Caffeine is a relatively benign drug to give up, wouldn't you say?
I've given up hard liquor, cancer sticks, and a lot of sugarwater, and I'm not even 30 yet. But caffeine (and THC)? Never. What do you gain by giving up such a benign altered state? Nothing.
If you give up caffeine, before you know it you'll be eating granola bars and drinking prune juice on your way to a boring grave.
Let's say this trend continues, and one day, only a tiny percentage of the population needs to work to meet the needs of all. What happens then?
That's the point at which the evil elite covertly releases their engineered plague to vastly reduce the useless peasant population by a couple billion so they can claim the whole planet as their post-scarcity playground. Duh. Conspiracy Theory 101.:)
If the gap between the rich and poor keeps increases as quickly as it has, then yeah, the rich has a lot to worry about if the people get angry enough to leave the breadlines and storm the castle^H^H^H^H^H^Hgated communities of billionaires...
(Fortunately things never got that bad (for the rich) even during the great depression.)
The sad reality is that superficial appearance matters to voters, and I agree with the AC in thinking that Kucinich looks like a mangy rat (even after his debate makeovers). And I'm sure John Kerry will get a lot of "he looks like a Kennedy" votes from women, but not enough to outweigh Dean voters, IMO.
The weakest looking president I can think of would be Truman, and Kucinich is a couple notches below him. But I do like his views-- which is what is supposed to matter most in an ideal world.
You pretty much nailed it. Those are the main reasons I continue to use Opera as well.
1) The keyboard focus bug in Moz REALLY annoys me. I hate having to click on the tab window to get focus back all the time.
2 & 3) Automatically restoring the last tabgroup session on startup is a must-have.
4) Opera (as of 7.23) sort of has this go-to-top bug too, but it only happens when you're scrolled to the very bottom of the page when you go back/forward.
One more pet peeve I'd add is that Moz mouse gestures STILL doesn't handle the right mouse button correctly. You have to recompile Mozilla with a custom patch in order to get rid of the context-menu interference problem. I'm addicted to the mouse-rocker (that works in Opera) for back/forward navigation.
I haven't seen that documentary yet, but since you mentioned Freud, I assume the reason for people wanting more and More and MORE is the same conclusion I've come to: evolutionary psychology.
The more shit you have, often the more power you have, and thus the more successful/attractive your selfish genes are to the opposite sex.
For me, though, it's been such a stress reliever to opt-out of the social-climbing, material-oriented rat-race, and living way beneath my means, not because I HAVE to, but because it feels right. (and I already snagged a wife anyway.)
Actually, yeah, the last thing a porn site wants is poor quality traffic that won't convert into dollars. Slashdot traffic is the kind that knows how to get it for FREE, whereas *.aol.com loves to whip out those CC's.
Back when I used to do this, a 1 in 500 conversion ratio (after an ever lower clickthrough ratio) was considered great.
Ever see the Futurama episode, I Dated a Robot"? One of my favorites. They poked fun at Napster by using KidNappster to make fully grown clones of hot celebs.
Mmmm... luscious Lucy Liu...
(In reality, the hard part wouldn't be cloning a body (or rather, molecularly assembling an adult copy), but in getting a good artificial "brain" for it. "I'll take the nag-free/chef/nympho neuralnet. Thanks!":)
...someone had to be paid to mine the dilithium that powered the warp core that drove the the communications array...
'+4 Insightful' indeed!
Eh, not really. The Trek universe has the technology to completely automate the mining, but to make it an interesting story they still require humans & aliens to toil in the mines.
The explaination I got was that for some reason Latinum is one of the few materials that the replicators can't duplicate, but just about everything else can be transformed from energy into matter. So, Latinum is inherently scarce and thus valuable to Ferengis because of scarcity alone (but not utility?).
It's an evolutionary psych thing to be able to claim ownership of something that no one else has. Your genes are then more attractive to the opposite sex.
Indeed. In ~30 years, our exponentially advancing technology will be completely unrecognizable. The amount of progress that used to evolve over centuries now only takes decades... years... months... days... Singularity.
If we want to save the internet from top-down fascist control, we just need to ensure two things:
We need to keep The Ends - our computing devices - under OUR complete control, and not in THEIR control. i.e. "Trusted Computing"/Palladium/EFI/DRM/etc must fail.
We need to keep the communication medium free from government and/or corporate censorship. i.e. ISPs must remain common carriers, and major routers mustn't refuse to carry "untrusted" packets.
Beyond that, software will simply evolve to handle any problems such as SPAM; it's an emergent system.
Say, where can I down load the molecular blueprint for that 52X nano-assembler thingie?
Sorry, but you'll probably have to buy the assembler unless you're among the 1% of the world population that is a DRM-free terrorist capable of making copies of things that AREN'T on the government approvied whitelist.:)
The few posts questioning this on the THG forums seem to have disappeared
Ahh! I HATE THAT! It's that kind of centralized moderator-nazi crap that keeps me away from most forums that aren't SELF-moderated and uncensored (like slashdot).
(spare me the line about how it's not technically censorship unless it's the government doing it. thanks.)
If product placement gets out of hand then expect to see the rise of "edit filters" that overlay generic Acme graphics over the crap they're trying to mentally engineer. All it takes is one person to supply the overlay info to blur out the annoying ads.
Nah, all the real Trek geeks download the completely ad-free "satellite rips" of Enterprise the day before it officially airs. If you want to wait until the day after it airs, you can see the ad-free HDTV version instead.
(I'd rather just pay a buck or two to get the episode, though, so Jolene Blalock can afford to keep up her collagen injections...)
With enough energy, we can restore anything we use back to a natural state.
This is the point I bring up all the time when people claim that we're going to pollute ourselves to death, or turn Earth in a giant Easter Island. I try to explain that, IMNSHO, our dirty, industrial, top-down manufacturing & distribution phase will end soon -- within a few decades-- and be replaced by a green, bottom-up, nanotechnological phase. With enough energy, and atomically precise control over matter, everything will be 100% clean & recyclable.
((I look forward to never having to take the garbage out again; instead, having it disassembled locally into component molecules for later reassembly into burgers & fries, clothes, diamond, computer parts, etc.))
"Everything's encrypted you damn fascists! And you can't torture my passphrase out of me - I've got human rights that trump your perpetual-profit rights!"
Slashdot Mirror
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I've given up hard liquor, cancer sticks, and a lot of sugarwater, and I'm not even 30 yet. But caffeine (and THC)? Never. What do you gain by giving up such a benign altered state? Nothing.
If you give up caffeine, before you know it you'll be eating granola bars and drinking prune juice on your way to a boring grave.
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The one belonging to no country which is hidden on a barge, rather than sitting atop an ICBM that leaves a trail pointing home.
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That's the point at which the evil elite covertly releases their engineered plague to vastly reduce the useless peasant population by a couple billion so they can claim the whole planet as their post-scarcity playground. Duh. Conspiracy Theory 101. :)
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(Fortunately things never got that bad (for the rich) even during the great depression.)
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The weakest looking president I can think of would be Truman, and Kucinich is a couple notches below him. But I do like his views-- which is what is supposed to matter most in an ideal world.
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1) The keyboard focus bug in Moz REALLY annoys me. I hate having to click on the tab window to get focus back all the time.
2 & 3) Automatically restoring the last tabgroup session on startup is a must-have.
4) Opera (as of 7.23) sort of has this go-to-top bug too, but it only happens when you're scrolled to the very bottom of the page when you go back/forward.
One more pet peeve I'd add is that Moz mouse gestures STILL doesn't handle the right mouse button correctly. You have to recompile Mozilla with a custom patch in order to get rid of the context-menu interference problem. I'm addicted to the mouse-rocker (that works in Opera) for back/forward navigation.
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The more shit you have, often the more power you have, and thus the more successful/attractive your selfish genes are to the opposite sex.
For me, though, it's been such a stress reliever to opt-out of the social-climbing, material-oriented rat-race, and living way beneath my means, not because I HAVE to, but because it feels right. (and I already snagged a wife anyway.)
--
Back when I used to do this, a 1 in 500 conversion ratio (after an ever lower clickthrough ratio) was considered great.
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Seriously.
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Mmmm... luscious Lucy Liu...
(In reality, the hard part wouldn't be cloning a body (or rather, molecularly assembling an adult copy), but in getting a good artificial "brain" for it. "I'll take the nag-free/chef/nympho neuralnet. Thanks!" :)
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'+4 Insightful' indeed!
Eh, not really. The Trek universe has the technology to completely automate the mining, but to make it an interesting story they still require humans & aliens to toil in the mines.
--
It's an evolutionary psych thing to be able to claim ownership of something that no one else has. Your genes are then more attractive to the opposite sex.
--
--
Beyond that, software will simply evolve to handle any problems such as SPAM; it's an emergent system.
--
Sorry, but you'll probably have to buy the assembler unless you're among the 1% of the world population that is a DRM-free terrorist capable of making copies of things that AREN'T on the government approvied whitelist. :)
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Ahh! I HATE THAT! It's that kind of centralized moderator-nazi crap that keeps me away from most forums that aren't SELF-moderated and uncensored (like slashdot).
(spare me the line about how it's not technically censorship unless it's the government doing it. thanks.)
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I already downloaded the molecular blueprint for my 52X nano-assembler, but thanks anyway!
The MIAA (Manufacturing Industry Association of America) can go pound sand (into their outdated product molds).
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I won't.
If product placement gets out of hand then expect to see the rise of "edit filters" that overlay generic Acme graphics over the crap they're trying to mentally engineer. All it takes is one person to supply the overlay info to blur out the annoying ads.
--
(I'd rather just pay a buck or two to get the episode, though, so Jolene Blalock can afford to keep up her collagen injections...)
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user: slashdot2003
pass: slashdot2003
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The Fox News cable channel has added "Terror Alert: HIGH" to their corner graphic which is displayed 24/7.
The idiocy is beyond words...
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This is the point I bring up all the time when people claim that we're going to pollute ourselves to death, or turn Earth in a giant Easter Island. I try to explain that, IMNSHO, our dirty, industrial, top-down manufacturing & distribution phase will end soon -- within a few decades-- and be replaced by a green, bottom-up, nanotechnological phase. With enough energy, and atomically precise control over matter, everything will be 100% clean & recyclable.
((I look forward to never having to take the garbage out again; instead, having it disassembled locally into component molecules for later reassembly into burgers & fries, clothes, diamond, computer parts, etc.))
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