There seems to be some element of confusion in the tech community about Apple's reason for existence. Many people seem to think that Apple is an entity like the force in Star Wars that will galvanize the tech community and resonate their hopes, dreams, and energy into a cornicopia of the coolest products on earth. And like the alchemist's stone, it will transform them as well.
Not quite right, I'm afraid. The sole reason for the existence of Apple Corporation is to transfer money from YOUR bank account to Steven Job's bank account and deliver to you in exchange, shiny trinkets. Remember the Indians selling Manhattan to Steve Jobs for $24 worth of Newtons? Do you really think that you're any different? It seemed like a good deal to them at the time.
Check out your iPhone. It's basically a really expensive plastic little hand-held telephone that glows in the dark. Check out your iPod. It's just a f**king Walkman. It blasts apart when you drop it. It pumps the same sound into your brain that you hear when you go to the mall or step into an elevator. For this you paid $200? No, you paid all that money to be part of the Tao of Steve. The trinkets are just your ID card into this cult.
What I'm trying to say is that if Apple were a serious company instead of a money-sucking vacuum cleaner, then they would have made the trinket nearly waterproof. Your $10 wristwatch is nearly waterproof; it doesn't stop working when you go out running in the rain. So why does your $300 iPhone have moisture sensors INSIDE it that void your warranty when it's in your pants pocket when you take a piss?
It's because neurotic obsessive/compulsive greedy twisted little shithead Steven Jobs demands that his 20,000 poodle engineers come up with ways to void the warranty instead of coming up with solutions to the issues that can cause the trinkets to stop functioning.
I can't believe that any self-respecting engineer would actually work for this guy.
How could this happen? I thought that the internet was more important than the government. Our internet; any government. Is this a cultural thing? Do Egyptian engineers always do whatever the government tells them to do without thinking ? Are they secretly Germans or Soviets? Even when they can see themselves that this particular government has reached its end?
Maybe it's my residual American chauvinism, but I just can't imagine any patriotic person anywhere blindly shutting his country totally off of the international computer network, Regardless of what any corrupt 82-year-old man tells them to do. I'd just hem and haw and techno-babble them blind about how it just couldn't be done.
I think that WE should protest this country's chickenshit engineers by refusing to let them back on the internet when they decide that they are rejoin civilization. And then start oscillating their currency in the international markets while they watch helplessly unable to do anything about it.
This is OUR internet. You just don't shut down part of it just because you feel like it. Every now and then we need to give the third world a taste of what real power is about (" a whiff of grapeshot" as the English used to say) so that they don't get a delusions of grandeur and think that they can get away with doing things like shutting down parts of the Internet.
Put this bozo in prison for a LONG time. Gitmo his ass. He deserves it. We (the tech community) must clean up the spammers, hustlers, and criminals on the internet. If we don't (and no one else will or can do it) then no one will take us seriously and OUR vision of what the internet is supposed to be will be overruled by lawyers, global corporations, and their goon squads.
It is unlikely that this asshole actually has $360,000 to pay the fine. And he committed a serious wide-ranging crime of fraud. So, yes, put this jerk in jail for a long time. Or at least as long as the feds would put a college student in hard jail for selling a little bag of bud to another college student. Which is a long time.
In 1979, Rev. Jesse Jackson traveled to the Middle East to explore a possible connection between the Afro-American and Palestinean people. After the meeting, the Reverend was overheard saying to himself:
" been a long time since I said Yassir to anyone."
Sorry to imply that I mocking your vacation activies and memories. I simply wished to imply that I found the original poster a touch obsessive towards photography.
I've been many places, some boring and some more interesting. In the past 20 years, my city of a million people has hosted over 250000 people from other countries throughout the globe.
I don't 'go' anywhere anymore to be in a foreign country. I just sit at the bus stop and the world comes to me. The man on the end was a former South Vietnamese officer who sold guns and supplies to the Viet Cong and used the money to bring his family to the USA. The little Chinese woman sitting on the bench was a Red Guard when she was fifteen. Beating up her teachers for being 'capitalist running dogs' and giving too many pop Algebra quizes. The little girl by the newspaper stand is an Iraqi Christian whose entire family was blown up last year with a car bomb. Her mother's body absorbed all the shrapnel that would have killed her. The other woman on the bench is from a village in Central Mexico where live hasn't changed since before the Conquistadors. She doesn't speak English: or Spanish; only an ancient pre-Columbian Aztec language known only by people living within 50 km of the mountain that her village is on. How she got to 'El Norte', she doesn't remember.
There are three basic ways to get your personal electronics stolen by a person in uniform at a border crossing.
One is by a simple corrupt thug who uses the customs office as his own private little WalMart. These creatures are most commonly found in Africa and the outlying former Soviet republics. They resell your property for a profit. They can be bribed if the value of the bribe is equal to the amount of effort that it would take for them to resell your property locally.
Second is the paranoid secret policeman who thinks every foreigner is a spy. Found in fascist police states (like Burma and Belorus) and backward religious tribal areas (like Pakistan). Often will be satisfied with the destruction of the data if they comprehend the technology. Otherwise they just smash the equipment so no one can use it.
Third is the clueless corporate 'security personel' found in the USA mostly. Given a wide mandate, nearly unlimited violence authorization, and extremely vague guidelines about what to actually be looking out for, they are very arbitrary in what they conficate. They never destroy or resell what they take, and would never consider themselves thieves, only employees. They can best be thrwarted by having a senior corporate-executive set of clothes and personal appearance. Having a corporate logo on your media and equipment (not a brand name, but a marker that shows that the item is corporate property, not personal) often offers good protection. People in the USA are very hesitant to confront anyone whom they preceive as being a corporate superior to them, even when they have broad but poorly defined ability to do so.
So yes you are right about the USA, but I was referring primarily to the African model in my scenario. I had assumed that you would have been aware of that also. I don't need you to remind me about the stupid Americans, (nor do I need your assuming that I am one of them).
Calling complete strangers annoying in print, mocking their creativity, their intoxicational preference and then telling them to "fuck off" is neither polite behaviour nor the path to a long and healthy life, amigo.
'Subtitle Sunglasses' refers to an exciting and innovative user-interface concept for an essential technology whose elements are just now beginning to come into focus. 'Subtitle Sunglasses', when they arrive, will combine nanoengineering, bio-motion power generation, molecular electronic circuitry, Sapir/Chomsky proto-linguistic theory, independent-speaker speech recognition, 'heads up' bio-luminiscent microdisplays into such a world-changing technology that will make image storage questions look as primitive as toroid-donut-based RAM memory does today.
Today's currency is not dollars or Euros, it's creative ideas. I give you a fantastic idea for free and the best that you can offer in return is a hearty "fuck off"?
I suggest, honored sir, that you are in the wrong industry. Might I suggest getting a few more tattoos and becoming a excrement-scraper at the elephant house at your citie's zoo?
Might I suggest... not taking so many pictures and just enjoy your vacation. And don't concern yourself about the best technological solution for storing your images. Whatever technical solution you come up with will be both obsolete within a decade (endangering the ability to retrieve your images), and expensive, and easily lost (or more likely) stolen in a backward third-world country, or held for ransom by customs (or border security) {"Senor, because of the possibility that you have photographed secret sensitive military installations, even inadvertently, we must view all 10000 of the photos on your laptop hard disk. It is too bad that you will miss your plane connection. However, for $300, we can make a copy of your hard disk and send you an e-mail if we find any photos that you should remove, and, of course, you will not miss your plane connection. A wonderful deal for you, senor"}
Ain't I just an insensitive racist jerk?! Nobody in the real-world would ever act like that! Just another stupid paranoid American buffoon who is too stupid and too scared to travel farther than Disneyland!!
You have the best memory and image storage system between your ears. Are you going to look at a thousand pictures of Mexico next year? Or are you just going to go someplace else? Or (heaven forbid) are you planning to sit friends and family down and make them view with you a thousand photos of your vacation?
Don't take a camera or laptop with you on vacation!!! It negates the whole idea of 'vacation'. The only technical thing that you should take on vacation is a good pair of 'subtitle sunglasses'. These are glasses that you wear when you are in a place where noone speaks your language. The tiny microphone in the frames and the nanotechnology-based AI computer chips also in the frame analyse the words that are spoken to you, translate them into English, and project them onto the insides of your glasses where you see them like old-fashioned 'subtitles' in foreign movies. Cool as hell, and very useful while traveling. Unfortunately they don't exist yet and probably won't for another fifty years.
Marin crosses the line in legislating psuedo-science into an active ordinance. I hear the anti_smart-meter people present their case on KBOO (www.kboo.fm) radio, the world-class alternative radio station out of southeast Portland Oregon USA. They're well-intentioned and enthusiastic, but they really seem a little touched with the ol'hippy paranoia 'all science is evil' herb-induced vibe.
Marin is a strange place. I've visited there many times and it seems normal and well-ordered, but it has a true bizarre historical undercurrent that goes back a hundred years (even before all the rich hippies moved there in the 1970s). It's =almost= the kind of place that would pass a law forcing the sun to rise in the West in order to get a great morning sunrise for the folks living in Stinson Beach. It is exactly the kind of place that people would ban a technology that they don't quite understand and doesn't appear to do anything to make them younger and more beautiful and more hip (and more rich). They are exactly the kind of people who would consider a piece of equipment from the power company ('a rather déclassé institution run by drab ordinary pedestrian types, not-our-sort-of-globally-aware-organic-people', dahrling) that emits radio signals from their home-lifespace to be an evil intrusion. If it's not spying on you for the Republicans, then it's trying to keep track of how much electricity is being diverted from your hot tub to the grow lights in your secret garden.
Marin has probably changed a lot since "The Serial" was published in the late 1970s, but it's the kind of place where the people pay a lot of money and a lot of karmic energy to make sure that it doesn't change all that much. Still they have crossed the line on this one issue.
Personally, I'd love to live in Marin. The MILFs are as gorgeous as the models. It's the 'coolest' place on earth. The grass is greener and everything's always groovy, no matter how stupid and ugly the rest of the world becomes. But I'm a little too ugly and a little to poor to be accepted as one of the 'golden cloud people' north of the Golden Gate.
What difference does it make if ghosts are real or not? Even if they were real, they can't do anything because they're dead. Maybe a few dead spirits have a way of triggering a mirage or hologram in our minds using a resonant reflection of their previous life force energy. So what. Even if it did exist for one in a million formerly living people, it doesn't matter. It would be just an image, it's not real.
Ghosts of dead people aren't going to help you pay this month's rent, find you a place to park, or change the stinky baby diapers for you. Dead people wouldn't care about any of the things that are important to living people.
Why would they? They're dead. Nothing matters to them. They can't shoot you, rape you, or knock your teeth out. All they can do, at their very baddest, is just sort-of make a semi-illusionary quasi-image in the dark night. So what.
Ghosts are not important because they're powerless because they're dead.
We created this problem when we created the web. It is our ('our' being us the people who make their living building and maintaining the web) responsibility to solve it. We can't just tell people to monitor the arcane technical details over what is basically an issue of massive amounts of unpunished fraud crime. If left unchecked, the criminals will just get better and better technology.
We have to decide several things: one, we have to accept that law enforcement can not deal with this because they don't have the time and resources. So, it is our responsibility. Two, we have to decide what we are going to do about it. In other words, what will be effective in stopping this activity. Three: we have to do it. Which means we have to be cruel to people. Ordinary people who are just trying to make a sleazy buck. Cruel like in violence, because violence is the only way to enforce the law when the traditional law-enforcement mechanism can't respond.
I suggest private sting operations. We set up or let it be known that we will set up phishing sites for people, and then apply violence to anyone who pays us money to do it. People will stop buying phishing site product.
One big problem with this is the possibility that large criminal organizations will demand that we run the entrapment phishing sites for them. Being large criminal organizations, they have the resources of violence to make us do this. But then we can offer these people to traditional law enforcement. One more day in the 'system of power', as the Mafia calls it.
But we should take care of this problem. Otherwise we can't claim that there is any real benefit to the citizens in using the internet that we have so painstakingly created.
With respect, these arguments above all miss the point that not just one system (i.e. my car, my house, my transportation situation) will be affected by a peak-oil rise in energy prices. Rather, all systems will be affected and they will cascade into an entropy of economic breakdown. It will, of course, happen at different rates for different people. But the economic dislocations caused by $150/$200 a barrel oil will filter through the entire economy making it impossible to sustain a 50-mile-a-day commute to an $65,000 a year job. At a sustained level of $150 a barrel oil, it will take about ten years to knock out the upper-middle class technological -based economy that most Slashdaughters either live in or aspire to. But it will happen much sooner for most everyone else.
What do you mean by file? If you are refering to an executable program, then I can still run a Draw Poker program from the mid-1980s for the original IBM-PC. It needs an auxiliary program that configures my 2 GigaHertz/2 Gigabyte DRAM Dell to be a mid-1980s IBM-PC with EGA-level video. And I can still run a 1988-era PCB layout program ORCAD ver 2, but not the Schematic Capture section with the XT emulator.
I can still load BASIC programs for the Radio Shack MC-10 micro color computer (the 'Alice') using a cassette tape recorder or an MC10-emulator for the PC. This is the version of BASIC that Bill Gates personally wrote for Radio Shack before Microsoft got the contract to supply DOS for the IBM-PC.
For important stuff, well yes, I do upgrade to new media often. For example, in 1964, I mowed two lawns for $0.50 each and bought The Beatles "Hard Day's Night/I Should Have Known Better" single (the yellow/orange spiral Capitol 45RPM one) for 78 cents. In 1969, I bought the Apple/Capital album version with the two songs. In 1978, I got the reissue on vinyl, and in 1988 the CD version came out. I borrowed it from the library and recorded it onto hi-fi Metal 90 minute cassette. In 1999, I downloaded the new CD ripper/MP3 program and made a 128KBPS digital file of the song pair. And last month, I found the 2009 re-release of the songs in stereo and used ExactAudioCopy program to make a 256KBPS copy.
In my humble opinion, not shared by the legal establishment, I bought a lifetime license to copy the songs for my personal use when I put the three quarters and three pennies on the counter back in 1964. In the ensuing decades, the media and reproduction cost has gone down incredibly. The $0.78 in 1964 dollars is about $5.00 today for two songs. The album was $3.90 in 1969 dollars, about $15 today for 11 songs. The 1979 reissue was about $6.50, about $15 today for 25 songs. The cassette was about $3 for about 30 songs. The 1999 blank CD was $2 for about 200 songs. And the DVD-ROM I used recently was $0.15 for about 1500 songs.
Progress in media storage, if not musical quality.
These guys are crazy. They live in a ultra-high-tech fantasy bubble world. In the real world, where we all must live, there will be either little difference between 2015 and now (if we're lucky) or things will be a lot worse for some of us and a little worse for most of us.
Technological advancement is peaking. The 20th century, the era-when-everything-happened is over. It was an aberation caused by huge amounts of cheap petroleum energy. With cheap oil depleting, the huge technology positive-feedback loop slows and stops.
Plus there isn't any money. The banking system is fundamentally broken, nobody trusts that due-process rule-of-law applies to the financial sector anymore. And one-by-one all the industries in the USA are going down like the housing industry in a chain reaction. Government will frozen and powerless to do anything to stop it from happening.
The 20th century was the era of focused positive-feedback technological advancement. The 21st century is the era of entropy; things falling apart; the center can not hold.
I want free stuff so I take free stuff. I walk next door to the library with my laptop. I plug it in at the wired table (they're all wired for 120V). I go to the shelf and pick up an interesting looking DVD or CD. I plug it into my laptop's DVD-RW and just make a copy of it right there. I read magazines and newspapers while the disk is being copied. Or write some code. Then I go home. Or if it is seriously cold weather, I linger in the heated public library and copy another DVD. Instead of rushing home to my barely-heated cold apartment.
The RIAA/MPAA/CIA doesn't fuck with me. They don't even see me. I don't announce that I'm putting "their" stuff on the web for download. I don't make a big deal about the fact that the RIAA/MPAA stole the public domain and that we are quietly stealing it back from them. I don't give a fuck about whatever they claim the law is. The so-called copyright law only exists because they paid off politicians to pass the so-called law exactly as they wrote it. I ignore it, so do you. Neither of us pay for anything, nor is it likely that we ever will again. They know this. They don't care. They realize that there isn't anything that they can do to get any money whatsoever from me and people like me. Like you. All they are interested in is making product, selling product (to people who are still willing and able to actually give them money for the product), driving beamers, shorting coke, escorting prime T&A to the A-list Hollywood parties, and stick their dicks into this prime T&A afterwards. People like you and me are not on the list of things that they are interested in.
There was a time around 2001 when the RIAA/MPAA/CIA thought that they were going to take on the librarians. They were misinformed. We set them straight. Now they don't care about us. We have a simple deal with them: each major city and suburban library buys one to ten copies of every piece of shit product that they produce. People (smart people that is, who actually use public libraries) get to take the product home for free if they agree to bring it back in a week or two. Whether they read it, copy it, or ignore it is no one's concern. It's the same basic deal that has been in place since Ben Franklin put it in place 250 years ago.
It works, and you should work with it. Forget about web distribution and so-called piracy or even freedom of information. It just provokes them to be stupid. And with all that coke floating around in their heads, they can be really mean and stupid. You join the civilized world when you realized that, individually, you have transcended the assholes.
I just spent ten weeks working in the Oregon State Unemployment Office helping people navigate the information-collecting computer system that everyone must use in order to get unemployment checks. Since the local economy is dissolving like a sugar cube in a cup of hot tea, this is applying to just about everybody here.
The morons who run the department thought that it would be a good idea to force everyone to fill out a very long ten+-page summary of their work history, skills level, and personal financial situation. Then it would try to match potential jobs to potential employees. This might work in Sweden or Singapore, but it sure messes up big time here.
Roughly 20 percent of the people have NEVER used a computer before. They don't know a mouse from a house. They wouldn't know a password from a hole in the ground. This system not only required elaborate passwords, but required changing the password if user (a contradictory term since it refers to all the people who have never used PCs before) to change their password if they forgot their previous one or their user name. Since the state assigns user names to begin with, this applied to just about everyone except people who work in IT and are used to all this kind of horseshit.
I've come away from this experience realizing that programmers ALWAYS write their user interface for people who are just one step below them in the IT industry skills-level hierarchy. They do this unconsciously because they never deal with people who don't ever use PCs. When dealing with the general public and there is a question of making a user interface easy-to-use or 'safe' at Defense_Department_Atom_Bomb_Launch_Codes, for F*ucks sake, go with easy-to-use. Rely on a separate level of human-confirmation for general security.
ALWAYS let people chose their own password and user-name!!! Don't tell them that it has to be n characters with x letters and digits. This will always fail. And when it fails, you fail to do your job well. Spare me the horseshit about security. Passwords are just a 1960s exercise in 'security through obscurantism', which doesn't work now because there are programs that can blast through millions of potential passwords quickly, and because people will always always ALWAYS forget any password that you force them to use and might might MIGHT remember a password that they have chosen for themselves. If Joe Blow wants 'joe' to be his username and 'blow' to be his password, then that's what he wants. He doesn't want you to tell him that he can't do this. So don't do it.
Don't use case-sensitivity for anything, anytime. You're dealing with people who don't understand the concept. You aren't going to get the concept through to them anyway. Do yourself a favor: do the world a favor: don't use case-sensitivity for anything ever. (Ever see Japanese characters differentiated between upper and lower case? Wanna try to explain the concept the concept of case-sensitivity to someone who looks at a keyboard and sees Western language letters already in capitals and they only read Chinese, Thai, or Russian?) It deserves repeating: Do yourself a favor: do the world a favor: don't use case-sensitivity for anything ever!
Get over your PC security hangup! Most websites don't NEED any user accounts passwords, etc... It just doesn't f*ucking matter! Most commercial websites are just trying to use registration for spamming and advert hussling anyway because some 95 IQ shit-for-brains Marketing-major web designer was told by his 95 IQ shit-for-brains Marketing-class college instructor that this was a good idea for 21st-century business.
Trust me: it's not. Don't do it. Expand your mind. Trust your intuition. Stay out of shopping malls and don't watch television advertisements. May the force be with you because the farce is on top of your ass always.
I work in the Employment office in Gresham, Oregon USA. I help people use computers. In order to get unemployment checks in Oregon, all applicants have to complete this long questionaire on a PC about their occupational skills, work history, and personal status. People can do this on-line or come into our 'worksource center' and use the computers that we have here. And I'm supposed to help them. (I get minimum wage for this and no benefits. Nnot that that is important. I just want you to know that I'm not a highly paid government employee) The information is supposed to match the unemployed with the jobs that all the companies in Oregon have available.
Not a bad concept except for two things. There are no jobs, and, about half of the people coming through the process can't use computers. And about 15-20% of the people can't speak english and have never, ever, ever used a computer before. I am not bullshitting you about this. It seems like a fantasy to highly-educated young Slashdaughters like yourself, but I assure you that this is the case in the lower-middle class neighborhoods of the USA (and probably the rest of the world as well).
So I get a lot of people who have never typed on a keyboard before. And they get put in front of a keyboard that was designed for advanced professional word-processing business typists of the early 1980's era. A lot of them must feel like they've been abducted by space aliens, especially the ones who have come from pre-industrial cultures and have been doing 'under the table' unskilled construction labor or fruit picking.
I would greatly help if there were only half of the keys on the PC keyboard that there are presently. And get rid of the fucking Num-lock key and the stupid Caps-Lock key!
The columnist who writes for Asia Times On-line (www.atimes.com) under the name Spengler foresaw this situation last year. He noted that 95+% off the software that was being used in Iran was 'pirate-ware' from the West. He noted that there was an Iranian government-run file download site that held hundreds of popular Western software packages along with their kraks, passwords, and keygens. He predicted that this would allow viruses to run amok throughout Iran at some point in the future.
He also quotes a BBC reporter who states that almost nobody except government officials and their goon squads (and old ladies, of course) still believes in fundamental Islam in Iran. She (the BBC reporter) says that only about 2% of the population regularly go to Friday services at the mosques in Iran. And over 5% of Iranians are addicted to cheap Afghanistan heroin, the highest addiction rate in the world. Unemployment among the young is in reality over 50%. She says that Iran currently resembles the Soviet Union in the late 1980's; it's a country that will just fall apart in the next ten years if the rest of the world just leaves them alone and lets it happen.
At the time of the revolution in 1978, Iran's population was about 27 million (I remember the number quoted as 50 million at the time) and now it is over 70 million: a direct result of Khomeini's exortation for young people to -'get a-fuckin'- (in a manner of speaking) and make lots of babies. When Khomeini died that policy died also, and Iran launched a massive birth-control program. Now, the children of the revolution are having almost no babies and the birth-rate in Iran is 1.6 children per couple; one of the lowest in the world. But their remains this huge bulge in the population demographic there; all the people born in the 1980's.
They call themselves 'the burnt generation'.
If any of this is true then we shouldn't worry too much about Iran. We should never actually believe anything that they say. And we should, on an individual-to-individual basis, offer whatever assistance that we can. Nevertheless, I would recommend NOT offering any detailed technical assistance to people in Iran on any specific technological project over the web until the Iranian government stops all this 'Death To America' nonsense as offical government policy.
When the US State Department classifies a cable as secret, it's usually because of some situation that will embarrass the pants off of someone there. Let' look at a typical situation that results in a 'classified secret' set of missives:
The US undersecretary of African Affairs refers to the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of the People's Democratic Republic of Bongo as a 'retarded monkey' because he stole half of the $150 million NGO grant for an egg farm and deposited it directly into his Swiss bank account without first wiring it through the Cayman Islands like the undersecretary told him to do. Now the transaction is transparent and the undersecretary won't get his $155,000 consultancy fee from the hedge fund firm that his Yale frat brother runs down there that was supposed to handle the transaction in the first place.
The situation is compounded by the fact that the US undersecretary and the Bongoian Deputy Minister are sharing a mistress who is a top fashion model. The undersecretary made the remark about the DM to his mistress in bed and she texted it to her sister in Paris. The communication was intercepted by the NSA/CIA and put into an official memo to the State Department. Now the DM will be pissed as hell and will make all sorts of accusations of 'USA imperialism' and 'racist corporate profiteering' at the United Nations. The undersecretary will have to buy the DM a new Mercedes to cool him down and get passed over for promotion until a new Secretary of the State Dept is appointed after the next election.
The only person who might be killed is the mistress/fashion model if she makes the mistake of going back to Bongo before the Deputy Minister gets his new Mercedes. Even then, she better allow the DM to indulge his special inclinations lest she find herself floating down the Bongo river, trying to catch up with her head.
-------- This is how diplomacy works and why all these cables have to be kept secret. Let's hope that the WikiLeaks people had the sense to make multiple copies and distributing them widely before announcing that they were going to post all this stuff!
" 'Medical devices should not be FedExed. They should be sent under a special service,' adds Siegel."
What a chickensh*t dick! He wants us to pay a HUGE price supplement for any shipment of anything marked 'medical equipment'. After all, he's not paying for it.
So instead of a shipment of a case of wooden tongue depressers being sent for $25 it will cost $350 because it is marked 'medical equipment'. You know this will happen.
If something is delicate or harmful_if_opened then just F*CKING mark it so when shipped. It doesn't matter if it's nuclear fuel rods or one-drop-kills-the-whole-block snake venom or whatever. Give it a 'special' tracking number. Mark the package in bright orange stickers written in English and Spanish "Don't open this package, nitwit! because you could die and take out the people around you also." Make sure that you don't lose it. You are a global shipping company: you're supposed to know what you're doing.
Warn people about the consequences about being stupid, and, having warned them, refuse to accept any responsibility for the bad things that happen when people ignore your warning.
By the way, if something is labeled -Dangerous!- -Hazard!- -Caution!- don't tell me that you're not to blame for messing with it because the label was in English and you only speak Spanish or whatever. Learn a few English words like 'caution' 'danger' 'warning'. It will serve you better than learning words like 'pussy' or 'Burger King'.
The Feds are just blowing smoke. They have far more important things that they should be doing, but aren't. They are just pandering to a few disabled people for votes. I seriously doubt that anyone in the ADA-enforcement business has the serious political pull to do anything more than make grandiose but vague announcements. Especially after the latest election. Tea partyers don't care whether or not disabled people have problems using the internet: nor would they be likely to sponsor legisation that inconvience anyone who might be a future campaign contributor, like big ISPs.
Put this one down to bureaucratic horseshit that just sparkles and dies when lit off.
No one is going to Mars: no one will ever walk there. Any announced Mars landing mission in the future will be quietly cancelled a few years after its announcement. There's not going to be any Apollo type mission to Mars.
Why do I say this?
Because the United States is broke. Not only is it broke but it is broken. Its financial system is paralyzed. The US government is too many trillions of dollars in debt. Whatever money that might have gone into a giant space project in the 20th century went instead into mortgauge fraud and pointless endless wars (that will be lost at great financial cost). The US economy is much more fragile than the government and news media is proclaiming it to be. There is no recovery, nor will there be, outside of the pronouncements of a cadre of paid-off economists and the accounting tricks of millions of government check-kiters.
There might be a project of a giant "Predator"-like drone that flys around in the Martian atmosphere, but I doubt it. Still the aerospace-NASA lobby can pull some strings and make a project like this happen. But there won't be many projects in space in the next 20-30 years. In 150-300 years, sure, who knows? But not in our lifetimes.
We haven't even begun to estimate the costs of the disruptions that will be caused by Peak Oil, Overpopulation, Global Warming, and fiscal collapse all happening at about the same time. My guess is that people will be so overwhelmed by the magnitude of these problems that any suggestion of massive space travel projects will be just laughed off.
Remember that it's easy to announce these massive space projects, and just as easy to quietly cancel them when no one but the Slashdaughters are paying attention.
No, seriously, think long term. Maybe in a 1000 years from now this will seem to be a good idea. But now and for the next 200 years, it's just fantasy-science fiction.
It isn't sinking in with the tech crowd here, but the United States is broke. We really don't have any money any more. There aren't going to be any great big new projects like there were in the 20th century.
All the technical advancement of the past 100 years has come from the ability to use ever-increasing amounts of cheap oil. And the amount of oil that we can cheaply pump out of the ground is reaching its peak. And there is no realistic energy source to replace it, cheaply.
Oh yeah, tell me about the upcoming research on hot fusion, cold fusion, 80% efficient solar cells, giant ocean wave turbines, lava heat exchangers, induced micro-earthquakes, whatever. But, research is one thing and getting any of these sources able to surplant cheap oil is something else.
There is no money to finance the huge capital expenditures needed to transform the energy systems from oil/coal to anything else. The banking system in the USA has imploded: and no one will talk about it.
In thirty years you will tell your children and grandchildren that long ago people could just jump into their cars and drive anywhere they wanted to, anytime that they wanted to. But they won't believe you. Because it will be far outside of their own life experience. Just like you don't believe that fifty years ago it was no big deal to bring your rifle with you on a commercial airplane trip when you went on a hunting vacation out west.
Anyway, there aren't going to be any giant floating cities in the future. There isn't any money to actually build them.
You want a glimpse of the real future? Visit Haiti. Corrupt, bankrupt, stupid, backward, crowded, loud, hopeless, and filled with lots of clueless rich people running around trying to help but doing nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad Now? Just wait 300 years! Apartments are going to be a B*I*T*C*H when Star Fleet United Federation of Planets moves into Sausalito.
There seems to be some element of confusion in the tech community about Apple's reason for existence. Many people seem to think that Apple is an entity like the force in Star Wars that will galvanize the tech community and resonate their hopes, dreams, and energy into a cornicopia of the coolest products on earth. And like the alchemist's stone, it will transform them as well.
Not quite right, I'm afraid. The sole reason for the existence of Apple Corporation is to transfer money from YOUR bank account to Steven Job's bank account and deliver to you in exchange, shiny trinkets. Remember the Indians selling Manhattan to Steve Jobs for $24 worth of Newtons? Do you really think that you're any different? It seemed like a good deal to them at the time.
Check out your iPhone. It's basically a really expensive plastic little hand-held telephone that glows in the dark. Check out your iPod. It's just a f**king Walkman. It blasts apart when you drop it. It pumps the same sound into your brain that you hear when you go to the mall or step into an elevator. For this you paid $200? No, you paid all that money to be part of the Tao of Steve. The trinkets are just your ID card into this cult.
What I'm trying to say is that if Apple were a serious company instead of a money-sucking vacuum cleaner, then they would have made the trinket nearly waterproof. Your $10 wristwatch is nearly waterproof; it doesn't stop working when you go out running in the rain. So why does your $300 iPhone have moisture sensors INSIDE it that void your warranty when it's in your pants pocket when you take a piss?
It's because neurotic obsessive/compulsive greedy twisted little shithead Steven Jobs demands that his 20,000 poodle engineers come up with ways to void the warranty instead of coming up with solutions to the issues that can cause the trinkets to stop functioning.
I can't believe that any self-respecting engineer would actually work for this guy.
How could this happen? I thought that the internet was more important than the government. Our internet; any government. Is this a cultural thing? Do Egyptian engineers always do whatever the government tells them to do without thinking ? Are they secretly Germans or Soviets? Even when they can see themselves that this particular government has reached its end?
Maybe it's my residual American chauvinism, but I just can't imagine any patriotic person anywhere blindly shutting his country totally off of the international computer network, Regardless of what any corrupt 82-year-old man tells them to do. I'd just hem and haw and techno-babble them blind about how it just couldn't be done.
I think that WE should protest this country's chickenshit engineers by refusing to let them back on the internet when they decide that they are rejoin civilization. And then start oscillating their currency in the international markets while they watch helplessly unable to do anything about it.
This is OUR internet. You just don't shut down part of it just because you feel like it. Every now and then we need to give the third world a taste of what real power is about (" a whiff of grapeshot" as the English used to say) so that they don't get a delusions of grandeur and think that they can get away with doing things like shutting down parts of the Internet.
The last radio transmission from the Challenger was the teacher asking " What's this button do?"
Put this bozo in prison for a LONG time. Gitmo his ass. He deserves it. We (the tech community) must clean up the spammers, hustlers, and criminals on the internet. If we don't (and no one else will or can do it) then no one will take us seriously and OUR vision of what the internet is supposed to be will be overruled by lawyers, global corporations, and their goon squads.
It is unlikely that this asshole actually has $360,000 to pay the fine. And he committed a serious wide-ranging crime of fraud. So, yes, put this jerk in jail for a long time. Or at least as long as the feds would put a college student in hard jail for selling a little bag of bud to another college student. Which is a long time.
In 1979, Rev. Jesse Jackson traveled to the Middle East to explore a possible connection between the Afro-American and Palestinean people. After the meeting, the Reverend was overheard saying to himself:
" been a long time since I said Yassir to anyone."
Sorry to imply that I mocking your vacation activies and memories. I simply wished to imply that I found the original poster a touch obsessive towards photography.
I've been many places, some boring and some more interesting. In the past 20 years, my city of a million people has hosted over 250000 people from other countries throughout the globe.
I don't 'go' anywhere anymore to be in a foreign country. I just sit at the bus stop and the world comes to me. The man on the end was a former South Vietnamese officer who sold guns and supplies to the Viet Cong and used the money to bring his family to the USA. The little Chinese woman sitting on the bench was a Red Guard when she was fifteen. Beating up her teachers for being 'capitalist running dogs' and giving too many pop Algebra quizes. The little girl by the newspaper stand is an Iraqi Christian whose entire family was blown up last year with a car bomb. Her mother's body absorbed all the shrapnel that would have killed her. The other woman on the bench is from a village in Central Mexico where live hasn't changed since before the Conquistadors. She doesn't speak English: or Spanish; only an ancient pre-Columbian Aztec language known only by people living within 50 km of the mountain that her village is on. How she got to 'El Norte', she doesn't remember.
There are three basic ways to get your personal electronics stolen by a person in uniform at a border crossing.
One is by a simple corrupt thug who uses the customs office as his own private little WalMart. These creatures are most commonly found in Africa and the outlying former Soviet republics. They resell your property for a profit. They can be bribed if the value of the bribe is equal to the amount of effort that it would take for them to resell your property locally.
Second is the paranoid secret policeman who thinks every foreigner is a spy. Found in fascist police states (like Burma and Belorus) and backward religious tribal areas (like Pakistan). Often will be satisfied with the destruction of the data if they comprehend the technology. Otherwise they just smash the equipment so no one can use it.
Third is the clueless corporate 'security personel' found in the USA mostly. Given a wide mandate, nearly unlimited violence authorization, and extremely vague guidelines about what to actually be looking out for, they are very arbitrary in what they conficate. They never destroy or resell what they take, and would never consider themselves thieves, only employees. They can best be thrwarted by having a senior corporate-executive set of clothes and personal appearance. Having a corporate logo on your media and equipment (not a brand name, but a marker that shows that the item is corporate property, not personal) often offers good protection. People in the USA are very hesitant to confront anyone whom they preceive as being a corporate superior to them, even when they have broad but poorly defined ability to do so.
So yes you are right about the USA, but I was referring primarily to the African model in my scenario. I had assumed that you would have been aware of that also. I don't need you to remind me about the stupid Americans, (nor do I need your assuming that I am one of them).
Thank you.
Calling complete strangers annoying in print, mocking their creativity, their intoxicational preference and then telling them to "fuck off" is neither polite behaviour nor the path to a long and healthy life, amigo.
'Subtitle Sunglasses' refers to an exciting and innovative user-interface concept for an essential technology whose elements are just now beginning to come into focus. 'Subtitle Sunglasses', when they arrive, will combine nanoengineering, bio-motion power generation, molecular electronic circuitry, Sapir/Chomsky proto-linguistic theory, independent-speaker speech recognition, 'heads up' bio-luminiscent microdisplays into such a world-changing technology that will make image storage questions look as primitive as toroid-donut-based RAM memory does today.
Today's currency is not dollars or Euros, it's creative ideas. I give you a fantastic idea for free and the best that you can offer in return is a hearty "fuck off"?
I suggest, honored sir, that you are in the wrong industry. Might I suggest getting a few more tattoos and becoming a excrement-scraper at the elephant house at your citie's zoo?
Might I suggest... not taking so many pictures and just enjoy your vacation. And don't concern yourself about the best technological solution for storing your images. Whatever technical solution you come up with will be both obsolete within a decade (endangering the ability to retrieve your images), and expensive, and easily lost (or more likely) stolen in a backward third-world country, or held for ransom by customs (or border security) {"Senor, because of the possibility that you have photographed secret sensitive military installations, even inadvertently, we must view all 10000 of the photos on your laptop hard disk. It is too bad that you will miss your plane connection. However, for $300, we can make a copy of your hard disk and send you an e-mail if we find any photos that you should remove, and, of course, you will not miss your plane connection. A wonderful deal for you, senor"}
Ain't I just an insensitive racist jerk?! Nobody in the real-world would ever act like that! Just another stupid paranoid American buffoon who is too stupid and too scared to travel farther than Disneyland!!
You have the best memory and image storage system between your ears. Are you going to look at a thousand pictures of Mexico next year? Or are you just going to go someplace else? Or (heaven forbid) are you planning to sit friends and family down and make them view with you a thousand photos of your vacation?
Don't take a camera or laptop with you on vacation!!! It negates the whole idea of 'vacation'. The only technical thing that you should take on vacation is a good pair of 'subtitle sunglasses'. These are glasses that you wear when you are in a place where noone speaks your language. The tiny microphone in the frames and the nanotechnology-based AI computer chips also in the frame analyse the words that are spoken to you, translate them into English, and project them onto the insides of your glasses where you see them like old-fashioned 'subtitles' in foreign movies. Cool as hell, and very useful while traveling. Unfortunately they don't exist yet and probably won't for another fifty years.
Marin crosses the line in legislating psuedo-science into an active ordinance. I hear the anti_smart-meter people present their case on KBOO (www.kboo.fm) radio, the world-class alternative radio station out of southeast Portland Oregon USA. They're well-intentioned and enthusiastic, but they really seem a little touched with the ol'hippy paranoia 'all science is evil' herb-induced vibe.
Marin is a strange place. I've visited there many times and it seems normal and well-ordered, but it has a true bizarre historical undercurrent that goes back a hundred years (even before all the rich hippies moved there in the 1970s). It's =almost= the kind of place that would pass a law forcing the sun to rise in the West in order to get a great morning sunrise for the folks living in Stinson Beach. It is exactly the kind of place that people would ban a technology that they don't quite understand and doesn't appear to do anything to make them younger and more beautiful and more hip (and more rich). They are exactly the kind of people who would consider a piece of equipment from the power company ('a rather déclassé institution run by drab ordinary pedestrian types, not-our-sort-of-globally-aware-organic-people', dahrling) that emits radio signals from their home-lifespace to be an evil intrusion. If it's not spying on you for the Republicans, then it's trying to keep track of how much electricity is being diverted from your hot tub to the grow lights in your secret garden.
Marin has probably changed a lot since "The Serial" was published in the late 1970s, but it's the kind of place where the people pay a lot of money and a lot of karmic energy to make sure that it doesn't change all that much. Still they have crossed the line on this one issue.
Personally, I'd love to live in Marin. The MILFs are as gorgeous as the models. It's the 'coolest' place on earth. The grass is greener and everything's always groovy, no matter how stupid and ugly the rest of the world becomes. But I'm a little too ugly and a little to poor to be accepted as one of the 'golden cloud people' north of the Golden Gate.
What difference does it make if ghosts are real or not? Even if they were real, they can't do anything because they're dead. Maybe a few dead spirits have a way of triggering a mirage or hologram in our minds using a resonant reflection of their previous life force energy. So what. Even if it did exist for one in a million formerly living people, it doesn't matter. It would be just an image, it's not real.
Ghosts of dead people aren't going to help you pay this month's rent, find you a place to park, or change the stinky baby diapers for you. Dead people wouldn't care about any of the things that are important to living people.
Why would they? They're dead. Nothing matters to them. They can't shoot you, rape you, or knock your teeth out. All they can do, at their very baddest, is just sort-of make a semi-illusionary quasi-image in the dark night. So what.
Ghosts are not important because they're powerless because they're dead.
Now vampires, on the other hand....
We created this problem when we created the web. It is our ('our' being us the people who make their living building and maintaining the web) responsibility to solve it. We can't just tell people to monitor the arcane technical details over what is basically an issue of massive amounts of unpunished fraud crime. If left unchecked, the criminals will just get better and better technology.
We have to decide several things: one, we have to accept that law enforcement can not deal with this because they don't have the time and resources. So, it is our responsibility. Two, we have to decide what we are going to do about it. In other words, what will be effective in stopping this activity. Three: we have to do it. Which means we have to be cruel to people. Ordinary people who are just trying to make a sleazy buck. Cruel like in violence, because violence is the only way to enforce the law when the traditional law-enforcement mechanism can't respond.
I suggest private sting operations. We set up or let it be known that we will set up phishing sites for people, and then apply violence to anyone who pays us money to do it. People will stop buying phishing site product.
One big problem with this is the possibility that large criminal organizations will demand that we run the entrapment phishing sites for them. Being large criminal organizations, they have the resources of violence to make us do this. But then we can offer these people to traditional law enforcement. One more day in the 'system of power', as the Mafia calls it.
But we should take care of this problem. Otherwise we can't claim that there is any real benefit to the citizens in using the internet that we have so painstakingly created.
With respect, these arguments above all miss the point that not just one system (i.e. my car, my house, my transportation situation) will be affected by a peak-oil rise in energy prices. Rather, all systems will be affected and they will cascade into an entropy of economic breakdown. It will, of course, happen at different rates for different people. But the economic dislocations caused by $150/$200 a barrel oil will filter through the entire economy making it impossible to sustain a 50-mile-a-day commute to an $65,000 a year job. At a sustained level of $150 a barrel oil, it will take about ten years to knock out the upper-middle class technological -based economy that most Slashdaughters either live in or aspire to. But it will happen much sooner for most everyone else.
What do you mean by file? If you are refering to an executable program, then I can still run a Draw Poker program from the mid-1980s for the original IBM-PC. It needs an auxiliary program that configures my 2 GigaHertz/2 Gigabyte DRAM Dell to be a mid-1980s IBM-PC with EGA-level video. And I can still run a 1988-era PCB layout program ORCAD ver 2, but not the Schematic Capture section with the XT emulator.
I can still load BASIC programs for the Radio Shack MC-10 micro color computer (the 'Alice') using a cassette tape recorder or an MC10-emulator for the PC. This is the version of BASIC that Bill Gates personally wrote for Radio Shack before Microsoft got the contract to supply DOS for the IBM-PC.
For important stuff, well yes, I do upgrade to new media often. For example, in 1964, I mowed two lawns for $0.50 each and bought The Beatles "Hard Day's Night/I Should Have Known Better" single (the yellow/orange spiral Capitol 45RPM one) for 78 cents. In 1969, I bought the Apple/Capital album version with the two songs. In 1978, I got the reissue on vinyl, and in 1988 the CD version came out. I borrowed it from the library and recorded it onto hi-fi Metal 90 minute cassette. In 1999, I downloaded the new CD ripper/MP3 program and made a 128KBPS digital file of the song pair. And last month, I found the 2009 re-release of the songs in stereo and used ExactAudioCopy program to make a 256KBPS copy.
In my humble opinion, not shared by the legal establishment, I bought a lifetime license to copy the songs for my personal use when I put the three quarters and three pennies on the counter back in 1964. In the ensuing decades, the media and reproduction cost has gone down incredibly. The $0.78 in 1964 dollars is about $5.00 today for two songs. The album was $3.90 in 1969 dollars, about $15 today for 11 songs. The 1979 reissue was about $6.50, about $15 today for 25 songs. The cassette was about $3 for about 30 songs. The 1999 blank CD was $2 for about 200 songs. And the DVD-ROM I used recently was $0.15 for about 1500 songs.
Progress in media storage, if not musical quality.
These guys are crazy. They live in a ultra-high-tech fantasy bubble world. In the real world, where we all must live, there will be either little difference between 2015 and now (if we're lucky) or things will be a lot worse for some of us and a little worse for most of us.
Technological advancement is peaking. The 20th century, the era-when-everything-happened is over. It was an aberation caused by huge amounts of cheap petroleum energy. With cheap oil depleting, the huge technology positive-feedback loop slows and stops.
Plus there isn't any money. The banking system is fundamentally broken, nobody trusts that due-process rule-of-law applies to the financial sector anymore. And one-by-one all the industries in the USA are going down like the housing industry in a chain reaction. Government will frozen and powerless to do anything to stop it from happening.
The 20th century was the era of focused positive-feedback technological advancement. The 21st century is the era of entropy; things falling apart; the center can not hold.
I want free stuff so I take free stuff. I walk next door to the library with my laptop. I plug it in at the wired table (they're all wired for 120V). I go to the shelf and pick up an interesting looking DVD or CD. I plug it into my laptop's DVD-RW and just make a copy of it right there. I read magazines and newspapers while the disk is being copied. Or write some code. Then I go home. Or if it is seriously cold weather, I linger in the heated public library and copy another DVD. Instead of rushing home to my barely-heated cold apartment.
The RIAA/MPAA/CIA doesn't fuck with me. They don't even see me. I don't announce that I'm putting "their" stuff on the web for download. I don't make a big deal about the fact that the RIAA/MPAA stole the public domain and that we are quietly stealing it back from them. I don't give a fuck about whatever they claim the law is. The so-called copyright law only exists because they paid off politicians to pass the so-called law exactly as they wrote it. I ignore it, so do you. Neither of us pay for anything, nor is it likely that we ever will again. They know this. They don't care. They realize that there isn't anything that they can do to get any money whatsoever from me and people like me. Like you. All they are interested in is making product, selling product (to people who are still willing and able to actually give them money for the product), driving beamers, shorting coke, escorting prime T&A to the A-list Hollywood parties, and stick their dicks into this prime T&A afterwards. People like you and me are not on the list of things that they are interested in.
There was a time around 2001 when the RIAA/MPAA/CIA thought that they were going to take on the librarians. They were misinformed. We set them straight. Now they don't care about us. We have a simple deal with them: each major city and suburban library buys one to ten copies of every piece of shit product that they produce. People (smart people that is, who actually use public libraries) get to take the product home for free if they agree to bring it back in a week or two.
Whether they read it, copy it, or ignore it is no one's concern. It's the same basic deal that has been in place since Ben Franklin put it in place 250 years ago.
It works, and you should work with it. Forget about web distribution and so-called piracy or even freedom of information. It just provokes them to be stupid. And with all that coke floating around in their heads, they can be really mean and stupid. You join the civilized world when you realized that, individually, you have transcended the assholes.
I just spent ten weeks working in the Oregon State Unemployment Office helping people navigate the information-collecting computer system that everyone must use in order to get unemployment checks. Since the local economy is dissolving like a sugar cube in a cup of hot tea, this is applying to just about everybody here.
The morons who run the department thought that it would be a good idea to force everyone to fill out a very long ten+-page summary of their work history, skills level, and personal financial situation. Then it would try to match potential jobs to potential employees. This might work in Sweden or Singapore, but it sure messes up big time here.
Roughly 20 percent of the people have NEVER used a computer before. They don't know a mouse from a house. They wouldn't know a password from a hole in the ground. This system not only required elaborate passwords, but required changing the password if user (a contradictory term since it refers to all the people who have never used PCs before) to change their password if they forgot their previous one or their user name. Since the state assigns user names to begin with, this applied to just about everyone except people who work in IT and are used to all this kind of horseshit.
I've come away from this experience realizing that programmers ALWAYS write their user interface for people who are just one step below them in the IT industry skills-level hierarchy. They do this unconsciously because they never deal with people who don't ever use PCs. When dealing with the general public and there is a question of making a user interface easy-to-use or 'safe' at Defense_Department_Atom_Bomb_Launch_Codes, for F*ucks sake, go with easy-to-use. Rely on a separate level of human-confirmation for general security.
ALWAYS let people chose their own password and user-name!!! Don't tell them that it has to be n characters with x letters and digits. This will always fail. And when it fails, you fail to do your job well. Spare me the horseshit about security. Passwords are just a 1960s exercise in 'security through obscurantism', which doesn't work now because there are programs that can blast through millions of potential passwords quickly, and because people will always always ALWAYS forget any password that you force them to use and might might MIGHT remember a password that they have chosen for themselves. If Joe Blow wants 'joe' to be his username and 'blow' to be his password, then that's what he wants. He doesn't want you to tell him that he can't do this. So don't do it.
Don't use case-sensitivity for anything, anytime. You're dealing with people who don't understand the concept. You aren't going to get the concept through to them anyway. Do yourself a favor: do the world a favor: don't use case-sensitivity for anything ever. (Ever see Japanese characters differentiated between upper and lower case? Wanna try to explain the concept the concept of case-sensitivity to someone who looks at a keyboard and sees Western language letters already in capitals and they only read Chinese, Thai, or Russian?) It deserves repeating: Do yourself a favor: do the world a favor: don't use case-sensitivity for anything ever!
Get over your PC security hangup! Most websites don't NEED any user accounts passwords, etc... It just doesn't f*ucking matter! Most commercial websites are just trying to use registration for spamming and advert hussling anyway because some 95 IQ shit-for-brains Marketing-major web designer was told by his 95 IQ shit-for-brains Marketing-class college instructor that this was a good idea for 21st-century business.
Trust me: it's not. Don't do it. Expand your mind. Trust your intuition. Stay out of shopping malls and don't watch television advertisements. May the force be with you because the farce is on top of your ass always.
I work in the Employment office in Gresham, Oregon USA. I help people use computers. In order to get unemployment checks in Oregon, all applicants have to complete this long questionaire on a PC about their occupational skills, work history, and personal status. People can do this on-line or come into our 'worksource center' and use the computers that we have here. And I'm supposed to help them. (I get minimum wage for this and no benefits. Nnot that that is important. I just want you to know that I'm not a highly paid government employee)
The information is supposed to match the unemployed with the jobs that all the companies in Oregon have available.
Not a bad concept except for two things. There are no jobs, and, about half of the people coming through the process can't use computers. And about 15-20% of the people can't speak english and have never, ever, ever used a computer before. I am not bullshitting you about this. It seems like a fantasy to highly-educated young Slashdaughters like yourself, but I assure you that this is the case in the lower-middle class neighborhoods of the USA (and probably the rest of the world as well).
So I get a lot of people who have never typed on a keyboard before. And they get put in front of a keyboard that was designed for advanced professional word-processing business typists of the early 1980's era. A lot of them must feel like they've been abducted by space aliens, especially the ones who have come from pre-industrial cultures and have been doing 'under the table' unskilled construction labor or fruit picking.
I would greatly help if there were only half of the keys on the PC keyboard that there are presently. And get rid of the fucking Num-lock key and the stupid Caps-Lock key!
Please.
I'm not kidding about this. Just do it.
The columnist who writes for Asia Times On-line (www.atimes.com) under the name Spengler foresaw this situation last year. He noted that 95+% off the software that was being used in Iran was 'pirate-ware' from the West. He noted that there was an Iranian government-run file download site that held hundreds of popular Western software packages along with their kraks, passwords, and keygens. He predicted that this would allow viruses to run amok throughout Iran at some point in the future.
He also quotes a BBC reporter who states that almost nobody except government officials and their goon squads (and old ladies, of course) still believes in fundamental Islam in Iran. She (the BBC reporter) says that only about 2% of the population regularly go to Friday services at the mosques in Iran. And over 5% of Iranians are addicted to cheap Afghanistan heroin, the highest addiction rate in the world. Unemployment among the young is in reality over 50%. She says that Iran currently resembles the Soviet Union in the late 1980's; it's a country that will just fall apart in the next ten years if the rest of the world just leaves them alone and lets it happen.
At the time of the revolution in 1978, Iran's population was about 27 million (I remember the number quoted as 50 million at the time) and now it is over 70 million: a direct result of Khomeini's exortation for young people to -'get a-fuckin'- (in a manner of speaking) and make lots of babies. When Khomeini died that policy died also, and Iran launched a massive birth-control program. Now, the children of the revolution are having almost no babies and the birth-rate in Iran is 1.6 children per couple; one of the lowest in the world. But their remains this huge bulge in the population demographic there; all the people born in the 1980's.
They call themselves 'the burnt generation'.
If any of this is true then we shouldn't worry too much about Iran. We should never actually believe anything that they say. And we should, on an individual-to-individual basis, offer whatever assistance that we can. Nevertheless, I would recommend NOT offering any detailed technical assistance to people in Iran on any specific technological project over the web until the Iranian government stops all this 'Death To America' nonsense as offical government policy.
Thank you.
When the US State Department classifies a cable as secret, it's usually because of some situation that will embarrass the pants off of someone there.
Let' look at a typical situation that results in a 'classified secret' set of missives:
The US undersecretary of African Affairs refers to the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of the People's Democratic Republic of Bongo as a 'retarded monkey' because he stole half of the $150 million NGO grant for an egg farm and deposited it directly into his Swiss bank account without first wiring it through the Cayman Islands like the undersecretary told him to do. Now the transaction is transparent and the undersecretary won't get his $155,000 consultancy fee from the hedge fund firm that his Yale frat brother runs down there that was supposed to handle the transaction in the first place.
The situation is compounded by the fact that the US undersecretary and the Bongoian Deputy Minister are sharing a mistress who is a top fashion model. The undersecretary made the remark about the DM to his mistress in bed and she texted it to her sister in Paris. The communication was intercepted by the NSA/CIA and put into an official memo to the State Department. Now the DM will be pissed as hell and will make all sorts of accusations of 'USA imperialism' and 'racist corporate profiteering' at the United Nations. The undersecretary will have to buy the DM a new Mercedes to cool him down and get passed over for promotion until a new Secretary of the State Dept is appointed after the next election.
The only person who might be killed is the mistress/fashion model if she makes the mistake of going back to Bongo before the Deputy Minister gets his new Mercedes. Even then, she better allow the DM to indulge his special inclinations lest she find herself floating down the Bongo river, trying to catch up with her head.
-------- This is how diplomacy works and why all these cables have to be kept secret. Let's hope that the WikiLeaks people had the sense to make multiple copies and distributing them widely before announcing that they were going to post all this stuff!
" 'Medical devices should not be FedExed. They should be sent under a special service,' adds Siegel."
What a chickensh*t dick! He wants us to pay a HUGE price supplement for any shipment of anything marked 'medical equipment'. After all, he's not paying for it.
So instead of a shipment of a case of wooden tongue depressers being sent for $25 it will cost $350 because it is marked 'medical equipment'. You know this will happen.
If something is delicate or harmful_if_opened then just F*CKING mark it so when shipped. It doesn't matter if it's nuclear fuel rods or one-drop-kills-the-whole-block snake venom or whatever. Give it a 'special' tracking number. Mark the package in bright orange stickers written in English and Spanish "Don't open this package, nitwit! because you could die and take out the people around you also." Make sure that you don't lose it. You are a global shipping company: you're supposed to know what you're doing.
Warn people about the consequences about being stupid, and, having warned them, refuse to accept any responsibility for the bad things that happen when people ignore your warning.
By the way, if something is labeled -Dangerous!- -Hazard!- -Caution!- don't tell me that you're not to blame for messing with it because the label was in English and you only speak Spanish or whatever. Learn a few English words like 'caution' 'danger' 'warning'. It will serve you better than learning words like 'pussy' or 'Burger King'.
The Feds are just blowing smoke. They have far more important things that they should be doing, but aren't. They are just pandering to a few disabled people for votes. I seriously doubt that anyone in the ADA-enforcement business has the serious political pull to do anything more than make grandiose but vague announcements. Especially after the latest election. Tea partyers don't care whether or not disabled people have problems using the internet: nor would they be likely to sponsor legisation that inconvience anyone who might be a future campaign contributor, like big ISPs.
Put this one down to bureaucratic horseshit that just sparkles and dies when lit off.
No one is going to Mars: no one will ever walk there. Any announced Mars landing mission in the future will be quietly cancelled a few years after its announcement. There's not going to be any Apollo type mission to Mars.
Why do I say this?
Because the United States is broke. Not only is it broke but it is broken. Its financial system is paralyzed. The US government is too many trillions of dollars in debt. Whatever money that might have gone into a giant space project in the 20th century went instead into mortgauge fraud and pointless endless wars (that will be lost at great financial cost). The US economy is much more fragile than the government and news media is proclaiming it to be. There is no recovery, nor will there be, outside of the pronouncements of a cadre of paid-off economists and the accounting tricks of millions of government check-kiters.
There might be a project of a giant "Predator"-like drone that flys around in the Martian atmosphere, but I doubt it. Still the aerospace-NASA lobby can pull some strings and make a project like this happen. But there won't be many projects in space in the next 20-30 years. In 150-300 years, sure, who knows? But not in our lifetimes.
We haven't even begun to estimate the costs of the disruptions that will be caused by Peak Oil, Overpopulation, Global Warming, and fiscal collapse all happening at about the same time. My guess is that people will be so overwhelmed by the magnitude of these problems that any suggestion of massive space travel projects will be just laughed off.
Remember that it's easy to announce these massive space projects, and just as easy to quietly cancel them when no one but the Slashdaughters are paying attention.
No, seriously, think long term. Maybe in a 1000 years from now this will seem to be a good idea. But now and for the next 200 years, it's just fantasy-science fiction.
It isn't sinking in with the tech crowd here, but the United States is broke. We really don't have any money any more. There aren't going to be any great big new projects like there were in the 20th century.
All the technical advancement of the past 100 years has come from the ability to use ever-increasing amounts of cheap oil. And the amount of oil that we can cheaply pump out of the ground is reaching its peak. And there is no realistic energy source to replace it, cheaply.
Oh yeah, tell me about the upcoming research on hot fusion, cold fusion, 80% efficient solar cells, giant ocean wave turbines, lava heat exchangers, induced micro-earthquakes, whatever. But, research is one thing and getting any of these sources able to surplant cheap oil is something else.
There is no money to finance the huge capital expenditures needed to transform the energy systems from oil/coal to anything else. The banking system in the USA has imploded: and no one will talk about it.
In thirty years you will tell your children and grandchildren that long ago people could just jump into their cars and drive anywhere they wanted to, anytime that they wanted to. But they won't believe you. Because it will be far outside of their own life experience. Just like you don't believe that fifty years ago it was no big deal to bring your rifle with you on a commercial airplane trip when you went on a hunting vacation out west.
Anyway, there aren't going to be any giant floating cities in the future. There isn't any money to actually build them.
You want a glimpse of the real future? Visit Haiti. Corrupt, bankrupt, stupid, backward, crowded, loud, hopeless, and filled with lots of clueless rich people running around trying to help but doing nothing.