Re:Thou hast open the flood gates
on
Portable Storage?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
So you're the bastard who broke my drive! The thing broke after about a year, stranding about 3 gigs worth of data on a useless medium. My total hard drive space was 2 gigs at the time, so you can understand my frustration. I spent $200 on the drive, and over $100 for the disks. In comparison, I bought a CD-RW for $150 a year or two later and it still works great. The disks for this one are a lot cheaper, too.
First someone says they're going to visit Noah's Ark, then someone says they've found Atlantis. What is this, pseudoscience week on/.? What's next? Bigfoot discovered at monster truck show? Planetary alignment causes massive earthquake? Global warming is entirely mankind's fault?
Even if my state (Minnesota, one of the most heavily-taxed states) was one of these 19 states, I wouldn't pay. Various governmental organizations already take 20% of my earnings (sales taxes, property taxes, state & federal, medicare, social security, gas, alcohol, etc...) and I don't even make all that much. If I try to make more money, they'll end up taking an even larger percentage. And what does it get me? Not a whole hell of a lot. Over 50% of the federal budget goes to medicare and social insecurity and welfare and I don't and probably won't get any benefit from any of that. My property taxes go to the schools, but I don't have kids. Minnesota is spending close to a billion dollars on a frickin' train that goes to three places at about 20 miles an hour. I'm getting sick of it. What the hell happened? Americans from 200 years ago would start a tax revolt if the taxation were to get above 10%. And don't tell me that the government needs that money to pay for all the stuff it's doing. The government shouldn't pay for everything. Cut spending rather than raise taxes, how simple is that? Freedom to keep the fruits of your labor without excessive taxation was one of the earliest principles of classical liberalism, and people just don't seem to care that it's gone.
They're talking about raising the prices, but they don't mention anything about the artists getting a bigger share of the take. Except for a select few, it looks like the majority of the musicians will still get peanuts, whether it's from traditional CD's or online downloads. That's why I have no qualms about downloading massive amounts of music. I archive it, listen to it at my leisure, and when I find music worth listening to on a regular basis, I might buy it, or better yet, go see the band when it comes to town. I can think of quite a few bands that have made more money from me because of this and I can't think of any bands that have suffered because I download music.
Larry Niven once pointed out that "Anything worth doing in space can be turned into a weapon". When you consider the kinetic energies involved, any small fleck of paint can cause significant damage. A mere bucket of sand placed in the path of an orbiting spacecraft will destroy it. Drop something from orbit and you also get damage. Really, this is just a logical step for humanity. Every new frontier has been weaponized: the seas, jungles, the Arctic, the tremendous volume of water under the surface of the ocean, and now space. It's going to happen weather or not we sign treaties. I'd prefer there not to be weapons in space, but eventually, someone is going to do it and it might as well be a country that is in theory free (as long as we don't keep socializing everything).
When the hell are news outlets going to hire writers that at least understand science somewhat and won't dumb it down so far that it becomes just another fluff story next to the one about the cute puppies? Granted, it's cool that scientists can confirm a hunk of crystallized carbon that large, but give me a friggin break....
You may also be interested in this
speech by Michael Crichton.
He states "The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda." He goes on to compare environmentalism to religion, pointing out that environmentalism is becoming more about belief than about cold hard facts. Overall, it's a good read and he makes some incisive points and offers some solutions to the increasing politicization of environmental science.
Does anyone remember a little article posted on slashdot a few weeks ago? Some scientists re-examined the data used in the study that forms the basis of the UN's climate policy. They found that the original authors of that study pretty much made up data and massaged the rest to come up with their conclusions. These scientists used the same methods on the same data, WITHOUT all of the data manipulation and found that while the 20th century was indeed slightly warmer than the 19th century, it is far from the warmest in the past 500 years. I see numerous studies showing that global warming is a farce. For instance, it was much warmer 1000 years ago, which was what allowed the Vikings to colonize Greenland. Hell, just look at the name. There isn't much green in Greenland these days. I saw another study that shows a direct correlation between solar influx and global temperatures. The problem with this global warming theory is that it is rapidly becoming dogma and any "heretics" are figuratively burned at the stake for having dissenting views. It is preached as truth when in fact it is mostly based on flawed data and computer simulations. Creation theory practically has more hard data behind it than global warming. Now, that's not to say I wouldn't like to see some reduction of emissions from fossil fuels. The way it is now seems wasteful to me. But if we blindly follow the environmentalists, we'll be reduced to squatting in ditches, poking berries up our noses. I'd personally like to see a move to nuclear energy and a hydrogen-based economy, but if and when that happens, the environmentalists will probably find a way to bitch about that too.
What are you going to do to reduce the steady increase in the scope and intrusiveness of the government in your state? I'm not a resident of California (nor plan to be), but it often influences many other states.
Aluminum is one of the most resource intensive materials on Earth? And I thought printer ink was bad. In any case, judging by the amount of Mountain Dew I drink, I should be able to fashion about 20 bikes a year. I don't see any bamboo growing up here in the frozen tundra of Minnesota. The choice for me is obvious.
I attended a Catholic high school, and as such, I had to take religion classes. Sometimes, we would watch movies in those classes and try to compare & contrast with Catholicism. Unfortunately, the movies we watched included "Man Without a Face" and "Fern Gully". I would much rather have watched "The Matrix" instead.
I used to work customer service for the Target website, until we farmed it out to Amazon. Target has been charging sales tax on its website since early last year, so this is nothing new to me. I forget the reasoning behind it, but I think it amounts to the fact that the website has become a part of Target Corporation, rather than a seperate company owned by Target Corporation, and due to tax laws, they had to charge sales tax on any orders shipped to states where there is a Target store (47 of them, the ones that don't are Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont, the freak states). That pissed off a lot of people. This probably won't hurt online retailers who don't have brick-and-mortar stores, like Amazon, since they usually offer things you can't find in stores. It will, however, probably hurt the websites for the big retailers, like Target or Walmart, since, as someone else mentioned, people will go to the store rather than pay shipping.
I don't understand much of the mathematics behind the paper, but oddly enough, I worked in that field for about 9 months. The professor I worked for was one of the authors of 3 of the papers cited in the bibliography. Granted, my contribution to the project wasn't much (I built a capacitance bridge used to measure liquid helium levels and I did some data acquisition), but it was still a lot of fun.
Here's some quick calculations that might put some things in perspective:
1. Volume of the galaxy, assuming a disc 50,000 ly in radius and 2000 ly in thickness is about 8e12 cubic ly. 2. Volume of space within 200 ly of Earth is about 3e7 cubic ly. 3. Assuming the distribution of supernova events is fairly even throughout the galactic disc, that means one out of every 300,000 supernova events is within 200 ly of Earth. 4. Based on an estimated frequency of once every 100 years, a supernova should occur within 200 ly of Earth on average once every 30 million years.
Now, I'm ignoring the galactic halo, which has a low stellar density, and the fact that supernovae will tend to be more common towards the center of the galaxy, but that shouldn't change this estimation by more than an order of magnitude. If my calculations are correct, then this means that Earth must have been near supernovae several times in the past 4.5 billion years. Therefore, if all this is true, then life on Earth must be pretty resilient if we're here talking about it today.
I play video games to relax, but if the game doesn't involve beating something up, killing numerous somethings, or conquering entire nations, planets, or universes, I'm just not interested.
Sometimes I wonder at the motives for some of these announcements. Remember alar? Turned out not to be such a bad thing. There's carcinogens in heated carbohydrates now, eating meat is bad, eating fat is bad, beer is bad, power lines cause cancer, driving my car is singlehandedly responsible for global warming, the list goes on. It doesn't matter to some of these people if any of this is true or not. The people who make these kind of announcements are usually either misguided, mistaken, or have some sort of agenda.
Sometimes I suspect those with the agenda won't be happy until they scare us into living in a non-technological society eating only nuts and berries. That's all well and good for them, but I personally like living in a heated apartment when it's 20 below zero (Centigrade) eating 5cm thick steaks while sucking down a couple beers and reading slashdot.
Nothing they say scares me and it shouldn't scare any other rational being. Unfortunately, most people aren't rational, so these fear-mongers get ratings and ratings means big bucks, which just encourages others to do the same. Those of us with more than a couple brain cells have the responsibility to educate those who don't know any better.
Just you wait. My patent for affixing a rope to a tire and then suspending it from a tree will soon be accepted by the Patent Office. Then, I'll let the royalties start rolling in.
Well, this really puts my nuts in a vise. Living in Minneapolis as I do, my broadband choices are Qwest DSL, which is switching over to MSN, or AOL-TimeWarner-Conhugeco, which wants to charge extra for bandwidth usage. I'll be damned if I'll go back to dial-up, but I may not be able to afford DSL or cable modem now. I guess I'll never be able to archive all the Futurama episodes before they're taken off the air.
The biggest mistake we as a species have made in the past 100 years was to allow advertising to become an industry in and of itself. There was a time when businesses did their own advertising, designed to inform the consumer of their new products and the superiority of those products over the competitor. Now, that function has been farmed off to other companies, who, due to the nature of capitalism, have to compete to get the most advertising business. That competition has fostered ever more intrusive advertising, from 30 second spots on tv to giant billboards to the various annoyances we're seeing now on the internet. I forsee that in ten years or less, an ad agency will replace mega-retailer Walmart as the largest company in the world.
This trend will continue, with ads becoming more and more ubiquitious. A few sci-fi writers have drawn this same conclusion, such as Neal Stephenson, who envisioned 3-D billboards that "attack" pedestrians, or another writer, whose name escapes me at the moment (it might have been Greg Egan), who posited that nano-robots could be used to "hack" the brain and perpetually display ads in a person's visual field. I can envision some enterprising young advertiser inventing eyeglasses that display ads. Poor, nearsighted people would put up with the ads in exchange for clear vision (if slightly obscured).
Sadly, there's not much we can do. Look at how well we've curtailed Microsoft. They had it wrong in Fight Club. The insurance companies and financial institutions aren't the enemies. It's the ad agencies. Maybe the same solution might work.
I think it's folly to judge the upcoming episode based entirely on rumor and a couple trailers. The whole point of a trailer is to make a movie look good and entice people to see it. Very often, the trailer is much better than the movie ever could be. In extreme cases, the trailer contains the sum total of the good material in the movie. There really is no way to correlate how well a trailer is put together with how well the movie turns out. Episode 1 proved that. I've gone to see many bad movies based on exciting trailers. Conversely, I've missed many good movies because the trailer put me to sleep.
As for Episode 2, the most recent trailer looked great, and I, for one, will see the movie, based partially on the trailer, and partially on tradition. In the end, though, the true judge of a movie's merit is the movie itself, not the trailer.
Let's not forget all the slaves taken from East Africa by Islamic traders. That was a fairly large business. And let's not forget the rather extensive slave trade still going on today in Africa that has nothing at all to do with the white man. I don't think there is any ethnic group out there that is completely innocent of enslaving other people. It just so happens that the Europeans are the most convenient scapegoat.
What about shows that are no longer aired, but are still traded, such as the Comedy Central episdoes of MST3K? And what about shows that are soon to be taken off the air, such as Family Guy and Futurama? Except for the episodes released on DVD or VHS, there is no more money being made by unbroadcast episodes, and therefore no money is being lost. Therefore, trading of defunct shows should be perfectly legal.
As for trading of currently airing shows, I'll not get into that. I'll just wait until someone comes forward with some hard data, like the RIAA did, to show that the networks are indeed losing money.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're the bastard who broke my drive! The thing broke after about a year, stranding about 3 gigs worth of data on a useless medium. My total hard drive space was 2 gigs at the time, so you can understand my frustration. I spent $200 on the drive, and over $100 for the disks. In comparison, I bought a CD-RW for $150 a year or two later and it still works great. The disks for this one are a lot cheaper, too.
First someone says they're going to visit Noah's Ark, then someone says they've found Atlantis. What is this, pseudoscience week on /.? What's next? Bigfoot discovered at monster truck show? Planetary alignment causes massive earthquake? Global warming is entirely mankind's fault?
This might be interesting, if I actually believed in global warming. In any case, I'll be quite safe here in the upper Midwest.
Awww, maaan, I get some of my best shit from Class and APC.
Even if my state (Minnesota, one of the most heavily-taxed states) was one of these 19 states, I wouldn't pay.
Various governmental organizations already take 20% of my earnings (sales taxes, property taxes, state & federal, medicare, social security, gas, alcohol, etc...) and I don't even make all that much. If I try to make more money, they'll end up taking an even larger percentage. And what does it get me? Not a whole hell of a lot. Over 50% of the federal budget goes to medicare and social insecurity and welfare and I don't and probably won't get any benefit from any of that. My property taxes go to the schools, but I don't have kids. Minnesota is spending close to a billion dollars on a frickin' train that goes to three places at about 20 miles an hour.
I'm getting sick of it. What the hell happened? Americans from 200 years ago would start a tax revolt if the taxation were to get above 10%. And don't tell me that the government needs that money to pay for all the stuff it's doing. The government shouldn't pay for everything. Cut spending rather than raise taxes, how simple is that? Freedom to keep the fruits of your labor without excessive taxation was one of the earliest principles of classical liberalism, and people just don't seem to care that it's gone.
They're talking about raising the prices, but they don't mention anything about the artists getting a bigger share of the take. Except for a select few, it looks like the majority of the musicians will still get peanuts, whether it's from traditional CD's or online downloads. That's why I have no qualms about downloading massive amounts of music.
I archive it, listen to it at my leisure, and when I find music worth listening to on a regular basis, I might buy it, or better yet, go see the band when it comes to town. I can think of quite a few bands that have made more money from me because of this and I can't think of any bands that have suffered because I download music.
Larry Niven once pointed out that "Anything worth doing in space can be turned into a weapon". When you consider the kinetic energies involved, any small fleck of paint can cause significant damage. A mere bucket of sand placed in the path of an orbiting spacecraft will destroy it. Drop something from orbit and you also get damage.
Really, this is just a logical step for humanity. Every new frontier has been weaponized: the seas, jungles, the Arctic, the tremendous volume of water under the surface of the ocean, and now space. It's going to happen weather or not we sign treaties. I'd prefer there not to be weapons in space, but eventually, someone is going to do it and it might as well be a country that is in theory free (as long as we don't keep socializing everything).
When the hell are news outlets going to hire writers that at least understand science somewhat and won't dumb it down so far that it becomes just another fluff story next to the one about the cute puppies? Granted, it's cool that scientists can confirm a hunk of crystallized carbon that large, but give me a friggin break....
You may also be interested in this speech by Michael Crichton. He states "The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda." He goes on to compare environmentalism to religion, pointing out that environmentalism is becoming more about belief than about cold hard facts. Overall, it's a good read and he makes some incisive points and offers some solutions to the increasing politicization of environmental science.
Follow the link below. I was just informed of it today and now I don't think I sound like such a whacko.
h es _quote05.html
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speec
Does anyone remember a little article posted on slashdot a few weeks ago? Some scientists re-examined the data used in the study that forms the basis of the UN's climate policy. They found that the original authors of that study pretty much made up data and massaged the rest to come up with their conclusions. These scientists used the same methods on the same data, WITHOUT all of the data manipulation and found that while the 20th century was indeed slightly warmer than the 19th century, it is far from the warmest in the past 500 years. I see numerous studies showing that global warming is a farce. For instance, it was much warmer 1000 years ago, which was what allowed the Vikings to colonize Greenland. Hell, just look at the name. There isn't much green in Greenland these days. I saw another study that shows a direct correlation between solar influx and global temperatures.
The problem with this global warming theory is that it is rapidly becoming dogma and any "heretics" are figuratively burned at the stake for having dissenting views. It is preached as truth when in fact it is mostly based on flawed data and computer simulations. Creation theory practically has more hard data behind it than global warming.
Now, that's not to say I wouldn't like to see some reduction of emissions from fossil fuels. The way it is now seems wasteful to me. But if we blindly follow the environmentalists, we'll be reduced to squatting in ditches, poking berries up our noses. I'd personally like to see a move to nuclear energy and a hydrogen-based economy, but if and when that happens, the environmentalists will probably find a way to bitch about that too.
What are you going to do to reduce the steady increase in the scope and intrusiveness of the government in your state? I'm not a resident of California (nor plan to be), but it often influences many other states.
Aluminum is one of the most resource intensive materials on Earth? And I thought printer ink was bad. In any case, judging by the amount of Mountain Dew I drink, I should be able to fashion about 20 bikes a year. I don't see any bamboo growing up here in the frozen tundra of Minnesota. The choice for me is obvious.
I attended a Catholic high school, and as such, I had to take religion classes. Sometimes, we would watch movies in those classes and try to compare & contrast with Catholicism. Unfortunately, the movies we watched included "Man Without a Face" and "Fern Gully". I would much rather have watched "The Matrix" instead.
I used to work customer service for the Target website, until we farmed it out to Amazon. Target has been charging sales tax on its website since early last year, so this is nothing new to me. I forget the reasoning behind it, but I think it amounts to the fact that the website has become a part of Target Corporation, rather than a seperate company owned by Target Corporation, and due to tax laws, they had to charge sales tax on any orders shipped to states where there is a Target store (47 of them, the ones that don't are Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont, the freak states). That pissed off a lot of people.
This probably won't hurt online retailers who don't have brick-and-mortar stores, like Amazon, since they usually offer things you can't find in stores. It will, however, probably hurt the websites for the big retailers, like Target or Walmart, since, as someone else mentioned, people will go to the store rather than pay shipping.
I don't understand much of the mathematics behind the paper, but oddly enough, I worked in that field for about 9 months. The professor I worked for was one of the authors of 3 of the papers cited in the bibliography. Granted, my contribution to the project wasn't much (I built a capacitance bridge used to measure liquid helium levels and I did some data acquisition), but it was still a lot of fun.
Here's some quick calculations that might put some things in perspective:
1. Volume of the galaxy, assuming a disc 50,000 ly in radius and 2000 ly in thickness is about 8e12 cubic ly.
2. Volume of space within 200 ly of Earth is about 3e7 cubic ly.
3. Assuming the distribution of supernova events is fairly even throughout the galactic disc, that means one out of every 300,000 supernova events is within 200 ly of Earth.
4. Based on an estimated frequency of once every 100 years, a supernova should occur within 200 ly of Earth on average once every 30 million years.
Now, I'm ignoring the galactic halo, which has a low stellar density, and the fact that supernovae will tend to be more common towards the center of the galaxy, but that shouldn't change this estimation by more than an order of magnitude. If my calculations are correct, then this means that Earth must have been near supernovae several times in the past 4.5 billion years. Therefore, if all this is true, then life on Earth must be pretty resilient if we're here talking about it today.
I play video games to relax, but if the game doesn't involve beating something up, killing numerous somethings, or conquering entire nations, planets, or universes, I'm just not interested.
Sometimes I wonder at the motives for some of these announcements. Remember alar? Turned out not to be such a bad thing. There's carcinogens in heated carbohydrates now, eating meat is bad, eating fat is bad, beer is bad, power lines cause cancer, driving my car is singlehandedly responsible for global warming, the list goes on. It doesn't matter to some of these people if any of this is true or not. The people who make these kind of announcements are usually either misguided, mistaken, or have some sort of agenda.
Sometimes I suspect those with the agenda won't be happy until they scare us into living in a non-technological society eating only nuts and berries. That's all well and good for them, but I personally like living in a heated apartment when it's 20 below zero (Centigrade) eating 5cm thick steaks while sucking down a couple beers and reading slashdot.
Nothing they say scares me and it shouldn't scare any other rational being. Unfortunately, most people aren't rational, so these fear-mongers get ratings and ratings means big bucks, which just encourages others to do the same. Those of us with more than a couple brain cells have the responsibility to educate those who don't know any better.
Just you wait. My patent for affixing a rope to a tire and then suspending it from a tree will soon be accepted by the Patent Office. Then, I'll let the royalties start rolling in.
Well, this really puts my nuts in a vise. Living in Minneapolis as I do, my broadband choices are Qwest DSL, which is switching over to MSN, or AOL-TimeWarner-Conhugeco, which wants to charge extra for bandwidth usage. I'll be damned if I'll go back to dial-up, but I may not be able to afford DSL or cable modem now. I guess I'll never be able to archive all the Futurama episodes before they're taken off the air.
The biggest mistake we as a species have made in the past 100 years was to allow advertising to become an industry in and of itself. There was a time when businesses did their own advertising, designed to inform the consumer of their new products and the superiority of those products over the competitor. Now, that function has been farmed off to other companies, who, due to the nature of capitalism, have to compete to get the most advertising business. That competition has fostered ever more intrusive advertising, from 30 second spots on tv to giant billboards to the various annoyances we're seeing now on the internet. I forsee that in ten years or less, an ad agency will replace mega-retailer Walmart as the largest company in the world.
This trend will continue, with ads becoming more and more ubiquitious. A few sci-fi writers have drawn this same conclusion, such as Neal Stephenson, who envisioned 3-D billboards that "attack" pedestrians, or another writer, whose name escapes me at the moment (it might have been Greg Egan), who posited that nano-robots could be used to "hack" the brain and perpetually display ads in a person's visual field. I can envision some enterprising young advertiser inventing eyeglasses that display ads. Poor, nearsighted people would put up with the ads in exchange for clear vision (if slightly obscured).
Sadly, there's not much we can do. Look at how well we've curtailed Microsoft. They had it wrong in Fight Club. The insurance companies and financial institutions aren't the enemies. It's the ad agencies. Maybe the same solution might work.
I think it's folly to judge the upcoming episode based entirely on rumor and a couple trailers. The whole point of a trailer is to make a movie look good and entice people to see it. Very often, the trailer is much better than the movie ever could be. In extreme cases, the trailer contains the sum total of the good material in the movie. There really is no way to correlate how well a trailer is put together with how well the movie turns out. Episode 1 proved that. I've gone to see many bad movies based on exciting trailers. Conversely, I've missed many good movies because the trailer put me to sleep.
As for Episode 2, the most recent trailer looked great, and I, for one, will see the movie, based partially on the trailer, and partially on tradition. In the end, though, the true judge of a movie's merit is the movie itself, not the trailer.
Let's not forget all the slaves taken from East Africa by Islamic traders. That was a fairly large business. And let's not forget the rather extensive slave trade still going on today in Africa that has nothing at all to do with the white man. I don't think there is any ethnic group out there that is completely innocent of enslaving other people. It just so happens that the Europeans are the most convenient scapegoat.
What about shows that are no longer aired, but are still traded, such as the Comedy Central episdoes of MST3K? And what about shows that are soon to be taken off the air, such as Family Guy and Futurama? Except for the episodes released on DVD or VHS, there is no more money being made by unbroadcast episodes, and therefore no money is being lost. Therefore, trading of defunct shows should be perfectly legal.
As for trading of currently airing shows, I'll not get into that. I'll just wait until someone comes forward with some hard data, like the RIAA did, to show that the networks are indeed losing money.