I find it unfortunate that it took an AC to say the obvious.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and nobody needs spam except the amateur P.T. Barnum's of the world who know that some fool somewhere is going to think the email they just recieived is anything more than a "ping" with a bandwidth "hoover" attached to it.
The law is of no use to anyone here except the politicians, who see another way to take taxpayer dollars and a possible vector to ratcheting more control over what people do or say on the Internet.
When someone forms a professional, international association that is underground, working with cells and transferring funds through a system of hard-to-track parcels and couriers that can "touch" spammers and let them know that they have screwed up and that the law cannot help them. They get one warning and a probation period. After that, they're a bounty. Imagine the time and money that would be saved by large corporations or even individuals who could effectively stop the problem for a relatively small ammount of money.
In some countries, such a system has existed and is usually affiliated with trafficking controlled materials and protecting said supply-lines. It would be nice to see something like that influencing the idiots who think they've just found a get-rich-quick scheme.
Idiots don't care unless you tap them on the shoulder and let them know that someone they have affected can touch them back.
And the idiots that don't learn. They need to be double-plus touched.
I believe P.T. Barnum would have fallen down in a laughing fit upon reading your post. However, everyone else will probably just quietly move along because there's something really sad about the illusion of owning a piece of lunar surface.
Yeah...I figured out he wasn't a professor after I reread the article twice more after posting and read the comments of other posters.
"Bad demo9orgon! Must properly punish myself!", nearby readership cringe at the sound of spirited forehead slapping.
But even with my oversight about the original article I did make an effort to present a meritous point. Higher education produces a socially networked reinforcement of itself. When that network is no longer in charge of what makes big business digitally viable, it is no longer as important.
Being tenured doesn't grant any cred. outside the circle of mastrubatory influence and purile dread. In fact, his riff on the supposed character of people who invest heavily in the lucre of repuation and respect (currency of the Free/Open software community) seeks to cut both ways. Not only does he seek to belittle the contributions of wise people who wanted to free themselves and all humanity from the yoke of software copyrights and restrictions, but businesses and individuals who he seems to think are fools for using such contributions.
As I read the piece the one thing that set my teeth on edge was the tone of incredulity. The characterization that somehow someone who hasn't possibly toiled away within the system that this professor holds near and dear and worked hard to obfuscate and proprietize under the auspices of corporate/academic credibility couldn't possibly create something meritable. Is there a professional wrestler with a penguin fetish we could convince to elbow drop a professor?
What I think we're seeing is an affirmation in the circles of higher education; that they still hold themselves as being the one true way to enlightenment. That they are the anointed high-priests, keepers of sacred seal and maintainers of the divine covenant (Touch the PDP-11 and repeat after me! By the sacred printwheel do we solemnly swear...in the amber glow of the vacuum tubes and by the robes I wear, to sell what I know to the corporate line, to booby trap it all and make it mine, to pass it on when I'm finally paid, with backdoors aplenty, with keys I can trade, I'll deal with evil if it gets me laid, pays for the toys to ply my trade, by this I swear in this hallowed place, with a fez on my head and a smile on my face) --forgive me my ad-hoc poetry gentle reader--
I would say they are highly-overvalued now, in an age where there's an API that fully embaraces the toiled for grails of sparse-matricies, linked-lists, and a sort for every season. Free/Open-sourcery may be creating wraiths of the instituions, draining them of their art, making it public-domain so that the much feared/maligned hacker-student-rogue programmer-anyman will touch once-sacred code with un-anointed hands.
More squeaking from the ivory towers. To which I say...
If government/business gave women from 18 yrs. and up any incentive whatsoever to obtain a medium (19 to 25 inch diagonal measure) sized digital televison, like the trade-in of a proportionally large analog set, there wouldn't be a household in the country without one.
Require them for anything on HBO, Showtime, the WB, JAG, or the "Public Servant" dramas on NBC and the market would be crushed like a grape. Create an artificial scarcity and profit like mad.
I think the corporations are worried about seeming too eager and scaring away sales from the warehouses/container ships full of analog TV's that still need to hit the street, or of being out of compliance with the FCC's final word on any legislation paid for by the infotainment masters of the United States. The companies in Korea and China (with labor in Mexico, Spain, and South-America) don't care about personal freedoms. They enjoy unrestricted television and technologies that will never make to the United States (legally). They're in it for the money. See what having a international technology market can do for the citizens of the United States?! U.S. citizens don't know how lucky they are to have most of their military hardware components sub-contracted from companies abroad either. Yea! You go multi-national conglomerates!
As usual, in the end the U.S. sheeple will be fleeced. They seem to enjoy it.
I think some file systems are trying to do too much. Anyone remember the question about balancing binary trees in their data-structures class? (and yes, those of you who haven't had it, use your imaginations)
"What is the best method for balancing a binary tree of increasing size and complexity?"
And the answer, "There isn't one. The effort is better spent by saving the information in a linear format and rebuilding the structure for the express purpose of solving the immediate problem."
The same thing may apply to a file-system of ever increasing feeping creaturism (a Larry Wall term), size and complexity.
We already keep duplicate copies of FAT and INODE-isms. I can only see adding XML, and NTFS wackyness to the mess as an equivalent to sprinkling powdered sugar on burnt toast. The end result may be a "do-everything" filesystem, but when you get past the tasty topping you can't help but notice things are not so pleasant...over time it will just get worse. Yes, entropy happens in file-systems just like everything else.
Could you imagine your file-system flapping like a router as it's trying to re-index itself? Meanwhile, you just keep clicking on the "Yes" button to save a document and it keeps throwing you blocking dialogs in some kind of race-condition loop.
Said it before, and it needs saying again. Computers don't teach children, teachers do.
Teachers need the money to pay off college loans and to have a life. Yes, anyone who has to spend _any_ time trying to crowbar useful stuff into the obdurite little brains of children deserves more appreciation than successful exploitive artists of corporate finance. It's not the kids that need the laptops. It's the teachers. There's absolutely no need to give kids in this country anything that doesn't have a joystick attached to it. All the keyboard "gruntwork" is being done in other countries. We're still going to need doctors, and tradesman, but if M$ and big-business have anything to do with it, anything more intensive than cleaning your mouse will be a DCMA/TIA terrorist offense and could result in a semi-permanent "rape" sentence.
We'll be much better off not setting our K12 institutions up for a fall at the hands of the BSA anyway. Face it, if you want mindlessly simple, easy to use/exploit/crack cheap software with built-in idemnification for the fat-cats that sodomized you with it, you'll have to go with lock-in crippleware. What's easier to keep track of, 50 laptops with licenses, or 1200? Maybe we should ask a k12 network administrator?
Large software and hardware corporations are milking taxpayers (government computer $oftware/hardware purchases) and big business already. They need to keep their wandering hands out of K12.
Our kids need to have some basic skills, like writing, math--serious math and early with it too, and being able to look things up in dead-tree books. Dead-tree books are more important than blogs because they are traditionally less malable and depending on the subject, still very timely. How much has changed when it comes to history? I think school textbooks are more dangerous than webpages--pure revisionist "politically correct" pap taxpayers already pay too much for. Children should be working out of college texts, at least they are in my house. Ahahahahah! (I'm having a blast)
If a school needs computers they should limit computer use to faculty through an encrypted wi-fi network and really support parents through the use of a moderated listserv (per teacher) that allows them to notify parents of class-events, and what the current homework assignments are. There's always this big disconnect between teachers and parents and I know this would bring any parent with an email account into the loop. It would certainly be better than having to rely on our kids to tell us if they have homework or not. How painful would it be to simply give the school an email address and from that point on the school/teacher would have another less intrusive, less confrontational vector to communicate?
Yep. That's too easy, makes too much sense, and won't make large corporations and budget monkeys in K12 very happy...after all, they have to demand more and spend it all. Rinse and repeat yearly.
Whoo-hoo! I've been TV-free since the start of summer, and even that bastard Bergman's "Ms. Blalock Vulcan Barbie Sexual-Tension Hour" (No offense to Ms. Blalock, Avatar of Circe, but after Bergman and co. basically performed a "bitchslap by proxy" on everything Gene Rodenberry did with "Enterprise" it's the only thing that drew me) couldn't bring me back.
And from the write-up on the front the first thing that came to mind was "We welcome our Queer-Eye Time Overlords".
Personally, I don't want another Dr. Who. The stream is never the same twice, but humanity still can't stand new stories. Really. How many countless variations of "Hercules 'this'" and "Gilgamesh 'that'" on the "Clever humans thwart the all-powerful, ooh we're such clever monkeys when we have a powerful fifth-column owner" pap. On the bright side, at least they're not all musicals.
Such diversions as "Dr. Who" take root when the people are ready to stomach better "Dawkins" meme-stuff. However, like the damming treatment of StarTrek under Bergman, we shouldn't stretch old-luck too far. The last time I watched Trek, I could have swore I saw them jump an ocean...no, planet of sharks. Stupid buggers.
It will be great fun to see what the Chinese do. Contrary to the opinions of the media titans and the Wintel rats' nest, China's MFN status lets them play. This means that unless Wintel can revoke MFN, everyone should look forward to an incredibly cheap kit that runs Linux like mad! Why should Wintel pout, after all, they don't want "filthy linux" on their fine, upstanding and embraced/extended/probed/cracked/exploited hardware-os thingy anyway. Right? Gwarsh...sounds like their dream of killing of AMD might come true after all and they're just worried that if the Chinese do a good job (why not, they manufacture all of the plastic shiny things that make your children goad you into getting them a toxic-meal) they will be next. Who cares. If you're posting from the states there's precious few manufacturing jobs here anyway, almost none of them involve components that make your PC's, just the ones that assemble them, and even that won't change for a while.
And as for the whole "...doomed for the rest of eternity..." thing, for all practical purposes humanity is doomed to spend it here. Don't worry though, it won't last long enough to matter except to some tiny subset of significance that countless ages from the last monkey-boy sputter something else might come along and say, "?" as it looks at the patterns the roads make from orbit before taking a snap and moving along.
Wither you paint the influence of Theocracy, the Military-Industrial complex, the Illuminati, the Masonic, Extra-dimmensional influencers/collectors or Whitey on the canvas doesn't really matter; the technologies required to bring a civilization into space and sustain it are too terrifying for any human society to accept unless there's no other choice. It's entertaining to think that someday the monkey-meat that drives cars, fights wars, and breeds out of control now could someday flit between the stars, but like freedom it's a fantasy that sells many shiny things.
Re:Not as big a security risk as you guys think
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Windows ATMs by 2005
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· Score: 1
My concerns are not about security per se.
Maybe I just don't want to have my eyeballs farmed out, or endure some jingle or flash commercial while I'm waiting for my money?
Maybe my time is more important to me, and my control of what I want to see and hear in the environment around me than some ideological argument about the use of software from a criminal company.
I can turn off my TV (haven't watched in months, and don't plan on going back), fast forward and skip commercials on DVD's, and block pop-ups and delete spam, but when I have to be poked in the brain just to get my money, MY MONEY, out of a machine and still have to pay ATM Fees then the credit union is looking like a better place all the damn time. I live right next to one, might as well start using it.
I'll be sure to write a glowing letter explaining all this to the bank when I stop using them and explain that I'm not their captive customer advert-bitch. Maybe the greedy bastards are unhappy that they can't outsource more of their work to other countries. Maybe the ever-increasing number of poor people is finally starting to eat their bottom line, but I'm not going to pay them to use my money and advertise crap to me.
It might also be a nice touch if people like me, who don't waste our time on commercialized crap, take that time and organize the migration of intelligent people from stupid companies (banks) to smarter companines (credit unions).
It would be a silent campaign--word of mouth, and reinforced every time someone passes by a Mall ATM, or has to stand in line behind three or more people at an ATM. You simply turn to the next guy in line and say,
"Hey, remember when you could just get your money and go?" They'll probably nod. "Yeah, I sure miss that. Now we get commercials for movies, television shows, and cars. And did you know we have to pay $2 to watch that?" They'll either nod or look unhappy. "Yep, it costs you $2 to make a transaction, and you still have to wait for the commercial to stop. Hey, I hear they don't do that at _creditunionnamehere_. Think I'll go check them out." Looks at watch as another commercial queues on the ATM and the person is waiting for it to stop before they can get their reciept. "Well, this is going to be forever, gotta go. Have a a nice day."
Or is it a PC? Technically, I believe that it's the closest thing to a PC the gaming console market has seen, and I'm sure the Mod-Community running Linux on it with some success (until recently) has shown that it's more amicable to doing so than any other console out there.
In keeping with the topic of the article, there's obviously gray areas where the PC and game consoles are overlapping, and it's been brought on by demand from consumers who don't want to buy another computer when their console will/can suffice. I'm probably like most parents with a computer and a console, who would rather let the kids play on the console, w/o touching the Internet or messing up my computer.
Since Logitech came out with that wonderful keyboard controller (I saw it in OPM), thats been on the wishlist. It's a better keyboard than the one which comes with the Linux Dev Kit for the Playstation2. An integrated keyboard controller makes short work of text-based entry. I don't see a problem typing when it's necessary as long as I'm not dropping my controller to respond to something. With hard-drives and network adapters showing up, the battle lines are no longer with the hardware. The whole Sony vs. M$ Warbucks thing is going to go on and on and on, no end in sight. The horrible irony is that even as these two gorillas tear down every tree and throw it at each other the game development companies are going broke (no matter what exclusive licensing deal they make) trying to write ever better games on increasingly complex platforms for increasingly sophisticated gamers who don't want to see anything that looks like last-year's bestseller.
I just wish someone would get together with Phillip Price and make a console game that fulfills the promise of "Alternate Reality", with a seamless treatment of "The City", "The Dungeon", "The Casino", "The Arena", "The Wilderness" and "The Palace". It doens't have to look any better than it did in 1987, just have it all there. I don't have to run into another stupid meatspace driven beastie to just play. I would value a complete story-arc and access to the locations and their opportunities over slick animations, detailed cutscenes, or expensive original scores--after all the game had incredible music thanks to the AMP (Atari Music Processor) work. Yes, I'm an old fool, but I'm an old _appreciative_ fool with a perfectly functional immagination.
And with regards to the percieved intentions of M$ with their hardware, I think the real reasons they have for tightly controlling their kit comes in the form of the Computer Software Rental Act (and ammendments) which sketch out the rules for the rental of software. We can thank all those crafty Amiga owners in the mid-80's who rented $1000's of dollars of software, bought boxes of disks and had a really good time. Once the SPA started investigating things and bringing lawsuits what constituted a computer and the software to run it on were carefully outlined.
There is a body of laws (meatgrinder of them actually) that M$ skirts with their console offering that is keeping them on their toes to prevent uncontrolled software deployments on their hardware. Below is an abstract involving the Computer Software Rental Act of 1990. I wasn't able to dig up the actual hardware parameters detailed by the act. I know the truth is out there.
http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/impact/w95/RN/apr7news/ Me rc-news-spa.html
If I wanted to play omniscient gov-god-monkey advocate and listen to all the little people I would happily look the other way while large corporations do as they please in exchange for allowing me to drop a six-pack of full cabinets in their colo and play transparent proxy/passive capture for them on the ports for their chat servers. In exchange for that favor I would gladly let my hired guns, fresh out of college in drunk love with their newfound uber-freedoms and control of sheeple powers have a great time playing with peeling entire conversations from all over the world out of the packet-captures to and from aggregation points. Why, with my newfound patriot powers of persuasion, I'd flit from network to network riding the packet love-chain. Thanks to eminent domain, all your asses are belongs to the gov-god-monkeys.
As for IRC...sheesh, that's so twenty years ago and full of spooks relaying out of half-a-dozen compromised eye-cattle desktops (thanks to a patriotic company willing to play the strawman to keep the shoppers of the US safe--ahahahahah), too much trouble for what it's worth. Besides, doing that would risk tipping the hands of too many kiddiot/porn/mp3/mpeg/Jihad-plants. Can't be playing your hand like that and still be the good guy with tens of millions in taxpayer dollars to ferret out the bad apples. At least the press is free and makes shoppers feel good--hey more sales!
The nice thing about IM is that unlike email, you don't have to mulch through smegs of uuencoded pap. Nice juicy text, quick n' easy. But to feast upon the schweet schweet innocence of instant messaging...now that's good stuff. Passwords, phone numbers, meeting times, places, and all the side-band transfers are just cake, take'm or leave'm, or checksum them for those patriots at the RIAA/MPAA.
The truly wise among you will see IM for what it really is and kick it and adopt a Freenet approach to use random nodes to transport your messages with encryption. Sure it sounds like a great deal of trouble to go through just to get a list of things to pick up for dinner on the way home, or to say hi, or to track your employees, but your freedom is paid for by your vigilance or by the forward looking few who can see the trouble ahead and plan around it.
Bugger FFX-whatever, when I read the faq for Champions of Norrath I had a hard time writing up the wishlist to annoy my wifette with (in blood, of course). And you bet your monkey-asses it's on the refrigerator, prominently placed _above_ all the art my wonderful little hellspawn make. Ahahahah! Free online play, random dungeons, shiny things..mmmm..lotsa shiny things to find and use and sell...ahahahah (cavort--cavort), hehehehe, yesss! Yessss!
As my cthonic(yet loving) wife often tells me, "Hey, -widgetx- is in the null-space accessed through a shimmering rift next to the Nth pan-dimensional eddy across from the lobed nodulus of Quron."
I should be used to such amphormous replies but even with those concise instructions I'm as visually imparied by the wonderous layering of semi-solid and even obdurite objects in a visual world as any meat-monkey. Worse yet, unless there's some squirt of delicious abject horror from the object once I've cast my withering stare upon it, how am I going to pick it out of the mess? How would visualizing my otherwise concise access to stupid digital objects make my life easier? Intuitively I know the answer, it won't. Most computer users look at the whole visual 3d-paradigm file-system as the close cousin to "AI" that it is. I applaud such wise beings.
Why anyone would want to visit some visual strucutre cluttered with the noise of everything including their target when they're looking for something like a script, "userthwack.pl", that's easily found by typing
userth[TAB]
in the appropriate folder at the command-line eludes me. Even the seething greed masters of Microsoft have begun their quest to sieze the glory of tab completion. What the image in the article reminds me of is an interface in some filthy Microsoft development package that presented circular tree diagrams that you could grab and sworl around. It was fun, but ultimately useless.
Humanity is just smart enough to know when something works and stupid enough to think they need to twist that into something "visual" when it shouldn't be. The command-line requires the user to bring something to the table, namely a brain and some knowledge on how to use the available tools. We need to appreciate and value the knowledge we have as users and we should rail against anyone or anything determined to make us nothing more than button-monkeys. Yes, most of userspace is populated by eye-cattle button-monkeys, but that doesn't mean I want to be treated like that.
When the machines are sophisticated enough to perform complex bio-electro-chemical analysis combined with adaptive filters that genetically shape their responses to the user in some kind of B.F.Skinner "wet-dream" of a causal negative-feedback loop associativity so that as a user approaches the machine the computer can seamlesly deliver exactly what the user wants (Porn, online-store, report a thought-criminal,share something) to do then a visual file-system is exactly what we should have.
Until that day, the intelligent computer user will enjoy the command-line and fall-back to a GUI when it's the only offered means, and the veal will let their corporate masters mold and shape them into the banner-add pop-up eye-cattle button-monkeys they deserve to be.
Not just Grumbles from the Grave, eh?
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New Heinlein Novel
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· Score: 1
When I was younger I thought a few of his books were ok. I read "Grumbles From the Grave" a while back and learned why I never really because a fan. The only two books I like from him are "Friday", and "Starship Troopers".
Everyone who thinks they're "fans" should go read "Grumbles From the Grave". I think it would give them all a much better perspective about their cherished entertainer.
I just had this terrible vision of a thousand foot Venn diagram towering over a blackened charred world lit only by buzzing corporate logos, displaying the visual for your assertion, supported on the backs of countless Discrete mathematicians who are happily writing proofs despite the onerous weight of what they bear...
Damn, this is good Diet Pepsi (the essential 12939 formula sans corn syrup).
The British government has had an interesting love-hate relationship with the automobile for some time now. As the number of autos grows in proportion to the population, the cities and towns become parking traps, with parking space as a premium and the watchful eye of the meter-readers making money hand-over-fist for the unfortunate who have no choice but to eat the cost of having to park -somewhere- in order to work.
In the larger towns and even some smaller ones with industry the issue has almost caused riots. For the Sun to print something like this is enough to have people up in arms who care to read the rag. I'm sure they've had a stern talking to, and I doubt the government had anything to do with putting them up to it. It's simply a sensationalist topic, prey to any fiction they bothered to spin. They could have said "mandatory install of labour party bobble-heads that measure centripetal force in turns as a means to fine you for excessive speeding" and the froth would fly. Interested parties would be advised to check the CSPAN schedule...www.cspan.org
British Newscast BBC, Newsnight London (United Kingdom) ID: 177913 - 08/26/2003 - 0:50 - NS
Face it, when death is no longer profitable for governments, life has to be.
If you had to give the govt. a massive "death-tax" portion of your estate every 100 years (or whatever they settle on) there wouldn't be anything wrong with this. Of course, as time goes on that time period will change as new laws are passed that favor the old/wealthy.
Personally, I'm still waiting for new technologies that make transplants risk-free and stable so new laws making speeding in a car, defrauding shareholders, and falsifying reports that lead to wars are death-penalty offenses.
That way, I can commute to work by bicycle and all the poor idiots in cars can happily be harvested while wealthy business owners and politicians can just feign ignorance and live the good life. This way all those car-crash victims can do us all some good. Have a heart, would you like a lung with that?
Wow...RFID with new "TERRORISM STOPPING POWERS". Next thing you know, RFID will stop kidnapping, child abuse, Spousal abuse...why, with the amazing RFID we'll be able to find out why some guy just bought 10 bottles of amonia; heck that's bomb-worthy product! Or track all those KY jelly and condom sales...that stuff can be used for...uh, sex. And damn, if the Pope doesn't find condom use evil, you can bet your lubricated ass new ways of tracking deviants and listing frequent buyers will be established. And combine the mighty RFID with the ever-increasing, global reaching Anti-Terrorist (anti-citizenry) laws and POW! Sheeple rejoice, your complete and total safety is at hand! Your submissive dream of a risk-free world can be realized! Shopping is your salvation...halleluja, praise the RFID! Revel in the mastrubatory shopping fantasy that is is anything but an information orgy with your complete and total dominion in mind. Just keep going until you reach that sweet, sweet release...of all your privacy.
Thank you. But my love of Perl/C/C++ and making tools (programmers are ultimately toolsmiths) far exceeds my desire to be locked into the pillory of a writing career--editors are much harsher than PHB's when it comes to a deadline.
I was just sharing some of my "quiet desperation".
What we're looking at is a very complex social/bio-chemical reaction that has come about as a means to dull-down the individuals engaged in a long-term relationship. It's all part of the "Gee, why has humanity been so sucessful if they suck so much?" factor.
If the individuals in a relationship still had a high level of mental acuity/activity they would be easily distracted. There's a reason why "Genius" is rare, it's a perk compared to the necessity of furthering the species. Although polygamous behavior would at first seem to contradict this, that would just be wishful thinking. Truth is natural selection isn't just about tooth-and-claw. It's about being smarter than the species...so suitability wears different hats: human males can't smell differences in their offspring, and are forgetful enough to endure being nagged, abused, socially tortured, cucolded that they often take years to freak out and finally go ape-sh*t. By that time the female usually has enough of a social support system to escape with the children.
Long-term relationships require less "abstraction" and more patience. Einstien has a famously poor record of parental responsibility, just like many other luminaries in the arts and sciences. Genius is amphourous, measured as madness in the present and only properly hailed as history after some really nice happy-accidents and peculiar insights.
Raise your children through the haze of a creative fugue and chances are you'll be spending quality time emptying pill-cups and wondering why you don't feeling like doing much of anything as you lay around a state-run half-way house bitching about the food during your passing moments of lucidity when the chemials make it to your bladder and saturate your fat. Meanwhile...your kid(s) enjoy the mind-phuk of their lives in a foster-home run by the closest alternative to private-prison the k-12 sector enjoys. And don't bother bitching about how ungrateful you are that the system is helping you and your family. Truth is, even fifty years ago would possibly find entire families run out of town or "disappeared" in order to maintain the appearance of normality that communities require in order to feel like they are successful.
I've been married almost 2x the national US average, and even through I still write programs and come up with some really non-linear/creative solutions I often find myself taking a ride on the "What-if" see-saw; finish college and go onto a career in computer-science vs. being a husband and father at the mercy of a compulsive-spending wife and children. I'm doing the latter, but it doesn't keep me from looking through my notes and holding my head...I wrote down things twenty years ago that are still being patented today and I'll never get there from here now.
The best I can hope for now is to be a great springboard for my kids. It's probably the only politically correct thing I can do. That way, when they fulfill my dreams I can springboard off their work and twist it towards my own fell goals... (yessssssss, peals of heed-ee-ous laughter follow). The world will be safe if the only thing I can do is feel happy that I was able to crap and woke up with an erection. At the rate things are going, my money's on the world and I'm pissed because the ratio of the whole thing feels as rigged as a harvest lottery. At least I'm not alone.
Hey! I'm not alone in noticing the crap railway system! (cavort! carvort!) I think there needs to be a bigger shift though. Because people won't take the train if they can still pile their stinking bodies onto a deathtrap and think it's faster/worth the risk to everyone.
Actually, it would be supercool to see the railsystem upgraded, and then kick things up a notch and limit aircraft capable of 12 or more passengers to military or government service, and then pass regulations so airliners meet the following specifications:
1) Detachable crew/passenger section which deploys multiple parachutes and uses a parafoil to steer. Think a three-parachute/droud system, balanced to provide the right angle and drag to make a large one (with a backup) parafoil at the rear for steering highly effective. Since the crew/passenger compartments are no longer intimately mated to a BOMB, it should dramatically increase survivability.
2) A semi-autonomous ILS intelligent independent superstruture which comprises the primary fusalage containing engines, fuel, and hydralic systems with a shunting fly-by-wire system that once disengaged from the crew/passenger section will context switch to a controlled landing in a close "ditch zone" to minimize casualties, or accept commands from an authenticated offical source like a flight controller, or just fly it's ass back to the airfield.
Both of these objectives have been do-able since the 1970's, but it's been the public's complete and total passivity and acceptance of unnecessary risk and loss-of-life. Nobody should have to die on/from a large aircraft if it can be avoided. We've had self-landing-capable aircraft for nearly thirty years, radio encryption for over twenty years, and computers just keep getting better all the damn time.
In the case of 9/11, all the pilots would have to do is say something cryptic into the radio and tap a switch to disengage the safties and they wouldn't have to be alive from that point on...the airframes could have disengaged remotely and the crew/passenger compartments would have landed safely and the explosive bits could have flown themsevles back to the airfield.
I've even sat down and drew the whole thing out. The only things preventing this kind of technology are greed, apathy, lawyers, or a government's need to start wars. The limits are not technology based.
And by creating regulations which would limit the size of flying vehicles,we would foster a boom in personal flying technology. Then I could have a car that would fly, just like they promised me so long ago. Of course, a flying car, filled with explosive bodies would be nothing to laugh at, but considering the level of autonomy required to prevent idiots from crashing into stuff the damage still wouldn't come close to a large commercial jet.
While we're on it, how about video-phones...from earth orbit...so I don't have to worry my wifette or be late for my meeting on Phobos base. I hear the marines will be crunchy. My kids love crunchy marines. Crunch kids crunch!
Why take such a limited view. True, your solution set may be under the curve for a few millenia, but don't limit yourself. The destruction of a species due to the very trinkets is a savory mental experiment. Mmmmmmmm...mmmm...DAMN GOOD.
Why would you deny a possible evolutionary path and potential fuel/trinket/food source to the future inhabitants of this mudball exists from manufactured goods measured in kilotons yearly? Doesn't anybody get it? Greedy humans take the plastic (oil) out of the ground, do interesting things with it, and then put it back. Sure, it's not the same, but then maybe that's the appeal.
Millions of years from now, something will either eat it and springboard into some evolutionary path, or it will become something else entirely and the future inhabitants of areas of the planet which were once landfills will become immensely {exploited||wealthy} and go on to make more artful works of it. Hastur was such a card when he did that job on his mother, but face it, things have been interesting ever since.
Remember, the bad-guys play to win with influence, association, and lock-in. To really mess with them, maybe a year-long moratorium from consumers buying their products would get their attention? Screw the courts, they're not for commoners. How about "Home-Brew" toner clubs run on donations? The formulary for toner isn't so special that it cannot be independently developed, and thanks to a "Gold-plated razorblade" mentallity, buying a test-printer to work with is laughably cheap. Where are the alchemists? Oh that's right, standardized education is just producting gangsters and drones. Stupid humanity...
Break the chains and bury the plastics. Hell is the Baccahnal you do that does you too.
Maybe I should have said, "Fundamentalist Infested Martyrs", with visions of whatever subjective paradise have been injected into their heads driving them onwards to victory for the cause of their handlers.
You're spot on with the observation though, it's an arms race. And to make matters worse, there's astrolite variants that make the typical stuff look like koolaid which are relatively non-toxic until deployment. For the young man or woman with their sights set on paradise (ahahahahah, stupid humans), or the fundamentalist looking for a good kill ratio, backscatter isn't a factor. However, for the sheeple, it's wholesale humiliation and another reason to let the airlines rot until the government flips the switch on the "tighten the bonds on the commoners so they feel safer" methodology of freedom and relaxes again.
If it's so dangerous to fly now, maybe it's time to invest in infrastructure and establish a real high-speed rail system, and not something built on a gravel berm that's insufficient for 40mph freight trains either. For an industrial nation, we have a crap rail system. Don't believe me? Get up from your computer and go take a look at it. It sucks.
Like the benefits we reap from a slower government, maybe slowing down people and using the medium (rail) to limit the amount of devestation possible is a much better way to go. Face it, the chances that you're going to turn on the news to hear than an Amtrak passenger train derailed and took out a skyscraper are really small, buy still probably better than winning a state (shaft the sheeple) lottery.
Damn...I've been infected with the "sheeple" meme...AAARRGH! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!!!
Slashdot Mirror
I find it unfortunate that it took an AC to say the obvious.
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and nobody needs spam except the amateur P.T. Barnum's of the world who know that some fool somewhere is going to think the email they just recieived is anything more than a "ping" with a bandwidth "hoover" attached to it.
The law is of no use to anyone here except the politicians, who see another way to take taxpayer dollars and a possible vector to ratcheting more control over what people do or say on the Internet.
When someone forms a professional, international association that is underground, working with cells and transferring funds through a system of hard-to-track parcels and couriers that can "touch" spammers and let them know that they have screwed up and that the law cannot help them. They get one warning and a probation period. After that, they're a bounty. Imagine the time and money that would be saved by large corporations or even individuals who could effectively stop the problem for a relatively small ammount of money.
In some countries, such a system has existed and is usually affiliated with trafficking controlled materials and protecting said supply-lines. It would be nice to see something like that influencing the idiots who think they've just found a get-rich-quick scheme.
Idiots don't care unless you tap them on the shoulder and let them know that someone they have affected can touch them back.
And the idiots that don't learn.
They need to be double-plus touched.
It's not just double-speak,
I believe P.T. Barnum would have fallen down in a laughing fit upon reading your post. However, everyone else will probably just quietly move along because there's something really sad about the illusion of owning a piece of lunar surface.
Good luck. Keep sleeping.
Yeah...I figured out he wasn't a professor after I reread the article twice more after posting and read the comments of other posters.
"Bad demo9orgon! Must properly punish myself!", nearby readership cringe at the sound of spirited forehead slapping.
But even with my oversight about the original article I did make an effort to present a meritous point. Higher education produces a socially networked reinforcement of itself. When that network is no longer in charge of what makes big business digitally viable, it is no longer as important.
Cheers.
Being tenured doesn't grant any cred. outside the circle of mastrubatory influence and purile dread. In fact, his riff on the supposed character of people who invest heavily in the lucre of repuation and respect (currency of the Free/Open software community) seeks to cut both ways. Not only does he seek to belittle the contributions of wise people who wanted to free themselves and all humanity from the yoke of software copyrights and restrictions, but businesses and individuals who he seems to think are fools for using such contributions.
As I read the piece the one thing that set my teeth on edge was the tone of incredulity. The characterization that somehow someone who hasn't possibly toiled away within the system that this professor holds near and dear and worked hard to obfuscate and proprietize under the auspices of corporate/academic credibility couldn't possibly create something meritable. Is there a professional wrestler with a penguin fetish we could convince to elbow drop a professor?
What I think we're seeing is an affirmation in the circles of higher education; that they still hold themselves as being the one true way to enlightenment. That they are the anointed high-priests, keepers of sacred seal and maintainers of the divine covenant (Touch the PDP-11 and repeat after me! By the sacred printwheel do we solemnly swear...in the amber glow of the vacuum tubes and by the robes I wear, to sell what I know to the corporate line, to booby trap it all and make it mine, to pass it on when I'm finally paid, with backdoors aplenty, with keys I can trade, I'll deal with evil if it gets me laid, pays for the toys to ply my trade, by this I swear in this hallowed place, with a fez on my head and a smile on my face)
--forgive me my ad-hoc poetry gentle reader--
I would say they are highly-overvalued now, in an age where there's an API that fully embaraces the toiled for grails of sparse-matricies, linked-lists, and a sort for every season. Free/Open-sourcery may be creating wraiths of the instituions, draining them of their art, making it public-domain so that the much feared/maligned hacker-student-rogue programmer-anyman will touch once-sacred code with un-anointed hands.
More squeaking from the ivory towers.
To which I say...
If government/business gave women from 18 yrs. and up any incentive whatsoever to obtain a medium (19 to 25 inch diagonal measure) sized digital televison, like the trade-in of a proportionally large analog set, there wouldn't be a household in the country without one.
Require them for anything on HBO, Showtime, the WB, JAG, or the "Public Servant" dramas on NBC and the market would be crushed like a grape. Create an artificial scarcity and profit like mad.
I think the corporations are worried about seeming too eager and scaring away sales from the warehouses/container ships full of analog TV's that still need to hit the street, or of being out of compliance with the FCC's final word on any legislation paid for by the infotainment masters of the United States. The companies in Korea and China (with labor in Mexico, Spain, and South-America) don't care about personal freedoms. They enjoy unrestricted television and technologies that will never make to the United States (legally). They're in it for the money. See what having a international technology market can do for the citizens of the United States?! U.S. citizens don't know how lucky they are to have most of their military hardware components sub-contracted from companies abroad either. Yea! You go multi-national conglomerates!
As usual, in the end the U.S. sheeple will be fleeced. They seem to enjoy it.
I think some file systems are trying to do too much. Anyone remember the question about balancing binary trees in their data-structures class? (and yes, those of you who haven't had it, use your imaginations)
:-D
"What is the best method for balancing a binary tree of increasing size and complexity?"
And the answer,
"There isn't one. The effort is better spent by saving the information in a linear format and rebuilding the structure for the express purpose of solving the immediate problem."
The same thing may apply to a file-system of ever increasing feeping creaturism (a Larry Wall term), size and complexity.
We already keep duplicate copies of FAT and INODE-isms. I can only see adding XML, and NTFS wackyness to the mess as an equivalent to sprinkling powdered sugar on burnt toast. The end result may be a "do-everything" filesystem, but when you get past the tasty topping you can't help but notice things are not so pleasant...over time it will just get worse. Yes, entropy happens in file-systems just like everything else.
Could you imagine your file-system flapping like a router as it's trying to re-index itself? Meanwhile, you just keep clicking on the "Yes" button to save a document and it keeps throwing you blocking dialogs in some kind of race-condition loop.
Oh no, _that_ could never happen.
Said it before, and it needs saying again.
Computers don't teach children, teachers do.
Teachers need the money to pay off college loans and to have a life. Yes, anyone who has to spend _any_ time trying to crowbar useful stuff into the obdurite little brains of children deserves more appreciation than successful exploitive artists of corporate finance.
It's not the kids that need the laptops. It's the teachers.
There's absolutely no need to give kids in this country anything that doesn't have a joystick attached to it. All the keyboard "gruntwork" is being done in other countries. We're still going to need doctors, and tradesman, but if M$ and big-business have anything to do with it, anything more intensive than cleaning your mouse will be a DCMA/TIA terrorist offense and could result in a semi-permanent "rape" sentence.
We'll be much better off not setting our K12 institutions up for a fall at the hands of the BSA anyway. Face it, if you want mindlessly simple, easy to use/exploit/crack cheap software with built-in idemnification for the fat-cats that sodomized you with it, you'll have to go with lock-in crippleware.
What's easier to keep track of, 50 laptops with licenses, or 1200? Maybe we should ask a k12 network administrator?
Large software and hardware corporations are milking taxpayers (government computer $oftware/hardware purchases) and big business already. They need to keep their wandering hands out of K12.
Our kids need to have some basic skills, like writing, math--serious math and early with it too, and being able to look things up in dead-tree books. Dead-tree books are more important than blogs because they are traditionally less malable and depending on the subject, still very timely. How much has changed when it comes to history? I think school textbooks are more dangerous than webpages--pure revisionist "politically correct" pap taxpayers already pay too much for. Children should be working out of college texts, at least they are in my house. Ahahahahah! (I'm having a blast)
If a school needs computers they should limit computer use to faculty through an encrypted wi-fi network and really support parents through the use of a moderated listserv (per teacher) that allows them to notify parents of class-events, and what the current homework assignments are. There's always this big disconnect between teachers and parents and I know this would bring any parent with an email account into the loop. It would certainly be better than having to rely on our kids to tell us if they have homework or not. How painful would it be to simply give the school an email address and from that point on the school/teacher would have another less intrusive, less confrontational vector to communicate?
Yep. That's too easy, makes too much sense, and won't make large corporations and budget monkeys in K12 very happy...after all, they have to demand more and spend it all. Rinse and repeat yearly.
Whoo-hoo!
I've been TV-free since the start of summer, and even that bastard Bergman's "Ms. Blalock Vulcan Barbie Sexual-Tension Hour" (No offense to Ms. Blalock, Avatar of Circe, but after Bergman and co. basically performed a "bitchslap by proxy" on everything Gene Rodenberry did with "Enterprise" it's the only thing that drew me) couldn't bring me back.
And from the write-up on the front the first thing that came to mind was "We welcome our Queer-Eye Time Overlords".
Personally, I don't want another Dr. Who.
The stream is never the same twice, but humanity still can't stand new stories. Really.
How many countless variations of "Hercules 'this'" and "Gilgamesh 'that'" on the "Clever humans thwart the all-powerful, ooh we're such clever monkeys when we have a powerful fifth-column owner" pap. On the bright side, at least they're not all musicals.
Such diversions as "Dr. Who" take root when the people are ready to stomach better "Dawkins" meme-stuff. However, like the damming treatment of StarTrek under Bergman, we shouldn't stretch old-luck too far. The last time I watched Trek, I could have swore I saw them jump an ocean...no, planet of sharks. Stupid buggers.
By 2057 we could see this technology on the front of newspapers.
And aside from mech-pilots in japanese school-girl uniforms, this was an excellent Anime. Short, but then brevity is the soul of wit.
Or in this case, the soul of a particular atreur.
If it were only that simple.
It will be great fun to see what the Chinese do. Contrary to the opinions of the media titans and the Wintel rats' nest, China's MFN status lets them play. This means that unless Wintel can revoke MFN, everyone should look forward to an incredibly cheap kit that runs Linux like mad! Why should Wintel pout, after all, they don't want "filthy linux" on their fine, upstanding and embraced/extended/probed/cracked/exploited hardware-os thingy anyway. Right? Gwarsh...sounds like their dream of killing of AMD might come true after all and they're just worried that if the Chinese do a good job (why not, they manufacture all of the plastic shiny things that make your children goad you into getting them a toxic-meal) they will be next. Who cares. If you're posting from the states there's precious few manufacturing jobs here anyway, almost none of them involve components that make your PC's, just the ones that assemble them, and even that won't change for a while.
And as for the whole "...doomed for the rest of eternity..." thing, for all practical purposes humanity is doomed to spend it here. Don't worry though, it won't last long enough to matter except to some tiny subset of significance that countless ages from the last monkey-boy sputter something else might come along and say, "?" as it looks at the patterns the roads make from orbit before taking a snap and moving along.
Wither you paint the influence of Theocracy, the Military-Industrial complex, the Illuminati, the Masonic, Extra-dimmensional influencers/collectors or Whitey on the canvas doesn't really matter; the technologies required to bring a civilization into space and sustain it are too terrifying for any human society to accept unless there's no other choice. It's entertaining to think that someday the monkey-meat that drives cars, fights wars, and breeds out of control now could someday flit between the stars, but like freedom it's a fantasy that sells many shiny things.
My concerns are not about security per se.
Maybe I just don't want to have my eyeballs farmed out, or endure some jingle or flash commercial while I'm waiting for my money?
Maybe my time is more important to me, and my control of what I want to see and hear in the environment around me than some ideological argument about the use of software from a criminal company.
I can turn off my TV (haven't watched in months, and don't plan on going back), fast forward and skip commercials on DVD's, and block pop-ups and delete spam, but when I have to be poked in the brain just to get my money, MY MONEY, out of a machine and still have to pay ATM Fees then the credit union is looking like a better place all the damn time. I live right next to one, might as well start using it.
I'll be sure to write a glowing letter explaining all this to the bank when I stop using them and explain that I'm not their captive customer advert-bitch. Maybe the greedy bastards are unhappy that they can't outsource more of their work to other countries. Maybe the ever-increasing number of poor people is finally starting to eat their bottom line, but I'm not going to pay them to use my money and advertise crap to me.
It might also be a nice touch if people like me, who don't waste our time on commercialized crap, take that time and organize the migration of intelligent people from stupid companies (banks) to smarter companines (credit unions).
It would be a silent campaign--word of mouth, and reinforced every time someone passes by a Mall ATM, or has to stand in line behind three or more people at an ATM. You simply turn to the next guy in line and say,
"Hey, remember when you could just get your money and go?"
They'll probably nod.
"Yeah, I sure miss that. Now we get commercials for movies, television shows, and cars. And did you know we have to pay $2 to watch that?"
They'll either nod or look unhappy.
"Yep, it costs you $2 to make a transaction, and you still have to wait for the commercial to stop. Hey, I hear they don't do that at _creditunionnamehere_. Think I'll go check them out."
Looks at watch as another commercial queues on the ATM and the person is waiting for it to stop before they can get their reciept.
"Well, this is going to be forever, gotta go. Have a a nice day."
Or is it a PC? Technically, I believe that it's the closest thing to a PC the gaming console market has seen, and I'm sure the Mod-Community running Linux on it with some success (until recently) has shown that it's more amicable to doing so than any other console out there.
/ Me rc-news-spa.html
In keeping with the topic of the article, there's obviously gray areas where the PC and game consoles are overlapping, and it's been brought on by demand from consumers who don't want to buy another computer when their console will/can suffice. I'm probably like most parents with a computer and a console, who would rather let the kids play on the console, w/o touching the Internet or messing up my computer.
Since Logitech came out with that wonderful keyboard controller (I saw it in OPM), thats been on the wishlist. It's a better keyboard than the one which comes with the Linux Dev Kit for the Playstation2. An integrated keyboard controller makes short work of text-based entry. I don't see a problem typing when it's necessary as long as I'm not dropping my controller to respond to something. With hard-drives and network adapters showing up, the battle lines are no longer with the hardware. The whole Sony vs. M$ Warbucks thing is going to go on and on and on, no end in sight. The horrible irony is that even as these two gorillas tear down every tree and throw it at each other the game development companies are going broke (no matter what exclusive licensing deal they make) trying to write ever better games on increasingly complex platforms for increasingly sophisticated gamers who don't want to see anything that looks like last-year's bestseller.
I just wish someone would get together with Phillip Price and make a console game that fulfills the promise of "Alternate Reality", with a seamless treatment of "The City", "The Dungeon", "The Casino", "The Arena", "The Wilderness" and "The Palace". It doens't have to look any better than it did in 1987, just have it all there. I don't have to run into another stupid meatspace driven beastie to just play. I would value a complete story-arc and access to the locations and their opportunities over slick animations, detailed cutscenes, or expensive original scores--after all the game had incredible music thanks to the AMP (Atari Music Processor) work. Yes, I'm an old fool, but I'm an old _appreciative_ fool with a perfectly functional immagination.
And with regards to the percieved intentions of M$ with their hardware, I think the real reasons they have for tightly controlling their kit comes in the form of the Computer Software Rental Act (and ammendments) which sketch out the rules for the rental of software. We can thank all those crafty Amiga owners in the mid-80's who rented $1000's of dollars of software, bought boxes of disks and had a really good time. Once the SPA started investigating things and bringing lawsuits what constituted a computer and the software to run it on were carefully outlined.
There is a body of laws (meatgrinder of them actually) that M$ skirts with their console offering that is keeping them on their toes to prevent uncontrolled software deployments on their hardware. Below is an abstract involving the Computer Software Rental Act of 1990. I wasn't able to dig up the actual hardware parameters detailed by the act. I know the truth is out there.
http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/impact/w95/RN/apr7news
If I wanted to play omniscient gov-god-monkey advocate and listen to all the little people I would happily look the other way while large corporations do as they please in exchange for allowing me to drop a six-pack of full cabinets in their colo and play transparent proxy/passive capture for them on the ports for their chat servers. In exchange for that favor I would gladly let my hired guns, fresh out of college in drunk love with their newfound uber-freedoms and control of sheeple powers have a great time playing with peeling entire conversations from all over the world out of the packet-captures to and from aggregation points. Why, with my newfound patriot powers of persuasion, I'd flit from network to network riding the packet love-chain. Thanks to eminent domain, all your asses are belongs to the gov-god-monkeys.
As for IRC...sheesh, that's so twenty years ago and full of spooks relaying out of half-a-dozen compromised eye-cattle desktops (thanks to a patriotic company willing to play the strawman to keep the shoppers of the US safe--ahahahahah), too much trouble for what it's worth. Besides, doing that would risk tipping the hands of too many kiddiot/porn/mp3/mpeg/Jihad-plants. Can't be playing your hand like that and still be the good guy with tens of millions in taxpayer dollars to ferret out the bad apples. At least the press is free and makes shoppers feel good--hey more sales!
The nice thing about IM is that unlike email, you don't have to mulch through smegs of uuencoded pap. Nice juicy text, quick n' easy. But to feast upon the schweet schweet innocence of instant messaging...now that's good stuff.
Passwords, phone numbers, meeting times, places, and all the side-band transfers are just cake, take'm or leave'm, or checksum them for those patriots at the RIAA/MPAA.
The truly wise among you will see IM for what it really is and kick it and adopt a Freenet approach to use random nodes to transport your messages with encryption. Sure it sounds like a great deal of trouble to go through just to get a list of things to pick up for dinner on the way home, or to say hi, or to track your employees, but your freedom is paid for by your vigilance or by the forward looking few who can see the trouble ahead and plan around it.
Bugger FFX-whatever, when I read the faq for Champions of Norrath I had a hard time writing up the wishlist to annoy my wifette with (in blood, of course). And you bet your monkey-asses it's on the refrigerator, prominently placed _above_ all the art my wonderful little hellspawn make. Ahahahah! Free online play, random dungeons, shiny things..mmmm..lotsa shiny things to find and use and sell...ahahahah (cavort--cavort), hehehehe, yesss! Yessss!
As my cthonic(yet loving) wife often tells me, "Hey, -widgetx- is in the null-space accessed through a shimmering rift next to the Nth pan-dimensional eddy across from the lobed nodulus of Quron."
I should be used to such amphormous replies but even with those concise instructions I'm as visually imparied by the wonderous layering of semi-solid and even obdurite objects in a visual world as any meat-monkey. Worse yet, unless there's some squirt of delicious abject horror from the object once I've cast my withering stare upon it, how am I going to pick it out of the mess? How would visualizing my otherwise concise access to stupid digital objects make my life easier? Intuitively I know the answer, it won't. Most computer users look at the whole visual 3d-paradigm file-system as the close cousin to "AI" that it is. I applaud such wise beings.
Why anyone would want to visit some visual strucutre cluttered with the noise of everything including their target when they're looking for something like a script, "userthwack.pl", that's easily found by typing
userth[TAB]
in the appropriate folder at the command-line eludes me. Even the seething greed masters of Microsoft have begun their quest to sieze the glory of tab completion. What the image in the article reminds me of is an interface in some filthy Microsoft development package that presented circular tree diagrams that you could grab and sworl around. It was fun, but ultimately useless.
Humanity is just smart enough to know when something works and stupid enough to think they need to twist that into something "visual" when it shouldn't be. The command-line requires the user to bring something to the table, namely a brain and some knowledge on how to use the available tools. We need to appreciate and value the knowledge we have as users and we should rail against anyone or anything determined to make us nothing more than button-monkeys. Yes, most of userspace is populated by eye-cattle button-monkeys, but that doesn't mean I want to be treated like that.
When the machines are sophisticated enough to perform complex bio-electro-chemical analysis combined with adaptive filters that genetically shape their responses to the user in some kind of B.F.Skinner "wet-dream" of a causal negative-feedback loop associativity so that as a user approaches the machine the computer can seamlesly deliver exactly what the user wants (Porn, online-store, report a thought-criminal,share something) to do then a visual file-system is exactly what we should have.
Until that day, the intelligent computer user will enjoy the command-line and fall-back to a GUI when it's the only offered means, and the veal will let their corporate masters mold and shape them into the banner-add pop-up eye-cattle button-monkeys they deserve to be.
When I was younger I thought a few of his books were ok. I read "Grumbles From the Grave" a while back and learned why I never really because a fan. The only two books I like from him are "Friday", and "Starship Troopers".
Everyone who thinks they're "fans" should go read "Grumbles From the Grave". I think it would give them all a much better perspective about their cherished entertainer.
Ugh!
I just had this terrible vision of a thousand foot Venn diagram towering over a blackened charred world lit only by buzzing corporate logos, displaying the visual for your assertion, supported on the backs of countless Discrete mathematicians who are happily writing proofs despite the onerous weight of what they bear...
Damn, this is good Diet Pepsi (the essential 12939 formula sans corn syrup).
The British government has had an interesting love-hate relationship with the automobile for some time now. As the number of autos grows in proportion to the population, the cities and towns become parking traps, with parking space as a premium and the watchful eye of the meter-readers making money hand-over-fist for the unfortunate who have no choice but to eat the cost of having to park -somewhere- in order to work.
In the larger towns and even some smaller ones with industry the issue has almost caused riots. For the Sun to print something like this is enough to have people up in arms who care to read the rag. I'm sure they've had a stern talking to, and I doubt the government had anything to do with putting them up to it. It's simply a sensationalist topic, prey to any fiction they bothered to spin. They could have said "mandatory install of labour party bobble-heads that measure centripetal force in turns as a means to fine you for excessive speeding" and the froth would fly. Interested parties would be advised to check the CSPAN schedule...www.cspan.org
British Newscast
BBC, Newsnight
London (United Kingdom)
ID: 177913 - 08/26/2003 - 0:50 - NS
Cheers.
Face it, when death is no longer profitable for governments, life has to be.
If you had to give the govt. a massive "death-tax" portion of your estate every 100 years (or whatever they settle on) there wouldn't be anything wrong with this. Of course, as time goes on that time period will change as new laws are passed that favor the old/wealthy.
Personally, I'm still waiting for new technologies that make transplants risk-free and stable so new laws making speeding in a car, defrauding shareholders, and falsifying reports that lead to wars are death-penalty offenses.
That way, I can commute to work by bicycle and all the poor idiots in cars can happily be harvested while wealthy business owners and politicians can just feign ignorance and live the good life. This way all those car-crash victims can do us all some good. Have a heart, would you like a lung with that?
(tents fingers)
Excellent
Wow...RFID with new "TERRORISM STOPPING POWERS".
Next thing you know, RFID will stop kidnapping, child abuse, Spousal abuse...why, with the amazing RFID we'll be able to find out why some guy just bought 10 bottles of amonia; heck that's bomb-worthy product! Or track all those KY jelly and condom sales...that stuff can be used for...uh, sex. And damn, if the Pope doesn't find condom use evil, you can bet your lubricated ass new ways of tracking deviants and listing frequent buyers will be established. And combine the mighty RFID with the ever-increasing, global reaching Anti-Terrorist (anti-citizenry) laws and POW! Sheeple rejoice, your complete and total safety is at hand! Your submissive dream of a risk-free world can be realized! Shopping is your salvation...halleluja, praise the RFID! Revel in the mastrubatory shopping fantasy that is is anything but an information orgy with your complete and total dominion in mind. Just keep going until you reach that sweet, sweet release...of all your privacy.
Thank you. But my love of Perl/C/C++ and making tools (programmers are ultimately toolsmiths) far exceeds my desire to be locked into the pillory of a writing career--editors are much harsher than PHB's when it comes to a deadline. I was just sharing some of my "quiet desperation".
What we're looking at is a very complex social/bio-chemical reaction that has come about as a means to dull-down the individuals engaged in a long-term relationship. It's all part of the "Gee, why has humanity been so sucessful if they suck so much?" factor.
If the individuals in a relationship still had a high level of mental acuity/activity they would be easily distracted. There's a reason why "Genius" is rare, it's a perk compared to the necessity of furthering the species. Although polygamous behavior would at first seem to contradict this, that would just be wishful thinking. Truth is natural selection isn't just about tooth-and-claw. It's about being smarter than the species...so suitability wears different hats: human males can't smell differences in their offspring, and are forgetful enough to endure being nagged, abused, socially tortured, cucolded that they often take years to freak out and finally go ape-sh*t. By that time the female usually has enough of a social support system to escape with the children.
Long-term relationships require less "abstraction" and more patience. Einstien has a famously poor record of parental responsibility, just like many other luminaries in the arts and sciences. Genius is amphourous, measured as madness in the present and only properly hailed as history after some really nice happy-accidents and peculiar insights.
Raise your children through the haze of a creative fugue and chances are you'll be spending quality time emptying pill-cups and wondering why you don't feeling like doing much of anything as you lay around a state-run half-way house bitching about the food during your passing moments of lucidity when the chemials make it to your bladder and saturate your fat. Meanwhile...your kid(s) enjoy the mind-phuk of their lives in a foster-home run by the closest alternative to private-prison the k-12 sector enjoys. And don't bother bitching about how ungrateful you are that the system is helping you and your family. Truth is, even fifty years ago would possibly find entire families run out of town or "disappeared" in order to maintain the appearance of normality that communities require in order to feel like they are successful.
I've been married almost 2x the national US average, and even through I still write programs and come up with some really non-linear/creative solutions I often find myself taking a ride on the "What-if" see-saw; finish college and go onto a career in computer-science vs. being a husband and father at the mercy of a compulsive-spending wife and children. I'm doing the latter, but it doesn't keep me from looking through my notes and holding my head...I wrote down things twenty years ago that are still being patented today and I'll never get there from here now.
The best I can hope for now is to be a great springboard for my kids. It's probably the only politically correct thing I can do. That way, when they fulfill my dreams I can springboard off their work and twist it towards my own fell goals... (yessssssss, peals of heed-ee-ous laughter follow). The world will be safe if the only thing I can do is feel happy that I was able to crap and woke up with an erection. At the rate things are going, my money's on the world and I'm pissed because the ratio of the whole thing feels as rigged as a harvest lottery. At least I'm not alone.
Hey! I'm not alone in noticing the crap railway system! (cavort! carvort!)
I think there needs to be a bigger shift though. Because people won't take the train if they can still pile their stinking bodies onto a deathtrap and think it's faster/worth the risk to everyone.
Actually, it would be supercool to see the railsystem upgraded, and then kick things up a notch and limit aircraft capable of 12 or more passengers to military or government service, and then pass regulations so airliners meet the following specifications:
1) Detachable crew/passenger section which deploys multiple parachutes and uses a parafoil to steer. Think a three-parachute/droud system, balanced to provide the right angle and drag to make a large one (with a backup) parafoil at the rear for steering highly effective. Since the crew/passenger compartments are no longer intimately mated to a BOMB, it should dramatically increase survivability.
2) A semi-autonomous ILS intelligent independent superstruture which comprises the primary fusalage containing engines, fuel, and hydralic systems with a shunting fly-by-wire system that once disengaged from the crew/passenger section will context switch to a controlled landing in a close "ditch zone" to minimize casualties, or accept commands from an authenticated offical source like a flight controller, or just fly it's ass back to the airfield.
Both of these objectives have been do-able since the 1970's, but it's been the public's complete and total passivity and acceptance of unnecessary risk and loss-of-life. Nobody should have to die on/from a large aircraft if it can be avoided. We've had self-landing-capable aircraft for nearly thirty years, radio encryption for over twenty years, and computers just keep getting better all the damn time.
In the case of 9/11, all the pilots would have to do is say something cryptic into the radio and tap a switch to disengage the safties and they wouldn't have to be alive from that point on...the airframes could have disengaged remotely and the crew/passenger compartments would have landed safely and the explosive bits could have flown themsevles back to the airfield.
I've even sat down and drew the whole thing out. The only things preventing this kind of technology are greed, apathy, lawyers, or a government's need to start wars. The limits are not technology based.
And by creating regulations which would limit the size of flying vehicles,we would foster a boom in personal flying technology. Then I could have a car that would fly, just like they promised me so long ago. Of course, a flying car, filled with explosive bodies would be nothing to laugh at, but considering the level of autonomy required to prevent idiots from crashing into stuff the damage still wouldn't come close to a large commercial jet.
While we're on it, how about video-phones...from earth orbit...so I don't have to worry my wifette or be late for my meeting on Phobos base. I hear the marines will be crunchy. My kids love crunchy marines. Crunch kids crunch!
Why take such a limited view. True, your solution set may be under the curve for a few millenia, but don't limit yourself. The destruction of a species due to the very trinkets is a savory mental experiment. Mmmmmmmm...mmmm...DAMN GOOD.
Why would you deny a possible evolutionary path and potential fuel/trinket/food source to the future inhabitants of this mudball exists from manufactured goods measured in kilotons yearly? Doesn't anybody get it? Greedy humans take the plastic (oil) out of the ground, do interesting things with it, and then put it back. Sure, it's not the same, but then maybe that's the appeal.
Millions of years from now, something will either eat it and springboard into some evolutionary path, or it will become something else entirely and the future inhabitants of areas of the planet which were once landfills will become immensely {exploited||wealthy} and go on to make more artful works of it. Hastur was such a card when he did that job on his mother, but face it, things have been interesting ever since.
Remember, the bad-guys play to win with influence, association, and lock-in. To really mess with them, maybe a year-long moratorium from consumers buying their products would get their attention? Screw the courts, they're not for commoners. How about "Home-Brew" toner clubs run on donations? The formulary for toner isn't so special that it cannot be independently developed, and thanks to a "Gold-plated razorblade" mentallity, buying a test-printer to work with is laughably cheap. Where are the alchemists? Oh that's right, standardized education is just producting gangsters and drones. Stupid humanity...
Break the chains and bury the plastics.
Hell is the Baccahnal you do that does you too.
Maybe I should have said,
"Fundamentalist Infested Martyrs", with visions of whatever subjective paradise have been injected into their heads driving them onwards to victory for the cause of their handlers.
You're spot on with the observation though, it's an arms race. And to make matters worse, there's astrolite variants that make the typical stuff look like koolaid which are relatively non-toxic until deployment. For the young man or woman with their sights set on paradise (ahahahahah, stupid humans), or the fundamentalist looking for a good kill ratio, backscatter isn't a factor. However, for the sheeple, it's wholesale humiliation and another reason to let the airlines rot until the government flips the switch on the "tighten the bonds on the commoners so they feel safer" methodology of freedom and relaxes again.
If it's so dangerous to fly now, maybe it's time to invest in infrastructure and establish a real high-speed rail system, and not something built on a gravel berm that's insufficient for 40mph freight trains either. For an industrial nation, we have a crap rail system. Don't believe me? Get up from your computer and go take a look at it. It sucks.
Like the benefits we reap from a slower government, maybe slowing down people and using the medium (rail) to limit the amount of devestation possible is a much better way to go. Face it, the chances that you're going to turn on the news to hear than an Amtrak passenger train derailed and took out a skyscraper are really small, buy still probably better than winning a state (shaft the sheeple) lottery.
Damn...I've been infected with the "sheeple" meme...AAARRGH! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT!!!