For quite some time now I've been saying that I wish to be served as the main course at my own wake. My corpse should be properly butchered of course and the usable meat chopped up and put into a nice stew.
Not surprisingly all of my friends wish for me to have a very long lifespan;->
Re:"Moron spammer issues apology and stops spammin
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Resume Spamming Redux
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Hehe, it occured to me right after I posted that, that headline would probably make/. as well.
I still stand by my original point that Bernie wouldn't have become "The Most Hated Man on the Internet" had that been the headline though.
it's obvious that Bernie Shifman is a moron asshole spammer, and on that basis I have no sympathy for him. But what Neil Schwartzman has done goes a little too far IMHO. He's posted Bernie's home address, phone number, aerial pictures of his apartment on his Web site. The popularity of that site has now given Bernie the dubious honor of "The Most Hated Man on the Internet" (Bill Gates notwithstanding). Shifman is no doubt the recepient of thousands of harassing phone calls, e-mails, people outside his apartment, etc. He will never be able to get a decent job again, and his life is all but ruined.
And this is a problem how? His actions, and his actions alone have made him "The Most Hated Man On the Internet" If he'd apologized to Neil, promised to never do it again and behaved like a decent human being, instead of threatening lawsuits with every other sentence do you think that he would nearly as hated? Even if Neil had posted the exchange under those circumstances would it have made Slashdot headlines? ("Moron spammer issues apology and stops spamming")
Yes, Bernie's moronic threats and accusations are highly amusing, but it's important to remember that there's a real person behind them. A person of obviously diminished capacity, who honestly thought he was doing the right thing. If Bernie Shifman were to commit suicide tomorrow, how would Neil Schwartzman and everyone else who took part in making this guy's life hell feel?
Though I took no active role in harrassing Bernie I certianlly wouldn't mourn his passing. Yes that's a cold hearted, vile thing to say but it's true. Likewise I wouldn't be upset if every person who ever sent me spam took their own lives, same goes for Hillary Rosen and "Smiling" Jack Valentii - all people who have in some way made my life (and many others) just a little bit more miserable their sudden absence would be like a ray of sunshine.
(And yes, the case can be made that Bernie did include his personal information in his spam, but does that mean he gave up his right to privacy? How many strangers do I have to send my resume to before I can make the assumption it'll be spread all over the Web? 5? 50? 500? 5000? Where's the line?)
One.
If your sending personal info to random strangers you've already given up your right to privacy. Maybe Bernie should've researched Neils privacy policy before sending him personal info?
In the end, I think this is really a matter between Bernie and Neil, and those are the two that need to settle it. I hate spam just as much as the next guy, but I think people need to be proven guilty (in a court of law) before being condemmed. Let's not all let ourselves be guided by mob rule. The Internet was built for better things than this
Bernies not being punished for a crime, he's being smacked by his peers for an amazing, and continued, breach of etiquitte(sp?) Anyway all Neil did was post the facts (+ some personal opinion) of his communications with Bernie and other some other publically available information. Final judgement was left to the reader, as was what (if any) action to take against him.
That it is illegal keeps many people from doing it. Also, should part of a law read "You cannot use software illegally unless you do not profit from it."? That is not a factor in traditional property crimes... why should it be so in intellectual property crimes?
No it doesn't. Everyone I know who is, or used to be (myself included) into Warez knew it was illegal and didn't care. People I know who don't avoid the warez scene do so either because they lack the technical know-how, have personal ethical reasons, consider the time involved in aquiring warez more valuable than the money it costs to buy a package or like me made the switch to Free Software and discovered that warez had become redundant. Those that want to pirate software, and have the skill and time to do it will, regardless of the law.
The difference between IP "theft" and traditional property crime, is that when you "steal" IP you do not deprive the original owner/creator of the use of the IP, unlike physical property crime. All you are stealing is a potential sale. In my warezing days I liked maybe 1/10 titles I downloaded well enough to even keep installed and use for more than a week, maybe half of those I liked well enough that I would've paid for (and later when I could afford to buy software, did or at least the next release or similar game by the same company) Not that I'm justifying my "piracy" with my later purchases, just being honest and putting my view into perspective. The points I'm trying to make is that piracy isn't really theft, in the same sense that stealing your car is theft, as no one really loses anything and that the law has little to no affect on stopping people from pirating software. On the other hand pirating a software package and reselling your own boxed version (or plain CD's) for 1/10 the regular purchase price does cost the producer something, everyone of those bootleg sales should be considered an actual lost sale IMO. It's the large, for profit pirate rings that actually harm businesses, not a bunch of IRC warez d00ds.
Re:This raises some frightening questions
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Battlefield Lasers
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Once you have high-precision and powerful lasers in space, you have a hell of a lot of power. Spy satellites already have impressive accuracy. It's entirely possible to create an offensive weapon that could kill anyone that's out in the open (given a certain amount of intelligence -- supposing biometrics don't get too good, so they could identify us from space).
Say wasn't this the plot to the movie Real Genius? Damn funny movie...
Did you actually read the linked article, or even the comment you are replying too? Or anything in this topic at all? No where in this whole story did anyone talk about asteroids as collectibles here on Earth. The article this guy linked specifically mentions small near earth asteroids that are worth trillions of dollars for the rare metals they contain, in addition to more common place ones such as iron, nickle or gold. Both the linked article and the main story go on to talk about how asteroid minings biggest advantage is in harvesting resources for use in space *NOT* their value on Earth. Mining operations in space will eventually have to supply all of the raw materials for any permanent extra terristial habitation we engage in, and that was the main thrust of this whole story.
All I have to say to this is "Damn Straight!" I'm in a pretty similar place myself right now, only I've hit myself with a double whammy:
I just finished my BA in Business Mngmt, which I hated by my senior year and have no desire to utilize at all anymore
I put myself through school working in IT and thought this is what I really wanted to do as geek stuff has been a hobby for most of my life. Boy was I wrong.
After a nice 2 month post grad road trip across the country I came back home and quickly found what I had thought would be a type of dream job for me: Unix Systems Engineer/Sysadmin for a mid sized ISP. I get to play on Linux and BSD servers all day. Should be great for a 23 yr old,/. reading Linux freak right? Well it was at first, but just four months into it and I can't stand it anymore. Not only is it getting boring, doing this full time has sucked the joy out of being a geek as a hobby, I've barely touched my home network in the past 8 weeks, it's sad.
More than than anything though I looked at the constant amount of work required to stay competitive and get ahead in the IT/CS world and realized that 40 years from now if I looked back and had nothing more than a wall full of certs and a fat 401(k) to show for the bulk of my life that I wouldn't consider it as time well spent. Prothiro's right life is too short, and too brutal to waste it on anything other than pursuing happiness. For me that pursuit is taking me back to a long abandoned dream, that I gave up on my senior because it didn't seem practicle. Next fall I'll be heading back to college to study journalism and public communitcation, most likely at WSU. It's a big risk, and it'll be years after graduation before I'm even making the money I am right now, but it will be far far better for my soul.
He he, I actually feel the same way about Atlas Shrugged, it's one of only a handful of books I've put down and never picked back up. I did howerver like Foutianhead quite a bit, not enough to ever read it again but still it wasn't too bad. But like I said, people will continue to read her precisely because people have such a strong reaction to her books.
As the Sci-Fi/Fantasy realm as already been pretty well covered, and the question pertained to all genre's here's my additions to the list:
Hunter S. Thompson - I think better than any other living author he truely understands the dark underbelley of 20th century life and commented on with such style and aplomb that he will become required reading
Kurt Vonnegut - Like Thompson he has a keen understanding of our modern world and is, IMO, the greatist satirist since Voltaire.
Ayn Rand - people either love her, or hate her but no one can argue that her work hasn't had a powerful effect.
Milton Friedman - he's one of the fathers of modern economic thought, someone will be reading him in 50 years
hell? I don't get it, am I the only one here who doesn't have problems managing their email? I maintain two seperate accounts, one at work and one at home. My employer doesn't have my home email address, and the work account never gets used for anything personal, or even checked outside of 8-5 Mon-Fri. On both accounts I use procmail + pine to keep everything sorted and undercontrol. Lists get pre-sorted into their folders by procmail, and most spam gets caught by Postfix via RBL's (at home at least where I run the server, my employer is currently listed as an open-relay on orbz but that's a different story...) and what little spam that does get through is pretty obvisous and get sent to spamcop right quick. With all the filters in place only direct messages to me hit my inbox, and email stays at a managable level, lists get read only when I have the time to spare.
Now I have no such filters on my snailmail so things get all muddled and tend to pile up. I have s huge stack of magazines, mixed with bills (thank $DIETY that I pay everything but rent electronically!), paper spam and the odd once a month actual letter. I get credit card offers disguised as bills or personal letters or checks, I get magazine offers disguised as all sorts of prizes and contests, some require more than a second glance to sort from the legit email. And for some reason my postman refuses to honor the procmial recipe I taped to the inside of my mailbox;-> I'd love to have a different box for magazines, for bills, for personal mail and a spam filter. Yes I know I can write to the bastards at the direct marketing assoc and get off their mailing lists but that's far more effort than blocking 'net spam is.
For me the S/N ratio is far worse for snailmail than it is for email because I have less control and less options to automate the sorting process. Plus replying costs money, and takes far more effort than hitting ctrl-x in Pine. Now I realize I have it lucky being a geek, I have finer grained control that most "normal" people do, but it doesn't take much effort for even a normal college student type of open up a couple of different free accounts to help sort things, and any of the free POP3 clients allow you to auto-sort mail with almost the same level of control you get with procmail, it just requires you to sit down for an hour or two and do it once, and save yourself hundreds of hours down the road in wasted time.
Not to pick nits or anything but hemorage typically refers to a great loss of something, usually blood but also used to describe loosing money. Lucas will be gorging himself on cash if anything;->
Damn straight. Another thing to keep in mind with new cheap machines is that they tend to use more generic components, which may not have good linux support. When I bought my laptop a few months ago I was considering a new IBM Thinkpad i series but opted out of it because of the funky off brand video chipset it was using, which at the time had shitty linux support. Instead a found a new Thinkpad 570E on warehouse.com for $1200. It's slower at 450mhz but it's a real P3 and everything, including the Lucent winmodem, works under linux. For my 1200 I got a cdrom, dvd-drive and the ultra base (love them rebates)
I have to say also that this is a pretty sweet machine too, lite as hell and rugged too, survived being drug around the states for 2 months on my post-grad roadtrip from hell this summer.
I'm on cable, no PPPoE, and I have a static IP. This allows me to host www.acerbic.org out of my living room. I do this without any kludges and if I happen to reboot my machine or have a power outage I don't loose my IP when I come back online. You can't do that with PPP.
Corporations do not have all the rights of a flesh and blood person, for example corps cannot vote. They do have certain legal rights and responsibilities however, they pay taxes, they can sue and can be sued and they are protected by the first amendment just like you and me. Corporations exist in order to protect their owners from liability, that is in fact the entire reason they exist right now.
Oh and the US has always had corporations, back to the earliest colonial days. Nearly all of the original colonies were founded by corporations, and much of America was opened up and explored by corporations (Hudson Bay Company ring a bell?) Do you know corporations where so popular for starting a colony? Because starting a colony was a very very risky operation, so investors back in England hit on the idea that if they pooled their money they could a) raise far more capital b) by sharing ownership they shared the risk, making it more reasonable. In a LLC (limited liability corporation) you as an owner (investor) are only liable for assests you put in, so if you toss $200 into a venture that goes tits-up you are only out that $200, the companies creditors can't after each investors personal assests only the money already paid up is at stake. This also opens up the door for the middle class to begin investing and playing an active role in big time business ventures, something they were unable to do previously. This inclusion of the middle class also makes vastly more capital available to businesses seeking to grow and further reduces the risk to individual owners, thus spurring more innovation and risk taking.
Now, armed with this knowledge do you see how corporations are in fact the cause for America's economic greatness?
Well not really, as the mere existance of condoms doesn't eliminate the problems of unwanted pregnancies or STD's, people still have to use the damn things in order for them to be effective, which is of course a sociological issue. Actually your condom example is perfect for illustrating his point, condoms as a technological solution by themselves do nothing for the problems, however when used as part of a sociological solution (making the idea of safe sex a cultural norm) they are a very effective tool. So his law still stands, and always will up until the RIAA develops mind control technology and enslaves the population to curb piracy;->
Ahh well that explains the mystery light switch in nearly every house I've ever lived in. Ya know the one where you spend hours flipping it on and off while someone runs around looking and listening for an effect but never figure out what it does.
And those other countries have -plenty- of teenage sex. They've managed to escape teenage pregnancy though, through widespread birth-control, which has nothing to do with censorship.
Yes it does. Birth control is just as available in the US as it is in the rest of the western world. But because of the verbotten nature of sexual discourse in the USA a lot teens grow up not really understanding how to have sex responcibly and safely. If the US as a whole simply accepted that sex was a normal, natural and healthy part of life then you can bet teen pregnencies would drop.
We pulled a good on my boss there. Me and the other Linux admin in our office spent the last few months cooking this one up.
We filtered all of his incoming email through a redneck filter we wrote in Perl. That is we translated all of his incoming mail from english to redneck english (ie 'computer' becomes 'new-fangled-computatin device' etc...)
What we did was write a little perl script that contained about 30 substitutions from english to redneck. We then wrote a.procmailrc that would redirect all of his incoming email through redneck.pl (and keep originals copied safely elsewhere) A root cron job was setup to swap this with his real.procmailrc at midnight april 1, and move them back at midnight april 3 (we wanted to make sure we got him on a workday too;-> ) It worked wonderfully, I got a call this morning from the boss laughing hysterically asking me to please turn it off now.
Wrongo. Under the Articles of Conferderation this would've been true, the states could do whatever they chose regardless of what applied to Congress. When our Constitution, and by exenstion the Bill of Rights, was drafted the framers it was their intention that the Constitution be the supreme law of the land, with power over the federal and state governments. The idea was that the US was founded on a few basic principles and that Americans have certain undeniable, and that no body of government in this Union has the right to take them away. In fact the states are expressly forbidden by the Constitution from enacting certain types of laws.
While geeks make up only a small part of the market for home PC's, the corporate world is a different story. IT types are by and large geeks, and know full well what a shitty deal copy protected hardware is, especially for RAID and diskimaging tools. While it's true in some cases the PHB's will override good judgement and force the issue, good managers will listen when their IT geeks explain why CPRM drives should be avoided.
Now assuming that us geeks make up %5 percent of the harddrive market, that's still nice chunk of the market for a small company. If a new HDD maker were to spring up that made a big deal about not complying with CPRM you can bet, as long as performance and quality were acceptable, that they'd take that %5 market share almost overnight. Whether or not that %5 of the market would be enough to sustain such a company, I don't know, not without a whole helluva lot more information about the HDD industry and it's finances.
However I wouldn't limit the number of people that won't by "protected" drives to just the %5 geek population. I think you can safely include the majority of Napster/Gnutella users into the market for non CPRM media. Most people may not be into technology for the sake of technology but they will take notice of it when their interests are directly affected by tech changes, the same forces that caused the Napster and MP3 explosion will also work against CPRM, which directly affects peoples interests (in the case their ability to get free music.)
So don't quite count the "normal" people out entirely, people can be suprisingly clueful when their interests are threatened.
I don't know I wouldn't mind seeing an attempt to start a TV series based on the "Time Corps" that pop up in a couple of Heinleins later novels (The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset) Granted neither was his greatest of work but I think he did setup a framework that would make a limited run series worth watching, with the multiple divergant timelines and competing groups of time travelers with a different agenda. The novelty of time travel and playing with multiple versions of Earth's history (future?) if combined with good writing/acting could carry such a series for a season or two, but would need to be killed before it got silly (Quantam Leap anyone?) Anyway just my two inflation adjusted cents on the matter.
If it's a corporation then the assets are held by the firm and not affected by the owners death. However a lot of family businesses and farms are run as sole proprieterships, a business structure that does not seperate the owners from the business. The famlies of people running sole proprieterships or partnerships suffer enourmously from estate taxes and many are forced to liquidate the business. While it's true that there are steps you can take to prevent this (namely transferring ownership before you die) accidents still happen. Estate taxes, like any government plan to redistribute wealth, are unjust and should be repealed. In the meantime I applaud anyone, no matter how wealthy, who shelters any amount of their hard earned (and already taxed at least once!) money from the estate tax, as long as it is still in existance.
As to the million dollar RR set, that would've been bought with money that was already taxed, what right does the government have to 55% of it's value? What did the government do to earn it's share? How bout this one, what if the owner had spent a lifetime collecting said RR set, since he was a boy and it grew in value to over a million dollars, even though him and his family are just working stiffs running a small family business? Ever think about that?
Why the fuck do people seem to think that government has some supreme right to take our property, without offering any useful service in return? Do you feel that your tax dollars are being well spent, on drafting and enforcing the DMCA, on CDA, COPA, Carnivore et al... Do you think that the interests of the American people are being well served by our current government, and do you somehow think giving them MORE money is a good thing and will correct the situation?
With proper intervention by legitimately elected policymakers, highspeed internet investments won't go to Silicon Alley anymore, but to Utah, Alaska, Montana- places where industry and agriculture are struggling and where, more than ever, young people need the Internet as a way out.
Thanks entirely to the efforts of unregulated private companies Alaska already has a high percentage of broadband access. In Anchorage, where I live, I have the choice of three different broadband techs from several different providers. We have cable, DSL (3 or 4 ISP's I think are offereing it) and ATT wireless broadband, and I believe a couple of local companies are offering their own wireless broadband as well) We have two fibres leading out of the state to Seattle, including a new high capacity one only a few years old built be GCI a local telco. Most all of the population centers in the state have a broadband option now, today. All of this funded by private companies w/out government aid.
Industry and agriculture are not struggeling Alaska, the oil industry is still going strong, older fields are still profitable and the soon to be opened ANWR region is very promising, and a massive natural gas pipeline is in the works to run the same course as the famous oil pipeline.
Highspeed internet goes to the places where it is best used and at the moment that includes both Alaska and Silicon Alley and plenty of other regions. You may have intended your post to be funny but you should still get your facts straight before spouting off.
I for one am certain that I have no "soul" in the sense that it is something that is bestowed upon my at conception by some mythical god almighty. As a souless atheist I wouldn't disriminate against clones, not if they were walking, talking, thinking and feeling human beings, like me. The only people that would discriminate against cloned human beings would be bigoted religous zealots, the same type of, and I use the term loosely here, person that has always discriminated against people based on the circumstances of their birth. Of course there is no way you could tell a person is cloned without seeing their birth records, so it'll be interesting to see how you'll manage to discriminate.
However if by "soul" what you really mean is sentience, and for some bizzare reason a cloned baby never developes consciousness then I'd say that means the experiments a failure, and clones aren't much good for anything but organ transplants, in which case it would probably be cheaper to just grow the organs on an as needed basis from the patients own DNA. Anyway the way cloning works today makes "mass production" of cloned humans impracticle as you would need an army of host mothers, and have to wait about 15 years for each cloned human to be useful.
You need to abandon your irrational fears and childish myths.
I mean they've never made much sense to me. Seriously what's the point, asides from confusing customers over the price of an item and generally creating hassals like this, which hurt the company's image, what does a rebate program accomplish. The only logic behind rebates that I can see is they basically allow retailers to advertise very low prices and not honor what the ads claim. With that in mind I've never let the price after rebate effect a purchase decision, if I can't afford it at retail (or it's just not worth it) then I won't buy it, if they want my business they'll legitimatly lower the price to something I'm willing to pay. There are two reasons for this thinking, first if I go through the effort to fill out the rebate forms and mail them in I can at best expect a six week turnaround time on the rebate. By the time I get the rebate it's lost all relation to the actual purchase as so many other transactions have come between them. The second reason is simply because of the potential hassals if a rebate, especially a large one, gets rejected. If something I'm already planning to buy happens to have a rebate attached, and it's worth more than the time it'll take to send in, then I'll send it in and forget about till the check shows up, which then feels like mana from heaven;->
Anyway like I was saying, rebates have always felt kinda shady to me. I can't help but wonder if their is a rebate formula, like the one used for automobile recalls, that marketers use when deciding whether or not a rebate program will be profitable, and takes into account at maximum number or rebates that they can fulfill. Honestly if this is the case would anyone here put it past rebate fulfillment companies to start denying claims once a rebate target has been reached? Like with the question asker for this topic, deny at first and give the rebate only on the second attempt with words of apology thrown in for good measure. I'd like to see some data on rebate fulfillment results and compare ease of fulfillment at the beginning of program to the end of a rebate, to see if the number of denied rebates that were later filled increases towards the end of a program. I wonder if such info is available to customers, probably not I suspect.
Slashdot Mirror
For quite some time now I've been saying that I wish to be served as the main course at my own wake. My corpse should be properly butchered of course and the usable meat chopped up and put into a nice stew.
;->
Not surprisingly all of my friends wish for me to have a very long lifespan
Hehe, it occured to me right after I posted that, that headline would probably make /. as well.
I still stand by my original point that Bernie wouldn't have become "The Most Hated Man on the Internet" had that been the headline though.
it's obvious that Bernie Shifman is a moron asshole spammer, and on that basis I have no sympathy for him. But what Neil Schwartzman has done goes a little too far IMHO. He's posted Bernie's home address, phone number, aerial pictures of his apartment on his Web site. The popularity of that site has now given Bernie the dubious honor of "The Most Hated Man on the Internet" (Bill Gates notwithstanding). Shifman is no doubt the recepient of thousands of harassing phone calls, e-mails, people outside his apartment, etc. He will never be able to get a decent job again, and his life is all but ruined.
And this is a problem how? His actions, and his actions alone have made him "The Most Hated Man On the Internet" If he'd apologized to Neil, promised to never do it again and behaved like a decent human being, instead of threatening lawsuits with every other sentence do you think that he would nearly as hated? Even if Neil had posted the exchange under those circumstances would it have made Slashdot headlines? ("Moron spammer issues apology and stops spamming")
Yes, Bernie's moronic threats and accusations are highly amusing, but it's important to remember that there's a real person behind them. A person of obviously diminished capacity, who honestly thought he was doing the right thing. If Bernie Shifman were to commit suicide tomorrow, how would Neil Schwartzman and everyone else who took part in making this guy's life hell feel?
Though I took no active role in harrassing Bernie I certianlly wouldn't mourn his passing. Yes that's a cold hearted, vile thing to say but it's true. Likewise I wouldn't be upset if every person who ever sent me spam took their own lives, same goes for Hillary Rosen and "Smiling" Jack Valentii - all people who have in some way made my life (and many others) just a little bit more miserable their sudden absence would be like a ray of sunshine.
(And yes, the case can be made that Bernie did include his personal information in his spam, but does that mean he gave up his right to privacy? How many strangers do I have to send my resume to before I can make the assumption it'll be spread all over the Web? 5? 50? 500? 5000? Where's the line?)
One.
If your sending personal info to random strangers you've already given up your right to privacy. Maybe Bernie should've researched Neils privacy policy before sending him personal info?
In the end, I think this is really a matter between Bernie and Neil, and those are the two that need to settle it. I hate spam just as much as the next guy, but I think people need to be proven guilty (in a court of law) before being condemmed. Let's not all let ourselves be guided by mob rule. The Internet was built for better things than this
Bernies not being punished for a crime, he's being smacked by his peers for an amazing, and continued, breach of etiquitte(sp?) Anyway all Neil did was post the facts (+ some personal opinion) of his communications with Bernie and other some other publically available information. Final judgement was left to the reader, as was what (if any) action to take against him.
That it is illegal keeps many people from doing it. Also, should part of a law read "You cannot use software illegally unless you do not profit from it."? That is not a factor in traditional property crimes
No it doesn't. Everyone I know who is, or used to be (myself included) into Warez knew it was illegal and didn't care. People I know who don't avoid the warez scene do so either because they lack the technical know-how, have personal ethical reasons, consider the time involved in aquiring warez more valuable than the money it costs to buy a package or like me made the switch to Free Software and discovered that warez had become redundant. Those that want to pirate software, and have the skill and time to do it will, regardless of the law.
The difference between IP "theft" and traditional property crime, is that when you "steal" IP you do not deprive the original owner/creator of the use of the IP, unlike physical property crime. All you are stealing is a potential sale. In my warezing days I liked maybe 1/10 titles I downloaded well enough to even keep installed and use for more than a week, maybe half of those I liked well enough that I would've paid for (and later when I could afford to buy software, did or at least the next release or similar game by the same company) Not that I'm justifying my "piracy" with my later purchases, just being honest and putting my view into perspective. The points I'm trying to make is that piracy isn't really theft, in the same sense that stealing your car is theft, as no one really loses anything and that the law has little to no affect on stopping people from pirating software. On the other hand pirating a software package and reselling your own boxed version (or plain CD's) for 1/10 the regular purchase price does cost the producer something, everyone of those bootleg sales should be considered an actual lost sale IMO. It's the large, for profit pirate rings that actually harm businesses, not a bunch of IRC warez d00ds.
Say wasn't this the plot to the movie Real Genius? Damn funny movie...
Did you actually read the linked article, or even the comment you are replying too? Or anything in this topic at all? No where in this whole story did anyone talk about asteroids as collectibles here on Earth. The article this guy linked specifically mentions small near earth asteroids that are worth trillions of dollars for the rare metals they contain, in addition to more common place ones such as iron, nickle or gold. Both the linked article and the main story go on to talk about how asteroid minings biggest advantage is in harvesting resources for use in space *NOT* their value on Earth. Mining operations in space will eventually have to supply all of the raw materials for any permanent extra terristial habitation we engage in, and that was the main thrust of this whole story.
All I have to say to this is "Damn Straight!" I'm in a pretty similar place myself right now, only I've hit myself with a double whammy:
/. reading Linux freak right? Well it was at first, but just four months into it and I can't stand it anymore. Not only is it getting boring, doing this full time has sucked the joy out of being a geek as a hobby, I've barely touched my home network in the past 8 weeks, it's sad.
I just finished my BA in Business Mngmt, which I hated by my senior year and have no desire to utilize at all anymore
I put myself through school working in IT and thought this is what I really wanted to do as geek stuff has been a hobby for most of my life. Boy was I wrong.
After a nice 2 month post grad road trip across the country I came back home and quickly found what I had thought would be a type of dream job for me: Unix Systems Engineer/Sysadmin for a mid sized ISP. I get to play on Linux and BSD servers all day. Should be great for a 23 yr old,
More than than anything though I looked at the constant amount of work required to stay competitive and get ahead in the IT/CS world and realized that 40 years from now if I looked back and had nothing more than a wall full of certs and a fat 401(k) to show for the bulk of my life that I wouldn't consider it as time well spent. Prothiro's right life is too short, and too brutal to waste it on anything other than pursuing happiness. For me that pursuit is taking me back to a long abandoned dream, that I gave up on my senior because it didn't seem practicle. Next fall I'll be heading back to college to study journalism and public communitcation, most likely at WSU. It's a big risk, and it'll be years after graduation before I'm even making the money I am right now, but it will be far far better for my soul.
He he, I actually feel the same way about Atlas Shrugged, it's one of only a handful of books I've put down and never picked back up. I did howerver like Foutianhead quite a bit, not enough to ever read it again but still it wasn't too bad. But like I said, people will continue to read her precisely because people have such a strong reaction to her books.
As the Sci-Fi/Fantasy realm as already been pretty well covered, and the question pertained to all genre's here's my additions to the list:
Hunter S. Thompson - I think better than any other living author he truely understands the dark underbelley of 20th century life and commented on with such style and aplomb that he will become required reading
Kurt Vonnegut - Like Thompson he has a keen understanding of our modern world and is, IMO, the greatist satirist since Voltaire.
Ayn Rand - people either love her, or hate her but no one can argue that her work hasn't had a powerful effect.
Milton Friedman - he's one of the fathers of modern economic thought, someone will be reading him in 50 years
Just to make it a longer list than requested:
Carl Sagan
Stephen Hawkings
Gore Vidal
hell? I don't get it, am I the only one here who doesn't have problems managing their email? I maintain two seperate accounts, one at work and one at home. My employer doesn't have my home email address, and the work account never gets used for anything personal, or even checked outside of 8-5 Mon-Fri. On both accounts I use procmail + pine to keep everything sorted and undercontrol. Lists get pre-sorted into their folders by procmail, and most spam gets caught by Postfix via RBL's (at home at least where I run the server, my employer is currently listed as an open-relay on orbz but that's a different story...) and what little spam that does get through is pretty obvisous and get sent to spamcop right quick. With all the filters in place only direct messages to me hit my inbox, and email stays at a managable level, lists get read only when I have the time to spare.
;-> I'd love to have a different box for magazines, for bills, for personal mail and a spam filter. Yes I know I can write to the bastards at the direct marketing assoc and get off their mailing lists but that's far more effort than blocking 'net spam is.
Now I have no such filters on my snailmail so things get all muddled and tend to pile up. I have s huge stack of magazines, mixed with bills (thank $DIETY that I pay everything but rent electronically!), paper spam and the odd once a month actual letter. I get credit card offers disguised as bills or personal letters or checks, I get magazine offers disguised as all sorts of prizes and contests, some require more than a second glance to sort from the legit email. And for some reason my postman refuses to honor the procmial recipe I taped to the inside of my mailbox
For me the S/N ratio is far worse for snailmail than it is for email because I have less control and less options to automate the sorting process. Plus replying costs money, and takes far more effort than hitting ctrl-x in Pine. Now I realize I have it lucky being a geek, I have finer grained control that most "normal" people do, but it doesn't take much effort for even a normal college student type of open up a couple of different free accounts to help sort things, and any of the free POP3 clients allow you to auto-sort mail with almost the same level of control you get with procmail, it just requires you to sit down for an hour or two and do it once, and save yourself hundreds of hours down the road in wasted time.
and Lucas would hemorage even more money.
;->
Not to pick nits or anything but hemorage typically refers to a great loss of something, usually blood but also used to describe loosing money. Lucas will be gorging himself on cash if anything
Damn straight. Another thing to keep in mind with new cheap machines is that they tend to use more generic components, which may not have good linux support. When I bought my laptop a few months ago I was considering a new IBM Thinkpad i series but opted out of it because of the funky off brand video chipset it was using, which at the time had shitty linux support. Instead a found a new Thinkpad 570E on warehouse.com for $1200. It's slower at 450mhz but it's a real P3 and everything, including the Lucent winmodem, works under linux. For my 1200 I got a cdrom, dvd-drive and the ultra base (love them rebates)
I have to say also that this is a pretty sweet machine too, lite as hell and rugged too, survived being drug around the states for 2 months on my post-grad roadtrip from hell this summer.
I'm on cable, no PPPoE, and I have a static IP. This allows me to host www.acerbic.org out of my living room. I do this without any kludges and if I happen to reboot my machine or have a power outage I don't loose my IP when I come back online. You can't do that with PPP.
Corporations do not have all the rights of a flesh and blood person, for example corps cannot vote. They do have certain legal rights and responsibilities however, they pay taxes, they can sue and can be sued and they are protected by the first amendment just like you and me. Corporations exist in order to protect their owners from liability, that is in fact the entire reason they exist right now.
Oh and the US has always had corporations, back to the earliest colonial days. Nearly all of the original colonies were founded by corporations, and much of America was opened up and explored by corporations (Hudson Bay Company ring a bell?) Do you know corporations where so popular for starting a colony? Because starting a colony was a very very risky operation, so investors back in England hit on the idea that if they pooled their money they could a) raise far more capital b) by sharing ownership they shared the risk, making it more reasonable. In a LLC (limited liability corporation) you as an owner (investor) are only liable for assests you put in, so if you toss $200 into a venture that goes tits-up you are only out that $200, the companies creditors can't after each investors personal assests only the money already paid up is at stake. This also opens up the door for the middle class to begin investing and playing an active role in big time business ventures, something they were unable to do previously. This inclusion of the middle class also makes vastly more capital available to businesses seeking to grow and further reduces the risk to individual owners, thus spurring more innovation and risk taking.
Now, armed with this knowledge do you see how corporations are in fact the cause for America's economic greatness?
Well not really, as the mere existance of condoms doesn't eliminate the problems of unwanted pregnancies or STD's, people still have to use the damn things in order for them to be effective, which is of course a sociological issue. Actually your condom example is perfect for illustrating his point, condoms as a technological solution by themselves do nothing for the problems, however when used as part of a sociological solution (making the idea of safe sex a cultural norm) they are a very effective tool. So his law still stands, and always will up until the RIAA develops mind control technology and enslaves the population to curb piracy ;->
Ahh well that explains the mystery light switch in nearly every house I've ever lived in. Ya know the one where you spend hours flipping it on and off while someone runs around looking and listening for an effect but never figure out what it does.
Yes it does. Birth control is just as available in the US as it is in the rest of the western world. But because of the verbotten nature of sexual discourse in the USA a lot teens grow up not really understanding how to have sex responcibly and safely. If the US as a whole simply accepted that sex was a normal, natural and healthy part of life then you can bet teen pregnencies would drop.
We pulled a good on my boss there. Me and the other Linux admin in our office spent the last few months cooking this one up.
.procmailrc that would redirect all of his incoming email through redneck.pl (and keep originals copied safely elsewhere) A root cron job was setup to swap this with his real .procmailrc at midnight april 1, and move them back at midnight april 3 (we wanted to make sure we got him on a workday too ;-> ) It worked wonderfully, I got a call this morning from the boss laughing hysterically asking me to please turn it off now.
We filtered all of his incoming email through a redneck filter we wrote in Perl. That is we translated all of his incoming mail from english to redneck english (ie 'computer' becomes 'new-fangled-computatin device' etc...)
What we did was write a little perl script that contained about 30 substitutions from english to redneck. We then wrote a
Wrongo. Under the Articles of Conferderation this would've been true, the states could do whatever they chose regardless of what applied to Congress. When our Constitution, and by exenstion the Bill of Rights, was drafted the framers it was their intention that the Constitution be the supreme law of the land, with power over the federal and state governments. The idea was that the US was founded on a few basic principles and that Americans have certain undeniable, and that no body of government in this Union has the right to take them away. In fact the states are expressly forbidden by the Constitution from enacting certain types of laws.
Now assuming that us geeks make up %5 percent of the harddrive market, that's still nice chunk of the market for a small company. If a new HDD maker were to spring up that made a big deal about not complying with CPRM you can bet, as long as performance and quality were acceptable, that they'd take that %5 market share almost overnight. Whether or not that %5 of the market would be enough to sustain such a company, I don't know, not without a whole helluva lot more information about the HDD industry and it's finances.
However I wouldn't limit the number of people that won't by "protected" drives to just the %5 geek population. I think you can safely include the majority of Napster/Gnutella users into the market for non CPRM media. Most people may not be into technology for the sake of technology but they will take notice of it when their interests are directly affected by tech changes, the same forces that caused the Napster and MP3 explosion will also work against CPRM, which directly affects peoples interests (in the case their ability to get free music.)
So don't quite count the "normal" people out entirely, people can be suprisingly clueful when their interests are threatened.
If it's a corporation then the assets are held by the firm and not affected by the owners death. However a lot of family businesses and farms are run as sole proprieterships, a business structure that does not seperate the owners from the business. The famlies of people running sole proprieterships or partnerships suffer enourmously from estate taxes and many are forced to liquidate the business. While it's true that there are steps you can take to prevent this (namely transferring ownership before you die) accidents still happen. Estate taxes, like any government plan to redistribute wealth, are unjust and should be repealed. In the meantime I applaud anyone, no matter how wealthy, who shelters any amount of their hard earned (and already taxed at least once!) money from the estate tax, as long as it is still in existance.
As to the million dollar RR set, that would've been bought with money that was already taxed, what right does the government have to 55% of it's value? What did the government do to earn it's share? How bout this one, what if the owner had spent a lifetime collecting said RR set, since he was a boy and it grew in value to over a million dollars, even though him and his family are just working stiffs running a small family business? Ever think about that?
Why the fuck do people seem to think that government has some supreme right to take our property, without offering any useful service in return? Do you feel that your tax dollars are being well spent, on drafting and enforcing the DMCA, on CDA, COPA, Carnivore et al... Do you think that the interests of the American people are being well served by our current government, and do you somehow think giving them MORE money is a good thing and will correct the situation?
Thanks entirely to the efforts of unregulated private companies Alaska already has a high percentage of broadband access. In Anchorage, where I live, I have the choice of three different broadband techs from several different providers. We have cable, DSL (3 or 4 ISP's I think are offereing it) and ATT wireless broadband, and I believe a couple of local companies are offering their own wireless broadband as well) We have two fibres leading out of the state to Seattle, including a new high capacity one only a few years old built be GCI a local telco. Most all of the population centers in the state have a broadband option now, today. All of this funded by private companies w/out government aid.
Industry and agriculture are not struggeling Alaska, the oil industry is still going strong, older fields are still profitable and the soon to be opened ANWR region is very promising, and a massive natural gas pipeline is in the works to run the same course as the famous oil pipeline.
Highspeed internet goes to the places where it is best used and at the moment that includes both Alaska and Silicon Alley and plenty of other regions. You may have intended your post to be funny but you should still get your facts straight before spouting off.
However if by "soul" what you really mean is sentience, and for some bizzare reason a cloned baby never developes consciousness then I'd say that means the experiments a failure, and clones aren't much good for anything but organ transplants, in which case it would probably be cheaper to just grow the organs on an as needed basis from the patients own DNA. Anyway the way cloning works today makes "mass production" of cloned humans impracticle as you would need an army of host mothers, and have to wait about 15 years for each cloned human to be useful.
You need to abandon your irrational fears and childish myths.
Anyway like I was saying, rebates have always felt kinda shady to me. I can't help but wonder if their is a rebate formula, like the one used for automobile recalls, that marketers use when deciding whether or not a rebate program will be profitable, and takes into account at maximum number or rebates that they can fulfill. Honestly if this is the case would anyone here put it past rebate fulfillment companies to start denying claims once a rebate target has been reached? Like with the question asker for this topic, deny at first and give the rebate only on the second attempt with words of apology thrown in for good measure. I'd like to see some data on rebate fulfillment results and compare ease of fulfillment at the beginning of program to the end of a rebate, to see if the number of denied rebates that were later filled increases towards the end of a program. I wonder if such info is available to customers, probably not I suspect.