With most car repair jobs, you have to spend time driving to the place, then you have to wait around while they do the work for you. What "rewarding things" could you do while waiting in the waiting room?
I guess that must be the American way. Here in the UK, you'd typically drop your car off at a mechanic near your workplace, walk (*) the rest of the way to work, and collect it at the end of the day. Or something similar.
Or if it's a short job, do your grocery shopping while it's being done. There's no reason to sit around in the waiting room.
(* or get a lift from a colleague, or take the bus, whatever)
I just Googled for some instructions on how to do an oil change. I'd rather let a professional do it. He'll have the right size wrench. He'll know for sure he's not undoing the wrong cap, and will identify the right one in seconds. He'll already be wearing overalls. He'll take 5 minutes doing it, where I'd take an hour or more. He gets to do it in a properly equipped garage; I'd have to do it on a public road with passers by watching.
Not that I've ever knowingly had an oil change done. At a guess, it's bundled in with a service.
I'm not a huge MS fan, but doing things this way for the "Hacker" community is a lot better than Sony's response to what hacking has been going on with the PS3.
"Better than Sony" isn't much of a target, to be fair.
Come on. I love rsync, but you're going to be doing a fair amount of tinkering before you get it to do what Time Machine does out of the box with no/minimal setup.
Obviously, that convenience comes at a price - money, freedom, (soul;) )
I don't trust car mechanics, and always do everything myself, including engine rebuilds. The people who work as auto mechanics aren't the smartest people around, nor the most thorough or conscientious. In addition to that, their charges are ridiculously high: about $70/hour here in AZ. People here always say their time is "so valuable"; I don't know about most geeks, but I don't make $140k, and I can make time in the evenings to save some money.
Presumably, at some point in the past, you paid your dues and spent time learning about car mechanics. I promise you, car jobs that would take you 10 minutes, would take me a whole day, may need me to buy tools I don't already own, would carry a strong risk of me screwing something up badly enough that I'd need to call in an expert, and would wind up more expensive than paying a mechanic.
Plus, time is valuable. I'm not talking about the money I could earn working the same hours. I'm talking about the rewarding things I could do with the time if I wasn't struggling with the greasy bits of a car. It's opportunity cost.
Similarly, I've paid my dues and know a bit about computers. I can set up a decent backup regime fairly easily. Someone who uses computers the way I use a car, would find it more of a time consuming challenge.
I don't grow my own food simply because I don't have the time for it
Well, maybe if you spent less time on your car... See? Opportunity cost.
What about commercial users who pay for Gmail? I think it's on the order of $50 per year per user. Google Mail is much more than just a free mail service.
Do you reckon, just maybe, the SLA contract for paying GMail customers covers this kind of thing?
While there are not (as yet, as far as I've seen) any people yelling and shouting for heads to role because some of their precious data is lost, I expect it to start soon.
There are far too few people who understand the danger of having only one copy of information, and people seem even more naive when that copy is help by another party (they assume that someone else is dealing with it, and seem to expect there will be some sort of come-back if the service they pay nothing for loses some of their info).
The expectation is that the 3rd party (Google in this case) are doing the backing up for you. If you were paying for Google Apps, you'd make damned sure your contract says so. As a free GMail user, I admit I haven't read the small print recently, but my assumption is that my data is "backed up". "Backed up" in quotes, because rather than there being a regular copy made to tape or whatever, their storage grid inherently has everything in multiple places.
They seem to be saying they'll recover the mailboxes in due course. If that's true, then it shows that their service is "as good as" having your own backup. Indeed it's better, because they did the recovery for free. Most people find recovering from their backup non-trivial.
If they fail to recover even one of these accounts, that's a big fail for Google.
"The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with bargains that don't get taxed."
My first association is with the time my partner and I rented an apartment in Brooklyn for a short Christmas break, while the residents were away visiting their families. It was a great, mutually beneficial arrangement, with strangers.
But now you point it out, by rights perhaps it should have been taxed, so you *could* say it's a crime. Oh well:)
By that reasoning, no soldier in the army would want to play Call of Duty. But as we all know they pretty much ALL play those games.
"As we all know"? I didn't know that. Have you a source.
My guess would be that there might be a lot of CoD players in the army because (a) the game could almost be seen as a recruitment tool and (b) you play CoD because you're into weapons and cammo, which is also why you join the army. So that's a causation theory, and a common cause theory.
However I'd also guess that soldiers who've seen war atrocities up-close might get turned off the computer wargames.
Those are all just guesses though; I'd love to see figures.
I've seen Collateral Murder, mind you -- those guys don't see the damage close up.
There do seem to be whole new subgenres of "horror" which aim for disgust rather than fear and - while perfectly happy to defend the right of others to watch it - I want nothing to do with it myself. Alien - fantastic movie. Saw - you can keep it.
Saw is a clever, entertaining, thought provoking and imaginative film. It's just a shame about the sequels (I gave up after the third, and wish I'd done so earlier).
My thoughts exactly. I enjoyed the Silent Hill movie okay actually, but things like The Hills Have Eyes just looked sadistic for the sake of being sadistic
I don't know whether you're talking about the 1977 Hills Have Eyes or the 2006 remake, but I'm going to talk about the original. It's tough to watch, and I personally wouldn't like to watch it again -- but it has artistic merit. We are supposed to be horrified by the hillbillies' attack, and find ourselves rooting for the WASPish tourists -- but when they they take their violent revenge, there comes a point where we (or at least, I) wonder whether they've become as bad as what they're fighting.
See also the incredible Man Bites Dog, in which we laugh along with the charismatic serial killer, until at some point things get a bit too nasty, and the audience wonders whether they really should have stopped laughing several scenes ago.
My favourite horror game of all time has to be Silent Hill 2. It worked on so many levels, the entire town becoming the James' own personal hell until he was finally able to confront the truth of what had really happened to him.
It was a game that genuinely terrified me at times, but not due to the gore, which there was not that much of, but the psychological fear it evoked, often making me wish that I could make James just turn around and drive away from that place.
It was fantastic, but even as a fairly hardened horror enthusiast, it was too much for me. I saved my game in the lobby of the hospital, because I was scared to go in and find out what was in there. Then whenever I contemplated going back for another session, I was held back by genuine fear.
I don't want this to be a shock to your system, but . . . the people in Hills Have Eyes are merely actors and not really having horrible things done to them (though the visuals may be disgusting to watch). And the people in Silent Hill aren't even real *people*!
Mmm, but in many forms of theatre, film and videogame, the actor (or animator's) job (and that of the director, editor, etc.) is to make you forget that, so that you engage emotionally with what you're seeing. You watch a romance in order to have your heartstrings tugged; that won't happen if you keep reminding yourself they're only actors. Depending on the kind of horror, you watch to either empathise with the victim, or revel in the violence, or perhaps a bit of both, and again, you won't get the full emotional impact unless you suspend disbelief for the duration.
Poor acting, ropey sets, continuity errors, etc. all remind us we're watching a movie, and that's why they're frowned upon. And look at the fairly recent trend of using shaky cameras to make choreographed and/or computer animated scenes look like reality TV. You're *mean* to forget you're watching a fiction.
I find it fucking sick that these jackholes would even think of using footage of those things for some sort of a study. It sounds like they're the real psychopaths, here. Also, if you said "do you want to see real video of monkeys have their brains scooped out and children having flesh ripped off their faces". I wouldn't refuse to watch more. I would refuse to watch it to begin with, just based on the description of it. Fucking sick.
I empathise with you, but let's examine that. The footage exists, and whether you watch it or not won't undo that. So what difference does it make whether you watch the "real" footage, or a very convincing fake of the same scene?
since this is not a debt based currency, can you explain how deflation is a negative effect? It seems to me deflation is only a concern when your wares drop in price but your debts do not.
I daresay people are already lending and borrowing Bitcoins. How large does it need to scale before it becomes what you call a "debt based currency"?
I think avoiding taxes is one of the unstated goals.
... insofar as the project can be said to have goals at all, since (judging by its forums) it's been adopted by people with a wide range of opinions and value systems.
I think it might provide a way to exist in a parallel, tax-free economy for a while -- but that will end if the system gets any kind of mainstream uptake.
You'll know that this currency has achieved official status once you can start renting escort services with it.
I'd be astonished if someone, somewhere isn't doing it already. I mean, why not? Since there are people offering to convert Bitcoin into dollars right now, all the enterprising sex worker has to do is accept Bitcoin at the going exchange rate, add on some commission to cover exchange fees and hassle, plus a bit, and convert it into dollars the moment the punter leaves the room. It seems like a no-brainer way to get paid a bit extra.
Why the punter wouldn't want to pay in dollars in the first place is another matter. Novelty? Principle? Bitcoins to burn and too lazy to do the conversion himself?
If the sex worker can buy stuff she wants from someone who accepts Bitcoin, she needn't even exchange into dollars of course.
Slashdot Mirror
With most car repair jobs, you have to spend time driving to the place, then you have to wait around while they do the work for you. What "rewarding things" could you do while waiting in the waiting room?
I guess that must be the American way. Here in the UK, you'd typically drop your car off at a mechanic near your workplace, walk (*) the rest of the way to work, and collect it at the end of the day. Or something similar.
Or if it's a short job, do your grocery shopping while it's being done. There's no reason to sit around in the waiting room.
(* or get a lift from a colleague, or take the bus, whatever)
I just Googled for some instructions on how to do an oil change. I'd rather let a professional do it. He'll have the right size wrench. He'll know for sure he's not undoing the wrong cap, and will identify the right one in seconds. He'll already be wearing overalls. He'll take 5 minutes doing it, where I'd take an hour or more. He gets to do it in a properly equipped garage; I'd have to do it on a public road with passers by watching.
Not that I've ever knowingly had an oil change done. At a guess, it's bundled in with a service.
I'm not a huge MS fan, but doing things this way for the "Hacker" community is a lot better than Sony's response to what hacking has been going on with the PS3.
"Better than Sony" isn't much of a target, to be fair.
Come on. I love rsync, but you're going to be doing a fair amount of tinkering before you get it to do what Time Machine does out of the box with no/minimal setup.
Obviously, that convenience comes at a price - money, freedom, (soul ;) )
I don't trust car mechanics, and always do everything myself, including engine rebuilds. The people who work as auto mechanics aren't the smartest people around, nor the most thorough or conscientious. In addition to that, their charges are ridiculously high: about $70/hour here in AZ. People here always say their time is "so valuable"; I don't know about most geeks, but I don't make $140k, and I can make time in the evenings to save some money.
Presumably, at some point in the past, you paid your dues and spent time learning about car mechanics. I promise you, car jobs that would take you 10 minutes, would take me a whole day, may need me to buy tools I don't already own, would carry a strong risk of me screwing something up badly enough that I'd need to call in an expert, and would wind up more expensive than paying a mechanic.
Plus, time is valuable. I'm not talking about the money I could earn working the same hours. I'm talking about the rewarding things I could do with the time if I wasn't struggling with the greasy bits of a car. It's opportunity cost.
Similarly, I've paid my dues and know a bit about computers. I can set up a decent backup regime fairly easily. Someone who uses computers the way I use a car, would find it more of a time consuming challenge.
I don't grow my own food simply because I don't have the time for it
Well, maybe if you spent less time on your car... See? Opportunity cost.
Good point. The tin foil hat brigade.
The "manage my domain" link suggests to me you're paying for Google Apps.
What about commercial users who pay for Gmail? I think it's on the order of $50 per year per user. Google Mail is much more than just a free mail service.
Do you reckon, just maybe, the SLA contract for paying GMail customers covers this kind of thing?
A good system might use QMail's maildir format, which is designed to overcome many of the serious problems mbox has.
Go into a conversation and look to the right.
Unless you have adblock, there's something special about your chosen skin, or you're paying for GMail.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6603
I also have a single line ad immediately above the "Archive" button - dunno why you don't.
How do they make a profit off gmail exactly? I don't recall ever seeing any ads on it. How does happy translate into money from an e-mail account?
Not looked very hard, have you?
GMail ads aren't very intrusive, but they're worryingly well targeted.
While there are not (as yet, as far as I've seen) any people yelling and shouting for heads to role because some of their precious data is lost, I expect it to start soon.
There are far too few people who understand the danger of having only one copy of information, and people seem even more naive when that copy is help by another party (they assume that someone else is dealing with it, and seem to expect there will be some sort of come-back if the service they pay nothing for loses some of their info).
The expectation is that the 3rd party (Google in this case) are doing the backing up for you. If you were paying for Google Apps, you'd make damned sure your contract says so. As a free GMail user, I admit I haven't read the small print recently, but my assumption is that my data is "backed up". "Backed up" in quotes, because rather than there being a regular copy made to tape or whatever, their storage grid inherently has everything in multiple places.
They seem to be saying they'll recover the mailboxes in due course. If that's true, then it shows that their service is "as good as" having your own backup. Indeed it's better, because they did the recovery for free. Most people find recovering from their backup non-trivial.
If they fail to recover even one of these accounts, that's a big fail for Google.
'The 4000-transistor, 8-bit logic circuit has the processing power of only a 1970s-era silicon model, but it has a key advantage—it can bend.
Did anyone else read "it can blend"?
"The unfortunate fact is that Craigslist has become almost synonymous with bargains that don't get taxed."
My first association is with the time my partner and I rented an apartment in Brooklyn for a short Christmas break, while the residents were away visiting their families. It was a great, mutually beneficial arrangement, with strangers.
But now you point it out, by rights perhaps it should have been taxed, so you *could* say it's a crime. Oh well :)
By that reasoning, no soldier in the army would want to play Call of Duty. But as we all know they pretty much ALL play those games.
"As we all know"? I didn't know that. Have you a source.
My guess would be that there might be a lot of CoD players in the army because (a) the game could almost be seen as a recruitment tool and (b) you play CoD because you're into weapons and cammo, which is also why you join the army. So that's a causation theory, and a common cause theory.
However I'd also guess that soldiers who've seen war atrocities up-close might get turned off the computer wargames.
Those are all just guesses though; I'd love to see figures.
I've seen Collateral Murder, mind you -- those guys don't see the damage close up.
There do seem to be whole new subgenres of "horror" which aim for disgust rather than fear and - while perfectly happy to defend the right of others to watch it - I want nothing to do with it myself. Alien - fantastic movie. Saw - you can keep it.
Saw is a clever, entertaining, thought provoking and imaginative film. It's just a shame about the sequels (I gave up after the third, and wish I'd done so earlier).
nobody wants to watch stuff like this.
Evidently some people do, for whatever reasons (hopefully in most cases, not to get kicks).
My thoughts exactly. I enjoyed the Silent Hill movie okay actually, but things like The Hills Have Eyes just looked sadistic for the sake of being sadistic
I don't know whether you're talking about the 1977 Hills Have Eyes or the 2006 remake, but I'm going to talk about the original. It's tough to watch, and I personally wouldn't like to watch it again -- but it has artistic merit. We are supposed to be horrified by the hillbillies' attack, and find ourselves rooting for the WASPish tourists -- but when they they take their violent revenge, there comes a point where we (or at least, I) wonder whether they've become as bad as what they're fighting.
See also the incredible Man Bites Dog, in which we laugh along with the charismatic serial killer, until at some point things get a bit too nasty, and the audience wonders whether they really should have stopped laughing several scenes ago.
Have you played Silent Hill 2 (or, indeed, 1)? Really unsettling.
Nothing can ever terrify us more than the notion of dying suddenly without even knowing why.
Not a great basis for a computer game, mind....
HAL.
Happened to me all the time in Quake II online...
My favourite horror game of all time has to be Silent Hill 2. It worked on so many levels, the entire town becoming the James' own personal hell until he was finally able to confront the truth of what had really happened to him.
It was a game that genuinely terrified me at times, but not due to the gore, which there was not that much of, but the psychological fear it evoked, often making me wish that I could make James just turn around and drive away from that place.
It was fantastic, but even as a fairly hardened horror enthusiast, it was too much for me. I saved my game in the lobby of the hospital, because I was scared to go in and find out what was in there. Then whenever I contemplated going back for another session, I was held back by genuine fear.
Brilliant :D
I don't want this to be a shock to your system, but . . . the people in Hills Have Eyes are merely actors and not really having horrible things done to them (though the visuals may be disgusting to watch). And the people in Silent Hill aren't even real *people*!
Mmm, but in many forms of theatre, film and videogame, the actor (or animator's) job (and that of the director, editor, etc.) is to make you forget that, so that you engage emotionally with what you're seeing. You watch a romance in order to have your heartstrings tugged; that won't happen if you keep reminding yourself they're only actors. Depending on the kind of horror, you watch to either empathise with the victim, or revel in the violence, or perhaps a bit of both, and again, you won't get the full emotional impact unless you suspend disbelief for the duration.
Poor acting, ropey sets, continuity errors, etc. all remind us we're watching a movie, and that's why they're frowned upon. And look at the fairly recent trend of using shaky cameras to make choreographed and/or computer animated scenes look like reality TV. You're *mean* to forget you're watching a fiction.
I find it fucking sick that these jackholes would even think of using footage of those things for some sort of a study. It sounds like they're the real psychopaths, here. Also, if you said "do you want to see real video of monkeys have their brains scooped out and children having flesh ripped off their faces". I wouldn't refuse to watch more. I would refuse to watch it to begin with, just based on the description of it. Fucking sick.
I empathise with you, but let's examine that. The footage exists, and whether you watch it or not won't undo that. So what difference does it make whether you watch the "real" footage, or a very convincing fake of the same scene?
You disregarded my last sentence.
since this is not a debt based currency, can you explain how deflation is a negative effect? It seems to me deflation is only a concern when your wares drop in price but your debts do not.
I daresay people are already lending and borrowing Bitcoins. How large does it need to scale before it becomes what you call a "debt based currency"?
I think avoiding taxes is one of the unstated goals.
... insofar as the project can be said to have goals at all, since (judging by its forums) it's been adopted by people with a wide range of opinions and value systems.
I think it might provide a way to exist in a parallel, tax-free economy for a while -- but that will end if the system gets any kind of mainstream uptake.
You'll know that this currency has achieved official status once you can start renting escort services with it.
I'd be astonished if someone, somewhere isn't doing it already. I mean, why not? Since there are people offering to convert Bitcoin into dollars right now, all the enterprising sex worker has to do is accept Bitcoin at the going exchange rate, add on some commission to cover exchange fees and hassle, plus a bit, and convert it into dollars the moment the punter leaves the room. It seems like a no-brainer way to get paid a bit extra.
Why the punter wouldn't want to pay in dollars in the first place is another matter. Novelty? Principle? Bitcoins to burn and too lazy to do the conversion himself?
If the sex worker can buy stuff she wants from someone who accepts Bitcoin, she needn't even exchange into dollars of course.