Life's a bitch. Thanks for playing...better luck next reincarnation.
So let's have the government hold a gun to your head, take the fruits of your labour and distribute them to unskilled labourers. That should be okay, since life's a bitch and you might have better luck next reincarnation, right ?
Or we could try to make the life a little less of a bitch to everyone, including those unskilled labourers.
The fair consequence of never developing skills is subsistence living.
The fair consequence of being an arrogant jerk is to get whatever fate you callously wished upon those you considered lesser beings.
But why should they, when they can get the corn cheaper elsewhere? Should they waste resources just so they can have an inefficient corn industry?
Because if they grow their own corn, other countries can't threaten to cut off supplies as a blackmail tool, nor do market fluctuations nor speculation threaten it.
It's stupid to rely on anyone else for vital supplies. The way Russia cut off natural gas to Europe is a good example of why.
And it's not as though relying on foreign-grown food is particularly risky. The world market is large, and if one seller goes away or raises its prices, another will just step in to fill its place. It's the same reason I don't feel particularly worried about not growing my own food.
Wasn't there a huge shortage/price spike for food just a while ago ?
The problem with implementing a system like this is that similar-sounding yet completely different systems were used as a form of institutionalized racism in the past, typically referred to as "literacy tests", which had the sole purpose of preventing black people from voting. This kind of abuse is radically different from what I am advocating, but it would make my idea very easy to demagogue in the media.
No, your idea is not at all different from the abuse you described. You simply use a different function to decide who is similar enough to you to vote.
If I advocate centrally planned economy and toll barriers, will you conclude that I don't know enough about economy to be allowed to vote ? If I say that I'm for gun control, is that grounds to take my vote away ? Or if I'm against your plan because I consider any limitation in the ability to vote a step towards a dictatorship - and yes, that means felons in prison should be allowed to vote - does that mean that I'm clearly too idealistic to have a say in the government ?
Move to China if you want rule by elite, but please leave the remaining democracies alone; they are crumbling fast enough without you helping them along with your condescending "people shouldn't have a say in matters which concern them unless they can prove they're smart enough to satisfy me" bullshit.
0. It looks good. The manager's boss will see that the manager's people put in long hours and concludes that he's doing a good job "motivating" them. This makes the manager look good and get a rise or bonus. He might even get more underlings since his team is obviously busy.
"If I don't see more cars in the parking lot after 6 P.M heads will roll !"
Look at it this way: if every software and computer "engineer" in the world evaporated tomorrow, "real" engineers would still be able to build stuff useful to people. If the reverse happened, it'd be uh-oh time on an extremely large scale.
Yeah, but do you know what would really kill us, and I mean that literally ? Truck drivers. No trucks -> no efficient enough way to resupply shops -> mass starvation.
Games of one-upmanship area really, really, really stupid.
What's next, a Wii that drinks my beer and has sex with my girlfriend?
How about a Wii that finds you a girlfriend ?-) It might be more relevant...
...now that I think of it, a dating service based around game-playing girls and the games they play might actually work. It's a common hobby, after all, and tying it into the online aspect of Wii would help keep the grievers out, since you'd need to buy a new console to re-register if you're banned. Plus, as I noted above, this is a demographic which might actually find the service extremely useful.
As a motivator once but it: "Dare to dream - you can have it all";).
Can you name a single game where you can just decide to not to play while in the middle of any given level, and the game will play for you?
Ur-Quan Masters. You can either fly through hyperspace by yourself, or let the autopilot guide you. The former has advantages if you're flying through enemy territory and want to avoid confrontations. The old Elite games also have an autopilot available. Coming to think of it, World of Goo's "skip this level" feature could be considered effectively the same as a self-playing feature.
And doesn't Eve Online have time-based skill increase even if you're not logged in ? For that matter, don't most MMORPGs have bots that auto-grind the character for you ? That would indicate that the whole concept of MMORPG needs to be reconsidered, since the whole point of a game is to e fun, but that's another discussion entirely.
For that matter, what about multiplayer strategy games which allow players to come and go ? The computer takes over any empty seats and gives over to a human player upon request. And then there's ProgressQuest. Heck, the automatic trading systems in real-life stock market could be considered prior art. This whole patent is utterly ridiculous, even for a software patent.
I guess I've just always chalked it up to people that are jealous of people who have extra money to burn, and like the finer things in life. Not everyone feels the need to make everything in live 'utility'...or 'just get by'.
True, some people get 700 billion government bailout to use for getting those finer things. The rest got the bill for that and try to get buy. Is it really so difficult to understand why the people in the latter category might feel something less than transcended love for those in the former ?
Not everyone who's wealthy or well-off is an utter asshole, it's simply that enough of them are that the rest get painted by the same brush. It's the same as with lawyers or politicians.
Pop music is like chocolate: it may taste really good, but in the back of your mind, you know it's bad for you.
Chocolate, coffee and wine are all good for you, as long as they're used within reason. The voice in your head telling you' they're bad is actually trying to kill you;).
You can tell its scripting is feature complete because the nerds have gone out and written virtual computers that run on top of the game.
Actually you can't. Your brains are also operating within the Universe, and thus bound by any limitation it might have; thus, if there's some important aspect of logic or computability which the Universe lacks, you couldn't conceive it existing, and thus you would mistakenly consider the Universe feature complete.
All that can be said is that the laws of logic within the Universe allow the computation of everything they allow, which is a tautological non-statement.
Although I am high energy physicist and not a climatologist, it should be possible for a climatologist to provide convincing and conclusive evidence that humans are unambiguously the cause of the recent global warming.
The only way to unambiguously prove the correlation between two variables is to carry out multiple experiments where only one of these variables changes. On Earth, that's simply impossible: a lot of variables are changing all the time.
However, what is known is that the global average temperatures seem to correlate with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that there is a simple model which explains this, and that we are constantly pumping a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Given this, I really don't think there's any scientific reason to doubt that there is, indeed, global warming going on and that we are at least one of the causes, probably the most important one (due to the correlation).
The problem with global warming (as I understand it) is that there is conflicting evidence as to the cause. So far I have not heard an expert on either side of the debate come up with convincing arguments to explain the other side's evidence. The conclusion I am therefore forced to reach is that we do not understand why the Earth is warming at the moment
In a system as complex as climate, there can be multiple causes for any observed phenomena. "Humans are causing global warming" in no way conflicts with "the Sun's output is rising and that is causing global warming".
I'm not the one disturbed by the thought that someone poor might have something nice. I am, however, disturbed by some moron endangering me and everyone else by not watching the road while he's driving because he's too busy spying into people's homes.
Its not that hard to noticed a big 4 foot glow in windows that dont have curtains even when driving by at urban speeds.
It is, however, quite a leap of imagination to jump from "a glow in a window" into a "brand new plasma television". Besides, urban speed limits are there because there's a lot more to watch in city traffic than in the countryside. If anything, urban driving requires more, not less, attention.
What we really need is an alien race to show up, blow up a major city or two, leave us exact directions on how to get to their home planet and specs on what sort of weaponry they have, and then leave us alone for about 200 years. That's about the only way I can see the military getting into manned space travel in a big way.
Or they could just put their I Can't Believe It's Not a Moon -brand mothership into Lunar orbit for a few days, send a transmission saying: "This looks like a suitable world. Our word for 'Yes, master' is 'Ndsda'. Practice pronouncing it, we'll be back in 200 years", and depart.
I think a large part of the problem is, these people are crooked. Stealing out of newspaper machines? Pretty damned low. Chances are, you give a job like that, and he's going to steal from you, too -- so you fire him within a week.
Or maybe he can't get a job because he has no job experience, and can get no job experience because he can get no job. Once the cycle goes on long enough, it becomes impossible to break it. I can well understand why someone would finally just say "fuck it" and become a criminal; it's the only door left open.
Because people collect coins and so they have more value to collectors than the metal they are made from. As the coins disappear over time (melted, lost, whatever) then the value of the coin goes up - in theory.
But we aren't talking about some ancient coinage. We're talking about a contemporary private coinage project. It seems likely that the number of coins hasn't topped yet, neither do these things have any historical value. Maybe in a few hundred years they're antique, but I wouldn't bet on that either, and in any case you could always have the silver you bought made into a nice statue.
You should switch to Liberty Dollar's (http://www.libertydollar.org/) to show your contempt for the government as well.
No, you shouldn't. They aren't money until they're accepted by Wal-Mart because that's what money is: a medium of exchange. So either get stocks, which are backed by the manufacturing/service capacity of the company issuing them, or if you want to hold wealth in silver, just buy silver bards directly. Why bother with a private currency, which inevitably has overhead costs ? What's the benefit ?
When these people have to start cutting their flour with cardboard to make it last longer, call me.
Out of curiosity: what does that mean?
It means that you take a piece of cardboard, grind it into powder, and mix it with flour, then make food from the mix as you'd do with flour normally. In old times, when food's been really tight, people have used the bark of trees similarly.
Basically, you substitute some of the flour needed to make for example a bread with cardboard.
I've never seen best buy drop one off, but I sure have seen them in peoples windows driving by some of the poorer areas of my neighborhood.
Maybe if you did your peeping into people's homes on foot, you would save enough on gas to be able to afford one too. And you'd be a lot less likely to cause an accident for not watching the road.
Wasn't the whole point of outsourcing data-ops to "the cloud" was so that the same hardware and network could be serving football video streams one day, and taking in business (or going-out-of-business) paperwork the next?
No, the whole point of "the cloud" was to get a new buzzword for salesmen and consultants.
Why hasn't this been implemented yet?
Because then you'd need to invent a new buzzword. "The cloud" is short and nice-sounding, so better milk it for all it's worth, especially in this economy.
Until you drop it while you're reading in the tub. Then you receive an electrical shock, and a financial shock of $300; whereas with a dead tree mag, you're out $5.00.
Magazine paper is surprisingly water-resistant. If you don't leave it to soak, but pick it up and let dry, it will likely be perfectly readable. Some pages and page edges will simply warp a little, but that's hardly a reason to buy a new copy.
I'm not sure why we're worried about contamination either. As soon as one human steps foot on Mars it will inevitably be contaminated anyway.
Which is why we need to do any research we might wish about possible martian life before that happens. That's why we shouldn't contaminate it before we have to.
So I for one have little (read: not "none". I still doubt those products would work well on the platfrom I'm writing this from.) problems with the idea of government ran DRM server.
But I do, and it's a big one: it will let the government know exactly what content I'm using and when. Every time you read an infected book, it's logged into government database; every time you watch infected movie, it's logged into a government database; every time you listen to an infected song, it's logged into a government database.
I don't want to be accused of a crime in the neighbourhood because their database shows that plenty of criminals have similar reading habits than me.
That's because sugar pills don't have any side-effects.
Maybe they're sugar pills, or maybe they're dried blood serum of Ebola victims rolled into pills and personally cursed by the High Priest of the Church of Satan to weed the stupid from the world. All you know for sure is that you got them from some shady character on the Internet who's whereabouts you don't know and who is unlikely to ever make business with you again, making him far less trustworthy or interested in your continued wellbeing than the neighbourhood drug dealer. So the question is:
These kind of stories swing both ways, and we've had literally dozens of "Finally the pendulum swings the other way moments" that have amounted to nothing more than blips across the radar... But I can't help but optimistically wonder if this is the start of a trend fighting back against corporate abuse of us, the customer?
No, it's just another blip on the radar.
Now the RIAA is backpedaling, and DRM is getting an appropriate scrutinizing.
Copyright cartels have won victory after victory to the detriment of everyone else, in the USA and everywhere else. That a single copyright cartel is taking a pause in their extortion campaign in no way changes that. And DRM is being scrutinized, not condemned - even at the very best this will simply result in a "Contains DRM" sticker on the gamebox.
Its a good start to 2009!
No, it's not. It simply isn't the absolute worst it could be.
So, what is Hamas, a group that shoots AT Israeli children while hiding behind Palestinian children?
Logically, anyone doing this would be a cowardly and murderous fuck.
And, what would you do if someone hid behind his children, and started taking pot shots at your child? Just ignore him or shoot back at him?
Which one are you talking about ? Because they're both killing each other's children.
As an answer to your question: no, I wouldn't blow up a school because it contains a gunman. I'd set in the SWAT team or the military equivalent. That's because I'd know that not only would blowing up that school make me a murderous fuck, it would also make me a stupid fuck; after all, after I blew it up, everyone who's children died there would be coming for me or my kids for revenge.
The whole general area seems to be one giant rabies-infested open-air asylum for the criminally insane. It's supposed to be the Holy Land of three major religions, but is looking more like the Temple of Doom each day.
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So let's have the government hold a gun to your head, take the fruits of your labour and distribute them to unskilled labourers. That should be okay, since life's a bitch and you might have better luck next reincarnation, right ?
Or we could try to make the life a little less of a bitch to everyone, including those unskilled labourers.
The fair consequence of being an arrogant jerk is to get whatever fate you callously wished upon those you considered lesser beings.
Because if they grow their own corn, other countries can't threaten to cut off supplies as a blackmail tool, nor do market fluctuations nor speculation threaten it.
It's stupid to rely on anyone else for vital supplies. The way Russia cut off natural gas to Europe is a good example of why.
Wasn't there a huge shortage/price spike for food just a while ago ?
No, your idea is not at all different from the abuse you described. You simply use a different function to decide who is similar enough to you to vote.
If I advocate centrally planned economy and toll barriers, will you conclude that I don't know enough about economy to be allowed to vote ? If I say that I'm for gun control, is that grounds to take my vote away ? Or if I'm against your plan because I consider any limitation in the ability to vote a step towards a dictatorship - and yes, that means felons in prison should be allowed to vote - does that mean that I'm clearly too idealistic to have a say in the government ?
Move to China if you want rule by elite, but please leave the remaining democracies alone; they are crumbling fast enough without you helping them along with your condescending "people shouldn't have a say in matters which concern them unless they can prove they're smart enough to satisfy me" bullshit.
0. It looks good. The manager's boss will see that the manager's people put in long hours and concludes that he's doing a good job "motivating" them. This makes the manager look good and get a rise or bonus. He might even get more underlings since his team is obviously busy.
"If I don't see more cars in the parking lot after 6 P.M heads will roll !"
Yeah, but do you know what would really kill us, and I mean that literally ? Truck drivers. No trucks -> no efficient enough way to resupply shops -> mass starvation.
Games of one-upmanship area really, really, really stupid.
How about a Wii that finds you a girlfriend ?-) It might be more relevant...
...now that I think of it, a dating service based around game-playing girls and the games they play might actually work. It's a common hobby, after all, and tying it into the online aspect of Wii would help keep the grievers out, since you'd need to buy a new console to re-register if you're banned. Plus, as I noted above, this is a demographic which might actually find the service extremely useful.
As a motivator once but it: "Dare to dream - you can have it all" ;).
Ur-Quan Masters. You can either fly through hyperspace by yourself, or let the autopilot guide you. The former has advantages if you're flying through enemy territory and want to avoid confrontations. The old Elite games also have an autopilot available. Coming to think of it, World of Goo's "skip this level" feature could be considered effectively the same as a self-playing feature.
And doesn't Eve Online have time-based skill increase even if you're not logged in ? For that matter, don't most MMORPGs have bots that auto-grind the character for you ? That would indicate that the whole concept of MMORPG needs to be reconsidered, since the whole point of a game is to e fun, but that's another discussion entirely.
For that matter, what about multiplayer strategy games which allow players to come and go ? The computer takes over any empty seats and gives over to a human player upon request. And then there's ProgressQuest. Heck, the automatic trading systems in real-life stock market could be considered prior art. This whole patent is utterly ridiculous, even for a software patent.
True, some people get 700 billion government bailout to use for getting those finer things. The rest got the bill for that and try to get buy. Is it really so difficult to understand why the people in the latter category might feel something less than transcended love for those in the former ?
Not everyone who's wealthy or well-off is an utter asshole, it's simply that enough of them are that the rest get painted by the same brush. It's the same as with lawyers or politicians.
Chocolate, coffee and wine are all good for you, as long as they're used within reason. The voice in your head telling you' they're bad is actually trying to kill you ;).
Actually you can't. Your brains are also operating within the Universe, and thus bound by any limitation it might have; thus, if there's some important aspect of logic or computability which the Universe lacks, you couldn't conceive it existing, and thus you would mistakenly consider the Universe feature complete.
All that can be said is that the laws of logic within the Universe allow the computation of everything they allow, which is a tautological non-statement.
The only way to unambiguously prove the correlation between two variables is to carry out multiple experiments where only one of these variables changes. On Earth, that's simply impossible: a lot of variables are changing all the time.
However, what is known is that the global average temperatures seem to correlate with the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that there is a simple model which explains this, and that we are constantly pumping a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Given this, I really don't think there's any scientific reason to doubt that there is, indeed, global warming going on and that we are at least one of the causes, probably the most important one (due to the correlation).
In a system as complex as climate, there can be multiple causes for any observed phenomena. "Humans are causing global warming" in no way conflicts with "the Sun's output is rising and that is causing global warming".
I'm not the one disturbed by the thought that someone poor might have something nice. I am, however, disturbed by some moron endangering me and everyone else by not watching the road while he's driving because he's too busy spying into people's homes.
It is, however, quite a leap of imagination to jump from "a glow in a window" into a "brand new plasma television". Besides, urban speed limits are there because there's a lot more to watch in city traffic than in the countryside. If anything, urban driving requires more, not less, attention.
Or they could just put their I Can't Believe It's Not a Moon -brand mothership into Lunar orbit for a few days, send a transmission saying: "This looks like a suitable world. Our word for 'Yes, master' is 'Ndsda'. Practice pronouncing it, we'll be back in 200 years", and depart.
You Americans and your violence fetish.
Or maybe he can't get a job because he has no job experience, and can get no job experience because he can get no job. Once the cycle goes on long enough, it becomes impossible to break it. I can well understand why someone would finally just say "fuck it" and become a criminal; it's the only door left open.
But we aren't talking about some ancient coinage. We're talking about a contemporary private coinage project. It seems likely that the number of coins hasn't topped yet, neither do these things have any historical value. Maybe in a few hundred years they're antique, but I wouldn't bet on that either, and in any case you could always have the silver you bought made into a nice statue.
No, you shouldn't. They aren't money until they're accepted by Wal-Mart because that's what money is: a medium of exchange. So either get stocks, which are backed by the manufacturing/service capacity of the company issuing them, or if you want to hold wealth in silver, just buy silver bards directly. Why bother with a private currency, which inevitably has overhead costs ? What's the benefit ?
It means that you take a piece of cardboard, grind it into powder, and mix it with flour, then make food from the mix as you'd do with flour normally. In old times, when food's been really tight, people have used the bark of trees similarly.
Basically, you substitute some of the flour needed to make for example a bread with cardboard.
Maybe if you did your peeping into people's homes on foot, you would save enough on gas to be able to afford one too. And you'd be a lot less likely to cause an accident for not watching the road.
No, the whole point of "the cloud" was to get a new buzzword for salesmen and consultants.
Because then you'd need to invent a new buzzword. "The cloud" is short and nice-sounding, so better milk it for all it's worth, especially in this economy.
Magazine paper is surprisingly water-resistant. If you don't leave it to soak, but pick it up and let dry, it will likely be perfectly readable. Some pages and page edges will simply warp a little, but that's hardly a reason to buy a new copy.
Which is why we need to do any research we might wish about possible martian life before that happens. That's why we shouldn't contaminate it before we have to.
But I do, and it's a big one: it will let the government know exactly what content I'm using and when. Every time you read an infected book, it's logged into government database; every time you watch infected movie, it's logged into a government database; every time you listen to an infected song, it's logged into a government database.
I don't want to be accused of a crime in the neighbourhood because their database shows that plenty of criminals have similar reading habits than me.
Maybe they're sugar pills, or maybe they're dried blood serum of Ebola victims rolled into pills and personally cursed by the High Priest of the Church of Satan to weed the stupid from the world. All you know for sure is that you got them from some shady character on the Internet who's whereabouts you don't know and who is unlikely to ever make business with you again, making him far less trustworthy or interested in your continued wellbeing than the neighbourhood drug dealer. So the question is:
Do you feel lucky, punk ?
No, it's just another blip on the radar.
Copyright cartels have won victory after victory to the detriment of everyone else, in the USA and everywhere else. That a single copyright cartel is taking a pause in their extortion campaign in no way changes that. And DRM is being scrutinized, not condemned - even at the very best this will simply result in a "Contains DRM" sticker on the gamebox.
No, it's not. It simply isn't the absolute worst it could be.
Logically, anyone doing this would be a cowardly and murderous fuck.
Which one are you talking about ? Because they're both killing each other's children.
As an answer to your question: no, I wouldn't blow up a school because it contains a gunman. I'd set in the SWAT team or the military equivalent. That's because I'd know that not only would blowing up that school make me a murderous fuck, it would also make me a stupid fuck; after all, after I blew it up, everyone who's children died there would be coming for me or my kids for revenge.
The whole general area seems to be one giant rabies-infested open-air asylum for the criminally insane. It's supposed to be the Holy Land of three major religions, but is looking more like the Temple of Doom each day.