Well, I made it almost all the way through this comment page and so far this is what I learned about Global Climate Change or whatever:
This is a complicated issue.
Some people get very riled up and immature about this issue:
Some people use hot topics like this to demonstrate their egotism via displays of logical analysis that take shots at other folk's posts but don't actually address the issue of global climate change.
No one seems to agree that any sort of climate change consensus can be trusted.
Some seem to feel that no sort of climate change consensus matters or can be reached.
Climate change stories gather more interest now than stories regarding potential organic matter on the moon as well as mappings of a particular cancer's genome.
My scientific conclusion:
Global climate change has become such a clusterfuck issue that it now ranks right up there with abortion, healthcare, and the extent to which any given religious text should be taken seriously in modern social context in terms of unpleasantness to discuss. In other words, people's eyes are going to start glazing over and their ears are going to become desensitized to anything relating to the environment. This whole issue is a forsaken mess.
So if you're in Authority you're damned if you do and damned if you don't!
Obviously it's time for the authorities to get creative, start thinking outside the box, and turn the use of force back around on themselves. Only through such creativity and innovation can they escape that wretched Scylla and Charybdis of damned if you do, damned if you don't. =P
From my perspective the question is whether or not these types of actions actually make anyone safer. Since we've implemented zero tolerance policies; started kicking students out of school for expressing darker thoughts;began monitoring their activities outside school...are students any safer than before?
I had a question about Slackware. I haven't done a lot of distro research, but I have an old Dell laptop (Pentium IV style), that I have been meaning to refurbish into an internet access/perl development system. The system resources are limited enough that I don't think running Ubuntu (my current distro) would be a good idea on it. Basically, I am curious if slackware is the right distro for a job like that. I've heard it referenced on slashdot a lot now as a lightweight distribution so I really should just do some more research, however, since you seem to be a fan of it yourself (unless that was sarcasm, I hope not), maybe you could give me your take on it?
Agreed, wholeheartedly so. I hopped from the sinking Windows ship after XP and started using Ubuntu on release 8.04. I must admit that I am not nearly as proficient on Ubuntu or Linux as I would like to be, but I am learning quickly. Where the first few months of my Ubuntu experience had me clicking through GUI's and resetting defaults regularly, after a few months of posting on the Ubuntu forums and getting a feel for how problems can be typically trouble-shooted, I started gediting config files and browsing through/etc on a regular basis. I started downloading some programs that could not be found in my repositories (with more confidence) and even started editing my sources list. Eventually I switched my default editor over to vim and began spitting out shell and perl scripts right and left to keep things simple for me and give me some peace of mind security wise. I've been using Ubuntu for just over a year now and, already, I am now posting advice on the Ubuntu forums more frequently than asking for it.
The point isn't that I learned quickly, its that, since I wanted to learn some of the more hardcore and advanced features of linux, it was easy for me to go out and do so once I got comfortable. The nicest thing about Ubuntu is that it doesn't scare the crap out of you the first time you use it. As a social experiment, I often take my non tech literate friends and sit them down at my central living room computer (hooked to my TV) which is running 9.04 and tell them to put on some music to listen to. None of these folk have ever used anything but Windows. None of them take more than 20 minutes and maybe 1 or 2 questions to figure it out.
Once someone gets comfortable with Ubuntu, if they want to start developing more advanced skills, they have a friendly place to ask which is easy to find (almost always google search result #1 with the word Ubuntu in it), the Ubuntu forums. When they do start asking about advanced topics, they are never dismissed as newbs or told something condescending. They are never attacked or outright flamed. Instead, if what they are asking about really is something of concern, they are told, in a rational and mature manner, about the risks they may or may not be taking. I couldn't be happier with the Ubuntu experience so far. I may decide to distro jump sometime in the future out of boredom or curiosity, but in terms of need, I really can't see a good reason to find something else.
Really? Because I have stood on the top of Half Dome in Yosemite in California once a year for the past seven years and my phone has literally no service save 911. I can climb to the top of Bishop's Peak, one of the highest points in San Luis Obispo County, and still get no reception until I get back down to my car, where I get a whopping 1 bar of service from Verizon. Oh, there were also all those times that I went snowboarding in the Sierra Nevada on the California side and never got any reception at the top of the mountain. No reception going over the I-80 pass when I visited my g/f for Christmas last year up near Truckee.....
...The list goes on. I was born and raised in the mountains. I visit the mountains regularly. I climb to the top of mountains regularly. I do this all in America, in fact, in California, one to the most developed and populated states in the country. I almost never get decent reception in the mountains.
There most certainly is something wrong with America's wireless communications infrastructure.
I should not have to leave my opinion at the border when entering a country, if my opinion is not causing any harm to anyone.
I don't mean to be an ass, but that sounds like the type of attitude that comes along with the luxury of living in a country where every opinion and idea is given a chance to survive based on its own merits. There are some places in this world where merely thinking certain things really is a crime. I am not saying Israel is one of those places, but having that, "I'm entitled to my own opinion." attitude is merely indicative of the fact that you were probably raised in an are where individual's opinions and beliefs are both respected and valued. Be careful if you ever travel, having such an outlook could easily cost you more than a broken laptop in some places.
The guy wants to produce useful energy from a fault line location with drills and geothermal power plants? Pssssh amateur. Here in California we learned a long time ago that the best type of power plant to build on a fault line is the nuclear variant.
What is there to discuss? McCarthyism hasn't been there for 50 years now.
Really? I suppose if you want to be pedantic that's true. The name 'McCarthyism' may have changed, but the general tactic and attitude hasn't. Ever try discussing, rationally, something like gay rights in a large group of people? Hell, I wasn't even 12 before I learned that saying, "Gay is okay" will get you ostracized from your peers and shunned from many social functions. Have you ever seen what happens to politicians that make a presidential bid when they are not married? I can't count how many times I've heard people discuss being against a candidate because, "They just don't seem to have proper family values." I mean, really? Some of the most intelligent, incredible folk I've met are well into their 50's and single. We can't let anyone like that have a shot at running the country though because they may not think of the children. And, of course, there is that fun word, 'terrorist' that got tossed around a lot after 9/11.
I know you mentioned more modern civil rights abuses in America later in your post, but the point I am trying to get at is that McCarthyism still exists just fine today, it's just a little more subtle and sneakier. Changing the name allows it to be such. It's kind of funny, I recall reading "The Scarlet Letter" in high school and failing to see why I should give a damn about that book. Nowadays I find Hawethorne's work more relevant than ever. Excommunication is a bitch.
had you tried stimulating her clitoris while this was in effect happening....
Perhaps you really are so very interested in the neuroscience that this seems, to you, like a pragmatic and reasonable 'experiement.' However, the parent post mentioned later in his discussion that the lady is undergoing, from time to time, experiences equivalent to feeling your skull crushed or your face deeply cut time and again. 'Offering' to conduct an experiment during these types of experiences by means of sexually stimulating a part of her genitalia seems tasteless at best.
There is a place and time for crude humor, or even just sexual humor, but regarding a serious neuro-disability and the painful hell a person is going through to cope with it is neither that time nor place. If you sincerely feel the need to induce an endorphin effect on a girl while she is undergoing intense pain, perhaps next time you should consider stimulating something other than her genitalia, as that just sounds perverse... even for the internet.
I graduated Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in aerospace engineering. Every year, the senior level Bachelor's students participate in a year long spacecraft design mission. Approximately 30 - 40 students team up to fulfill some mission requirements thought up by a few of the professors. I wasn't able to attend the final design review last year, but I know for a fact that the project they worked on involved setting up a telescope array on the dark side of the moon. I have no doubt that their design probably had some holes in it and definitely failed to account for some things because, well, all student designs do. However, I also know for a fact that those 30 some odd students had to develop a design and implementation (launch, orbital trajectories, power solutions, thermal balancing issues, communications systems, the whole shebang if you will) that was practical and possible. In other words, if they relied on unobtainium, they would not have passed.
The moral of the story is that if a handful of Bachelor's students can come up with a practical design concept in 9 months, there really is no reason that NASA, JPL, or, hell, even some commercial agency, couldn't set up a full telescope array on the dark side of the moon given proper funding and motivation. Then again, that's the kicker. Grades are great motivation for students. In the real world, someone has to fork over dollars, and people don't like doing that for science anymore....
I have no doubt that there could be some far reaching consequences of blocking all advertising out of the majority of folk's lives on the economy. In fact, I would imagine that it would require quite a few industries to rebuild significant parts of their business model from the ground up. It might even, eventually, force certain parts of the economy into bankruptcy and blackout, like, say, companies that rely on ad-revenue for profit. So yes, I agree, there could be far reaching consequences to the business world if tools like AdBlock get adopted en masse.
However, I do not believe that would be the doom and gloom and end all be all of good products or good companies. Frankly, I am damn tired of company after company trying to cram their useless shite down my throat when I haven't asked for it:
"Buy a shamwow! That towel you use right now isn't nearly good enough! By something that does the exact same thing instead!"
"Buy our penis enlargement pills! Your dick doesn't *really* please your wife/girlfriend! Trust us! We know penises!"
"Buy this new car! You don't need to keep the car you've had for 5 years! Cars are a short term commodity that should be recycled every 3 years!"
"Buy our new piece of software! Using free, open source alternatives is difficult and scary! We'll protect you!"
Give me a break. If I need/want something, I will go out and find out information about it via trusted sources. I don't need or want companies spamming me with flashing lights and catchy jingles (I swear to God, Old Navy, you are hellborn spawn of the devil itself) everywhere I turn. I don't want to go to my myspace page to e-mail my old HS friends only to have to watch full length production commercial pop ups about why the new anti-depression drug will make my life less suck and more awesome. I only want to hear about things relative to my life when I want to find that information. Why? Because if I am shopping for a new car, hearing about a no-down introductory fixed rate apr in a 45 second info. dump to my brain is not going to be something I remember. I will filter it out, and forget it, and then, when I do MY research, I will write it down in my notebook and remember it because I was looking for it.
My point is, the only reason that ad-revenue is a fundamental part of our economy, right now (if it is), is because our society made the false assumption that people want to have crap sold to them. Some of us already don't, and, I would wager, more folk are getting to the point that they don't want to be marketed to any longer. So what happens if we start letting the ad-industry fail? Will Google fail? Will twitter fail? Will facebook fail? Maybe. Or, maybe, they will do exactly what humans have been doing since before the Egyptians built the pyramids. That is, maybe they will adapt. Maybe services will go to a paywall model. Maybe some will offer a *gold membership* model (like slashdot). Maybe some will become donation/non-profit entities. Hell, maybe some business-majors will have to actually innovate for once (and earn part of their overblown salaries) and write an entirely NEW business model that helps both the customer and the company. Shock and awe, wouldn't that be one helluva development.
So sure, caution about the possible repercussions of ad-blockers. However, the way I figure it, society will adapt without advertisements and may just become the better for it.
Well, if it really does become a problem, perhaps we could develop the technology to upload the human consciousness into circuitry, making it so that each 'person' uses many fewer resources and exists in a virtual(ish) world. Not sure if that's the best solution, but I always figured that eventually we are going to find that these meatbags we occupy have a limited shelf life. Perhaps we can push that life up a little longer...115 years or 130 years rather than 100, but sooner or later the parts just wear out (like the engines of even the most reliable cars and motorcycles). Thus, to continue extending human life, the default answer seems to be to keep the mental abstraction known as identity (whatever the hell that is), digitize it, and download it into more reliable, easily recycled hardware (circuitry). Of course, it is debatable whether we will be able to inhabit other planets or inhabit our computers first, but its still another idea.
Although, in all seriousness, I did play WoW in a fairly dedicated manner for two and a half years and did find it quite refreshing when I moved on with my life. But of course, satire often seems lost on the masses.
Trying to FIND the command to do something is nearly impossible.
....or if you know that you used a command to do something, but can't remember what, also usually impossible to find again easily...unless you have a near-photographic memory of the results pages for every google search you've done in the last x-many days.
Something I found that is incredibly useful when using linux, keep a hardcopy notebook where you write down commands you have used and what they did for you. It saves you tons of re-research time. A text file also works if it is saved in a convenient directory like ~/. But yeah, I've found that starting a self-documentation project is the most convenient way to learn linux so far...
Most users don't *know* about the documentation. I installed Ubuntu for the first time a year ago. I am generally a power user and love to hack around and try new things on computers. They are a toy for me. I knew Ubuntu was not the most powerful or most efficient OS, but, having no previous linux experience, I picked the distribution that was supposed to be the most user friendly so I could be eased into a new system. Again, that was a year ago.
After installing (went smoothly) and configuring my wireless network (somewhat smoothly, had to ditch the GUI though, config file editing all the way) I started trying stuff. I started researching programs. I started installing things. I started clicking things. In general, I had fun. If I had a question (which I often did) I went straight to the Ubuntu forums. Why? Because that was always the first Google hit everytime i typed in "Ubuntu ____" in google. I posted on those forums in a dedicated manner for 3 months before I even heard about the 'man' command. I had dicked around on the command line plenty. I even learned the 'command --help' trick and found that, by and large, most commands had that option which was only sometimes useful. Three months of frigging about on a linux platform and I had never even heard of the most basic documentation command.
So sure, blame newbs for not reading the documentation. Blame developers for not writing good documentation. Blame anyone that can be thought of for new users not learning how to do stuff on their own. None of that changes the fact that new users, especially those coming from windows or mac, will have no idea what the crap 'man,' RTFM, "manpage says..." or, "read the documentation," means. At best, that will make the user just go search google (assuming they have internet access). At worst it will make them run terrified back into the cold embrace of their previous proprietary OS overlords.
One other thing, it doesn't help that 'most' linux GUI applications I have stumbled upon have a help menu which only contains 1 item: 'info,'' which, when clicked, pops up a new dialogue box that has a version number, a developer's name, and a latest release date on it and nothing more.
On a side note, I am still using ubuntu and installing it on many computers that I own. Slowly, but surely, I am learning mostly from force of my own will and my stubbornness in refusing to return to Windows or try Mac. To this day the most useful documentation I have found is a personal notebook that I have kept, written in pencil to allow erasures, where I document every configuration option for every program I use, the locations of all their config files, and an ever growing list of various cryptic command line inputs that automagically allow shit to work the way I want them to when I put them in.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I made it almost all the way through this comment page and so far this is what I learned about Global Climate Change or whatever:
This is a complicated issue.
Some people get very riled up and immature about this issue:
Some people use hot topics like this to demonstrate their egotism via displays of logical analysis that take shots at other folk's posts but don't actually address the issue of global climate change.
No one seems to agree that any sort of climate change consensus can be trusted.
Some seem to feel that no sort of climate change consensus matters or can be reached.
Climate change stories gather more interest now than stories regarding potential organic matter on the moon as well as mappings of a particular cancer's genome.
My scientific conclusion:
Global climate change has become such a clusterfuck issue that it now ranks right up there with abortion, healthcare, and the extent to which any given religious text should be taken seriously in modern social context in terms of unpleasantness to discuss. In other words, people's eyes are going to start glazing over and their ears are going to become desensitized to anything relating to the environment. This whole issue is a forsaken mess.
Will do, it's on a post it and in my backpack for when I get home. Thanks for the info. =)
So if you're in Authority you're damned if you do and damned if you don't!
Obviously it's time for the authorities to get creative, start thinking outside the box, and turn the use of force back around on themselves. Only through such creativity and innovation can they escape that wretched Scylla and Charybdis of damned if you do, damned if you don't. =P
From my perspective the question is whether or not these types of actions actually make anyone safer. Since we've implemented zero tolerance policies; started kicking students out of school for expressing darker thoughts;began monitoring their activities outside school...are students any safer than before?
Nope.
In short, passing this proposal would give Lord Mandelson a complete dictatorship over the UK.
"Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot.
I know of no reason,
The Gunpowder Treason,
Should ever be forgot."
I had a question about Slackware. I haven't done a lot of distro research, but I have an old Dell laptop (Pentium IV style), that I have been meaning to refurbish into an internet access/perl development system. The system resources are limited enough that I don't think running Ubuntu (my current distro) would be a good idea on it. Basically, I am curious if slackware is the right distro for a job like that. I've heard it referenced on slashdot a lot now as a lightweight distribution so I really should just do some more research, however, since you seem to be a fan of it yourself (unless that was sarcasm, I hope not), maybe you could give me your take on it?
Any thoughts you have would be appreciated.
Agreed, wholeheartedly so. I hopped from the sinking Windows ship after XP and started using Ubuntu on release 8.04. I must admit that I am not nearly as proficient on Ubuntu or Linux as I would like to be, but I am learning quickly. Where the first few months of my Ubuntu experience had me clicking through GUI's and resetting defaults regularly, after a few months of posting on the Ubuntu forums and getting a feel for how problems can be typically trouble-shooted, I started gediting config files and browsing through /etc on a regular basis. I started downloading some programs that could not be found in my repositories (with more confidence) and even started editing my sources list. Eventually I switched my default editor over to vim and began spitting out shell and perl scripts right and left to keep things simple for me and give me some peace of mind security wise. I've been using Ubuntu for just over a year now and, already, I am now posting advice on the Ubuntu forums more frequently than asking for it.
The point isn't that I learned quickly, its that, since I wanted to learn some of the more hardcore and advanced features of linux, it was easy for me to go out and do so once I got comfortable. The nicest thing about Ubuntu is that it doesn't scare the crap out of you the first time you use it. As a social experiment, I often take my non tech literate friends and sit them down at my central living room computer (hooked to my TV) which is running 9.04 and tell them to put on some music to listen to. None of these folk have ever used anything but Windows. None of them take more than 20 minutes and maybe 1 or 2 questions to figure it out.
Once someone gets comfortable with Ubuntu, if they want to start developing more advanced skills, they have a friendly place to ask which is easy to find (almost always google search result #1 with the word Ubuntu in it), the Ubuntu forums. When they do start asking about advanced topics, they are never dismissed as newbs or told something condescending. They are never attacked or outright flamed. Instead, if what they are asking about really is something of concern, they are told, in a rational and mature manner, about the risks they may or may not be taking. I couldn't be happier with the Ubuntu experience so far. I may decide to distro jump sometime in the future out of boredom or curiosity, but in terms of need, I really can't see a good reason to find something else.
Really? Because I have stood on the top of Half Dome in Yosemite in California once a year for the past seven years and my phone has literally no service save 911. I can climb to the top of Bishop's Peak, one of the highest points in San Luis Obispo County, and still get no reception until I get back down to my car, where I get a whopping 1 bar of service from Verizon. Oh, there were also all those times that I went snowboarding in the Sierra Nevada on the California side and never got any reception at the top of the mountain. No reception going over the I-80 pass when I visited my g/f for Christmas last year up near Truckee.....
...The list goes on. I was born and raised in the mountains. I visit the mountains regularly. I climb to the top of mountains regularly. I do this all in America, in fact, in California, one to the most developed and populated states in the country. I almost never get decent reception in the mountains.
There most certainly is something wrong with America's wireless communications infrastructure.
I should not have to leave my opinion at the border when entering a country, if my opinion is not causing any harm to anyone.
I don't mean to be an ass, but that sounds like the type of attitude that comes along with the luxury of living in a country where every opinion and idea is given a chance to survive based on its own merits. There are some places in this world where merely thinking certain things really is a crime. I am not saying Israel is one of those places, but having that, "I'm entitled to my own opinion." attitude is merely indicative of the fact that you were probably raised in an are where individual's opinions and beliefs are both respected and valued. Be careful if you ever travel, having such an outlook could easily cost you more than a broken laptop in some places.
Happy Tuesday.
The guy wants to produce useful energy from a fault line location with drills and geothermal power plants? Pssssh amateur. Here in California we learned a long time ago that the best type of power plant to build on a fault line is the nuclear variant.
That's how we roll. =D
What is there to discuss? McCarthyism hasn't been there for 50 years now.
Really? I suppose if you want to be pedantic that's true. The name 'McCarthyism' may have changed, but the general tactic and attitude hasn't. Ever try discussing, rationally, something like gay rights in a large group of people? Hell, I wasn't even 12 before I learned that saying, "Gay is okay" will get you ostracized from your peers and shunned from many social functions. Have you ever seen what happens to politicians that make a presidential bid when they are not married? I can't count how many times I've heard people discuss being against a candidate because, "They just don't seem to have proper family values." I mean, really? Some of the most intelligent, incredible folk I've met are well into their 50's and single. We can't let anyone like that have a shot at running the country though because they may not think of the children. And, of course, there is that fun word, 'terrorist' that got tossed around a lot after 9/11.
I know you mentioned more modern civil rights abuses in America later in your post, but the point I am trying to get at is that McCarthyism still exists just fine today, it's just a little more subtle and sneakier. Changing the name allows it to be such. It's kind of funny, I recall reading "The Scarlet Letter" in high school and failing to see why I should give a damn about that book. Nowadays I find Hawethorne's work more relevant than ever. Excommunication is a bitch.
had you tried stimulating her clitoris while this was in effect happening....
Perhaps you really are so very interested in the neuroscience that this seems, to you, like a pragmatic and reasonable 'experiement.' However, the parent post mentioned later in his discussion that the lady is undergoing, from time to time, experiences equivalent to feeling your skull crushed or your face deeply cut time and again. 'Offering' to conduct an experiment during these types of experiences by means of sexually stimulating a part of her genitalia seems tasteless at best.
... even for the internet.
There is a place and time for crude humor, or even just sexual humor, but regarding a serious neuro-disability and the painful hell a person is going through to cope with it is neither that time nor place. If you sincerely feel the need to induce an endorphin effect on a girl while she is undergoing intense pain, perhaps next time you should consider stimulating something other than her genitalia, as that just sounds perverse
I graduated Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in aerospace engineering. Every year, the senior level Bachelor's students participate in a year long spacecraft design mission. Approximately 30 - 40 students team up to fulfill some mission requirements thought up by a few of the professors. I wasn't able to attend the final design review last year, but I know for a fact that the project they worked on involved setting up a telescope array on the dark side of the moon. I have no doubt that their design probably had some holes in it and definitely failed to account for some things because, well, all student designs do. However, I also know for a fact that those 30 some odd students had to develop a design and implementation (launch, orbital trajectories, power solutions, thermal balancing issues, communications systems, the whole shebang if you will) that was practical and possible. In other words, if they relied on unobtainium, they would not have passed.
The moral of the story is that if a handful of Bachelor's students can come up with a practical design concept in 9 months, there really is no reason that NASA, JPL, or, hell, even some commercial agency, couldn't set up a full telescope array on the dark side of the moon given proper funding and motivation. Then again, that's the kicker. Grades are great motivation for students. In the real world, someone has to fork over dollars, and people don't like doing that for science anymore....
I have no doubt that there could be some far reaching consequences of blocking all advertising out of the majority of folk's lives on the economy. In fact, I would imagine that it would require quite a few industries to rebuild significant parts of their business model from the ground up. It might even, eventually, force certain parts of the economy into bankruptcy and blackout, like, say, companies that rely on ad-revenue for profit. So yes, I agree, there could be far reaching consequences to the business world if tools like AdBlock get adopted en masse.
However, I do not believe that would be the doom and gloom and end all be all of good products or good companies. Frankly, I am damn tired of company after company trying to cram their useless shite down my throat when I haven't asked for it:
"Buy a shamwow! That towel you use right now isn't nearly good enough! By something that does the exact same thing instead!"
"Buy our penis enlargement pills! Your dick doesn't *really* please your wife/girlfriend! Trust us! We know penises!"
"Buy this new car! You don't need to keep the car you've had for 5 years! Cars are a short term commodity that should be recycled every 3 years!"
"Buy our new piece of software! Using free, open source alternatives is difficult and scary! We'll protect you!"
Give me a break. If I need/want something, I will go out and find out information about it via trusted sources. I don't need or want companies spamming me with flashing lights and catchy jingles (I swear to God, Old Navy, you are hellborn spawn of the devil itself) everywhere I turn. I don't want to go to my myspace page to e-mail my old HS friends only to have to watch full length production commercial pop ups about why the new anti-depression drug will make my life less suck and more awesome. I only want to hear about things relative to my life when I want to find that information. Why? Because if I am shopping for a new car, hearing about a no-down introductory fixed rate apr in a 45 second info. dump to my brain is not going to be something I remember. I will filter it out, and forget it, and then, when I do MY research, I will write it down in my notebook and remember it because I was looking for it.
My point is, the only reason that ad-revenue is a fundamental part of our economy, right now (if it is), is because our society made the false assumption that people want to have crap sold to them. Some of us already don't, and, I would wager, more folk are getting to the point that they don't want to be marketed to any longer. So what happens if we start letting the ad-industry fail? Will Google fail? Will twitter fail? Will facebook fail? Maybe. Or, maybe, they will do exactly what humans have been doing since before the Egyptians built the pyramids. That is, maybe they will adapt. Maybe services will go to a paywall model. Maybe some will offer a *gold membership* model (like slashdot). Maybe some will become donation/non-profit entities. Hell, maybe some business-majors will have to actually innovate for once (and earn part of their overblown salaries) and write an entirely NEW business model that helps both the customer and the company. Shock and awe, wouldn't that be one helluva development.
So sure, caution about the possible repercussions of ad-blockers. However, the way I figure it, society will adapt without advertisements and may just become the better for it.
I just read your uid and sig for the first time...frankly, that's hot.
Well, if it really does become a problem, perhaps we could develop the technology to upload the human consciousness into circuitry, making it so that each 'person' uses many fewer resources and exists in a virtual(ish) world. Not sure if that's the best solution, but I always figured that eventually we are going to find that these meatbags we occupy have a limited shelf life. Perhaps we can push that life up a little longer...115 years or 130 years rather than 100, but sooner or later the parts just wear out (like the engines of even the most reliable cars and motorcycles). Thus, to continue extending human life, the default answer seems to be to keep the mental abstraction known as identity (whatever the hell that is), digitize it, and download it into more reliable, easily recycled hardware (circuitry). Of course, it is debatable whether we will be able to inhabit other planets or inhabit our computers first, but its still another idea.
Making actual working products? What do they think they are? God?
Wait, wait, wait, you think God makes products that work? Obviously you've never been in love ....
And I quietly wonder what will happen to the WoW addicts that suddenly lose the last bits of meaning their life has...
They will join the Church of Scientology?
You know Chuck Norris?! Does he smell as good in person as I imagine? .... mmmmmmm
Real gamers wear their underwear on their feet ;)
Although, in all seriousness, I did play WoW in a fairly dedicated manner for two and a half years and did find it quite refreshing when I moved on with my life. But of course, satire often seems lost on the masses.
Since it seems you're being serious....
Hehehehe, and that was the assumption that made the rest of your post one epic bucket of failure bucko =P
And where, pray tell, were these mythical How To's stored? Is there even a remote possibility that I will find them without google?
Trying to FIND the command to do something is nearly impossible.
Something I found that is incredibly useful when using linux, keep a hardcopy notebook where you write down commands you have used and what they did for you. It saves you tons of re-research time. A text file also works if it is saved in a convenient directory like ~/. But yeah, I've found that starting a self-documentation project is the most convenient way to learn linux so far...
Most users don't *know* about the documentation. I installed Ubuntu for the first time a year ago. I am generally a power user and love to hack around and try new things on computers. They are a toy for me. I knew Ubuntu was not the most powerful or most efficient OS, but, having no previous linux experience, I picked the distribution that was supposed to be the most user friendly so I could be eased into a new system. Again, that was a year ago.
..." or, "read the documentation," means. At best, that will make the user just go search google (assuming they have internet access). At worst it will make them run terrified back into the cold embrace of their previous proprietary OS overlords.
After installing (went smoothly) and configuring my wireless network (somewhat smoothly, had to ditch the GUI though, config file editing all the way) I started trying stuff. I started researching programs. I started installing things. I started clicking things. In general, I had fun. If I had a question (which I often did) I went straight to the Ubuntu forums. Why? Because that was always the first Google hit everytime i typed in "Ubuntu ____" in google. I posted on those forums in a dedicated manner for 3 months before I even heard about the 'man' command. I had dicked around on the command line plenty. I even learned the 'command --help' trick and found that, by and large, most commands had that option which was only sometimes useful. Three months of frigging about on a linux platform and I had never even heard of the most basic documentation command.
So sure, blame newbs for not reading the documentation. Blame developers for not writing good documentation. Blame anyone that can be thought of for new users not learning how to do stuff on their own. None of that changes the fact that new users, especially those coming from windows or mac, will have no idea what the crap 'man,' RTFM, "manpage says
One other thing, it doesn't help that 'most' linux GUI applications I have stumbled upon have a help menu which only contains 1 item: 'info,'' which, when clicked, pops up a new dialogue box that has a version number, a developer's name, and a latest release date on it and nothing more.
On a side note, I am still using ubuntu and installing it on many computers that I own. Slowly, but surely, I am learning mostly from force of my own will and my stubbornness in refusing to return to Windows or try Mac. To this day the most useful documentation I have found is a personal notebook that I have kept, written in pencil to allow erasures, where I document every configuration option for every program I use, the locations of all their config files, and an ever growing list of various cryptic command line inputs that automagically allow shit to work the way I want them to when I put them in.