I am fortunate in that, for me, the unenjoyable weight of debt far exceeds the enjoyment attained from shiny new things.
I'm going to guess that you aren't married? The enjoyment of shiny stuff wasn't all that great, but the enjoyment of someone else's enjoyment of shiny stuff tipped the scales in a big way.
That's ok, women live longer then men. That means she gets to support me when I'm too sick to keep working. Who gets the last laugh then, eh!? </sarcasm>
Foo: you don't cash out if you're young...you just borrow some of it Bar: I disagree. We should be encouraging people not to borrow, period. Don't borrow on credit and certainly don't borrow from yourself. The phrase, "robbing Paul to pay Peter" rings ever so true here
Teh grandparent got it right -- he's saying that's what I did, not that it's a good idea. I borrowed up to the absolute maximum allowed by my plan, so there's no tax penalty. To fund the loan, the plan manager sold my shares. I'll pay back the loan over time, and the plan manager will use that money to buy shares. So I tried to time it when the market was heading upwards (sell high) but is near its peak and entering a period of decline (buy low).
But you're right, too -- it's *not* a good idea. I'm missing out on the company's partial match, so even if the market tanked, I'd still be better off staying in the fund. My 1337 statement was intended as an ironic comment on the validity of making investment decisions based on advice received from a poster on Slashdot.
Oh, and you're right for another reason... I didn't pay off everything. I blew some of the dough on a home wireless network, and other things (not all of which I can even remember) that didn't help with the debt situation. I think I'll still be better off in the medium term, because of the way I've set up the rest of the debt (it's all under 10% now), but I'm absolutely screwed in the long term. Oh, well, retirement would have been boring, anyway.
It sure does feel like 1998. That's why, this morning, I just moved almost all of my 401k out of US-based stocks.
Ha! I'm way ahead of you. I sold off half my 401(k) last month and invested the whole thing in a guaranteed 17% investment. I paid off one of those damned credit cards. One down, three to go. ph34r my 1337 1nv357m3n7 sk177z!
The Great Bubble of the late '90s shaped a generation of Internet entrepreneurs and investors much as the Great Depression shaped a generation of economizers in the mid-20th century.
Since my own existence only dates back some 40 years, I can't claim firsthand experience of the Great Depression, but comparisons between the Dot-Com Bust and the Great Depression are so overblown that it ain't even funny. From the usual suspects:
Almost all countries were affected; the worst hit were the most industrialized, including the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and Japan. Cities around the world were hit hard, especially those based on heavy industry. Construction virtually halted in many countries. Farmers and rural areas suffered as prices for crops fell by 40-60%. Mining and lumbering areas were perhaps the hardest hit because demand fell sharply and there was little alternative economic activity.
I guess it's to be expected, though. We're supposedly in this War on Terror, but so far, I haven't been asked to participate in a single Meatless Tuesday. Where do I go to get my ration cards, anyway?
When I pulled up the three sites in Opera (before they were Slashdotted, gotta love that Subscription option), two out of three failed.
Michael Johnson -- footer in middle of page (also mentioned as a Firefox problem).
Jason Porritt -- critical flaw: it went into an endless loop, with the box around the story repeating itself until the story disappeared entirely.
Peter Lada -- no problems and looks good and clean to boot.
Remember, we'll all be using Opera to surf to Slashdot on the Wii, and it's gotta work there! (Oh, and something about Opera and standards compliance, etc...)
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
on
Bloodless Surgery
·
· Score: 1
Bloodless surgery = easy
Bloodless discussion of religion on Slashdot = impossible
The way I see it, I say give it a hundred years or so, and every one of us will find out whether we're right (or to be more precise, find out how many ways we're wrong) about the nature of God. Can I get a witness!?
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."
Wow, that's a great link! 20 comments later and by an AC... not much chance for an upmod, but here's hoping.
(Can you believe how many of those 20 comments were from people who thought I had *plans* to step out in front of the next Jaguar I see? Guess I should have used the [sarcasm] tag after all.)
Side sensors on the car's side, for example, gauge if the car is about to roll over, and then activate the roll-over bar, which breaks through the glass of the back windshield.
For front-end collisions, a fiber optic connection from left to right registers impacts. The sensors' algorithms then program the hood and front end to react differently according to what is hit.
For pedestrians, a mesh-like material is activated in less than 50 milliseconds beneath the hood, which serve to cushion the blow upon impact.
These well-nigh amazing safety features leave me asking the same question that I ask myself when I hear GM's OnStar commercials, touting features like calling emergency services on airbag deployment.
How many lives does a feature have to save before it should be required equipment?
Early automobiles were deathtraps, until a fellow by the name of Ralph brought the issue to national prominence in 1965 with Unsafe at Any Speed, a book to which many of us owe our very existence. Since then, we have assumed a right to a safe vehicle. No car company would be allowed to sell a $3000 rattletrap with no seat belts and no air bags and an engine in the passenger seat, even if they required purchasers to sign a safety waiver. I think this can be counted as "progress", though the more Libertarian folks out there might disagree.
But assuming that Da Gooberment has an obligation to obligate safer vehicles, where do you set the bar? If a "mesh-like material" is the difference between injury and Pedestrian Souffle', why not require such a system on all vehicles? Or do I have to cross my fingers and only step out in front of cars built by Jaguar?
I thought for sure that there would be enough Subscribers send email to the DaddyPants address that this one would be yanked.
Well, for reference, here are all the +4 and +5 comments from last week's installment of this story, so you karma whores can repost them and hope the moderators don't see through your ruse...
I've always been intrigued by the possibility of mining for commercially viable metals on Venus. The effort would be an order of magnitude more than mining on Earth, but some of the materials most in demand -- tantalum for capacitors, for example -- are in limited supply in politically difficult locations. Not to mention the fact that the mining process tears up one of my favorite planets.
The highlands of Venus are covered by a heavy metal "frost", say planetary scientists from Washington University.
Because it is hot enough to melt lead at the surface, metals vaporise and condense at cooler, higher elevations.
This may explain why radar observations made by orbiting spacecraft show that the highlands are highly reflective.
Detailed calculations, to be published in the journal Icarus, suggest that lead and bismuth are to blame for giving Venus its bright, metallic skin.
The article goes on to discuss lead and bismuth being the primary metals. Nobody's going to launch a mission to Venus to build a digestive elixir plant, but it seems entirely possible that the lead and bismuth might be "contaminated" with more interesting metals -- perhaps even in quantities large enough to be commericially interesting.
Actually, the grandparent post was about as close to a literal LOL as I allow myself at work.
I pictured an unmanned space object at the end of its life being deorbited, and then as it enters the atmosphere, shooting parachutes out from all sides like some bizarre space flower. The resulting stresses shatter the spacecraft into pieces, therefore it "uses parachutes to break".
You should really include a link to the entry at bash.org, which includes the continuation of the encounter. It's the followup that makes it a classic.
So apple-option-power is the Mac equivalent of ctl-alt-del? I'll have to remember that.
I wasn't too terribly worried, though... while some browser exploits are cross-platform, I figured the Mac-based browsers were at least as hijack-proof as Opera. The chances of needing to do a reboot would be pretty slim. Besides, my target audience consisted of my parents, and they don't own a Mac.
The article sure made a big to-do about how typosquatters target kids, implying that the Bad Guys want to get 11-year-olds to steal their parents' credit cards so that they can visit neopetsporn.com or something.
So, what, I'm supposed to install this on my PC instead of teaching my kids how to hit the "esc" key and then hit "back"? As a parent, I've always figured it was *my* job, not Bill's, to teach my kids to surf safely. Heck, I even gave the rest of my family detailed instructions on how to respond if they accidentally visited the porn squatter at the dot-com next door to my family's domain name.
Of course, I guess if you're using Internet Explorer, you probably need some sort of blocker for the sites that send you to Popup Hell or otherwise highjack your browser. Strange how I never have this problem myself (coughcoughcough).
I'm impressed they found such a responsive registrar.
O RLY? (I've always wanted to type that)
I haven't found a registrar yet -- at least not since the 48-hour DNS timeouts went away -- that didn't have a domain ready to rock immediately upon registration.
But I don't think the sites were held back for fear of discovery. Unless someone was watching caltechcannon.com (possible, but not terribly likely) and howeandser.com (even less likely), nobody would know until they got the URL posted on Slashdot. I guess it was just an oversight... I was just razzing 'em in hopes of getting upmodded^W a laugh.
Strangely, though, the web site commemorating the [major theft]|[harmless prank] was only established yesterday.
Whois - caltechcannon.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: CALTECHCANNON.COM
Created on: 05-Apr-06
Expires on: 06-Apr-08
Last Updated on: 05-Apr-06
Also referenced is howeandser.com -- same date, same semi-anonymous registrar. You'd have thought that the website would have been the *first* thing they put together!
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Apr 05, '06 03:23 PM from the make-sure-to-give-it-to-more-than-just-the- corporate-monkies dept.
You would think that an editor called Scuttle Monkey would know that the correct plural of "Monkey" is "Monkeys", not "Monkies".
"Monkies" would be the plural of "Monkie", which I guess is what you'd call a baby Monk Seal, or if you knew him really well, a resident of a Monastery. "Hey, Monkie, nice robe!"
Of course, if you were talking to Michael Nesmith, the singular form would be "Monkee". But that's neither here nor there.
The country is failing. The ride is over. All great nations fall, and when they do, they fall fast, and hard.
Its over.
Our people do not think like the Americans of old. There is no tolerance or American idealism. It's now about control and the people are too complacent and out matched.
Hey, brotha', I'm with you all the way as to the erosion of the rights we hold dear. But please, please bone up on your history before you make blanket statements about the demise of the American experiment. Wikipedia Is Your Friend.
Alien and Sedition Acts The Alien and Sedition Acts were acts of Congress passed during the administration of President John Adams; his signature made them into law on July 14, 1798. They were designed to protect the United States from aliens alleged dangerous.
Japanese American internment The Japanese American Internment refers to the forcible relocation of approximately 112,000 to 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, 62 percent of whom were United States citizens, from the west coast of the United States during World War II to hastily constructed housing facilities called War Relocation Camps in remote portions of the nation's interior.
McCarthyism McCarthyism took place during a period of intense suspicion in the United States primarily from 1950 to 1954, when the U.S. government was actively countering American Communist Party subversion, its leadership, and others suspected of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. During this period people from all walks of life became the subject of aggressive "witch-hunts," often based on inconclusive or questionable evidence. It grew out of the Second Red Scare that began in the late 1940s and is named after the U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin.
Lynching in the United States Lynching, in the United States, has influenced and been influenced by the major social conflicts in the country, revolving around the American frontier, Reconstruction, and the American Civil Rights Movement. Originally, lynching meant any extra-judicial punishment, including tarring and feathering and running out of town, but during the 19th century in the United States, it began to be used to refer specifically to murder, usually by hanging.
As a country -- if not always as individuals -- we have survived those assaults on our freedoms. And we have become stronger for it.
Please, do not stop crying out for our freedoms. But don't lose heart, either: we've been here before, and as long as we don't forget where we come from, we'll be free once more.
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind, I'm sure the other types of leaks will follow soon enough.
If the new Windows Player has a problem with leakage, perhaps it needs a Wii Controller?
Thank you, I'll be here all week, try the sushi!
So was that wireless network for you or your better half? ;-)
:)
She got the last 18 years... I get the next 18 years. And yes, I'm moderately jealous.
I am fortunate in that, for me, the unenjoyable weight of debt far exceeds the enjoyment attained from shiny new things.
I'm going to guess that you aren't married? The enjoyment of shiny stuff wasn't all that great, but the enjoyment of someone else's enjoyment of shiny stuff tipped the scales in a big way.
That's ok, women live longer then men. That means she gets to support me when I'm too sick to keep working. Who gets the last laugh then, eh!? </sarcasm>
Foo: you don't cash out if you're young...you just borrow some of it
Bar: I disagree. We should be encouraging people not to borrow, period. Don't borrow on credit and certainly don't borrow from yourself. The phrase, "robbing Paul to pay Peter" rings ever so true here
Teh grandparent got it right -- he's saying that's what I did, not that it's a good idea. I borrowed up to the absolute maximum allowed by my plan, so there's no tax penalty. To fund the loan, the plan manager sold my shares. I'll pay back the loan over time, and the plan manager will use that money to buy shares. So I tried to time it when the market was heading upwards (sell high) but is near its peak and entering a period of decline (buy low).
But you're right, too -- it's *not* a good idea. I'm missing out on the company's partial match, so even if the market tanked, I'd still be better off staying in the fund. My 1337 statement was intended as an ironic comment on the validity of making investment decisions based on advice received from a poster on Slashdot.
Oh, and you're right for another reason... I didn't pay off everything. I blew some of the dough on a home wireless network, and other things (not all of which I can even remember) that didn't help with the debt situation. I think I'll still be better off in the medium term, because of the way I've set up the rest of the debt (it's all under 10% now), but I'm absolutely screwed in the long term. Oh, well, retirement would have been boring, anyway.
It sure does feel like 1998. That's why, this morning, I just moved almost all of my 401k out of US-based stocks.
Ha! I'm way ahead of you. I sold off half my 401(k) last month and invested the whole thing in a guaranteed 17% investment. I paid off one of those damned credit cards. One down, three to go. ph34r my 1337 1nv357m3n7 sk177z!
The Great Bubble of the late '90s shaped a generation of Internet entrepreneurs and investors much as the Great Depression shaped a generation of economizers in the mid-20th century.
Since my own existence only dates back some 40 years, I can't claim firsthand experience of the Great Depression, but comparisons between the Dot-Com Bust and the Great Depression are so overblown that it ain't even funny. From the usual suspects:
Almost all countries were affected; the worst hit were the most industrialized, including the United States, Germany, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, and Japan. Cities around the world were hit hard, especially those based on heavy industry. Construction virtually halted in many countries. Farmers and rural areas suffered as prices for crops fell by 40-60%. Mining and lumbering areas were perhaps the hardest hit because demand fell sharply and there was little alternative economic activity.
I guess it's to be expected, though. We're supposedly in this War on Terror, but so far, I haven't been asked to participate in a single Meatless Tuesday. Where do I go to get my ration cards, anyway?
trickofperspective (180714) wrote:
:)
At first I thought that Jason's was just a psychedelic feature...
With a username like that, you couldn't help *but* think it was intentional!
When I pulled up the three sites in Opera (before they were Slashdotted, gotta love that Subscription option), two out of three failed.
Michael Johnson -- footer in middle of page (also mentioned as a Firefox problem).
Jason Porritt -- critical flaw: it went into an endless loop, with the box around the story repeating itself until the story disappeared entirely.
Peter Lada -- no problems and looks good and clean to boot.
Remember, we'll all be using Opera to surf to Slashdot on the Wii, and it's gotta work there! (Oh, and something about Opera and standards compliance, etc...)
Bloodless surgery = easy
Bloodless discussion of religion on Slashdot = impossible
The way I see it, I say give it a hundred years or so, and every one of us will find out whether we're right (or to be more precise, find out how many ways we're wrong) about the nature of God. Can I get a witness!?
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."
Found it here: http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-dict.html
And I would humbly suggest the addition of a hyphen like so:
All of my foes are spelling- or grammar Nazis.
But maybe that's just my personal preference.
I see the point, but I think you'd need to do this:
All of my foes are spelling- or grammar-Nazis.
(I saw this on M2 and had to reply. I had to be honest, though, so I M2'd the "Offtopic" mod as "Fair"... sorry...)
Konichi-wa! Have you ever been to Tokyo?
We dropped the controller there. It just fell out of Our hands while We were playing. Just slipped right out.
We hope you can visit during the day's rolling. Like that's possible.
If We were designing the controller, We would have made it much bigger.
Malcolm Gladwell has covered this - long but interesting:
t m
http://www.gladwell.com/2001/2001_06_11_a_crash.h
Wow, that's a great link! 20 comments later and by an AC... not much chance for an upmod, but here's hoping.
(Can you believe how many of those 20 comments were from people who thought I had *plans* to step out in front of the next Jaguar I see? Guess I should have used the [sarcasm] tag after all.)
Side sensors on the car's side, for example, gauge if the car is about to roll over, and then activate the roll-over bar, which breaks through the glass of the back windshield.
For front-end collisions, a fiber optic connection from left to right registers impacts. The sensors' algorithms then program the hood and front end to react differently according to what is hit.
For pedestrians, a mesh-like material is activated in less than 50 milliseconds beneath the hood, which serve to cushion the blow upon impact.
These well-nigh amazing safety features leave me asking the same question that I ask myself when I hear GM's OnStar commercials, touting features like calling emergency services on airbag deployment.
How many lives does a feature have to save before it should be required equipment?
Early automobiles were deathtraps, until a fellow by the name of Ralph brought the issue to national prominence in 1965 with Unsafe at Any Speed , a book to which many of us owe our very existence. Since then, we have assumed a right to a safe vehicle. No car company would be allowed to sell a $3000 rattletrap with no seat belts and no air bags and an engine in the passenger seat, even if they required purchasers to sign a safety waiver. I think this can be counted as "progress", though the more Libertarian folks out there might disagree.
But assuming that Da Gooberment has an obligation to obligate safer vehicles, where do you set the bar? If a "mesh-like material" is the difference between injury and Pedestrian Souffle', why not require such a system on all vehicles? Or do I have to cross my fingers and only step out in front of cars built by Jaguar?
I thought for sure that there would be enough Subscribers send email to the DaddyPants address that this one would be yanked.
Well, for reference, here are all the +4 and +5 comments from last week's installment of this story, so you karma whores can repost them and hope the moderators don't see through your ruse...
Microsoft 'URL Tracer' Hunts Typosquatters
Meanwhile, you can blame me for jinxing it.
Ghost Article: M'soft Tool To Help Users Avoid Typo Domains
d'oh. Thanks! I think... I'll have to revoke my thanks if I get fired for laughing out loud...
According to this 2003 BBC article:
The article goes on to discuss lead and bismuth being the primary metals. Nobody's going to launch a mission to Venus to build a digestive elixir plant, but it seems entirely possible that the lead and bismuth might be "contaminated" with more interesting metals -- perhaps even in quantities large enough to be commericially interesting.
breaks... brakes... breaks... brakes...
Actually, the grandparent post was about as close to a literal LOL as I allow myself at work.
I pictured an unmanned space object at the end of its life being deorbited, and then as it enters the atmosphere, shooting parachutes out from all sides like some bizarre space flower. The resulting stresses shatter the spacecraft into pieces, therefore it "uses parachutes to break".
Aight. I put on my robe and wizard hat.
You should really include a link to the entry at bash.org, which includes the continuation of the encounter. It's the followup that makes it a classic.
So apple-option-power is the Mac equivalent of ctl-alt-del? I'll have to remember that.
I wasn't too terribly worried, though... while some browser exploits are cross-platform, I figured the Mac-based browsers were at least as hijack-proof as Opera. The chances of needing to do a reboot would be pretty slim. Besides, my target audience consisted of my parents, and they don't own a Mac.
The article sure made a big to-do about how typosquatters target kids, implying that the Bad Guys want to get 11-year-olds to steal their parents' credit cards so that they can visit neopetsporn.com or something.
So, what, I'm supposed to install this on my PC instead of teaching my kids how to hit the "esc" key and then hit "back"? As a parent, I've always figured it was *my* job, not Bill's, to teach my kids to surf safely. Heck, I even gave the rest of my family detailed instructions on how to respond if they accidentally visited the porn squatter at the dot-com next door to my family's domain name.
Of course, I guess if you're using Internet Explorer, you probably need some sort of blocker for the sites that send you to Popup Hell or otherwise highjack your browser. Strange how I never have this problem myself (coughcoughcough).
I'm impressed they found such a responsive registrar.
O RLY? (I've always wanted to type that)
I haven't found a registrar yet -- at least not since the 48-hour DNS timeouts went away -- that didn't have a domain ready to rock immediately upon registration.
But I don't think the sites were held back for fear of discovery. Unless someone was watching caltechcannon.com (possible, but not terribly likely) and howeandser.com (even less likely), nobody would know until they got the URL posted on Slashdot. I guess it was just an oversight... I was just razzing 'em in hopes of getting upmodded^W a laugh.
Strangely, though, the web site commemorating the [major theft]|[harmless prank] was only established yesterday.
Whois - caltechcannon.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: CALTECHCANNON.COM
Created on: 05-Apr-06
Expires on: 06-Apr-08
Last Updated on: 05-Apr-06
Also referenced is howeandser.com -- same date, same semi-anonymous registrar. You'd have thought that the website would have been the *first* thing they put together!
Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Apr 05, '06 03:23 PM
from the make-sure-to-give-it-to-more-than-just-the- corporate-monkies dept.
You would think that an editor called Scuttle Monkey would know that the correct plural of "Monkey" is "Monkeys", not "Monkies".
"Monkies" would be the plural of "Monkie", which I guess is what you'd call a baby Monk Seal, or if you knew him really well, a resident of a Monastery. "Hey, Monkie, nice robe!"
Of course, if you were talking to Michael Nesmith, the singular form would be "Monkee". But that's neither here nor there.
The country is failing. The ride is over. All great nations fall, and when they do, they fall fast, and hard.
Its over.
Our people do not think like the Americans of old. There is no tolerance or American idealism. It's now about control and the people are too complacent and out matched.
Hey, brotha', I'm with you all the way as to the erosion of the rights we hold dear. But please, please bone up on your history before you make blanket statements about the demise of the American experiment. Wikipedia Is Your Friend.
Alien and Sedition Acts
The Alien and Sedition Acts were acts of Congress passed during the administration of President John Adams; his signature made them into law on July 14, 1798. They were designed to protect the United States from aliens alleged dangerous.
Japanese American internment
The Japanese American Internment refers to the forcible relocation of approximately 112,000 to 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, 62 percent of whom were United States citizens, from the west coast of the United States during World War II to hastily constructed housing facilities called War Relocation Camps in remote portions of the nation's interior.
McCarthyism
McCarthyism took place during a period of intense suspicion in the United States primarily from 1950 to 1954, when the U.S. government was actively countering American Communist Party subversion, its leadership, and others suspected of being Communists or Communist sympathizers. During this period people from all walks of life became the subject of aggressive "witch-hunts," often based on inconclusive or questionable evidence. It grew out of the Second Red Scare that began in the late 1940s and is named after the U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican of Wisconsin.
Lynching in the United States
Lynching, in the United States, has influenced and been influenced by the major social conflicts in the country, revolving around the American frontier, Reconstruction, and the American Civil Rights Movement. Originally, lynching meant any extra-judicial punishment, including tarring and feathering and running out of town, but during the 19th century in the United States, it began to be used to refer specifically to murder, usually by hanging.
As a country -- if not always as individuals -- we have survived those assaults on our freedoms. And we have become stronger for it.
Please, do not stop crying out for our freedoms. But don't lose heart, either: we've been here before, and as long as we don't forget where we come from, we'll be free once more.