I study cybernetics, in both organic and artificial neural networks. There is no real difference between organic and machine intelligence.
I think this assumption is a mistake - and a big one. Science still has not accounted for consciousness and isn't even close. Until it does, such sweeping statements are myopic at best, if applied to human beings.
Can you point me to a recent natural disaster where everyone else just shrugged it off? "More for me"
Hurricane Katrina. I shudder to think what government assistance will mean in the future with "Fusion Centers" at the heart of it all. Google that if you're not familiar. There's a lot of tin-foil nuttery, but just the basic facts that are admitted and publicly known are enough to make you stop and go "hmmm..."
You must devise a test for granting the machines the rights and responsibilities of personhood, and here it is: If they ask for rights, who are you to deny them?
This I agree with. We may find that, unfortunately, there may be many real organic humans who cannot pass this test. I suggest that we start by making it a required qualified for public office.
Also, while I am not a big fan of anime, the Ghost in the Shell animated feature had a fascinating look at this idea. Recommended for forward-looking fans of gunporn and/or philosophy.
I'm just not following your logic here. You say above you worked with IETF and Daniel J Berstein, so I have good reasons to suspect you're closer and more familiar with the details of this subject, but it seems to me that fundamentally the random number generator is an important part of the encryption math, so your statement that:
What the NSA may have done is made it so your encrypted communications have two keys: yours and the NSA's. There is no evidence that it weakens the algorithm in any way, provided of course that NSA doesn't publish their private key.
While the cipher may be more or less exactly as advertised, the weakening of the RNG is still an important factor. If "the algorithm is not weakened in any way" is true, it's only in the strictest technical sense, and not how most people will define it. You then go on to say that NSA has simply made themselves another key in the generation process. This strikes me as being exactly backwards. Care to elaborate?
I switched from Avira due to constant obnoxious upgrade offers some time ago. If they've gotten better on that I might reconsider - but Avast works fine if you're willing to whitelist a process and then reboot. I mostly run into false positives with flash drives, so all it takes is unplug and replug in that case. What really pisses me off is, as you say, "yanking the keyboard away" and forcibly removing useful utilities which Norton/Mcafee tend to do regularly without the option to cancel. I've taken to setting up a Truecrypt volume that mounts read-only with all those things that tend to trigger it. Mcafee throws a tantrum, wanting to "reboot to remove the threat" every 20 seconds or so, but it gives me time to shut off the automatic protection and then get the work done.
Avast has also added update checking for 3rd-party programs (e.g. Java) which can conceivably be helpful for those users who aren't very good at keeping individual programs up to date.
MSE does have a certain minimal functionality that at least provides a bit of CYA for those users who insist they have protection they're going to load but don't seem very good at risk management...
MSE used to be a pay-for service called Live OneCare from Microsoft, and as noted above used to be a separate product originally written by another company. So it's more of a good strategic acquisition rather than an inspired idea by the MS execs themselves. I don't know exactly why they went free, but you missed your chance to pay for it, unless you feel like getting Forefront licenses
I've seen a few of these around, they were fairly expensive for the storage volume last I looked. Instead, I've taken to using a portable TrueCrypt executable and mounting a pre-loaded volume in read-only mode so that, at least, my tools aren't arbitrarily deleted (you'd be surprised how often this happens to useful utilities particularly with Norton and Mcafee protections installed...). Not perfect for e.g. preventing auto-run viruses from spreading across sneakernet 2.0, but better than restoring from backup constantly
Various black-hat websites have stolen credit card numbers available for sale or (I guess) free to anybody. It might make sense for credit card companies to trawl for these things and see if any of their user's cards are compromised, but they don't seem too interested in that. They'd rather wait until I make a purchase for a big item, decline the transaction, and make me call them when my new NAS fails to ship. I'm lucky if I get an email notification about it in a timely fashion.
Basically, it amounts to society being dragged down by stupid crap that is pushed through by Big Money interests who are blind to opportunity cost. I want better economic opportunity for the people whose lives impact me in society, and I calculate that as being a lot of people.
By way of example, I'm friends with a married couple that spent TEN YEARS living paycheck-to-paycheck in apartments and struggling to pay off medical bills and recover their credit. Today, one of them is on permanent medical disability and the other is fighting cancer and working 60-hour weeks just to get by. They're only going to be rich if their family's land sells some major mining rights off which is, once again, luck (at least insofar as valuable minerals even being there is concerned). The difference I'm concerned with is in their social opportunities. If he wasn't having to work 60-hour weeks due to poor health coverage and atrocious labor support, I could spend more time with them, and they would be better able to appreciate the time as well.
You want the ability to hop seamlessly from job to job, have your wages increase no matter how low value your labor becomes, and get cheap health care paid by someone else.
Somewhat incorrect. I don't like job hopping; while the option needs to be there I prefer to exercise it rarely, because it can never be seamless.
And "overbearing legal environments for start-up businesses"? Maybe you should have thought about this before writing all the previous crap. It got sacrificed in order to get what you thought you wanted.
I'm referring specifically to patent warchests and cross-licensing agreements where big businesses can basically lawyer-nuke a start-up from orbit. Barrier to entry is increasingly prohibitive and does not result in a healthy competitive market. If they're not worried about extravagant legal costs, maybe small business can pay people what they're worth and new ideas could live up to their potential.
I would also prefer to pay my health care through direct insurance. Why should my employer be involved? Just pay enough to cover such things and let me handle that. One of the driving forces behind ridiculous health costs is that people are frequently isolated from the high cost of unnecessary procedures (or procedures where a much cheaper alternative is available). Let the costs be more visible and you will get a reduction in demand which will drive prices down. Unfortunately, employers get better deals and so it's not feasible to get decent insurance on your own where co-pays can reflect real costs to keep premiums down, so nobody does it if they have benefits available through employment, and the cycle perpetuates itself.
I also want some sanity to return to wage spectrums. I cannot fathom how a CEO, no matter how big the company is, deserves salary several HUNDRED times that of the hourly workers in the same company. Is his knowledge worth more? Ideally, yes (arguable in many specific cases, but I digress). Is it ever worth that much more? Maybe Elon Musk is, but not in most cases I'd say. I also think that if you want to pay a CEO more, it needs to be solely in company stock that has to hold long-term value before it can be sold so that you remove the incentive for slash-and-burn management. That way, the average person that wants to invest in a company doesn't get shafted by this quarterly-profit mentality that is destroying our pensions and investment opportunities for people without fiber-optic trading connections and algorithms written by math majors (to say nothing of the workers laid off and forced to find new jobs for these frivolous restructuring games). Want to talk about labor pools affecting wages? Why hasn't that brought CEO pay down? Because like I said, it's turning more plutocratic than capitalist.
TL;DR: I want the middle class, and upward-mobility of the low end, to return.
I call it as I see it. I'm sorry if I've stepped on your toes with my frank assessment of how lopsided economic opportunity currently is, I don't have any need to be overbearing or put anyone down, so I apologize if I came across a bit harsh. Maybe you're happy with your 30%-over-poverty lifestyle; for me, the American Dream is dead.
Oh, the rest can have a great society - they just choose not to
There is a tragedy of the commons in effect here. There are those who would build better towns, businesses, and society. Unfortunately, there needs to be greater agreement in the general populace to maintain order where such things can thrive. When you have warlords and religious nuts tearing down every wall you build, it's very difficult to make any progress. Education is a huge problem. As many problems as the US system has, we can hardly fathom the difficulty of trying to build anything resembling a modern society without the historical references and baseline literacy we already take for granted. We've build our society on the backs of giants. Were global education on equal footing, I would completely agree with you.
Learn how to adapt
Spoken like a true Republican. I did adapt - I discovered that money isn't everything and, in fact, I pity those rich people who think of nothing else and don't know how to be happy.
On the other hand, I recognize that I am lucky. I started with a number of advantages which have allowed me to gain benefit from relatively scarce resources. Not everyone can be above average, though. A healthy economy depends on widespread opportunities for most people, not just a lucky few. When the 0.001% hoard a grossly disproportionate portion of the capital for themselves, this sets the stage for social instability, and that hurts everyone. I think there are always going to be better opportunities for the talented few, and that's as it should be; men are not all created exactly equal. The problem is the disparity between the top and bottom.
I don't know how easy such a thing would be to gather on a useful scale, but I believe you can keep a hang-glider more or less permanently aloft by riding thermal updrafts, and birds of prey have been known to utilize this as well. With some kind of kinetic energy conversion (e.g. a turbine, like current wind power collectors use) you could potentially be energy-positive. They talk about high-altitude though, which I don't recall being the best place to find updrafts.
My question is, how much does it cost to produce the hardware that can do this with enough efficiency to be worth bothering to do? Wikipedia talks about a wirelessly-power helicopter, but presumably the efficiency was terrible and it's only because a big, heavy, ground-based power source was throwing all kinds of energy at it. TFA talks about doing it the other way around, and I have serious reservations about how much power you're going to get out of such a system, to say nothing of weather and equipment failure complications. We don't even have wireless electric-car charging stations (with any real distance involved); how do they think they're going to drive that kind of power over longer distances?
Because, due to improvements in health care and nutrition, we are better able to develop our mental capabilities during childhood. It's not that our genes are actually self-improving - although nutrition etc. may be improving sperm health and thus improving the natural selection process at conception. It's just that our existing genetic potential can be more fully realized.
Last I checked, people get paid decent money and can move to new jobs and places.
You might want to check again. In the US we're getting to the point where this "jobless recovery" is cementing what's left of the middle class into the rough equivalent of a company town. The transformation is not yet complete, but between non-compete/non-poach clauses, wages not keeping pace with inflation, outsourcing, lack of single-payer health insurance, and overbearing legal environments for start-up businesses, the opportunity just isn't there anymore.
aggressively save your money
Don't make me laugh. Most of the people I know make low-5-figure wages. Sure, this is a low TCoL area, so we're not hurting too badly, but my resources are insignificant in the grand scheme. Capitalism is not about giving advantage to those lucky enough to be born to big money, it's about giving a chance to anybody with a good process/business model and the drive to make it work. Since there aren't enough big-company C*O positions to go around, this means that at middle-class level, there needs to be ample opportunity to get ahead, which has been subverted by the disproportionate lobbying power of big business.
In short, it's not that there's a problem with capitalism - it's that there's a problem because there isn't capitalism in effect here. There is, essentially, oligarchy/plutocracy.
Hell, you think people living in Africa like the conditions there, compared to here? By modern standards, that isn't living, it's merely existing. Why do you think they aren't just moving over here for the better opportunity? Some lucky few do, but the rest simply cannot. In that sense, we in the 99% are all in the same boat, figuratively speaking. Big companies have externalized their costs globally, and our governments have failed to protect the people from being swept away with the other detritus left in the wake.
The winner went for the "social engineering" tactic. It's a bit on the not-impressive side technically, but considering the dark side of hacker culture and given that we're talking about a host that has the name "sales" in its name, I can't be too particularly surprised. No honor among thiev^H^H^H^H^H marketers.
With a good charging station you could probably mitigate a lot of these issues with the simple addition of multiple easy-to-replace batteries. Pop a battery and drop it in the charger, grab a fresh one or three, and put them in. Batteries could charge continuously or even set on a timer to coincide with off-peak hours for best energy price. I don't think you'd end up spending much more time on it than you would filling a gas tank, with the added benefit of being able to set up anywhere you can run a power line.
The one thing that is still a downside is that range of the vehicle still wouldn't be too good - you could potentially have to swap batteries once or twice a day, and until we have better battery tech there's no way around that. Well, that and the up-front cost of multiple batteries.
We've had stickers and such for decades. What we really need is a fully open-source phone hardware device, drivers and all. Sure, we've supposedly got Firefox OS working on that, but I've yet to see that they haven't taken the functionality and gone off the rails like their browser. As it stands, even my N900 can't fully get away from the binary blobs. I haven't a clue what I'm going to do when it finally dies.
Like the crowd-funded Truecrypt verification project, we need full access to the internals of our devices so we know they are actually serving the owners, rather than the corporate and government overlords. If they want to distribute free handsets, that's one thing, but if I buy my phone outright, I should have full control of it, carrier shenanigans be damned.
I recently bought a Nexus 7 pogo dock and, while I don't understand the point of mono-sound-only output (not enough pins to carry stereo), it was only $30 ($40 at launch from what I've seen). Google has changed the interface such that the new Nexus 7 does not work with it; hopefully they fixed some of the issues. I don't understand why they have such trouble getting such a simple thing right, but it's not all been that expensive.
Alternatively, just remove the profit incentive. This is supposed to be how capitalism works, right? Let profit motive dictate the best path. Here's the concept:
No business group can own both an ISP division, and a media production/distribution division. Roll back the Telecommunications Act of 1996 a bit. Let such companies fight it out on terms as equal as possible, rather than letting a CEO or other upper management at the parent company play create onerous policy at one branch at the expense of another branch.
No, corporate stooge, quit whining about government interference, you're doing capitalism wrong.
Every bundle has had the option to change how the money you pay is divided. You can give it all to charity, all to developers, or for whatever silly reason, all to the Humble Tip option if you want. You can also customize which charity, which developer, gets how much of the alloted portion of the total. Personally, what with all the things happening lately, I've been favoring the EFF heavily in my purchases.
Which is why, if you read the info on the IndieGoGo blurb, they talk about a validated Windows build that is signed.
Unfortunately it's not realistic to ask every Windows user to compile Truecrypt themselves. Our proposal is to adapt the deterministic build process that Tor is now using, so we can know the binaries are safe and untampered.
Well, the US has a big economic base, and a ridiculous military. I wouldn't expect anybody to take us on head-to-head.
But, since you suggest leaving the country, you can make sure your own country is a suitable place to land. Remember, a lot of the first to leave will be the smart ones - that's brain drain you can use to your advantage. I've heard Germany has been getting pretty inhospitable to Americans lately; that's the wrong approach. Call out a welcome to the ones feeling oppressed by our own government and you may come out very much ahead, both morally and economically.
If by "mission accomplished" you mean that the spammer gets his post through - yes. However, it's hard to monetize that success when the requirement for said message getting through is that it's usefully informative or otherwise helpful to the human readers of the forum.
Ultimately, if such a thing happens (I personally foresee anti-CAPTCHA technology evolving into the first proper AI somehow), it will be more of a win for the human users than the spammers. Signal:Noise ratio is the main problem holding back those online communities as far as I can tell. Hell, maybe an artificial spam-intelligence will help us the way targeted advertising was *supposed* to do, and ad moguls still claim it does.
How's this for a new business model: become a useful member of society by providing useful information in accessible places, and then using your new-found credibility to push services that make you money. Sounds a lot like celebrity endorsement, maybe, but perhaps there's a whole market for "computer problem" experts, or "aftermarket automotive modifications" experts, or other niche knowledge bases. Turn your weird passions into cash! OK advertisers, you want a place at the table in whatever form Web 3.0 takes, get on it.
Well if it wasn't for the rampant disregard for the integrity of ad contents and the careless serving of malware, most of the legitimate reasons to install and use NoScript would vanish. Add in a little regard for not being overly obtrusive (pop-up hover-links in the body of article text? Seriously, you think your content is worth that much?), and you might get more users onboard with the ad-supported model. As it is, there's an arms race with users on one side, and ad networks/SEO on the other.
Remember, your business model does not have a right to make money. It only has the right to try. Poisoning the well for a little short-term gain is strongly discouraged.
Slashdot Mirror
I study cybernetics, in both organic and artificial neural networks. There is no real difference between organic and machine intelligence.
I think this assumption is a mistake - and a big one. Science still has not accounted for consciousness and isn't even close. Until it does, such sweeping statements are myopic at best, if applied to human beings.
Can you point me to a recent natural disaster where everyone else just shrugged it off? "More for me"
Hurricane Katrina. I shudder to think what government assistance will mean in the future with "Fusion Centers" at the heart of it all. Google that if you're not familiar. There's a lot of tin-foil nuttery, but just the basic facts that are admitted and publicly known are enough to make you stop and go "hmmm..."
You must devise a test for granting the machines the rights and responsibilities of personhood, and here it is: If they ask for rights, who are you to deny them?
This I agree with. We may find that, unfortunately, there may be many real organic humans who cannot pass this test. I suggest that we start by making it a required qualified for public office. Also, while I am not a big fan of anime, the Ghost in the Shell animated feature had a fascinating look at this idea. Recommended for forward-looking fans of gunporn and/or philosophy.
I'm just not following your logic here. You say above you worked with IETF and Daniel J Berstein, so I have good reasons to suspect you're closer and more familiar with the details of this subject, but it seems to me that fundamentally the random number generator is an important part of the encryption math, so your statement that:
What the NSA may have done is made it so your encrypted communications have two keys: yours and the NSA's. There is no evidence that it weakens the algorithm in any way, provided of course that NSA doesn't publish their private key.
While the cipher may be more or less exactly as advertised, the weakening of the RNG is still an important factor. If "the algorithm is not weakened in any way" is true, it's only in the strictest technical sense, and not how most people will define it. You then go on to say that NSA has simply made themselves another key in the generation process. This strikes me as being exactly backwards. Care to elaborate?
I switched from Avira due to constant obnoxious upgrade offers some time ago. If they've gotten better on that I might reconsider - but Avast works fine if you're willing to whitelist a process and then reboot. I mostly run into false positives with flash drives, so all it takes is unplug and replug in that case. What really pisses me off is, as you say, "yanking the keyboard away" and forcibly removing useful utilities which Norton/Mcafee tend to do regularly without the option to cancel. I've taken to setting up a Truecrypt volume that mounts read-only with all those things that tend to trigger it. Mcafee throws a tantrum, wanting to "reboot to remove the threat" every 20 seconds or so, but it gives me time to shut off the automatic protection and then get the work done.
Avast has also added update checking for 3rd-party programs (e.g. Java) which can conceivably be helpful for those users who aren't very good at keeping individual programs up to date.
MSE does have a certain minimal functionality that at least provides a bit of CYA for those users who insist they have protection they're going to load but don't seem very good at risk management...
MSE used to be a pay-for service called Live OneCare from Microsoft, and as noted above used to be a separate product originally written by another company. So it's more of a good strategic acquisition rather than an inspired idea by the MS execs themselves. I don't know exactly why they went free, but you missed your chance to pay for it, unless you feel like getting Forefront licenses
I've seen a few of these around, they were fairly expensive for the storage volume last I looked. Instead, I've taken to using a portable TrueCrypt executable and mounting a pre-loaded volume in read-only mode so that, at least, my tools aren't arbitrarily deleted (you'd be surprised how often this happens to useful utilities particularly with Norton and Mcafee protections installed...). Not perfect for e.g. preventing auto-run viruses from spreading across sneakernet 2.0, but better than restoring from backup constantly
Various black-hat websites have stolen credit card numbers available for sale or (I guess) free to anybody. It might make sense for credit card companies to trawl for these things and see if any of their user's cards are compromised, but they don't seem too interested in that. They'd rather wait until I make a purchase for a big item, decline the transaction, and make me call them when my new NAS fails to ship. I'm lucky if I get an email notification about it in a timely fashion.
Then what is there to complain about?
Basically, it amounts to society being dragged down by stupid crap that is pushed through by Big Money interests who are blind to opportunity cost. I want better economic opportunity for the people whose lives impact me in society, and I calculate that as being a lot of people.
By way of example, I'm friends with a married couple that spent TEN YEARS living paycheck-to-paycheck in apartments and struggling to pay off medical bills and recover their credit. Today, one of them is on permanent medical disability and the other is fighting cancer and working 60-hour weeks just to get by. They're only going to be rich if their family's land sells some major mining rights off which is, once again, luck (at least insofar as valuable minerals even being there is concerned). The difference I'm concerned with is in their social opportunities. If he wasn't having to work 60-hour weeks due to poor health coverage and atrocious labor support, I could spend more time with them, and they would be better able to appreciate the time as well.
You want the ability to hop seamlessly from job to job, have your wages increase no matter how low value your labor becomes, and get cheap health care paid by someone else.
Somewhat incorrect. I don't like job hopping; while the option needs to be there I prefer to exercise it rarely, because it can never be seamless.
And "overbearing legal environments for start-up businesses"? Maybe you should have thought about this before writing all the previous crap. It got sacrificed in order to get what you thought you wanted.
I'm referring specifically to patent warchests and cross-licensing agreements where big businesses can basically lawyer-nuke a start-up from orbit. Barrier to entry is increasingly prohibitive and does not result in a healthy competitive market. If they're not worried about extravagant legal costs, maybe small business can pay people what they're worth and new ideas could live up to their potential.
I would also prefer to pay my health care through direct insurance. Why should my employer be involved? Just pay enough to cover such things and let me handle that. One of the driving forces behind ridiculous health costs is that people are frequently isolated from the high cost of unnecessary procedures (or procedures where a much cheaper alternative is available). Let the costs be more visible and you will get a reduction in demand which will drive prices down. Unfortunately, employers get better deals and so it's not feasible to get decent insurance on your own where co-pays can reflect real costs to keep premiums down, so nobody does it if they have benefits available through employment, and the cycle perpetuates itself.
I also want some sanity to return to wage spectrums. I cannot fathom how a CEO, no matter how big the company is, deserves salary several HUNDRED times that of the hourly workers in the same company. Is his knowledge worth more? Ideally, yes (arguable in many specific cases, but I digress). Is it ever worth that much more? Maybe Elon Musk is, but not in most cases I'd say. I also think that if you want to pay a CEO more, it needs to be solely in company stock that has to hold long-term value before it can be sold so that you remove the incentive for slash-and-burn management. That way, the average person that wants to invest in a company doesn't get shafted by this quarterly-profit mentality that is destroying our pensions and investment opportunities for people without fiber-optic trading connections and algorithms written by math majors (to say nothing of the workers laid off and forced to find new jobs for these frivolous restructuring games). Want to talk about labor pools affecting wages? Why hasn't that brought CEO pay down? Because like I said, it's turning more plutocratic than capitalist.
TL;DR: I want the middle class, and upward-mobility of the low end, to return.
your whiny rant
I call it as I see it. I'm sorry if I've stepped on your toes with my frank assessment of how lopsided economic opportunity currently is, I don't have any need to be overbearing or put anyone down, so I apologize if I came across a bit harsh. Maybe you're happy with your 30%-over-poverty lifestyle; for me, the American Dream is dead.
Oh, the rest can have a great society - they just choose not to
There is a tragedy of the commons in effect here. There are those who would build better towns, businesses, and society. Unfortunately, there needs to be greater agreement in the general populace to maintain order where such things can thrive. When you have warlords and religious nuts tearing down every wall you build, it's very difficult to make any progress. Education is a huge problem. As many problems as the US system has, we can hardly fathom the difficulty of trying to build anything resembling a modern society without the historical references and baseline literacy we already take for granted. We've build our society on the backs of giants. Were global education on equal footing, I would completely agree with you.
Learn how to adapt
Spoken like a true Republican. I did adapt - I discovered that money isn't everything and, in fact, I pity those rich people who think of nothing else and don't know how to be happy.
On the other hand, I recognize that I am lucky. I started with a number of advantages which have allowed me to gain benefit from relatively scarce resources. Not everyone can be above average, though. A healthy economy depends on widespread opportunities for most people, not just a lucky few. When the 0.001% hoard a grossly disproportionate portion of the capital for themselves, this sets the stage for social instability, and that hurts everyone. I think there are always going to be better opportunities for the talented few, and that's as it should be; men are not all created exactly equal. The problem is the disparity between the top and bottom.
I don't know how easy such a thing would be to gather on a useful scale, but I believe you can keep a hang-glider more or less permanently aloft by riding thermal updrafts, and birds of prey have been known to utilize this as well. With some kind of kinetic energy conversion (e.g. a turbine, like current wind power collectors use) you could potentially be energy-positive. They talk about high-altitude though, which I don't recall being the best place to find updrafts.
My question is, how much does it cost to produce the hardware that can do this with enough efficiency to be worth bothering to do? Wikipedia talks about a wirelessly-power helicopter, but presumably the efficiency was terrible and it's only because a big, heavy, ground-based power source was throwing all kinds of energy at it. TFA talks about doing it the other way around, and I have serious reservations about how much power you're going to get out of such a system, to say nothing of weather and equipment failure complications. We don't even have wireless electric-car charging stations (with any real distance involved); how do they think they're going to drive that kind of power over longer distances?
Everyone's capital will soon be Beige'ing
I dunno, if recent history is any measure, they may soon all be going Rouge
Check your sarcasm-detector. I think you've got a fault.
Because, due to improvements in health care and nutrition, we are better able to develop our mental capabilities during childhood. It's not that our genes are actually self-improving - although nutrition etc. may be improving sperm health and thus improving the natural selection process at conception. It's just that our existing genetic potential can be more fully realized.
Last I checked, people get paid decent money and can move to new jobs and places.
You might want to check again. In the US we're getting to the point where this "jobless recovery" is cementing what's left of the middle class into the rough equivalent of a company town. The transformation is not yet complete, but between non-compete/non-poach clauses, wages not keeping pace with inflation, outsourcing, lack of single-payer health insurance, and overbearing legal environments for start-up businesses, the opportunity just isn't there anymore.
aggressively save your money
Don't make me laugh. Most of the people I know make low-5-figure wages. Sure, this is a low TCoL area, so we're not hurting too badly, but my resources are insignificant in the grand scheme. Capitalism is not about giving advantage to those lucky enough to be born to big money, it's about giving a chance to anybody with a good process/business model and the drive to make it work. Since there aren't enough big-company C*O positions to go around, this means that at middle-class level, there needs to be ample opportunity to get ahead, which has been subverted by the disproportionate lobbying power of big business.
In short, it's not that there's a problem with capitalism - it's that there's a problem because there isn't capitalism in effect here. There is, essentially, oligarchy/plutocracy.
Hell, you think people living in Africa like the conditions there, compared to here? By modern standards, that isn't living, it's merely existing. Why do you think they aren't just moving over here for the better opportunity? Some lucky few do, but the rest simply cannot. In that sense, we in the 99% are all in the same boat, figuratively speaking. Big companies have externalized their costs globally, and our governments have failed to protect the people from being swept away with the other detritus left in the wake.
The winner went for the "social engineering" tactic. It's a bit on the not-impressive side technically, but considering the dark side of hacker culture and given that we're talking about a host that has the name "sales" in its name, I can't be too particularly surprised. No honor among thiev^H^H^H^H^H marketers.
With a good charging station you could probably mitigate a lot of these issues with the simple addition of multiple easy-to-replace batteries. Pop a battery and drop it in the charger, grab a fresh one or three, and put them in. Batteries could charge continuously or even set on a timer to coincide with off-peak hours for best energy price. I don't think you'd end up spending much more time on it than you would filling a gas tank, with the added benefit of being able to set up anywhere you can run a power line.
The one thing that is still a downside is that range of the vehicle still wouldn't be too good - you could potentially have to swap batteries once or twice a day, and until we have better battery tech there's no way around that. Well, that and the up-front cost of multiple batteries.
We've had stickers and such for decades. What we really need is a fully open-source phone hardware device, drivers and all. Sure, we've supposedly got Firefox OS working on that, but I've yet to see that they haven't taken the functionality and gone off the rails like their browser. As it stands, even my N900 can't fully get away from the binary blobs. I haven't a clue what I'm going to do when it finally dies.
Like the crowd-funded Truecrypt verification project, we need full access to the internals of our devices so we know they are actually serving the owners, rather than the corporate and government overlords. If they want to distribute free handsets, that's one thing, but if I buy my phone outright, I should have full control of it, carrier shenanigans be damned.
I recently bought a Nexus 7 pogo dock and, while I don't understand the point of mono-sound-only output (not enough pins to carry stereo), it was only $30 ($40 at launch from what I've seen). Google has changed the interface such that the new Nexus 7 does not work with it; hopefully they fixed some of the issues. I don't understand why they have such trouble getting such a simple thing right, but it's not all been that expensive.
...and how do you know this without having monitored him at some point?
Well, that's one way to find the droid you're looking for...
Alternatively, just remove the profit incentive. This is supposed to be how capitalism works, right? Let profit motive dictate the best path. Here's the concept:
No business group can own both an ISP division, and a media production/distribution division. Roll back the Telecommunications Act of 1996 a bit. Let such companies fight it out on terms as equal as possible, rather than letting a CEO or other upper management at the parent company play create onerous policy at one branch at the expense of another branch.
No, corporate stooge, quit whining about government interference, you're doing capitalism wrong.
Every bundle has had the option to change how the money you pay is divided. You can give it all to charity, all to developers, or for whatever silly reason, all to the Humble Tip option if you want. You can also customize which charity, which developer, gets how much of the alloted portion of the total. Personally, what with all the things happening lately, I've been favoring the EFF heavily in my purchases.
Unfortunately it's not realistic to ask every Windows user to compile Truecrypt themselves. Our proposal is to adapt the deterministic build process that Tor is now using, so we can know the binaries are safe and untampered.
Well, the US has a big economic base, and a ridiculous military. I wouldn't expect anybody to take us on head-to-head.
But, since you suggest leaving the country, you can make sure your own country is a suitable place to land. Remember, a lot of the first to leave will be the smart ones - that's brain drain you can use to your advantage. I've heard Germany has been getting pretty inhospitable to Americans lately; that's the wrong approach. Call out a welcome to the ones feeling oppressed by our own government and you may come out very much ahead, both morally and economically.
If by "mission accomplished" you mean that the spammer gets his post through - yes. However, it's hard to monetize that success when the requirement for said message getting through is that it's usefully informative or otherwise helpful to the human readers of the forum.
Ultimately, if such a thing happens (I personally foresee anti-CAPTCHA technology evolving into the first proper AI somehow), it will be more of a win for the human users than the spammers. Signal:Noise ratio is the main problem holding back those online communities as far as I can tell. Hell, maybe an artificial spam-intelligence will help us the way targeted advertising was *supposed* to do, and ad moguls still claim it does.
How's this for a new business model: become a useful member of society by providing useful information in accessible places, and then using your new-found credibility to push services that make you money. Sounds a lot like celebrity endorsement, maybe, but perhaps there's a whole market for "computer problem" experts, or "aftermarket automotive modifications" experts, or other niche knowledge bases. Turn your weird passions into cash! OK advertisers, you want a place at the table in whatever form Web 3.0 takes, get on it.
Well if it wasn't for the rampant disregard for the integrity of ad contents and the careless serving of malware, most of the legitimate reasons to install and use NoScript would vanish. Add in a little regard for not being overly obtrusive (pop-up hover-links in the body of article text? Seriously, you think your content is worth that much?), and you might get more users onboard with the ad-supported model. As it is, there's an arms race with users on one side, and ad networks/SEO on the other.
Remember, your business model does not have a right to make money. It only has the right to try. Poisoning the well for a little short-term gain is strongly discouraged.