Out of 341 replies, only 6 slashdotters comment with something approximating, "I reject this study! The sample is too small and I think the science was bad."
Compare this to ANY other study posted here which makes claims having the audacity to criticize some accepted aspect of the scientific realm.
I'm by no means a religious person. . , come on people! Aren't you embarrassed? Skepticism my arse. Science doesn't need bias to protect it. Unlike religion, science is wonderful stuff; it won't vanish in a puff if nobody leaps to defend it with brute force and sheer ignorance.
I'm much the same way, as I suspect many here are. Knowledge is always power of some kind or other, and when it comes to consumer hardware, the advantages of Knowing are obvious.
When it comes to other items, however, like cars. . .
Oi.
It takes a while to build up a decent knowledge set, and some things blind-side you, especially when you share a vehicle with a girlfriend who just seems to have a knack for destroying stuff and making half-assed deals at the speed of light which require your signature and wallet on the turn of a dime. At certain points, the time and stress saved by paying what I called the "30% bullshit charge" is worth it.
I know several people who simply have no interest in learning computer skills and who knowingly pay a lot more for gear just so that they won't have to think about it. --I have one friend who made a noble effort one week to follow me through the build process of a new computer and have me explain it all to him as I did it. Either I'm a horrible teacher or some people just aren't well suited for absorbing certain types of knowledge. Despite numerous approaches, by the time we finished he still doesn't quite grasp the difference between chip memory and hard drive memory. I've followed my lady around trying to learn some sense of fashion so I won't dress like an idiot or have to get her to pick out stuff that looks good on me. There's an art to that which I sort of understand, but if I were to be quizzed on, I'd fail at miserably. Partly because I find after an hour of that I want to lie down on my back in the middle of the shoe section and throw a screaming tantrum just like the four year-old the next aisle over.
Who cares what price mechanics go on behind the label? The market is big enough to self-correct. This is one of those times and places where the religion of, "Competition" is entirely valid. --Like Newtonian physics, there is a scale at which that math works perfectly.
And so we have the marvel of comparison shopping. If the Business Depot is selling at more than what I can get elsewhere, then I won't buy it from them.
Incidentally, one intangible and hard-to-come-by substance which the Business Depot sells better than most is, 'Convenience'.
I've sometimes needed big portions of that stuff, and I've paid top dollar for it. The only computer items I ever buy at the Business Depot are during times of emergency, when I need something NOW. (I've often lived within a few blocks of a Business Depot). My biggest purchase like this was a laser printer; I was in the middle of some big project and my existing printer died. I might have even gotten a good deal, but it really didn't matter at the time. I had $500 and I needed to be printing documents before 1 PM. They came through. No internet company on the planet can do that.
When I haven't had that kind of need or financial luxury, --or as is most often the case, when I just feel the need to go hunting for the best deal, the Business Depot is the last place I'd ever shop. But that's their problem. I will respectfully allow them to price stuff however the heck they want. So long as I can get the same or a similar item somewhere else for a better price, then who really cares?
There is no doubt in my mind from reading your post that you're one of the people this article is talking about.
Well, actually I'm X-Gen. --That would be the perpetually cynical generation which spent its school years being grilled on just how screwed we are in ten different colorful ways by the "I Deserve" generation which came before and the "I Deserve generation which came after. If anybody has the right to pen an article like the one above, it's me. In fact, I suspect that it was written exactly by an X-Gen guy, and so I understand his motivation. But that still doesn't mean he's right.
Personal power doesn't stem from delusions or from huge, unstoppable population trends. Zombies one-on-one are relatively useless, but as a force, they tend to stumble toward their goal and there is little you can do to prevent them, agonizing as it might seem. But seriously. . ? What would you rather be? The guy with the golf club or. . , well, the guy with the golf club *and* the golf shoes?
So yeah, I recognize that for some reason, people who come from large population trends tend to be less aware somehow. I think this has to do with going through school so utterly surrounded by so many people that you naturally take on herd identity traits. --When I was in Jr. high school, half the class rooms were empty, I had two lockers just cuz' and everybody in the school knew my name. And I knew most of theirs. We were ALL individuals without having to work terribly hard for that status. In overly dense populations, systems with too many people, different forms of individual expression become adopted, and it seems to result in people thinking like cows or zombies. Or zombie cows. And the delusion of the Zombie Cow is that they deserve something. And you're right; the way things are going in the world, those expectations will probably be dashed, but I also suspect that the programming may serve as useful. When an economy crashes and the young & strong work force refuses to believe it. . , what happens? I'm actually really curious about that.
Anyway, X-Gen people suffer from their own programming, and this article is a prime example of it; low self-esteem and bitterness. And there's no true reason for feeling like that other than the programming. X-Gen people have an enormous advantage, and when they choose to use it, they find happiness and gobs of personal power in life. --Though, this stems far less often from the accumulation of material wealth than it does from the "Zen" route. But how lucky is that? Everybody knows abundant material wealth is the siren call which leads to insanity, barbecues and lawn mowers. The only practical way to real success is to become self-aware. But rather than focus on this, the writer of the article is moaning about how he isn't a zombie cow as well. Whenever I hear this kind of thing, I tend to think, "You practically had your light saber handed to you and all you want to do is trade it in for a successful moisture farm."
If I were handing out awards, I'd give you one for the amount of effort required to transform your thinly disguised personal hate-on into a bogus rhetorical question capable of passing through the Slashdot filters. Why not just post something about how, "young, single mothers are a drain on the social security net"?
There's nothing new about the phenomenon of expectations among young people being out of sync with reality. The funny thing is that when people believe they deserve something, they often get it. Perhaps that's the thing which bugs you the most; have you set your sights too low?
There is a middle ground between wishful thinking and high expectations, and it's called, "Reality".
What's going to drive you absolutely mad, is that when an over-seas spot opens up at some conference, there is a much higher chance of it being given to the boy who believes he deserves it rather than to you.
This is not true. Glass was made via a process that made it thicker at the edges of the sheet, which was then cut into a rectangular shape and the thicker side placed at the bottom of the window to help with structural integrity.
This is actually the coolest discovery of my week so far. I can't remember where exactly I learned the 'super-cooled liquid' version; I know my parents talked about it that way when I was a kid, and I know at least one high school science teacher explained it this way. It's a little sad to see it go for one reason: I recall reading a novel where a character had the experience of traveling through time at a highly accelerated rate and seeing lightbulbs 'melt', which always struck me as a really neat visual.
So now I do have a question. . . The super-cooled liquid thing is how I always explained why silicone chips failed over time. --Now I don't get it. Anybody? Why do chips fail? And do they fail when just sitting unused, or is it a property of their semi/conducting electricity?
Even if the execs don't realize consciously why they're doing it, I'd say that it's a fairly deliberate effort at some level.
The shows speak to matters, through the sci-fi metaphor, which play quite heavily in this reality. Firefly was very anti-government, anti-establishment. It died. (Compare to something like 24, which is pro-torture, pro-government, pro-homeland security, etc. That show has no trouble holding its air time.)
Fringe is crap, imho, (I hate "dark and gritty" and the ideas are skewed to shit), but it still looks at the world in a way which is anti-establishment and quite accusatory.
Dollhouse is another great example. Mind control is easy; when you deliberately traumatize a child, they dissociate and it is very easy to program alternate personalities. This is by no means rocket science and it is clear enough to anybody who has looked into this matter that the Manchurian Candidate concept is a powerful tool in the game of politics and cultural subversion. (Before you auto-react against that, please do some research into the field. Start with, Marta Stout's Myth of Sanity and read the, Greenbaum speach to get a better perspective.) --Again, while Dollhouse is a sci-fi metaphor, it's not the sort of thing you want the public thinking about too much if you're trying to keep the public deaf and dumb.
So how do you control the release of subversive material? Well, you put it on FOX where the level of negative government alignment is very much entrenched. That way, it's easy to kill a series before it can gain too much traction.
For some reason which has not been well explained imo, (the official FOX claim is that Joss chose to make the changes), the original episode he created was axed at the last moment and was cobbled together with new material to completely alter things and stretch the material over several episodes.
This was a pretty huge blow.
I hunted around and found a copy of the script for the original first episode, and I thought is was very strong compared to the episode which got aired. I've uploaded a copy of it here. . .
But that really brings the discussion round to what "old" is. The 40GB drive described above is small by modern standards, but not uselessly so and certainly not obsolete.
Very true.
I remember still running a 2.5 GB "C drive" for years beyond its market obsolescence simply because it was inconvenient to re-build my OS. I had a fairly huge secondary drive where I kept everything else. The only reason I replaced it was that 2.5 GB became limiting when some programs refused to allow me to install them in other locations and temp files became top-heavy. I could easily see putting an OS on a primary 40 GB drive and forgetting about it until the drive physically wore out. I always derive a certain amount of satisfaction from wearing a piece of equipment into the ground from honest use. When I toss it out, it doesn't feel so wasteful.
--My dad had a stack of old hard drives, each was 10 megabytes, and each drive was the size of one of those old Commodore 64 floppy disk drives. (Another piece of utterly obsolete hardware which we have all conveniently banished from memory.) They're land fill.
The USB plugs however. . . Those are more interesting. Some universal sockets seem to have very long use-lives. Think of the common headphone audio jack. The phone jack. Heck, the wall-socket power cord plug and light-bulb screw. We'll have to wait and see, but the humble four pin USB socket might possibly fall into that category.
That means those memory sticks might actually be worth keeping files on the same way you keep old books on shelves. The only problem I see is that silicone is somewhat like glass in windows; it's a slow-moving liquid which deforms with age. --Windows in old buildings have glass which is thicker at the bottom than at the top because of the glacial migration. Hm. Even glaciers move more quickly than glass does, but I seem to recall reading that V'ger's chips were failing because of this. Maybe when memory chips are made from carbon based minerals we will truly be in an age of archival-quality micro-chips.
Hm.
No, I think that computer junk is computer junk and this is just something we have to live with. I know NorTel spent a lot of research into how to make components recyclable, or at least destroyable in a way which was not toxic, knowing that computer components have a short life-expectancy and that planning for their entire life cycle was important.
It's not as bad, though, as old CRTs and automobiles, but even they decompose eventually to be reclaimed by the Earth. None of it is nuclear waste, thankfully.
ever try getting a response from the slashdot crew?
Ever had a thread deleted by the Slashdot crew?
Precisely.
-FL
Did anybody else notice. . .
on
Watchmen Watched
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Anybody else notice that Watchmen actually happened?
"Ozymandias decides to unite the world under a One World Government by manufacturing a False Flag attack on New York to unite the world against a made-up threat."
Sound familiar?
The only difference being that Ozymandias was driven by a desire to assist mankind, not enslave it. Though, in working through deception, the whole scheme remains broken.
The only thing I can't decide is whether Allan Moore was a genius or if Bush & Co were juvenile.
The fact that it seems to have worked says a lot about humanity as a whole.
Wow. With Colorado declaring IE 6 safer than Firefox, and now this, one wonders what Florida and Texas will cough up for today's news cycle. I'm THIS close to actually being entertained!
Unless you have failed to notice, the system of money exchange is a global, catastrophic failure which leads to economic slavery and villainy. By its very nature, it must self-destruct.
The notion of sharing energies is the only one which really works, which is why it has been demonized from without and destroyed from within with enormous social programming efforts. If people start sharing, it threatens the system which keeps the elite in power. There is a reason there is such a huge fight going on over copyright. People are seeing that when things are shared openly, certain universal principals come into effect; somehow everybody, both producer and recipient benefit despite all the clever, fear-based economic theory. --I've seen many examples on both the small and large scale. The fear just isn't validated.
--As a result, I produce tons of stuff for free because I LIKE to. And amazingly, this has led to many non-linear rewards to the point where I have been able to quit my formal job. I was nervous at first, but after the years add up, the emergent pattern becomes impossible to ignore. When you do what you love and you do it well, you can't fail. It's like a theory of motion or energy or something. It might be both.
People like money because it feels safe, but that's only because they've never known anything different and they've been hammered with endless streams of propaganda and education on the matter and all the connected matters. The paradigm of fear and selfishness doesn't work unless people are strictly controlled. But that system is going to collapse. People will have to learn new systems, and those systems, if people want to survive, will require human contact, love, and the concept of sharing openly without immediate reward. New systems will almost certainly involve wealth markers of some kind; there will always be power-mongers and so there will be continuing problems with slavery and abuse and cycles of collapse. But whatever happens, I can guarantee, people will still make food, art and everything in between, and those who do it well, will always have the option of living in comfort. Why? Because we love them!
The old system is a giant, hideous failure which can only be endured when people either live in a neurotic state of discordant awareness where they don't think about global slavery, --or if they are broken inside and WANT there to be slavery.
"You bombed and raped our families. We will do the same to yours!"
That makes both sides abominable and the public will just want to see everybody punished. Think of the Obama campaign. Whether you like the new president or not, he won in part because his campaign refused to get dirty while the other side had no problem being a bunch of mud-slinging dicks. The public doesn't respect dicks. --And anyway, an unspoken portion of the argument is that Pirates are not bad people. The judge will certainly be affected by this regardless of whether or not it should formally be considered in court.
No, seriously. That actually looks like a LOT of fun!
Buuuuuut, it also looks like a suicide machine. --I mean, ultralights are dangerous enough, but this one looks fantastically dangerous. Fixed wing aircraft still get to keep their wings in a strong wind.
But then, while pondering this 2003 U.S. Paragliding Accident Summary, (1 per 500 paragliders died in 2003) I was struck by the notion that, yeah, there are going to be some accidents, --that's the nature of tying yourself to a kite and jumping off a mountain-- BUT, this time the pilot is actually sitting inside a pretty awesome roll cage. And anyway, I bet there's at least one person dumber than me among those 499 other guys.
I knew the term had morphed beyond recognition when I heard one guy say, "Yeah, I'm on like three different teams, plus I do weight lifting and I bike everywhere. I'm a total sports geek."
I also met a guy who was a self-proclaimed, "Rock climbing geek."
I have to say, though, that I'm rather happy that the term has taken on this tone. It makes the world seem less mean-spirited.
I recently gave $50 to www.democracynow.org, partly because I was blown away by one of Goodman's podcasts but largely because I know how their funding model works and it's clear where their heart is.
The Associated Press is fulla liars and line toe-ers. They're on their own.
I can't see the whole picture yet of the emerging information paradigm and how it will all work, but something somewhere out there feels kinda right. . .
Maybe one of these days I'll toss some money to Slashdot. If they ever ask, I'll probably give. Love this place!
Slashdot Mirror
"Taxi down the runway."
(Sorry. That's the best I've got this early in my day. Filter and Drip, damn you, Filter and Drip!)
-FL
How many football fields can it drive on a full tank?
-FL
Out of 341 replies, only 6 slashdotters comment with something approximating, "I reject this study! The sample is too small and I think the science was bad."
Compare this to ANY other study posted here which makes claims having the audacity to criticize some accepted aspect of the scientific realm.
I'm by no means a religious person. . , come on people! Aren't you embarrassed? Skepticism my arse. Science doesn't need bias to protect it. Unlike religion, science is wonderful stuff; it won't vanish in a puff if nobody leaps to defend it with brute force and sheer ignorance.
-FL
I just contacted Prof Salthouse to see if I could get a copy of his paper. I was, in part, interested in the very question you raised.
I love this kind of research!
-FL
I'm much the same way, as I suspect many here are. Knowledge is always power of some kind or other, and when it comes to consumer hardware, the advantages of Knowing are obvious.
When it comes to other items, however, like cars. . .
Oi.
It takes a while to build up a decent knowledge set, and some things blind-side you, especially when you share a vehicle with a girlfriend who just seems to have a knack for destroying stuff and making half-assed deals at the speed of light which require your signature and wallet on the turn of a dime. At certain points, the time and stress saved by paying what I called the "30% bullshit charge" is worth it.
I know several people who simply have no interest in learning computer skills and who knowingly pay a lot more for gear just so that they won't have to think about it. --I have one friend who made a noble effort one week to follow me through the build process of a new computer and have me explain it all to him as I did it. Either I'm a horrible teacher or some people just aren't well suited for absorbing certain types of knowledge. Despite numerous approaches, by the time we finished he still doesn't quite grasp the difference between chip memory and hard drive memory. I've followed my lady around trying to learn some sense of fashion so I won't dress like an idiot or have to get her to pick out stuff that looks good on me. There's an art to that which I sort of understand, but if I were to be quizzed on, I'd fail at miserably. Partly because I find after an hour of that I want to lie down on my back in the middle of the shoe section and throw a screaming tantrum just like the four year-old the next aisle over.
-FL
Who cares what price mechanics go on behind the label? The market is big enough to self-correct. This is one of those times and places where the religion of, "Competition" is entirely valid. --Like Newtonian physics, there is a scale at which that math works perfectly.
And so we have the marvel of comparison shopping. If the Business Depot is selling at more than what I can get elsewhere, then I won't buy it from them.
Incidentally, one intangible and hard-to-come-by substance which the Business Depot sells better than most is, 'Convenience'.
I've sometimes needed big portions of that stuff, and I've paid top dollar for it. The only computer items I ever buy at the Business Depot are during times of emergency, when I need something NOW. (I've often lived within a few blocks of a Business Depot). My biggest purchase like this was a laser printer; I was in the middle of some big project and my existing printer died. I might have even gotten a good deal, but it really didn't matter at the time. I had $500 and I needed to be printing documents before 1 PM. They came through. No internet company on the planet can do that.
When I haven't had that kind of need or financial luxury, --or as is most often the case, when I just feel the need to go hunting for the best deal, the Business Depot is the last place I'd ever shop. But that's their problem. I will respectfully allow them to price stuff however the heck they want. So long as I can get the same or a similar item somewhere else for a better price, then who really cares?
-FL
There is no doubt in my mind from reading your post that you're one of the people this article is talking about.
Well, actually I'm X-Gen. --That would be the perpetually cynical generation which spent its school years being grilled on just how screwed we are in ten different colorful ways by the "I Deserve" generation which came before and the "I Deserve generation which came after. If anybody has the right to pen an article like the one above, it's me. In fact, I suspect that it was written exactly by an X-Gen guy, and so I understand his motivation. But that still doesn't mean he's right.
Personal power doesn't stem from delusions or from huge, unstoppable population trends. Zombies one-on-one are relatively useless, but as a force, they tend to stumble toward their goal and there is little you can do to prevent them, agonizing as it might seem. But seriously. . ? What would you rather be? The guy with the golf club or. . , well, the guy with the golf club *and* the golf shoes?
So yeah, I recognize that for some reason, people who come from large population trends tend to be less aware somehow. I think this has to do with going through school so utterly surrounded by so many people that you naturally take on herd identity traits. --When I was in Jr. high school, half the class rooms were empty, I had two lockers just cuz' and everybody in the school knew my name. And I knew most of theirs. We were ALL individuals without having to work terribly hard for that status. In overly dense populations, systems with too many people, different forms of individual expression become adopted, and it seems to result in people thinking like cows or zombies. Or zombie cows. And the delusion of the Zombie Cow is that they deserve something. And you're right; the way things are going in the world, those expectations will probably be dashed, but I also suspect that the programming may serve as useful. When an economy crashes and the young & strong work force refuses to believe it. . , what happens? I'm actually really curious about that.
Anyway, X-Gen people suffer from their own programming, and this article is a prime example of it; low self-esteem and bitterness. And there's no true reason for feeling like that other than the programming. X-Gen people have an enormous advantage, and when they choose to use it, they find happiness and gobs of personal power in life. --Though, this stems far less often from the accumulation of material wealth than it does from the "Zen" route. But how lucky is that? Everybody knows abundant material wealth is the siren call which leads to insanity, barbecues and lawn mowers. The only practical way to real success is to become self-aware. But rather than focus on this, the writer of the article is moaning about how he isn't a zombie cow as well. Whenever I hear this kind of thing, I tend to think, "You practically had your light saber handed to you and all you want to do is trade it in for a successful moisture farm."
-FL
Wow!
If I were handing out awards, I'd give you one for the amount of effort required to transform your thinly disguised personal hate-on into a bogus rhetorical question capable of passing through the Slashdot filters. Why not just post something about how, "young, single mothers are a drain on the social security net"?
There's nothing new about the phenomenon of expectations among young people being out of sync with reality. The funny thing is that when people believe they deserve something, they often get it. Perhaps that's the thing which bugs you the most; have you set your sights too low?
There is a middle ground between wishful thinking and high expectations, and it's called, "Reality".
What's going to drive you absolutely mad, is that when an over-seas spot opens up at some conference, there is a much higher chance of it being given to the boy who believes he deserves it rather than to you.
-FL
And yet, I was out of my chair and grooving. (On your lawn).
-FL
This is not true. Glass was made via a process that made it thicker at the edges of the sheet, which was then cut into a rectangular shape and the thicker side placed at the bottom of the window to help with structural integrity.
This is actually the coolest discovery of my week so far. I can't remember where exactly I learned the 'super-cooled liquid' version; I know my parents talked about it that way when I was a kid, and I know at least one high school science teacher explained it this way. It's a little sad to see it go for one reason: I recall reading a novel where a character had the experience of traveling through time at a highly accelerated rate and seeing lightbulbs 'melt', which always struck me as a really neat visual.
So now I do have a question. . . The super-cooled liquid thing is how I always explained why silicone chips failed over time. --Now I don't get it. Anybody? Why do chips fail? And do they fail when just sitting unused, or is it a property of their semi/conducting electricity?
-FL
Even if the execs don't realize consciously why they're doing it, I'd say that it's a fairly deliberate effort at some level.
The shows speak to matters, through the sci-fi metaphor, which play quite heavily in this reality. Firefly was very anti-government, anti-establishment. It died. (Compare to something like 24, which is pro-torture, pro-government, pro-homeland security, etc. That show has no trouble holding its air time.)
Fringe is crap, imho, (I hate "dark and gritty" and the ideas are skewed to shit), but it still looks at the world in a way which is anti-establishment and quite accusatory.
Dollhouse is another great example. Mind control is easy; when you deliberately traumatize a child, they dissociate and it is very easy to program alternate personalities. This is by no means rocket science and it is clear enough to anybody who has looked into this matter that the Manchurian Candidate concept is a powerful tool in the game of politics and cultural subversion. (Before you auto-react against that, please do some research into the field. Start with, Marta Stout's Myth of Sanity and read the, Greenbaum speach to get a better perspective.) --Again, while Dollhouse is a sci-fi metaphor, it's not the sort of thing you want the public thinking about too much if you're trying to keep the public deaf and dumb.
So how do you control the release of subversive material? Well, you put it on FOX where the level of negative government alignment is very much entrenched. That way, it's easy to kill a series before it can gain too much traction.
-FL
For some reason which has not been well explained imo, (the official FOX claim is that Joss chose to make the changes), the original episode he created was axed at the last moment and was cobbled together with new material to completely alter things and stretch the material over several episodes.
This was a pretty huge blow.
I hunted around and found a copy of the script for the original first episode, and I thought is was very strong compared to the episode which got aired. I've uploaded a copy of it here. . .
First Dollhouse Script
The show feels a bit cut & pasted at the moment, but the themes are very strong. Read the script and see what you think.
-FL
But that really brings the discussion round to what "old" is. The 40GB drive described above is small by modern standards, but not uselessly so and certainly not obsolete.
Very true.
I remember still running a 2.5 GB "C drive" for years beyond its market obsolescence simply because it was inconvenient to re-build my OS. I had a fairly huge secondary drive where I kept everything else. The only reason I replaced it was that 2.5 GB became limiting when some programs refused to allow me to install them in other locations and temp files became top-heavy. I could easily see putting an OS on a primary 40 GB drive and forgetting about it until the drive physically wore out. I always derive a certain amount of satisfaction from wearing a piece of equipment into the ground from honest use. When I toss it out, it doesn't feel so wasteful.
-FL
False -- try again.
Did you enjoy that as much as I think you did?
It's the little joys I'm happy to provide!
-FL
Interesting.
Some parts will last and others are just junk.
The hard drives are junk.
--My dad had a stack of old hard drives, each was 10 megabytes, and each drive was the size of one of those old Commodore 64 floppy disk drives. (Another piece of utterly obsolete hardware which we have all conveniently banished from memory.) They're land fill.
The USB plugs however. . . Those are more interesting. Some universal sockets seem to have very long use-lives. Think of the common headphone audio jack. The phone jack. Heck, the wall-socket power cord plug and light-bulb screw. We'll have to wait and see, but the humble four pin USB socket might possibly fall into that category.
That means those memory sticks might actually be worth keeping files on the same way you keep old books on shelves. The only problem I see is that silicone is somewhat like glass in windows; it's a slow-moving liquid which deforms with age. --Windows in old buildings have glass which is thicker at the bottom than at the top because of the glacial migration. Hm. Even glaciers move more quickly than glass does, but I seem to recall reading that V'ger's chips were failing because of this. Maybe when memory chips are made from carbon based minerals we will truly be in an age of archival-quality micro-chips.
Hm.
No, I think that computer junk is computer junk and this is just something we have to live with. I know NorTel spent a lot of research into how to make components recyclable, or at least destroyable in a way which was not toxic, knowing that computer components have a short life-expectancy and that planning for their entire life cycle was important.
It's not as bad, though, as old CRTs and automobiles, but even they decompose eventually to be reclaimed by the Earth. None of it is nuclear waste, thankfully.
Ashes to ashes. . .
-FL
ever try getting a response from the slashdot crew?
Ever had a thread deleted by the Slashdot crew?
Precisely.
-FL
Anybody else notice that Watchmen actually happened?
"Ozymandias decides to unite the world under a One World Government by manufacturing a False Flag attack on New York to unite the world against a made-up threat."
Sound familiar?
The only difference being that Ozymandias was driven by a desire to assist mankind, not enslave it. Though, in working through deception, the whole scheme remains broken.
The only thing I can't decide is whether Allan Moore was a genius or if Bush & Co were juvenile.
The fact that it seems to have worked says a lot about humanity as a whole.
-FL
Wow. With Colorado declaring IE 6 safer than Firefox, and now this, one wonders what Florida and Texas will cough up for today's news cycle. I'm THIS close to actually being entertained!
-FL
No, people are going to starve because they made stupid decisions in life that resulted in them having no money.
Ah, see there now there's your problem right there.
You're making the same assumption that many unimaginative conservative people do.
You seem to believe that money will still exist by the end of the year. How have you prepared for that?
-FL
Unless you have failed to notice, the system of money exchange is a global, catastrophic failure which leads to economic slavery and villainy. By its very nature, it must self-destruct.
The notion of sharing energies is the only one which really works, which is why it has been demonized from without and destroyed from within with enormous social programming efforts. If people start sharing, it threatens the system which keeps the elite in power. There is a reason there is such a huge fight going on over copyright. People are seeing that when things are shared openly, certain universal principals come into effect; somehow everybody, both producer and recipient benefit despite all the clever, fear-based economic theory. --I've seen many examples on both the small and large scale. The fear just isn't validated.
--As a result, I produce tons of stuff for free because I LIKE to. And amazingly, this has led to many non-linear rewards to the point where I have been able to quit my formal job. I was nervous at first, but after the years add up, the emergent pattern becomes impossible to ignore. When you do what you love and you do it well, you can't fail. It's like a theory of motion or energy or something. It might be both.
People like money because it feels safe, but that's only because they've never known anything different and they've been hammered with endless streams of propaganda and education on the matter and all the connected matters. The paradigm of fear and selfishness doesn't work unless people are strictly controlled. But that system is going to collapse. People will have to learn new systems, and those systems, if people want to survive, will require human contact, love, and the concept of sharing openly without immediate reward. New systems will almost certainly involve wealth markers of some kind; there will always be power-mongers and so there will be continuing problems with slavery and abuse and cycles of collapse. But whatever happens, I can guarantee, people will still make food, art and everything in between, and those who do it well, will always have the option of living in comfort. Why? Because we love them!
The old system is a giant, hideous failure which can only be endured when people either live in a neurotic state of discordant awareness where they don't think about global slavery, --or if they are broken inside and WANT there to be slavery.
Move over. There's something better on its way.
-FL
Bad plan.
"You bombed and raped our families. We will do the same to yours!"
That makes both sides abominable and the public will just want to see everybody punished. Think of the Obama campaign. Whether you like the new president or not, he won in part because his campaign refused to get dirty while the other side had no problem being a bunch of mud-slinging dicks. The public doesn't respect dicks. --And anyway, an unspoken portion of the argument is that Pirates are not bad people. The judge will certainly be affected by this regardless of whether or not it should formally be considered in court.
-FL
No, seriously. That actually looks like a LOT of fun!
Buuuuuut, it also looks like a suicide machine. --I mean, ultralights are dangerous enough, but this one looks fantastically dangerous. Fixed wing aircraft still get to keep their wings in a strong wind.
But then, while pondering this 2003 U.S. Paragliding Accident Summary, (1 per 500 paragliders died in 2003) I was struck by the notion that, yeah, there are going to be some accidents, --that's the nature of tying yourself to a kite and jumping off a mountain-- BUT, this time the pilot is actually sitting inside a pretty awesome roll cage. And anyway, I bet there's at least one person dumber than me among those 499 other guys.
Sign me up!
-FL
Heck, I know what it's supposed to say, but even after staring at it, it refuses to refrain from sounding like a Monty Python sketch.
-FL
I knew the term had morphed beyond recognition when I heard one guy say, "Yeah, I'm on like three different teams, plus I do weight lifting and I bike everywhere. I'm a total sports geek."
I also met a guy who was a self-proclaimed, "Rock climbing geek."
I have to say, though, that I'm rather happy that the term has taken on this tone. It makes the world seem less mean-spirited.
-FL
I recently gave $50 to www.democracynow.org, partly because I was blown away by one of Goodman's podcasts but largely because I know how their funding model works and it's clear where their heart is.
The Associated Press is fulla liars and line toe-ers. They're on their own.
I can't see the whole picture yet of the emerging information paradigm and how it will all work, but something somewhere out there feels kinda right. . .
Maybe one of these days I'll toss some money to Slashdot. If they ever ask, I'll probably give. Love this place!
-FL