I don't like Daylight Saving Time, or as I call it "Pretend it's an hour later than it is," and will be glad when the clock in my car doesn't make me do addition to remember what time it is (I refuse to adjust it for this nonsense.) This silly dance we do every year twice.
My alarm clock is a self-adjusting atomic model (not internally of course, it readjusts itself via radio signal from the U.S. Atomic Clock in Colorado).
Actually, you'd think so, but no, he isn't. He doesn't even understand what "open source" means. Oh, I'm sure he has all kinds of negative opinions about open source software, but he's misapplying the term in is article to stuff that isn't even open source software.
Youtube is not open source, Myspace is not open source, Google is not open source. They aren't even free. They are selling a resource, human eyeballs. The "free" things on the sites are the method of collecting these eyeballs. That's both giving people the opportunity to create free content, and giving the people the opportunity to view free things that others have created. Their trying to collect the eyeballs of both the creators and the viewers.
The Myspace/Youtube model is ancient in Internet terms. I've still got a Geocities page from back in the day, which survived from before the tech crash all the way to the current day.
Now, this guys thesis is pretty muddled, so let me see if I understand. Microsoft is going to be in trouble with Hotmail, because they refuse to pay people to use the Hotmail service to send Email. (Hotmail, of course, is also ancient. I still have my Hotmail account from before it was Microsoft.)
Obviously, no one is going to write up a long Email, wasting their precious time and send it out to their friends and families for free! Is their labor not worth money?
Oh, wait, that doesn't make any sense does it? People are sending Emails to family and friends because its something they want to do, not in order to get paid for it? Well, that's what vanity pages are for. That's why people make their own music videos by cutting up random anime series and putting a Nine Inch Nails soundtrack to them. That's why people complain about classes or coworkers on MySpace or a random blogging service. It's all just a way to communicate. Even Wikipedia, which has more standards than MySpace, is really just a way for people to tell the world about something they're into.
Most of this isn't labor, it's recreation. (Much like this post I've written here, just now. You guys had better give me some monies for this! Or else! No more Slashdot posts! I shudder to think how much the "I, for one..." and "In Soviet Russia..." posts are going to cost in the New Economy! Through the roof, no doubt!) Now, it's possible people won't be able to afford recreation for some reason (time crunch working longer hours or two or more jobs), but that's not his argument.
It's actually easier to make the argument that Microsoft should charge users to use Hotmail, but right now they consider it more profitable to charge advertisers. They aren't doing anything here out of altruism.
Hmm, the other day, I told someone, that they could watch an episode of a show they missed on Hulu for free. Well, the person said, "No, I don't want to do anything illegal." I tried to explain it was legal, but it was like trying to explain to the Almighty Tallest that humans could be tall but also dumb. I finally gave up.
Isn't it entirely possible that those were God's orders?
God's orders? God's orders!?! See, this is exactly the problem, that people believe that God is giving people, or ever gave people orders.
The world would be a better place if people would ignore the voices in their heads, the voices in their leaders' heads, or the voices that their leaders made up in order to justify committing atrocities.
Still, if you like that kind of stuff, please see this note:
L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, maintained that ancient Egypt was "a battleground between two space groups" who infiltrated humanity and become integral to Egyptian culture. (What is Knowable to the PC, 1961) In Responsibility and the State of OT, he claimed that Moses had a "disintegrator pistol".
-- Moses
Now, when the Israelite army was executing the women and male children (which enlightened people understand to be disgustingly evil even when ordered by Magic Sky Faeries) and dragging the female children off to be raped (ditto), I wonder if Moses was using that disintigrator pistol? Or just that magical snake stick from the Bible?
In Australia, it's a man named Michael Atkinson (among others). As Yahtzee says in his latest review, "I imported Silent Hill Homecoming to review next week, looks like you lose Michael Atkinson!"
Yahtzee had better be careful, or he'll have to "Face the Wheel" (something I saw in a documentary about the Australian justice system some years back.) I originally thought it was some kind of fantasy movie, but the more I hear about Australia, the more I realize that they were just showing us the awful truth.
You know, every so often I read a bit of amusing, absurdist humor on Slashdot that just brightens my day.
Of course, it's possible that someone might take this blather seriously. The purpose of the police is to protect the System. If you are completely happy with the System (I am not) you might like that. In my case, I have had some fun dealings with the police in regard to asset forfeiture (incidentally, they realized there might be trouble, so I got my one "get my car out of impound free (hah, impound fees were quite lucrative for them) as I was innocent of any crime." So, no, I don't believe the police are there to protect people. I imagine that in Chicago there are several people who agree with me.
I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.
I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.
Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.
That's truly the most impressive spin I've seen so far, and I'd love to read your reasoning behind it.
See, you think you'd like to hear the "reasoning" behind it, but you really wouldn't. It resembles the "reasoning" Young Earth Creationists come up with to justify their "scientific" theories. Which isn't surprising considering that there's a lot of crossover there.
Listening to it makes one's head hurt, and doesn't really solve any problems. Because if you come up with some refutation of the theory, they come back with equally specious "reasoning" refuting it. It's a non-falsifiable theory based on faith.
Hmm, sounds like The Producers a classic Mel Brooks comedy. For people who haven't seen it here's the gist, timid accountant Leo Bloom explains to shifty Broadway producer Max Bialistock how he could make money on a flop play. Basically, all he has to do is oversell shares in the play by a huge amount, then when they play tanks, no one will expect their shares of the profits.
Then, much as in the current derivatives market, hilarity ensues.
Oh, also, frighteningly prescient was an episode of Really Weird Tales (an SCTV movie that's hard to find now) about a small town making money on no money down home sales. Why the whole town got rich selling houses to each other! Then those people got rich by reselling the houses to other people in the town. Until, finally, well I won't spoil the ending but it kind of has been spoiled by Congress....
Actually, no one explains it better than my favorite blog, Dr. Housing Bubble
Well, I didn't know, until it came into action recently. Here's an article: Regulators seize troubled IndyMac. Basically, the government comes in a seizes the bank, and makes sure people can get their money up to the insured amount. The the FDIC sells the bank, and depending on how much they get customers may get more than the insured limit.
I don't expect it to change minds, though. Bastard Calvinism is a popular faith in the United States, and hating the poor, and especially the minority poor is it's chief tenet. (Of course, poor is relative...)
I'd make some kind of a game out of it. Have the kids represent servers, sysadmins, and threats. The threats would be trying to infect, crack or destroy the servers, the sysadmins would be trying to stop them. The servers would have some kinds of defenses against the threats, but without help from the sysadmins they'd eventually be overwhelmed.
Don't forget to bring twenty sided dice and graph paper.
I bought one of his MP3s from Amazon, "It's Christmas at Ground Zero." I really like that song, perfect for this coming Christmas, especially, don'tcha think?
They'll work on whatever cheap crummy MP3 player (or high quality MP3 player, or iPod) you want to use. You can make as many copies as you want, record MP3 CDs, the works. Shouldn't the RIAA be crying bloody murder?
Or is it just that the pressure from RIAA is just a pretext, and Apple doesn't want people to be able to easily use their competitors players? I'm not being cynical, it just doesn't make sense to me since even not technically savvy people can undertand the value of un-DRMed MP3s over the alternative, iTunes should have a competitive disadvantage.
Back when they were pursuing the Broadcast Flag unfunded mandate, I had my objection hand delivered for a fee by http://www.congress.org/
I got a nice letter back explaining why I was all wrong and the broadcast flag was the greatest thing since sliced peaches, but at least they got my letter.
Here's the thing, in some places dead people were signing up for loans.
My guess is they rose from their graves, took pen in hand, signed up for the loans and then returned to their crypts. Of course, it could just be that the people who thought Boiler Room was a training tape were crooked as all Hell.
People with senile dementia were talked into changing 30 year fixed rate mortgages with low monthly payments into the more exiting and "fun" Adjustible Rate Mortgages. The hard sell was king, think Glengarry, Glen Ross.
Here's a quote from the article linked above:
Allegation
1. Handed out copies of the movie Boiler Room as a training tape
2. Partnered to sell its PayOption Arms with a brokerage owned by a five-time felon, whose convictions included gun-related charges
3. Forbade loan officers to check borrower income on certain loans
4. Ran an "art department" in its Tampa office, where documents were altered
5. Settled allegations of institutionalized marketing deception that covered two million customers
6. Developed "FastQual," a program designed to approve borrowers in twelve seconds
7. Incentivized brokers and loan officers through "yield spread premiums" and other compensation schemes to put borrowers into more expensive loans
8. Tapped two kegs of beer at weekly staff meetings
Slashdot Mirror
Here's my favorite anti-daylight savings time page:
End Day Light Savings Time
I don't like Daylight Saving Time, or as I call it "Pretend it's an hour later than it is," and will be glad when the clock in my car doesn't make me do addition to remember what time it is (I refuse to adjust it for this nonsense.) This silly dance we do every year twice.
My alarm clock is a self-adjusting atomic model (not internally of course, it readjusts itself via radio signal from the U.S. Atomic Clock in Colorado).
Actually, you'd think so, but no, he isn't. He doesn't even understand what "open source" means. Oh, I'm sure he has all kinds of negative opinions about open source software, but he's misapplying the term in is article to stuff that isn't even open source software.
Youtube is not open source, Myspace is not open source, Google is not open source. They aren't even free. They are selling a resource, human eyeballs. The "free" things on the sites are the method of collecting these eyeballs. That's both giving people the opportunity to create free content, and giving the people the opportunity to view free things that others have created. Their trying to collect the eyeballs of both the creators and the viewers.
The Myspace/Youtube model is ancient in Internet terms. I've still got a Geocities page from back in the day, which survived from before the tech crash all the way to the current day.
Now, this guys thesis is pretty muddled, so let me see if I understand. Microsoft is going to be in trouble with Hotmail, because they refuse to pay people to use the Hotmail service to send Email. (Hotmail, of course, is also ancient. I still have my Hotmail account from before it was Microsoft.)
Obviously, no one is going to write up a long Email, wasting their precious time and send it out to their friends and families for free! Is their labor not worth money?
Oh, wait, that doesn't make any sense does it? People are sending Emails to family and friends because its something they want to do, not in order to get paid for it? Well, that's what vanity pages are for. That's why people make their own music videos by cutting up random anime series and putting a Nine Inch Nails soundtrack to them. That's why people complain about classes or coworkers on MySpace or a random blogging service. It's all just a way to communicate. Even Wikipedia, which has more standards than MySpace, is really just a way for people to tell the world about something they're into.
Most of this isn't labor, it's recreation. (Much like this post I've written here, just now. You guys had better give me some monies for this! Or else! No more Slashdot posts! I shudder to think how much the "I, for one..." and "In Soviet Russia..." posts are going to cost in the New Economy! Through the roof, no doubt!) Now, it's possible people won't be able to afford recreation for some reason (time crunch working longer hours or two or more jobs), but that's not his argument.
It's actually easier to make the argument that Microsoft should charge users to use Hotmail, but right now they consider it more profitable to charge advertisers. They aren't doing anything here out of altruism.
Hmm, the other day, I told someone, that they could watch an episode of a show they missed on Hulu for free. Well, the person said, "No, I don't want to do anything illegal." I tried to explain it was legal, but it was like trying to explain to the Almighty Tallest that humans could be tall but also dumb. I finally gave up.
God's orders? God's orders!?! See, this is exactly the problem, that people believe that God is giving people, or ever gave people orders.
The world would be a better place if people would ignore the voices in their heads, the voices in their leaders' heads, or the voices that their leaders made up in order to justify committing atrocities.
Still, if you like that kind of stuff, please see this note:
Now, when the Israelite army was executing the women and male children (which enlightened people understand to be disgustingly evil even when ordered by Magic Sky Faeries) and dragging the female children off to be raped (ditto), I wonder if Moses was using that disintigrator pistol? Or just that magical snake stick from the Bible?
I'm kind of surprised that the Kotaku story didn't mention Left4Dead, which I have the impression will be a really good survival horror game.
In Australia, it's a man named Michael Atkinson (among others). As Yahtzee says in his latest review, "I imported Silent Hill Homecoming to review next week, looks like you lose Michael Atkinson!"
Yahtzee had better be careful, or he'll have to "Face the Wheel" (something I saw in a documentary about the Australian justice system some years back.) I originally thought it was some kind of fantasy movie, but the more I hear about Australia, the more I realize that they were just showing us the awful truth.
You know, every so often I read a bit of amusing, absurdist humor on Slashdot that just brightens my day.
Of course, it's possible that someone might take this blather seriously. The purpose of the police is to protect the System. If you are completely happy with the System (I am not) you might like that. In my case, I have had some fun dealings with the police in regard to asset forfeiture (incidentally, they realized there might be trouble, so I got my one "get my car out of impound free (hah, impound fees were quite lucrative for them) as I was innocent of any crime." So, no, I don't believe the police are there to protect people. I imagine that in Chicago there are several people who agree with me.
I bet those Republicans aren't Scotsmen, either.
There was a black hacker in the original Die Hard. Ok, he was with the bad guys, but still.
See, you think you'd like to hear the "reasoning" behind it, but you really wouldn't. It resembles the "reasoning" Young Earth Creationists come up with to justify their "scientific" theories. Which isn't surprising considering that there's a lot of crossover there.
Listening to it makes one's head hurt, and doesn't really solve any problems. Because if you come up with some refutation of the theory, they come back with equally specious "reasoning" refuting it. It's a non-falsifiable theory based on faith.
Well, it's best to cultivate contacts in the Mossad, then. Ok, maybe just the Likud party....
Through Deception Thou Shalt Do War!
Uh-huh
I think most of that number was clerks at Blockbuster video.
Hmm, sounds like The Producers a classic Mel Brooks comedy. For people who haven't seen it here's the gist, timid accountant Leo Bloom explains to shifty Broadway producer Max Bialistock how he could make money on a flop play. Basically, all he has to do is oversell shares in the play by a huge amount, then when they play tanks, no one will expect their shares of the profits.
Then, much as in the current derivatives market, hilarity ensues.
Oh, also, frighteningly prescient was an episode of Really Weird Tales (an SCTV movie that's hard to find now) about a small town making money on no money down home sales. Why the whole town got rich selling houses to each other! Then those people got rich by reselling the houses to other people in the town. Until, finally, well I won't spoil the ending but it kind of has been spoiled by Congress....
Actually, no one explains it better than my favorite blog, Dr. Housing Bubble
Hmm, I know that debt cramdowns had been proposed.
Here's an example, 5 Step Proposed Plan - New Requests (Scroll Down)
Well, I didn't know, until it came into action recently. Here's an article: Regulators seize troubled IndyMac. Basically, the government comes in a seizes the bank, and makes sure people can get their money up to the insured amount. The the FDIC sells the bank, and depending on how much they get customers may get more than the insured limit.
Here's another story: IndyMac Customers Wait For Cash, Answers
McGrew, here's an article:
Misunderstanding Credit and Housing Crises: Blaming the CRA, GSEs
I don't expect it to change minds, though. Bastard Calvinism is a popular faith in the United States, and hating the poor, and especially the minority poor is it's chief tenet. (Of course, poor is relative...)
I'm thinking of doing a Christmas Mix, including "I am Santa Claus" o/~ Give him cookies and beer, only has to work one day a year o/~
I'd make some kind of a game out of it. Have the kids represent servers, sysadmins, and threats. The threats would be trying to infect, crack or destroy the servers, the sysadmins would be trying to stop them. The servers would have some kinds of defenses against the threats, but without help from the sysadmins they'd eventually be overwhelmed.
Don't forget to bring twenty sided dice and graph paper.
I bought one of his MP3s from Amazon, "It's Christmas at Ground Zero." I really like that song, perfect for this coming Christmas, especially, don'tcha think?
Ripped from the headlines!!
Amazon is currently selling DRM free MP3s, heres' a sample page:
Amazon MP3 Store
They'll work on whatever cheap crummy MP3 player (or high quality MP3 player, or iPod) you want to use. You can make as many copies as you want, record MP3 CDs, the works. Shouldn't the RIAA be crying bloody murder?
Or is it just that the pressure from RIAA is just a pretext, and Apple doesn't want people to be able to easily use their competitors players? I'm not being cynical, it just doesn't make sense to me since even not technically savvy people can undertand the value of un-DRMed MP3s over the alternative, iTunes should have a competitive disadvantage.
Back when they were pursuing the Broadcast Flag unfunded mandate, I had my objection hand delivered for a fee by http://www.congress.org/
I got a nice letter back explaining why I was all wrong and the broadcast flag was the greatest thing since sliced peaches, but at least they got my letter.
My guess is they rose from their graves, took pen in hand, signed up for the loans and then returned to their crypts. Of course, it could just be that the people who thought Boiler Room was a training tape were crooked as all Hell.
People with senile dementia were talked into changing 30 year fixed rate mortgages with low monthly payments into the more exiting and "fun" Adjustible Rate Mortgages. The hard sell was king, think Glengarry, Glen Ross .
Here's a quote from the article linked above: