> Money is a concept built on mutual trust. I trust that the money you give me will be honored at its face value in another place.
> > Be it dollars, euros, gold, or matchsticks. > > Money, as such, is meaningless without that trust.
Which, I believe, is the original poster's point.
As of two weeks ago, any RBC accountholder could take a piece of paper with some RBC-blessed magnetic scrawlings on it, and many people would trust that the scrawlings could be turned into dollars, euros, gold, and/or matchsticks.
> I made my credit card payment via online banking on June 1st, and the transaction went through. However, on June 2nd, the system decided to pay my credit card again a second time. Now I'm down a few hundred bucks.... should be fun getting this sorted out:|
Speculation:
Suppose Something Bad(tm) happens to the database and the failover machines. Traditionally, you restore from backups, and roll it forward based on the transaction log.
I can think of a few scenarios, but I don't like any of them. Just about every scenario I can imagine involves combinations of restoring the wrong version of the database from backups, a rollback operation that fails, or a rolling forward the wrong set of transactions from a log. I thought the whole point of an RDBMS was to have transactional integrity -- so that if the database thinks it's June 2nd, you can't roll forward a June 1 transaction to make it happen twice. A database shouldn't be able to permit that to happen, even if God himself is at the console.
Any DBA wonks care to speculate further as to WTF could be going on?
Somehow I'm uninspired by the "media-relations officer" saying "I am not a technical person [... ] It did have to do with computer software and at this point I understand it did have something to do with sequencing. [... ] I honestly don't know. As I say, I mean, it's one of those tech things."
Now, that might be good media relations, but I'm not media. If I banked in Canada, there'd only be one more transaction pending against any account I had at this bank: A transfer of the account's full balance to a competitor.
> "TO UNCOVER ALL MY PASSWORDS LOVE, > LOOK UP INTO THE STARS ABOVE! > THE CHEERING CROWDS GAZE WITH FUN > FROM LOCATION THIRTY ONE!" > > "Stars above? What does it mean!" > > "I've got it! To the Planetarium! The next clue must be under seat thirty one!" > > "Man, i'm so glad Bill died. I'm having the time of my life!"
Problem is, if someone's closed the planetarium or just changed the seating arrangements in the past decade, the game breaks down.
Except for one thing: In the decades of evolution after the extinction of that particular movie genre, we've developed:
1) "Shared-secret" cryptosystems. You don't need all of the key. And even if your clues are chained together, you can make up strings of clues that intersect. (If the Planetarium Clue leads you to the Zoo Clue, you can still find the Zoo Clue if a third Clue also points people to the Zoo.)
2) Geocaching.
3) Widely-known and widely-distributed images that can never be truly "erased" from history, unlike the clue buried under the planetarium.
4) If your estate isn't worth several million dollars, nobody's gonna bother flying halfway across the country for each clue. But by using #3 and only a little bit of geocaching, a little Perl scripting might be worth doing.
BRIM'S EXCLUSIVE QUAKER OATS,
NATALIE PORTMAN POURS SOME GOATS!
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, CYCLES YOU,
ALL YOUR BASE ARE THIRTY-TWO!
"OMFG, if we XOR the ASCII for 'wilfrid', as in the Quaker Oats guy 'Wilfrid Brimley', and we XOR it with 'hotgrit', and XOR *that* with the Goatse Guy's picture, all we need to do is take a CRC-32 of the resulting file and we have the next four bytes of the key! w00t!"
> > The problem is that I want to live forever, but I don't particularly want to have to share the world with everyone else being immortal as well. If world population were reduced by 75%,
culling out the bottom 75% of the IQ curve, the world would be very nearly perfect. > > But who would clean the toilets?
I'm in favor of a cull. But with exponential population growth, culling the bottom 75% isn't going to solve things for more than 100 years or so. That's a drop in the bucket if human lifespan can be extended to 1000. In order to be effective, the culling cannot be a one-time event -- it has to be a regular event.
Unless there are a lot of home toilets that are overflowing with mold and shit, I'd surmise that anyone who can keep their home toilet clean without help, is also capable of keeping the toilet at work (or at a restaurant) clean without help.
With a life span of 1000 years, the excuse of "I don't have time to clean up my own mess" falls pretty flat too.
Finally, it's a pretty easy case to make that anyone who regularly pisses on the seat or shits on the floor has problems, and if they compound those problems by being unwilling to grab a mop to clean up the mess just as they would at home, they've gone pretty far below the 75% threshold, and have automatically rendered themselves eligible for the next culling.
In short, if you could regularly cull the stupid and lazy from the face of the earth, the answer to the question "who would clean the toilets" is that failure to clean the toilets would rapidly become a self-correcting phenomenon.
> it's simple. your woman, and even your life, can be viewed as a game. instead of working hard to score in a game, work hard to score with your woman...
Huh? Has anyone actually tried this? I mean, unlike Leisure Suit Larry, the game you describe may have better graphics, but the gameplay itself is as boring as the Sims, and the speed-up key can only be used once a day, and in an astonishing display of programmer ignorance, the speed-up key only works at night when you're trying to game! At least the Sims design team got that part right -- you want to fast-forward during the day when you're at work and nobody's home!
> instead of exploring levels of some fake world, figure out what places you can take your woman to in the real world that get her in the mood. figure out how to get her to do x and y things that she would never think of doing.
And the list of defects goes on. Like, there's no fucking save/restore feature either! I mean, you spend six weeks of game time setting up a surprise menage-a-trois with you, your girlfriend and just *one* lousy goat, and if the persuade roll fails, all you can do is pull out the old.45 and restart.
No way, man, "RL" is teh suck. I wouldn't even warez it.
> there's always the run for your frickin' life option, in which you tell her that you have a
business trip somewhere, and then spend a weekend hepped up on coca-cola, pop-tarts, and pizza, sitting in front of your computer with your friends, an optical mouse, and a keyboard in a lan party in a cheap hotel room...
*bedeebedeebedeebedeebeep*
He: (boom, zzzot, blam) HELLO?
She: Hi, hon-hey, what's that in the background?
He: (boom, *boooOoom*) (whispering) dudes, turn it down or put on some pr0n or something, quick! -- NOTHING, HOney!
She: Don't you lie to me...
He: (ooooh, baby, come back to bed nooowww...) Look, I know I'm on a business trip, this sorta thing happens.
She: Don't you LIE to me, you worthless bastard!
He: (slurp, groan) Sometimes these things happen, I'll make it up to you, honest!
She: BULLSHIT! You're not ON a business trip! You're not even in a HOTEL ROOM with some CHEAP FLOOZIE!
He: Bu-but, I can exp-
She: You're at one of those FUCKING LAN PARTIES AGAIN, AREN'T YOU?*click*
> I'm wondering how other people have deal with it? I tried installing Zoo Tycoon on my other computer and saying 'Look honey, cute bears' but she just didn't bite."
Dude, that's a good sign.
The next step in the beta testing process is to try her out on one of the Half-Life 2 demo videos. "Look honey! No more cute bears. Gibs that splatter across half the playfield when you whack the hanging torso with a crowbar."
If she sits there with her jaw dropped to the floor while a small puddle of drool forms on the desk, propose to her. If you hear words like "w00t!" or "cool!" or "whoa!", don't just propose, for fuck's sake, marry her!
> I just bought a new (to me) vehicle, and this is a good point. The payments on a new 2004
Honda Accord were about $320 / month for a 60 month loan - a two-year lease was $210 a month. Since it seems most Americans are constantly making payments anyway, which one is cheaper?
The one that's cheaper is "Whichever one the car salesman doesn't want you to choose."
Over 10 years, you're paying $320x60 = $19200 for 10 years of driving the same car (5 of which you spend driving an old car). Or you're paying $210*120 = $25200 over 10 years by renewing the lease on a new vehicle, at similar terms, every 2 years.
Favorite car-buying story: To bring us back on topic -- if we're talking about leasing hardware or buying hardware on a "service basis", I'l bet this guy would have leased me this car for as low as $10/month for the rest of my life, with the lease up for renewal (modulo depreciation) the first week after I'd driven it off the lot.
Me: What does the car cost?
Weasel: What do you want it to cost?
Me: Probably the lowest price at which you'll sell it to me.
Weasel: No, I meant, what do you want the payments to be?
Me: Doesn't matter. I'm not asking what the monthly payment on the car is going to be, because we haven't discussed how I'm going to finance the purchase. I just wanna know what does the car cost?
Weasel: Well, it depends on how you finance it. How much were you looking to spend per month?
Me: Whatever the cost of the car is, plus interest, divided by the term of a loan. What is the cost of this car?
Weasel: Could be $300/month, could be $200/month. What would you like your payment to be? We have lease options that'll get it a little lower if you can't afford it.
Me: [resisting temptation to roll eyes] If you do not tell me the cost of this car - that is, a number I can ask my bank to write on a certified check, and that if I give you that check, you'll let me drive off the lot with the car - I will take my business elsewhere.
Weasel: [utterly failing to get it, or perhaps his script forced him to hard-sell the lease option even when customers are clearly not interested] What monthly payment did you want again?
Me: [Walks off without saying another word, leaving a stupefied sales drone in my wake]
> Bakers are, in a sense, biologists. They know that yeast in bread and rolls thrive in warm
temperatures, and that the ideal temperature for yeast activity is between 120 an 130 degrees F. Heat the dough to 140, and the yeast dies. Salt will kill yeast if brought in direct contact with it as well. And yeast loves sugar - so much so that if you leave the sugar out of bread, the yeast will start breaking down the complex sugars in the flour, which in turn changes the flavor of the breads.
So when a recipe calls for a certain amount of honey to be added to a dough that also includes flour and eggs, you're really just tweaking the bee-puke input in order to adjust yeast-shit output as a function of how many bird menstruation products you added.
(And yet, I still enjoy bread and beer, and am still hungry. Go figure.)
Re:Article text. *NO KARMA WHORING*
on
NYT on Spam Cops
·
· Score: 1
Quoth the NYT:
> Spammers have been sending more junk e-mail than ever, despite a new federal antispam law that
took effect Jan. 1.
"despite"? Try "thanks to".
> In the last 15 months, Microsoft has filed 53 civil cases against spammers. Ten have resulted in court orders banning the defendant from further spamming, either because of a settlement or because the defendant did not show up in court. One case was dismissed. The rest are working their way through the Washington State courts.
But the new federal (You)CAN-SPAM law supercedes WA state law. So yes, there are 53 civil cases pending in WA state courts.
And because of You-CAN-SPAM, not one of those cases matters worth shit.
> If you're working 60 or 80 hours a week you're married to your work not to your wife. What's the point in living under the same roof if all you have the time to do is to sleep in the same bed?
Well, for one thing, you don't have to worry about ironing your shirts. Either because you don't need to impress her with your snappy looks (because you're not doing anything together - or because she's got what she wants from you, namely your money, and doesn't care what you look like)...
...or because things are going great and she can stay home and iron the clothes. Well, in between... well, let's just say the postman always comes twice.
> I feel sorry for people like you who get so consumed by their jobs/quest for money that they're not living a human life anymore. What will you do when you're a burnt-out hulk of a man at 50 with no friends?
Huh? Same thing I do every night, Pinky! Post on Slashdot, get rated (+5, Funny), rack up the karma, and get friends by the dozen. You don't even have to be 50, but being burned out helps.
> > Being executed and the family being billed for the bullet will certainly prevent them from
spamming again. > > I have grave reservations about putting spammers in front of a firing squad. > They need something far more agonising and drawn out. Eaten alive by rats maybe?
Lawyer from the ASPCA on line 1 for you. He wants to know why you have a hate-on for rats.
> I think that IF johnny learned about history by experimenting with running or crushing a revolt, and by observing the differences between democracy and despotism that he might be a better citizen.
Except you left out the other thing that was a lot of fun about Civ and Alpha Centauri. Being evil is fun!
One of my favorite SMAC cutscenes was the one for the "Self-Aware Colony"... buncha dirtball citizens running around with spray cans whispering "We must dissent". Go ahead, 'cuz I got your dissent right here, citizen!
The ability to wipe out a good chunk of a continent was also peachy. Dropping a couple of singularity planet-busters in the middle of your enemy's most populated continent takes out most of his ability to defend the remnants of his empire and greatly accelerates the endgame.
I always wondered why the soccer-mom "Nerf the world for the chylllldrun!" crowd was so worried about about the violence in games like GTA3. A typical game of Civ or SMAC typically ends with body counts in the millions.
(It's doubly ironic in that the genocide strategy works even when there's no military necessity for it - it's still better to reduce your opponents to ash so that you can safely ignore their remnants while and diverting your entire economy towards the "good" endgame goal of completing the games' technology trees and building the starship / transcending humanity a few turns earlier:)
> > Hi, Officer! Good to see you. Here's the box. I've downloaded 100 CDs' worth of stuff since your last visit. I'll plead 'no contest' and see you at the impound yard with my check. At $15 per CD, that's $1500 worth of music I'm getting for only $1000 > > What makes you think the box'll still contain any music?
Another difference between the WoD and a profitably-constructed WoM:
If Officer Friendly wipes the drives (instead of
just copying the music for himself:), I'm much less likely to download another 100 CDs' worth of music for the next seizure.
In that scenario, Officer Friendly doesn't get enough money (either from me at the impound yard, or from schools wanting a brand-new Pentium 133 on the auction block) to justify the time and expense of seizing the equipment. The seizures stop because they become a self-limiting phenomenon.
The business of asset forfeiture relies on a penalty light enough to encourage citizens to reoffend, but tough enough to make a profit.
If it's a $10 fine, it's not worth the cops' time to investigate or prosecute. If it's $1000 for a $100 system, the cops never collect a penny. If it's $1000 for $5000 worth of ill-gotten goods, everybody wins.
ObSlashdot: Think of Microsoft and antitrust fines -- if you get fined $1B in the process of making $10B from your monopoly, you write it off as the cost of doing business. Bill Gates wins because he keeps $9B. Government also wins because it gets $1B in additional revenue. If it threatened to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, Microsoft would change its business practices and the government wouldn't see a penny.
> Much like the war on drugs, this war on piracy is going to end up costing the tax payer more money, infringing upon non-infringing citizens, and lining the pockets of those in government who perpetuate heavy-handed methods of dealing with petty crimes.
Actually, due to aggressive expansion of asset-forfeiture laws, the WoD is self-funding. If you're a cop, all you have to do is hang out on the corner, see a guy purchase a bag of weed, and you get to take his car and sell it for $1000-10000 (depending on how nice a car it was) at auction. Pretty good for 10-15 minutes' work. Even if you just impound it and fine him $500 or so to get his car back, you've made your department a profit.
When computers were expensive, I thought that asset forfeiture laws ought to be expanded to spammers. At the time, there were plenty of local school districts that needed computers.
Likewise, because there are so many people (10-20% of the population) who are guilty of downloading copyrighted musical content, a WoM (War on Music) would be a profitable venture for the local police department. Download tunes while Officer Friendly's lookin' at the router, pay $1000 to get your computer back at the auction next weekend.
Unlike the WoD, the funny part about the WoM is that if you're downloading enough music, it could still be a bargain for consumers. "Hi, Officer! Good to see you. Here's the box. I've downloaded 100 CDs' worth of stuff since your last visit. I'll plead 'no contest' and see you at the impound yard with my check. At $15 per CD, that's $1500 worth of music I'm getting for only $1000 -- and the best part is, the money stays in my community, rather than going to the RIAA!"
> Oh, boy, now I can put out "The Sims -- Shreveport Louisiana" expansion pack. Or "Grand Theft Auto 13: The Streets of Missoula Montana"
Oh yeah, I can just see GTA XIV: Pennsylvania - and Congress getting all in a tizzy after a bunch of wise-cracking Amish dudes put up signs saying "Kill the Mennonites!" the night the level-mapping cart is pulled through town:)
> 92Tbps is total fabric capacity when used in a mesh, 40Gbps is what can be done on a single interface. So this thing can route 2300 40Gbps interfaces when used in a cluster, that's more capacity than any organization can use at this time,
Future Slashdot Poll: Suppose you had a router that could handle 2300 40Gbps interfaces?
92Tbps ought to be enough for anybody!
92Tbps is insignificant compared to the power of the Slashdot effect!
Spoken like someone who's never seen CowboyNeal's pr0n collection.
> Consider this, if you are having a dinner party. Do you clean up the house some first? (Most
people do.) Why? It is not nessesarily functional to have the floor vacumed. Having the
bathrooms clean does not make the food taste better.
If there's enough beer, wine, and whisky being served at the dinner party, I can guaran-damn-tee you that having the bathrooms clean most assuredly does make the food taste better. The second time around.
> > In the United States, "It's all about complying with the law, which may or may not have any bearing to people," said Ponemon. "In Canada, I got the sense that they thought it was just the right thing to do." > > Isn't that exactly why we have laws in the first place, to set up penalties for not doing the 'right thing?'
When there's no law, there are market incentives to Do The Right Thing. (If you fail to Do The Right Thing, your customers get pissed off and leave.)
The instant anything is codified into law - whether it's the Right Thing To Do or not - the penalty for failing to comply with the law means you get sued, go to jail, or both.
Oddly enough, as soon as this happens, complying with the law suddenly becomes more important than even thinking about what the Right Thing might be, and Doing The Right Thing falls completely off the radar. Funny, that.
> Get the Teamsters involved! Think about it: If IT workers were Teamsters, and there was a contract disagreement between IT and management, then NOTHING would get shipped ANYWHERE by truck. That would really be an issue for most large corporations.
Yep, it sure would. Oh, it's funny you should mention the Teamsters and the trucking industry this morning:
CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 23, 2004--USF Corporation (NASDAQ:USFC - News) announced that it is shutting down its USF Red Star operating company effective immediately. The Company concluded on Sunday that the unexpected and unilateral job action initiated on Friday by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters had triggered a loss of customers and revenue to a point where Red Star would never be able to recover from the business losses caused by this Teamster job action.
> Don't rely on professional organizations like the IEEE and ACM to help you with your career. These are international organizations, and don't give a rat's ass about IT in the USA.
Don't rely on a bunch of political hacks like the Teamsters to help you with your career. They're a bunch of ignorant thugs, and don't give a rat's ass about your job -- only their ability to extract union dues from you to prop up their political power.
- Me, channelling Gene Roddenberry, who's unsure of whether he's addressing that Klingon. Bastard. Who. Killed. My. Son, Rick Berman, or William Shatner.
Slashdot Mirror
>
> Be it dollars, euros, gold, or matchsticks.
>
> Money, as such, is meaningless without that trust.
Which, I believe, is the original poster's point.
As of two weeks ago, any RBC accountholder could take a piece of paper with some RBC-blessed magnetic scrawlings on it, and many people would trust that the scrawlings could be turned into dollars, euros, gold, and/or matchsticks.
As of today, that's no longer entirely clear.
Speculation:
Suppose Something Bad(tm) happens to the database and the failover machines. Traditionally, you restore from backups, and roll it forward based on the transaction log.
I can think of a few scenarios, but I don't like any of them. Just about every scenario I can imagine involves combinations of restoring the wrong version of the database from backups, a rollback operation that fails, or a rolling forward the wrong set of transactions from a log. I thought the whole point of an RDBMS was to have transactional integrity -- so that if the database thinks it's June 2nd, you can't roll forward a June 1 transaction to make it happen twice. A database shouldn't be able to permit that to happen, even if God himself is at the console.
Any DBA wonks care to speculate further as to WTF could be going on?
Somehow I'm uninspired by the "media-relations officer" saying "I am not a technical person [ ... ] It did have to do with computer software and at this point I understand it did have something to do with sequencing. [ ... ] I honestly don't know. As I say, I mean, it's one of those tech things."
Now, that might be good media relations, but I'm not media. If I banked in Canada, there'd only be one more transaction pending against any account I had at this bank: A transfer of the account's full balance to a competitor.
> LOOK UP INTO THE STARS ABOVE!
> THE CHEERING CROWDS GAZE WITH FUN
> FROM LOCATION THIRTY ONE!"
>
> "Stars above? What does it mean!"
>
> "I've got it! To the Planetarium! The next clue must be under seat thirty one!"
>
> "Man, i'm so glad Bill died. I'm having the time of my life!"
Problem is, if someone's closed the planetarium or just changed the seating arrangements in the past decade, the game breaks down.
Except for one thing: In the decades of evolution after the extinction of that particular movie genre, we've developed:
1) "Shared-secret" cryptosystems. You don't need all of the key. And even if your clues are chained together, you can make up strings of clues that intersect. (If the Planetarium Clue leads you to the Zoo Clue, you can still find the Zoo Clue if a third Clue also points people to the Zoo.)
2) Geocaching.
3) Widely-known and widely-distributed images that can never be truly "erased" from history, unlike the clue buried under the planetarium.
4) If your estate isn't worth several million dollars, nobody's gonna bother flying halfway across the country for each clue. But by using #3 and only a little bit of geocaching, a little Perl scripting might be worth doing.
BRIM'S EXCLUSIVE QUAKER OATS,
NATALIE PORTMAN POURS SOME GOATS!
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, CYCLES YOU,
ALL YOUR BASE ARE THIRTY-TWO!
"OMFG, if we XOR the ASCII for 'wilfrid', as in the Quaker Oats guy 'Wilfrid Brimley', and we XOR it with 'hotgrit', and XOR *that* with the Goatse Guy's picture, all we need to do is take a CRC-32 of the resulting file and we have the next four bytes of the key! w00t!"
Man, I so have to update my will.
>
> But who would clean the toilets?
I'm in favor of a cull. But with exponential population growth, culling the bottom 75% isn't going to solve things for more than 100 years or so. That's a drop in the bucket if human lifespan can be extended to 1000. In order to be effective, the culling cannot be a one-time event -- it has to be a regular event.
Unless there are a lot of home toilets that are overflowing with mold and shit, I'd surmise that anyone who can keep their home toilet clean without help, is also capable of keeping the toilet at work (or at a restaurant) clean without help.
With a life span of 1000 years, the excuse of "I don't have time to clean up my own mess" falls pretty flat too.
Finally, it's a pretty easy case to make that anyone who regularly pisses on the seat or shits on the floor has problems, and if they compound those problems by being unwilling to grab a mop to clean up the mess just as they would at home, they've gone pretty far below the 75% threshold, and have automatically rendered themselves eligible for the next culling.
In short, if you could regularly cull the stupid and lazy from the face of the earth, the answer to the question "who would clean the toilets" is that failure to clean the toilets would rapidly become a self-correcting phenomenon.
Huh? Has anyone actually tried this? I mean, unlike Leisure Suit Larry, the game you describe may have better graphics, but the gameplay itself is as boring as the Sims, and the speed-up key can only be used once a day, and in an astonishing display of programmer ignorance, the speed-up key only works at night when you're trying to game! At least the Sims design team got that part right -- you want to fast-forward during the day when you're at work and nobody's home!
> instead of exploring levels of some fake world, figure out what places you can take your woman to in the real world that get her in the mood. figure out how to get her to do x and y things that she would never think of doing.
And the list of defects goes on. Like, there's no fucking save/restore feature either! I mean, you spend six weeks of game time setting up a surprise menage-a-trois with you, your girlfriend and just *one* lousy goat, and if the persuade roll fails, all you can do is pull out the old .45 and restart.
No way, man, "RL" is teh suck. I wouldn't even warez it.
*bedeebedeebedeebedeebeep*
He: (boom, zzzot, blam) HELLO?
She: Hi, hon-hey, what's that in the background?
He: (boom, *boooOoom*) (whispering) dudes, turn it down or put on some pr0n or something, quick! -- NOTHING, HOney!
She: Don't you lie to me...
He: (ooooh, baby, come back to bed nooowww...) Look, I know I'm on a business trip, this sorta thing happens.
She: Don't you LIE to me, you worthless bastard!
He: (slurp, groan) Sometimes these things happen, I'll make it up to you, honest!
She: BULLSHIT! You're not ON a business trip! You're not even in a HOTEL ROOM with some CHEAP FLOOZIE!
He: Bu-but, I can exp-
She: You're at one of those FUCKING LAN PARTIES AGAIN, AREN'T YOU?*click*
Tried that with DOOM I. Didn't work too good. (But if it does, marry her.)
Good old BUNNY.MP3, the best end game music ever.
Dude, that's a good sign.
The next step in the beta testing process is to try her out on one of the Half-Life 2 demo videos. "Look honey! No more cute bears. Gibs that splatter across half the playfield when you whack the hanging torso with a crowbar."
If she sits there with her jaw dropped to the floor while a small puddle of drool forms on the desk, propose to her. If you hear words like "w00t!" or "cool!" or "whoa!", don't just propose, for fuck's sake, marry her!
The one that's cheaper is "Whichever one the car salesman doesn't want you to choose."
Over 10 years, you're paying $320x60 = $19200 for 10 years of driving the same car (5 of which you spend driving an old car). Or you're paying $210*120 = $25200 over 10 years by renewing the lease on a new vehicle, at similar terms, every 2 years.
Favorite car-buying story: To bring us back on topic -- if we're talking about leasing hardware or buying hardware on a "service basis", I'l bet this guy would have leased me this car for as low as $10/month for the rest of my life, with the lease up for renewal (modulo depreciation) the first week after I'd driven it off the lot.
Me: What does the car cost?
Weasel: What do you want it to cost?
Me: Probably the lowest price at which you'll sell it to me.
Weasel: No, I meant, what do you want the payments to be?
Me: Doesn't matter. I'm not asking what the monthly payment on the car is going to be, because we haven't discussed how I'm going to finance the purchase. I just wanna know what does the car cost?
Weasel: Well, it depends on how you finance it. How much were you looking to spend per month?
Me: Whatever the cost of the car is, plus interest, divided by the term of a loan. What is the cost of this car?
Weasel: Could be $300/month, could be $200/month. What would you like your payment to be? We have lease options that'll get it a little lower if you can't afford it.
Me: [resisting temptation to roll eyes] If you do not tell me the cost of this car - that is, a number I can ask my bank to write on a certified check, and that if I give you that check, you'll let me drive off the lot with the car - I will take my business elsewhere.
Weasel: [utterly failing to get it, or perhaps his script forced him to hard-sell the lease option even when customers are clearly not interested] What monthly payment did you want again?
Me: [Walks off without saying another word, leaving a stupefied sales drone in my wake]
So when a recipe calls for a certain amount of honey to be added to a dough that also includes flour and eggs, you're really just tweaking the bee-puke input in order to adjust yeast-shit output as a function of how many bird menstruation products you added.
(And yet, I still enjoy bread and beer, and am still hungry. Go figure.)
> Spammers have been sending more junk e-mail than ever, despite a new federal antispam law that took effect Jan. 1.
"despite"? Try "thanks to".
> In the last 15 months, Microsoft has filed 53 civil cases against spammers. Ten have resulted in court orders banning the defendant from further spamming, either because of a settlement or because the defendant did not show up in court. One case was dismissed. The rest are working their way through the Washington State courts.
But the new federal (You)CAN-SPAM law supercedes WA state law. So yes, there are 53 civil cases pending in WA state courts.
And because of You-CAN-SPAM, not one of those cases matters worth shit.
Well, for one thing, you don't have to worry about ironing your shirts. Either because you don't need to impress her with your snappy looks (because you're not doing anything together - or because she's got what she wants from you, namely your money, and doesn't care what you look like)...
> I feel sorry for people like you who get so consumed by their jobs/quest for money that they're not living a human life anymore. What will you do when you're a burnt-out hulk of a man at 50 with no friends?
Huh? Same thing I do every night, Pinky! Post on Slashdot, get rated (+5, Funny), rack up the karma, and get friends by the dozen. You don't even have to be 50, but being burned out helps.
Naw, it's just a duplicate of a "Slashback" article :)
>
> I have grave reservations about putting spammers in front of a firing squad.
> They need something far more agonising and drawn out. Eaten alive by rats maybe?
Lawyer from the ASPCA on line 1 for you. He wants to know why you have a hate-on for rats.
>
> Hmmm.
"Hmmm", indeed.
How the fuck would a prosecutor find a jury that would convict?
>
> How about seven years and the victims get to pick his cellmate?
How about three years... but he has to opt out of every ass-raping.
Of course, if he gets out in three years and claims that it wasn't rape, his cellmates can claim that he opted in anyways, and just forgot about it.
Except you left out the other thing that was a lot of fun about Civ and Alpha Centauri. Being evil is fun!
One of my favorite SMAC cutscenes was the one for the "Self-Aware Colony"... buncha dirtball citizens running around with spray cans whispering "We must dissent". Go ahead, 'cuz I got your dissent right here, citizen!
The ability to wipe out a good chunk of a continent was also peachy. Dropping a couple of singularity planet-busters in the middle of your enemy's most populated continent takes out most of his ability to defend the remnants of his empire and greatly accelerates the endgame.
I always wondered why the soccer-mom "Nerf the world for the chylllldrun!" crowd was so worried about about the violence in games like GTA3. A typical game of Civ or SMAC typically ends with body counts in the millions.
(It's doubly ironic in that the genocide strategy works even when there's no military necessity for it - it's still better to reduce your opponents to ash so that you can safely ignore their remnants while and diverting your entire economy towards the "good" endgame goal of completing the games' technology trees and building the starship / transcending humanity a few turns earlier :)
>
> What makes you think the box'll still contain any music?
Another difference between the WoD and a profitably-constructed WoM:
If Officer Friendly wipes the drives (instead of just copying the music for himself :), I'm much less likely to download another 100 CDs' worth of music for the next seizure.
In that scenario, Officer Friendly doesn't get enough money (either from me at the impound yard, or from schools wanting a brand-new Pentium 133 on the auction block) to justify the time and expense of seizing the equipment. The seizures stop because they become a self-limiting phenomenon.
The business of asset forfeiture relies on a penalty light enough to encourage citizens to reoffend, but tough enough to make a profit.
If it's a $10 fine, it's not worth the cops' time to investigate or prosecute. If it's $1000 for a $100 system, the cops never collect a penny. If it's $1000 for $5000 worth of ill-gotten goods, everybody wins.
ObSlashdot: Think of Microsoft and antitrust fines -- if you get fined $1B in the process of making $10B from your monopoly, you write it off as the cost of doing business. Bill Gates wins because he keeps $9B. Government also wins because it gets $1B in additional revenue. If it threatened to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, Microsoft would change its business practices and the government wouldn't see a penny.
Actually, due to aggressive expansion of asset-forfeiture laws, the WoD is self-funding. If you're a cop, all you have to do is hang out on the corner, see a guy purchase a bag of weed, and you get to take his car and sell it for $1000-10000 (depending on how nice a car it was) at auction. Pretty good for 10-15 minutes' work. Even if you just impound it and fine him $500 or so to get his car back, you've made your department a profit.
When computers were expensive, I thought that asset forfeiture laws ought to be expanded to spammers. At the time, there were plenty of local school districts that needed computers.
Likewise, because there are so many people (10-20% of the population) who are guilty of downloading copyrighted musical content, a WoM (War on Music) would be a profitable venture for the local police department. Download tunes while Officer Friendly's lookin' at the router, pay $1000 to get your computer back at the auction next weekend.
Unlike the WoD, the funny part about the WoM is that if you're downloading enough music, it could still be a bargain for consumers. "Hi, Officer! Good to see you. Here's the box. I've downloaded 100 CDs' worth of stuff since your last visit. I'll plead 'no contest' and see you at the impound yard with my check. At $15 per CD, that's $1500 worth of music I'm getting for only $1000 -- and the best part is, the money stays in my community, rather than going to the RIAA!"
Win-win in my books :)
Oh yeah, I can just see GTA XIV: Pennsylvania - and Congress getting all in a tizzy after a bunch of wise-cracking Amish dudes put up signs saying "Kill the Mennonites!" the night the level-mapping cart is pulled through town :)
Future Slashdot Poll: Suppose you had a router that could handle 2300 40Gbps interfaces?
If there's enough beer, wine, and whisky being served at the dinner party, I can guaran-damn-tee you that having the bathrooms clean most assuredly does make the food taste better. The second time around.
>
> Isn't that exactly why we have laws in the first place, to set up penalties for not doing the 'right thing?'
When there's no law, there are market incentives to Do The Right Thing. (If you fail to Do The Right Thing, your customers get pissed off and leave.)
The instant anything is codified into law - whether it's the Right Thing To Do or not - the penalty for failing to comply with the law means you get sued, go to jail, or both.
Oddly enough, as soon as this happens, complying with the law suddenly becomes more important than even thinking about what the Right Thing might be, and Doing The Right Thing falls completely off the radar. Funny, that.
Privacy: It's dead. You have none. Get over it.
Yep, it sure would. Oh, it's funny you should mention the Teamsters and the trucking industry this morning:
> Don't rely on professional organizations like the IEEE and ACM to help you with your career. These are international organizations, and don't give a rat's ass about IT in the USA.
Don't rely on a bunch of political hacks like the Teamsters to help you with your career. They're a bunch of ignorant thugs, and don't give a rat's ass about your job -- only their ability to extract union dues from you to prop up their political power.
- Me, channelling Gene Roddenberry, who's unsure of whether he's addressing that Klingon. Bastard. Who. Killed. My. Son, Rick Berman, or William Shatner.