> Also sounds like you're speaking from ignorance (the correct definition, meaning you just don't know or have incomplete knowledge. No offense intended). The bulk of excessive medications lies not with physicians, but rather, with adamant patients.
Ironic; apart from semiregular checkups, I've tended to avoid doctors for part of this reason - unless there's something wrong with me, I'm likely to misdiagnose and ask for something I don't need, and I'm worried that the doc will acquiesce.
I miss my old GP. I'd walk in (typically after two weeks of having a cold), say "OK, I've had it with this one, if it was viral, shouldn't it have been gone by now?", and he'd say "holy crap, you waited this long?", and wing some amoxicillin my way, with instructions to come back if I didn't see improvement in a week. (He could prescribe like that because he knew damn well I wouldn't come in demanding antibiotics at the first sniffle!)
Course, his profit margin off me wasn't that great. Probably why I've never found a comparable replacement.
I think I need a business card for whenever I move and need a new GP. Something like this. "Hi. I'm a fundamentalist materialist who believes in germ theory and the validity of the scientific method. I'm here because I need a GP. Mention 'toxins', 'purification', 'chelation', and I'll leave quietly and find someone else. If you're reading this and I'm in a hospital, and one of your nurses tries to do 'theraputic touch' in any form other than a handjob, I'll call security and demand that I be moved to a hospital, not a duck farm. Basically, if it quacks, I want it roasted with orange sauce. Can we do business?"
> Likewise, getting the last 9 when it comes to making people law-abiding(4) is going to be infinitely more expensive both from a monetary cost and most importantly, the cost of lost freedom...
Given that both the dollar cost and the "freedom cost" of the last "9" in 99.999% compliance are borne by the taxpayers, and not the enforcers, I'd say the cost of the last "9" is dirt cheap - for those doing the spending - and those doing the spending are the only ones whose opinions count.
> If the FBI won't bother going after someone who has just hijacked charter.com's DNS server entries and is running their own online bank password and credit card number sniffing web proxies, why would they spend a New York minute on a Kazaa user?
Because the RIAA pays them to.
Hijack a million open proxies to fill your kids' inboxes with h0t w3t 5lutz wh0 w4nt 2 suk ur c0ck? No problem! (Hell, not even charter.com gives a fuck, and it's charter's clueless fuckwit customers whose open proxies are being abused to tell your kids about incest goat pr0n.)
But listen to Britney Spears without paying RIAA their cut? Yo, dude, that's a crime. FBI'll be on your ass like Hilary Rosen on a box of Krispy Kremes.
All I want is to live in a world where comments like this could be moderated (-1, Troll) instead of (+1, Informative).
> Games are art just like movies are art- while they may seem, on the surface, to be churned out for nothing other than the big bucks, there are actually a lot of people who put there hands on these games who really feel like they're creating something great.
And then there's the guys who invented a game where you whip your schlong (or attach a strap-on garden hose nozzle) and piss on hamsters after drinking a few at the local bar. A multiplayer option is forthcoming.
> > libertarian socialism > That high-pitched keening sound you hear is Ayn Rand twirling about in her interment...
So? Wrap a few thousand turns of Rearden Wire around 'er, and hey, now we know how Galt's Gulch was really powered!
In the esoteric version of the novel (in which the Oath was a trap to trigger the generator's self-destruct mechanism by causing Rand to stop spinning), John Galt's biggest complaint about Gulch life was having to say "libertarian socialism" three times a day just to keep Ayn spun up fast enough to power the city.)
> I read this somewhere once (I think it was at the DOT / DMV): 80% of all drivers consider themselves to be above average. > >Personally, I consider myself below average, but I know I'm wrong.
Y'know what I'd like? I'd like a DOT/DMV checkup test.
Not a "fail, and you lose your license" test. That only encourages the driver to be extremely cautious during the test. (Caution is good. But if doing 24.5 in a 25 zone, and stopping completely at every stop sign isn't how you drive every day, the test is telling you nothing.)
No, I want a "Drive however the hell you normally drive in the city and on the freeway, break any traffic law you want, and we'll talk about it after." test.
I consider myself an average driver, too. I realized this the day I read the aforementioned statistic - odds are very good I'm not one tenth as good on the road as I think I am, and a reality check would be a Great Thing.
Obviously, the DMV isn't gonna, and equally-obviously, (and ironically, given that insurance companies would benefit greatly by having better-trained drivers) I'd never trust an insurance company not to abuse this information and turn it from an honest "how's my driving" reality check into a useless "pass this test to get lower rates" gimmick.
Do any private companies or driver training organizations do this sorta thing?
> Is that vehicle 300ft ahead parked? What if a squirrel runs in the road, how sensitive is the radar?
At sufficiently high output power on the radar (or laser), squirrels within 300 feet will not present a hazard. Nor will cats or small dogs. Deer and moose will still require evasive action... and a nice Cabernet.
> > [ Airbus jets, for example, are programmed to ] override the pilot in crisis situations. > >This is a real good thing, in my opinion.
Your points on some events - turbine blades about to shred the passengers in the cabin - notwithstanding, might I suggest you read Pilot in command, or computer in command??
Some birdstrikes are bad. Most runwaystrikes are worse.
(If nothing else, I learned a new joke today:
What are an Airbus pilot's first and last words? The first: 'What's it doing now?' The last: 'It's never done that before!'.:)
> Not much at all, I suspect. Even if you just enter the term ebook (not even author or title information) on your favourite P2P software you'll see literally hundreds of titles out there already in plain text. Unfortunately I downloaded the Metallica autobiography and ended up with Battlefield:Earth instead. Bastards.
And if you thought Lars Ulrich was a badass copyright dude, wait'll you see what L. Ron Hubbard's landsharks are like! Sonny Bono of DMCA fame was a member. It gets worse from there.
> Why keep it a secret? No one's going to blame you for it, every country goes through this stuff all the time. Is Communism so fragile that a few extra-heavy-duty flu cases will destroy it?
As a matter of fact, yes, it is.
Authoritarian regimes are strong, but brittle. In an environment characterized by slow technological change, they can last indefinitely, because the tools used to control the proles change slowly enough that leaders can keep up with them.
Rapid technological change upsets that balance. Such change is typically driven by technology - witness the printing press, the rise of the "freethinkers", and the eventual topplings of the monarchies of Europe and Russia. (And the despots that took their place - Robespierre in France, Lenin in Russia, and so on.)
Authoritarian regimes typically rely on controlling the means of communication in order to maintain power. Technologically-driven change in the area of communications is one of the most threatening things an authoritarian regime.
If the Communist Party lies about SARS, then maybe... *gasp*, they lied about the day the dam broke in my village. I've gotta call my brother who was 1000 miles away with the army when it happened and ask him if the Party told him his village's dam was the only one that broke that night. And my cousin who works in Hong Kong now, I remember him laughing when I first told him it was only our dam, maybe now I know why he laughed. And my grandfather back in my old village who remembers the times before the Party.
When nobody believes the Party ("Pravda and Izvestia - There is no truth in Pravda, and there is no news in Izvestia"), the regime shatters.
> Seems like if a goverment wants to gain trust and credibility, they should flat-out tell the truth sometimes.
Any government's first duty is to perpetuate itself; "building trust and credibility" is a useful goal (from the government's point of view) only insofar as it enables the government to perpetuate itself and/or increase its power over its subjects.
Telling the truth through the various Party news outlets doesn't serve the goal of keeping the Party in power, because the forms of media that can be controlled aren't set up to deliver truth.
And the forms of media that can't be controlled... well, one day you're talking about SARS, and the next day you're talking about what life was like without the Party.
And that, if you're a Party official, is a fate far worse than the deaths of a few million of your subjects.
> My question is how the hell do they plan on "destroying" someone's computer? Come over to your
house and kick it in? The article made it sound like it would happen over the internet, which I can't imagine a way of doing.
Hmm, there was that guy who spun a CD-ROM up to 52x and made it shatter.
Suppose RIAA were to embed little metal weights to unbalance every CD they ship.
Put it in your CD-ROM or Discman, it plays back at 1x, and you hear music. If the Discman is stuffed down your pants, you might even enjoy it.
But since we all know that RIAA considers a high-speed CD-R drive as "equivalent to" multiple CD-R drives, and consequently a Weapon of Mass Piracy (an ironic acronym, to be sure), if one was to put a suitably-unbalanced CD into a high-speed CD-ROM drive and attempt to "rip" the content to WAV files for future MP3 encoding, the disc would shatter, effectively destroying the drive, and possibly damaging other components in the computer.
One could double-up on this by embedding granules of pyrophoric (combusts in contact with oxygen) materials in nitrogen or other inert-gas bubbles in the disc substrate. The disc shatters in the high-speed piracy weapon, neutralizing it, and then the pyrophoric granules ignite, dumping toxic fumes and possibly burning other components inside the copyright terrorist's weapon (aka "computer").
Prediction: RIAA will develop this technology, and its use will be mandated. Within six months of the passage of the Active Countermeasures Against Copyright Terrorism Act, a 747 will be brought down by a Muslim whackjob playing Britney Spears in a laptop.
Congress will immediately respond to this new security threat... by passing another to require that all laptops be checked as baggage.
A thunderous roar of "Dude! We're getting your Dell!" will be heard from airport security screeners worldwide.
> When one of the various Higher Ups says "Copyright Holder", they don't meant you. They mean the multinationals that put out music and movies and such, and pump billions into the economy, and millions more into campaign funding.
On the whole, correct.
> 1) Some serious, hard core old fasioned Walt Disney-style gumption and lots of luck.
There is at least one typo in this sentence. The one I noticed first was that you spelled "money" as "gumption".:)
> Yeah maaaan! Microsoft - and therefore the government - now has a huge list of misspelled and
non-existant website addresses! Just imagine the kind of horrific infringements of privacy that can take place now!! It doesn't bear thinking about, does it!
And if you think that's funny, you should see all the failed DNS lookups that XP's dumb-ass DNS client cached for me!
*mutters, grumbles, disables yet another useless service*
As a citizen, I have no power. I couldn't convince him - not even me and a thousand of my friends - to vote one way or the other on a piece of legislation to curb Microsoft's behavior. Legisliation, incidentally, that was probably drafted by lobbyists for Microsoft.
As a consumer, I have plenty of power. When I ask a vendor to sell me that system without an OS, or to sell it to me without a hard drive, they can either sell it to me on my terms, or I'll turn around and take my purchase to a vendor who will.
Of all the things guys a guy could fuck - vaccuum cleaners, sheep, random holes in the dirt, fistfuls of broken glass, SCO executives' mothers... dude, a Dewar flask?:-)
> Later, as PCs wormed into the classroom around 286 vintage, there were boot sector viruses. I knew how to use a low-level (nibble) disk editor, but I never quite overcame the awe of the self-replicating TSR.
Grok!
I still remember stunning some of my cow orkers by saying from two cubicles away, "Dude, run a virus scanner. There's no reason your floppy drive should be doing that many seeks across the entire width of the disk. Something's writing to the FAT or boot sector every time you access any files. Probably a virus. Kill it before it kills you."
To this day, they still no idea how I knew about that without even looking at the screen or touching the box, but from where I sat it was just obvious (when I first heard that pattern of seeks and asked if the guy was copying 100 small files to the floppy, and he said "no") that something on that box was fucked up. (And fucked up in a way that MS-DOS, all by itself, wasn't:)
Funny note - the virus in question was indeed a boot sector virus, and was pretty much harmless on Win3.1 boxen. Not so on an NT box. If only I'd come to work one day before. Yuk.
> A better headline for this article might have been: "IBM Gives SCO the Finger, and SCO gives IBM their phonecall."
Lou "Agent Blue" Gerstner to Darl "Retro" McBride: "It seems that you have been living two lives, Mister McBride. One of these lives - has a future. The other - does not. Oh, who the fuck am I kidding. We're going to pound your balls flat with a mallet."
(Wotthehell, two SCO threads, I'll post my Matrix one-liner twice.)
But in the spirt of avoiding redundancy, I'll throw in one more obvious one inspired by the past day or so:
Hydrodemolitionbot: "Yo! McBride! Bite my deep blue ass!"
> SCO just stepped into some seriously nasty, smelly stuff. Bad move, SCO. Baaaaaaaadddddd move.
Hmph, maybe "in Soviet Russia".
But in America, we say things the right way 'round. I think you really meant to say:
"A sloppy, maggot-ridden, reeking glob of cow shit got some of itself stuck to some SCO executive's shoe. Bad move. What'd that cow patty do to deserve that?"
> CNET also has an extensive interview with SCO CEO Darl McBride [com.com], who is now claiming that there are "hundreds of thousands of lines" of infringing code in Linux. Choice quote: "The world
seems to be divided into two camps - those that respect intellectual property and those that don't."
Lou "Agent Blue" Gerstner to Darl "Retro" McBride: "It seems that you have been living two lives, Mister McBride. One of these lives - has a future. The other - does not. Oh, who the fuck am I kidding. We're going to pound your balls flat with a mallet."
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously someone didn't read his Supreme Court rulings this morning.
Ironic; apart from semiregular checkups, I've tended to avoid doctors for part of this reason - unless there's something wrong with me, I'm likely to misdiagnose and ask for something I don't need, and I'm worried that the doc will acquiesce.
I miss my old GP. I'd walk in (typically after two weeks of having a cold), say "OK, I've had it with this one, if it was viral, shouldn't it have been gone by now?", and he'd say "holy crap, you waited this long?", and wing some amoxicillin my way, with instructions to come back if I didn't see improvement in a week. (He could prescribe like that because he knew damn well I wouldn't come in demanding antibiotics at the first sniffle!)
Course, his profit margin off me wasn't that great. Probably why I've never found a comparable replacement.
I think I need a business card for whenever I move and need a new GP. Something like this. "Hi. I'm a fundamentalist materialist who believes in germ theory and the validity of the scientific method. I'm here because I need a GP. Mention 'toxins', 'purification', 'chelation', and I'll leave quietly and find someone else. If you're reading this and I'm in a hospital, and one of your nurses tries to do 'theraputic touch' in any form other than a handjob, I'll call security and demand that I be moved to a hospital, not a duck farm. Basically, if it quacks, I want it roasted with orange sauce. Can we do business?"
Given that both the dollar cost and the "freedom cost" of the last "9" in 99.999% compliance are borne by the taxpayers, and not the enforcers, I'd say the cost of the last "9" is dirt cheap - for those doing the spending - and those doing the spending are the only ones whose opinions count.
Because the RIAA pays them to.
Hijack a million open proxies to fill your kids' inboxes with h0t w3t 5lutz wh0 w4nt 2 suk ur c0ck? No problem! (Hell, not even charter.com gives a fuck, and it's charter's clueless fuckwit customers whose open proxies are being abused to tell your kids about incest goat pr0n.)
But listen to Britney Spears without paying RIAA their cut? Yo, dude, that's a crime. FBI'll be on your ass like Hilary Rosen on a box of Krispy Kremes.
All I want is to live in a world where comments like this could be moderated (-1, Troll) instead of (+1, Informative).
And then there's the guys who invented a game where you whip your schlong (or attach a strap-on garden hose nozzle) and piss on hamsters after drinking a few at the local bar. A multiplayer option is forthcoming.
> That high-pitched keening sound you hear is Ayn Rand twirling about in her interment...
So? Wrap a few thousand turns of Rearden Wire around 'er, and hey, now we know how Galt's Gulch was really powered!
In the esoteric version of the novel (in which the Oath was a trap to trigger the generator's self-destruct mechanism by causing Rand to stop spinning), John Galt's biggest complaint about Gulch life was having to say "libertarian socialism" three times a day just to keep Ayn spun up fast enough to power the city.)
>
>Personally, I consider myself below average, but I know I'm wrong.
Y'know what I'd like? I'd like a DOT/DMV checkup test.
Not a "fail, and you lose your license" test. That only encourages the driver to be extremely cautious during the test. (Caution is good. But if doing 24.5 in a 25 zone, and stopping completely at every stop sign isn't how you drive every day, the test is telling you nothing.)
No, I want a "Drive however the hell you normally drive in the city and on the freeway, break any traffic law you want, and we'll talk about it after." test.
I consider myself an average driver, too. I realized this the day I read the aforementioned statistic - odds are very good I'm not one tenth as good on the road as I think I am, and a reality check would be a Great Thing.
Obviously, the DMV isn't gonna, and equally-obviously, (and ironically, given that insurance companies would benefit greatly by having better-trained drivers) I'd never trust an insurance company not to abuse this information and turn it from an honest "how's my driving" reality check into a useless "pass this test to get lower rates" gimmick.
Do any private companies or driver training organizations do this sorta thing?
At sufficiently high output power on the radar (or laser), squirrels within 300 feet will not present a hazard. Nor will cats or small dogs. Deer and moose will still require evasive action... and a nice Cabernet.
>
>This is a real good thing, in my opinion.
Your points on some events - turbine blades about to shred the passengers in the cabin - notwithstanding, might I suggest you read Pilot in command, or computer in command?? Some birdstrikes are bad. Most runwaystrikes are worse.
(If nothing else, I learned a new joke today: What are an Airbus pilot's first and last words? The first: 'What's it doing now?' The last: 'It's never done that before!'. :)
And if you thought Lars Ulrich was a badass copyright dude, wait'll you see what L. Ron Hubbard's landsharks are like! Sonny Bono of DMCA fame was a member. It gets worse from there.
Whoever registered Slashdot #75865 http://slashdot.org/~BillGates might beg to differ with you. :)
Then we slashdot all of Brazil, at least until the mirrors are up :-)
As a matter of fact, yes, it is.
Authoritarian regimes are strong, but brittle. In an environment characterized by slow technological change, they can last indefinitely, because the tools used to control the proles change slowly enough that leaders can keep up with them.
Rapid technological change upsets that balance. Such change is typically driven by technology - witness the printing press, the rise of the "freethinkers", and the eventual topplings of the monarchies of Europe and Russia. (And the despots that took their place - Robespierre in France, Lenin in Russia, and so on.)
Authoritarian regimes typically rely on controlling the means of communication in order to maintain power. Technologically-driven change in the area of communications is one of the most threatening things an authoritarian regime.
If the Communist Party lies about SARS, then maybe... *gasp*, they lied about the day the dam broke in my village. I've gotta call my brother who was 1000 miles away with the army when it happened and ask him if the Party told him his village's dam was the only one that broke that night. And my cousin who works in Hong Kong now, I remember him laughing when I first told him it was only our dam, maybe now I know why he laughed. And my grandfather back in my old village who remembers the times before the Party.
When nobody believes the Party ("Pravda and Izvestia - There is no truth in Pravda, and there is no news in Izvestia"), the regime shatters.
> Seems like if a goverment wants to gain trust and credibility, they should flat-out tell the truth sometimes.
Any government's first duty is to perpetuate itself; "building trust and credibility" is a useful goal (from the government's point of view) only insofar as it enables the government to perpetuate itself and/or increase its power over its subjects.
Telling the truth through the various Party news outlets doesn't serve the goal of keeping the Party in power, because the forms of media that can be controlled aren't set up to deliver truth.
And the forms of media that can't be controlled... well, one day you're talking about SARS, and the next day you're talking about what life was like without the Party.
And that, if you're a Party official, is a fate far worse than the deaths of a few million of your subjects.
Hmm, there was that guy who spun a CD-ROM up to 52x and made it shatter.
Suppose RIAA were to embed little metal weights to unbalance every CD they ship.
Put it in your CD-ROM or Discman, it plays back at 1x, and you hear music. If the Discman is stuffed down your pants, you might even enjoy it.
But since we all know that RIAA considers a high-speed CD-R drive as "equivalent to" multiple CD-R drives, and consequently a Weapon of Mass Piracy (an ironic acronym, to be sure), if one was to put a suitably-unbalanced CD into a high-speed CD-ROM drive and attempt to "rip" the content to WAV files for future MP3 encoding, the disc would shatter, effectively destroying the drive, and possibly damaging other components in the computer.
One could double-up on this by embedding granules of pyrophoric (combusts in contact with oxygen) materials in nitrogen or other inert-gas bubbles in the disc substrate. The disc shatters in the high-speed piracy weapon, neutralizing it, and then the pyrophoric granules ignite, dumping toxic fumes and possibly burning other components inside the copyright terrorist's weapon (aka "computer").
Prediction: RIAA will develop this technology, and its use will be mandated. Within six months of the passage of the Active Countermeasures Against Copyright Terrorism Act, a 747 will be brought down by a Muslim whackjob playing Britney Spears in a laptop.
Congress will immediately respond to this new security threat... by passing another to require that all laptops be checked as baggage. A thunderous roar of "Dude! We're getting your Dell!" will be heard from airport security screeners worldwide.
On the whole, correct.
> 1) Some serious, hard core old fasioned Walt Disney-style gumption and lots of luck.
There is at least one typo in this sentence. The one I noticed first was that you spelled "money" as "gumption". :)
And if you think that's funny, you should see all the failed DNS lookups that XP's dumb-ass DNS client cached for me!
*mutters, grumbles, disables yet another useless service*
As a citizen, I have no power. I couldn't convince him - not even me and a thousand of my friends - to vote one way or the other on a piece of legislation to curb Microsoft's behavior. Legisliation, incidentally, that was probably drafted by lobbyists for Microsoft.
As a consumer, I have plenty of power. When I ask a vendor to sell me that system without an OS, or to sell it to me without a hard drive, they can either sell it to me on my terms, or I'll turn around and take my purchase to a vendor who will.
> Frog bomb!
Frogdor the Burninator!
Of all the things guys a guy could fuck - vaccuum cleaners, sheep, random holes in the dirt, fistfuls of broken glass, SCO executives' mothers... dude, a Dewar flask? :-)
Grok!
I still remember stunning some of my cow orkers by saying from two cubicles away, "Dude, run a virus scanner. There's no reason your floppy drive should be doing that many seeks across the entire width of the disk. Something's writing to the FAT or boot sector every time you access any files. Probably a virus. Kill it before it kills you."
To this day, they still no idea how I knew about that without even looking at the screen or touching the box, but from where I sat it was just obvious (when I first heard that pattern of seeks and asked if the guy was copying 100 small files to the floppy, and he said "no") that something on that box was fucked up. (And fucked up in a way that MS-DOS, all by itself, wasn't :)
Funny note - the virus in question was indeed a boot sector virus, and was pretty much harmless on Win3.1 boxen. Not so on an NT box. If only I'd come to work one day before. Yuk.
>
> Kinda makes the phrase "The early bird catches the worm", redundant doesn't it.
Honeypots: The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
*BOFH-like evil grin*
Lou "Agent Blue" Gerstner to Darl "Retro" McBride: "It seems that you have been living two lives, Mister McBride. One of these lives - has a future. The other - does not. Oh, who the fuck am I kidding. We're going to pound your balls flat with a mallet."
(Wotthehell, two SCO threads, I'll post my Matrix one-liner twice.)
But in the spirt of avoiding redundancy, I'll throw in one more obvious one inspired by the past day or so:
Hydrodemolitionbot: "Yo! McBride! Bite my deep blue ass!"
Hmph, maybe "in Soviet Russia".
But in America, we say things the right way 'round. I think you really meant to say:
"A sloppy, maggot-ridden, reeking glob of cow shit got some of itself stuck to some SCO executive's shoe. Bad move. What'd that cow patty do to deserve that?"
Lou "Agent Blue" Gerstner to Darl "Retro" McBride: "It seems that you have been living two lives, Mister McBride. One of these lives - has a future. The other - does not. Oh, who the fuck am I kidding. We're going to pound your balls flat with a mallet."
Profile: SCOX
Stock's at $11. 12M shares outstanding. Market capitalization $136M.
The SCOXuckers are suing IBM for One. Billion. Dollars.
So right now, the market's giving 6:1 odds that Big Blue machine will turn SCOX into a thick yellow spray all over the courtoom walls.