> If children are tought to live under all day surveillance under the pretext of their safety,
they will grow up to be paranoid freaks, who will have no idea what terms like privacy,
liberty mean
If children grow up accustomed to living in a safe, secure, surveilled environment, they will realize that the ones reanding about "privacy" and "liberty" are the true "paranoid freaks".
> Continous tracking gives a sense of dis-trust and that is totally worng psychologically, A kid needs to feel secure and trusted in a learning environment.
You only say this because you grew up in a presecurity environment. A generation from now, we'll have learned to deal with omnipresent surveillance. Indeed, your kids won't feel secure or trusted without it.
I already get so much pr0n in my spam I don't care if I ever see naked people again. Why would I want to watch you fuck? Why would anyone want to watch me beat off?
When the cameras are everywhere, you're as invisible in the crowd as you are in the middle of the Australian outback at midnight.
When was the last time you heard a fish complain about not being able to move around with all this damn transparent liquid in his way?
> I guess because if you have technology that prevents you technologically from being irresponsible, you can never learn how to be responsible? > > What happens when they get out? "Wicked, I'm not being tracked anymore! I can do whatever I want to do, consequence free!"
If that happens, then the solution is simply never to remove the tracking device, and to add some sort of reserve capsule of tranquilizers (or better, stimulants) to control the reward center of the brain. With suitable debugging, we could dispense caffeine in the morning, alcohol in the evening, and Ritalin or Prozac during the day as required. (Particularly worthy behavior might be rewarded with a half-dose of Viagra *G*:)
The alternative is rigorous mental conditioning, so that even with the tracking device removed, you continue to behave responsibly.
Personally, I prefer the latter option on a purely aesthetic basis, even though there's probably more money to be made with the former.
As always, start small. Alzheimers' patients are always doing two things: (1) wandering randomly, and (2) forgetting to take their meds. Remotely-operated medicine-releasing devices with real-time location capability solves that problem. Such technology also has interesting military applications. Bring it on!
> [ http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/ ]
Some of us would like this book to remain fiction.
Bully for you. Some of us see great profit to be made in investing in companies contracted to implement the functional specification you referenced.
Today's kids = tomorrow's workers. Prepare them!
on
Reading, Writing, RFID
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· Score: 5, Insightful
> Scary? Why? I sit at work and have absolutely no expectation of privacy. My boss could walk in at any time and, in part, my behavior is based on that knowledge. I don't see why kids should have it any better.
"School" as we know it was designed to train the children of subsistence farmers to be effective factory workers. Rather than getting up at dawn, working with their families at their own pace, and doing whatever it was subsistence farmers did for fun, the Industrial age required workers trained to wake up at the same time every day, respond to stimuli such as whistles ordering the start and end of the working day, and so on. A few generations of such schooling later, and it's become our cultural norm. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, the notion of schooling was nothing short of, well, revolutionary.
Fast-forward to today. We have Industrial-era schooling in an Security-era economy. Your post ("I don't see why kids should have it any better") is evidence of this - you seem to think that having the Panopticon in the workplace and government is a Bad Thing. And yet, you're learning; you're adapting, as evidenced in your next paragraph:
> When you have kids you'll take whatever steps are necessary to protect them. If that means they have to live without much privacy for 18 or so years of their life then so be it! They have approx. 70 more to have all the privacy they want.
Actually, they won't. But you're correct that the RFID-chipping of kids is a Good Thing. Just as you know no limits when it comes to keeping track track them for their protection, your employer and government has an interest in your well-being. Granted, the interest isn't as overarching as the relationship between parent and child; more like rancher and cattle. But show me a rancher who doesn't take care of his cattle, and I'll show you a rancher who's out of business in a year.
But back to school. We moved from the agricultural age to the industrial age, and we designed schools to raise children who would take us there. We now stand at the transitional generation from the industrial age to the security age. By getting the kids accustomed to the Panopticon at an early age, they'll graduate from school better-prepared to take part in the security society.
300 years ago, old farmers probably hated having to get up at oh-dark-hundred to go to the factory as much as you seem to dislike your zero-privacy expectation at work.
As a result of our transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, we have a wide range of consumer goods ranging from broadband pr0n to advances in medical treatment that have doubled the human lifespan and nearly tripled the useful part of the human lifespan.
Today, you and I grumble, and your kids might even chafe (initially) at being chipped. Within a generation or so, our presecurity culture will also be abandoned, and 300 years from now, our descendants will look on us and our presecuity culture as just as primitive as we now imagine our preindustrial subsistence-farming ancestors.
> 10) Do promote and respect your player base, because we pay your salaries. And a note to SOE,
SWG looks cool, but Blizzard is still going to kick your ass next year.;)
Nethack and Omega kicked SWG's ass 10 years ago.:)
> 9) Do create more special in game events (GM Events). They are fun and exciting. Give away unique items for GM quests, etc...
There's more content in Bard's Tale than SWG. Even the NPCs in Bard's tale are more likely to pass the Turing Test than the players in SWG.
/bitchslap Darth;/puke Palpatine;/bonk Chewbacca
Where's a human actor when you need one? Pay some kid in India $0.50 an hour to roleplay NPCs, hook the NPC up to an Eliza chatbot, do something, damnit!
> What, you mean like The Sims Online? > > That was a train wreck, entirely because if the game doesn't support levelling intrinsically it'll appear elsewhere. In TSO, the first few people to make houses had their houses become popular party locations, which meant they got more simoleons (because having other people using your stuff gives you them) which meant they could expand them which meant they stayed popular.
Many players just gave up when they realised that there was no point developing their house
because nobody would come over.
You've just described SWG. Terrain engine and chat client - walk around a planet and talk to morons. Sims in Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!
> If you find yourself writing C-shell-family script, consider a nice crack pipe and some hash
brownies. Because you're fucking insane already. KIlling the rest of your brain cells would be a harmless mod. (I don't believe gmhowell to be one of these people; it just needed to be said.) > >
The C shell was written "to mimic the C programming language." What's the primary tool in the C programming language? Functions. What did csh remove that all other shells had? Functions. What are you supposed to use in their place? > > goto
> Perhaps this is the Libertarian in me speaking out, but I'm not convinced that SPAM has or needs a government solution.
Spam is theft. The only legitimate function of government is to enforce property rights.
There's your Libertarian argument for an anti-spam law, right there.
> People who are agitated by SPAM enough to want to take measures against it are probably within their ability to do so.
You mean my mother, who doesn't even know how to view headers, let alone understand them, is somehow able to prevent the spam from being transmitted to her ISP's SMTP server?:)
> One problem is people ignoring email that isn't spam, simply because the subject line looks like it
True. My own mother sent me a mail that said "Hi from home, how are you?" and I deleted it without ever reading it. I'm also beginning to see spammers adapting by seeing [word] with square brackets around it in the Subject: lines of my spam.
What's worse is how this mental killfiling is extending into real life.
For instance, about half of the drugs I get spams for are legit, the other half are pure quackery, or worse, once-legit drugs that got banned due to side effects.
I know that Viagra and Prozac are legitimate drugs. I think Phentermine was one of those fad weight loss things that killed enough people that it got pulled from the formulary.
But the worst thing is that I don't know what half of these other drugs do, but if my Doctor ever offers me Soma, Floricet, Meridla, Propecia, Adipex, or any of about 100 other drugs I get spambombed with every day, my first reaction is going to be to blurt out loud "What the fuck is that crap? Are you another one of those spamming quacks running an MLM scheme or an illegal offshore pharmacy? Up yours, quack, I came to you because I thought you were a real doctor!"
If the trend holds up, it'll end sexual promiscuity. Imagine, every day, going to school with 500 hot teen girls. (Or for those of us who are a little older, going to work and being surrounded by MILFs for 8 hours a day.)
Once upon a time, that sounded like a lot of fun. After eight years of being spammed to death with the notion that that somehow constitues "sex", I'll respond with any offers of a date with "Look, spammer, my wang's plenty big enough, I can make it 3 inches bigger any time I want to, and I delete so many pictures of 'em every day that I don't care if I ever see tits again. And stop fucking dogs and horses."
> But to answer your question, *IF* hotmail gave up their many many OC-3 and faster links and
decide to go with a 1mbit DSL or 56k dialup for their hosting, *AND* they choose AT&T as their dialup/dsl provider, then yes hotmail will need to register their mail servers with AT&T before those servers can send mail to the rest of the internet. And if hotmail, as one of AT&T's
customers at this point, tried to send out spam, im sure they will be removed from the whitelist.
All of which is a long way of saying that AT&T should just block outbound SMTP connections from their clueless fuckwit DSL and cablemodem customers (but I repeat myself) in 12.0.0.0/8.
Ironic, no? "AT&T: There's so much fucking spam coming from our own customers that even we block traffic from them!"
> Imagine computer cases that dont bend and break. Ever.
Horrible. How the fuck would you mod them?
> Or very lightweight airplanes. >Imagine taller skyscrapers.
There's a very sick joke in there about what happens when an irresistable force meets an immovable object, and I'm going straight to hell for even hinting at it.
> 2003 saw the first scientifically reported incidence of a whale flatulence. A picture and writeup can be
found here
. Warning: the picture caption is bound to induce fits of giggles in young children...or people like
me who still find poop jokes funny.
From the article: "...the Australian Antarctic Division scientists have developed a method that allows them to collect whale feces and study its DNA to figure out what the whale recently consumed. "
> If things ever reach the point that people are being killed off for being "useless", then I hope humanity drives itself extinct as soon as possible, so that perhaps a better species can evolve intelligence and perhaps create something worthwhile.
I am so going to hell for this, but "I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!"
*shrug*, I gave up on a pretty future a long time ago. I'll settle for a pretty cool future. Waking up every morning knowing that the only reason you're still alive is because someone has decided to let you live, qualifies.
> suddenly large amounts of people jobless - often with entire areas having their main sources
of employment disappear entirely. These would be people with not a lot of job skills, and little opportunities for them to work. What would be done if millions of people were out of work and had no job prospects? There's not enough money available for a safety net for all of them,
So we build robots to feed them. Or to kill them. Whatever.
> Do those of us in higher up jobs that are not (yet) vunerable to automation just let them suffer?
If you've got a problem with that, you can either adopt one of the unemployable and feed it yourself, or you can use some of your excess capital to buy a robot to take care of it.
Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I made good grades. I got a good job. I'm alright, Jack. I'm saving money to buy robots. Sucks to be one of those who didn't make it.
If I end up being one of those who didn't make it, it'll also suck to be me. I'm okay with that too.
> Reduced sales all around, thus people being laid off as not needed, more unemployment claims and less purchasing power
Which is why the robots need to do the feeding (reducing the capital sucked out of producers' hands through taxation for eventual redistribution in the form of unemployment claims) or the killing (reducing the cost of unemployment claims by reducing the number of payees) of the unemployable.
In a perfect world, we'd build robots to feed 'em, not kill 'em. The unemployable could sit on their asses all day long, and the few of them who choose to be more than food tubes (I'm not slagging them; I'm a food tube, and you probably are too) will probably come up with fantastic artwork that would never have been created had they been spending 8 hours a day at McDonald's. That's a shame, because art is one of those of things robots can't build, and may never be able to build.
It is, however, an imperfect world. On the whole, it'll probably cost less to the economy to kill them than to feed them. So get used to it.
> They will keep doing this until SOMETHING(some state government not buying any of it's bs) forces that company apart, stops OEM exclusionary system and installation of XP software, and LIMITS their marketshare at a certain percentage. Something like 60 - 70 % would be good for me. This would allow true competition in os software again.
I hate Windows as much as anyone, but... what the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck?
Are you seriously telling me that I should go into my corner store, plunk down $750 on a case, mobo, hard drive, stick of RAM, video card, and hear "I'd like to take your $149 for this gaming system you're building, Mr. Tackhead, but I've already sold my 70% of Windows XP Licenses this month. If either you or the two customers behind you would like to buy Red Hat for $49.99 and this surplus Pentium I for $99.99 and install it, right here, and sign this binding agreement that you'll continue to use it for the rest of the lifetime of the machine, my Compliance Report to the State Commissioner for Operating System Market Share will report the sale of an additional Linux license, which will permit me to sell another three Windows licenses before the SCOSMS fines kick in. Thank you for your co-operation in these trying times."
I say again - a state-mandated market share for operating systems - what the fucking fuck fuck?
> If someone breaks in to my house I am perfectly capable of handling the situation myself. In fact I have done so. Calling 911 does not prevent any damage, or injury to my person or family.
*blink*
I'm as pro-gun and Social Darwinist as anyone. But since when could you use a gun to put out a fire? (Unless it's a Really Really Big Gun:-)
911 is like insurance. You "use" 911 every day in the sense that if you witness an immediate danger to life and health, you can pick up the phone and call it in as soon as you've done what you can to solve the problem yourself.
And unlike insurance, it's cheap enough on a per-user basis that it's more efficient to have everyone pay $0.xx per month, than it would be to manage individual billing of individual 911 subscribers.
Perhaps the best model for 911 is vaccination/immunization. It's not just cheapest, but it's most useful when every phone in the country can be safely assumed to have it.
> There's a reliability issue with VoIP, I for one will not cut my dial tone off until I have nearly 100% uptime on my net connection. In all my life I think there was one time (after a hurricane) that I picked up my telephone and did not hear a dial tone. I can't count how many minutes per month/year my net connection is down for one reason or another.
There's only one number I really want to be able to dial for an outbound voice call. 911.
If VoIP can promise me that with an uptime comparable to that of my local telco, I'll switch.
I hate my local telco with a passion. (But I hate all other telcos and cable companies with similar degrees of passion. Y'all suck.) But I have to give them credit for providing uptime.
> Please elaborate. When would you consider him "reformed"? When he's crouched on his broken
kneecaps, begging for your forgiveness for sending you a few unsolicited mails?
As pleasant as that image is, I have to concede the point.
Spamford Wallace stopped spamming.
I wouldn't let him touch my computer. But the guy found a legitimate business and is making an honest buck. Seedy honest buck? Sure. But seedy or not, he's now selling a product people want, and he's not violating my property rights by filling up my inbox. If I wanna go to his club, I can. If I don't wanna go to his club, I can choose not to.
The only good spammer is a dead spammer or a former spammer. Spamford's chosen to become a former spammer. Not because he's "seen the light", but because he knows AOL's legal department will crush him like a bug. That's still good enough for me.
Spamford, you're an ass. But you're no longer a spamming ass. So long as you've got no more potted meat product for me, I've got no more beef with you.
> If there were no public school systems, what the hell would a voucher mean?
That you have the right to spend $1000 of voucherbucks for an education of your choice.
Currently, the public school system provides poor product at high (albeit invisible) dollar cost.
Some people (fundie whackjobs) find the public school product unacceptable and (as you point out) are using vouchers as a means of getting the gubmint to pay for Fundiecation. I agree with you that that - and that alone - would be a Bad Thing.
Which is why I want to scrap the Bureacracy of Education altogether. In the absence of a public school system, there would be a new market niche: People who want their kids to learn about science and technology without being burdened by either educratic touchy-feely social dogma or fundiematic religious dogma.
This market segment currently uses the public school systems because their kids are harmed less by the educrats than the fundies. I'd like to see a market niche where kids aren't harmed at all.
Fundiecation market segment: Abortion and genetic engineering are eeeeeeevil! God says so! (Gotta run, my shift as a greeter at Wal-Mart starts now.)
Touchy-feely educrat segment: Abortion's fine, but genetic engineering is eeeeeeevil! Greenpeace says so! (Gotta run and smash some windows at Starbucks! Fuck teh pigs!)
Dawkins-and-Rummy-on-crack market segment: Let's figure out how to hack what's hackable, and abort the buggy experiments. The notion that "It's all just meat" is consistent with observed phenomena. (Gotta run, limo's here with Pfizer reps hiring Ph.Ds for a top-secret experimental bioengineering project.)
> Just think about it: God creates a universe, populates it with sentient beings, and then sends his only-begotten son to save these beings from Hell. Does he write the good news on the Moon in mile-high letters for all to see? No, he inspires men to write a cryptic, error-riddled, tedious book, basically saying
that the only way you can take advantage of salvation is to throw any notions of evidence out of the window,
and take it all on blind faith. Which leads me to my final point: How is God so unfathomably inept at PR?
Where do you think marketroids go when they die? Heaven?!?!?!
> > Jesus said in his temptation in the desert by Satan: Do not put the Lord your God to the test.
> > That's pretty rich, in light of all of the appalling tests which Job had to endure at God's hand. What happened to 'do unto others....?
And the Lord God answered Job out of the Whirlwind: "Dude. I'm God. That's why. Deal."
What makes the story interesting is that Job, unlike his friends, and unlike how most of us would react, Dealt.
Re:What about those of us
on
CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
Depends if you're writing frequently to the data. I should have said "static files", not "flat data". For MP3s, once ripped and tagged, the partition could be read-only for all I care:)
Slashdot Mirror
If children grow up accustomed to living in a safe, secure, surveilled environment, they will realize that the ones reanding about "privacy" and "liberty" are the true "paranoid freaks".
> Continous tracking gives a sense of dis-trust and that is totally worng psychologically, A kid needs to feel secure and trusted in a learning environment.
You only say this because you grew up in a presecurity environment. A generation from now, we'll have learned to deal with omnipresent surveillance. Indeed, your kids won't feel secure or trusted without it.
I already get so much pr0n in my spam I don't care if I ever see naked people again. Why would I want to watch you fuck? Why would anyone want to watch me beat off? When the cameras are everywhere, you're as invisible in the crowd as you are in the middle of the Australian outback at midnight. When was the last time you heard a fish complain about not being able to move around with all this damn transparent liquid in his way?
>
> What happens when they get out? "Wicked, I'm not being tracked anymore! I can do whatever I want to do, consequence free!"
If that happens, then the solution is simply never to remove the tracking device, and to add some sort of reserve capsule of tranquilizers (or better, stimulants) to control the reward center of the brain. With suitable debugging, we could dispense caffeine in the morning, alcohol in the evening, and Ritalin or Prozac during the day as required. (Particularly worthy behavior might be rewarded with a half-dose of Viagra *G* :)
The alternative is rigorous mental conditioning, so that even with the tracking device removed, you continue to behave responsibly.
Personally, I prefer the latter option on a purely aesthetic basis, even though there's probably more money to be made with the former.
As always, start small. Alzheimers' patients are always doing two things: (1) wandering randomly, and (2) forgetting to take their meds. Remotely-operated medicine-releasing devices with real-time location capability solves that problem. Such technology also has interesting military applications. Bring it on!
Bully for you. Some of us see great profit to be made in investing in companies contracted to implement the functional specification you referenced.
"School" as we know it was designed to train the children of subsistence farmers to be effective factory workers. Rather than getting up at dawn, working with their families at their own pace, and doing whatever it was subsistence farmers did for fun, the Industrial age required workers trained to wake up at the same time every day, respond to stimuli such as whistles ordering the start and end of the working day, and so on. A few generations of such schooling later, and it's become our cultural norm. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, the notion of schooling was nothing short of, well, revolutionary.
Fast-forward to today. We have Industrial-era schooling in an Security-era economy. Your post ("I don't see why kids should have it any better") is evidence of this - you seem to think that having the Panopticon in the workplace and government is a Bad Thing. And yet, you're learning; you're adapting, as evidenced in your next paragraph:
> When you have kids you'll take whatever steps are necessary to protect them. If that means they have to live without much privacy for 18 or so years of their life then so be it! They have approx. 70 more to have all the privacy they want.
Actually, they won't. But you're correct that the RFID-chipping of kids is a Good Thing. Just as you know no limits when it comes to keeping track track them for their protection, your employer and government has an interest in your well-being. Granted, the interest isn't as overarching as the relationship between parent and child; more like rancher and cattle. But show me a rancher who doesn't take care of his cattle, and I'll show you a rancher who's out of business in a year.
But back to school. We moved from the agricultural age to the industrial age, and we designed schools to raise children who would take us there. We now stand at the transitional generation from the industrial age to the security age. By getting the kids accustomed to the Panopticon at an early age, they'll graduate from school better-prepared to take part in the security society.
300 years ago, old farmers probably hated having to get up at oh-dark-hundred to go to the factory as much as you seem to dislike your zero-privacy expectation at work.
As a result of our transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, we have a wide range of consumer goods ranging from broadband pr0n to advances in medical treatment that have doubled the human lifespan and nearly tripled the useful part of the human lifespan.
Today, you and I grumble, and your kids might even chafe (initially) at being chipped. Within a generation or so, our presecurity culture will also be abandoned, and 300 years from now, our descendants will look on us and our presecuity culture as just as primitive as we now imagine our preindustrial subsistence-farming ancestors.
Nethack and Omega kicked SWG's ass 10 years ago. :)
> 9) Do create more special in game events (GM Events). They are fun and exciting. Give away unique items for GM quests, etc...
There's more content in Bard's Tale than SWG. Even the NPCs in Bard's tale are more likely to pass the Turing Test than the players in SWG.
Where's a human actor when you need one? Pay some kid in India $0.50 an hour to roleplay NPCs, hook the NPC up to an Eliza chatbot, do something, damnit!
>
> That was a train wreck, entirely because if the game doesn't support levelling intrinsically it'll appear elsewhere. In TSO, the first few people to make houses had their houses become popular party locations, which meant they got more simoleons (because having other people using your stuff gives you them) which meant they could expand them which meant they stayed popular. Many players just gave up when they realised that there was no point developing their house because nobody would come over.
You've just described SWG. Terrain engine and chat client - walk around a planet and talk to morons. Sims in Spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!
>
> The C shell was written "to mimic the C programming language." What's the primary tool in the C programming language? Functions. What did csh remove that all other shells had? Functions. What are you supposed to use in their place?
>
> goto
And to that end: Csh Programming Considered Harmful.
Anyone who puts me in tcsh had can expect serious bashing or Korn holing in return.
Spam is theft. The only legitimate function of government is to enforce property rights.
There's your Libertarian argument for an anti-spam law, right there.
> People who are agitated by SPAM enough to want to take measures against it are probably within their ability to do so.
You mean my mother, who doesn't even know how to view headers, let alone understand them, is somehow able to prevent the spam from being transmitted to her ISP's SMTP server? :)
True. My own mother sent me a mail that said "Hi from home, how are you?" and I deleted it without ever reading it. I'm also beginning to see spammers adapting by seeing [word] with square brackets around it in the Subject: lines of my spam.
What's worse is how this mental killfiling is extending into real life.
For instance, about half of the drugs I get spams for are legit, the other half are pure quackery, or worse, once-legit drugs that got banned due to side effects.
I know that Viagra and Prozac are legitimate drugs. I think Phentermine was one of those fad weight loss things that killed enough people that it got pulled from the formulary.
But the worst thing is that I don't know what half of these other drugs do, but if my Doctor ever offers me Soma, Floricet, Meridla, Propecia, Adipex, or any of about 100 other drugs I get spambombed with every day, my first reaction is going to be to blurt out loud "What the fuck is that crap? Are you another one of those spamming quacks running an MLM scheme or an illegal offshore pharmacy? Up yours, quack, I came to you because I thought you were a real doctor!"
If the trend holds up, it'll end sexual promiscuity. Imagine, every day, going to school with 500 hot teen girls. (Or for those of us who are a little older, going to work and being surrounded by MILFs for 8 hours a day.)
Once upon a time, that sounded like a lot of fun. After eight years of being spammed to death with the notion that that somehow constitues "sex", I'll respond with any offers of a date with "Look, spammer, my wang's plenty big enough, I can make it 3 inches bigger any time I want to, and I delete so many pictures of 'em every day that I don't care if I ever see tits again. And stop fucking dogs and horses."
All of which is a long way of saying that AT&T should just block outbound SMTP connections from their clueless fuckwit DSL and cablemodem customers (but I repeat myself) in 12.0.0.0/8.
Ironic, no? "AT&T: There's so much fucking spam coming from our own customers that even we block traffic from them!"
Horrible. How the fuck would you mod them?
> Or very lightweight airplanes.
>Imagine taller skyscrapers.
There's a very sick joke in there about what happens when an irresistable force meets an immovable object, and I'm going straight to hell for even hinting at it.
> Which is:
> 340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand, 456.
Oh. A assload! (I believe that's an Imperial assload, to be precise. The Metric assload is only 2^100.)
From the article: "...the Australian Antarctic Division scientists have developed a method that allows them to collect whale feces and study its DNA to figure out what the whale recently consumed. "
Quick! Patent that before Jeff Bezos does!
"That's not a bug, it's a feature!"
I am so going to hell for this, but "I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!"
*shrug*, I gave up on a pretty future a long time ago. I'll settle for a pretty cool future. Waking up every morning knowing that the only reason you're still alive is because someone has decided to let you live, qualifies.
So we build robots to feed them. Or to kill them. Whatever.
> Do those of us in higher up jobs that are not (yet) vunerable to automation just let them suffer?
If you've got a problem with that, you can either adopt one of the unemployable and feed it yourself, or you can use some of your excess capital to buy a robot to take care of it.
Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I made good grades. I got a good job. I'm alright, Jack. I'm saving money to buy robots. Sucks to be one of those who didn't make it.
If I end up being one of those who didn't make it, it'll also suck to be me. I'm okay with that too.
> Reduced sales all around, thus people being laid off as not needed, more unemployment claims and less purchasing power
Which is why the robots need to do the feeding (reducing the capital sucked out of producers' hands through taxation for eventual redistribution in the form of unemployment claims) or the killing (reducing the cost of unemployment claims by reducing the number of payees) of the unemployable.
In a perfect world, we'd build robots to feed 'em, not kill 'em. The unemployable could sit on their asses all day long, and the few of them who choose to be more than food tubes (I'm not slagging them; I'm a food tube, and you probably are too) will probably come up with fantastic artwork that would never have been created had they been spending 8 hours a day at McDonald's. That's a shame, because art is one of those of things robots can't build, and may never be able to build.
It is, however, an imperfect world. On the whole, it'll probably cost less to the economy to kill them than to feed them. So get used to it.
I hate Windows as much as anyone, but... what the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck?
Are you seriously telling me that I should go into my corner store, plunk down $750 on a case, mobo, hard drive, stick of RAM, video card, and hear "I'd like to take your $149 for this gaming system you're building, Mr. Tackhead, but I've already sold my 70% of Windows XP Licenses this month. If either you or the two customers behind you would like to buy Red Hat for $49.99 and this surplus Pentium I for $99.99 and install it, right here, and sign this binding agreement that you'll continue to use it for the rest of the lifetime of the machine, my Compliance Report to the State Commissioner for Operating System Market Share will report the sale of an additional Linux license, which will permit me to sell another three Windows licenses before the SCOSMS fines kick in. Thank you for your co-operation in these trying times."
I say again - a state-mandated market share for operating systems - what the fucking fuck fuck?
*blink*
I'm as pro-gun and Social Darwinist as anyone. But since when could you use a gun to put out a fire? (Unless it's a Really Really Big Gun :-)
911 is like insurance. You "use" 911 every day in the sense that if you witness an immediate danger to life and health, you can pick up the phone and call it in as soon as you've done what you can to solve the problem yourself.
And unlike insurance, it's cheap enough on a per-user basis that it's more efficient to have everyone pay $0.xx per month, than it would be to manage individual billing of individual 911 subscribers.
Perhaps the best model for 911 is vaccination/immunization. It's not just cheapest, but it's most useful when every phone in the country can be safely assumed to have it.
There's only one number I really want to be able to dial for an outbound voice call. 911.
If VoIP can promise me that with an uptime comparable to that of my local telco, I'll switch.
I hate my local telco with a passion. (But I hate all other telcos and cable companies with similar degrees of passion. Y'all suck.) But I have to give them credit for providing uptime.
As pleasant as that image is, I have to concede the point.
Spamford Wallace stopped spamming.
I wouldn't let him touch my computer. But the guy found a legitimate business and is making an honest buck. Seedy honest buck? Sure. But seedy or not, he's now selling a product people want, and he's not violating my property rights by filling up my inbox. If I wanna go to his club, I can. If I don't wanna go to his club, I can choose not to.
The only good spammer is a dead spammer or a former spammer. Spamford's chosen to become a former spammer. Not because he's "seen the light", but because he knows AOL's legal department will crush him like a bug. That's still good enough for me.
Spamford, you're an ass. But you're no longer a spamming ass. So long as you've got no more potted meat product for me, I've got no more beef with you.
That you have the right to spend $1000 of voucherbucks for an education of your choice.
Currently, the public school system provides poor product at high (albeit invisible) dollar cost.
Some people (fundie whackjobs) find the public school product unacceptable and (as you point out) are using vouchers as a means of getting the gubmint to pay for Fundiecation. I agree with you that that - and that alone - would be a Bad Thing.
Which is why I want to scrap the Bureacracy of Education altogether. In the absence of a public school system, there would be a new market niche: People who want their kids to learn about science and technology without being burdened by either educratic touchy-feely social dogma or fundiematic religious dogma.
This market segment currently uses the public school systems because their kids are harmed less by the educrats than the fundies. I'd like to see a market niche where kids aren't harmed at all.
Fundiecation market segment: Abortion and genetic engineering are eeeeeeevil! God says so! (Gotta run, my shift as a greeter at Wal-Mart starts now.)
Touchy-feely educrat segment: Abortion's fine, but genetic engineering is eeeeeeevil! Greenpeace says so! (Gotta run and smash some windows at Starbucks! Fuck teh pigs!)
Dawkins-and-Rummy-on-crack market segment: Let's figure out how to hack what's hackable, and abort the buggy experiments. The notion that "It's all just meat" is consistent with observed phenomena. (Gotta run, limo's here with Pfizer reps hiring Ph.Ds for a top-secret experimental bioengineering project.)
Where do you think marketroids go when they die? Heaven?!?!?!
Just because you've made an Apple that can't be eaten, doesn't make you God.
(God sees everyhing, Mr. Steve Jobs.)
>
> That's pretty rich, in light of all of the appalling tests which Job had to endure at God's hand. What happened to 'do unto others....?
And the Lord God answered Job out of the Whirlwind: "Dude. I'm God. That's why. Deal."
What makes the story interesting is that Job, unlike his friends, and unlike how most of us would react, Dealt.
Depends if you're writing frequently to the data. I should have said "static files", not "flat data". For MP3s, once ripped and tagged, the partition could be read-only for all I care :)