The flight toward other entertainment channels is already in full swing. TV ownership is declining. People are dropping cable. More males play videogames than watch sports now. The baby boomers, the quintessential TV generation, have begun going on to their reward. Even basic media consumption habits (time-shifting, etc) have changed for good. TV still has more time left than newspapers do, but not much.
So turning down the volume of commercials now is a bit like repainting the ballroom after the ship has already hit the iceberg.
Montana is a big state. The nearest lab is often 2.5 hours drive away. Times 2 that is 5 hours. Times $10/hr you're talking $50 plus gas. To put that in New York State terms, it's like driving from Staten Island to Albany and back to deliver a vial of water.
My sister owns a water quality lab in Montana. Every town is required to test their water supply regularly for biological and chemical contaminants and for years they have submitted their samples via regular mail to labs like my sister's for testing. Except that the EPA has shortened the window for getting your samples in to a lab from 48 hours to 30 hours, which the Post Office cannot manage with current levels of service. UPS and FedEx don't serve many rural areas, so there is no way for many towns to test their water any more. Add in large, imminent cutbacks at the USPS, and you have a looming public health crisis as it is.
Now with the advent of fracking in the state there is a real possibility thousands of people will be poisoned by ground water contamination, but thanks to the breakdown in the testing it won't be discovered until it's far too late.
Winning more natural gas is a plus for energy independence, but if we're doing that at the cost of putting benzene into our drinking water then perhaps we need to look at other ways to generate power.
An increasing number of households, smart phones, and even newer model cars have WiFi transmission capabilities, so why can't we create ad-hoc mesh networks as a backup to the internet the government can control via backbones? As long as houses, phones, and cars have power there will always be a free internet. Confiscating all those is logistically impossible.
Seems to me, that with the un-constitutional reactionary laws the 1% is trying to push through right now that we need to make this happen swiftly.
by messing with Netflix. Thanks to withholding their content from Netflix, my children have never, and will never, view a Disney movie. That means they will never pester me for Mickey Mouse dolls and all that crap. They will never demand to go to Disney World; they don't know it exists. And we all know that merchandising dwarfs box office revenue, so that's a giant revenue stream to them from my pocket that will not materialize. As a budget-minded father, I am grateful for that.
So not brainwashing my kids to want their crap is one positive externality of the MPAA picking up their ball and going home. Another is the quality foreign films, indy movies, and documentaries I have watched instead. I've discovered Korean, Indian, Russian, and other movies whose stories and production values equal or exceed Hollywood's. With those and the indies and documentaries I realize I am more entertained but also better informed now that the MPAA has pushed me outside the circle of their influence.
Lastly, all Slashdotters know and have said for more than a decade that if Big Content makes it too difficult for customers to pay for their product at an affordable price, then they will simply get it for free online. A friend recently lent me an external 500GB harddrive ($50) with more movies on it than you can shake a stick at. I know others exchange files in myriad other ways. And as hard as Big Content tries, that genie is out of the bottle and will never, never go back.
In the end, the only party that loses is Big Content. The rest of us gain in nearly every way.
Every government, including the American one, has limited resources. Every government, especially the American one, has bureaucratic constraints. Think of the slowest, dumbest Fortune 500 company you can, and then think of the slowest, dumbest PHB within that corporation, and then multiply that by 1000. That's the caliber of people who work for governments. It's the nature of the beast: create a system where ass-kissing, not merit, determine career progress, and then divorce that entirely from a mitigating profit motive, and you have government.
These are the people who are buying the services/products of these surveillance companies. These are the people who don't read the user manuals of the products/services that these companies sell. These are the people who boss around the "technical" staff who are tasked with reading the user manuals but who frankly don't get paid enough to put up with this shit.
That is the reality of the surveillance net.
Now, consider that these days you, me, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there has access to virtually the same tech the governments and their corporate enablers do. Consider that even the cost factor for said tech is racing to zero. That is, the governments and companies are not using some secretly acquired alien technology that uses physics that the rest of the world doesn't grasp yet. You and I can understand the same physical laws and technology that the governments and the corporations in their employ do. And we do.
So why don't we turn it all around and crowd-source surveillance of them? Why not minutely track the exact location of every Congressman sneaking off to boink a 20 year old intern? Why not put Jamie Dimon's cell phone conversations on a streaming service, available to anyone in the world to listen to? Why not put them under the same microscope that they want to put us under?
After all, if the technological balance of power is at or near parity, then the deciding factor becomes how many people can you get to make sense of the data; and there are vastly more of us than there are of them to do that.
Let's once and for all shatter this venomous illusion of authority and competence that governments and corporations have cultivated and exploited for millenia. Let's excise the incalculable damage they have done to human advancement and win a better world for ourselves.
I for one am so very tired of the stunted one they have forced on us.
People on/. have been complaining about this for *years*. Back in the day some/.-ers complained about Jon Katz. Then others complained about anything Stallman related. Still others complained about anything remotely redolent of Microsoft astroturfing.
The years have rolled on, and the biases editors and community members are accused of have changed too, but you know what? I can still read the comments on any given article here and expect to find insightful information from at least 1-2 actual experts modded high. So, if I want to read about the latest Mars mission, I'm 80% sure to see a comment about it from someone who works *on that actual mission*. Where else can you find that? Digg? I don't think so.
Knock/. if you will. It's still better than anything else out there. I miss CmdrTaco and Hemos and CowboyNeal and all the others; when CmdrTaco left I was truly sad like a member of my family had died. But the ethos they created lives on, and I hope it never dies.
We all know the 1% (or "powers that be," if you prefer) are tracking us now and will continue to expand the scope and depth of how they track us.
But we in the 99% (or "little people/hoi poloi/peasants," if you prefer) have access to most of the same technology at an affordable price point. There is no technical reason we cannot track them as much or more than they can us, especially if we use our vastly superior numbers to crowd-source the most difficult part of tracking: making sense of the deluge of data.
If we repeat what we did with searching for Steve Fossett's plane using Google Earth crossed with FoldIt and SETI@home we can develop a real-time picture of exactly what the 1% are doing, where, and when. That's a tremendous amount of intelligence we can leverage in many ways.
So, for example, if we map radio transponders used by our friendly neighborhood shock troo, er, police then we can equal the spying they're already doing on peaceful protesters (Google "NYPD spying protest groups." What would they do if we knew exactly where they keep their LRAD cannons and pepper spray depots and stage sit-ins at the entrances before they can deploy? What if every single Lt. John Pike gets followed home by the protesters who surround his home, quietly sitting and linking arms?
Or, more to the point, what if we made sure that the puppet masters never have a moment's peace and that they know we all know them exactly for the scum they are?
That, I believe, is what needs to happen next to break the back of this beast.
The thing about a real panopticon is that every node can see every other node.
Somebody needs to tag all the cop, govt, and elected officials' cars and keep a public database of their movements so that the citizenry can keep exact track of what they're doing. Their home addresses, where their kids go to school, medical records, and bank account information should also be posted.
Let's show them where this road they're on ultimately leads.
Being a programmer was cool back during the Dot-Com days too. Everyone assumed you were about to become another instant millionaire. Then Buy.com, I believe it was, imploded and set off the chain reaction that left a lot of those "cool" programmers unemployed and decidedly uncool for a long time afterward. The Pollyanna lesson I would usually leap to draw from that is to do what you love no matter how "cool" others think it is.
But now watching the 1% the obvious answer in America is, duh, to remember to bribe as many Congressmen as you can while the going is good to make sure you get bailed out when the bubble bursts so you can immediately reinflate the bubble using Chinese money and the sweet, sweet vapor given off by the combustion of the hopes and dreams of millions of future Americans and a country that might have been all the while getting even more fabulously rich than before. Rinse, repeat.
They may bottle it up for now (though I doubt they'll succeed at that), but the root causes of OWS and the Tea Party remain and they will build to the point where the 1% are publicly beheaded, mark my words.
The federal government has shown it cannot manage hurricane relief, which is something that was forecast and for which they supposedly train constantly. How will they fare when the country explodes along every fault line at once? Hint: the 1% will be lynched.
It makes me think about recent events with the Arab Spring's use of technology, Anonymous, and Wikileaks. Are the little people (us) in essence weaponizing the internet against the powers-that-be? Ad-hoc mesh networks might be a fall-back when the powers-that-be realize that and try to switch it off.
But especially with regard to Wikileaks. They say they've been stymied by the financial blockade of the big banks. So I wonder if there is any work being done on how to route around the financial blockade, since it seems to be the only thing that has remotely stopped the efforts of the little people against the powers-that-be.
The unlimited power of corporations and the ultra-wealthy to game the system has brought everything to the verge of collapse. If you really want to revive the country you have to break their stranglehold on wealth and power.
Corporations must lose their status as "artificial persons," which gives them all of the rights of natural persons with none of the responsibilities. The ultra-wealthy must not be entrenched aristocracies nor 100% peopled by sociopaths and they cannot be insulated or excused from their own misdeeds, shortcomings, failures, and crimes. If you crash the economy you need to instantly lose everything you have and face prison for the rest of your life, if not a firing squad.
The next step after that is to fire every single person in our current government from the President, Congress, and SCOTUS down to the state houses and the utterly corrupt city councilmembers. We hold a constitutional convention, and apply the empirical data from the past 200+ years of what works and what doesn't to design a better document that will carry us through the next 200 years. National transportation infrastructure and defense work. Professional politicians don't. Supporting entrepreneurship and innovation work. Locking in the status quo doesn't. Companies that produce real value work. Goldman Sachs and its ilk don't.
have no expectation of privacy and can be tracked at will by the police, do police therefore have no expectation of privacy and can be tracked at will by citizens? Sounds like a great argument. Think I'll run out, buy a bunch of these trackers, and stick them to the undercarriages of cop cars and then set up a web site that reports the position of every cop car in the city at all times in case you, um, need to call the cops.
Either that must be the case, or cops must get a warrant to do this.
If neither is the case, then the only option left to Americans is to fire every single person in every level of government with extreme prejudice, convene a constitutional convention, and start all over again from scratch.
Our current problems arise from the failure of checks and balances. The first American Constitution, the one we are suffering under now, provides checks & balances between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches as though they are the only repositories of power in society. Corporations & the wealthy, though, have been exceptionally successful in undermining the entire system such that it always works in their interests alone, no matter who occupies the positions within it.
We need a second American Constitution that breaks that cycle. Corporations must be deprived of "artificial personhood." They cannot have the same rights as a natural person. Furthermore, entrenched wealth and power must be uprooted. Want to be Steve Jobs, becoming a billionaire by creating a lot of value for the world? Great, more power to you! But a worthless Wall Street banker or trustfund baby, sitting around gaming the system and skimming off the real economy? Nope, go straight to jail, do not pass Go.
We need a system that rewards hard work, creativity, and innovation and does everything it can to support and encourage citizens in those endeavors.
in finding quality information than it used to be. Too many aggregator and link farms returned in the results. Too many paywalled sites. They need a non-commercial flag so you can weed out all that crap; sometimes you want neutral, authoritative information instead of the latest diet craze or gadget BS.
As an example, my family recently started experiencing respiratory distress and we suspected toxic mold because of the exceptionally damp, warm summer we had. Yet after *30* pages of search results in Google it is *impossible* to find any information of any kind that isn't trying to sell you a kit.
Miniaturization is not the big challenge with concepts like these, battery life is. Close behind battery life comes interface: how do you get information into and out of the darn thing? How much fun would it be to try to type an email on a watch using one hand?
Last but not least you have to think through the use-cases very thoroughly. Look at the iPad. Pretty, cool to have. Not terribly useful. Where do you have time to sit down and use it? If you live in Chicago, New York, or some other place that has public transportation you might get lucky enough to get a seat so you can type. But if you have to stand in rush hour traffic you need one hand to hold on to something, which means you need the other hand to hold the device and a third hand to type/interact with the screen. If you are at home or work and want to get real work done, you're gonna want to be able to touch type and you can't do that with a tablet. So again, not terribly useful.
In the same vein, why would you have a watch like this instead of a smartphone? What use-case would trump the use-case for a phone? Because it's attached to your wrist and you're never going to accidentally leave it at home? Because you can take it into the shower with you?
The time is very near when we shall have to dust this one off and use it for its original purpose: to check the physical power of the government.
Yes, a couple guys with hunting rifles are not going to seriously challenge a military with tanks and jets. But there are millions and millions of those guys, and they all know how to shoot well enough to bring down even SEAL Team 6. Also, tanks and jets are pretty useful when you want to completely, indiscriminately flatten someone else's cities, but they're not so terribly useful when you try to use them against your own; the guys with the guns are mixed in with non-combatants and the collateral damage of dropping napalm on Hackensack would be unacceptably high.
This future is coming to an America near you if the 1% don't wake the hell up right now and chart a radically better course.
We are in one of those historical moments when everything is gathering to a point of profound dislocation. The powers that be are unwilling to change because the status quo benefits them. But somewhere deep inside they sense that the whole thing is starting to get away from them, so they rush to grab as much as they can as fast as they can before the hammer falls, in much the same way that looters smash & grab whatever they can carry. And while the powers that be rush to steal anything that's not nailed down, they close ranks and tighten the screws on the people hoping to contain the building pressure for a little while longer so they can steal just a few trillion more.
Except, all of this intensifies the inevitable explosion. Where can these thieves go to escape the wrath of the American people? Switzerland? China? The moon? Where do they think they can go to find sanctuary when the rest of the world hates them more than we do, and when there is no place on Earth that the American people cannot reduce to smoldering rubble if they so choose, if any place should be so foolish as to give them shelter?
I for one will not allow my children to grow up in this Orwellian dystopia they are erecting. I would prefer to vote them out or even hold a second Constitutional Convention to restructure them out of existence, but if those avenues are shut off and we the People have no other recourse, then I will take up arms.
I was born in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and that is where I will die, no matter the cost.
Their linux laptops are awesome--everything works out of the box. Lincoln Durey really knows his stuff, too, so if you ever run into even esoteric issues with aftermarket additions he's typically able to work it out in no more than a day and a half, even if he's never seen or heard of the issue before. I've gotten two thinkpad convertible tablets (x41 and x200) from Emperor and they work flawlessly.
Add this to the list of problems with the 1% that need to be corrected. The entire issue of intellectual property needs to be overhauled in the Constitution 2.0.
Blackberries and the like are the bane of productive activity. Every meeting takes 5x as long and is 1/5 as effective because the idiots are tapping away on their phones instead of paying attention and contributing to the discussion; you wind up repeating everything multiple times and it still doesn't sink in because their eyes are glazed while thinking about how their friend just tweeted "OMG that hot guy totally checked me out."
There are a couple instances when it is useful to whip out your phone, like when you're lost and need directions or you're waiting for a bus and want to kill time. Or when you want to restart a server remotely. But those times are far outweighed by the inappropriate times.
I can't imagine living under the status quo for another 35 years, much less 110. This business of semi-feudalistic society with wage serfdom and self-styled lords & ladies has gotta change. Can you really see yourself working in the cube farm for another 120-30 years for PHB's who know nothing about what you do and whose only skill is counting their stock options? That's a Dantean fate if ever there was one.
Now, a realm of hackerspaces, DIY innovation, unlimited creativity, Maker Faire style stuff I can get behind. If we had the kind of society were folks could choose that and not starve, lose healthcare, or wind up homeless, that would be worth living in and for.
I have a different method for detecting psychopathy. It has predictive power.
Those who work for the government, big banks, big oil, and the other oligarchs are psychopaths. As a bonus, they're easy to find. So let's round them up and commit them so they can get the treatment they need.
Slashdot Mirror
The flight toward other entertainment channels is already in full swing. TV ownership is declining. People are dropping cable. More males play videogames than watch sports now. The baby boomers, the quintessential TV generation, have begun going on to their reward. Even basic media consumption habits (time-shifting, etc) have changed for good. TV still has more time left than newspapers do, but not much.
So turning down the volume of commercials now is a bit like repainting the ballroom after the ship has already hit the iceberg.
Montana is a big state. The nearest lab is often 2.5 hours drive away. Times 2 that is 5 hours. Times $10/hr you're talking $50 plus gas. To put that in New York State terms, it's like driving from Staten Island to Albany and back to deliver a vial of water.
My sister owns a water quality lab in Montana. Every town is required to test their water supply regularly for biological and chemical contaminants and for years they have submitted their samples via regular mail to labs like my sister's for testing. Except that the EPA has shortened the window for getting your samples in to a lab from 48 hours to 30 hours, which the Post Office cannot manage with current levels of service. UPS and FedEx don't serve many rural areas, so there is no way for many towns to test their water any more. Add in large, imminent cutbacks at the USPS, and you have a looming public health crisis as it is.
Now with the advent of fracking in the state there is a real possibility thousands of people will be poisoned by ground water contamination, but thanks to the breakdown in the testing it won't be discovered until it's far too late.
Winning more natural gas is a plus for energy independence, but if we're doing that at the cost of putting benzene into our drinking water then perhaps we need to look at other ways to generate power.
An increasing number of households, smart phones, and even newer model cars have WiFi transmission capabilities, so why can't we create ad-hoc mesh networks as a backup to the internet the government can control via backbones? As long as houses, phones, and cars have power there will always be a free internet. Confiscating all those is logistically impossible.
Seems to me, that with the un-constitutional reactionary laws the 1% is trying to push through right now that we need to make this happen swiftly.
by messing with Netflix. Thanks to withholding their content from Netflix, my children have never, and will never, view a Disney movie. That means they will never pester me for Mickey Mouse dolls and all that crap. They will never demand to go to Disney World; they don't know it exists. And we all know that merchandising dwarfs box office revenue, so that's a giant revenue stream to them from my pocket that will not materialize. As a budget-minded father, I am grateful for that.
So not brainwashing my kids to want their crap is one positive externality of the MPAA picking up their ball and going home. Another is the quality foreign films, indy movies, and documentaries I have watched instead. I've discovered Korean, Indian, Russian, and other movies whose stories and production values equal or exceed Hollywood's. With those and the indies and documentaries I realize I am more entertained but also better informed now that the MPAA has pushed me outside the circle of their influence.
Lastly, all Slashdotters know and have said for more than a decade that if Big Content makes it too difficult for customers to pay for their product at an affordable price, then they will simply get it for free online. A friend recently lent me an external 500GB harddrive ($50) with more movies on it than you can shake a stick at. I know others exchange files in myriad other ways. And as hard as Big Content tries, that genie is out of the bottle and will never, never go back.
In the end, the only party that loses is Big Content. The rest of us gain in nearly every way.
Every government, including the American one, has limited resources. Every government, especially the American one, has bureaucratic constraints. Think of the slowest, dumbest Fortune 500 company you can, and then think of the slowest, dumbest PHB within that corporation, and then multiply that by 1000. That's the caliber of people who work for governments. It's the nature of the beast: create a system where ass-kissing, not merit, determine career progress, and then divorce that entirely from a mitigating profit motive, and you have government.
These are the people who are buying the services/products of these surveillance companies. These are the people who don't read the user manuals of the products/services that these companies sell. These are the people who boss around the "technical" staff who are tasked with reading the user manuals but who frankly don't get paid enough to put up with this shit.
That is the reality of the surveillance net.
Now, consider that these days you, me, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry out there has access to virtually the same tech the governments and their corporate enablers do. Consider that even the cost factor for said tech is racing to zero. That is, the governments and companies are not using some secretly acquired alien technology that uses physics that the rest of the world doesn't grasp yet. You and I can understand the same physical laws and technology that the governments and the corporations in their employ do. And we do.
So why don't we turn it all around and crowd-source surveillance of them? Why not minutely track the exact location of every Congressman sneaking off to boink a 20 year old intern? Why not put Jamie Dimon's cell phone conversations on a streaming service, available to anyone in the world to listen to? Why not put them under the same microscope that they want to put us under?
After all, if the technological balance of power is at or near parity, then the deciding factor becomes how many people can you get to make sense of the data; and there are vastly more of us than there are of them to do that.
Let's once and for all shatter this venomous illusion of authority and competence that governments and corporations have cultivated and exploited for millenia. Let's excise the incalculable damage they have done to human advancement and win a better world for ourselves.
I for one am so very tired of the stunted one they have forced on us.
People on /. have been complaining about this for *years*. Back in the day some /.-ers complained about Jon Katz. Then others complained about anything Stallman related. Still others complained about anything remotely redolent of Microsoft astroturfing.
The years have rolled on, and the biases editors and community members are accused of have changed too, but you know what? I can still read the comments on any given article here and expect to find insightful information from at least 1-2 actual experts modded high. So, if I want to read about the latest Mars mission, I'm 80% sure to see a comment about it from someone who works *on that actual mission*. Where else can you find that? Digg? I don't think so.
Knock /. if you will. It's still better than anything else out there. I miss CmdrTaco and Hemos and CowboyNeal and all the others; when CmdrTaco left I was truly sad like a member of my family had died. But the ethos they created lives on, and I hope it never dies.
We all know the 1% (or "powers that be," if you prefer) are tracking us now and will continue to expand the scope and depth of how they track us.
But we in the 99% (or "little people/hoi poloi/peasants," if you prefer) have access to most of the same technology at an affordable price point. There is no technical reason we cannot track them as much or more than they can us, especially if we use our vastly superior numbers to crowd-source the most difficult part of tracking: making sense of the deluge of data.
If we repeat what we did with searching for Steve Fossett's plane using Google Earth crossed with FoldIt and SETI@home we can develop a real-time picture of exactly what the 1% are doing, where, and when. That's a tremendous amount of intelligence we can leverage in many ways.
So, for example, if we map radio transponders used by our friendly neighborhood shock troo, er, police then we can equal the spying they're already doing on peaceful protesters (Google "NYPD spying protest groups." What would they do if we knew exactly where they keep their LRAD cannons and pepper spray depots and stage sit-ins at the entrances before they can deploy? What if every single Lt. John Pike gets followed home by the protesters who surround his home, quietly sitting and linking arms?
Or, more to the point, what if we made sure that the puppet masters never have a moment's peace and that they know we all know them exactly for the scum they are?
That, I believe, is what needs to happen next to break the back of this beast.
The thing about a real panopticon is that every node can see every other node.
Somebody needs to tag all the cop, govt, and elected officials' cars and keep a public database of their movements so that the citizenry can keep exact track of what they're doing. Their home addresses, where their kids go to school, medical records, and bank account information should also be posted.
Let's show them where this road they're on ultimately leads.
Being a programmer was cool back during the Dot-Com days too. Everyone assumed you were about to become another instant millionaire. Then Buy.com, I believe it was, imploded and set off the chain reaction that left a lot of those "cool" programmers unemployed and decidedly uncool for a long time afterward. The Pollyanna lesson I would usually leap to draw from that is to do what you love no matter how "cool" others think it is.
But now watching the 1% the obvious answer in America is, duh, to remember to bribe as many Congressmen as you can while the going is good to make sure you get bailed out when the bubble bursts so you can immediately reinflate the bubble using Chinese money and the sweet, sweet vapor given off by the combustion of the hopes and dreams of millions of future Americans and a country that might have been all the while getting even more fabulously rich than before. Rinse, repeat.
are the last non-violent warning the 1% will get.
They may bottle it up for now (though I doubt they'll succeed at that), but the root causes of OWS and the Tea Party remain and they will build to the point where the 1% are publicly beheaded, mark my words.
The federal government has shown it cannot manage hurricane relief, which is something that was forecast and for which they supposedly train constantly. How will they fare when the country explodes along every fault line at once? Hint: the 1% will be lynched.
It makes me think about recent events with the Arab Spring's use of technology, Anonymous, and Wikileaks. Are the little people (us) in essence weaponizing the internet against the powers-that-be? Ad-hoc mesh networks might be a fall-back when the powers-that-be realize that and try to switch it off.
But especially with regard to Wikileaks. They say they've been stymied by the financial blockade of the big banks. So I wonder if there is any work being done on how to route around the financial blockade, since it seems to be the only thing that has remotely stopped the efforts of the little people against the powers-that-be.
The unlimited power of corporations and the ultra-wealthy to game the system has brought everything to the verge of collapse. If you really want to revive the country you have to break their stranglehold on wealth and power.
Corporations must lose their status as "artificial persons," which gives them all of the rights of natural persons with none of the responsibilities. The ultra-wealthy must not be entrenched aristocracies nor 100% peopled by sociopaths and they cannot be insulated or excused from their own misdeeds, shortcomings, failures, and crimes. If you crash the economy you need to instantly lose everything you have and face prison for the rest of your life, if not a firing squad.
The next step after that is to fire every single person in our current government from the President, Congress, and SCOTUS down to the state houses and the utterly corrupt city councilmembers. We hold a constitutional convention, and apply the empirical data from the past 200+ years of what works and what doesn't to design a better document that will carry us through the next 200 years. National transportation infrastructure and defense work. Professional politicians don't. Supporting entrepreneurship and innovation work. Locking in the status quo doesn't. Companies that produce real value work. Goldman Sachs and its ilk don't.
have no expectation of privacy and can be tracked at will by the police, do police therefore have no expectation of privacy and can be tracked at will by citizens? Sounds like a great argument. Think I'll run out, buy a bunch of these trackers, and stick them to the undercarriages of cop cars and then set up a web site that reports the position of every cop car in the city at all times in case you, um, need to call the cops.
Either that must be the case, or cops must get a warrant to do this.
If neither is the case, then the only option left to Americans is to fire every single person in every level of government with extreme prejudice, convene a constitutional convention, and start all over again from scratch.
Our current problems arise from the failure of checks and balances. The first American Constitution, the one we are suffering under now, provides checks & balances between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches as though they are the only repositories of power in society. Corporations & the wealthy, though, have been exceptionally successful in undermining the entire system such that it always works in their interests alone, no matter who occupies the positions within it.
We need a second American Constitution that breaks that cycle. Corporations must be deprived of "artificial personhood." They cannot have the same rights as a natural person. Furthermore, entrenched wealth and power must be uprooted. Want to be Steve Jobs, becoming a billionaire by creating a lot of value for the world? Great, more power to you! But a worthless Wall Street banker or trustfund baby, sitting around gaming the system and skimming off the real economy? Nope, go straight to jail, do not pass Go.
We need a system that rewards hard work, creativity, and innovation and does everything it can to support and encourage citizens in those endeavors.
in finding quality information than it used to be. Too many aggregator and link farms returned in the results. Too many paywalled sites. They need a non-commercial flag so you can weed out all that crap; sometimes you want neutral, authoritative information instead of the latest diet craze or gadget BS.
As an example, my family recently started experiencing respiratory distress and we suspected toxic mold because of the exceptionally damp, warm summer we had. Yet after *30* pages of search results in Google it is *impossible* to find any information of any kind that isn't trying to sell you a kit.
Miniaturization is not the big challenge with concepts like these, battery life is. Close behind battery life comes interface: how do you get information into and out of the darn thing? How much fun would it be to try to type an email on a watch using one hand?
Last but not least you have to think through the use-cases very thoroughly. Look at the iPad. Pretty, cool to have. Not terribly useful. Where do you have time to sit down and use it? If you live in Chicago, New York, or some other place that has public transportation you might get lucky enough to get a seat so you can type. But if you have to stand in rush hour traffic you need one hand to hold on to something, which means you need the other hand to hold the device and a third hand to type/interact with the screen. If you are at home or work and want to get real work done, you're gonna want to be able to touch type and you can't do that with a tablet. So again, not terribly useful.
In the same vein, why would you have a watch like this instead of a smartphone? What use-case would trump the use-case for a phone? Because it's attached to your wrist and you're never going to accidentally leave it at home? Because you can take it into the shower with you?
The time is very near when we shall have to dust this one off and use it for its original purpose: to check the physical power of the government.
Yes, a couple guys with hunting rifles are not going to seriously challenge a military with tanks and jets. But there are millions and millions of those guys, and they all know how to shoot well enough to bring down even SEAL Team 6. Also, tanks and jets are pretty useful when you want to completely, indiscriminately flatten someone else's cities, but they're not so terribly useful when you try to use them against your own; the guys with the guns are mixed in with non-combatants and the collateral damage of dropping napalm on Hackensack would be unacceptably high.
This future is coming to an America near you if the 1% don't wake the hell up right now and chart a radically better course.
Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, my ass.
We are in one of those historical moments when everything is gathering to a point of profound dislocation. The powers that be are unwilling to change because the status quo benefits them. But somewhere deep inside they sense that the whole thing is starting to get away from them, so they rush to grab as much as they can as fast as they can before the hammer falls, in much the same way that looters smash & grab whatever they can carry. And while the powers that be rush to steal anything that's not nailed down, they close ranks and tighten the screws on the people hoping to contain the building pressure for a little while longer so they can steal just a few trillion more.
Except, all of this intensifies the inevitable explosion. Where can these thieves go to escape the wrath of the American people? Switzerland? China? The moon? Where do they think they can go to find sanctuary when the rest of the world hates them more than we do, and when there is no place on Earth that the American people cannot reduce to smoldering rubble if they so choose, if any place should be so foolish as to give them shelter?
I for one will not allow my children to grow up in this Orwellian dystopia they are erecting. I would prefer to vote them out or even hold a second Constitutional Convention to restructure them out of existence, but if those avenues are shut off and we the People have no other recourse, then I will take up arms.
I was born in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, and that is where I will die, no matter the cost.
Their linux laptops are awesome--everything works out of the box. Lincoln Durey really knows his stuff, too, so if you ever run into even esoteric issues with aftermarket additions he's typically able to work it out in no more than a day and a half, even if he's never seen or heard of the issue before. I've gotten two thinkpad convertible tablets (x41 and x200) from Emperor and they work flawlessly.
Add this to the list of problems with the 1% that need to be corrected. The entire issue of intellectual property needs to be overhauled in the Constitution 2.0.
Blackberries and the like are the bane of productive activity. Every meeting takes 5x as long and is 1/5 as effective because the idiots are tapping away on their phones instead of paying attention and contributing to the discussion; you wind up repeating everything multiple times and it still doesn't sink in because their eyes are glazed while thinking about how their friend just tweeted "OMG that hot guy totally checked me out."
There are a couple instances when it is useful to whip out your phone, like when you're lost and need directions or you're waiting for a bus and want to kill time. Or when you want to restart a server remotely. But those times are far outweighed by the inappropriate times.
Get one that can do the same using body fat, and you're on.
I can't imagine living under the status quo for another 35 years, much less 110. This business of semi-feudalistic society with wage serfdom and self-styled lords & ladies has gotta change. Can you really see yourself working in the cube farm for another 120-30 years for PHB's who know nothing about what you do and whose only skill is counting their stock options? That's a Dantean fate if ever there was one.
Now, a realm of hackerspaces, DIY innovation, unlimited creativity, Maker Faire style stuff I can get behind. If we had the kind of society were folks could choose that and not starve, lose healthcare, or wind up homeless, that would be worth living in and for.
I have a different method for detecting psychopathy. It has predictive power.
Those who work for the government, big banks, big oil, and the other oligarchs are psychopaths. As a bonus, they're easy to find. So let's round them up and commit them so they can get the treatment they need.