to the rise of Egyptian civilization. Wikipedia: "By around 3400 BC, the monsoon retreated south to approximately where it is today,[16] leading to the gradual desertification of the Sahara. [17] The Sahara is now as dry as it was about 13,000 years ago.[12] "
This is an emerging field. We don't understand all of the mechanics. But if a desert of that size can be created in the timespan of human civilization, that's the danger before us.
Yep. One of the most shocking things about global warming (should you choose to accept this theory) is that the Western countries that are causing it also stand to benefit. Russia was a no-brainer once you mentioned Siberia, the all-time classic example of a vast tract of land unsuitable for use because it's too cold. But I also question whether Europe or the US will be badly affected - affected for sure, but if the farm belt moves north into the Dakotas, so what?
The whole history of Western expansion is that we've built our economy on the backs of cheap foreign labor. As an American, you're "rich" precisely because the Chinese who make your goods earn 10x less than you. This system has survived because the "slave labor" class is like a hot potato that gets passed around. Once the Chinese grow out of it, they'll just hand it off to $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY.
But now we're threatening to take the very air they breathe and water they drink from the third world, via climate change, and profit from it. Under these conditions, how long do you think the empire-based economic model can survive?
Is it wrong if the articles they were suppressing were just propaganda?
I mean, that's the shocker, yes? That good scientists would suppress bad data. Bad scientists suppressing good data...that's run-of-the-mill corporatism that we're used to.
Who are these pro-warming scientists who won't release their data? It sounds to me like the anti-warming crowd has convinced you of false equivalency. e.g. "The other side is just as big scumbags as we are."
Actually if you put everybody on the dole, you can cheaply and efficiently solve everyone's medical problems at once. Assuming you find a treatment that works, you can keep handing it out.
My point is that "we're all in this together" is probably a better deal. Since we currently have private health care, as far as I'm concerned anyone with diabetes can go FUCK themselves. Is that cool?
Because someday I'm going to end up with something and then I'll want help. Medical care is equal in the sense that everybody ends up with something that needs to be fixed. You want to play dollars and cents with whose disease is more affordable? That's a risky game.
You could end up being the guy with diabetes. That's $100,000/year. How does that dole sound now?
>I routinely see these Anointed Ones drive very fast without any flashing lights...I have also had these guys tailgate me in an attempt to get me to drive faster than the speed limit.
Of course. You don't understand what they're doing. On highways, cops sweep the road at 90mph. They don't want you to drive faster, they want you to get out of the way. There's no sense in a cop car "joining the herd" at 60mph. It accomplishes nothing.
On local streets they seem to go pretty damn slow and will usually let you in front if they can.
Yeah but I personally find bass more tolerable pain-wise than a lot of excess high frequency. They may have gotten it right from a safety perspective (although maybe not from a nuisance perspective).
Yep. There's no way to regulate the volume coming out of a device. Only the voltage. So people will buy 2-ohm speakers and their ipods will be just as loud again, but sound like shit in the process.
Meanwhile, people who try to plug in their ipod at their friends house to throw a party will be disappointed when it's not loud enough to fill the room. A 1/8" jack and tiny lithium battery were garbage to begin with. Now they're making it worse.
Enjoy your ipod governor as you drive to 7-11 to buy a $10 pack of cigarettes that the government MANDATES that it contain disgusting additives along with your gasoline that's been 10% watered down with ethanol piss. Fucking nanny state is right.
And there's a good reason for that. The louder it is, the more detail there can be.
But you have to be able to pick your distance from the stage (and thus, your personal volume). Being trapped in a concrete box while someone bounces rock music off the flat, hard walls is really not much better than being in Abu Ghraib.
I like the sun at 10,000 degrees fahrenheit. I also like to sit under a tree sometimes.
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Insightful.
>The notion that cell phone radiation causes cancer directly, as in through genetic damage, is ludicrous.
I admire the consistency of your arguments, but I would like to see actual data of cell users vs. non users. Your argument seems to be, "Since cell radiation (radio, microwave) is below visible spectrum, it should't be harmful." Well, what makes X-rays harmful? Do we even know?
Microwaves can kill, and microwaves were the idea behind the Japanese death ray of WWII. I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand. What if it came out, that holding a cellphone was the equivalent of sticking your head in a microwave oven?
The cost of giving up cell phones is actually quite low. Take a look at 10 years ago, when basically nobody had one. Were we in a massive recession? (Dot com I guess, but that's mega-lol.) Did the news pontificate about Airplane Bomber X or Y?
I think cellphones are cool. But is there anything about them that is more than just convenience?
They sure as hell don't sound good. And they're expensive as fuck.
Actually, you don't know that. You read a Reuters summary of a medical study.
Get your hands on the actual study before commenting. Oh, and good luck with that.
Nah, my Netflix queue is a year long. Netflix users are more chilled out than that. If Netflix says "short wait," I get something else. That's the benefit of having access to everything.
Besides, $20/month on Netflix is 3 movies at a time. I pay $9.77. I can blow that on a deli sandwich, and that doesn't last me all month.
It does have a decent library. Heroes, Weeds, and Lost are all recent shows. They also have 30 Rock and The Office.
I could swear they had 2001: A Space Odyssey. I guess they do delete some things. "Last watched by you on 12/21/09." Funny because it's #47 in my queue.
I disagree with the quality, too. Sure, VHS is only like 180 lines, but a brand-new VHS tape was way crisper than broadcast, sometimes cable, and way better than a copy.
The problem is that most VHS players were pretty crappy. I lived in a VHS-centric household, and yet many of our players were 2-head or mono, or both. Just around the time people realized that 4-head stereo was the way to go, DVD came out, and VHS equipment quality went down again.
Also, VHS tapes were sold as "standard" quality or "movie grade." I made a habit of buying the movie-grade tapes until DVD came out, and then they got hard to find.
VHS rentals held up pretty well considering how many times they were played back.
>Physical media is so 20th century.
And yet I'm not generally willing to pay for non-physical media. I know the iPod generation is throwing wads of cash at Apple's music store, but they're stupid.
You can sell me an object, with some objective value, or you can sell me a service, such as Netflix. With Netflix (mail or streaming), I'm not paying per movie. Sure, there's a floor to how cheap it can get (about $1), but ultimately I'm paying for access to their library, as fast as I can personally consume it.
Paying for digital copies is the great boondoggle of the 21st century. Mostly because the prices are too high. I'll pay $0.10 for an mp3 but not $0.99. That's just nuts - it's probably cheaper to get the CD. With the artwork. And the CD itself. And the packaging. And the receipt. And the experience of going to the store.
This is nothing new, mr. +5 Insightful. Back in the VHS days, they used to charge $90 per movie on the day of release. Rental stores had to pay it since they wanted new releases. Even though they had to rent it 20-30 times to break even. Prices fell to $20 a few weeks later.
Because they forbid sex before marriage, which means a lot of 17-year-old couples (e.g. high school) get married just to have sex.
Also, they have been known to railroad 14-year-old girls into marrying Elders of the Church. That's nothing short of child abuse.
Yeah, the women are hot, but it's the decadence that matters.
>Is our view of privacy outdated?
Not exactly. Privacy is as important as it ever was.
Without privacy, you cannot "pull off" anything vs anyone else. You cannot be the first to market a product, because the competitors know what you're going to do.
The lack of privacy is an assault on your being. You have a right to your own thoughts. You have a right to control the information that flows out from your body.
Take a simple example. My grandmother hated being photographed. I have no photographs of her. That was her choice.
Privacy is nothing less than an extension of property ownership since we conquered the Indians. If you take for granted that nobody can steal your CD player, then privacy is just the same.
Kids these days are living in a loosely privatized online world for the sake of convenience. It helps them make friends. The idea that their privacy is important is not diminished by the ease with which we take it from them.
Yeah, people use it. It's a web email service from the biggest, baddest web provider out there. Why wouldn't they?
I don't have a gmail account, for the same reason as you. But not everyone is meta-thinking this.
You know Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, right? (FOXNews) Has this stopped anyone from telling you to "go to my Myspace?"
>They, like Commodore, made bad decisions, like sticking with an 8bit CPU for the CoCo3 instead of moving into the 16bit world (except with their PC clones).
How about the fact that Tandy's weren't PC-compatible? I mean, everybody knew the hardware was identical to PC hardware, but it wasn't guaranteed to work. Game boxes listed "IBM" and "Tandy" compatibility separately. Wiki says the keyboard and parallel ports were proprietary. Not all dos versions worked.
It seems the PC sphere is littered with the carcasses of companies that tried to make their hardware proprietary. Tandy, Compaq. IBM succeeded despite their PC business. Same with Apple. Not to mention SGI, Sun, DEC, and every other workstation manufacturer. BeBox and Amiga, nice try. RISC...hey, lets take something that conforms to Moore's law, and make it even cheaper! That's useful...
It's one bright light in an otherwise dismal world, PC architecture is still cheap and agreed-upon.
>How about IBM. They should have died years ago,
IBM is trading at $130.
Who exactly is arguing for community-run nuclear power plants, anyway? People want fuel cells, solar and wind so they can get off the grid, and get over the guilt of contributing to the pollution problem. Distributed power generation is potentially the biggest game changer since gasoline (which, ultimately, was also a massively distributed power generation scheme - see the automobile). Gasoline enabled the suburbs and the settlement of vast interiors of the US.
Distributed electricity generation will probably result in another renaissance of rural development, and ultimately the telecommuting society that was envisioned 10-15 years ago.
Oh, and a "commune in the woods" is also known as a "town." I'm pretty sure that before this plot of land had a desk and a computer, it was full of, you know, trees.
That's all true. We have plenty of coal, and natural gas hasn't been exploited properly (imo). But that's assuming Manhattan isn't underwater by then. I don't think we're running out of fossil fuel so much as we're running out of a place to dump the waste carbon. The third world is practically in a state of revolt over the climate issue and has begun extracting concessions from the likes of us.
>climate science is no more complex than that.
I bet it is, actually. If we understood the climate, we could control it to anyone's benefit.
Look at the Sahara desert. It's right on the equator, you tend to assume, oh that part of the Earth is burnt to a crisp. It turns out the Sahara was verdant (source: History channel) just prior to the rise of Egyptian civilization. Wikipedia: "By around 3400 BC, the monsoon retreated south to approximately where it is today,[16] leading to the gradual desertification of the Sahara. [17] The Sahara is now as dry as it was about 13,000 years ago.[12] "
This is an emerging field. We don't understand all of the mechanics. But if a desert of that size can be created in the timespan of human civilization, that's the danger before us.
Yep. One of the most shocking things about global warming (should you choose to accept this theory) is that the Western countries that are causing it also stand to benefit. Russia was a no-brainer once you mentioned Siberia, the all-time classic example of a vast tract of land unsuitable for use because it's too cold. But I also question whether Europe or the US will be badly affected - affected for sure, but if the farm belt moves north into the Dakotas, so what?
The whole history of Western expansion is that we've built our economy on the backs of cheap foreign labor. As an American, you're "rich" precisely because the Chinese who make your goods earn 10x less than you. This system has survived because the "slave labor" class is like a hot potato that gets passed around. Once the Chinese grow out of it, they'll just hand it off to $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY.
But now we're threatening to take the very air they breathe and water they drink from the third world, via climate change, and profit from it. Under these conditions, how long do you think the empire-based economic model can survive?
>Is it still a conspiracy theory when it's true?
Is it wrong if the articles they were suppressing were just propaganda?
I mean, that's the shocker, yes? That good scientists would suppress bad data. Bad scientists suppressing good data...that's run-of-the-mill corporatism that we're used to.
>both have shown signs of being disreputable.
Who are these pro-warming scientists who won't release their data? It sounds to me like the anti-warming crowd has convinced you of false equivalency. e.g. "The other side is just as big scumbags as we are."
Actually if you put everybody on the dole, you can cheaply and efficiently solve everyone's medical problems at once. Assuming you find a treatment that works, you can keep handing it out.
My point is that "we're all in this together" is probably a better deal. Since we currently have private health care, as far as I'm concerned anyone with diabetes can go FUCK themselves. Is that cool?
Because someday I'm going to end up with something and then I'll want help. Medical care is equal in the sense that everybody ends up with something that needs to be fixed. You want to play dollars and cents with whose disease is more affordable? That's a risky game.
You could end up being the guy with diabetes. That's $100,000/year. How does that dole sound now?
>I routinely see these Anointed Ones drive very fast without any flashing lights...I have also had these guys tailgate me in an attempt to get me to drive faster than the speed limit.
Of course. You don't understand what they're doing. On highways, cops sweep the road at 90mph. They don't want you to drive faster, they want you to get out of the way. There's no sense in a cop car "joining the herd" at 60mph. It accomplishes nothing.
On local streets they seem to go pretty damn slow and will usually let you in front if they can.
Yeah but I personally find bass more tolerable pain-wise than a lot of excess high frequency. They may have gotten it right from a safety perspective (although maybe not from a nuisance perspective).
Yep. There's no way to regulate the volume coming out of a device. Only the voltage. So people will buy 2-ohm speakers and their ipods will be just as loud again, but sound like shit in the process.
Meanwhile, people who try to plug in their ipod at their friends house to throw a party will be disappointed when it's not loud enough to fill the room. A 1/8" jack and tiny lithium battery were garbage to begin with. Now they're making it worse.
Enjoy your ipod governor as you drive to 7-11 to buy a $10 pack of cigarettes that the government MANDATES that it contain disgusting additives along with your gasoline that's been 10% watered down with ethanol piss. Fucking nanny state is right.
And there's a good reason for that. The louder it is, the more detail there can be.
But you have to be able to pick your distance from the stage (and thus, your personal volume). Being trapped in a concrete box while someone bounces rock music off the flat, hard walls is really not much better than being in Abu Ghraib.
I like the sun at 10,000 degrees fahrenheit. I also like to sit under a tree sometimes.