>> Come on people, I know it's just a web forum so I can't reach around the world and smack you up side the head, but have a little class... >
> What if I offered you a little button, and said that you would get $1 if you pressed it, but someone on the other side of the world would get smacked upside the head?
Someone would give you a webcam and $1M in venture capital?:-)
> Also, if you think about it, the only reason you find my organs valuable is because other people are willing to pay money to receive them. But since the people my organs would save are no more valuable than I am***, there can only be a net loss to the economy. > >
*** Less valuable, in fact, since it would take all that time, talent, and effort to make them healthy again. I'm all in favor of voluntary organ donation, but killing a healthy person to make a sick person healthy doesn't make economic sense.
Unfounded assumption. You assume that all humans are of equal value. Feels warm and fuzzy, but is false on the face of it.
You even recognize this - and in so doing, contradict yourself:
> ** That is, unless you happen to nab one of the bastards from Website Results. The economy could only benefit from such a turn of events.
If the guys who ran Website Results are a net drag on the economy (as we both appear to agree), it follows that it's good economics to harvest their organs and use them to repair someone who's not as big a drag on the economy.
Someone such as you or I - well, we'd be offline for a few weeks while we recuperated from surgery, which costs a few thousand bucks, plus we'd have consumed maybe $100K worth of medical supplies and labor from the surgeon and hospital staff. If we malfunction, we cost about $150-200K to repair, but if we can expect to produce about $500K-1M worth of (software, hardware, ideas, automobiles, whatever it is we do for a living) goods, then repairing us is a good bet.
So - whom ought we to smite for our organs? Someone who's less likely to outproduce us, like the guys at Website Results:-)
And likewise -- to whom ought our organs to be available for harvesting? Those who are more likely to outproduce us.
If you can accept that, why can't you accept that some folks are more valuable than we are? Wouldn't the world be a better place if someone had harvested our parts to, say, save Carl Sagan (RIP)? Or give Stephen Hawking (alive, but only for a few more years) a better-working nervous system? Or Warren Buffett (still alive, but nearing retirement) another 20 years of productive life?
These guys produce more in a year than you or I are likely to produce in our lifetimes. If someone harvested me for parts to give one of them another 20 years, I'd be cheezed that my number came up, but it'd make good economic sense.
If we're selecting people for harvesting based on their future potential contribution to the economy, you and I are probably pretty far down the list of selectees -- moderately-healthy, but poor, folks would be most useful. Go to the inner-city high schools, find the ones with below-average intelligence, better-than-average (but not star-quality) brawn, but who have managed to stay away from drugs. Good quality bodies with no real earnings potential would make the best sources of parts. Portion of proceeds to go to the parents.
As there's an ethical issue of donor consent here (China's got that one solved:-), and as the "parents" in such a society might well start breeding kids for parts anyways, the right move would be to skip the charade and start the actual farming of humans for parts. Offer breeder units good money to carry 'em to term, feed the offspring well, give 'em plenty of exercise equipment, and solve the consent problem with an education that consists only of "Angels are the guys in white coats, and heaven's the place behind the big red door! Everyone goes there eventually!"
(Rant: Got an ethical problem with that? Fine! Then why not just allow embryonic stem-cell research, which would allow you to grow the desired organ without having to deal with the human life support system surrounding it!)
> How is it so easy to place a value on a human life you ask. I'll tell you. Because human life is worth whatever you think it is. Worth is an human concept and can be applied to everything. But the funny thing with life economics is that it's not transverable, I can't take your life and have two. So if you ask "what is my life worth to you" you are asking, "how much money would you pay to save me from death". Well, zero.
Or, as seen in a completely unrelated Slashdot thread:
Poster A: "I'd give my left nut for a space ship. More interesting would be a study of which body parts people would be willing to trade for the ability to take a weekend excursion to Mars."
Poster B: "And if I had a space ship, I wouldn't take your left nut (or anyone else's) in exchange for it. I strongly suspect that I don't value your nuts anywhere near as much as you do."
> Because it's the twist ending <cloying=on> silly <cloying>. Someone else will now get the chance to do the same...someone you don't know, be assured.
Yeah, it's a neat story, but there's one thing left unsaid: How's the victim selected?
Is the victim selected randomly, or is the victim selected from the set of people who've pushed the button? (What makes the story good, of course, is that it's ambiguous -- "Someone you don't know" tells you nothing about the pool of "someones".)
If the guy in the Twilight Zone episode is distributing the button randomly, and the selection of people who get snuffed is also random, then it's probably safe to push it.
For everyone, there are over six billion people whom they don't know; if the victim's selected randomly, then for any future button press, the odds that you will be the guy who gets snuffed the next time the button will be pushed are therefore about six billion to one against.
So you push the button and collect your loot. Yes, you might get struck by lightning tomorrow. That could be because you pushed the button yesterday, but odds are far greater that you had the misfortune to be struck by lightning, than because you were the one-in-six-billion victim of bad karma:)
To summarize:
If victims selected from pool of previous button-pushers -- good story, but not much of an ethical test, because there's a very good reason not to push the button.
If victims selected randomly -- then it's a real ethical test. But a lousy story, because 5,999,999,999 out of 6,000,000,000 tellings of the story will be "Yeah, I pressed the button, the world's body count got incremented by one out of thousands, and look at my big house, shiny new car, and trophy wife! Pressing that button was the best thing that ever happened to me!"
> If you could push a button because it is there. It's really not in the morning for most of you. More than half the posts already have said basically, "So what, wouldn't you do it too?" or "What's so wrong with that?" How is it that we fin[...yadda yadda yadda...]
If a guy with a Chomskybot offered you a million bucks not to push the button that would kill him, wouldn't you push it anyway?;-)
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
Rule #2: If you think a spammer is telling the truth, see Rule #1.
Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.
(Krugel's Corollary: Spammer lies are really stupid.)
"Opt-In Marketing" hits Rule #1, Rule #2 and the corollary - in its name alone. And by getting that far with just its name, I'd say that trips Rule #3 to boot.
There's a fascinating thread in news.admin.net-abuse.email ("COURT: Opt in Marketing vs [SPEWS, SPAMHAUS, SPAMCOP, QUEST(sic), COVISTA and Steve
Linford(of Idaho?)]" about what Scelson's up to. This article in nanae provides an interesting perspective.
Between Scelson biting off more than he can chew (and what a coincidence, now showing up on the press's radar), and Alan Ralsky being sued by Verizon, this could be a long, hot summer for the spammers.
Me? I'm keeping a bag of popcorn handy whenever I read nanae. Seeing these two go down in court will be a delight. I can only hope a certain Mr. Haberli is next on the docket. That'd be three major spam rings in serious d00d00.
> Then of course, registration sites could present an image and ask you to identify it as a) Britney Spears b) the Space Shuttle c) Winnie-the-Pooh or d) Regis Philbin.
I'm gonna burn in hell for giving the bastards this idea, but I think you misspelled:
A fresh, juicy Quarter-Pounder with cheese and three strips of bacon!
The 2002 Lincoln Navigator SUV, winner of 3 international design awards!
The latest singing sensation to take the world by storm, the fantabulous Titney's Peers!
An ice-cold Pepsi, the choice of a marketing generation!
For bonus points in hell, all images to be served up in large Flash animations from www.doublefuck.net, or via Javashit popups.
There's an insurance company, who, in exchange for premiums, was dum^H^H^Hwilling to fund a NASA lunar sample retrieval mission in the event of theft, accidental loss, or destruction...
...and NOBODY from NASA was smart enough to steal the damn rock, pound it into sand, and drop the sand into the sea over the Marianas Trench?:-)
C'mon, NASA, this isn't rocket science... uh... lemme rephrase that.
> I was at a client's the other day (large multi-national), and they had a 50GB server full of mp3s and the like. They're safe because the admin who put them there can hide behind a screen of anonymity in a company that has enough $$ to buy a continent.
> The weird thing about Salon is that it managed to stop running all of the (funny) stuff I read on a regular basis right after I paid for premium service. All that's left now is complete crapola.
It's about knowing your market.
I used to read Salon (still do, in fact) to get the left-wing spin to counter my innate right-wing bias.
(Aside: Never had a problem with their intrusive ads, because I always have Javashit and Flash turned off. Otherwise I would have stopped visiting them a year or two ago.)
Around the time of the recount battles of 2001, it became clear they'd dropped any pretense of editorial balance and were just an arm of the Democratic party.
Nothing wrong with that during an election battle, but they kept doing it.
My biggest disappointment with Salon is that the articles most likely to challenge my beliefs are the premium ones, and I don't see that much value for the money.
So I never subscribed. And now, the articles most likely to either be rejected as Democratic propaganda (the tiresome "Bushed!" series), but with a small probability of changing one's world view are labeled "Premium".
By way of personal example, I used to be a fervent drug warrior, but today, as much as I still think drugs are for idiots, I believe the money could be better spent on HomeSec. (OK, so Salon would also have a problem with spending the money on HomeSec, but we'd at least agree that much of the money spent in the WoD is wasted. 2-3 years ago, I'd have argued otherwise - that is, for spending taxpayer dollars on both the WoD and the WoTerror. Now I believe we should scrap the WoD because we can use the same resources elsewhere. No government/law-enforcement jobs or budgets need be cut, and frankly, I think the cops would have more fun hunting down the real badasses trying to kill us than comparatively harmless potheads. Salon might disagree with my solutions to both problems, but at least they got me thinking:-)
But the probability of finding a series of those ideology-changing articles (now locked-off in the for-pay ghetto) was sufficiently low that I couldn't justify the subscription fee.
Which is a bummer.
From a business perspective, I can see why preaching to the converted (e.g. the lame "erotica" content along with the regular US/Bush-bashing dreck) makes business sense for Salon.
But from the standpoint of a guy who loves a good political/economic/cultural debate, I lament the loss of the alternative standpoint that Salon used to provide to all -- and now only provides to its own narrow audience.
Word to the Dems and Greens: You wanna change the world? Fund Salon, but give them editorial freedom and cut 'em slack when they don't toe the party line. The rest of us can tell the difference between a genuinely-held position and shameless propaganda -- so stop trying to pretend otherwise.
Word to the Republicans: Salon's made their bed, let 'em lie on it. Their loss is your gain. Carpe diem, and don't make the same mistakes they did. All their blogspace are now belong to you!:-)
> Do you think that the Corporate Media is going to start calling a spade a spade? If they reporter tries to submit "WorldCom Execs Comit $3.8BFraud - Is Corporate America a Complete House of Cards?" or somesuch, their boss' would get a call right quick from someone who Golfs
with those criminals. > >
Its self-censorship (direct censorship?) in the age of Corporate Media.
> >
Take a look at the Corporate Relationships between the Rest of the World and the Media
companies...
While I was merely poking fun at WCOM's spin doctors and their attempt to mask what appears to be massive fraud as innocent error, it appears you took me too seriously.
So I'll return the favor. In answer to your question -- as a matter of fact...
...yes. All reports from last night, within an hour of the release.
Take a look at the complete absence of any relationship between Noam Chomsky's rhetoric and what anyone can see for him or herself in the business press every day.
> Here, after only 3 months, the one individual interviewed (which we don't know which group he was in,) was in rough shape when it came time to get back on his feet. It sounds like we've got along way to go, to get someone whose capable of remaining in microgravity for 2 years, in order to get to Mars. That, or we're going to have to design a ship that employs some form of gravity simulator.
Psychology: Give me a laptop, a copy of CivIII or Alpha Centauri, and a DVD-ROM full of USENET postings to read and MP3z to listen to while I play. Upload some new warez to me halfway through the journey. That'll cover a good 8 hours a day.
Gravity: Doesn't anyone remember the old Skylab footage of astronauts jogging around a cylindrical room -- sorta like a hamster wheel - except the wheel stayed fixed and the hamster ran around it;-)
Wouldn't that count as at least some simulated gravity (if you ran fast enough?) I can't see Coriolis forces being too disorienting - your legs may weigh more than your arms, and your head's still nearly weightless, but that's more of a tidal force, not a coriolis force.
Jog around the track for an hour a day, maybe spend some time on an exercise bike (half an hour for the legs, half an hour for the arms). Strap legs to bed, do sit-ups - much easier without gravity, but it's still some exercise as you've still gotta move the upper half and slow it down again. Calisthenics.
If I could get three months in space (not a hospital bed), I'd gladly spend a year in physiotherapy afterwards to rebuild my body to its previous functionality.
Of course, if I could go to Mars, I wouldn't care if it was a one-way trip.
It seems to me that going to Mars is like going to the New World in the 1400s. It's a long journey, in cramped conditions, with lousy food, and no medical help, and maybe a 20-30% chance that you'll die en route - on either half of the journey.
Maybe we're looking for the wrong sorts of people. Instead of happy, well-adjusted folks with wives and kids to come home to, maybe we need people who are just a little bit nuts.
So the first words beamed back from Mars won't be "One small step for a man...", more like "What happen? Somebody set up us the landing site! Your base is belong to us!" -- big deal. At least someone would make it there.
One neophyte geologist on Mars could accomplish more in an hour than our most brilliant geologists have accomplished to date. For purposes of collecting samples and relaying data back to Earth, anyone could learn all they needed to know during the two-year trip.
Think of it as a B.Sc. in Areology, offered as a two-year correspondence course, with the final exam to take place in situ:-)
> Spielberg: "What really disturbs me - a nerd who does have a weird walk - is that I imagine that suddenly a van pulls up and hauls me into an interrogation, you know, for being original... or
for being different."
Huh? Spielberg's going dystopian? Sounds more like Monty Python!
> Come back and post again after you have actually watched the show, ok? Not every design is a shredder, but there are many designs that are quite effective. Or do you want to see flamethrowers and tacnukes?:-)
> Make a few other similar bombs with trace amounts of radioactive materials to go off a few days or weeks later and the problem is compounded even more.
Key word here is "trace".
A "dirty bomb" that would actually constitute a threat (the post-9/11 definition - a device to spread contaminants - not the older definition, which was "a nuke that fizzled") needs more than trace amounts. It also needs to use certain elements which are readily absorbed by (and not easily cleaned out of) humans.
The kid's project didn't do that, and couldn't do that, for the same scaling reasons as it didn't present a proliferation risk.
Not to say that a radiological attack isn't a risk, as some of the nasty elements involved in such a device are poorly controlled - just that the kid's project isn't gonna be able to generate enough of them to be a problem either.
The real problem (as you point out) is public ignorance about both the physics and chemistry involved, combined with media ignorance and sensationalism.
What do you want to bet that if we get hit with one of these, there'll be emergency rooms full of idjits who've guzzled tincture of iodine (because they didn't have any potassium iodide and they think of KI as some sort of "magic anti-radiation pill") as a "precaution" against a device that may not have contained a single atom of iodine, and for which KI would also offer zero protection?
The press could educate the public about the range of threats and associated precautions, but they prefer to sensationalize. Whether the press chooses to take this route out of ignorance or a desire for ratings is sadly irrelevant.
> Honestly, of the 700 or so tracks in my mp3 collection, I own a legitimate copy (RIAA approved media) of at least 650 of them. Many others are audio recordings of television programs, which I've time- and format-shifted to the media of my
choice. Of those media types, NONE of them require me to pay-per-listen. Shit, I bought "Frampton Comes Alive" on vinyl...twice! and once each on cassette and CD. Why? I wore them out. I don't have to worry about this anymore. Unless
the RIAA copy-prevents each new silvery-thingy that looks a lot like a CD, but isn't. I'm not buying MY music over again. I
own it, and I AM entitled to listen to it in any way I see fit. Period. Hilary Rosen, please fuck off. [emphasis mine, not poster's]
"Please" fuck off? What's this "please" shit?
Respect is earned, dude.
The correct response is (borrowing heavily from an all-time classic flame/rant I saw to a joe-jobbing spammer in news.admin.net-abuse.email)...
Hilary Rosen - Fuck off, fuck
right off, and stay fucked off. Have a fuck-off and a smile. Fuck off, and
expedite. Achieve total light fuckoffosity. The english language is
incapable of expressing the full scope of the total fuckedoffitude with
with you need to fuck off. You need to attend the fuckoff university and
do postgraduate studies in fuckoffology, work at an apprenticeship to a
master fuckoff until you are awarded a union card from the fuckoff local
151, and then work in a small local fuckoff business for a few years unti
you feel able to achieve the perfect fuckoff. You should then make a
pilgramage to the Fuckoff Lama and spend a few years in Fuckoffindental
meditation until you have achieved a perfect state of inner fuckoff.
You may be operating under the impression that you are dealing with a few geeks who post negative comments on Slashdot about your fraudulent sham
organization, but you're not; you're dealing with the advocates for the
owners of the internet that you seek to pollute and defraud, and we
(tinw) are music lovers, and legion, and have server rooms full of
multiply-redundant Fuck Off servers producing an OC-192's bandwidth of
high-speed digital Fuck Offs just for you. And any time you care to
unfuck off, we (tinw) will provide you with as many fuck offs as you
can handle and then some.
Simply put: continue to fuck with us, and we will continue to crush your obsolete business model's nuts.
> However I'm surprised that the "Powers That Be" haven't killed this story since it has step by step directions on how to make...
When this story came out a few years ago, I worried a bit about this too, but I remember some stuff from the few physics classes I took, and after dusting off my old texts, concluded that it's impossible to use this process to make enough of the substance to constitute a proliferation risk.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that large purchases of precursor materials are tracked, and even my limited understanding of the physics led me to conclude that there are characteristics of many of the materials at various steps in the process that are detectable at long range.
From either of these, it seems clear that any group or nation who managed to try and scale this process up would either fry themselves in the process, and if they didn't, would find themselves looking at the business end of an assault rifle, a laser-guided bomb, (or both), long before they had a significant amount of anything that could pose a threat.
Bottom line - the kid had a way-cool science project (but he should have hooked up with a professor at a university who could have helped him do it safely), but it's not a proliferation risk.
(If I had to speculate as to why the article was so detailed, it's to make high school teachers and college professors aware that when a high school student shows up with a science project involving a lantern and a smoke detector, it's a mentoring opportunity, not something to be ignored just because it sounds crazy!;-)
> As soon as the word "recreate" is used to describe the process, that means that the original is destroyed (i.e. killed), and the new object is just a copy. Sorry, I'm not going to step into that machine.
man fork(2)
The fork() and fork1() functions create a new process. The new process (child process) is an exact copy of the calling process (parent process). [... ]"
Unless there's some stuff in the kernel we don't know about yet (always a possibility), humans don't come with unique process IDs. Both processes' fork() calls will return zero.
When I step into the machine, one of me is vaporized and feels nothing. It's not around to complain:-) The surviving process steps into the machine and perceives itself as walking out the other end, instantaneously, even if "the other end" was light-years away.
(And given that my data traveled at light speed to get there, and that all the news from Earth has been traveling at the same speed while I was in transit, I can walk over to the nearest kiosk and read the rest of today's Slashdot posts... Going back, mind you, would give me about nine years of reading to catch up on, which would suck ass...:)
> Time Warner is one of those media companies who wants us to stream movie trailers and music. Or have you ever noticed how many streaming videos there are of news reports on CNN.com? I tend to think that they want people to be able to access these types of media as much as possible.
Funny, I draw the opposite conclusion - you emphasized the word "stream" in your original post, and that's why.
They want you to download it every time you view it. You need broadband to do that. (And if you pay AOL/TW by the byte, they rack up the dollars.)
If you downloaded the video clip, you could play it back whenever you liked without re-downloading it. ("Dude, check this out!")
A company that advocates streaming - which requires an always-on broadband connection - over downloading, to me, is the antithesis of "wanting people to be able to access these types of media as much as possible".
> I tend to think that they want people to be able to access these types of media as much as possible. It creates a conflict between the companies that make the media and the companies who deliver it. In the case of Time Warner, they do both, which is why everybody hates them.
By choosing streaming formats over downloadable formats, there is no conflict in AOL/TW's mind. You pay for the fat pipe you need to stream the video, you pay by the byte, and because you can't save what you downloaded, you pay again when you click "rewind".
Is AT&T a bunch of fucknozzles out to rape the customer? Sure - but unlike AOL/TW and other advocates of streamed media, at least AT&T doesn't mind if you click "SaveToDisk" after transferring your MP3 or DivX over their network. Once the file's on your hard drive, it's yours to keep.
> > A terrapin is a turtle, and a mine is a place where you dig up riches. So if you get one of these you will become rich with turtles? > > That's the optimistic version. Now, here's my take: > > A mine is something that blows up if you get near it. And a turtle is legendary for being slow. > > What kind of PR department do these people have?!;)
Hah! Your version is still too optimistic!
Airline Screener: "Sir, what's that thing in your carry-on luggage?"
Passenger: "Oh, just my terrapin mine..."
Screener: *presses Big Red Button, sirens go off, and auto-targeting lasers immediately render passenger into a smudge on the checkpoint floor*
> We did terminate Tom Fenderling WotC senior vice president and severed our relationship with a quality assurance consultant Gene Maddox. We have filed law suits against both of these individuals alleging improper purchasing practices and the falsifying of expense reports.
New AD&D thief subclass for purposes of WOTC game submission:
Fraudster! Gain one experience point per dollar successfully l33ch3d from shareholders in the form of embezzled funds, falsified expense reports, improper derivatives trades, or just plain lousy accounting."
experience : Rank
0-100 : Office Supply Cabinet Raider
100 - 999 : Expense Account Padder
1000 - 9999 : Spammer
[... ]
? - ? : WOTC executive (1)
[... ]
100,000,000 - 999,999,999 : Rogue trader
zzzzzzzzzzzzz - zzzzzzzzzzzz : Rogue trader of the Order of Leeson (2)
over zzzzzzzzzzzzz : Arthur Andersen!
(1) - To Be Determined
(2) - a Rogue Trader of the Order of Leeson must both inflict a loss of over $1B and the collapse of a major financial institution. The Order is named after Nick Leeson, who broke his employer, Barings Bank, with $1.3B derivatives loss.
(3) - Title chosen by the reigning champion. Former winners have included Bre-X ($4B scam re: nonexistent gold mine supported by faked ore samples) and current leader Enron at over $60B (740M shares outstanding at $83 at the peak) in vaporized market cap.
The title is currently in contention, with executives from Tyco (TYC) making yet another strong showing this morning by racking up almost 9 billion experience points as TYC trades down to $10.12 (-$4.48) on further allegations that alleged personal improper accounting may have also affected the company. While TYC had appeared to be coming back from its lows in recent weeks, these revelations have taken Koslowski's score from ~60B experience points to 80B experience points, and he currently stands at 90B.
(And before you go off in a huff and claim that capitalism has somehow failed - despite these egregious examples, the market's full of thousands of good companies out there run by good people out to make an honest buck by providing a service or good for money.
And more importantly, all of these scandals combined still barely make a dent against the multi-trillion dollar pyramid scam called "social security". The people who purchased ENE or TYC did so of their own free will. The same cannot be said for the unlucky "participants" in the Social Security game.)
> Personally, to get a secure system, I'd use the most recent release that has appeared to be stable for some time and limit what each machine does. e.g. a web server should only allow http and ssh to the outside world.
On that note, Win9x isn't that bad, out-of-the-box and run by an end-user who isn't an idiot (read: doesn't install the "latest and greatest" spyware and trojans).
Think about it - a Win9x box, out-of-the-box, doesn't really run any services. As long as file/print sharing is turned off (and the firewall should be blocking these ports anyways), there's no IIS to 0wn via Code Red or Nimda, you don't have to install Outbreak Excess, and you can always install Nutscrape or Opera instead of IE.
Would I use such a box as a server? Never. But for a basic web-surfing and gaming box, why not?
The real point about security-through-obsolescence is that the crackers upon whom the skr1pt k1ddiez depend aren't actively looking for new 95, 98, or 98SE 'sploits, because it's no longer the cool thing to crack.
Slashdot Mirror
>
> What if I offered you a little button, and said that you would get $1 if you pressed it, but someone on the other side of the world would get smacked upside the head?
Someone would give you a webcam and $1M in venture capital? :-)
>
> *** Less valuable, in fact, since it would take all that time, talent, and effort to make them healthy again. I'm all in favor of voluntary organ donation, but killing a healthy person to make a sick person healthy doesn't make economic sense.
Unfounded assumption. You assume that all humans are of equal value. Feels warm and fuzzy, but is false on the face of it.
You even recognize this - and in so doing, contradict yourself:
> ** That is, unless you happen to nab one of the bastards from Website Results. The economy could only benefit from such a turn of events.
If the guys who ran Website Results are a net drag on the economy (as we both appear to agree), it follows that it's good economics to harvest their organs and use them to repair someone who's not as big a drag on the economy.
Someone such as you or I - well, we'd be offline for a few weeks while we recuperated from surgery, which costs a few thousand bucks, plus we'd have consumed maybe $100K worth of medical supplies and labor from the surgeon and hospital staff. If we malfunction, we cost about $150-200K to repair, but if we can expect to produce about $500K-1M worth of (software, hardware, ideas, automobiles, whatever it is we do for a living) goods, then repairing us is a good bet.
So - whom ought we to smite for our organs? Someone who's less likely to outproduce us, like the guys at Website Results :-)
And likewise -- to whom ought our organs to be available for harvesting? Those who are more likely to outproduce us.
If you can accept that, why can't you accept that some folks are more valuable than we are? Wouldn't the world be a better place if someone had harvested our parts to, say, save Carl Sagan (RIP)? Or give Stephen Hawking (alive, but only for a few more years) a better-working nervous system? Or Warren Buffett (still alive, but nearing retirement) another 20 years of productive life?
These guys produce more in a year than you or I are likely to produce in our lifetimes. If someone harvested me for parts to give one of them another 20 years, I'd be cheezed that my number came up, but it'd make good economic sense.
If we're selecting people for harvesting based on their future potential contribution to the economy, you and I are probably pretty far down the list of selectees -- moderately-healthy, but poor, folks would be most useful. Go to the inner-city high schools, find the ones with below-average intelligence, better-than-average (but not star-quality) brawn, but who have managed to stay away from drugs. Good quality bodies with no real earnings potential would make the best sources of parts. Portion of proceeds to go to the parents.
As there's an ethical issue of donor consent here (China's got that one solved :-), and as the "parents" in such a society might well start breeding kids for parts anyways, the right move would be to skip the charade and start the actual farming of humans for parts. Offer breeder units good money to carry 'em to term, feed the offspring well, give 'em plenty of exercise equipment, and solve the consent problem with an education that consists only of "Angels are the guys in white coats, and heaven's the place behind the big red door! Everyone goes there eventually!"
(Rant: Got an ethical problem with that? Fine! Then why not just allow embryonic stem-cell research, which would allow you to grow the desired organ without having to deal with the human life support system surrounding it!)
Or, as seen in a completely unrelated Slashdot thread:
Poster A: "I'd give my left nut for a space ship. More interesting would be a study of which body parts people would be willing to trade for the ability to take a weekend excursion to Mars."
Poster B: "And if I had a space ship, I wouldn't take your left nut (or anyone else's) in exchange for it. I strongly suspect that I don't value your nuts anywhere near as much as you do."
Yeah, it's a neat story, but there's one thing left unsaid: How's the victim selected?
Is the victim selected randomly, or is the victim selected from the set of people who've pushed the button? (What makes the story good, of course, is that it's ambiguous -- "Someone you don't know" tells you nothing about the pool of "someones".)
If the guy in the Twilight Zone episode is distributing the button randomly, and the selection of people who get snuffed is also random, then it's probably safe to push it.
For everyone, there are over six billion people whom they don't know; if the victim's selected randomly, then for any future button press, the odds that you will be the guy who gets snuffed the next time the button will be pushed are therefore about six billion to one against.
So you push the button and collect your loot. Yes, you might get struck by lightning tomorrow. That could be because you pushed the button yesterday, but odds are far greater that you had the misfortune to be struck by lightning, than because you were the one-in-six-billion victim of bad karma :)
To summarize:
If victims selected from pool of previous button-pushers -- good story, but not much of an ethical test, because there's a very good reason not to push the button.
If victims selected randomly -- then it's a real ethical test. But a lousy story, because 5,999,999,999 out of 6,000,000,000 tellings of the story will be "Yeah, I pressed the button, the world's body count got incremented by one out of thousands, and look at my big house, shiny new car, and trophy wife! Pressing that button was the best thing that ever happened to me!"
If a guy with a Chomskybot offered you a million bucks not to push the button that would kill him, wouldn't you push it anyway? ;-)
From he NANAE FAQ
[Rule #0: Spam is theft.]
Rule #1: Spammers lie.
Rule #2: If you think a spammer is telling the truth, see Rule #1.
Rule #3: Spammers are stupid.
(Krugel's Corollary: Spammer lies are really stupid.)
"Opt-In Marketing" hits Rule #1, Rule #2 and the corollary - in its name alone. And by getting that far with just its name, I'd say that trips Rule #3 to boot.
There's a fascinating thread in news.admin.net-abuse.email ("COURT: Opt in Marketing vs [SPEWS, SPAMHAUS, SPAMCOP, QUEST(sic), COVISTA and Steve Linford(of Idaho?)]" about what Scelson's up to. This article in nanae provides an interesting perspective.
Between Scelson biting off more than he can chew (and what a coincidence, now showing up on the press's radar), and Alan Ralsky being sued by Verizon, this could be a long, hot summer for the spammers.
Me? I'm keeping a bag of popcorn handy whenever I read nanae. Seeing these two go down in court will be a delight. I can only hope a certain Mr. Haberli is next on the docket. That'd be three major spam rings in serious d00d00.
I'm gonna burn in hell for giving the bastards this idea, but I think you misspelled:
- A fresh, juicy Quarter-Pounder with cheese and three strips of bacon!
- The 2002 Lincoln Navigator SUV, winner of 3 international design awards!
- The latest singing sensation to take the world by storm, the fantabulous Titney's Peers!
- An ice-cold Pepsi, the choice of a marketing generation!
For bonus points in hell, all images to be served up in large Flash animations from www.doublefuck.net, or via Javashit popups.There's an insurance company, who, in exchange for premiums, was dum^H^H^Hwilling to fund a NASA lunar sample retrieval mission in the event of theft, accidental loss, or destruction...
C'mon, NASA, this isn't rocket science... uh... lemme rephrase that.
So that's where Worldcom's $3.6 gigabucks went!
It's about knowing your market.
I used to read Salon (still do, in fact) to get the left-wing spin to counter my innate right-wing bias.
(Aside: Never had a problem with their intrusive ads, because I always have Javashit and Flash turned off. Otherwise I would have stopped visiting them a year or two ago.)
Around the time of the recount battles of 2001, it became clear they'd dropped any pretense of editorial balance and were just an arm of the Democratic party.
Nothing wrong with that during an election battle, but they kept doing it. My biggest disappointment with Salon is that the articles most likely to challenge my beliefs are the premium ones, and I don't see that much value for the money.
So I never subscribed. And now, the articles most likely to either be rejected as Democratic propaganda (the tiresome "Bushed!" series), but with a small probability of changing one's world view are labeled "Premium".
By way of personal example, I used to be a fervent drug warrior, but today, as much as I still think drugs are for idiots, I believe the money could be better spent on HomeSec. (OK, so Salon would also have a problem with spending the money on HomeSec, but we'd at least agree that much of the money spent in the WoD is wasted. 2-3 years ago, I'd have argued otherwise - that is, for spending taxpayer dollars on both the WoD and the WoTerror. Now I believe we should scrap the WoD because we can use the same resources elsewhere. No government/law-enforcement jobs or budgets need be cut, and frankly, I think the cops would have more fun hunting down the real badasses trying to kill us than comparatively harmless potheads. Salon might disagree with my solutions to both problems, but at least they got me thinking :-)
But the probability of finding a series of those ideology-changing articles (now locked-off in the for-pay ghetto) was sufficiently low that I couldn't justify the subscription fee.
Which is a bummer.
From a business perspective, I can see why preaching to the converted (e.g. the lame "erotica" content along with the regular US/Bush-bashing dreck) makes business sense for Salon.
But from the standpoint of a guy who loves a good political/economic/cultural debate, I lament the loss of the alternative standpoint that Salon used to provide to all -- and now only provides to its own narrow audience.
Word to the Dems and Greens: You wanna change the world? Fund Salon, but give them editorial freedom and cut 'em slack when they don't toe the party line. The rest of us can tell the difference between a genuinely-held position and shameless propaganda -- so stop trying to pretend otherwise.
Word to the Republicans: Salon's made their bed, let 'em lie on it. Their loss is your gain. Carpe diem, and don't make the same mistakes they did. All their blogspace are now belong to you! :-)
>
> Its self-censorship (direct censorship?) in the age of Corporate Media.
>
> Take a look at the Corporate Relationships between the Rest of the World and the Media companies...
While I was merely poking fun at WCOM's spin doctors and their attempt to mask what appears to be massive fraud as innocent error, it appears you took me too seriously.
So I'll return the favor. In answer to your question -- as a matter of fact...
Reuters Business Report: WorldCom Shares Sink After Fraud Report
Dow Jones Business News: CNBC sources report "massive fraud" at Worldcom
CBS Marketwatch: WorldCom fraud shreds stock.
Take a look at the complete absence of any relationship between Noam Chomsky's rhetoric and what anyone can see for him or herself in the business press every day.
>
What the fuck? "Error?" Who the fuck writes this crap?
Mars Observer overflies Valles Marineris. Finds "ditch".
Psychology: Give me a laptop, a copy of CivIII or Alpha Centauri, and a DVD-ROM full of USENET postings to read and MP3z to listen to while I play. Upload some new warez to me halfway through the journey. That'll cover a good 8 hours a day.
Gravity: Doesn't anyone remember the old Skylab footage of astronauts jogging around a cylindrical room -- sorta like a hamster wheel - except the wheel stayed fixed and the hamster ran around it ;-)
Wouldn't that count as at least some simulated gravity (if you ran fast enough?) I can't see Coriolis forces being too disorienting - your legs may weigh more than your arms, and your head's still nearly weightless, but that's more of a tidal force, not a coriolis force.
Jog around the track for an hour a day, maybe spend some time on an exercise bike (half an hour for the legs, half an hour for the arms). Strap legs to bed, do sit-ups - much easier without gravity, but it's still some exercise as you've still gotta move the upper half and slow it down again. Calisthenics.
If I could get three months in space (not a hospital bed), I'd gladly spend a year in physiotherapy afterwards to rebuild my body to its previous functionality.
Of course, if I could go to Mars, I wouldn't care if it was a one-way trip.
It seems to me that going to Mars is like going to the New World in the 1400s. It's a long journey, in cramped conditions, with lousy food, and no medical help, and maybe a 20-30% chance that you'll die en route - on either half of the journey. Maybe we're looking for the wrong sorts of people. Instead of happy, well-adjusted folks with wives and kids to come home to, maybe we need people who are just a little bit nuts.
So the first words beamed back from Mars won't be "One small step for a man...", more like "What happen? Somebody set up us the landing site! Your base is belong to us!" -- big deal. At least someone would make it there.
One neophyte geologist on Mars could accomplish more in an hour than our most brilliant geologists have accomplished to date. For purposes of collecting samples and relaying data back to Earth, anyone could learn all they needed to know during the two-year trip. Think of it as a B.Sc. in Areology, offered as a two-year correspondence course, with the final exam to take place in situ :-)
Huh? Spielberg's going dystopian? Sounds more like Monty Python!
Dude, this is Slashdot. OF COURSE WE DO!
Key word here is "trace".
A "dirty bomb" that would actually constitute a threat (the post-9/11 definition - a device to spread contaminants - not the older definition, which was "a nuke that fizzled") needs more than trace amounts. It also needs to use certain elements which are readily absorbed by (and not easily cleaned out of) humans.
The kid's project didn't do that, and couldn't do that, for the same scaling reasons as it didn't present a proliferation risk.
Not to say that a radiological attack isn't a risk, as some of the nasty elements involved in such a device are poorly controlled - just that the kid's project isn't gonna be able to generate enough of them to be a problem either.
The real problem (as you point out) is public ignorance about both the physics and chemistry involved, combined with media ignorance and sensationalism.
What do you want to bet that if we get hit with one of these, there'll be emergency rooms full of idjits who've guzzled tincture of iodine (because they didn't have any potassium iodide and they think of KI as some sort of "magic anti-radiation pill") as a "precaution" against a device that may not have contained a single atom of iodine, and for which KI would also offer zero protection?
The press could educate the public about the range of threats and associated precautions, but they prefer to sensationalize. Whether the press chooses to take this route out of ignorance or a desire for ratings is sadly irrelevant.
"Please" fuck off? What's this "please" shit?
Respect is earned, dude.
The correct response is (borrowing heavily from an all-time classic flame/rant I saw to a joe-jobbing spammer in news.admin.net-abuse.email)...
Hilary Rosen - Fuck off, fuck right off, and stay fucked off. Have a fuck-off and a smile. Fuck off, and expedite. Achieve total light fuckoffosity. The english language is incapable of expressing the full scope of the total fuckedoffitude with with you need to fuck off. You need to attend the fuckoff university and do postgraduate studies in fuckoffology, work at an apprenticeship to a master fuckoff until you are awarded a union card from the fuckoff local 151, and then work in a small local fuckoff business for a few years unti you feel able to achieve the perfect fuckoff. You should then make a pilgramage to the Fuckoff Lama and spend a few years in Fuckoffindental meditation until you have achieved a perfect state of inner fuckoff.
You may be operating under the impression that you are dealing with a few geeks who post negative comments on Slashdot about your fraudulent sham organization, but you're not; you're dealing with the advocates for the owners of the internet that you seek to pollute and defraud, and we (tinw) are music lovers, and legion, and have server rooms full of multiply-redundant Fuck Off servers producing an OC-192's bandwidth of high-speed digital Fuck Offs just for you. And any time you care to unfuck off, we (tinw) will provide you with as many fuck offs as you can handle and then some.
Simply put: continue to fuck with us, and we will continue to crush your obsolete business model's nuts.
When this story came out a few years ago, I worried a bit about this too, but I remember some stuff from the few physics classes I took, and after dusting off my old texts, concluded that it's impossible to use this process to make enough of the substance to constitute a proliferation risk.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that large purchases of precursor materials are tracked, and even my limited understanding of the physics led me to conclude that there are characteristics of many of the materials at various steps in the process that are detectable at long range.
From either of these, it seems clear that any group or nation who managed to try and scale this process up would either fry themselves in the process, and if they didn't, would find themselves looking at the business end of an assault rifle, a laser-guided bomb, (or both), long before they had a significant amount of anything that could pose a threat.
Bottom line - the kid had a way-cool science project (but he should have hooked up with a professor at a university who could have helped him do it safely), but it's not a proliferation risk.
(If I had to speculate as to why the article was so detailed, it's to make high school teachers and college professors aware that when a high school student shows up with a science project involving a lantern and a smoke detector, it's a mentoring opportunity, not something to be ignored just because it sounds crazy! ;-)
Funny, as a guy who holds to "B", I always thought one of the biggest attractions of "B" was that it avoided the scariness implicit in "C".
man fork(2)
The fork() and fork1() functions create a new process. The new process (child process) is an exact copy of the calling process (parent process). [ ... ]"
Unless there's some stuff in the kernel we don't know about yet (always a possibility), humans don't come with unique process IDs. Both processes' fork() calls will return zero.
When I step into the machine, one of me is vaporized and feels nothing. It's not around to complain :-) The surviving process steps into the machine and perceives itself as walking out the other end, instantaneously, even if "the other end" was light-years away.
(And given that my data traveled at light speed to get there, and that all the news from Earth has been traveling at the same speed while I was in transit, I can walk over to the nearest kiosk and read the rest of today's Slashdot posts... Going back, mind you, would give me about nine years of reading to catch up on, which would suck ass... :)
Funny, I draw the opposite conclusion - you emphasized the word "stream" in your original post, and that's why.
They want you to download it every time you view it. You need broadband to do that. (And if you pay AOL/TW by the byte, they rack up the dollars.)
If you downloaded the video clip, you could play it back whenever you liked without re-downloading it. ("Dude, check this out!")
A company that advocates streaming - which requires an always-on broadband connection - over downloading, to me, is the antithesis of "wanting people to be able to access these types of media as much as possible".
> I tend to think that they want people to be able to access these types of media as much as possible. It creates a conflict between the companies that make the media and the companies who deliver it. In the case of Time Warner, they do both, which is why everybody hates them.
By choosing streaming formats over downloadable formats, there is no conflict in AOL/TW's mind. You pay for the fat pipe you need to stream the video, you pay by the byte, and because you can't save what you downloaded, you pay again when you click "rewind".
Is AT&T a bunch of fucknozzles out to rape the customer? Sure - but unlike AOL/TW and other advocates of streamed media, at least AT&T doesn't mind if you click "SaveToDisk" after transferring your MP3 or DivX over their network. Once the file's on your hard drive, it's yours to keep.
>
> That's the optimistic version. Now, here's my take:
>
> A mine is something that blows up if you get near it. And a turtle is legendary for being slow.
>
> What kind of PR department do these people have?!
Hah! Your version is still too optimistic!
Airline Screener: "Sir, what's that thing in your carry-on luggage?"
Passenger: "Oh, just my terrapin mine..."
Screener: *presses Big Red Button, sirens go off, and auto-targeting lasers immediately render passenger into a smudge on the checkpoint floor*
"Dude! 19 times out of 20, the probability your CEO's getting you a Dell is 0.95?"
New AD&D thief subclass for purposes of WOTC game submission:
(And before you go off in a huff and claim that capitalism has somehow failed - despite these egregious examples, the market's full of thousands of good companies out there run by good people out to make an honest buck by providing a service or good for money.
And more importantly, all of these scandals combined still barely make a dent against the multi-trillion dollar pyramid scam called "social security". The people who purchased ENE or TYC did so of their own free will. The same cannot be said for the unlucky "participants" in the Social Security game.)
On that note, Win9x isn't that bad, out-of-the-box and run by an end-user who isn't an idiot (read: doesn't install the "latest and greatest" spyware and trojans).
Think about it - a Win9x box, out-of-the-box, doesn't really run any services. As long as file/print sharing is turned off (and the firewall should be blocking these ports anyways), there's no IIS to 0wn via Code Red or Nimda, you don't have to install Outbreak Excess, and you can always install Nutscrape or Opera instead of IE.
Would I use such a box as a server? Never. But for a basic web-surfing and gaming box, why not?
The real point about security-through-obsolescence is that the crackers upon whom the skr1pt k1ddiez depend aren't actively looking for new 95, 98, or 98SE 'sploits, because it's no longer the cool thing to crack.