> Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein and his band of adventurers are standing beside the Tomb of the Unknown Gulf War I Soldier, reading a crumbling old book that they found alongside: > >we have barred the gates... can hold them off long if... horrible... suffer... They are coming. We cannot get out. Drums, drums, drums... they are coming."
Ahem.
To the tune of "Five foot two, Eyes of Blue".
Five foot nine, just quit tryin'
Been outa sight for quite some time,
Has anybody seen Saddam?
The mouth that lied, is open wide,
Schwartzkopf's dick stuck deep inside,
Has anybody seen Saddam?
So if you run into
a sand-monkey who
is shell-shocked with horror,
Maybe missing a limb,
but according to him,
he just won the fuckin' war!
Fuck Iraq,
Fuck Iran,
Nuke 'em both back into sand,
Has anybody seeeeen Saddaaaammmmmmmmmmm?
- John Valby, "Saddam", written for the first Gulf War.
I can only imagine what Dr. Dirty will have in store for his next album.
(Ah, fond memories of "Concerto for Voice, Piano, and 566 Screaming Assholes" and his various Christmas Albums. If you're in upstate New York and enjoy tasteless humor guaranteed to offend everyone, you've gotta see him live.:)
> > you know you're REALLY cool only when you spell porn, prOn! >wtf are you talkin' about? oh, you mean pr0n? please note the (subtle) difference, because your "prOn" has to be the worst case of misspelling on slashdot EVER!:)
I dunno. Maybe he's a CI0. Isn't that how your CIO would spell pr0n?
> There are already several treatments for HIV and the symptoms of AIDS that are quite cheap - that is, cheap to produce. However most (but not all [wangonet.org]) of the western pharmaceutical companies refuse to license them at discounted rates because they're such a cash cow. Which means that tens of millions are facing death simply because drugs company execs are unwilling to sacrifice their bottom lines.
That problem will be solved by 2013. Or 2016 at the latest. It's called "patented".
Unlike AIDS cures, we as a society have decided that some kinds of intellectual property are important We call those things "copyrighted", and you get a monopoly on that for your lifetime plus 75 years (the "75" is extended by Congress every 25 years) or until infinity minus a day - whichever comes last.
Sink a billion dollars into developing a wonder drug, and you get 13 years to make your money back before the patents expire.
Now if you draw a fuckin' cartoon mouse, that's another story. Some things are important, y'know?
> Dorking around with technology is the entire point of being a geek. If you have to question why these people shouldn't have done this, I question your geektitude.;)
Damn straight!
My biggest pet peeve with weather newscasts is that they only show, say, eight hours of cloud movement. (You know, it looks like a frickin' animated.GIF. Blip, reset, blip, reset, blip.)
That's all I need to guess what the weather will be like tomorrow.
For geekitude, I'd like to have a screen saver looping, say, the last year's cloud movement, so I could watch the tropical storms develop over the Atlantic and Pacific, build in power, and dissipate over the coast, or the forest fires lighting up and spreading smoke until late fall.
To do that and to say "Oh, my world weather time-lapse screensaver? Antenna glued to my flagpole, little dongle and A/D converter, and a cron job."
> It's posts like this that make me realize a) why I am a socialist and b) why socialism is such an important movement. "Let Them Starve" is not an ethical position I would ever want to support. Obviously the same can not be said for you.
I would prefer not to let them starve. Gimme nanoassemblers that provide all material comforts and remove any need for labor, and rock on.
But I don't have nanoassemblers. So I'm faced with three choices:
1) Say "Let them starve" and keep my toys. They starve, I party.
2) Say "I can't let them starve", give them my toys, and ask a billion others to do the same. But if others don't do the same, "they" still starve, I end up with no toys.
3) Say "I can't let anyone else let them starve either", give them my toys, and use guns to take, by force, the toys of everyone who disagrees with me. (The historical track record for societies that chose #3 is remarkably similar to #2 - mass starvations during Mao's Great Leap Forward, or Stalin's famines, but let's ignore that for purposes of this debate. By taking the toys away from the 1,000,000,000 Westerners, and giving them to the 5,000,000,000 non-Westerners, nobody starves, but all six billion of us live like hillbillies in Arkansas or inner-city welfare slums.)
Choice #3 - even if it "works" - is little more than barbarism and thuggery.
Choice #2 is highly ethical, but is relatively ineffective. People have tried to persuade others to voluntarily redistribute their wealth, but it seems many people aren't willing to give up their toys. (They're making Choice #1, they're just not conscious that they've indeed made a choice.)
Choice #1 may be distasteful - but if the choice is between a billion happy people and five billion miserable people, or a world of six billion miserable people, I'll take choice #1.
Choice #0 I've left out - talk as if you believe in choice #2, but when push comes to shove, and you realize the sacrifices being asked of you by people who would have you choose #2, mumble incoherently or fudge about.
(Yes, I'm in the choice #1 camp. For the record, I think you're in the Choice #2 camp. The fact that we've at least made a choice places us squarely above the hypocrites in #0 who are too scared to make the choice, or even to realize that the choice is demanded of them, with every product they buy, and every vote they cast.)
> > > In the eyes of 5,000,000,000 people of the 6,000,000,000 on the planet, you are "the rich". > > Even when you have no job? > Ask that to some poor sap in Ethopia, or Somilia, or most any African country and see how they answer.
> But I also was there *because* I was a geeky white boy. Because there, of all places, I wasn't the "walking dictionary" or the person to push in the halls because I knew too many answers or didn't dress right.
Wow. Took the words outa my mouth.
Favorite arcade memory - a chance meeting with one of my high school minor-nemeses at one of the rougher downtown arcades. Hey, it was the only place that had enough Robotrons that I could actually play for an hour or so without having to yield the machine to the guy with the next quarter lined up on the control panel.
I had no idea my minor nemeses was even there until I heard a couple of familiar voices behind me - "Holy shit! It's $NAME!!" ("$NAME? What the fuck's he doing here?!") "I dunno, but check it out, he's kickin' ass!"
> Think about it. For us, video games taught us socialization skills. Well, arcades, actually. How ironic. How hard, these days, to parse. Chuck E Cheese just ain't ever gonna provide the same sort of thing.
Yep. Nemesis and I both learned a lesson about "respect" that day. We never had trouble with each other again.
> Of all the city services to cut, they decide to cut funding to the libraries? That seem a little nuts to anyone else?
If they cut basket-weaving, nobody would care. Taxes would remain flat, or even lower. The power of politicians to control the lives of their citizens is diminished.
If they cut libraries, police, and fire departments, people scream. Taxes can then be raised. The power of politicans to control the lives of their citizens is raised.
Ever notice how it's never the basket-weaving and other pork-barreling, that gets threatened with cuts when tax revenues fall, and always the schools, cops, and firemen? Funny, isn't it?
> > No company is going to hire anyone until this mess with Iraq starts to straigten out. > That's just silly - why not? Are they waiting to see if Iraq maybe wins?
Actually, they are.
In order for me to make good money selling widgets, I need to build widgets cheaply, and you need to have enough money to buy them at a price that allows me to make money.
If oil is expensive, widgetmaking is expensive. My widget factory needs electricity and heat. My widgets might be made out of plastic. My widget factory might have to fly widgetparts in by FedEx, or hire truck drivers to deliver pallets of finished widgets to widget stores.
Likewise, if oil is expensive, you're spending more money on gasoline and have less money left over to buy widgets.
Right now, oil is expensive becase we don't know how much of it is gonna flow after the war. If Saddam manages to drag this thing out long enough to permanently destroy his wells and pipelines, or to spread this around and destroy other nations' oil infrastructure, oil will remain expensive. Last time around, he made a big mess, but we got the mess cleaned up in less than six months, and I'm sure you know what happened to the economy from 1991 forwards.
By the way, the price of oil fell to around $10/barrel in 1997. Funny what else happened to the economy around 1997, isn't it?
> I do not see how creating a 'world economy' helps anyone but the rich. It deflates wages. Maybe I am missing the picture here.
I can think of one part of the picture you're missing: In the eyes of 5,000,000,000 people of the 6,000,000,000 on the planet, you are "the rich".
> Maybe there is a grand schema that will allow balance across the globe.
If by "balance", you mean "equally distribute all wealth among all 6,000,000,000 people", here's another part of the picture you're missing.
If you want that kind of "balance", be prepared to give up air conditioning, your automobile, your paved roads, your heart surgeon, your chemotherapy, your MRI scans, your broadband and 56k modems for a 2400-9600 baud serial line, and a couple of hours a day of electricity.
In short, be prepared to live a lifestyle below that of the poorest inner-city welfare mother. If that offends you as a racist stereotype, replace it with "the most inbred hillbillies in the Appalacians".
I won't presume to speak for you, but as for me, I'm not prepared to do that. As a citizen of a Western nation in a capitalist economy, I was born into the top 15% of the planetary socioeconomic pyramid. I like it here. I'm staying here. And I'm willing to pay 20% of my earnings, every year, to the top 1% to keep it that way. (The top 1% currently takes about 40% of those earnings, but that's haggling over price, not a fundamental argument about the principle:)
> I only see that somehow jobs are harder to find, and those I do find pay a lot less. I am not speaking of.Com era wages, but prior to that- the early to mid 90s era.
The first part is called a "recession". They tend to be finite in length.
The second part is called "deflation". It happens to CPU prices when better CPU designs reach the market, and/or when competing companies design a comparable CPU but charges less.
It happens to wages when skills become obsolescent, and/or when competing workers offer the same work you do, for less price.
If you're in the CPU business, you can either cut your price, or build a better CPU. If you're in the job market, you can either lower your salary expectations, or learn about a new technology.
> Lastly, sometimes the most beautiful objects are those with no use at all.
True, however, all male geeks need to be aware that this is one of those sentences for which no interpretation exists that allows for the continued attachment of their testicles to their body.
>A trip to mars right now is a one way trip.
>
>How, oh wise one, would you get back? Where would you find someone skilled enough to go to Mars that was willing to go there to die? Much less a whole crew?
How would you get back? You probably wouldn't. So what?
Skills 1? Spaceships fly themselves for the most part. Martian colonists on one-way trips are spam in a can until they land.
Skills 2? After spending six months in a can reading geology textbooks, they break out the pickaxe and start digging and taking pictures. Any of us reading this could do more in five minutes on Mars than has been done in the past 30 years.
Volunteers? You ask for them.
"Congratuations. You're going to Mars.
Since there's nothing on Mars to spend your money on, we are going to pay one person of your choosing your "salary" of $100K/year for the rest of your life, or until you come back, whichever comes first.
We will put you on the cheapest spaceship money can buy. Some of you will blow up on the pad. Some of you will have air leaks and suffocate or freeze en route. Some of you will burn up on re-entry. But at $50M per launch, some of you will land on Mars.
Your mission, en route, is to read about rocks and learn how to use a microscope. Once there, your mission is to break big rocks into little rocks and tell us what you found.
Your ship has an RTG (or better yet, a small nuclear reactor) that provides your capsule with electricity to break water into oxygen for you to breathe, alcohol to drink, and hydrogen for you to refuel your engines with. If you manage to find enough water, you will also be able to use that hydroponics lab to grow food for a while.
Some of you will figure out how to get enough food, water, heat and oxygen out of your setup to last for months, maybe years. Some of you will live long enough to make it to the point where we've already landed half a dozen unfueled crew and sample return vehicles.
We will pay you or your beneficiary $100,000 per pound of Mars rock that comes back. The return vehicles can carry 500 pounds. Whether you launch that thing with 500 pounds of rock, or 350 pounds of life support, your 140-pound ass, and 10 pounds of rocks, hey, that's up to you.
I won't lie to you. Many of you will not be coming back, but we will see to it that you have one hell of an adventure."
Every day, people sign up for what is fundamentally the same deal: If you're willing to do something you believe in, even knowing you might die, we will give you the equipment to do it. Soldiers have vastly better odds of survival than my Mars colonists, but keep in mind that they do it for a tenth of the pay.
Believe me, a faster-riskier-cheaper manned space exploration programme would have no shortage of volunteers.
> I get 7 hours out of my widescreen Fujitsu P2120 sporting a Crusoe 933MHz, and it's 3.4lbs and half the price. If you're interested in more, here's the specs [fujitsupc.com].
Yes, which is cool for ultra light/thin. But if you're going for a desktop replacement, getting 6 hours out of a 14-15 inch screen and the gaming performance of a 2.0 P4, r0x0rz.
But the marketing... Gack. Disgusting. I gotta rant.
"Centrino". A Pentium-M (and 855PM chipset) and an Intel WLAN card.
So lemme get these three CPUs straight...
Pentium-III-M: That icky old Pentium 3, yuk, you don't want a Pentium 3! That's old!
Pentium-4-M: That awesome new Pentium 4, but mobile! That's new!
Pentium-M: We spent millions to train people that "Pentium 4" was the hot new thing... And see, "Pentium III", that must suck, because "3" is less than "4". So what do we call our newest, bestest, fastest mobile chip? You know, the one that so handily beats a P4 on an IPC basis that at 1.6 GHz, it beats a 2.4 GHz Pentium-4-M? The one with the huge-azz 1M cache, and the 5-6 hour battery life? Well, we decided we should call that CPU the "Pentium-M"! You know, so it sounds like the mobile version of the 133 MHz thing you had back in 1995 or so!
All this so that the consumer will ask for a "Centrino" instead of "the laptop with that newer, faster P3 that had the 1M cache, 400 MHz FSB, and P4's branch prediction unit, and insanely low power consumption" -- so that manufacturers, in order to say "Centrino! Comin' right up!" will sell them a laptop with an Intel WLAN card as opposed to any other manufacturer's WLAN card.
(No Intel WLAN card? Sorry, not a cool fast buzzword-compliant Centrino! Icky slow Pentium-M that doesn't even have a "3" or "4" after it!)
I want one of these things, awright, but I want it for the (Banias / Pentium-M) CPU and battery life. I don't give a rat's ass who makes the frickin' WLAN card!
So if you also don't give a rat's ass about who makes the WLAN card, remember that "Pentium-M" is just as good as a "Centrino".
In addition to (possibly) saving you a few bucks, there's the added benefit that with a non-Intel WLAN card, your laptop won't be branded with a logo that looks like it came off a box of tampons.
> Thursday March 13, @04:50PM > Mozilla takes FIRE BREATHING REVENGE OF DOOM! LAUNCHES NUCLEAR MISSLES AT "THE THREAT"
MOZILLA was a browser, he was a dragon-browser, he was just a dragon, but he was still MOZILLA! Burninating the BLINK tags! Burninating the DOM! Burninating all the Frontpage users in their non-compliant HTML! (NON-COMPLIANT HTMLLLL!!!!!) AND THE BEAST SHALL COME FORTH SURROUNDED BY A ROILING CLOUD OF VENGEANCE... uh, I mean IN THE NIIIIIIGHT!
> Even if its only 70% accurate, thats still 700,000,000 emails. At a cost of $10bn per year, its about time that its was illegal country wide, made a felony and a section of the FBI setup and funded by a $1 per quarter employee tax on companies. They should then track down, arrest, beat and torture these non-people, put them on a stinking shithole island,
Hey, hey, hey.
What did a pit full of decaying fecal matter do to deserve being filled with spammer?
> This wouldn't appear in a Roper (about a 4% margin), but more likely a Kennmore Elite or Maytag Neptune. A refrigertator with online access to temperature and enegry usage graphs is more likely to be a $3999 SubZero than a $399 GE. The good thing about this product is that as more people use it, pricing will drop and it will work its way down to mid-range products where the margins are thinner.
And more to the point - it allows you to sell $399 fridge without an energy usage graph, or the exact same fridge, but with a CD-ROM and an Ethernet jack, so that you can view the energy graph from your PC, for $699, you've just made $300 on $33 worth of parts. That's a great way for fridgemakers to boost margins too:)
> A copy is a copy. The consciousness (spirit, soul, whatever it's called) must be moved along with everything else.
That's metaphysics; you are presupposing the existence of consciousness independent of a physical medium.
At present, there is no evidence to support (or refute) your hypothesis.
It's just as possible that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of chemical activity in a special configuration of neurons known as a "brain" - in much the same way that "Pac-Man" is an epiphenomenon of certain electrical impulses in special configuration of silicon known as a "Z80 CPU and EPROMs", or "P4 2.4GHz, hard drive, and MAME".
If the materialist viewpoint is the case, and the copy is destructive, then yes, one of me experiences death. And one of me experiences a lifetime before transfer to machine, followed by an odd transitional moment (which may not be "experienced" per se -- can a machine actually be said to be "running" code in the nanoseconds between clock cycles?), followed by life as a machine.
More interestingly, if the copying process is nondestructive, one of me experiences being the aforementioned weird transition from "running on meat" to "running on silicon", and the original experiences nothing worse than having some kind of funky scanner waved over me.
I'd like to run on silicon. fork() me a few times, plug my copies into space probes, and lob them off on random paths to star systems, and HLT me until there are enough photons bouncing off my solar panels to run my clock. It may take 500,000 years to go from star system to star system, but who cares? I cease to exist for half a million years at a time, but those are the boring parts of the trip anyways. Finally, I could see the galaxy on five Altarian dollars a day!
> My point is that if a mailing list makes a mistake and sends you an email, if you don't attempt to opt-out of it then how can you really complain?
My point is that if I had a dollar for every time a commercial emailer has said "if you are receiving this email in error, click to be removed", my wallet would have undergone gravitational collapse and become a black hole.
> There is no other side to this story, it simply stated that Digital Impact was a spammer and that was that.
Spam: Unsolicited commercial email sent to people who have not participated in a closed-loop opt-in confirmation process. Consent, not content.
Spammer: One who sends spam.
Digital Eclipse: Typing "m0.net spam" provides a four-year history documenting Digital Eclipe's practice of being a spammer.
We're in agreement that there is no other side to the story. (That is, if you want to redefine "spam" as "that which Digital Eclipse doesn't do" - there's still no other side to the story.:)
In the specific scenario you described, in which (I'll paraphrase) "Users agree via clickthrough to receive mailings from m0.net as part of the user's agreement with Microsoft that allows said user to use Microsoft's servers to access a hotmail.com email account", I'll concede that it might not be an issue.
But that's emphatically not the case for the rest of m0.net's activities, as even the most trivial groups.google.com search shows.
Companies are called "spamhaus" because of what they do. Every buik mailer from m0.net to Alan Ralsky can scream all day long about how "non-spamming" they are, but it's what comes out of their servers and into users' inboxes that matters.
If you're willing to take the word of an email marketer, say, in the form of Digital Impact press release, over a documented history of spamming, more power to ya. I prefer to base my opinion on Digital Impact's "spamminess" on their actions, not their words.
Slashdot Mirror
>
>we have barred the gates... can hold them off long if... horrible... suffer... They are coming. We cannot get out. Drums, drums, drums... they are coming."
Ahem.
To the tune of "Five foot two, Eyes of Blue".
- John Valby, "Saddam", written for the first Gulf War.I can only imagine what Dr. Dirty will have in store for his next album.
(Ah, fond memories of "Concerto for Voice, Piano, and 566 Screaming Assholes" and his various Christmas Albums. If you're in upstate New York and enjoy tasteless humor guaranteed to offend everyone, you've gotta see him live. :)
Dude. You rock. That's about 90% of what I want. w00t!
>wtf are you talkin' about? oh, you mean pr0n? please note the (subtle) difference, because your "prOn" has to be the worst case of misspelling on slashdot EVER!
I dunno. Maybe he's a CI0. Isn't that how your CIO would spell pr0n?
That problem will be solved by 2013. Or 2016 at the latest. It's called "patented".
Unlike AIDS cures, we as a society have decided that some kinds of intellectual property are important We call those things "copyrighted", and you get a monopoly on that for your lifetime plus 75 years (the "75" is extended by Congress every 25 years) or until infinity minus a day - whichever comes last.
Sink a billion dollars into developing a wonder drug, and you get 13 years to make your money back before the patents expire.
Now if you draw a fuckin' cartoon mouse, that's another story. Some things are important, y'know?
Damn straight!
My biggest pet peeve with weather newscasts is that they only show, say, eight hours of cloud movement. (You know, it looks like a frickin' animated .GIF. Blip, reset, blip, reset, blip.)
That's all I need to guess what the weather will be like tomorrow.
For geekitude, I'd like to have a screen saver looping, say, the last year's cloud movement, so I could watch the tropical storms develop over the Atlantic and Pacific, build in power, and dissipate over the coast, or the forest fires lighting up and spreading smoke until late fall.
To do that and to say "Oh, my world weather time-lapse screensaver? Antenna glued to my flagpole, little dongle and A/D converter, and a cron job."
Geekitude to the max.
I would prefer not to let them starve. Gimme nanoassemblers that provide all material comforts and remove any need for labor, and rock on.
But I don't have nanoassemblers. So I'm faced with three choices:
1) Say "Let them starve" and keep my toys. They starve, I party.
2) Say "I can't let them starve", give them my toys, and ask a billion others to do the same. But if others don't do the same, "they" still starve, I end up with no toys.
3) Say "I can't let anyone else let them starve either", give them my toys, and use guns to take, by force, the toys of everyone who disagrees with me. (The historical track record for societies that chose #3 is remarkably similar to #2 - mass starvations during Mao's Great Leap Forward, or Stalin's famines, but let's ignore that for purposes of this debate. By taking the toys away from the 1,000,000,000 Westerners, and giving them to the 5,000,000,000 non-Westerners, nobody starves, but all six billion of us live like hillbillies in Arkansas or inner-city welfare slums.)
Choice #3 - even if it "works" - is little more than barbarism and thuggery.
Choice #2 is highly ethical, but is relatively ineffective. People have tried to persuade others to voluntarily redistribute their wealth, but it seems many people aren't willing to give up their toys. (They're making Choice #1, they're just not conscious that they've indeed made a choice.)
Choice #1 may be distasteful - but if the choice is between a billion happy people and five billion miserable people, or a world of six billion miserable people, I'll take choice #1.
Choice #0 I've left out - talk as if you believe in choice #2, but when push comes to shove, and you realize the sacrifices being asked of you by people who would have you choose #2, mumble incoherently or fudge about.
(Yes, I'm in the choice #1 camp. For the record, I think you're in the Choice #2 camp. The fact that we've at least made a choice places us squarely above the hypocrites in #0 who are too scared to make the choice, or even to realize that the choice is demanded of them, with every product they buy, and every vote they cast.)
> > Even when you have no job?
> Ask that to some poor sap in Ethopia, or Somilia, or most any African country and see how they answer.
My point precisely. Thanks for saying it.
Wow. Took the words outa my mouth.
Favorite arcade memory - a chance meeting with one of my high school minor-nemeses at one of the rougher downtown arcades. Hey, it was the only place that had enough Robotrons that I could actually play for an hour or so without having to yield the machine to the guy with the next quarter lined up on the control panel.
I had no idea my minor nemeses was even there until I heard a couple of familiar voices behind me - "Holy shit! It's $NAME!!" ("$NAME? What the fuck's he doing here?!") "I dunno, but check it out, he's kickin' ass!"
> Think about it. For us, video games taught us socialization skills. Well, arcades, actually. How ironic. How hard, these days, to parse. Chuck E Cheese just ain't ever gonna provide the same sort of thing.
Yep. Nemesis and I both learned a lesson about "respect" that day. We never had trouble with each other again.
If they cut basket-weaving, nobody would care. Taxes would remain flat, or even lower. The power of politicians to control the lives of their citizens is diminished.
If they cut libraries, police, and fire departments, people scream. Taxes can then be raised. The power of politicans to control the lives of their citizens is raised.
Ever notice how it's never the basket-weaving and other pork-barreling, that gets threatened with cuts when tax revenues fall, and always the schools, cops, and firemen? Funny, isn't it?
> That's just silly - why not? Are they waiting to see if Iraq maybe wins?
Actually, they are.
In order for me to make good money selling widgets, I need to build widgets cheaply, and you need to have enough money to buy them at a price that allows me to make money.
If oil is expensive, widgetmaking is expensive. My widget factory needs electricity and heat. My widgets might be made out of plastic. My widget factory might have to fly widgetparts in by FedEx, or hire truck drivers to deliver pallets of finished widgets to widget stores.
Likewise, if oil is expensive, you're spending more money on gasoline and have less money left over to buy widgets.
Right now, oil is expensive becase we don't know how much of it is gonna flow after the war. If Saddam manages to drag this thing out long enough to permanently destroy his wells and pipelines, or to spread this around and destroy other nations' oil infrastructure, oil will remain expensive. Last time around, he made a big mess, but we got the mess cleaned up in less than six months, and I'm sure you know what happened to the economy from 1991 forwards.
By the way, the price of oil fell to around $10/barrel in 1997. Funny what else happened to the economy around 1997, isn't it?
I can think of one part of the picture you're missing: In the eyes of 5,000,000,000 people of the 6,000,000,000 on the planet, you are "the rich".
> Maybe there is a grand schema that will allow balance across the globe.
If by "balance", you mean "equally distribute all wealth among all 6,000,000,000 people", here's another part of the picture you're missing.
If you want that kind of "balance", be prepared to give up air conditioning, your automobile, your paved roads, your heart surgeon, your chemotherapy, your MRI scans, your broadband and 56k modems for a 2400-9600 baud serial line, and a couple of hours a day of electricity.
In short, be prepared to live a lifestyle below that of the poorest inner-city welfare mother. If that offends you as a racist stereotype, replace it with "the most inbred hillbillies in the Appalacians".
I won't presume to speak for you, but as for me, I'm not prepared to do that. As a citizen of a Western nation in a capitalist economy, I was born into the top 15% of the planetary socioeconomic pyramid. I like it here. I'm staying here. And I'm willing to pay 20% of my earnings, every year, to the top 1% to keep it that way. (The top 1% currently takes about 40% of those earnings, but that's haggling over price, not a fundamental argument about the principle :)
> I only see that somehow jobs are harder to find, and those I do find pay a lot less. I am not speaking of .Com era wages, but prior to that- the early to mid 90s era.
The first part is called a "recession". They tend to be finite in length.
The second part is called "deflation". It happens to CPU prices when better CPU designs reach the market, and/or when competing companies design a comparable CPU but charges less. It happens to wages when skills become obsolescent, and/or when competing workers offer the same work you do, for less price.
If you're in the CPU business, you can either cut your price, or build a better CPU. If you're in the job market, you can either lower your salary expectations, or learn about a new technology.
"SCO? Look, that OpenSewer wouldn't VOOM if you put 2000 Xeons in it!"
True, however, all male geeks need to be aware that this is one of those sentences for which no interpretation exists that allows for the continued attachment of their testicles to their body.
>
>How, oh wise one, would you get back? Where would you find someone skilled enough to go to Mars that was willing to go there to die? Much less a whole crew?
How would you get back? You probably wouldn't. So what?
Skills 1? Spaceships fly themselves for the most part. Martian colonists on one-way trips are spam in a can until they land.
Skills 2? After spending six months in a can reading geology textbooks, they break out the pickaxe and start digging and taking pictures. Any of us reading this could do more in five minutes on Mars than has been done in the past 30 years.
Volunteers? You ask for them.
"Congratuations. You're going to Mars.
Since there's nothing on Mars to spend your money on, we are going to pay one person of your choosing your "salary" of $100K/year for the rest of your life, or until you come back, whichever comes first.
We will put you on the cheapest spaceship money can buy. Some of you will blow up on the pad. Some of you will have air leaks and suffocate or freeze en route. Some of you will burn up on re-entry. But at $50M per launch, some of you will land on Mars.
Your mission, en route, is to read about rocks and learn how to use a microscope. Once there, your mission is to break big rocks into little rocks and tell us what you found.
Your ship has an RTG (or better yet, a small nuclear reactor) that provides your capsule with electricity to break water into oxygen for you to breathe, alcohol to drink, and hydrogen for you to refuel your engines with. If you manage to find enough water, you will also be able to use that hydroponics lab to grow food for a while.
Some of you will figure out how to get enough food, water, heat and oxygen out of your setup to last for months, maybe years. Some of you will live long enough to make it to the point where we've already landed half a dozen unfueled crew and sample return vehicles.
We will pay you or your beneficiary $100,000 per pound of Mars rock that comes back. The return vehicles can carry 500 pounds. Whether you launch that thing with 500 pounds of rock, or 350 pounds of life support, your 140-pound ass, and 10 pounds of rocks, hey, that's up to you.
I won't lie to you. Many of you will not be coming back, but we will see to it that you have one hell of an adventure."
Every day, people sign up for what is fundamentally the same deal: If you're willing to do something you believe in, even knowing you might die, we will give you the equipment to do it. Soldiers have vastly better odds of survival than my Mars colonists, but keep in mind that they do it for a tenth of the pay.
Believe me, a faster-riskier-cheaper manned space exploration programme would have no shortage of volunteers.
>NCSA Mosaic was first released ten years ago today
To Tim Berners-Lee: After ten years, don't you sometimes wish you'd taken the blue pill? :)
Yes, which is cool for ultra light/thin. But if you're going for a desktop replacement, getting 6 hours out of a 14-15 inch screen and the gaming performance of a 2.0 P4, r0x0rz.
But the marketing... Gack. Disgusting. I gotta rant.
"Centrino". A Pentium-M (and 855PM chipset) and an Intel WLAN card.
So lemme get these three CPUs straight...
Pentium-III-M: That icky old Pentium 3, yuk, you don't want a Pentium 3! That's old!
Pentium-4-M: That awesome new Pentium 4, but mobile! That's new!
Pentium-M: We spent millions to train people that "Pentium 4" was the hot new thing... And see, "Pentium III", that must suck, because "3" is less than "4". So what do we call our newest, bestest, fastest mobile chip? You know, the one that so handily beats a P4 on an IPC basis that at 1.6 GHz, it beats a 2.4 GHz Pentium-4-M? The one with the huge-azz 1M cache, and the 5-6 hour battery life? Well, we decided we should call that CPU the "Pentium-M"! You know, so it sounds like the mobile version of the 133 MHz thing you had back in 1995 or so!
All this so that the consumer will ask for a "Centrino" instead of "the laptop with that newer, faster P3 that had the 1M cache, 400 MHz FSB, and P4's branch prediction unit, and insanely low power consumption" -- so that manufacturers, in order to say "Centrino! Comin' right up!" will sell them a laptop with an Intel WLAN card as opposed to any other manufacturer's WLAN card.
(No Intel WLAN card? Sorry, not a cool fast buzzword-compliant Centrino! Icky slow Pentium-M that doesn't even have a "3" or "4" after it!)
I want one of these things, awright, but I want it for the (Banias / Pentium-M) CPU and battery life. I don't give a rat's ass who makes the frickin' WLAN card! So if you also don't give a rat's ass about who makes the WLAN card, remember that "Pentium-M" is just as good as a "Centrino".
In addition to (possibly) saving you a few bucks, there's the added benefit that with a non-Intel WLAN card, your laptop won't be branded with a logo that looks like it came off a box of tampons.
> Mozilla takes FIRE BREATHING REVENGE OF DOOM! LAUNCHES NUCLEAR MISSLES AT "THE THREAT"
MOZILLA was a browser, he was a dragon-browser, he was just a dragon, but he was still MOZILLA! Burninating the BLINK tags! Burninating the DOM! Burninating all the Frontpage users in their non-compliant HTML! (NON-COMPLIANT HTMLLLL!!!!!) AND THE BEAST SHALL COME FORTH SURROUNDED BY A ROILING CLOUD OF VENGEANCE... uh, I mean IN THE NIIIIIIGHT!
- The Book of Consummate Vs, 12:10
Hey, hey, hey.
What did a pit full of decaying fecal matter do to deserve being filled with spammer?
Have some respect for shit, man.
And more to the point - it allows you to sell $399 fridge without an energy usage graph, or the exact same fridge, but with a CD-ROM and an Ethernet jack, so that you can view the energy graph from your PC, for $699, you've just made $300 on $33 worth of parts. That's a great way for fridgemakers to boost margins too :)
Careful what you ask for. I hear that's how the Goatse guy got started. *rimshot*
So? I can carry 120 in the palm of my hand for less than $200.
(Yeah, I know. I thought 80G was a lot of data back then too :)
That's metaphysics; you are presupposing the existence of consciousness independent of a physical medium.
At present, there is no evidence to support (or refute) your hypothesis.
It's just as possible that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of chemical activity in a special configuration of neurons known as a "brain" - in much the same way that "Pac-Man" is an epiphenomenon of certain electrical impulses in special configuration of silicon known as a "Z80 CPU and EPROMs", or "P4 2.4GHz, hard drive, and MAME".
If the materialist viewpoint is the case, and the copy is destructive, then yes, one of me experiences death. And one of me experiences a lifetime before transfer to machine, followed by an odd transitional moment (which may not be "experienced" per se -- can a machine actually be said to be "running" code in the nanoseconds between clock cycles?), followed by life as a machine.
More interestingly, if the copying process is nondestructive, one of me experiences being the aforementioned weird transition from "running on meat" to "running on silicon", and the original experiences nothing worse than having some kind of funky scanner waved over me.
I'd like to run on silicon. fork() me a few times, plug my copies into space probes, and lob them off on random paths to star systems, and HLT me until there are enough photons bouncing off my solar panels to run my clock. It may take 500,000 years to go from star system to star system, but who cares? I cease to exist for half a million years at a time, but those are the boring parts of the trip anyways. Finally, I could see the galaxy on five Altarian dollars a day!
(But you'll have to get in line behind me!)
My point is that if I had a dollar for every time a commercial emailer has said "if you are receiving this email in error, click to be removed", my wallet would have undergone gravitational collapse and become a black hole.
> There is no other side to this story, it simply stated that Digital Impact was a spammer and that was that.
Spam: Unsolicited commercial email sent to people who have not participated in a closed-loop opt-in confirmation process. Consent, not content.
Spammer: One who sends spam.
Digital Eclipse: Typing "m0.net spam" provides a four-year history documenting Digital Eclipe's practice of being a spammer.
We're in agreement that there is no other side to the story. (That is, if you want to redefine "spam" as "that which Digital Eclipse doesn't do" - there's still no other side to the story. :)
In the specific scenario you described, in which (I'll paraphrase) "Users agree via clickthrough to receive mailings from m0.net as part of the user's agreement with Microsoft that allows said user to use Microsoft's servers to access a hotmail.com email account", I'll concede that it might not be an issue.
But that's emphatically not the case for the rest of m0.net's activities, as even the most trivial groups.google.com search shows.
Companies are called "spamhaus" because of what they do. Every buik mailer from m0.net to Alan Ralsky can scream all day long about how "non-spamming" they are, but it's what comes out of their servers and into users' inboxes that matters.
If you're willing to take the word of an email marketer, say, in the form of Digital Impact press release, over a documented history of spamming, more power to ya. I prefer to base my opinion on Digital Impact's "spamminess" on their actions, not their words.
No, that's the watercooling option.