Well, it could be that the thing you are escaping from is not social interaction, per se, but social interaction in a particular context. On the internet gaming social interaction, no one knows you're a dog. In real-world social internaction, they know it all too well.
We do "other things" for relaxation. Part of relaxation may include some type of "escape", the "from what" part of that will vary from person to person, but it's generally "whatever bullshit I have to deal with all the time and can't stand anymore".
But note that I said "other things". Not "play video games", not anything at all specific, but "other things". Each person has their own "other thing" they like to do for fun. Why do some of us pick video games, and not something else? Probably has to do with the fact that we like video games. What's likeable about video games is a broad enough topic that it's safe to say that it encompasses, but also goes beyond, "escaping" from [whatever].
Add in the taxes that go to pay for the construction and maintenance of roads, and public transportation via light rail is not so expensive anymore. Roads and automobiles have indeed opened the countryside as a viable living space, but it's not sustainable and as soon as cheap oil runs out, the trend toward consolidated population centers is going to reverse (once the massive die-off subsides, assuming civil order re-emerges out of the chaos that event will cause). It was a good idea to get out of the city at the time, when cities were crowded, filthy, polluted, and crime-ridden, but as it turns out the massive suburban sprawl that the automobile has created will not last much beyond a century.
In an era where the cost per gigabyte of storage is well under a dollar, he's charging a dollar for a single pixel's worth of data, no wonder he made a million. The only mystery is why were people so eager to pay such an exhorbitant price for hosting.
Hell, I think BillG and/or Microsoft themselves have advocated not using IE, and specifically recommended Firefox for more secure web browsing on a Windows PC. Wasn't there some big hoopla over this in the past year?
So? Fuck Dell. They're not the only game in town. You want a godly gamebox? Build it, it's not like it's hard. You'll learn a lot about the specifics of *your* system, and when you're done it'll be just what you want, and cost less too.
I submit that if the DMCA is a valid law, then the inverse, (eg, lack of DRM protections on media) should constitute free license to copy and distribute the content in any way, shape, or form desired.
Coming up with a good name is really damn hard, just ask the Firefox people. Common, easy to understand words such as "Word" or "Illustrator" are already taken, and you're asking for a lawsuit if you try to use them.
You can try being clever, like the Lindows and KIllustrator people did, and you can still get sued. You can try to come up with nonsense names or geeky in-jokes, but then normal people are going to be like "WTF?" and your software will never penetrate the market.
You can concatenate corporate-sounding prefixes, roots, and suffixes, and sound like a buzzword hype drone, er I mean Buzzhypdro(TM) Generator, which will get converted into an acronym, which will be trademarked by some obscure company in a completely different industry who will try to sue you even though they're in a completely different industry.
And then when your acronym becomes accepted it'll get co-opted by commercial software projects that will treat yours like it's an extensible, embraceable standard, and then they'll sue you to relinquish your own name so they can use it in their marketing literature.
Someone should start a "Voldemort" project for coming up with pseudo-random placeholder names for "projects that must not be named".
Encourage a relaxed work atmosphere. Allow people to feel free to be themselves and not have to put on an act of phony ass-kissing professionalism.
Encourage people to speak their minds and to disagree, but professionally.
Weed out employees who can't hack it. Cut down on the support nightmares we all dread.
Reward honesty by not punishing mistakes, so long as: (1) corrective action is taken to prevent recurrence; (2) the mistake did not cause a severe impact in the company's bottom line.
Eliminate bullshit like software licensing, tracking and auditing. Running everything in an IP-unencumbered fashion to the greatest extent possible will make everyone happier.
Pay well, rewarding productivity and innovation. If I invent, suggest, or implement a process that saves the company money, or that brings in more revenue, pay me a bonus in recognition, or a comission on the savings or revenue increase. If you go with the commission, allow it to remain in place as long as the practice is in place, for as long as I remain with the company. If I have to have a non-compete clause, have it last until the non-compete expires.
Pay me for on-call time. 1/4 time for merely being on call, 2x time if I get called in for off hours work.
If I'm on salary, don't require that I work 40 hours a week, as long as I'm getting my assignments done and being productive for the company (ie, returning more value than I cost the company).
No dress codes that discriminate against culture -- and recognize contemporary subcultures, not just traditional national, ethnic, or religious subcultures. Allow people to express themselves through their personal appearance. Don't punish people for wanting to look different or unusual.
Nobody imagined that that son of a bitch Bush II and his minions would have spent the intervening years abusing/hiding behind it while turning the U.S. into a police state, and that they'd not want to pare down any of the civil-liberties-stomping aspects.
I imagined it, and a lot of other people did as well. We were quashed right out of public discourse, the corporate controlled mass media completely suppressed all dissent until sometime around mid 2004.
They all die is a true statement. There is no 100% reliable manufacturer whose drives never fail. That still leaves the door open for some being better than others. There are occasional bad batches, bad product lines, such as the "Death Star" line that are aberrantly unreliable, and yes, Maxtor seems to have a reputation that even it's 1-year warranty may be more boast than bankable. But all you can say about that is "avoid the bad" -- if you interpret that as "if you get the good, there's no need to worry about RAID or backups" you're inviting disaster.
All hard drives die. Do you think there's one magic brand that never breaks? They all do.
There might be varying levels of quality among specific brands and models, but data loss is inevitable if your only line of defense is faith in your bullet proof manufacturer who has never failed on you before. Everyone has one, and every one's is different. Some people have an incredible string of luck with Seagate, others with WD, etc. They all die. If you don't have a robust backup plan that you test regularly, you're going to get fucked at some point. If you've worked with computers long enough, you learn this and understand it.
I look at a hard drive like most people look at a roll of toilet paper. I use it, it serves its purpose, it gets discarded. The data on it, however, is nearly sacred, and I take every precaution I can afford to protect mine. If I lose data, then I feel like I lost a pet. But I don't have any special attachment to my hard drives whatsoever.
Having faith in a hard drive vendor is like a quaint superstition from the time when people were so poor that they might only have a single hard drive containing all the data they've ever generated in their entire lifetime.
If that's the case, why is it that shitty movies and music that sucks are really easy to find for download, whereas classic films and good music are much more difficult to obtain?
That's a good question. My theory is that p2p always will favor the new stuff, pretty much regardless of quality. People want to know if what's new is worth going to a theater to see, worth buying on DVD, or worth skipping. The classics, people have less of a need to download because they've already seen it and know what it is, and in a lot of cases already own it on VHS or DVD, and thus have less of a need to download it. The good new stuff will be more desirable than the shitty new stuff, though. But if they make it all shitty enough that no one wants to look at it, even just to see if it's worth paying to see, then they'll have effectively ended piracy. Of course, this type of cure is the type that kills the disease by killing the patient, but if you're singlemindedly focused on ending illegal copying, you probably don't care.
Keep on making shitty movies and music that suck ass, and you'll kill all motivation to illegally copy them. This is the real solution, and the MP/RI-AA is a lot closer to it than they realize.
No, literally. My eyes and ears are the analog hole. I have wetware exploits out the wazoo, and a damn near photogrpahic memory (albeit with some lossy codecs). The only way these copyright cartels are going to be able to legislate these holes closed will be to sew my eyes shut and fill my ears with cement. They should probably cut my fingers off and cut my tongue out while they're at it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it could be that the thing you are escaping from is not social interaction, per se, but social interaction in a particular context. On the internet gaming social interaction, no one knows you're a dog. In real-world social internaction, they know it all too well.
I think you're missing the point.
We do "other things" for relaxation. Part of relaxation may include some type of "escape", the "from what" part of that will vary from person to person, but it's generally "whatever bullshit I have to deal with all the time and can't stand anymore".
But note that I said "other things". Not "play video games", not anything at all specific, but "other things". Each person has their own "other thing" they like to do for fun. Why do some of us pick video games, and not something else? Probably has to do with the fact that we like video games. What's likeable about video games is a broad enough topic that it's safe to say that it encompasses, but also goes beyond, "escaping" from [whatever].
Add in the taxes that go to pay for the construction and maintenance of roads, and public transportation via light rail is not so expensive anymore. Roads and automobiles have indeed opened the countryside as a viable living space, but it's not sustainable and as soon as cheap oil runs out, the trend toward consolidated population centers is going to reverse (once the massive die-off subsides, assuming civil order re-emerges out of the chaos that event will cause). It was a good idea to get out of the city at the time, when cities were crowded, filthy, polluted, and crime-ridden, but as it turns out the massive suburban sprawl that the automobile has created will not last much beyond a century.
In an era where the cost per gigabyte of storage is well under a dollar, he's charging a dollar for a single pixel's worth of data, no wonder he made a million. The only mystery is why were people so eager to pay such an exhorbitant price for hosting.
Hell, I think BillG and/or Microsoft themselves have advocated not using IE, and specifically recommended Firefox for more secure web browsing on a Windows PC. Wasn't there some big hoopla over this in the past year?
So? Fuck Dell. They're not the only game in town. You want a godly gamebox? Build it, it's not like it's hard. You'll learn a lot about the specifics of *your* system, and when you're done it'll be just what you want, and cost less too.
I submit that if the DMCA is a valid law, then the inverse, (eg, lack of DRM protections on media) should constitute free license to copy and distribute the content in any way, shape, or form desired.
The stock market game.
Coming up with a good name is really damn hard, just ask the Firefox people. Common, easy to understand words such as "Word" or "Illustrator" are already taken, and you're asking for a lawsuit if you try to use them.
You can try being clever, like the Lindows and KIllustrator people did, and you can still get sued. You can try to come up with nonsense names or geeky in-jokes, but then normal people are going to be like "WTF?" and your software will never penetrate the market.
You can concatenate corporate-sounding prefixes, roots, and suffixes, and sound like a buzzword hype drone, er I mean Buzzhypdro(TM) Generator, which will get converted into an acronym, which will be trademarked by some obscure company in a completely different industry who will try to sue you even though they're in a completely different industry.
And then when your acronym becomes accepted it'll get co-opted by commercial software projects that will treat yours like it's an extensible, embraceable standard, and then they'll sue you to relinquish your own name so they can use it in their marketing literature.
Someone should start a "Voldemort" project for coming up with pseudo-random placeholder names for "projects that must not be named".
I wrote about what would make a work environment fun, not what management will go for.
I bet Jack Thompson will reveal at the shareholder's meeting that that ultra-boring box stacking game that is designed not to influence kids in any way has a secret easter egg box cutter level, and then all hell will break loose in teh board room.
Nobody imagined that that son of a bitch Bush II and his minions would have spent the intervening years abusing/hiding behind it while turning the U.S. into a police state, and that they'd not want to pare down any of the civil-liberties-stomping aspects.
I imagined it, and a lot of other people did as well. We were quashed right out of public discourse, the corporate controlled mass media completely suppressed all dissent until sometime around mid 2004.
Uh, have you ever tried expatriating? It's very difficult, and takes a long time.
They all die is a true statement. There is no 100% reliable manufacturer whose drives never fail. That still leaves the door open for some being better than others. There are occasional bad batches, bad product lines, such as the "Death Star" line that are aberrantly unreliable, and yes, Maxtor seems to have a reputation that even it's 1-year warranty may be more boast than bankable. But all you can say about that is "avoid the bad" -- if you interpret that as "if you get the good, there's no need to worry about RAID or backups" you're inviting disaster.
All hard drives die. Do you think there's one magic brand that never breaks? They all do.
There might be varying levels of quality among specific brands and models, but data loss is inevitable if your only line of defense is faith in your bullet proof manufacturer who has never failed on you before. Everyone has one, and every one's is different. Some people have an incredible string of luck with Seagate, others with WD, etc. They all die. If you don't have a robust backup plan that you test regularly, you're going to get fucked at some point. If you've worked with computers long enough, you learn this and understand it.
I look at a hard drive like most people look at a roll of toilet paper. I use it, it serves its purpose, it gets discarded. The data on it, however, is nearly sacred, and I take every precaution I can afford to protect mine. If I lose data, then I feel like I lost a pet. But I don't have any special attachment to my hard drives whatsoever.
Having faith in a hard drive vendor is like a quaint superstition from the time when people were so poor that they might only have a single hard drive containing all the data they've ever generated in their entire lifetime.
That's nothing. I've seen a dupe of a story that was still on the front page.
If that's the case, why is it that shitty movies and music that sucks are really easy to find for download, whereas classic films and good music are much more difficult to obtain?
That's a good question. My theory is that p2p always will favor the new stuff, pretty much regardless of quality. People want to know if what's new is worth going to a theater to see, worth buying on DVD, or worth skipping. The classics, people have less of a need to download because they've already seen it and know what it is, and in a lot of cases already own it on VHS or DVD, and thus have less of a need to download it. The good new stuff will be more desirable than the shitty new stuff, though. But if they make it all shitty enough that no one wants to look at it, even just to see if it's worth paying to see, then they'll have effectively ended piracy. Of course, this type of cure is the type that kills the disease by killing the patient, but if you're singlemindedly focused on ending illegal copying, you probably don't care.
Keep on making shitty movies and music that suck ass, and you'll kill all motivation to illegally copy them. This is the real solution, and the MP/RI-AA is a lot closer to it than they realize.
No, literally. My eyes and ears are the analog hole. I have wetware exploits out the wazoo, and a damn near photogrpahic memory (albeit with some lossy codecs). The only way these copyright cartels are going to be able to legislate these holes closed will be to sew my eyes shut and fill my ears with cement. They should probably cut my fingers off and cut my tongue out while they're at it.
Are we going to stand for this? Are we?
Wait, we already do that.
Oh, I see you meant "the other side", not the bad guys.
Come on, wikipedians! I know we can put more errors into our articles than that! We just need to work harder!
Don't think of it as a battery, think of it as a built-in UPS.
pnemonic seems to be a cross between pneumatic and mnemnomic.
Fuckit, I'll just throw letters around, and let everyone else decide where they're supposed to go.
For my own password, I chose a pnemonic one
You mean, a password so sucky that you could REMEMBER it blows?