Yeah. You know, I'm sure the people in Tiennamen Square had no reason to feel paranoid either, just because there were govenrment cameras posted on every lightpost and street corner, taping the protesting students and then waging a full-on airwave war over government television, feeding massive propoganda to their populace.
Besides, that's the whole point of a system like FACE. It does the scanning for you so that you (a human) only waste your time on relavent concerns that it has detected. ---
seumas.com
Long-term, cheap, flying surveillance vehicals. Everyone, everywhere, monitored, doing everything. Link them to some computerized systems like FACE in the UK so they can automatically alert the authorities of interesting individuals and situations picked up by various surveilance senses on the flying wing and you've got yet another reason for loving this wonderful country! ---
seumas.com
That wasn't quite my point, however. To someone making six figures, seven figures is a lot -- tax the hell out of everyone making seven figurs cause they're richer than I am!
To someone making 50k, 100k is pretty good -- tax the hell out of those bastards!.
To someone sitting at home on wellfare or living off of their social security, someone making $25k is doing really well -- tax the hell out of those people!
To someone flipping burgers, most of us are doing pretty well I'm sure -- but that doesn't mean we should be taxed to death. I mean, at least leave us enough money so that potential for owning our own house isn't obliterated. Maybe leave us enough of our own cash to invest in our own retirement...
Certainly, someone who is wealthy enough that they're buying massive yachts and 10 million dollar houses and have a collection of 80 sports cars should pay more than someone who is struggling to feed their two kids and keep a house over their head and only earning $20k -- and you know what? They already are! That's the whole point of a flat-percentage tax. 10% of a billion is a lot more than 10% of $30k. I mean... duh... So why should the 'rich' have to fund the rest of the country?
It would be nice if the wealthier people just gave away all their money to the destitute so everyone could hold hands and live in harmony, but then we wouldn't be living in a capitalistic society and nobody would have their flashy computer systems, nice cards and funky techno-gizmos that everyone's fond of. Socialist countries aren't exactly the most thrilling to live in, as you may have noticed. There's a reason our quality of living is so high here and why we can buy disposable everything. Wellfare/re-distribution and capitalism just don't integrate very well. You either have to say "you should get to keep what you work hard to earn" or we need to just give up and let the government accept all of our income for us and let them hand out a little bit to us here and there, like an allowance from your parents, no matter what job you work.
I'm the first to admit that there are gross fortunes out there being wasted (Ted Turner, Bill Gates, many entertainers...) but I can't ever get over the fundemental injustice in forcing one man to give something that is his to another man. Taxation is no longer about funding the required elements of a government so that it can perform its duties. Taxation is a form of class-retribution and serves only to support every experimental program that some dreamy-eyed highschool graduate pulls out of their ass to fix the world. We're a country and people of contradictions and I really don't care about it anymore. Let me make my money, save my cash, buy my house, do my own thing -- and die. Elect who you want to, social-engineer the hell out of everyone.. whatever... I honestly don't care much anymore because I'll hopefully have croaked in another 50 years when the effects of all this idiocy is finally evident. ---
seumas.com
Whoo. So there will always be one person out in space at all times. Now, find a way to keep one person in space through the entire ISS's lifespan (with an occasional visit to earth of course, but living the majority of their time in space) and you've got something neat.
Keep them in space the full 25 years without returning until the span is over and plant video cameras everywhere to record the decaying of their skeletal and muscular structures and put them on the web and television in a Big-Brother-esque series so we can watch them slip into dementia and you've got something most intriquing.
Throw in hot space-space chicks and you can sell pay-per-view on the Spice channel... Then you've most certainly got something... ---
seumas.com
And since the majority of people are probably not college graduates and the majority of people do not make as much money as they wish they did, they always find happiness in persicution of those who are doing better than they are, financially.
The majority always were happy to do a lot of other things that we all know are great injustices. The duty of the country is to protect its citizens -- not to please the many by the harassment, theft or persicution of the few.
Of course, should be and is are worlds apart. ---
seumas.com
I whole-heartedly believe that the people who think those who make more should pay a higher percentage of their income are completely mathematically illiterate.
The government, though bloated, should still seek taxation as a form of revenue for the funding of things we as a country have deemed worthy. Too many political figures and groups seek taxation as a form of retribution.
And what are they seeking retribution against? Hell if I can figure it out. I guess hard work is no excuse for deserving money -- so you need to have yours taken away so those who make lesser wages can feel better about themselves.
Hell, I don't know. I don't like to sound so angry over money and taxes, but I'm disgrunted that I have relatives who could really use a bit of the 52% of my salary that the government is taking out of my checks. ---
seumas.com
The process of democracy in this country encourages everyone to vote. You can be as stupid as a pumpkin and still vote. "Get out the vote" rhetoric only further encourages those who wouldn't vote in the first place to go and do so, adding to the number of people who will vote on things like "how much will it increase my wellfare/social security/income" and "what government programs will it create to help my particular selfish need". Or worse, "which candidate went on what cheesy day-time talk show and who looks better on a magazine?"
There are more people who will vote for Candidate X because their family has always voted the party-line or who don't like the other candidates' race/sex/religion. There are always more people who will vote for someone because Paula Poundstone, Alec Baldwin or Rosie O'Donnel told them they should. In short, in a country where religious orders, celebrities, television and commercials perform the functions of critical thinking for the majority of individuals, there will never be a drastic positive change. Governments will always grow larger, taxes will always climb (on the grand scale, though year to year they may fluctuate) and we'll always sacrifice our liberties "for the children".
I know of no way to resolve this dilemma, short of neglecting the entire philosophy that the country was supposedly founded on. So it seems that it is part of our political structure that we will always be forced into mediocrity -- at best. ---
seumas.com
Playing Q3 in 1024x768, trilinear, high-detail, full quality everything, I peak at 130fps on my 64MB Radeon and 150fps on my 64MB GeForce Ultra2.
In the midst of battle with body parts and rockets flying everywhere (clarification: my body-parts; someone elses rockets), my rate easily drops down to 90fps. Very rarely, I'll catch it plummeting as low as 70fps or 60fps. I can't really tell any difference between 70fps and 150fps, but anything below about 60fps is noticable to varied degrees.
As long as you can still aim and shoot fluidly, you're fine. Anyone who is still moving fluidly at the heaviest point of graphic intensity shouldn't worry about tweaking every last frame out of their system. Unless there is some revolutionary change in the industry, I don't plan to upgrade my cards for a long time to come (until we see games that drop my frame rate enough that I can notice it). I'm certainly not about to dump a few hundred more on a card just because I can achieve 200fps, when 150fps will more than do.
Besides, what is more irritating is the games with the poor net framework that makes finding a fast server impossible. While Q3's code seems to be sleek (I usualy find a lot of servers averaging between 12 and 30 ping), other games (Unreal Tournement, to name one) rarely have anything below 100 and only a few under 200 ping. Even the sweetest frame-rate can't help poor network performance. ---
seumas.com
The PS2 (like every other gaming console) doesn't offer anything that my PC's don't, other than perhaps a few game titles. Except for the hardcore gamers who have to get their hands on every possible game, I'd think consoles would be obsolete long ago.
Money isn't tight, but I still wouldn't blow a couple hundred dollars on a console and then almost a hundred bucks per game. Especially since I've never found a console that produces graphics and speed that compare to my PC (or whatever PCs I have at the time that each console has been released throughought the last fifteen years).
I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon -- I just honestly don't understand the appeal to these boxes in this day and age... I'd suggest saving that $200 and applying it to a high-end video card. Then every time you buy a game for your computer (if you actually pay for it, that is) put the $30 or $50 that you're saving over the cost of a console title toward future upgrades.
Being on-call is considered part of our job and, thus, not worthy of any additional benefit or pay.
Depending on the number of techies, your pager-duty (which is 24x7) could be every other week or every fourth week. Typically, you work a full day each day for the full week and are also on-call for the entire world, except Asia. You're likely to be paged a few times and as much as a dozen on busy weeks. The average situation can last between an hour and 18 hours. I've been in situations where I worked a full work week, didn't sleep two of the week nights and spent 18 hours on a saturday and another 18 hours the next day (sunday) responding to an on-call page.
We found a web page on our internal servers that claims we're supposed to be paid what would equate to about $300+ per week that we're on call, which would come out to about $600 extra per month for each of us, but when we ask HR about it, they act like they've never heard of such a thing and think we're crazy. ---
seumas.com
Oh man, that's one thing I'll never understand -- why people want to have kids. I mean, I can understand the occasional 'accident', but to have one or two or three intentionally? If you think your boss is ungrateful, you have another thing coming!
If I had kids, I would actually imagine them standing in the way of doing great meaningful things. I know everyone likes to praise parents as if plopping out a miniature of themselves and raising it is some miraculous feat. If they really wanted to accomplish something of redeeming value, you'd think they'd adopt some poor kid who doesn't have any parents outside of state-run foster care or an orphanage. But the only time people find it in their heart to do that is when they can't manage to plop out their own clone.
I don't mean to bad-mouth people who choose to have kids, but people need to be realistic and stop treating every guy or girl who infest the world with their little spawn like they're national heros.
Sometimes, I wonder if people who have kids and raise them while believing that they're doing humanity a wonderful service are actually people who didn't manage to accomplish anything else of great affect or importance and decided to cop-out, have a kid and live in the delusion that it's some noble pursuit.
First, I have to disagree with Sharky's comment which eluded to optical mice being lame. I've really enjoyed my neutered mouse. It handles Quake and other games just fine and I haven't had to clean it or do.. well, much of anything to it since I purchased it.
I hate to rain on people's parades -- especially when they've put so much hard work into their cool devices...
...But, why would anyone want this? It seems like just another 'rumble pack' like they had for the N64. Whoo. I fell, my mouse shook. Amazing.
How realistic can it be if all the sensory input (to the body) goes through the mouse? Yay! My hand is shaking, but my ass isn't...
Perhaps this 'tool' will find a use as some sort of feminine stimulation device -- like the ones you see sold on late night television or in the back of magazines desguised as 'personal massage' utilities... ---
seumas.com
I wake up every morning with the knowledge that I'm making good money but for all the stress and overload, I'm not making one damned person's life significantly better in any tangible way.
So someone's email server is back up because of me. Or their HA deployment is smooth and successful. Good for them. And good for my company's reputation.
But honestly, who gives a damn? What kind of karma does life dish out for those who keep machines running so other big companies can keep the flow of information(money) moving steadily?
Even more annoying is that I have to deal with a lot of companies that completely contradict my political/ethical opinions. I'm only compelled to help WeFilterStuffSoYouDon'tHaveToBeAParent has a smooth transition between one version of a product and another because I don't want to get grief from my management. Or how about some media magnate who is known for taking over the world? Do I really have a personal interest in seeing them successful? Damn, I doubt if the person I'm working with at any given time (from whatever company I'm assisting) cares any more about it than I do either!
But for all the ranting and whining, it comes down to the personal question that almost everyone asks themselves at some point in their lives:
Am I making a difference?
Too often, the answer is no. Unfortunately, it's hard to survive on the salary of a saintly life. And if you live in the Silicon Valley or the Silicon Forrest, the desire to live with a roof over your head (even a leaking one) precludes any ambition to be generous and kind with your time and actions.
Helping big business is rewarded. Truly meaningful endeavors are not.
I bet a lot of people tell themselves the same thing I do -- Someday I'll have enough money and time to help someone.
But how many of us actually will? Perhaps we have the best of intentions, but we'll probably never be financially secure enough that we can dedicate more of our time and energy to something worthy. Some of us will do worthwhile things outside of work, but others of us have no outside of work. We're always working or resting so that we can work more.
If we can't offer anything meaningful in terms of the human condition, perhaps we can at least do something that interests us and be in charge of our own lives? A lot of us have the dream of owning our own company, pursuing whatever interest fancies us -- be it video games or some weird new peripheral device or a better snowboard or our cookie's based on an old family recipe. Even that is a far cry for most of us. Yet, it would be very fulfilling and we wouldn't have that dreaded concern that we're not really going anywhere important. It's unsettling to have the quality of your life depending on someone else's choices and decisions. Not only the quality of your life, but the individual characteristics of each day. Someone deciding when you can take a break, how long your lunch can be, what your title will be, how loud your music can be or what kind of shirt you can wear into the office... Taking control of yourself and your career can be very satisfying.
I wonder if it comforts anyone to know that their place in the world may not be to do anything truly important or meaningful. Knowing that, instead, their purpose is to waste their life away in a stressing unimportant job so that the president of their company can afford to spend more time on his yacht or founding his sixth billion-dollar corporation or buying his seventh house on a fourth continant?
Oh well. Most of us are all talk and no action anyway. I'm pretty sure I am. ---
seumas.com
Human nature, though, tends to lead us to accomplish more and live and work in a better environment. The rich boss of your Fortune 500 company didn't say "I make six figures now, so I'm going to just calm down and cool off, because I have it better than most people". No -- of course not! He said "I want more. I want better. This is good, but I deserve more". And now he's probably making eight or nine figures -- and still plowing along, from his big office, company limo and private jet.
No matter how good anyone has it, they usually strive for something better. It's just human nature. When I was stuck in a tech-farm making $11/hr, I thought I'd be happy finding a permenant gig making at least $50k. I figured that I'd feel like I finally "made it" once I hit that point.
Here I am a year later, making closer to six figures doing something I enjoy (but wouldn't want to do forever) and it isn't enough. I still want something more.
Luckily, I not only work for one of the top three giants of this industry, but I get to telecommute from out of my house, 600 miles away.
In an age when most of our jobs could be done from home, it seems like a petty issue of control by run-of-the-mill upper-management to leverage their power by making sure their employees are working right under their eyeballs in a little cube in a building that nobody wants to be confined in.
Management should grow up and remember that employees have lives. If they can do the job from home and consistantly perform well under those circumstances, by all means -- get off your high horse and send them home. You'll save them and yourself stress and money and probably increase productivity and loyalty. Since I've been telecommuting, other companies have offered me substantially more but I've turned them down. I like where I am. But if I were doing this same job from a cube in a big stuffy building like a drone, I'd have taken the other offer already.
Hell yeah, we have life much better than a lot of people. We could be digging ditches or flipping burgers. Not that those jobs are insignificant, but I for one have tried the back-breaking labor thing. I'll pass, thank you. I've done the burger-flipping thing in highschool, too -- talk about a brain-drain. I have to be somewhere that I'm more than a turning mechanism for a spatula.
What written law says that if you do a job for someone, it must be done in a specific place between certain hours under a million other constraints that have nothing to do with the direct job? When was the last time Double-Day or Viking told Stephen King that they'd like to publish his book, but only if he came to their business between 8am and 5pm every weekday and typed away at his laptop in a little cube down the hall from the editor's office?
It just seems rediculous. Sure, you have to be on-site to pour a foundation for a house or cut someone's brain open and poke around, but you can write code or documentation or QA a product from anywhere. Some things can't be done remotely, but life is short and as long as the job is accomplished to the employer's satisfaction, they should clue in and be a little more flexible. If you're a billionaire businessman, your company problem means everything to you. But most of your employees couldn't give less of a fuck. It's just a paycheck. And no matter how many stock options you give them or how much ass-kissing you do, you may not be able to buy their loyalty -- and certainly not their lives. You may find that a competitor is going to woo your top performers away from you not because of a bigger paycheck or a pinball machine down the hall from their office, but by simply letting them do their job in the most productive and comfortble manner possible.
Okay. I'm done ranting. I have it pretty good, too and don't want to fuck with my karma too much (real life karma, not Slashdot karma!). ---
seumas.com
Nobody is arrested for "walking down the street talking on a cell phone".
I'm sure if you asked all 400+ people who were arrested in Philidelphia during the convention, every single one will say "I was just walking down the street, minding my own business!", too. ---
seumas.com
Who the fuck is Fred Moody? Apparently some "technology expert" for ABC News or something, but he seems about as witless as Burst and his dopey 'reports'.
This is one of the strongest reasons for not wanting to spread linux and unix across the globe. Let people use Windows. Who gives a damn. I use what I like and could care less if the guy down the street uses Windows or Linux. At least I know that when it comes down to it, I'll be enjoying my six month uptime while he's still rebooting his PC for the tenth time that day. --- seumas.com
Screw Signing Up For The ICANN At Large...
on
NYT On DeCSS Case
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· Score: 1
I've been trying to sign up half a dozen to a dozen times, every day, for almost three weeks straight. Every single time, I wind up with the the database is too busy errors.
What a fucking joke. I hate to sound like a pissed off troll, but it sucks that so many people won't be able to participate in the least, simply because ICANN's site couldn't handle a hundred of the traffic that Slashdot manages to. I have absolutely no faith in these people whatsoever in any aspect of this now (not that I began with much faith in them, ever). --- seumas.com
Wouldn't matter. Suits are the only ones who would be dumb enough to go click-happy on advertisements. And for the rest of us, it wouldn't be much of a probably to insert parenthesised URL's next to tagged words -- annoying, but hey, when you're the government -- and when it has to do with making money, who cares who it annoys! --- seumas.com
Okay. Carnivore and this new M15 system is a wonderful way for the governments to fund themselves!
All they have to do is follow what Dejanews.com does -- filtering messages and embedding links in Usenet posts. Carnivore could scan every single email sent through America and replace common words and product names with hypertext links that would allow the recipient of messages to automatically be transported to the site of a company paying the government for advertising!
Example: Jim, Thanks for lending me your car lastnight. Hopefully I will have mine back from the body shop in time for the game tomorrow. I owe you big time. Remind me to give you some of these great cigars when we meet up at the game -- it's the least I can do!
Damn, I hate credit cards and don't have any, but for this -- I wish I did. King has always been an entertaining writer and a rather odd individual. I'm glad he's using his massive clout to push the boundaries for all the little guys out here with great things to write and publish but no publisher willing to risk anything on a new guy.
I would certainly buy a copy online if I had a way to make the online transaction.
The only drawback that I see is that Stephen King books are meant to be read with both hands clutching a fifty pound tomb, snug in bed or a chair or streched out on the grass in a public park. I don't really want to read king on a monitor. Plus, there is truly something nice about a hardcover book and pages that is very pleasing for some of us. Also, I like to collect books. I don't want to have two gigabytes of books on my hard drive. I want to have tons of shelves filled with tangible reading material -- each with a different cover and style and appeal. However, the brilliant part of something like this is that you can make a somewhat acceptable compromise and just have a nice printer and a cheap $50 binding tool like a lot of high schools still have and let the consumer become the publisher of their own reading material. Heh.
Anyway, I hope this doesn't push out books you can touch, hold and see on shelves, but I do hope this forces the publishing world to realize they need to be less the nazi's they are and embrace a new world of information and demand.
Glad King is feeling better and that he is still writing, though! I remember shortly after his accident, he had stated that he wasn't sure if he was going to ever write again. And here he's been pumping out some rather interesting material and in interesting mediums recently! I really have to respect and admire this guy. I hope he keeps it up, even if this first main trial doesn't do so well.
You know, my MCI Pager probably has just as great a chance of detecting extraterrestrial life. I think I'll save my money and put it toward something slightly more useful. --- seumas.com
Then you might have a slight problem... What if baptists in the United Kingdom and baptists in America wanted to use Corinthians? And what if the same were true for the soccer team?
Oh no! Now we forgot, what if there is a professional league and a grade-school league? Egads, and what about two baptist organizations wanting Corinthians in the same state and city?
Wow! I guess more TLD's and implementation of third, fourth and umpteenth level domains really does solve the problem! And it's so simple! --- seumas.com
The internet is NOTHING like testifying in court. No, you can't testify in court with complete anonymity and privacy. But guess what? You can publish a book under a pseudonym. You can distribute leaflets, booklets and other media with complete anonymity and privacy.
The internet is an ocean of minds and it needs to stay that way. It's one of the last bastions where human interaction and human thought can roam, explore and interact largely without restriction. Without this, many people who have access to the net would feel increasingly boxed-in and claustrophobic. The government, your employer, other governments, your friends... They have no granted right to know every thought you think or care to share, yet you do have the freedom to share them -- and without revealing yourself, if you so desire.
Privacy and anonymity should be granted to those who wish to have it. I'm in favor of leaving things as they are. You can encrypt data. You can use pseudonyms. There are many things you can do to assert your privacy and anonymity. Please, leave government (all 200 of them that would like to regulate the internet) out of it and let technology govern the ability for privacy. As long as there is demand for it, and it is not made illegal, means of acheiving relatively secure privacy will be available and usable.
Further, not everyone who wants anonymity or privacy is on a soapbox, as you seem to be. There are people who are seeking legal information, medical information, information on dealing with rape, abuse, drug addiction, dealing with sexual harassment, unfair treatment at work, career advice, information on relationships, raising children, self-defense, constitutional rights, police mis-conduct, misconduct by government officials, alchoholism and a million other things which would be stifled if people could, without any effort, find out that you are Jane Jones of 1414 S Someplace and that you were concerned with the fact that your employer is threatening you with termination if you don't follow through with unethical and perhaps illegal conduct and that your husband is an alchoholic and you're not sure how to leave him and get assistance for yourself and your child without being put in danger and that you were raped when you were in high school and that you think you might have felt a lump in your left breast and are scared to death that it might be cancer.
These are the reasons that both privacy and anonymity is important. What is valuable on the internet is information and the free flow of it -- not the names attached to it. It has nothing to do with responsibility of the individual and everything to do with the very fundamental expectation of freedom from punishment, persecution and unjust attack by the unneeded granting of your personal information, unless deemed available by yourself.
I would really encourage people who just shrug their shoulders and say "bah! It's the new millenium. It's technology! Get off your soap box and live with it!" to reconsider their position. The internet is larger than Slashdot and people being accountable for their statements on the specs of the latest rumored graphics card -- and there are far greater risks and losses certain to come from not protecting privacy and anonymity than there are from protecting it. I, for one, would rather not fuck with it, lest we make the biggest mistake of our generation and wager the rights of future on-line generations.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides, that's the whole point of a system like FACE. It does the scanning for you so that you (a human) only waste your time on relavent concerns that it has detected.
---
seumas.com
Long-term, cheap, flying surveillance vehicals. Everyone, everywhere, monitored, doing everything. Link them to some computerized systems like FACE in the UK so they can automatically alert the authorities of interesting individuals and situations picked up by various surveilance senses on the flying wing and you've got yet another reason for loving this wonderful country!
---
seumas.com
That wasn't quite my point, however. To someone making six figures, seven figures is a lot -- tax the hell out of everyone making seven figurs cause they're richer than I am!
To someone making 50k, 100k is pretty good -- tax the hell out of those bastards!.
To someone sitting at home on wellfare or living off of their social security, someone making $25k is doing really well -- tax the hell out of those people!
To someone flipping burgers, most of us are doing pretty well I'm sure -- but that doesn't mean we should be taxed to death. I mean, at least leave us enough money so that potential for owning our own house isn't obliterated. Maybe leave us enough of our own cash to invest in our own retirement...
Certainly, someone who is wealthy enough that they're buying massive yachts and 10 million dollar houses and have a collection of 80 sports cars should pay more than someone who is struggling to feed their two kids and keep a house over their head and only earning $20k -- and you know what? They already are! That's the whole point of a flat-percentage tax. 10% of a billion is a lot more than 10% of $30k. I mean... duh... So why should the 'rich' have to fund the rest of the country?
It would be nice if the wealthier people just gave away all their money to the destitute so everyone could hold hands and live in harmony, but then we wouldn't be living in a capitalistic society and nobody would have their flashy computer systems, nice cards and funky techno-gizmos that everyone's fond of. Socialist countries aren't exactly the most thrilling to live in, as you may have noticed. There's a reason our quality of living is so high here and why we can buy disposable everything. Wellfare/re-distribution and capitalism just don't integrate very well. You either have to say "you should get to keep what you work hard to earn" or we need to just give up and let the government accept all of our income for us and let them hand out a little bit to us here and there, like an allowance from your parents, no matter what job you work.
I'm the first to admit that there are gross fortunes out there being wasted (Ted Turner, Bill Gates, many entertainers...) but I can't ever get over the fundemental injustice in forcing one man to give something that is his to another man. Taxation is no longer about funding the required elements of a government so that it can perform its duties. Taxation is a form of class-retribution and serves only to support every experimental program that some dreamy-eyed highschool graduate pulls out of their ass to fix the world. We're a country and people of contradictions and I really don't care about it anymore. Let me make my money, save my cash, buy my house, do my own thing -- and die. Elect who you want to, social-engineer the hell out of everyone.. whatever... I honestly don't care much anymore because I'll hopefully have croaked in another 50 years when the effects of all this idiocy is finally evident.
---
seumas.com
Keep them in space the full 25 years without returning until the span is over and plant video cameras everywhere to record the decaying of their skeletal and muscular structures and put them on the web and television in a Big-Brother-esque series so we can watch them slip into dementia and you've got something most intriquing.
Throw in hot space-space chicks and you can sell pay-per-view on the Spice channel... Then you've most certainly got something...
---
seumas.com
The majority always were happy to do a lot of other things that we all know are great injustices. The duty of the country is to protect its citizens -- not to please the many by the harassment, theft or persicution of the few.
Of course, should be and is are worlds apart.
---
seumas.com
Sorry, but voting requirements contradict this.
---
seumas.com
The government, though bloated, should still seek taxation as a form of revenue for the funding of things we as a country have deemed worthy. Too many political figures and groups seek taxation as a form of retribution.
And what are they seeking retribution against? Hell if I can figure it out. I guess hard work is no excuse for deserving money -- so you need to have yours taken away so those who make lesser wages can feel better about themselves.
Hell, I don't know. I don't like to sound so angry over money and taxes, but I'm disgrunted that I have relatives who could really use a bit of the 52% of my salary that the government is taking out of my checks.
---
seumas.com
There are more people who will vote for Candidate X because their family has always voted the party-line or who don't like the other candidates' race/sex/religion. There are always more people who will vote for someone because Paula Poundstone, Alec Baldwin or Rosie O'Donnel told them they should. In short, in a country where religious orders, celebrities, television and commercials perform the functions of critical thinking for the majority of individuals, there will never be a drastic positive change. Governments will always grow larger, taxes will always climb (on the grand scale, though year to year they may fluctuate) and we'll always sacrifice our liberties "for the children".
I know of no way to resolve this dilemma, short of neglecting the entire philosophy that the country was supposedly founded on. So it seems that it is part of our political structure that we will always be forced into mediocrity -- at best.
---
seumas.com
In the midst of battle with body parts and rockets flying everywhere (clarification: my body-parts; someone elses rockets), my rate easily drops down to 90fps. Very rarely, I'll catch it plummeting as low as 70fps or 60fps. I can't really tell any difference between 70fps and 150fps, but anything below about 60fps is noticable to varied degrees.
As long as you can still aim and shoot fluidly, you're fine. Anyone who is still moving fluidly at the heaviest point of graphic intensity shouldn't worry about tweaking every last frame out of their system. Unless there is some revolutionary change in the industry, I don't plan to upgrade my cards for a long time to come (until we see games that drop my frame rate enough that I can notice it). I'm certainly not about to dump a few hundred more on a card just because I can achieve 200fps, when 150fps will more than do.
Besides, what is more irritating is the games with the poor net framework that makes finding a fast server impossible. While Q3's code seems to be sleek (I usualy find a lot of servers averaging between 12 and 30 ping), other games (Unreal Tournement, to name one) rarely have anything below 100 and only a few under 200 ping. Even the sweetest frame-rate can't help poor network performance.
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seumas.com
Money isn't tight, but I still wouldn't blow a couple hundred dollars on a console and then almost a hundred bucks per game. Especially since I've never found a console that produces graphics and speed that compare to my PC (or whatever PCs I have at the time that each console has been released throughought the last fifteen years).
I hate to sound like an old curmudgeon -- I just honestly don't understand the appeal to these boxes in this day and age... I'd suggest saving that $200 and applying it to a high-end video card. Then every time you buy a game for your computer (if you actually pay for it, that is) put the $30 or $50 that you're saving over the cost of a console title toward future upgrades.
Hell, just a thought . . .
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seumas.com
Depending on the number of techies, your pager-duty (which is 24x7) could be every other week or every fourth week. Typically, you work a full day each day for the full week and are also on-call for the entire world, except Asia. You're likely to be paged a few times and as much as a dozen on busy weeks. The average situation can last between an hour and 18 hours. I've been in situations where I worked a full work week, didn't sleep two of the week nights and spent 18 hours on a saturday and another 18 hours the next day (sunday) responding to an on-call page.
We found a web page on our internal servers that claims we're supposed to be paid what would equate to about $300+ per week that we're on call, which would come out to about $600 extra per month for each of us, but when we ask HR about it, they act like they've never heard of such a thing and think we're crazy.
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seumas.com
If I had kids, I would actually imagine them standing in the way of doing great meaningful things. I know everyone likes to praise parents as if plopping out a miniature of themselves and raising it is some miraculous feat. If they really wanted to accomplish something of redeeming value, you'd think they'd adopt some poor kid who doesn't have any parents outside of state-run foster care or an orphanage. But the only time people find it in their heart to do that is when they can't manage to plop out their own clone.
I don't mean to bad-mouth people who choose to have kids, but people need to be realistic and stop treating every guy or girl who infest the world with their little spawn like they're national heros.
Sometimes, I wonder if people who have kids and raise them while believing that they're doing humanity a wonderful service are actually people who didn't manage to accomplish anything else of great affect or importance and decided to cop-out, have a kid and live in the delusion that it's some noble pursuit.
I dunno. Just thinking out loud.
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seumas.com
I hate to rain on people's parades -- especially when they've put so much hard work into their cool devices...
How realistic can it be if all the sensory input (to the body) goes through the mouse? Yay! My hand is shaking, but my ass isn't...
Perhaps this 'tool' will find a use as some sort of feminine stimulation device -- like the ones you see sold on late night television or in the back of magazines desguised as 'personal massage' utilities...
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seumas.com
I wake up every morning with the knowledge that I'm making good money but for all the stress and overload, I'm not making one damned person's life significantly better in any tangible way.
So someone's email server is back up because of me. Or their HA deployment is smooth and successful. Good for them. And good for my company's reputation.
But honestly, who gives a damn? What kind of karma does life dish out for those who keep machines running so other big companies can keep the flow of information(money) moving steadily?
Even more annoying is that I have to deal with a lot of companies that completely contradict my political/ethical opinions. I'm only compelled to help WeFilterStuffSoYouDon'tHaveToBeAParent has a smooth transition between one version of a product and another because I don't want to get grief from my management. Or how about some media magnate who is known for taking over the world? Do I really have a personal interest in seeing them successful? Damn, I doubt if the person I'm working with at any given time (from whatever company I'm assisting) cares any more about it than I do either!
But for all the ranting and whining, it comes down to the personal question that almost everyone asks themselves at some point in their lives:
Am I making a difference?
Too often, the answer is no. Unfortunately, it's hard to survive on the salary of a saintly life. And if you live in the Silicon Valley or the Silicon Forrest, the desire to live with a roof over your head (even a leaking one) precludes any ambition to be generous and kind with your time and actions.
Helping big business is rewarded. Truly meaningful endeavors are not.
I bet a lot of people tell themselves the same thing I do -- Someday I'll have enough money and time to help someone.
But how many of us actually will? Perhaps we have the best of intentions, but we'll probably never be financially secure enough that we can dedicate more of our time and energy to something worthy. Some of us will do worthwhile things outside of work, but others of us have no outside of work. We're always working or resting so that we can work more.
If we can't offer anything meaningful in terms of the human condition, perhaps we can at least do something that interests us and be in charge of our own lives? A lot of us have the dream of owning our own company, pursuing whatever interest fancies us -- be it video games or some weird new peripheral device or a better snowboard or our cookie's based on an old family recipe. Even that is a far cry for most of us. Yet, it would be very fulfilling and we wouldn't have that dreaded concern that we're not really going anywhere important. It's unsettling to have the quality of your life depending on someone else's choices and decisions. Not only the quality of your life, but the individual characteristics of each day. Someone deciding when you can take a break, how long your lunch can be, what your title will be, how loud your music can be or what kind of shirt you can wear into the office... Taking control of yourself and your career can be very satisfying.
I wonder if it comforts anyone to know that their place in the world may not be to do anything truly important or meaningful. Knowing that, instead, their purpose is to waste their life away in a stressing unimportant job so that the president of their company can afford to spend more time on his yacht or founding his sixth billion-dollar corporation or buying his seventh house on a fourth continant?
Oh well. Most of us are all talk and no action anyway. I'm pretty sure I am.
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seumas.com
Human nature, though, tends to lead us to accomplish more and live and work in a better environment. The rich boss of your Fortune 500 company didn't say "I make six figures now, so I'm going to just calm down and cool off, because I have it better than most people". No -- of course not! He said "I want more. I want better. This is good, but I deserve more". And now he's probably making eight or nine figures -- and still plowing along, from his big office, company limo and private jet.
No matter how good anyone has it, they usually strive for something better. It's just human nature. When I was stuck in a tech-farm making $11/hr, I thought I'd be happy finding a permenant gig making at least $50k. I figured that I'd feel like I finally "made it" once I hit that point.
Here I am a year later, making closer to six figures doing something I enjoy (but wouldn't want to do forever) and it isn't enough. I still want something more.
Luckily, I not only work for one of the top three giants of this industry, but I get to telecommute from out of my house, 600 miles away.
In an age when most of our jobs could be done from home, it seems like a petty issue of control by run-of-the-mill upper-management to leverage their power by making sure their employees are working right under their eyeballs in a little cube in a building that nobody wants to be confined in.
Management should grow up and remember that employees have lives. If they can do the job from home and consistantly perform well under those circumstances, by all means -- get off your high horse and send them home. You'll save them and yourself stress and money and probably increase productivity and loyalty. Since I've been telecommuting, other companies have offered me substantially more but I've turned them down. I like where I am. But if I were doing this same job from a cube in a big stuffy building like a drone, I'd have taken the other offer already.
Hell yeah, we have life much better than a lot of people. We could be digging ditches or flipping burgers. Not that those jobs are insignificant, but I for one have tried the back-breaking labor thing. I'll pass, thank you. I've done the burger-flipping thing in highschool, too -- talk about a brain-drain. I have to be somewhere that I'm more than a turning mechanism for a spatula.
What written law says that if you do a job for someone, it must be done in a specific place between certain hours under a million other constraints that have nothing to do with the direct job? When was the last time Double-Day or Viking told Stephen King that they'd like to publish his book, but only if he came to their business between 8am and 5pm every weekday and typed away at his laptop in a little cube down the hall from the editor's office?
It just seems rediculous. Sure, you have to be on-site to pour a foundation for a house or cut someone's brain open and poke around, but you can write code or documentation or QA a product from anywhere. Some things can't be done remotely, but life is short and as long as the job is accomplished to the employer's satisfaction, they should clue in and be a little more flexible. If you're a billionaire businessman, your company problem means everything to you. But most of your employees couldn't give less of a fuck. It's just a paycheck. And no matter how many stock options you give them or how much ass-kissing you do, you may not be able to buy their loyalty -- and certainly not their lives. You may find that a competitor is going to woo your top performers away from you not because of a bigger paycheck or a pinball machine down the hall from their office, but by simply letting them do their job in the most productive and comfortble manner possible.
Okay. I'm done ranting. I have it pretty good, too and don't want to fuck with my karma too much (real life karma, not Slashdot karma!).
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seumas.com
I'm sure if you asked all 400+ people who were arrested in Philidelphia during the convention, every single one will say "I was just walking down the street, minding my own business!", too.
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seumas.com
This is one of the strongest reasons for not wanting to spread linux and unix across the globe. Let people use Windows. Who gives a damn. I use what I like and could care less if the guy down the street uses Windows or Linux. At least I know that when it comes down to it, I'll be enjoying my six month uptime while he's still rebooting his PC for the tenth time that day.
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seumas.com
What a fucking joke. I hate to sound like a pissed off troll, but it sucks that so many people won't be able to participate in the least, simply because ICANN's site couldn't handle a hundred of the traffic that Slashdot manages to. I have absolutely no faith in these people whatsoever in any aspect of this now (not that I began with much faith in them, ever).
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seumas.com
Wouldn't matter. Suits are the only ones who would be dumb enough to go click-happy on advertisements. And for the rest of us, it wouldn't be much of a probably to insert parenthesised URL's next to tagged words -- annoying, but hey, when you're the government -- and when it has to do with making money, who cares who it annoys!
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seumas.com
All they have to do is follow what Dejanews.com does -- filtering messages and embedding links in Usenet posts. Carnivore could scan every single email sent through America and replace common words and product names with hypertext links that would allow the recipient of messages to automatically be transported to the site of a company paying the government for advertising!
Example:
Jim, Thanks for lending me your car lastnight. Hopefully I will have mine back from the body shop in time for the game tomorrow. I owe you big time. Remind me to give you some of these great cigars when we meet up at the game -- it's the least I can do!
Thanks,
Ted
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seumas.com
I would certainly buy a copy online if I had a way to make the online transaction.
The only drawback that I see is that Stephen King books are meant to be read with both hands clutching a fifty pound tomb, snug in bed or a chair or streched out on the grass in a public park. I don't really want to read king on a monitor. Plus, there is truly something nice about a hardcover book and pages that is very pleasing for some of us. Also, I like to collect books. I don't want to have two gigabytes of books on my hard drive. I want to have tons of shelves filled with tangible reading material -- each with a different cover and style and appeal. However, the brilliant part of something like this is that you can make a somewhat acceptable compromise and just have a nice printer and a cheap $50 binding tool like a lot of high schools still have and let the consumer become the publisher of their own reading material. Heh.
Anyway, I hope this doesn't push out books you can touch, hold and see on shelves, but I do hope this forces the publishing world to realize they need to be less the nazi's they are and embrace a new world of information and demand.
Glad King is feeling better and that he is still writing, though! I remember shortly after his accident, he had stated that he wasn't sure if he was going to ever write again. And here he's been pumping out some rather interesting material and in interesting mediums recently! I really have to respect and admire this guy. I hope he keeps it up, even if this first main trial doesn't do so well.
King is the fucking man.
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seumas.com
You know, my MCI Pager probably has just as great a chance of detecting extraterrestrial life. I think I'll save my money and put it toward something slightly more useful.
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seumas.com
Oh. Well, not the private thoughts part.
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seumas.com
corinthians.religion
corinthians.sports
Of course, then what would have happened if there is a football team named Corinthians? Or if the Baptists and the Methodists wanted the same domain?
corinthians.baptists.religion
corinthians.soccer.sports
Then you might have a slight problem... What if baptists in the United Kingdom and baptists in America wanted to use Corinthians? And what if the same were true for the soccer team?
corinthians.baptists.religion.uk
corinthians.soccer.sports.br
Oh no! Now we forgot, what if there is a professional league and a grade-school league? Egads, and what about two baptist organizations wanting Corinthians in the same state and city?
corinthians.menudopublicschool.k-12.amateur.soccer .sports.brt eo.ca.us.baptists.religion
corinthians.three-square-church.firststreet.sanma
Wow! I guess more TLD's and implementation of third, fourth and umpteenth level domains really does solve the problem! And it's so simple!
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seumas.com
The internet is an ocean of minds and it needs to stay that way. It's one of the last bastions where human interaction and human thought can roam, explore and interact largely without restriction. Without this, many people who have access to the net would feel increasingly boxed-in and claustrophobic. The government, your employer, other governments, your friends... They have no granted right to know every thought you think or care to share, yet you do have the freedom to share them -- and without revealing yourself, if you so desire.
Privacy and anonymity should be granted to those who wish to have it. I'm in favor of leaving things as they are. You can encrypt data. You can use pseudonyms. There are many things you can do to assert your privacy and anonymity. Please, leave government (all 200 of them that would like to regulate the internet) out of it and let technology govern the ability for privacy. As long as there is demand for it, and it is not made illegal, means of acheiving relatively secure privacy will be available and usable.
Further, not everyone who wants anonymity or privacy is on a soapbox, as you seem to be. There are people who are seeking legal information, medical information, information on dealing with rape, abuse, drug addiction, dealing with sexual harassment, unfair treatment at work, career advice, information on relationships, raising children, self-defense, constitutional rights, police mis-conduct, misconduct by government officials, alchoholism and a million other things which would be stifled if people could, without any effort, find out that you are Jane Jones of 1414 S Someplace and that you were concerned with the fact that your employer is threatening you with termination if you don't follow through with unethical and perhaps illegal conduct and that your husband is an alchoholic and you're not sure how to leave him and get assistance for yourself and your child without being put in danger and that you were raped when you were in high school and that you think you might have felt a lump in your left breast and are scared to death that it might be cancer.
These are the reasons that both privacy and anonymity is important. What is valuable on the internet is information and the free flow of it -- not the names attached to it. It has nothing to do with responsibility of the individual and everything to do with the very fundamental expectation of freedom from punishment, persecution and unjust attack by the unneeded granting of your personal information, unless deemed available by yourself.
I would really encourage people who just shrug their shoulders and say "bah! It's the new millenium. It's technology! Get off your soap box and live with it!" to reconsider their position. The internet is larger than Slashdot and people being accountable for their statements on the specs of the latest rumored graphics card -- and there are far greater risks and losses certain to come from not protecting privacy and anonymity than there are from protecting it. I, for one, would rather not fuck with it, lest we make the biggest mistake of our generation and wager the rights of future on-line generations.
Now I will jump off of my soapbox.
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seumas.com