Say WHAT? You think the coins have any different fiat value than the paper bills?
You've got a lot of learning to do. Start by looking for videos from David Icke. I don't agree with everything he says, but he'll do a far better job of expaining currency, fiat, and the banking system than I ever could. Suffice to say, you're currently severely misinformed.
I can buy two Ford Focus cars for the price of one Volt. And despite the lack of an electric drive train, both of them will get better highway mileage than the Volt.
The rights enshrined in the US Constitution are supposed to apply to everyone, especially those accused of criminal activities by the government.
President Obama, the US Congress, and the US Senate are traitors to their own nation's values.
What a shame the sheeple go along with it, sacrificing their rights in the name of a chicken-little "War on Terrorism" that couldn't stop a Texan from killing a half dozen people, several dozen cars from being fire-bombed over the past few days in California, or an incompetent underwear bomber from trying to set off his shorts.
You should know from the experience of the Israelis that imposing police-state security on the people does not result in safety, only in government and military control of those being oppressed and occupied. Why do you think it'll work any better in the US than in Israel?
I call on the world to demand that the UN veto be taken away from the United States. We cannot allow a government that doesn't respect it's own social mandates to have the final say on how other governments act. Letting someone who wants to arbitrarily jail and hold the accused for an indefinite time without charges or a quick and speedy fair trial have the final say on how the UN members are to respect human rights is so incredibly wrong-headed and stupid that I can't believe any nation in the world is willing to put up with it.
If the Americans want to screw themselves into a police state, let them. But don't let them force that Orwellian nightmare on the rest of the world.
In short, I'm still waiting for someone to follow through and bring Alan Kay's ideas to market instead of trying to tell me that being able to play "Angry Birds" is more innovative and useful than being able to take notes.
I have an odd set of features I hope to find some day.
I have no interest in carrying a cell phone and being leashed to harassment by customers and employers 24x7. Leave a message on my landline or send an email -- I'll get back to you when I have time, not cater to your impatient demands for instant service impinging on my personal life.
Seeing as I don't want to carry around a phone all the time, what I want is a tablet device that will let me use a stylus to scribble notes and diagrams, a true replacement for pen and paper.
I want the option of having those scribblings analyzed for text content, graphical components, and an interface to clean up those scribblings and turn them into a proper document on my home/main system when I get back from collecting notes at a client site.
It might be nice to have 4G and phone connectivity from the tablet device, maybe even skype video conferencing support, but I'd rather just clip a bluetooth headset to my ear and have it talk to the tablet than deal with an actual cell phone.
If you want to get fancy, let me use the bluetooth headset to "command" the tablet through a voice interface. I don't mean being able to say "Select File. Select Save As...." type dialogs, but Siri Part II: Siri Meets Watson. With an actual tablet, the device has enough power to do the voice analysis and grammar parsing without resorting to a central server like Siri has to because of the low CPU power and memory of a cell phone.
Metro, Unity, and all these other "innovative" interfaces are nothing more than a desktop of big icon buttons and an attempt to force the user back to a single-tasking model from a windowing interface model that encourages multi-tasking.
It's not "innovative" -- it's a step backwards to the bad old days of green screen form processing, where you kept filling out screens and hitting submit to move through an application with no option to change the workflow from what the programmers built in.
Sybase sold Microsoft a copy of the ASE 10 series code mere months before they were planning to release ASE 11, which drastically changed the architecture and performance characteristics of the database.
The way I see it, Sybase suckered Microsoft into paying for obsolete technology.
The fact that Sybase marketing sucked and never made much inroads with the 11 or 12 series ASE databases outside their established markets was what killed Sybase, not some predatory behaviour by Microsoft.
I'm quick to blame Microsoft when they're at fault, but I'm not so naive as to let companies get away with shitty marketing or technology that they subsequently blame "monopoly abuse" for failing to win a place in the market.
I hate to dash your illusions of originality, but if anyone deserves "First Post" on being an international scale movement, it's the cannabis right's groups that have fought around the globe since before the '60s.
Why do Occupy protesters think they're the first to ever rise up? Are they really that uninformed and naive about the history of the world and the nations they live in? Or are they just so arrogant they believe their own bullshit?
Some companies are so slow to address reported and known security issues that the malware writers have time to not only create an exploit, but an entire framework for deploying it, and delivering multiple platform enhancements over the years.
All while the vendor can't plug one stinking hole.
And as with any Occupy members, if you don't blindly agree with them, you're labeled as being of the "1%" even if you're on unemployment. After all, being of the "1%" is supposed to make you feel ashamed. Maybe someday I will be of the 1%, but if I am, it'll be because I WORKED to get there.
But don't listen to anyone who tries to help you get the message out or who tries to teach you how to influence change. That'll take away time from you being able to cry "nobody listens to me" and "nobody understands" while you harass the police until they get pissed off enough to punch you in the face. Don't worry, as we've seen, if you get in their face for 2-3 months they WILL lose their patience and give you that damning "police abuse" video for you to share with everyone as proof of your victimization.
The Occupy protesters have a lot to learn about how to present their arguments to the public, how to convince people who don't agree with them, and how to explain themselves to people who have no idea what they're talking about. Their dreams of changing the world won't happen without those skills and years of dedication.
But they sparked a movement and made people aware there are issues. The question is whether they can stop their self-righteous whining about their "rights" and see themselves as the public sees them, so they can face up to facts and work on their public perception problems.
No one shot at you like the Arab Spring protesters. You weren't under military guard like the Palestinians. You didn't spend decades fighting for the right to use effective medication without being arrested for it by the DEA. You weren't systemically abused like the black community before the civil rights movement.
You spent over TWO MONTHS squatting in public parks without effectively delivering a message to the PUBLIC instead of amongst your own faithful at the protests. When there were conflicts with the police while you were being evicted, you were only maced and shot with rubber bullets. No one was killed. You had to scream in the faces of the officers for TWO MONTHS before they'd even go that far to get rid of the camps.
Freedom of speech rights my ass. Occupy doesn't know what their rights are and what they mean, how to deliver a message, or how to work for change. Instead, they come across as a bunch of posers and whiners squatting in the parks and demanding the right to squat there for the rest of their lives while they wait for the world to change itself just because they discovered the world isn't fair.
Despite that, Occupy was the news story of the year to me. It was a brief spark of hope dashed by the incompetence of self-styled "victims" who insult those who know what actual oppression is.
So if a bunch of dirty squatters have to get in the public's face for a couple of months before the police will pull out the rubber bullets and mace to get rid of them, I should take their word at face value and be outraged that their right to free speech was violated? Pfft.
You mean customers will rebel when companies start charging them extra for services that they originally rolled out to customers with the claim that the company would save money by switching to the new system?
The problem isn't just greed, it's the insulting assumption that customers are complete and utter morons who'll just give Verizon money because they say they want it. Verizon has always had shitty service any time I ever dealt with them. FFS, they couldn't even deliver a data line for a 56K modem link to Bear County in Delaware -- their codecs crunched the audio so much you could only get a 28.8 connection. And that was YEARS after most districts had DSL or cable based high-speed.
That's just it, buddy boy -- all they're doing is complaining.
They have tabled no viable proposals or suggestions.
They have no speakers informing the public.
They have no patience for a fight to change society that will take GENERATIONS.
And they have no respect for those they claim kinship with (like the Arab Spring protesters), because while they cry about their "rights" being violated, the people they claim kinship with WERE BEING SHOT AT.
I'm part of the problem? You don't know who I am, mother-fucker.
It's a coin toss. Do you want companies telling you what they're trying to do so you can prepare for changes, or do you want to be broadsided by a truly innovative product developed in secure isolation?
I'd argue that if a company is working on something truly revolutionary, it's there obligation to let others know about it so they can issue the layoff notices before having their lunch eaten.:p
I understand angst. I understand outrage. I understand wanting to "do something about it."
But Anonymous is a voice without a mission. They and the Occupy protesters expect the world to change policy on a dime just because they've suddenly discovered that the world sucks and the greedy get away with it.
They can both take a spin. The movement to fight the US DEA's dogmatic persecution of cannabis users and patients began before I was born. It's been a multi-generational battle, with each generation teaching the next about what tactics worked, and what tactics didn't Instead of crying that "no one listens to me", the cannabis activists kept learning and adapting as the laws and rules of society changed, but they never gave up on the core mission.
The battle isn't over by any means -- the DEA still insists there is no "medical use" for cannabis despite literally millions of patients around the world testifying to it's usefulness and over a dozen states approving medical cannabis programs.
If a change of policy that is backed by such sound economic, scientific, social, and moral benefits cannot be won in less time, what makes Anonymous and Occupy think they're going to change the world by complaining?!?!?!
If you can't read the link to know where it leads, how can you possibly avoid phishing attacks with a QR code? This technology is a wet dream for spammers and malware authors! They can send you anywhere, and you can't even see where they're sending you.
URL shortening services are bad enough. I disagree with posting shortened URLs except in a twitter feed.
Funny. I rather enjoyed the movie when I viewed it on my 19" CRT. I saw nothing in the movie that made me believe it would have been a better story or presentation if the 3D effect were available from my monitor.
In fact, I'm quite certain the story and the film didn't change at all when making the transition from the much-vaunted 3D presentation to my 2D monitor.
I don't go to theatres because there are inevitably one or more of the following present to ruin the experience:
Someone emitting a cloud of migraine-inducing perfume
Some kid who won't stop bleeping, blooping, and flashing their texts while everyone else is trying to watch the move
Some half-drunk buffoon guffawing at the top of their lungs every time the laugh track kicks in
A group of young people commenting their opinion about every line in the movie
Why would I pay a PREMIUM to see a movie at a theatre, knowing full well it's pretty much guaranteed someone is going to ruin the movie experience with their self-indulgently rude and obnoxious behaviour?
Book publishers have formatting standards for how they want to see books submitted, too, but that doesn't seem to restrict the creativity of the writers in any way.
Here's a "mil-spec" tidbit for you. Back with my first job at SED Systems in Saskatoon, SK fresh out of university two weeks before I started with them, I was assigned to work on a project delivering to the Canadian military.
We failed a mil-spec inspection because some valves we were shipped were the commercial versions. The difference between the mil-spec and commercial versions? mil-spec meant they were spray painted Canadian military olive green; the commercial version was spray painted black.
We took out the valves, spray painted them green, and put them back. We passed the next inspection.
You wouldn't believe how much extra the company charged to spray paint the valves green instead of black.
I think you overestimate how special NASA technology is. The same high-quality "must not fail" principles have applied to the entire aerospace industry for decades, particularly for any company working on missile and aircraft technologies.
The only thing "special" about a mil-spec part is that it's tested to tighter tolerances than the regular commercial product. It's not inherently more reliable or produced by a different manufacturing process -- it's just been tested more stringently before being shipped to the customer.
Just to clarify, if the license you originally published under has no explicit license termination clauses, you can't revoke the license you originally published under. But you always have the right to republish your statements under different license terms in the future unless you explicitly reassign copyright to someone else, or to publish the same copyright content under many different licenses by posting copies to many different websites.
Slashdot Mirror
Say WHAT? You think the coins have any different fiat value than the paper bills?
You've got a lot of learning to do. Start by looking for videos from David Icke. I don't agree with everything he says, but he'll do a far better job of expaining currency, fiat, and the banking system than I ever could. Suffice to say, you're currently severely misinformed.
You mean like the Volt? Great idea, insane price.
I can buy two Ford Focus cars for the price of one Volt. And despite the lack of an electric drive train, both of them will get better highway mileage than the Volt.
"We The People".
Not "We The Citizens".
The rights enshrined in the US Constitution are supposed to apply to everyone, especially those accused of criminal activities by the government.
President Obama, the US Congress, and the US Senate are traitors to their own nation's values.
What a shame the sheeple go along with it, sacrificing their rights in the name of a chicken-little "War on Terrorism" that couldn't stop a Texan from killing a half dozen people, several dozen cars from being fire-bombed over the past few days in California, or an incompetent underwear bomber from trying to set off his shorts.
You should know from the experience of the Israelis that imposing police-state security on the people does not result in safety, only in government and military control of those being oppressed and occupied. Why do you think it'll work any better in the US than in Israel?
I call on the world to demand that the UN veto be taken away from the United States. We cannot allow a government that doesn't respect it's own social mandates to have the final say on how other governments act. Letting someone who wants to arbitrarily jail and hold the accused for an indefinite time without charges or a quick and speedy fair trial have the final say on how the UN members are to respect human rights is so incredibly wrong-headed and stupid that I can't believe any nation in the world is willing to put up with it.
If the Americans want to screw themselves into a police state, let them. But don't let them force that Orwellian nightmare on the rest of the world.
In short, I'm still waiting for someone to follow through and bring Alan Kay's ideas to market instead of trying to tell me that being able to play "Angry Birds" is more innovative and useful than being able to take notes.
I have an odd set of features I hope to find some day.
I have no interest in carrying a cell phone and being leashed to harassment by customers and employers 24x7. Leave a message on my landline or send an email -- I'll get back to you when I have time, not cater to your impatient demands for instant service impinging on my personal life.
Seeing as I don't want to carry around a phone all the time, what I want is a tablet device that will let me use a stylus to scribble notes and diagrams, a true replacement for pen and paper.
I want the option of having those scribblings analyzed for text content, graphical components, and an interface to clean up those scribblings and turn them into a proper document on my home/main system when I get back from collecting notes at a client site.
It might be nice to have 4G and phone connectivity from the tablet device, maybe even skype video conferencing support, but I'd rather just clip a bluetooth headset to my ear and have it talk to the tablet than deal with an actual cell phone.
If you want to get fancy, let me use the bluetooth headset to "command" the tablet through a voice interface. I don't mean being able to say "Select File. Select Save As. ..." type dialogs, but Siri Part II: Siri Meets Watson. With an actual tablet, the device has enough power to do the voice analysis and grammar parsing without resorting to a central server like Siri has to because of the low CPU power and memory of a cell phone.
Metro, Unity, and all these other "innovative" interfaces are nothing more than a desktop of big icon buttons and an attempt to force the user back to a single-tasking model from a windowing interface model that encourages multi-tasking.
It's not "innovative" -- it's a step backwards to the bad old days of green screen form processing, where you kept filling out screens and hitting submit to move through an application with no option to change the workflow from what the programmers built in.
Sybase sold Microsoft a copy of the ASE 10 series code mere months before they were planning to release ASE 11, which drastically changed the architecture and performance characteristics of the database.
The way I see it, Sybase suckered Microsoft into paying for obsolete technology.
The fact that Sybase marketing sucked and never made much inroads with the 11 or 12 series ASE databases outside their established markets was what killed Sybase, not some predatory behaviour by Microsoft.
I'm quick to blame Microsoft when they're at fault, but I'm not so naive as to let companies get away with shitty marketing or technology that they subsequently blame "monopoly abuse" for failing to win a place in the market.
What a copout for not being able to explain yourself.
I hate to dash your illusions of originality, but if anyone deserves "First Post" on being an international scale movement, it's the cannabis right's groups that have fought around the globe since before the '60s.
Why do Occupy protesters think they're the first to ever rise up? Are they really that uninformed and naive about the history of the world and the nations they live in? Or are they just so arrogant they believe their own bullshit?
Some companies are so slow to address reported and known security issues that the malware writers have time to not only create an exploit, but an entire framework for deploying it, and delivering multiple platform enhancements over the years.
All while the vendor can't plug one stinking hole.
And as with any Occupy members, if you don't blindly agree with them, you're labeled as being of the "1%" even if you're on unemployment. After all, being of the "1%" is supposed to make you feel ashamed. Maybe someday I will be of the 1%, but if I am, it'll be because I WORKED to get there.
But don't listen to anyone who tries to help you get the message out or who tries to teach you how to influence change. That'll take away time from you being able to cry "nobody listens to me" and "nobody understands" while you harass the police until they get pissed off enough to punch you in the face. Don't worry, as we've seen, if you get in their face for 2-3 months they WILL lose their patience and give you that damning "police abuse" video for you to share with everyone as proof of your victimization.
So of course after I post and reread the summary I find the mention of Occupy, making it look like I can't read as well as I can write. *LOL*
The Occupy protesters have a lot to learn about how to present their arguments to the public, how to convince people who don't agree with them, and how to explain themselves to people who have no idea what they're talking about. Their dreams of changing the world won't happen without those skills and years of dedication.
But they sparked a movement and made people aware there are issues. The question is whether they can stop their self-righteous whining about their "rights" and see themselves as the public sees them, so they can face up to facts and work on their public perception problems.
No one shot at you like the Arab Spring protesters. You weren't under military guard like the Palestinians. You didn't spend decades fighting for the right to use effective medication without being arrested for it by the DEA. You weren't systemically abused like the black community before the civil rights movement.
You spent over TWO MONTHS squatting in public parks without effectively delivering a message to the PUBLIC instead of amongst your own faithful at the protests. When there were conflicts with the police while you were being evicted, you were only maced and shot with rubber bullets. No one was killed. You had to scream in the faces of the officers for TWO MONTHS before they'd even go that far to get rid of the camps.
Freedom of speech rights my ass. Occupy doesn't know what their rights are and what they mean, how to deliver a message, or how to work for change. Instead, they come across as a bunch of posers and whiners squatting in the parks and demanding the right to squat there for the rest of their lives while they wait for the world to change itself just because they discovered the world isn't fair.
Despite that, Occupy was the news story of the year to me. It was a brief spark of hope dashed by the incompetence of self-styled "victims" who insult those who know what actual oppression is.
So if a bunch of dirty squatters have to get in the public's face for a couple of months before the police will pull out the rubber bullets and mace to get rid of them, I should take their word at face value and be outraged that their right to free speech was violated? Pfft.
You don't know what oppression is, kid.
You mean customers will rebel when companies start charging them extra for services that they originally rolled out to customers with the claim that the company would save money by switching to the new system?
The problem isn't just greed, it's the insulting assumption that customers are complete and utter morons who'll just give Verizon money because they say they want it. Verizon has always had shitty service any time I ever dealt with them. FFS, they couldn't even deliver a data line for a 56K modem link to Bear County in Delaware -- their codecs crunched the audio so much you could only get a 28.8 connection. And that was YEARS after most districts had DSL or cable based high-speed.
That's just it, buddy boy -- all they're doing is complaining.
They have tabled no viable proposals or suggestions.
They have no speakers informing the public.
They have no patience for a fight to change society that will take GENERATIONS.
And they have no respect for those they claim kinship with (like the Arab Spring protesters), because while they cry about their "rights" being violated, the people they claim kinship with WERE BEING SHOT AT.
I'm part of the problem? You don't know who I am, mother-fucker.
It's a coin toss. Do you want companies telling you what they're trying to do so you can prepare for changes, or do you want to be broadsided by a truly innovative product developed in secure isolation?
I'd argue that if a company is working on something truly revolutionary, it's there obligation to let others know about it so they can issue the layoff notices before having their lunch eaten. :p
Launch enough and sooner or later one won't crash...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU2y6ztlMAQ
I understand angst. I understand outrage. I understand wanting to "do something about it."
But Anonymous is a voice without a mission. They and the Occupy protesters expect the world to change policy on a dime just because they've suddenly discovered that the world sucks and the greedy get away with it.
They can both take a spin. The movement to fight the US DEA's dogmatic persecution of cannabis users and patients began before I was born. It's been a multi-generational battle, with each generation teaching the next about what tactics worked, and what tactics didn't Instead of crying that "no one listens to me", the cannabis activists kept learning and adapting as the laws and rules of society changed, but they never gave up on the core mission.
The battle isn't over by any means -- the DEA still insists there is no "medical use" for cannabis despite literally millions of patients around the world testifying to it's usefulness and over a dozen states approving medical cannabis programs.
If a change of policy that is backed by such sound economic, scientific, social, and moral benefits cannot be won in less time, what makes Anonymous and Occupy think they're going to change the world by complaining?!?!?!
If you can't read the link to know where it leads, how can you possibly avoid phishing attacks with a QR code? This technology is a wet dream for spammers and malware authors! They can send you anywhere, and you can't even see where they're sending you.
URL shortening services are bad enough. I disagree with posting shortened URLs except in a twitter feed.
Funny. I rather enjoyed the movie when I viewed it on my 19" CRT. I saw nothing in the movie that made me believe it would have been a better story or presentation if the 3D effect were available from my monitor.
In fact, I'm quite certain the story and the film didn't change at all when making the transition from the much-vaunted 3D presentation to my 2D monitor.
I don't go to theatres because there are inevitably one or more of the following present to ruin the experience:
Why would I pay a PREMIUM to see a movie at a theatre, knowing full well it's pretty much guaranteed someone is going to ruin the movie experience with their self-indulgently rude and obnoxious behaviour?
Book publishers have formatting standards for how they want to see books submitted, too, but that doesn't seem to restrict the creativity of the writers in any way.
Here's a "mil-spec" tidbit for you. Back with my first job at SED Systems in Saskatoon, SK fresh out of university two weeks before I started with them, I was assigned to work on a project delivering to the Canadian military.
We failed a mil-spec inspection because some valves we were shipped were the commercial versions. The difference between the mil-spec and commercial versions? mil-spec meant they were spray painted Canadian military olive green; the commercial version was spray painted black.
We took out the valves, spray painted them green, and put them back. We passed the next inspection.
You wouldn't believe how much extra the company charged to spray paint the valves green instead of black.
I think you overestimate how special NASA technology is. The same high-quality "must not fail" principles have applied to the entire aerospace industry for decades, particularly for any company working on missile and aircraft technologies.
The only thing "special" about a mil-spec part is that it's tested to tighter tolerances than the regular commercial product. It's not inherently more reliable or produced by a different manufacturing process -- it's just been tested more stringently before being shipped to the customer.
Just to clarify, if the license you originally published under has no explicit license termination clauses, you can't revoke the license you originally published under. But you always have the right to republish your statements under different license terms in the future unless you explicitly reassign copyright to someone else, or to publish the same copyright content under many different licenses by posting copies to many different websites.