After all, the idea of open source (FWIK) was wanting something important to come in to being *more* than wanting to make a profit from the process. How many people have spent countless hours doing this so they could have an OS or DB that put "working well" before "being profitable"?
It seems to me that being treated or cured of a painful disease or condition ought to be right up there with not having to use closed source software (some would say I'm being redundant).
Drug companies are *companies*. Their first priority has to be profit, or they will be taken over by a different company willing to put profit first. But what good does that profit do if you make billions helping old men get boners... and then find out you have cancer? (hint: not a lot).
Normally when rich people get an incurable disease, they leave all their money to some institute trying to cure it. But it's a little late then, particularly if the institute they set up or funded puts a monetary barrier in front of anyone who'd want to help them. So yeah, someone out there is eventually going to have both the time and resources to put quality over profit.
I do hope the new drugs they come out with are a bit easier to use than those early Linux distros then. I hate reading long manuals when I'm sick.
Better yet is to figure out how to break the encryption and strip the DRM, as DarkReverser has done.
The point is not to prevent piracy, because that simply can't be done. The point is to prevent *casual* piracy - ala mp3 files. Getting a one-off credit card, and purchasing hundreds of expense books with it so that you can share them on p2p networks along with the name and number you used... well, that doesn't sound terribly casual to me. Frankly, it's faster to just install python, grab pdb2html, and strip the info out entirely. Which isn't being done, 'cause it's still more work than shelling out five or ten bucks for a book apparently.
Now for those really, really expensive books(>$300) - hell yeah! But from what I've seen, some patient soul will just use the analog hole before someone obtains a one off credit card name and number that can be traced back to them and puts that up on p2p networks.
Speaking of really freakin' expensive books - the one area where the much-harder-to-crack Kindle could be both netbooks and smart phones, is those text books where you need to see a diagram (larger than an iphone screen) to learn it. It should be netbooks because publishers of those books are only going to release a few to the Kindle, and then wait to see if they get pirated. If they do, that's it, game over. You'll have to get those books as PDFs from someone with the patience to scan the whole thing. Or Xerox it, and then make copies of that which is easier - like we used to do when I was at University. Hmm... I wonder if that's why they kept coming out with new editions of those each year - to kill both the used-books and xeroxed sources from lowering their sales?
The DRM issue was already solved by Peanut Press (now Fictionwise) a decade ago, and quite elegantly. The data is encrypted for 2 keys, your full name, and your credit card number. You're more than welcome to share your books with whomever you want... but you'll have to give them your name and credit card number to do it. In other words, you can give your book to your close friend, but would not give it to PirateBay.
The other issue they worked out elegantly was to pair each new book sale with a new reader, which was updated roughly every month. What's that do? Well, no encryption scheme is fool proof of course - so by the time some one cracks the encryption on a book - it would have wound up in the 75% off bin anyway.
Reselling the books is something that could be arranged using this infrastructure if there was sufficient demand.
Lastly, they compiled the reader for smart phones. Which, unlike an electronic device that can't fit into your pocket... fits into your pocket. So you always have your library with you because it rides along with your phone.
Steve Jobs made a HUGE mistake not supporting eBooks. "People don't read". Really Steve? Did you forget what Amazon started out selling? But Fictionwise's EReader app is one of the most popular on the iTunes store, and it's free. So Apple makes no money on e-Books because they don't sell the content for the app on the iTunes store.
As for the Electronic Paper - yes, it's better for people who still remember reading off of paper. But reading off of paper is quickly becoming the exception to the rule (at least for people who can afford ebooks). Schools have computers, and with newpapers being free on the Web, people are going to become much more comfortable reading off an electronic screen than they are now.
And even if there's a significant portion of people who don't, well, how often has superior quality (E Paper) beat out a combination of convenience (pocket size) and price(you already own a phone)? I suspect the Kindle 2 will make loads of money, but not become the "iPod of Books" because it's no more portable than "portable" CD players were. But perhaps eInk will find it's way on a smart phone before long.
Oh, there's no doubt that a significant portion of this country does waste money on things we don't need. But that gap between industrialized country's salaries and third world salaries cannot begin to be erased by eliminating this.
I actually *did* look into telecommuting for an Indian firm after the dot com bubble burst. Not only would I have had to give up non-essentials (coffee, beer), but I would have to give up living indoors because the going salary alone wouldn't have let me qualify for *any* apartment in New York City. Yes, including Harlem and the Bronx.
It would be a very good idea for us to give up on useless junk (ie anything you can find on the Home Shopping Network, Sky Mall Catalog, or with the word "luxery" in the model name); but it's a very bad idea to give up on things which help keep you alive. Workers in these "cheap" countries have already done it en masse, and now no amount of success there can buy them back.
Please look into what it's like to be a top programmer in India. There's a reason they can get by on 1/3 of the salary they'd need in the US - and it' ain't because they buy less "toys" there. It's because everything is cheaper. Housing is cheaper because property taxes are cheaper. And the taxes are cheaper because the government doesn't provide those "luxery" services like free police and fire departments for all, free education for all, free emergency health care for all, free food inspection, blah blah blah. Oh, they have some of those things, but they're barely funded compared to what "spoiled" Americans get. Like electricity that's only on part of the day.
The only thing US citizens waste money on is health care insurance. Other countries industrialized nations provide health care too; they just don't splurge on making health insurance companies rich in the process. Take that out of the equation, and it's no cheaper to live in the US than anywhere else. In the US, you just get stuff that 3rd world nations don't take for granted.
I'm not one of those "stand on principle" kind of guys. If someone wants to force me into joining their religion, I'm more than happy to do it... in a way that makes them wish they'd never even mentioned it to me.
The trick is to *gradually* go from simply hearing about their beliefs, to spending the entire work day doing nothing but praying loudly about literally everything in your immediate field of vision, speaking in "tongues" during conference calls, adding new rules to the religion that you insist everyone follow, and generally just giving the religion a bad name by following it far more fanatically than the person who introduced you to it.
Another fun thing you can do these days is take advantage of the new law passed by still President Bush which says you don't have to do anything at work which violates your religious beliefs. He did this so that Evangelicals wouldn't have to perform abortions or distribute birth control, but had to make the wording broad enough to cover *any* religion. Like, if you work at a hospital and Dick Cheney comes in with yet another heart attack, you can claim you're a Christian Scientist: "I need 50 cc's of holy water and prayer circle, stat!". Or if you work at a technology firm, you can say you're Amish and refuse to use anything which uses electricity.
Really, there's nothing quite a fun as joining a religion you think is bizarre in a country that lets you do damn near anything as long as you say God told you to.
I know they used to play music videos, but I also know that my 486 66Mhz computer used to play cutting edge video games. At around the same period in history if I'm not mistaken.
I would venture to guess that YouTube is by far the most prominent way of distributing the multi-million dollar music videos that record companies make to promote the sale of albums. I'd also venture to guess that Warner never bothered to find out one way or the other. More likely, they just got the idea in their heads that "TV = Spend Money to Make Money" and "Internet = Loose Money Unless Google is Involved" and left it at that.
Let's just all agree now not to give them a government bailout when thinking like this drives them to the brink of bankruptcy, OK?
No doubt, "Rape the Kid" would not be a very big seller. But that should be because no game company of any merit would want to create it, and no realistic amount of customers would buy it - NOT because a government official decided that it should be made. Personally, I quite appreciate knowing what kind of society I live in based on what the free people in it do, knowledge I would lack if people could only express government approved ideas and values.
BTW... didn't you find it just a bit creepy that a religious education teacher would think of "Rape the Kid" as video game title?
A lot of "common sense" powers have had to be denied to police, because they've proven themselves incapable of not abusing them. Every counter-intuitive restriction placed on government officials can be traced to an incident of abuse so horrific, that society opted to "tie the hands" of everyone rather than entrust anyone with that power any longer. Really, it takes quite a lot for anyone in government to advocate a limit on governmental powers.
Viruses generally exploit users at some point, right? They may be wicked sick once there in there - but some numb-nuts had to open the "I Love You" attachment to get started.
This is why both Linux and OSX viruses are lower than both what their market share AND security models alone can explain.
OSX users are generally either newbies (Grandma) who don't know *how* to do anything that would compromise their systems, or techies who know better. When a newbie sees a prompt to enter the admin password, they ignore it, call someone for help, or turn off the computer and hope it doesn't happen again (I'm not making this up). A techie realizes that shouldn't happen when they visit a webpage, and leave.
So... yes, when OSX market share increases to the point where there are enough "a little knowledge is dangerous" people on them, it'll finally break it's virus cherry. Until then, it'll have to get by with the
"To complete the installation of this software, your computer must be restarted, and then submerged in orange juice" approach.
When wealth of the magnitude of a few million dollars and up is passed on, the heirs don't just receive fruits of their parent's labour as a comfortable life - they receive real power.
If people did live for hundreds of years, yes there would be a real risk of overpopulation even compared to what we have now. But if the people with power, the ultra wealthy, knew they'd be living for long enough that their actions would eventually have consequences on themselves - would not they be more inclined to think long term? There's a limit to what wealth can protect you from.
Even beyond over population, the wealthy would have to consider who they treated the environment more, and what sort of innovations they enabled or stifled. The way things work now, you can make a few billion making the world a worse place and afford to be insulated against that damage for the rest of your life. The longer people live though, the less feasible that becomes.
Take a look at what the ultra rich are doing already with the longer life spans today's medical technology are giving them. They're funding cure-centric (as opposed to profit-centric) approaches to the diseases they're coming down with, or fear coming down with. Of course, it's a bit of a hail Mary pass to start supporting better schools and better medical research when you're sixty, eh?
Longer life spans may well shift the most powerful among us to start treating the whole planet as something they're going to have to life with for a long, long time.
Here's something I ran across by accident while creating a wedding present for my friend "Scum":
1. Take an ordinary was table candle, contained in a glass holder. 2. Light it, and wait for the wax to start melting. 3. Add paper bit to function as "extra wicks" until the top is melted. 4. Start throwing random bits of garbage into it. 5. Transfer the contraption to a metal container before the glass shatters - which you really should have done before step 2.
Here's what happens: After step 3, there is no longer any "wick". A heavy white gas floats above the wicks, and that's what's burning. After step 4, the heat is no longer just boiling away the wax, but also boiling away the garbage. Any flammable gas from the garbage is all that's burning, not the solids.
Why this strikes me as similar: It's a bit like doing fractional distillation, turning solids in to gasses and boiling them off. The difference is that you're using only the heat generated by the vaporized solids to vaporize further solids.
Why this is really freakin' dangerous: Candle wax is paraffin, and really really tough to extinguish. It doesn't need a hell of a lot of oxygen to continue burning - so trying to put it out by say putting a plate over the top may not work as once you remove the plate the smallest flame around the imperfect seal is light it right back up. You also don't want to throw water on it - the water will boil spitting flaming crap everywhere, and the mixture won't go out. If you throw the whole thing in water (as I tried when I realized all this) - it will kind of explode. One of these things (which I called a "Sludge Candle") in a tuna tin, when tossed into a sink full of water, created a shaft of flames about 3 feet in diameter that extended to the ceiling. It also, as you can imagine, really freaking hot. Do this with a glass candle holder and the glass with crack as I mentioned, and it's not really easy to get near to by that point.. Oh yeah - not all the gases from the garbage will be flammable either; and those ones will just kind of float around the dorm room until they cool down and solidify on every available surface including your lungs. If you really wanted to use this as a recycling approach, you'd distill those gases instead of course.
Still though, it's pretty neat if you have no regard for safety, property, or being formally banned from campus for seven years.
An easier and safer way of seeing this is to simply blow out a candle that's been burning for a bit - and light it by touching a flame to the white smoke rising from the wick rather than having to touch the wick itself.
No doubt there are people who know something about chemistry on here who can tell me why this is an even dumber idea that it already seems. That's cool - my fascination with things like this ended when I turned my hand into a John Merrick Hand Puppet for about a month right before my piano recital. Who knew butane was *heavier* than air? Butane, apparently. Point taken. Nothing but nice safe LCD candles for me these days:-)
Seriously, don't do this. That plasma thing sounds much more promising.
Here's fun experiment to try out: 1. Transfer the oldest windows media readable file you can find lying around (something from like 15 years ago) into your current system. Congratulations, you've just solved the "read media" problem the author poses. 2. Now, try to actually view that media. One of three things will happen: -A)Your current machine will play the media, but highly distorted.(~90% of the time) -B)Your current machine will play the media correctly (~7% of the time). -C)Your computer will report that the required codec cannot be located (~3% of course).
My point is that being able to read all physical "media" (and I've got some really rare ones here) is only helpful if you can read the *data* from that media correctly. And while the latest Microsoft Word program will probably convert enough of a Word Perfect 1.0 document for you to not notice the difference, there are a host of other data formats that simply can't be read on anything other than an old machine, with old dll's.
So, to *truly* build the ultimate media-reading machine - not only would you need all the various drives necessary (which would probably have to be from a host of other networked machines - but you'd also have to have several different virtual machines set up within that main machine to ensure you were really seeing the data as it originally existed.
Here's a question for the others in that vein: What criteria would you use to determine the make up of the virtual machines?
-Current software from every year or two? -Every possible combination of operating system version and the software released during it's time-frame (though you could at least narrow it down to the software needed to read just the data you were interested in)? -The latest version of the operating system and software from the date the file was last modified on? -Opening up the file itself raw to determine what software it expects to run on, and using *exactly* that version?
Though my example of windows media files is the easiest to spot problems in, I'm sure we're all keenly aware of how different an HTML page written in 1995 would look on a browser released in 2005. Yeah, you could still get the gist of it, but you *not* have truly seen the "data" - the information which that file really contained for the person who created it in 1995 using god knows what.
I wonder if the government is working on this problem? Who knows what sort of secret messages terror groups are hiding in their blink or no frames tags? Maybe the background noise on Osama's tape is actually a deadly BASIC program readable only by a Texas Instruments TI-994A, or contains an infrared signal only readable by the Microsoft-Timex Databank watches of the 90's? This may sound totally ridiculous, but these guys *do* live in caves - it ain't like they're registered iPhone developers. I mean, remember the "shoe bomber", the moron whose responsible for you (and everyone else) having to take off your shoes while trying to board a plane? Ya know what he tried to ignite his shoes with? Matches! Matches??? I'm sorry, but if you're trying to take down airplanes but haven't even heard of cigarette lighters yet; I'm reading all your email on an 8088 clone running Windows for Workgroups and Eudora 1.0.
what's wrong with being able to have more control over it? A lot of people here have made the case that we should concentrate on accepting baldness instead of changing it. But is that so different than accepting beards instead of developing a shaver?
Whether it's a matter of personal taste, societal standards, or inherent genetic cues - where is the downside to people having more control over how they appear visually to themselves and others?
Yes, it's possible to go too far with this as it is with anything. Spending $300,000.00 on an outfit instead of just dressing nicely, devoting your life to the gym, or jumping into not-ready-for-prime-time plastic surgery techniques (ex: Micheal Jackson). But just because you *can* go overboard with something, doesn't mean that's your only choice.
Frankly, where technology sits right now I think we'd be better off having stayed with powdered wigs for the time being. You get any hair style you want, and everyone does it so there's no out-cast factor. But we should be working towards having the level of genetic control over our hair that people want. Both in terms on more on our heads, and less pretty much everywhere else. There's a reason that the classic Greek statues bore zero resemblance hair-wise to either Dr. Katz or that fat guy from the Borat movie.
The "Theory" of Evolution is to Evolution as the "Theory" of Gravity is to Gravity. They are both attempts to explain an *observed* phenomena. Creationism and "Intelligent Design" make no attempt to explain the observable phenomena of evolution. They are concerned primarily with Biogenesis (ie. How did live get started in the first place) and essentially ignore evolution If they should be compared to anything, that comparison should take place in physics classes where the Theory of the Big Bang is discusses, as *that* is the scientific theory which concerns itself with Biogenesis.
There they can be compared against an actual scientific theory (meaning a testable, and tested hypothesis) and shown to fall short of even meeting the definition of hypothesis (ie. an *educated* guess).
But Creationism and "Intelligent Design" are most appropriately taught in philosophy class. That's where untestable guesses at the *meaning* of life are discussed. Putting them in science or physics classes would be like putting novels where the characters don't need calculus to succeed in life in math class, or teaching the views of the Amish in an electronics class as an "alternate view".
Technically they are an alternate view, but they're *so* different (essentially arguing against the discipline itself) that they belong in the disciplines which discuss the merits of pursuing other disciplines: philosophy class.
All major religious deserve equal time with Plato, Socrates and Machiavelli because they address the same subject matter, take the same approach, hold themselves to the same standard, and are widely discussed. I'm sure people with other philosophies that conflict with science would like their views to be equated with it as well, but there is a standard they do not meet and thus cannot yet be granted equivalency yet. Take it, leave it, or meet the standards of the area you want your ideas discussed in.
Those who think their ideas need special treatment, to be held to a *lower* standard than anything else, clearly do not have much confidence in them. It would be an insult to those who do to, listen only to those who don't - and that goes for any idea.
I found an easy work around (effective on anyone working at Best Buy):
#1: Ask them a legitimate specific technical question, that doesn't have a yes or no answer.
Example Me: "I'm looking for a Blue-Tooth headset. Which model here has the longest battery life?" Them: "Those ones are black. Let me see if we have any blue ones in stock. The battery section is over there [pointing to a display of Duracells]" (Actual response)
#2: Ask them an illegitimate yes/no question:
Ex: Me: "Ooo, I like this monitor. Does it run at 7200 RPMs?" Them: "Uh... [looking at the card underneath it which is actually meant for one of the wireless mice that used to be stocked there] Yea, I think so. And if not, you can always bring it back in 30 days for one that does."
Seriously, sometimes I just feel like asking them "Am I at Best Buy?" just so they'd have *some* success during the week. But I'm almost afraid to ask anything more complex than "Who's a good boooy? Who's a gooood boooy???"
$20 says even then I won't get back "I'm a good boy!!!".
Any takers?
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
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LHC Success!
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If you explained to an average idiot that the idea of HLC is to get one particle going at near the speed of light, and then get another going at the same speed so they smashed into each reproducing the "big bang", and then pretended to just realize that their desk lamp is spitting out photons at the speed of light, and so were the overhead lights...
At least 30% of them would dive under their desks if you pointed their lamp at the ceiling.
People are so stupid. Everyone knows ordinary desks can't protect you from the Big Bang. Only the Rex Devious Big-Bang Resistant Desk System can! Available now for 1/2 off it's $1,400 retail price for a very, very limited time. Act now and receive our patented "Black Hole Child Safety Screen" absolutely free!
And of course, if should you become separated into matter and anti-matter, your child become reduced to a single point of infinite density, or you are unsatisfied with your new Desk System in anyway - we offer a 100% money back guarantee! That's how sure we are you'll be perfectly safe no matter *what* direction you point your desk lamp in. Act Now... before that light in the office mini-fridge goes on!
Re:There's goes the last advantage to being German
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Robots Learn To Follow
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In all honesty, I think the vast majority of people are like this. German heritage only comes into play because we get raised with a perspective of strong pride in being part of well organized group rather than a perspective which values you according to how high up the ladder you are. It's a good perspective we have, because any society will need more followers than leaders (or as my first well-run programming outfit put it, "We need more Indians, not more Chiefs").
However... the qualities that make *most* people into leaders is not their ability to lead wisely, but their ability to get others to follow, period. Which is why, if you look at all the leaders the human race has ever had, they come off as being significantly worse human beings than the ordinary people you've met in your life.
So in all seriousness, I think we really would be better off with "Robot" leaders. Things which unquestionably accept our principles and guidelines, yet also possess the ability to get people to follow them.
In a way, laws are like that. We have a law that says you can't murder someone unless in self defense. And if you do so, you can argue all you want that you should have been able to, but the law remains written exactly as it was as still applies to you. Sure, you change the law later, but it doesn't retroactively make what you did legal.
The only problem with just having laws alone, is they lack the ability to get you to follow them voluntarily. So you have to create a law enforcement component. And that puts a big gap between those making the laws, and those following them - leading ultimately to bad laws. And even outside of that, someone who can get you to follow them can also get you to disregard those laws.
Now, imagine a computer (like the one you're using or one inside a mobile robot), that had the ability to get you to follow it voluntarily. You program it with the motivation to say, induce you to complete whatever items you put on your todo list, and it essentially talks you into it. On a personal level, you'd be incredibly productive. It would be like having a boss who didn't care about his salary or the company's profits - only your personal advancement.
99.999% of us spend our lives as "followers" in our social hierarchy. As children we do as our parents, as young people we do what our parents, teachers, and peer groups say, and after a brief debacle as college students who don't really follow anyone, we wind up as adults doing what our boss's say. In our unstructured time, we pretty much do what - sorry - marketers of leisure say. We very rarely "lead", and when we do it's a lot more difficult than following.
I wrote a program once to manage my free time productively. When it got to the point where it was more qualified to do that than I was - it didn't matter. Because it hadn't made me feel like it's "follower" yet.
Look at any person or group that gets people to follow. The less qualified the better. You'll see a staggeringly large amount of similarities. If we can give these abilities to machines, the ability to get us to follow them voluntarily - perhaps one day we really will have Robot Leaders. And if you're a programmer or engineer - you know that bullshit about computers randomly changing their goals to selfish ones is *never* going to happen. We programs malfunction, 99 times out of 100 they simply crash. The other time they do something clearly wrong. Ever see a spreadsheet formula get corrupted in a way that just so happens to increase the budget for spreadsheet programs? Me neither.
The *last* thing we need is robot followers, because as a species we've consistently produced terrible leaders. But we do have very good goals (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, protect and serve, tell the truth, the whole truth etc.) - we just need *leaders* who will follow those goals as faithfully as a computer follows it's programs.
Give me a few years:-). I read way more psychology books than programming books. For the time being though, I
There's goes the last advantage to being German
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Robots Learn To Follow
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· Score: 2, Funny
I was always precise, fast, and prone to crashing at work; but what really set me apart from the crowd was, being half German, I was a "born follower". I *hate* leading, what with all the decisions and vague metrics of success. I much prefer basking in the flawless execution of my assigned tasks, even when they were morally ambiguous or made no sense at all. I make a great programmer because computers also demand you do things "their way", even it only a tiny fraction of the population can stomach it.
It's only a small step from following leaders physically to following them figuratively. I can only hope that *some* company sticks with the current approach of producing software that treats me as the spineless meat-bag that I am.
I worked at an Investment Bank with a very expensive backups system. We only had to use it occasionally when someone deleted a file by accident - but there was one period where we didn't need it for about 3 months. The next time we tried to restore something, we discovered it had stopped working about 2 1/2 months before that. So a regularly testing interval for various types of restores is important to implement.
The random server gone missing scenario *sounds* ideal... but those times the missing server never came back? Yeah, that was me, and no - I didn't work there. Next time, have your IT tester use *company* Post-It's; they're much hard to forge.;-)
If these machines are so eminently hackable, no one from our community has ever obviously hacked them? I totally agree that it looks like the machines were deliberately designed to be tamper-friendly (full version of windows, access db, on and on); but it seems odd to me that while we've broken DVD encryption, pawned websites, massive multiplayer games, stolen identities, made pirating music something a child could do - not ONE person has thrown a practical joke that exposes the flaws in the arguably the least secure machines of the bunch. Sure, I've heard lots of people suggest countless *ways* to do it - but I've never seen it done.
To some extent, the "stolen" elections theory strikes me the way the 9/11 conspiracies do. Yes, I can believe there are people in power who'd be *willing* to have done it - but I find it much harder to believe they're also so competent that they'd have been able to without getting caught red-handed. I don't believe the government is telling the truth about, well, pretty much anything - but to suggest they've stolen the elections from under our noses while thwarting every hacker on the planet who'd be willing to expose them seems to be given them more credit than they're due.
I must agree. I have been very fortunate in the weight/muscle department. I'm a programmer, I don't excercise, I smoke too much, drink too much, and consist on a diet that would put most people in the hospital. I'm also 40, and have been treating my body with borderline contempt since... roughly age 8. Yet I look like this:
www.RexDevious.com
Other people I've met or know have to struggle constantly with their weight and muscle tone, and still fall well short of their goals. I can't even fathom what they must go through, the constant burden of watching everything they eat, the hours at the gym, and what it feels like to still be so unhappy with their appearance.
While I take my fortunate situation less and less for granted every day - it does seem to suggest that there *is* a way for weight and muscle issues to not be the enormous pain in the ass it is for so very many people. And no, the fact that this wouldn't be a problem for people if only they were impoverished does not make their suffering less real. I've been there myself, and still wished that those who had body image problems *and* money didn't have hurtful metabolisms.
So bring on the discoveries that help! The more we learn about controlling our bodies, the better.
Not to mention of course all the people who simply have no "natural" way of achieving these results. I've got a sister with MG - she can't exercise because her tendons are so shot they'll literally detach if she tries. I myself have Rheumatoid Arthritis, and am very limited in what exercises I could do if I needed to.
Kudos Paul, you've got the right attitude about preventing needless suffering.
If you'd have left it that way and just kept hitting "Software Update", eventually some over-worked, distracted Apple wunderkind would have written a driver for it. Then we'd *all* have soup headphones!
Think about it. If you were a species intelligent enough to invent faster than light speed travel (or patient enough to put up with the alternative), would you want to meet:
1. The government, farmers, and the occasional astronaut. 2. Puppies and Super-models*.
So when Jessica Alba or Knut the Polar bear cub says they met an alien, *then* I'll start paying attention.
*Hot as she is, I imagine they'd try to duck Angelina Jolie - for fear of being adopted and paraded around Kenya in a diaper or something.
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After all, the idea of open source (FWIK) was wanting something important to come in to being *more* than wanting to make a profit from the process. How many people have spent countless hours doing this so they could have an OS or DB that put "working well" before "being profitable"?
It seems to me that being treated or cured of a painful disease or condition ought to be right up there with not having to use closed source software (some would say I'm being redundant).
Drug companies are *companies*. Their first priority has to be profit, or they will be taken over by a different company willing to put profit first. But what good does that profit do if you make billions helping old men get boners... and then find out you have cancer? (hint: not a lot).
Normally when rich people get an incurable disease, they leave all their money to some institute trying to cure it. But it's a little late then, particularly if the institute they set up or funded puts a monetary barrier in front of anyone who'd want to help them. So yeah, someone out there is eventually going to have both the time and resources to put quality over profit.
I do hope the new drugs they come out with are a bit easier to use than those early Linux distros then. I hate reading long manuals when I'm sick.
Better yet is to figure out how to break the encryption and strip the DRM, as DarkReverser has done.
The point is not to prevent piracy, because that simply can't be done. The point is to prevent *casual* piracy - ala mp3 files. Getting a one-off credit card, and purchasing hundreds of expense books with it so that you can share them on p2p networks along with the name and number you used... well, that doesn't sound terribly casual to me. Frankly, it's faster to just install python, grab pdb2html, and strip the info out entirely. Which isn't being done, 'cause it's still more work than shelling out five or ten bucks for a book apparently.
Now for those really, really expensive books(>$300) - hell yeah! But from what I've seen, some patient soul will just use the analog hole before someone obtains a one off credit card name and number that can be traced back to them and puts that up on p2p networks.
Speaking of really freakin' expensive books - the one area where the much-harder-to-crack Kindle could be both netbooks and smart phones, is those text books where you need to see a diagram (larger than an iphone screen) to learn it. It should be netbooks because publishers of those books are only going to release a few to the Kindle, and then wait to see if they get pirated. If they do, that's it, game over. You'll have to get those books as PDFs from someone with the patience to scan the whole thing. Or Xerox it, and then make copies of that which is easier - like we used to do when I was at University. Hmm... I wonder if that's why they kept coming out with new editions of those each year - to kill both the used-books and xeroxed sources from lowering their sales?
The DRM issue was already solved by Peanut Press (now Fictionwise) a decade ago, and quite elegantly. The data is encrypted for 2 keys, your full name, and your credit card number. You're more than welcome to share your books with whomever you want... but you'll have to give them your name and credit card number to do it. In other words, you can give your book to your close friend, but would not give it to PirateBay.
The other issue they worked out elegantly was to pair each new book sale with a new reader, which was updated roughly every month. What's that do? Well, no encryption scheme is fool proof of course - so by the time some one cracks the encryption on a book - it would have wound up in the 75% off bin anyway.
Reselling the books is something that could be arranged using this infrastructure if there was sufficient demand.
Lastly, they compiled the reader for smart phones. Which, unlike an electronic device that can't fit into your pocket... fits into your pocket. So you always have your library with you because it rides along with your phone.
Steve Jobs made a HUGE mistake not supporting eBooks. "People don't read". Really Steve? Did you forget what Amazon started out selling? But Fictionwise's EReader app is one of the most popular on the iTunes store, and it's free. So Apple makes no money on e-Books because they don't sell the content for the app on the iTunes store.
As for the Electronic Paper - yes, it's better for people who still remember reading off of paper. But reading off of paper is quickly becoming the exception to the rule (at least for people who can afford ebooks). Schools have computers, and with newpapers being free on the Web, people are going to become much more comfortable reading off an electronic screen than they are now.
And even if there's a significant portion of people who don't, well, how often has superior quality (E Paper) beat out a combination of convenience (pocket size) and price(you already own a phone)? I suspect the Kindle 2 will make loads of money, but not become the "iPod of Books" because it's no more portable than "portable" CD players were. But perhaps eInk will find it's way on a smart phone before long.
Oh, there's no doubt that a significant portion of this country does waste money on things we don't need. But that gap between industrialized country's salaries and third world salaries cannot begin to be erased by eliminating this.
I actually *did* look into telecommuting for an Indian firm after the dot com bubble burst. Not only would I have had to give up non-essentials (coffee, beer), but I would have to give up living indoors because the going salary alone wouldn't have let me qualify for *any* apartment in New York City. Yes, including Harlem and the Bronx.
It would be a very good idea for us to give up on useless junk (ie anything you can find on the Home Shopping Network, Sky Mall Catalog, or with the word "luxery" in the model name); but it's a very bad idea to give up on things which help keep you alive. Workers in these "cheap" countries have already done it en masse, and now no amount of success there can buy them back.
Please look into what it's like to be a top programmer in India. There's a reason they can get by on 1/3 of the salary they'd need in the US - and it' ain't because they buy less "toys" there. It's because everything is cheaper. Housing is cheaper because property taxes are cheaper. And the taxes are cheaper because the government doesn't provide those "luxery" services like free police and fire departments for all, free education for all, free emergency health care for all, free food inspection, blah blah blah. Oh, they have some of those things, but they're barely funded compared to what "spoiled" Americans get. Like electricity that's only on part of the day.
The only thing US citizens waste money on is health care insurance. Other countries industrialized nations provide health care too; they just don't splurge on making health insurance companies rich in the process. Take that out of the equation, and it's no cheaper to live in the US than anywhere else. In the US, you just get stuff that 3rd world nations don't take for granted.
I'm not one of those "stand on principle" kind of guys. If someone wants to force me into joining their religion, I'm more than happy to do it... in a way that makes them wish they'd never even mentioned it to me.
The trick is to *gradually* go from simply hearing about their beliefs, to spending the entire work day doing nothing but praying loudly about literally everything in your immediate field of vision, speaking in "tongues" during conference calls, adding new rules to the religion that you insist everyone follow, and generally just giving the religion a bad name by following it far more fanatically than the person who introduced you to it.
Another fun thing you can do these days is take advantage of the new law passed by still President Bush which says you don't have to do anything at work which violates your religious beliefs. He did this so that Evangelicals wouldn't have to perform abortions or distribute birth control, but had to make the wording broad enough to cover *any* religion. Like, if you work at a hospital and Dick Cheney comes in with yet another heart attack, you can claim you're a Christian Scientist: "I need 50 cc's of holy water and prayer circle, stat!". Or if you work at a technology firm, you can say you're Amish and refuse to use anything which uses electricity.
Really, there's nothing quite a fun as joining a religion you think is bizarre in a country that lets you do damn near anything as long as you say God told you to.
I know they used to play music videos, but I also know that my 486 66Mhz computer used to play cutting edge video games. At around the same period in history if I'm not mistaken.
I would venture to guess that YouTube is by far the most prominent way of distributing the multi-million dollar music videos that record companies make to promote the sale of albums. I'd also venture to guess that Warner never bothered to find out one way or the other. More likely, they just got the idea in their heads that "TV = Spend Money to Make Money" and "Internet = Loose Money Unless Google is Involved" and left it at that.
Let's just all agree now not to give them a government bailout when thinking like this drives them to the brink of bankruptcy, OK?
No doubt, "Rape the Kid" would not be a very big seller. But that should be because no game company of any merit would want to create it, and no realistic amount of customers would buy it - NOT because a government official decided that it should be made. Personally, I quite appreciate knowing what kind of society I live in based on what the free people in it do, knowledge I would lack if people could only express government approved ideas and values.
BTW... didn't you find it just a bit creepy that a religious education teacher would think of "Rape the Kid" as video game title?
A lot of "common sense" powers have had to be denied to police, because they've proven themselves incapable of not abusing them. Every counter-intuitive restriction placed on government officials can be traced to an incident of abuse so horrific, that society opted to "tie the hands" of everyone rather than entrust anyone with that power any longer. Really, it takes quite a lot for anyone in government to advocate a limit on governmental powers.
Viruses generally exploit users at some point, right? They may be wicked sick once there in there - but some numb-nuts had to open the "I Love You" attachment to get started.
This is why both Linux and OSX viruses are lower than both what their market share AND security models alone can explain.
OSX users are generally either newbies (Grandma) who don't know *how* to do anything that would compromise their systems, or techies who know better. When a newbie sees a prompt to enter the admin password, they ignore it, call someone for help, or turn off the computer and hope it doesn't happen again (I'm not making this up). A techie realizes that shouldn't happen when they visit a webpage, and leave.
So... yes, when OSX market share increases to the point where there are enough "a little knowledge is dangerous" people on them, it'll finally break it's virus cherry. Until then, it'll have to get by with the
"To complete the installation of this software, your computer must be restarted, and then submerged in orange juice" approach.
When wealth of the magnitude of a few million dollars and up is passed on, the heirs don't just receive fruits of their parent's labour as a comfortable life - they receive real power.
If people did live for hundreds of years, yes there would be a real risk of overpopulation even compared to what we have now. But if the people with power, the ultra wealthy, knew they'd be living for long enough that their actions would eventually have consequences on themselves - would not they be more inclined to think long term? There's a limit to what wealth can protect you from.
Even beyond over population, the wealthy would have to consider who they treated the environment more, and what sort of innovations they enabled or stifled. The way things work now, you can make a few billion making the world a worse place and afford to be insulated against that damage for the rest of your life. The longer people live though, the less feasible that becomes.
Take a look at what the ultra rich are doing already with the longer life spans today's medical technology are giving them. They're funding cure-centric (as opposed to profit-centric) approaches to the diseases they're coming down with, or fear coming down with. Of course, it's a bit of a hail Mary pass to start supporting better schools and better medical research when you're sixty, eh?
Longer life spans may well shift the most powerful among us to start treating the whole planet as something they're going to have to life with for a long, long time.
Here's something I ran across by accident while creating a wedding present for my friend "Scum":
1. Take an ordinary was table candle, contained in a glass holder.
2. Light it, and wait for the wax to start melting.
3. Add paper bit to function as "extra wicks" until the top is melted.
4. Start throwing random bits of garbage into it.
5. Transfer the contraption to a metal container before the glass shatters - which you really should have done before step 2.
Here's what happens:
After step 3, there is no longer any "wick". A heavy white gas floats above the wicks, and that's what's burning. After step 4, the heat is no longer just boiling away the wax, but also boiling away the garbage. Any flammable gas from the garbage is all that's burning, not the solids.
Why this strikes me as similar:
It's a bit like doing fractional distillation, turning solids in to gasses and boiling them off. The difference is that you're using only the heat generated by the vaporized solids to vaporize further solids.
Why this is really freakin' dangerous:
Candle wax is paraffin, and really really tough to extinguish. It doesn't need a hell of a lot of oxygen to continue burning - so trying to put it out by say putting a plate over the top may not work as once you remove the plate the smallest flame around the imperfect seal is light it right back up. You also don't want to throw water on it - the water will boil spitting flaming crap everywhere, and the mixture won't go out. If you throw the whole thing in water (as I tried when I realized all this) - it will kind of explode. One of these things (which I called a "Sludge Candle") in a tuna tin, when tossed into a sink full of water, created a shaft of flames about 3 feet in diameter that extended to the ceiling. It also, as you can imagine, really freaking hot. Do this with a glass candle holder and the glass with crack as I mentioned, and it's not really easy to get near to by that point.. Oh yeah - not all the gases from the garbage will be flammable either; and those ones will just kind of float around the dorm room until they cool down and solidify on every available surface including your lungs. If you really wanted to use this as a recycling approach, you'd distill those gases instead of course.
Still though, it's pretty neat if you have no regard for safety, property, or being formally banned from campus for seven years.
An easier and safer way of seeing this is to simply blow out a candle that's been burning for a bit - and light it by touching a flame to the white smoke rising from the wick rather than having to touch the wick itself.
No doubt there are people who know something about chemistry on here who can tell me why this is an even dumber idea that it already seems. That's cool - my fascination with things like this ended when I turned my hand into a John Merrick Hand Puppet for about a month right before my piano recital. Who knew butane was *heavier* than air? Butane, apparently. Point taken. Nothing but nice safe LCD candles for me these days :-)
Seriously, don't do this. That plasma thing sounds much more promising.
I wouldn't recommend that the same company that is cloning mice subsequently clone very large elephants.
Here's fun experiment to try out:
1. Transfer the oldest windows media readable file you can find lying around (something from like 15 years ago) into your current system. Congratulations, you've just solved the "read media" problem the author poses.
2. Now, try to actually view that media. One of three things will happen:
-A)Your current machine will play the media, but highly distorted.(~90% of the time)
-B)Your current machine will play the media correctly (~7% of the time).
-C)Your computer will report that the required codec cannot be located (~3% of course).
My point is that being able to read all physical "media" (and I've got some really rare ones here) is only helpful if you can read the *data* from that media correctly. And while the latest Microsoft Word program will probably convert enough of a Word Perfect 1.0 document for you to not notice the difference, there are a host of other data formats that simply can't be read on anything other than an old machine, with old dll's.
So, to *truly* build the ultimate media-reading machine - not only would you need all the various drives necessary (which would probably have to be from a host of other networked machines - but you'd also have to have several different virtual machines set up within that main machine to ensure you were really seeing the data as it originally existed.
Here's a question for the others in that vein:
What criteria would you use to determine the make up of the virtual machines?
-Current software from every year or two?
-Every possible combination of operating system version and the software released during it's time-frame (though you could at least narrow it down to the software needed to read just the data you were interested in)?
-The latest version of the operating system and software from the date the file was last modified on?
-Opening up the file itself raw to determine what software it expects to run on, and using *exactly* that version?
Though my example of windows media files is the easiest to spot problems in, I'm sure we're all keenly aware of how different an HTML page written in 1995 would look on a browser released in 2005. Yeah, you could still get the gist of it, but you *not* have truly seen the "data" - the information which that file really contained for the person who created it in 1995 using god knows what.
I wonder if the government is working on this problem? Who knows what sort of secret messages terror groups are hiding in their blink or no frames tags? Maybe the background noise on Osama's tape is actually a deadly BASIC program readable only by a Texas Instruments TI-994A, or contains an infrared signal only readable by the Microsoft-Timex Databank watches of the 90's? This may sound totally ridiculous, but these guys *do* live in caves - it ain't like they're registered iPhone developers. I mean, remember the "shoe bomber", the moron whose responsible for you (and everyone else) having to take off your shoes while trying to board a plane? Ya know what he tried to ignite his shoes with? Matches! Matches??? I'm sorry, but if you're trying to take down airplanes but haven't even heard of cigarette lighters yet; I'm reading all your email on an 8088 clone running Windows for Workgroups and Eudora 1.0.
what's wrong with being able to have more control over it? A lot of people here have made the case that we should concentrate on accepting baldness instead of changing it. But is that so different than accepting beards instead of developing a shaver?
Whether it's a matter of personal taste, societal standards, or inherent genetic cues - where is the downside to people having more control over how they appear visually to themselves and others?
Yes, it's possible to go too far with this as it is with anything. Spending $300,000.00 on an outfit instead of just dressing nicely, devoting your life to the gym, or jumping into not-ready-for-prime-time plastic surgery techniques (ex: Micheal Jackson). But just because you *can* go overboard with something, doesn't mean that's your only choice.
Frankly, where technology sits right now I think we'd be better off having stayed with powdered wigs for the time being. You get any hair style you want, and everyone does it so there's no out-cast factor. But we should be working towards having the level of genetic control over our hair that people want. Both in terms on more on our heads, and less pretty much everywhere else. There's a reason that the classic Greek statues bore zero resemblance hair-wise to either Dr. Katz or that fat guy from the Borat movie.
The "Theory" of Evolution is to Evolution as the "Theory" of Gravity is to Gravity. They are both attempts to explain an *observed* phenomena. Creationism and "Intelligent Design" make no attempt to explain the observable phenomena of evolution. They are concerned primarily with Biogenesis (ie. How did live get started in the first place) and essentially ignore evolution If they should be compared to anything, that comparison should take place in physics classes where the Theory of the Big Bang is discusses, as *that* is the scientific theory which concerns itself with Biogenesis.
There they can be compared against an actual scientific theory (meaning a testable, and tested hypothesis) and shown to fall short of even meeting the definition of hypothesis (ie. an *educated* guess).
But Creationism and "Intelligent Design" are most appropriately taught in philosophy class. That's where untestable guesses at the *meaning* of life are discussed. Putting them in science or physics classes would be like putting novels where the characters don't need calculus to succeed in life in math class, or teaching the views of the Amish in an electronics class as an "alternate view".
Technically they are an alternate view, but they're *so* different (essentially arguing against the discipline itself) that they belong in the disciplines which discuss the merits of pursuing other disciplines: philosophy class.
All major religious deserve equal time with Plato, Socrates and Machiavelli because they address the same subject matter, take the same approach, hold themselves to the same standard, and are widely discussed. I'm sure people with other philosophies that conflict with science would like their views to be equated with it as well, but there is a standard they do not meet and thus cannot yet be granted equivalency yet. Take it, leave it, or meet the standards of the area you want your ideas discussed in.
Those who think their ideas need special treatment, to be held to a *lower* standard than anything else, clearly do not have much confidence in them. It would be an insult to those who do to, listen only to those who don't - and that goes for any idea.
I found an easy work around (effective on anyone working at Best Buy):
#1: Ask them a legitimate specific technical question, that doesn't have a yes or no answer.
Example
Me: "I'm looking for a Blue-Tooth headset. Which model here has the longest battery life?"
Them: "Those ones are black. Let me see if we have any blue ones in stock. The battery section is over there [pointing to a display of Duracells]" (Actual response)
#2: Ask them an illegitimate yes/no question:
Ex:
Me: "Ooo, I like this monitor. Does it run at 7200 RPMs?"
Them: "Uh... [looking at the card underneath it which is actually meant for one of the wireless mice that used to be stocked there] Yea, I think so. And if not, you can always bring it back in 30 days for one that does."
Seriously, sometimes I just feel like asking them "Am I at Best Buy?" just so they'd have *some* success during the week. But I'm almost afraid to ask anything more complex than "Who's a good boooy? Who's a gooood boooy???"
$20 says even then I won't get back "I'm a good boy!!!".
Any takers?
If you explained to an average idiot that the idea of HLC is to get one particle going at near the speed of light, and then get another going at the same speed so they smashed into each reproducing the "big bang", and then pretended to just realize that their desk lamp is spitting out photons at the speed of light, and so were the overhead lights...
At least 30% of them would dive under their desks if you pointed their lamp at the ceiling.
People are so stupid. Everyone knows ordinary desks can't protect you from the Big Bang. Only the Rex Devious Big-Bang Resistant Desk System can! Available now for 1/2 off it's $1,400 retail price for a very, very limited time. Act now and receive our patented "Black Hole Child Safety Screen" absolutely free!
And of course, if should you become separated into matter and anti-matter, your child become reduced to a single point of infinite density, or you are unsatisfied with your new Desk System in anyway - we offer a 100% money back guarantee! That's how sure we are you'll be perfectly safe no matter *what* direction you point your desk lamp in. Act Now... before that light in the office mini-fridge goes on!
In all honesty, I think the vast majority of people are like this. German heritage only comes into play because we get raised with a perspective of strong pride in being part of well organized group rather than a perspective which values you according to how high up the ladder you are. It's a good perspective we have, because any society will need more followers than leaders (or as my first well-run programming outfit put it, "We need more Indians, not more Chiefs").
However... the qualities that make *most* people into leaders is not their ability to lead wisely, but their ability to get others to follow, period. Which is why, if you look at all the leaders the human race has ever had, they come off as being significantly worse human beings than the ordinary people you've met in your life.
So in all seriousness, I think we really would be better off with "Robot" leaders. Things which unquestionably accept our principles and guidelines, yet also possess the ability to get people to follow them.
In a way, laws are like that. We have a law that says you can't murder someone unless in self defense. And if you do so, you can argue all you want that you should have been able to, but the law remains written exactly as it was as still applies to you. Sure, you change the law later, but it doesn't retroactively make what you did legal.
The only problem with just having laws alone, is they lack the ability to get you to follow them voluntarily. So you have to create a law enforcement component. And that puts a big gap between those making the laws, and those following them - leading ultimately to bad laws. And even outside of that, someone who can get you to follow them can also get you to disregard those laws.
Now, imagine a computer (like the one you're using or one inside a mobile robot), that had the ability to get you to follow it voluntarily. You program it with the motivation to say, induce you to complete whatever items you put on your todo list, and it essentially talks you into it. On a personal level, you'd be incredibly productive. It would be like having a boss who didn't care about his salary or the company's profits - only your personal advancement.
99.999% of us spend our lives as "followers" in our social hierarchy. As children we do as our parents, as young people we do what our parents, teachers, and peer groups say, and after a brief debacle as college students who don't really follow anyone, we wind up as adults doing what our boss's say. In our unstructured time, we pretty much do what - sorry - marketers of leisure say. We very rarely "lead", and when we do it's a lot more difficult than following.
I wrote a program once to manage my free time productively. When it got to the point where it was more qualified to do that than I was - it didn't matter. Because it hadn't made me feel like it's "follower" yet.
Look at any person or group that gets people to follow. The less qualified the better. You'll see a staggeringly large amount of similarities. If we can give these abilities to machines, the ability to get us to follow them voluntarily - perhaps one day we really will have Robot Leaders. And if you're a programmer or engineer - you know that bullshit about computers randomly changing their goals to selfish ones is *never* going to happen. We programs malfunction, 99 times out of 100 they simply crash. The other time they do something clearly wrong. Ever see a spreadsheet formula get corrupted in a way that just so happens to increase the budget for spreadsheet programs? Me neither.
The *last* thing we need is robot followers, because as a species we've consistently produced terrible leaders. But we do have very good goals (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, protect and serve, tell the truth, the whole truth etc.) - we just need *leaders* who will follow those goals as faithfully as a computer follows it's programs.
Give me a few years :-). I read way more psychology books than programming books. For the time being though, I
I was always precise, fast, and prone to crashing at work; but what really set me apart from the crowd was, being half German, I was a "born follower". I *hate* leading, what with all the decisions and vague metrics of success. I much prefer basking in the flawless execution of my assigned tasks, even when they were morally ambiguous or made no sense at all. I make a great programmer because computers also demand you do things "their way", even it only a tiny fraction of the population can stomach it.
It's only a small step from following leaders physically to following them figuratively. I can only hope that *some* company sticks with the current approach of producing software that treats me as the spineless meat-bag that I am.
I worked at an Investment Bank with a very expensive backups system. We only had to use it occasionally when someone deleted a file by accident - but there was one period where we didn't need it for about 3 months. The next time we tried to restore something, we discovered it had stopped working about 2 1/2 months before that. So a regularly testing interval for various types of restores is important to implement.
The random server gone missing scenario *sounds* ideal... but those times the missing server never came back? Yeah, that was me, and no - I didn't work there. Next time, have your IT tester use *company* Post-It's; they're much hard to forge. ;-)
If these machines are so eminently hackable, no one from our community has ever obviously hacked them? I totally agree that it looks like the machines were deliberately designed to be tamper-friendly (full version of windows, access db, on and on); but it seems odd to me that while we've broken DVD encryption, pawned websites, massive multiplayer games, stolen identities, made pirating music something a child could do - not ONE person has thrown a practical joke that exposes the flaws in the arguably the least secure machines of the bunch. Sure, I've heard lots of people suggest countless *ways* to do it - but I've never seen it done.
To some extent, the "stolen" elections theory strikes me the way the 9/11 conspiracies do. Yes, I can believe there are people in power who'd be *willing* to have done it - but I find it much harder to believe they're also so competent that they'd have been able to without getting caught red-handed. I don't believe the government is telling the truth about, well, pretty much anything - but to suggest they've stolen the elections from under our noses while thwarting every hacker on the planet who'd be willing to expose them seems to be given them more credit than they're due.
All explanations welcome.
I must agree. I have been very fortunate in the weight/muscle department. I'm a programmer, I don't excercise, I smoke too much, drink too much, and consist on a diet that would put most people in the hospital. I'm also 40, and have been treating my body with borderline contempt since... roughly age 8. Yet I look like this:
www.RexDevious.com
Other people I've met or know have to struggle constantly with their weight and muscle tone, and still fall well short of their goals. I can't even fathom what they must go through, the constant burden of watching everything they eat, the hours at the gym, and what it feels like to still be so unhappy with their appearance.
While I take my fortunate situation less and less for granted every day - it does seem to suggest that there *is* a way for weight and muscle issues to not be the enormous pain in the ass it is for so very many people. And no, the fact that this wouldn't be a problem for people if only they were impoverished does not make their suffering less real. I've been there myself, and still wished that those who had body image problems *and* money didn't have hurtful metabolisms.
So bring on the discoveries that help! The more we learn about controlling our bodies, the better.
Not to mention of course all the people who simply have no "natural" way of achieving these results. I've got a sister with MG - she can't exercise because her tendons are so shot they'll literally detach if she tries. I myself have Rheumatoid Arthritis, and am very limited in what exercises I could do if I needed to.
Kudos Paul, you've got the right attitude about preventing needless suffering.
If you'd have left it that way and just kept hitting "Software Update", eventually some over-worked, distracted Apple wunderkind would have written a driver for it. Then we'd *all* have soup headphones!
Think about it. If you were a species intelligent enough to invent faster than light speed travel (or patient enough to put up with the alternative), would you want to meet:
1. The government, farmers, and the occasional astronaut.
2. Puppies and Super-models*.
So when Jessica Alba or Knut the Polar bear cub says they met an alien, *then* I'll start paying attention.
*Hot as she is, I imagine they'd try to duck Angelina Jolie - for fear of being adopted and paraded around Kenya in a diaper or something.