While working at walgreens corporate, i was once asked to clean desks with paper towels and windex... for $68/hr.
I always tell my IT employers, like it's a joke or something, that for the amount of money they're paying me, if they want me to sweep the corridor, I'll sweep the corridor. And I'd do it too.
I wouldn't care that they hired me to system test their fabby new app (or crappy old app even). I really wouldn't. Cleaning's way easier work for the money and you get nice pine-fresh scent at the end of it. You only get that in software engineering if you die coding on the toilet.
All I'm saying is that there's a market for content, all across the world, that TV companies could be accessing directly rather than dealing with publishers, Sony/Philips licensing, Virgin Megastores, and all the other guys who exist to capitalise on other people's creativity.
I'd only advocate sharing without paying for it in the case, like you say, where you can't pay for the content.
But, when you can, you should. Your mum taught you better;)
But don't kid yourself - as a pirate, you are violating copyright laws and contributing to the decline of quility programming on TV. Less cash from the customers = less output, plain and simple
And the only reason people do this is a combination of impatience and television companies not developing the technology to deliver advertisment-free programs via the internet on a per-episode basis for a small ($1/episode or so) fee.
When people do things like this, then TV companies shouldn't be spending their time bitching and whining about copyright and spending their money on lawyers. They should be working out ways to screw money out of folks to allow the consumers to do what they're going to do anyway.
Doing some sums (and wouldn't it be nice if someone checked them - don't trust me to remember where the decimal point goes...):
1 kg of iron going at 2/3 * c has 2E16J of kinetic energy (about 4.8 megatons of TNT) and will take approx 2s (1.925s by my calculation) to cover the distance from the Moon to Earth. Most 'battlefield' nuclear weapons are about 25 kilotons, so you'd probably only need a mass of about 0.5g (plus whatever you expect to burn up in the atmosphere) to enable a very, very capable artillery battery.
Nuclear reactor + big-ass capacitors + -155 deg C in the shade = superconducting electromagnetic projectile launcher capable of taking out cities. 4-minute warning?! Bwahahahahaha!
Rail guns. Low gravity makes shooting them up (then back down) the well pretty feasible. And you can build them pretty much as big as you like with less structural support needed in the moon's low gravity. And if you want superconductivity then you just dig a big pit and stick it in the shade at the bottom (approx 118K out of the sun, or -155 deg C).
And you won't be waiting 3 days for the projectile to hit its target either...
In the UK we've got Shazam for our mobile phones, and it's pretty cool. You're in a club and you want to know what's playing? Phone 2580 and hold up your phone, Shazam takes a sample and matches it up to one in it's database. Then Shazam sends you an SMS message with Artist, Track Info, etc. It's damn good and it can ID remixes, covers, EPs, etc. It costs 50p a shot (about 80 in USian) a song and you can register at their website to keep a list of the songs you tag for later copyright theft.
Don't you have this in the US? Or is there no demand to ID banjo music, songs about truck drivers and the long lonely highway, or teeny skate-punk pop rock?
the USA has agreed to prevent the Brits from sending any more beagles.
Eh?! The USians are going to tell us to stop deploying invasive surveillance devices? But we've only just got warmed up bugging the NWO^H^H^HUN and now we're supposed to just stop?
5. Who do you think would win in a fight - Dracula or Wolfman?
Gah! It's Dracula every time! There is no contest. Drac's a classy multi-centenarian with all the moves and Wolfie's a slobbering, mangy, flea-bitten sheep-worrier. Even Buffy couldn't knock off Big D all the way.
And supposing Wolfie managed to rip Drac's head clean off, Igor would come along with a few drops of virgin's blood and it's *ding* *ding* Round Two.
Now Dracula vs. Jean-Luc Picard... that'll be a fight worth watching.
It's not wise to put strong encryption capabilities in the hands of any Islamic nation.
What? Because the dumb towelheads can't write crypto programs themselves? They can't understand our funny western mathematical squiggles? They can't count if it doesn't look like camels?
Can I have a toke of whatever you're having, please?
The only reason there wasn't strong encryption in place is because Saddam and his goonsquad would torture you if they couldn't read your email. Not because there's no Iraqis capable of programming.
The computer users in Iraq will be perfectly capable of implementing their own encryption systems if they want to - with any strength keys they care to use. Just like anyone in the world is if they're not lazy, can crack open a few books, and have access to a processor.
Generally the only reason to go to war is that, at state level, someone does a cost/benefit analysis of murdering a bunch of folk and, if the sums work out right, they do it. So the economics of the situation are the only thing that's keeping anyone from going to war: they'd lose too much if they did.
What this reminds me of is how the Feds are made to work in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash: the first ones in in the morning take the desks nearest the door and management can tell at a glance who's the most dedicated to the job.
I think this is the plan. Instead of management having to understand what their business does, they just assume the drones are substitutable or know what they're doing as much as anyone else and then hire or fire them based on how much they're willing to surrender of themselve to acheive the corporate "vision". Whatever that is today.
It's a fairly inevitable outcome of seeing employees as commodities or resources. How else can you discriminate between them? It's not as if management are going to bother learning their names for God's sake!
Oh, Jiminy this is funny. I mean every other country on Earth rejected facism 60 years ago and now the US of A is catching up big time. they seem to be determined not to learn from everybody else's mistakes. The best thing is they're not just doing it in politics, they're going for it in a corporate way too.
I used to tell folks who said Americans were too fucking dumb to remember to breath that they were wrong: just look, I said, a whole continent - good air in, bad air out. They can do it. You're wrong I said. And just promoting prejudice, I said.
Do you think I say that now?
Seriously, I don't think you realise exactly how fucked your country is. Not by a looooong fucking way.
But for those of you who don't know, Heinlein was a master Science Fiction writer
Only if you consider incest cutting edge sci-fi. He was a bit of a perv, let's face facts. The whole Lazarus Long thing was a convoluted Oedipus complex he was working through. And forcing his readers to work through with him. Yeeeurgh.
And the Starship Troopers movie was way better than the book (if only for Paul Verhoven's blatant anti-Nazi subtext). The book was one self-centred whine to another.
Don't put quotes around free when you're talking about the world outside the USA. That state stopped being an experiment in democracy quite a while ago. It's more an experiment in what your particular specialist interest can get away with these days (from the outside, anyway).
I live in Glasgow and we have CCTV cameras throughout the city centre (and quite a bit beyond), checking on us all the time and making us think harder about behaving nicely. If I could see what the folks monitoring the systems could see, I'd be a lot happier about the surveillance.
Making all the CCTVs in a city centre webcams is the answer to "Who watches the watchers?" We do. If the naughty guard is zooming in on the booty shots or looking in folks windows we can check the time, report it directly, and get them the disciplining they need. It'd be a balance to the one-sided oppressive feeling the current systems engender. I wouldn't need any sort of control over where they were pointed, just being able to check out (whenever I felt like it) what they were watching would be good enough for me.
It'd bring folks back to the city centre here, too. When they realise how boring it is these days. And they can see the lack of anything happening from the comfort of their desk.
There was a heck of a lot less stress and a lot more free time for hobbies in the hunter and gather societies.
Just as long as you think the constant struggle to find food, making war on neighbouring tribes to control the land, making your own clothes, and eradicating parasitic infections are hobbies.
Hobbies?! The concept didn't even exist in the caveman days! Hobbies are slack in our system, overcapacity expressed as recreation. In those days overcapacity meant you had food to eat all week. Make a hobby out of that!
1. Completely ignore your children, get drunk doing the stuff you like to do, and let them entertain themselves; 2. Let them have guns; 3. When they kill folks, sue the games/movies/TV/rock bands for turning their little angels (as if the parents knew what their progeny were actually like...) into callous murdering bastards; 4. PROFIT!!!
... and that's the business model. I honestly don't see a future where anyone gets charged for the BBC, except the UK taxpayers. And I don't really want that to change, as that would make the BBC into just another commercial broadcaster, deciding its programming based on commercial criteria in the long run.
The BBC isn't (and never was) just for UK residents. It's always had a mandate to bring culture (as opposed to ignorance) to everyone in the world. Yeah, the Beeb has priorities, and maybe they'll throttle the bandwidth to non-UK clients, but charging? Nah. And as a license payer I wouldn't want them to.
While this idea might generate quite a bit of funding from the developed nations, it'd also block access from the developing nations, and it's the developing nations that would need this stuff the most. It's not just Blackadder and Dr. Who, there's a ton of educational material in the archives, including the Open University, that should be free to anyone with an internet connection (and a lot of patience).
If it's anywhere, it's in the understanding that life, and the way people live their lives, is not there to provide you with a moral at the end of the story.
I think this is a stupid comment, why would anybody be less likely to risk their life just because of their potential logevity? Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?
Uh, yeah they are. Check out Liberia, Ethiopea, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Afghanistan,...
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While working at walgreens corporate, i was once asked to clean desks with paper towels and windex... for $68/hr.
I always tell my IT employers, like it's a joke or something, that for the amount of money they're paying me, if they want me to sweep the corridor, I'll sweep the corridor. And I'd do it too.
I wouldn't care that they hired me to system test their fabby new app (or crappy old app even). I really wouldn't. Cleaning's way easier work for the money and you get nice pine-fresh scent at the end of it. You only get that in software engineering if you die coding on the toilet.
Yeah, that sting's just pride fuckin' wit ya.
All I'm saying is that there's a market for content, all across the world, that TV companies could be accessing directly rather than dealing with publishers, Sony/Philips licensing, Virgin Megastores, and all the other guys who exist to capitalise on other people's creativity.
;)
I'd only advocate sharing without paying for it in the case, like you say, where you can't pay for the content.
But, when you can, you should. Your mum taught you better
But don't kid yourself - as a pirate, you are violating copyright laws and contributing to the decline of quility programming on TV. Less cash from the customers = less output, plain and simple
And the only reason people do this is a combination of impatience and television companies not developing the technology to deliver advertisment-free programs via the internet on a per-episode basis for a small ($1/episode or so) fee.
When people do things like this, then TV companies shouldn't be spending their time bitching and whining about copyright and spending their money on lawyers. They should be working out ways to screw money out of folks to allow the consumers to do what they're going to do anyway.
It's called marketing.
Doing some sums (and wouldn't it be nice if someone checked them - don't trust me to remember where the decimal point goes...):
1 kg of iron going at 2/3 * c has 2E16J of kinetic energy (about 4.8 megatons of TNT) and will take approx 2s (1.925s by my calculation) to cover the distance from the Moon to Earth. Most 'battlefield' nuclear weapons are about 25 kilotons, so you'd probably only need a mass of about 0.5g (plus whatever you expect to burn up in the atmosphere) to enable a very, very capable artillery battery.
Nuclear reactor + big-ass capacitors + -155 deg C in the shade = superconducting electromagnetic projectile launcher capable of taking out cities. 4-minute warning?! Bwahahahahaha!
How does the moon have military value?
Rail guns. Low gravity makes shooting them up (then back down) the well pretty feasible. And you can build them pretty much as big as you like with less structural support needed in the moon's low gravity. And if you want superconductivity then you just dig a big pit and stick it in the shade at the bottom (approx 118K out of the sun, or -155 deg C).
And you won't be waiting 3 days for the projectile to hit its target either...
In the UK we've got Shazam for our mobile phones, and it's pretty cool. You're in a club and you want to know what's playing? Phone 2580 and hold up your phone, Shazam takes a sample and matches it up to one in it's database. Then Shazam sends you an SMS message with Artist, Track Info, etc. It's damn good and it can ID remixes, covers, EPs, etc. It costs 50p a shot (about 80 in USian) a song and you can register at their website to keep a list of the songs you tag for later copyright theft.
Don't you have this in the US? Or is there no demand to ID banjo music, songs about truck drivers and the long lonely highway, or teeny skate-punk pop rock?
the USA has agreed to prevent the Brits from sending any more beagles.
Eh?! The USians are going to tell us to stop deploying invasive surveillance devices? But we've only just got warmed up bugging the NWO^H^H^HUN and now we're supposed to just stop?
Jeez, you use us and then you break our hearts...
5. Who do you think would win in a fight - Dracula or Wolfman?
Gah! It's Dracula every time! There is no contest. Drac's a classy multi-centenarian with all the moves and Wolfie's a slobbering, mangy, flea-bitten sheep-worrier. Even Buffy couldn't knock off Big D all the way.
And supposing Wolfie managed to rip Drac's head clean off, Igor would come along with a few drops of virgin's blood and it's *ding* *ding* Round Two.
Now Dracula vs. Jean-Luc Picard... that'll be a fight worth watching.
It's not wise to put strong encryption capabilities in the hands of any Islamic nation.
What? Because the dumb towelheads can't write crypto programs themselves? They can't understand our funny western mathematical squiggles? They can't count if it doesn't look like camels?
Can I have a toke of whatever you're having, please?
The only reason there wasn't strong encryption in place is because Saddam and his goonsquad would torture you if they couldn't read your email. Not because there's no Iraqis capable of programming.
The computer users in Iraq will be perfectly capable of implementing their own encryption systems if they want to - with any strength keys they care to use. Just like anyone in the world is if they're not lazy, can crack open a few books, and have access to a processor.
Here's MS Word's autosummary of the Fellowship of the Ring:
Frodo! Frodo shuddered. Frodo gasped.
Frodo remained silent.
Frodo halted. Frodo asked. Hobbits! Sam! Frodo! Old Gandalf. _Dear Frodo,_
_GANDALF_.
Frodo answered. Good night, Frodo! Frodo! '
Frodo shivered.
' answered Frodo. ' cried Frodo. Frodo, Frodo! Frodo actually laughed.
So there you go. No need to read the book or waste 24.99 getting the DVD. Cool, huh?
Generally the only reason to go to war is that, at state level, someone does a cost/benefit analysis of murdering a bunch of folk and, if the sums work out right, they do it. So the economics of the situation are the only thing that's keeping anyone from going to war: they'd lose too much if they did.
What this reminds me of is how the Feds are made to work in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash: the first ones in in the morning take the desks nearest the door and management can tell at a glance who's the most dedicated to the job.
I think this is the plan. Instead of management having to understand what their business does, they just assume the drones are substitutable or know what they're doing as much as anyone else and then hire or fire them based on how much they're willing to surrender of themselve to acheive the corporate "vision". Whatever that is today.
It's a fairly inevitable outcome of seeing employees as commodities or resources. How else can you discriminate between them? It's not as if management are going to bother learning their names for God's sake!
publicise.
crikey.
Do you think I say that now?
I do, but I very rarely pulicise the fact.
Oh, Jiminy this is funny. I mean every other country on Earth rejected facism 60 years ago and now the US of A is catching up big time. they seem to be determined not to learn from everybody else's mistakes. The best thing is they're not just doing it in politics, they're going for it in a corporate way too.
I used to tell folks who said Americans were too fucking dumb to remember to breath that they were wrong: just look, I said, a whole continent - good air in, bad air out. They can do it. You're wrong I said. And just promoting prejudice, I said.
Do you think I say that now?
Seriously, I don't think you realise exactly how fucked your country is. Not by a looooong fucking way.
Goddamn. Nicely put.
But for those of you who don't know, Heinlein was a master Science Fiction writer
Only if you consider incest cutting edge sci-fi. He was a bit of a perv, let's face facts. The whole Lazarus Long thing was a convoluted Oedipus complex he was working through. And forcing his readers to work through with him. Yeeeurgh.
And the Starship Troopers movie was way better than the book (if only for Paul Verhoven's blatant anti-Nazi subtext). The book was one self-centred whine to another.
Don't put quotes around free when you're talking about the world outside the USA. That state stopped being an experiment in democracy quite a while ago. It's more an experiment in what your particular specialist interest can get away with these days (from the outside, anyway).
I live in Glasgow and we have CCTV cameras throughout the city centre (and quite a bit beyond), checking on us all the time and making us think harder about behaving nicely. If I could see what the folks monitoring the systems could see, I'd be a lot happier about the surveillance.
Making all the CCTVs in a city centre webcams is the answer to "Who watches the watchers?" We do. If the naughty guard is zooming in on the booty shots or looking in folks windows we can check the time, report it directly, and get them the disciplining they need. It'd be a balance to the one-sided oppressive feeling the current systems engender. I wouldn't need any sort of control over where they were pointed, just being able to check out (whenever I felt like it) what they were watching would be good enough for me.
It'd bring folks back to the city centre here, too. When they realise how boring it is these days. And they can see the lack of anything happening from the comfort of their desk.
There was a heck of a lot less stress and a lot more free time for hobbies in the hunter and gather societies.
Just as long as you think the constant struggle to find food, making war on neighbouring tribes to control the land, making your own clothes, and eradicating parasitic infections are hobbies.
Hobbies?! The concept didn't even exist in the caveman days! Hobbies are slack in our system, overcapacity expressed as recreation. In those days overcapacity meant you had food to eat all week. Make a hobby out of that!
Oh, hold on, you're USicans...
1. Completely ignore your children, get drunk doing the stuff you like to do, and let them entertain themselves;
2. Let them have guns;
3. When they kill folks, sue the games/movies/TV/rock bands for turning their little angels (as if the parents knew what their progeny were actually like...) into callous murdering bastards;
4. PROFIT!!!
... and that's the business model. I honestly don't see a future where anyone gets charged for the BBC, except the UK taxpayers. And I don't really want that to change, as that would make the BBC into just another commercial broadcaster, deciding its programming based on commercial criteria in the long run.
The BBC isn't (and never was) just for UK residents. It's always had a mandate to bring culture (as opposed to ignorance) to everyone in the world. Yeah, the Beeb has priorities, and maybe they'll throttle the bandwidth to non-UK clients, but charging? Nah. And as a license payer I wouldn't want them to.
While this idea might generate quite a bit of funding from the developed nations, it'd also block access from the developing nations, and it's the developing nations that would need this stuff the most. It's not just Blackadder and Dr. Who, there's a ton of educational material in the archives, including the Open University, that should be free to anyone with an internet connection (and a lot of patience).
This is Insightful? Where exactly is the insight?
If it's anywhere, it's in the understanding that life, and the way people live their lives, is not there to provide you with a moral at the end of the story.
Keep your laser handy.
I think this is a stupid comment, why would anybody be less likely to risk their life just because of their potential logevity? Are people in third world countries more likely to endager their lives because their life expectancy is only half that of the first world?
...
Uh, yeah they are. Check out Liberia, Ethiopea, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Afghanistan,