We turned our back on utopia when we took plow to earth
We "put plow to earth" because it turns out that burying your children who starved through the winter is not so much fun after all.
no amount of technology will bring it back without a funndamental shift in our culture.
If you want it back that badly, you can have it easilly. Go deep into the mountains of Asia or Africa. Leave everything, including your clothes, behind you when you go. Enjoy the three or four weeks you manage to survive in your primative utopia. I'll just stay home and watch TV, thanks.
Apparently, many people want to reach or approach a state of immortality. I can understand why, but if it's in the sense of extending human life as it is now to an unlimited life span, I'll pass on it. I bet that this desire of becoming some immortal human being is mostly rooted in egoism, which causes most people to assume that the rest of the world will stay mortal when they become immortal. Which will, of course, be true to some extent since none of the less developed countries will be able to profit from whatever technology makes immortality possible. But eventually, the world (be it earth or all planets we might make habitable) will be filled with immortal people, unable to procreate because there is no more room nor resources for more people. They will be doomed to either continue living with the same people eternally, kill each other, or commit suicide. No thanks.
We will miss you.
What's wrong with having the same people around "eternally"?
There's... what? Six billion of us? Even if you figure that more than half of those people are assholes, that's still almost three billion people worth having as friends. It would take a long time to get acquainted with them all (and sift them out from said assholes.) Just learning all the languages we would need to learn to all talk to each other fluently would take one or two of what we used to consider lifetimes.
If we can use human stem cells to grow human organs on rats or pigs, we ought to be able to add wings to ourselves.
Anybody up for mapping the avian genome? I gotta think there's big bucks in it for somebody. Put me on the "early adopter" list once the clinical trials are over. I'd gladly take out a loan and shell out six figures for the ability to fly to work at a reasonable commuting speed without a vehicle.
I think the one of the most fascinating things about longevity research is the race of competing solutions.
1. Mechanical replacement: Either a matrix-like virtual world where we experience all the senses of a normal body and stay young and beautiful forever, or else robot bodies.
2. Biological replacement: New cloned parts and eventually new cloned bodies.
3. Biological maintenance: Cure aging and most of the major lethal illnesses, and there's no reason your current body can't last until your flying car accidentally crashes into a giant neon Coca-cola billboard.
I'll be happy with any of these options. I'm a Christian, and believe in a life after this one, but that doesn't mean I'm in any particular hurry to leave.
iPod nanos are going to sell like hookers this Christmas
Are hookers going to sell particularly well this Christmas? I would think that with New Orleans still recovering from the flood, it would be kind of a down year for prostitution...
The legal term for what you are talking about is larceny.
"Stealing" has always been a casual usage term, and there's nothing wrong with applying it to any situation where you acquire something without paying for it, including the free copying of media files which you should have paid for.
If you're challenged on your team not having low enough productivity (ie. not working long enough hours) it is important to have the latest output measures at hand, and to point out that maximum productivity is achieved at around 35 hours per week.
Or you could just lie.
Most tech people do at least some of their work from home, and there are only two ways to measure how much time they spend working at home: 1. How long they say they worked. 2. How much they get done.
If both of those metrics indicate that they worked a solid full week, then nobody has any way to dispute it.
Without actually telling them directly, make sure your employees understand that the road to happiness under your management is to get their shit done, and fudge their time cards to make it look like it takes 40 hours a week. Hell, get them to log another 8 hours they didn't work on the weekend, then you will look like a real slave-driver!!!
We'll see what you think about that when nearly everyone who can maintain a computer ssytem from the mid 1990s has retired.
The computer systems from the mid 1990s will have retired long before the High Priests who know how to maintain them (re: paper MCSE's and Bachelor-degree holding *nix geeks) are gone.
Old retired COBOL guys got a little "bounce" during all the panic over Y2K, but that "crisis" merely provoked a lot of companies to realize the need to move on from those old, cobweb-covered "big iron" mainframes.
I was under the impression that Western Civilization has been on the verge of colapse, or at least decline in decay, for a long time now.
Five US Presidents later, I'm done waiting for it to happen.
The economy cycles, but continues to slowly rise. Priorities of morallity shift around, yet we do not decline into nihillistic anarchy, but rather we continue to gradually raise our standards regarding what offends our sensibilities. Countries around us get their shit together and look as if they will "catch up" to us in global competition, and we end up finding a way to trade with them which enhances our prosperity. Our freedoms endure troubling restrictions in some ways, while opening up more than ever before in others, and brutal dictatorships around the world continue to slip into what Reagan once called "the ash bin of history."
I've finally come to conclude that we actually have a rather robust society in place.
As a child, I grew up (like many Cold-War kids) believing that the whole goddamn world would burn up in a massive nuclear apocalypse in my lifetime.
As a young man, I was dead certain that we were living in the declining years of society... that we caught the very tail end of something great, and it will all be over soon.
Today, I've come around to see that calling our society "doomed" is about as meaningful as calling Apple Computer "beleagured."
So farewell to all the hand-wringing and furrowed brows about the future. I now firmly believe that the world will be a even better place during the rest my life than it has been so far. What's more, it will continue to improve long after I'm gone.
Trying to enjoy a DVD? Then turn your ringer off. That's what answering machines and voicemail boxes are for right?
So when a call comes about a family member with a medical emergency who wants me at the hospital for the final minutes of their life, I guess it will just have to wait until the movies over to find out about it, because I'm hiding from the whole goddamn world is what it takes to avoid interruptions from annoying fucktards like you, and I should just accept that without ever being rude or indignant.
You're no better than them you piece of trash. That's what you are. Trash. Utterly wasteful human garbage. You obviously leech off of other peoples' misery and try to prevent them from making a living in any way, shape, or form instead of just being polite and resolving your issue with them.
My "issue with them" is that they choose to call me. They are welcome to make a living any way they like, but they are not welcome to call me, and will suffer my wrath when they do. Don't like it? Then don't call.
It might be aggravating, but there are much better ways to go about it then trying to make someone feel awful about themselves.
I can think of at least three, but none of them are as much fun. They feel awful about themselves after talking to me? Good! They are being awful people, and therefore I'm merely aligning their self-image with reality! Perhaps I will provoke some of them to change their lives in a positive direction.
Seriously. Prostitutes deserve more dignity than telemarketers. At least a whore is providing a service which is actually desired by her customers.
Because you show no polite respect to us. You've taken a job that you know annoys the hell out of 90% of the population. That shows an utter lack of consideration of any type for the rest of humainty. Be polite? If I met you I'd punch you in the face.
You were modded down as flame-bait and troll for saying this, but I'm behind you on this one.
Yes, saying "put me on your do not call list" is a simple thing to do, but doing so three times in one evening when you are trying to enjoy a DVD or play a computer game is very tiresome. Before Minnesota's do-not-call registry was set up, that's what it was like.
I'm generally a nice guy, but I delight in being rude to telemarketers. I deliberately waste their time. I belittle them. I pummel them with questions about why they want to be parasites and how can they sleep at night knowing that they make their livings spreading human misery.
Why? Because I want every telemarketer to utterly hate his or her job. I want them to go home crying and wonder if the paycheck is worth the stress and heartache, so some of them will quit and companies who rely on telemarketing have to spend more money to hire new people. This makes telemarketing cost more for the same return, which makes it a less attractive means of generating business.
If everybody who disliked being called by soliciters was as mean, rude, and disruptive as me, the entire industry would dry up within a couple years.
Coming to think about it, a 10$ bill also looks like the TR-1. It is flat and has a round wheel around Alexander Hamilton.
Brilliant. A new thieves' cant name for the iPod.
Apply a little cockney rhyming slang... let's see...
Hamilton Hilton Paris Hilton.
Got it. From now on, we shall refer to an iPod as a "Paris."
Used in context:
"Well, I 'ad a butcher's at that new Leamington that was Plimsolled out be'ind the bath down the Kermit last night, and what should I notice but a shiney new Paris on the dash. So, make a long story short, I put a copacabana through the Kevin, and Robert is your father's brother. Happy birthday, me old china!"
It's a music player (with a 1.5yr life thanks to the battery)
WTF?
By 3G iPod had a battery that lasted just under 1.5 years due to lots and lots of charging cycles... so I replaced it.
For $20, I've got a battery that lasted longer than the original one did when it was new. The life of my iPod is FAR from over.
The company which sold me the battery even included a little plastic tool for opening the case up. Replacing the battery was easier (and less delicate) than installing memory on a typical laptop.
It's long past time for the iPod battery troll to go away.
i dont think the OP or the AC that responded are really contributing anything to the discussion.
The OP points out that the particular court which ruled on this case is requently overturned. If nothing else, he called attention to the fact that the 9th Circuit is perceived by some as somewhat controversial. If we are going to discuss their ruling, that might be worth talking about.
since you dont want anyone censored, do you read/. at -1? if not, why?
The purpose of moderation is two-fold: The first (and more important) purpose is to elevate the visibility of noteworthy comments. Some people like to read at a high threshold to save time. They will only see posts which were seen by at least a few people as particularily worthy of consideration.
The other is allow people to filter out crapflooders, goatse.cx trolls, and other folks who are not really posting to express an idea or participate in a conversation, but simply ruin the experience of reading the forum for everybody else. The moderation guidelines take great pains to urge people to use negative moderation points extremely sparingly.
Modding down somebody simply because you disagree with them, don't like them, or consider their views "dangerous" is not what moderation is supposed to be for. Some people choose to do exactly that with their mod points, but that's a shame.
The way to counter bad ideas is to confront them with good ones, not shout them down.
Yeah, yeah... insert oblig. "you must be new here" joke.
*Not that these movies make everyone cry - just a couple of schmaltzy movies.
If Schindler's List didn't make you cry, it's time to run a VK scan on your retina, skin-job!
Otherwise, good point. I certainly enjoyed doing motorcycle stunts and shooting people in GTA:VC far more then I ever will enjoy watching a Vin Diesel flick, but no game can match the emotional impact of Million Dollar Baby or House of Flying Daggers (to name a couple recent examples.)
The only post worse than one from a Karma whore is one that calls for somebody to be modded down because you don't like their politics.
Maybe the guy really is a myopic jackass for getting his panties in a twist over a very obscure and complex ruling from a court he doesn't like... maybe not. I dunno. Reverse engineering laws are complex, and I admit that, not being an IP lawyer, I barely grasp them.
How about arguing against his point rather than making a personal attack and calling for him to be silenced (by begging mods to crank his post down to -1 where almost nobody will see it)?
Why do you hate Free Speech?
Seriously. Why? There's no room for debate on the point that you do, as you are trying to censor rather than debate, so the only question is, why do you hate Free Speech?
Have you ever tried to put a DVD on your computer. Beyond the fact, that you're violating the DMCA, it takes hours to pull the data off the DVD and then re-encode it in a compressed format. You'd better have a good reason to go through that hassle, and frankly most people don't.
Mac The Ripper will grab an entire dual-layer DVD movie in well under a half-hour on an old eMac.
Why compress? Hard drives are cheap these days and even the much-hyped new compression formats are lossy. Every movie I own is archived on hard drives for playback on my projection system via a Mac mini, all stored as VideoTS images on about 1.5TB of cheap drives. (No need for backups, since I still have all the original disks boxed up in a storage closet.)
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We turned our back on utopia when we took plow to earth
We "put plow to earth" because it turns out that burying your children who starved through the winter is not so much fun after all.
no amount of technology will bring it back without a funndamental shift in our culture.
If you want it back that badly, you can have it easilly. Go deep into the mountains of Asia or Africa. Leave everything, including your clothes, behind you when you go. Enjoy the three or four weeks you manage to survive in your primative utopia. I'll just stay home and watch TV, thanks.
Apparently, many people want to reach or approach a state of immortality. I can understand why, but if it's in the sense of extending human life as it is now to an unlimited life span, I'll pass on it. I bet that this desire of becoming some immortal human being is mostly rooted in egoism, which causes most people to assume that the rest of the world will stay mortal when they become immortal. Which will, of course, be true to some extent since none of the less developed countries will be able to profit from whatever technology makes immortality possible.
But eventually, the world (be it earth or all planets we might make habitable) will be filled with immortal people, unable to procreate because there is no more room nor resources for more people. They will be doomed to either continue living with the same people eternally, kill each other, or commit suicide. No thanks.
We will miss you.
What's wrong with having the same people around "eternally"?
There's... what? Six billion of us? Even if you figure that more than half of those people are assholes, that's still almost three billion people worth having as friends. It would take a long time to get acquainted with them all (and sift them out from said assholes.) Just learning all the languages we would need to learn to all talk to each other fluently would take one or two of what we used to consider lifetimes.
"No, dag nabbitt!!! I said the Singularity is a Ni***BONG****"
Ah... Thank you Mel Brooks. Your jokes will never get old.
People will grow wings and fly themselves.
Actually, that ain't a half-bad idea.
If we can use human stem cells to grow human organs on rats or pigs, we ought to be able to add wings to ourselves.
Anybody up for mapping the avian genome? I gotta think there's big bucks in it for somebody. Put me on the "early adopter" list once the clinical trials are over. I'd gladly take out a loan and shell out six figures for the ability to fly to work at a reasonable commuting speed without a vehicle.
I think the one of the most fascinating things about longevity research is the race of competing solutions.
1. Mechanical replacement: Either a matrix-like virtual world where we experience all the senses of a normal body and stay young and beautiful forever, or else robot bodies.
2. Biological replacement: New cloned parts and eventually new cloned bodies.
3. Biological maintenance: Cure aging and most of the major lethal illnesses, and there's no reason your current body can't last until your flying car accidentally crashes into a giant neon Coca-cola billboard.
I'll be happy with any of these options. I'm a Christian, and believe in a life after this one, but that doesn't mean I'm in any particular hurry to leave.
if everyone is "rich" what does that do to the economy?
We will all die from a disease spread by dirty telephones. I thought everybody knew that by now.
iPod nanos are going to sell like hookers this Christmas
Are hookers going to sell particularly well this Christmas? I would think that with New Orleans still recovering from the flood, it would be kind of a down year for prostitution...
"Steal" and "Theft" are not legal terms.
The legal term for what you are talking about is larceny.
"Stealing" has always been a casual usage term, and there's nothing wrong with applying it to any situation where you acquire something without paying for it, including the free copying of media files which you should have paid for.
If you're challenged on your team not having low enough productivity (ie. not working long enough hours) it is important to have the latest output measures at hand, and to point out that maximum productivity is achieved at around 35 hours per week.
Or you could just lie.
Most tech people do at least some of their work from home, and there are only two ways to measure how much time they spend working at home: 1. How long they say they worked. 2. How much they get done.
If both of those metrics indicate that they worked a solid full week, then nobody has any way to dispute it.
Without actually telling them directly, make sure your employees understand that the road to happiness under your management is to get their shit done, and fudge their time cards to make it look like it takes 40 hours a week. Hell, get them to log another 8 hours they didn't work on the weekend, then you will look like a real slave-driver!!!
We'll see what you think about that when nearly everyone who can maintain a computer ssytem from the mid 1990s has retired.
The computer systems from the mid 1990s will have retired long before the High Priests who know how to maintain them (re: paper MCSE's and Bachelor-degree holding *nix geeks) are gone.
Old retired COBOL guys got a little "bounce" during all the panic over Y2K, but that "crisis" merely provoked a lot of companies to realize the need to move on from those old, cobweb-covered "big iron" mainframes.
Ipods have never been designed for the pocket...
WTF? I've never carried my 3G 20GB iPod any other way. It fits perfectly in the front or back pocket of my jeans.
The touch sensitive controls and interface that requires one hand to hold while the other operates...
Only if you belong to a species which has no opposable thumbs. Do you peel bananas with your teeth, too?
I was under the impression that Western Civilization has been on the verge of colapse, or at least decline in decay, for a long time now.
Five US Presidents later, I'm done waiting for it to happen.
The economy cycles, but continues to slowly rise. Priorities of morallity shift around, yet we do not decline into nihillistic anarchy, but rather we continue to gradually raise our standards regarding what offends our sensibilities. Countries around us get their shit together and look as if they will "catch up" to us in global competition, and we end up finding a way to trade with them which enhances our prosperity. Our freedoms endure troubling restrictions in some ways, while opening up more than ever before in others, and brutal dictatorships around the world continue to slip into what Reagan once called "the ash bin of history."
I've finally come to conclude that we actually have a rather robust society in place.
As a child, I grew up (like many Cold-War kids) believing that the whole goddamn world would burn up in a massive nuclear apocalypse in my lifetime.
As a young man, I was dead certain that we were living in the declining years of society... that we caught the very tail end of something great, and it will all be over soon.
Today, I've come around to see that calling our society "doomed" is about as meaningful as calling Apple Computer "beleagured."
So farewell to all the hand-wringing and furrowed brows about the future. I now firmly believe that the world will be a even better place during the rest my life than it has been so far. What's more, it will continue to improve long after I'm gone.
But really, it sends a message that even if the MPAA or whoever takes out a few pirates, there are more ready to take their places.
Kudos to you for not trotting out Princess Leia's "the more you tighten your grip" line in order to make that point.
Trying to enjoy a DVD? Then turn your ringer off. That's what answering machines and voicemail boxes are for right?
So when a call comes about a family member with a medical emergency who wants me at the hospital for the final minutes of their life, I guess it will just have to wait until the movies over to find out about it, because I'm hiding from the whole goddamn world is what it takes to avoid interruptions from annoying fucktards like you, and I should just accept that without ever being rude or indignant.
You're no better than them you piece of trash.
That's what you are. Trash.
Utterly wasteful human garbage. You obviously leech off of other peoples' misery
and try to prevent them from making a living in any way, shape, or form instead of
just being polite and resolving your issue with them.
My "issue with them" is that they choose to call me. They are welcome to make a living any way they like, but they are not welcome to call me, and will suffer my wrath when they do. Don't like it? Then don't call.
It might be aggravating, but there are much better ways to go about it then trying to make
someone feel awful about themselves.
I can think of at least three, but none of them are as much fun. They feel awful about themselves after talking to me? Good! They are being awful people, and therefore I'm merely aligning their self-image with reality! Perhaps I will provoke some of them to change their lives in a positive direction.
Seriously. Prostitutes deserve more dignity than telemarketers. At least a whore is providing a service which is actually desired by her customers.
(Now I've only watched about 15 minutes of Firefly, so I could be way off base here, so go easy on me if I'm wrong).
Glad to!
You're wrong, but it doesn't make you a bad person.
Because you show no polite respect to us. You've taken a job that you know annoys the hell out of 90% of the population. That shows an utter lack of consideration of any type for the rest of humainty. Be polite? If I met you I'd punch you in the face.
You were modded down as flame-bait and troll for saying this, but I'm behind you on this one.
Yes, saying "put me on your do not call list" is a simple thing to do, but doing so three times in one evening when you are trying to enjoy a DVD or play a computer game is very tiresome. Before Minnesota's do-not-call registry was set up, that's what it was like.
I'm generally a nice guy, but I delight in being rude to telemarketers. I deliberately waste their time. I belittle them. I pummel them with questions about why they want to be parasites and how can they sleep at night knowing that they make their livings spreading human misery.
Why? Because I want every telemarketer to utterly hate his or her job. I want them to go home crying and wonder if the paycheck is worth the stress and heartache, so some of them will quit and companies who rely on telemarketing have to spend more money to hire new people. This makes telemarketing cost more for the same return, which makes it a less attractive means of generating business.
If everybody who disliked being called by soliciters was as mean, rude, and disruptive as me, the entire industry would dry up within a couple years.
Think of the do-not-call list as a service. You just got called by the service people to see how they're doing.
Isn't that sort of like a doctor ripping your brand-new stitches out to see how the wound is healing?
Coming to think about it, a 10$ bill also looks like the TR-1. It is flat and has a round wheel around Alexander Hamilton.
Brilliant. A new thieves' cant name for the iPod.
Apply a little cockney rhyming slang... let's see...
Hamilton
Hilton
Paris Hilton.
Got it. From now on, we shall refer to an iPod as a "Paris."
Used in context:
"Well, I 'ad a butcher's at that new Leamington that was Plimsolled out be'ind the bath down the Kermit last night, and what should I notice but a shiney new Paris on the dash. So, make a long story short, I put a copacabana through the Kevin, and Robert is your father's brother. Happy birthday, me old china!"
It's a music player (with a 1.5yr life thanks to the battery)
WTF?
By 3G iPod had a battery that lasted just under 1.5 years due to lots and lots of charging cycles... so I replaced it.
For $20, I've got a battery that lasted longer than the original one did when it was new. The life of my iPod is FAR from over.
The company which sold me the battery even included a little plastic tool for opening the case up. Replacing the battery was easier (and less delicate) than installing memory on a typical laptop.
It's long past time for the iPod battery troll to go away.
i dont think the OP or the AC that responded are really contributing anything to the discussion.
/. at -1? if not, why?
The OP points out that the particular court which ruled on this case is requently overturned. If nothing else, he called attention to the fact that the 9th Circuit is perceived by some as somewhat controversial. If we are going to discuss their ruling, that might be worth talking about.
since you dont want anyone censored, do you read
The purpose of moderation is two-fold: The first (and more important) purpose is to elevate the visibility of noteworthy comments. Some people like to read at a high threshold to save time. They will only see posts which were seen by at least a few people as particularily worthy of consideration.
The other is allow people to filter out crapflooders, goatse.cx trolls, and other folks who are not really posting to express an idea or participate in a conversation, but simply ruin the experience of reading the forum for everybody else. The moderation guidelines take great pains to urge people to use negative moderation points extremely sparingly.
Modding down somebody simply because you disagree with them, don't like them, or consider their views "dangerous" is not what moderation is supposed to be for. Some people choose to do exactly that with their mod points, but that's a shame.
The way to counter bad ideas is to confront them with good ones, not shout them down.
Yeah, yeah... insert oblig. "you must be new here" joke.
...Schindler's List*.
*Not that these movies make everyone cry - just a couple of schmaltzy movies.
If Schindler's List didn't make you cry, it's time to run a VK scan on your retina, skin-job!
Otherwise, good point. I certainly enjoyed doing motorcycle stunts and shooting people in GTA:VC far more then I ever will enjoy watching a Vin Diesel flick, but no game can match the emotional impact of Million Dollar Baby or House of Flying Daggers (to name a couple recent examples.)
The only post worse than one from a Karma whore is one that calls for somebody to be modded down because you don't like their politics.
Maybe the guy really is a myopic jackass for getting his panties in a twist over a very obscure and complex ruling from a court he doesn't like... maybe not. I dunno. Reverse engineering laws are complex, and I admit that, not being an IP lawyer, I barely grasp them.
How about arguing against his point rather than making a personal attack and calling for him to be silenced (by begging mods to crank his post down to -1 where almost nobody will see it)?
Why do you hate Free Speech?
Seriously. Why? There's no room for debate on the point that you do, as you are trying to censor rather than debate, so the only question is, why do you hate Free Speech?
but give the fact I have a hard time with that SUPER bright/battary killer or too dark to see in indoor lighting screen.
Battery-saving tip (I have the ultra-small battery 3G model):
Leave the backlight off by default.
Anytime you need it, hold the menu and play buttons down together for about three seconds and the light will turn on. Do it again to turn it back off.
Have you ever tried to put a DVD on your computer. Beyond the fact, that you're violating the DMCA, it takes hours to pull the data off the DVD and then re-encode it in a compressed format. You'd better have a good reason to go through that hassle, and frankly most people don't.
Mac The Ripper will grab an entire dual-layer DVD movie in well under a half-hour on an old eMac.
Why compress? Hard drives are cheap these days and even the much-hyped new compression formats are lossy. Every movie I own is archived on hard drives for playback on my projection system via a Mac mini, all stored as VideoTS images on about 1.5TB of cheap drives. (No need for backups, since I still have all the original disks boxed up in a storage closet.)