What school textbooks do you know of that advocate critical thinking about *any* of the subject matter? Kids aren't taught to question if 1+1 is really 2, or to do a double-blind study and see if exercise is actually good for you, or to go and find out that the founding fathers were largely womanizing elitists. History aside, the science classes teach the kids what others have THEORIZED about and that science as a whole has accepted as the best current model. EVERYTHING in science is a THEORY, because it's all open to be investigated and dismantled in the face of NEW and BETTER EVIDINCE. In fact, considering that EVERY biology book is based on science (yeah, I'm making assumptions here), they all have an underlying tone of "question what you see" because they are ALL based on the SCIENTIFIC METHOD.
Once somebody has a better TESTABLE MODEL, so that the whole process resembles science is any way whatsoever (completely contrary to nearly all creationism today), then it can be added to the SCIENCE textbooks.
What we really need is a bunch of people who don't take offense to being told that some ideas they hold don't match plain-as-day evidence (sounds like a mental illness to me; anyway...) to go into churches and put "God is just pretend" stickers on all the bibles. I mean, what right do these people have to be filling kid's heads with untestable fairy-tale hypothesis and THEORIES? Oh, I forgot, they don't have theories they're "simply right, because we feel it in our hearts". Heh, talk about an establishment that doesn't take to being critisized or questioned.
[For anyone who cares: Go ahead and believe what you want, but don't go pushing ideas onto others or witholding information from kids. Faith cannot be true if it is all you are ever told. Unless you have seen and explored the multitude of options and picked out of them what resonates with your soul, you cannot be a true believer; you are only indoctrinated.]
but the only point (...) is to conform to implied social norms - an objective that has nothing to do with getting the job done.
Same with farting, chewing with your mouth open, talking with food in your mouth, using profane language, not holding the door open for people, and throwing your trash on the floor instead of in the bin. All of those are small things that take a few seconds to do, and they show that you are conscientious, responsible, and that you respect yourself and others. Some of those things you maight do when alone or in front of friends, but you hopefully have the sense to not do them at work (especially when around people you want to have a good opinion of you).
Yeah, it's all "implied social norms". And, there's a good reason for that. When in a professional relationship, have the decency to show the person you're communicating with that you actually care enough to get a clear message across. To force the reciever to work harder in understanding your message, just so you can be lazy about constructing your message and not have to actually think or care, is to strongly imply that they aren't worth your time or effort; that they are less than you.
Personally, I try to make nearly all of my writing to be of at least mediocre quality, for the reasons mentioned above as well as a sense of personal pride. Whether the effort is strictly worth it or not, *I* know I care enough to put in extra effort.
It's not that Ripley is anomalous, it's that Alien was anomalous. Most action movies with heroines as the protagonist tend to overdo the stunts in the first place (ala the robot-fighting scene in Tomb Raider 2). Alien(s) had a strong, sensible, believable badass as a protagonist. Tomb Raider had a superhuman magical gun-toting nitwit who we were supposed to believe was a normal person with normal hardware. Any movie that has somebody shooting full-auto pistols for minutes on end without reloading (or reloading over and over and over and over and over again with clips that appear from nowhere) is cheesy. What sucks is that movies with female action characters tend to try and make up for the fact that the character is female by overdoing the badassedness to the point that it's silly. This also includes the one-punch knockout by a 100 lb. waif. I can't remember seeing any movie that asked the audience to believe that a 95 lb weakling dude could throw one untrained punch and actually hurt somebody. And I've seen a lot of bad movies. GI Jane threw a good punch...
However, you're treading a thin line. It almost sounds as if you're blaming poor inner-city education *entirely* on the culture. Personally, I'm not going to even start to believe it until the same $X per student that is spent on rich suburban kids is also spent on inner-city kids.
No, but all too many 'scientists' are Gaians or worse.
You must work for Faux News, eh? Nice mud slinging, without any sort of support. Personally, I went to Case Western Reserver U, an engineering school, and the only people I met who would even consider believing in Gaia were some of the few liberal arts / english majors there.
Under what authority do you lay claim to dictate how me and others live our lives?
Under the same authority you claim gives you the right to do whatever you want. I have the right to not be inconvenienced by you. You don't have to be doing physical harm to me to be infringing on my personal liberty and happiness.
But until the threat is at LEAST as proven as Saddam's threat was; please piss off and stop trying to run everyone else's life.
Well, that's easy. Considering no WMDs have been found, and it's been verified that Saddam *wanted* WMDs but was *not* producing them because of the sanctions, then we're already there!
Unless you happen to be one of the ones who loses their livelihood in the economic chaos that signing Kyoto would bring.
So, your livelihood is polluting? You make money off of that? Somehow, companies have survived even as pollution reducing techniques have been implemented.
The data on smoking was pretty damned clear. The Tobacco industry was forced to keep up a front on the issue because they realized what the trial lawyers were trying to do... what they DID do eventually.
Heh. The only reason they got in trouble is because they LIED about their research. If, instead, they had said "yeah, this is bad for you, but look how cool you are* *BTW, don't blame us when you die", then the blame would have been with the users. But, see, in the name of profits, they lied about the safety of their product. They did it to themselves, and they were fucking stupid to play it that way. The only thing more stupid is to act as if they were the victim.
It looks to me as if an American heard a native Spanish speaker quickly pronounce the English words "blue jeans", wrote down how he thought this mysterious foreign word should be spelled, and then asked the Spanish speaker what it meant. The fact that an official body is thinking of adopting the word sounds kind of... insulting. But, if people are actually using it (rather than saying "blue jeans" with a heavy accent), then I guess it's the thing to do.
I don't know if whole-house protectors work the same, but I know that regular plug-in surge-protectors degrade over time and need replaced every 3-5 years. And, they only help for 1 strike, so you need to replace them after a suspected incident (well, the insurance on them only covers that).
So, I don't know if it would be worth installing something that protects the whole house. In any case, it would only protect from a relatively distant strike to the electrical lines, and not a closer strike that put current into the system on the other side of the protection (i.e., through the ground or structure and then directly into the wires).
The rest of what you're saying makes perfect sense to me and begs the question:
NO! NO, IT DOESN'T!
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/begs.html states, among other things: An argument that improperly assumes as true the very point the speaker is trying to argue for is said in formal logic to "beg the question." Here is an example of a question-begging argument: "This painting is trash because it is obviously worthless."
Sorry, I'm not trying to be a grammar Nazi, but after my meetings with a certain crowd over the last 2 weeks, I can't take it anymore. If I don't snap here, it'll happen in front of people I can't afford to spaz out in front of.
Yes, they should. Unfortunately, "society" is the Law, and the proof is in the pudding regarding how well America's laws actually protect from the abuse of corporations.
Yeah, but it's the "they operate on razor thin margins" line that always gets repeated to make it sound as if they're about to go under, even though plenty of money is being made. (another example of this is gas stations)
He's just using "profit" as the common concept of "I brought in $100 today and spent $10 on supplies, so I made $90 profit", rather than the corporate version of "I brought in $100 today, spent $10 on supplies, and paid myself $89; so I only made $1 profit today!".
Yeah, I've heard a little about it. I guess that helps some. If there were a good way to try skills out before picking them permanently, that would make me happy.
Hmm, I never really ran into that, and only saw it once. I played a fair bit on a number of servers, usually with ranged chars, and one fire spec. *shrug*
Hell that's why they went from 40 cable ribbons to 80 cable ribbons. It's just to add extra space because the faster speeds increase more interference.
It's not extra space, it's extra ground wires; but, yeah, it's to decrease interference at higher signal frequencies.
The thing is, by folding the cable back on itself so that the wires are right next to eachother, you could cause harmful interference. I'm assuming that the writer was lucky that most of his folds were at 90 degrees, thus minimising this problem, but I think he mentioned a couple 180 degree fold-overs.
Also, the 90 degree folds are making nice pointy angles, which are decent antennas.
I'll also mention that I was having problems with one of my hard drives that went away when I corrected the crink in my 80 wire cable. It's come and gone a couple times since then because I tend to put a certain force on the cable when trying to get to other components, and I'm too lazy to unhook the cable. The recognition and performance problems always go away when I straighten the cable back out. Yes, this may be caused by a short and not EMI.
As another data point: I have a Thunderbird 1GHz, GeForce 2MX 400, 512MB, and a DSL line with a good ping AFAIK. Sure, I turn down sprites, etc., but my framerate only ever slows down when I'm in a large group (6-8) with a lot of people doing AoE.
I don't know for sure in this case, but most MMORPG betas have the difficulty turned way down so that the testers will be able to test much more content in much less time than paying customers. The developers might think a power is working OK, but the marketers say "hmm, if you slow the travel powers down by 10%, it will take them that much longer to do what they want, and we'll make that much more money", and changes are made.
It was probably realization that not many of today's gamers have 6 friends to stack a team with that can play together on such a very basis, and getting a group of random people like that together is difficult and time consuming. I.E., the majority of the users aren't going to try and play the system like that.
That amounts to pretty much the same thing, unless you have a large item craft and sell aspect. Still, they could always point out that you could play another character while your "dead" one times out.
Yes, but it sounds like a cop-out to me. Maybe I'm being overly harsh, but one of the biggest reasons I wanted to play CoH was because they weren't going to force the characters into the typical Tank, Mage, and Healer roles. Then, they changed their minds, and the game feels pretty much exactly like any D&D game. The travel powers add some divergent novelty, and you can't discount those because you have to do a LOT of running around, especially if you are doing a Task Force or trying to find a shop that you can't remember the exact location of.
Sorry, but I can't believe that with all the effort they put into re-doing the skill system that they couldn't have come up with a reasonable way to limit newbies to certain combinations and still allow the flexibility they originally advertised. Reading his responses, I got the very distinct impression that he didn't like the tank-mage soloers because they don't fit his view of what a MMORPG experience should be, so they implemented the typical class system to force grouping.
Here's a question: Why can't you auto-cash the enhancements you pick up, instead of having to carry them back and sell them? This would help gameplay quite a bit, and allow you to hold on to enhancements until the next level without having to sacrifice all your cashflow.
Here's another: Why can't you un-train skills? [removed a big rant about all the reasons, which should be obvious to any MMORPG player anyway]
The answers seem simple and obvious: This stuff adds to the timewasting treadmill, and, thus, to revenue. Same as the Task Force missions that have you running from one end of a zone to the other end of another, just to get some information from somebody (which is to run back to where you just were for more info, or, if you're lucky, a fight).
I pre-ordered CoH, and played it for a good while. But, not being able to untrain skills has actually made me afraid to level my many 13-18s up any higher because I don't want to permenantly screw them up. And it's not that I'll pick one bad skill. It's that, with every pick, I have a good chance of regretting it forever, and in the end my character will be a mishmash of uncomplimentary and non roleplay-matched skills. (the latter due to poor descriptions that aren't even consistent between char-gen and in-game)
Yeah, I'm still paying my monthly fee, even though I haven't played in 3 months. But, that will probably change this month. Same as with SW Galaxies. The only reason I held onto it for so long was because they promised to actually finish the game they advertised they were selling (adding mounts, etc.). Too little too late there.
Let's take one example: the DOT. You're saying that the government should either produce millions a month in order to pay road construction costs, or pay the road workers nearly nothing so that inflation doesn't get out of hand. I don't see that working. As it is, tax money is taken from the majority and redistributed to the minority doing such work. How would your system pay for public services?
Also, what's wrong with money not being based on physical materials any more? There are only so many natural resources, and if inflation is supposed to counteract the increasing output in productivity, then you're going to run out of natural resources at some point. Today's lifestyle isn't such that each person can give a pig to the government in order to feed government workers. It probably isn't practical to work directly for the government for X months of the year, in a direct trade of your labor/expertise for governmental services.
In any case, the government paid for everything simply by printing money, you'd get either hyper deflation or nobody willing to do the work for 2-3% of what they used to get paid to do the job.
This all depends heavily on the resolution needed to actually reproduce "conciousness". It's easy to copy a bit pattern because you don't need to worry about the spin of every electron in the area storing the bit. I have my doubts that such resolution is actually needed for recording a brain's state, either. (Mostly because I don't believe that the human body is capable of reading, modifying, and maintaining such delicate information; especially maintaining it over long time periods).
To be more consultant like, work for a consulting / headhunter firm. You get the feast-or-famine experience, you get to learn the ropes of consulting, you get to look at how a large company does its contracts to cover its ass, you get to be independant. Sure, you're making other people money. But, if you get the right company, you also get health insurance and pay during times where they can't find you work.
Slashdot Mirror
What school textbooks do you know of that advocate critical thinking about *any* of the subject matter? Kids aren't taught to question if 1+1 is really 2, or to do a double-blind study and see if exercise is actually good for you, or to go and find out that the founding fathers were largely womanizing elitists. History aside, the science classes teach the kids what others have THEORIZED about and that science as a whole has accepted as the best current model. EVERYTHING in science is a THEORY, because it's all open to be investigated and dismantled in the face of NEW and BETTER EVIDINCE. In fact, considering that EVERY biology book is based on science (yeah, I'm making assumptions here), they all have an underlying tone of "question what you see" because they are ALL based on the SCIENTIFIC METHOD.
Once somebody has a better TESTABLE MODEL, so that the whole process resembles science is any way whatsoever (completely contrary to nearly all creationism today), then it can be added to the SCIENCE textbooks.
What we really need is a bunch of people who don't take offense to being told that some ideas they hold don't match plain-as-day evidence (sounds like a mental illness to me; anyway...) to go into churches and put "God is just pretend" stickers on all the bibles. I mean, what right do these people have to be filling kid's heads with untestable fairy-tale hypothesis and THEORIES? Oh, I forgot, they don't have theories they're "simply right, because we feel it in our hearts". Heh, talk about an establishment that doesn't take to being critisized or questioned.
[For anyone who cares: Go ahead and believe what you want, but don't go pushing ideas onto others or witholding information from kids. Faith cannot be true if it is all you are ever told. Unless you have seen and explored the multitude of options and picked out of them what resonates with your soul, you cannot be a true believer; you are only indoctrinated.]
Einstein was a funny guy. Also, he needed help with his math. He was good at concepts.
Yeah, it sounds a bit elitist, but I'm pretty sure he was just making a good-natured joke.
but the only point (...) is to conform to implied social norms - an objective that has nothing to do with getting the job done.
Same with farting, chewing with your mouth open, talking with food in your mouth, using profane language, not holding the door open for people, and throwing your trash on the floor instead of in the bin. All of those are small things that take a few seconds to do, and they show that you are conscientious, responsible, and that you respect yourself and others. Some of those things you maight do when alone or in front of friends, but you hopefully have the sense to not do them at work (especially when around people you want to have a good opinion of you).
Yeah, it's all "implied social norms". And, there's a good reason for that. When in a professional relationship, have the decency to show the person you're communicating with that you actually care enough to get a clear message across. To force the reciever to work harder in understanding your message, just so you can be lazy about constructing your message and not have to actually think or care, is to strongly imply that they aren't worth your time or effort; that they are less than you.
Personally, I try to make nearly all of my writing to be of at least mediocre quality, for the reasons mentioned above as well as a sense of personal pride. Whether the effort is strictly worth it or not, *I* know I care enough to put in extra effort.
It's not that Ripley is anomalous, it's that Alien was anomalous. Most action movies with heroines as the protagonist tend to overdo the stunts in the first place (ala the robot-fighting scene in Tomb Raider 2). Alien(s) had a strong, sensible, believable badass as a protagonist. Tomb Raider had a superhuman magical gun-toting nitwit who we were supposed to believe was a normal person with normal hardware. Any movie that has somebody shooting full-auto pistols for minutes on end without reloading (or reloading over and over and over and over and over again with clips that appear from nowhere) is cheesy. What sucks is that movies with female action characters tend to try and make up for the fact that the character is female by overdoing the badassedness to the point that it's silly. This also includes the one-punch knockout by a 100 lb. waif. I can't remember seeing any movie that asked the audience to believe that a 95 lb weakling dude could throw one untrained punch and actually hurt somebody. And I've seen a lot of bad movies. GI Jane threw a good punch...
Technically, you're correct and I agree with you.
However, you're treading a thin line. It almost sounds as if you're blaming poor inner-city education *entirely* on the culture. Personally, I'm not going to even start to believe it until the same $X per student that is spent on rich suburban kids is also spent on inner-city kids.
MMMmmm. Time to eat some Troll!
No, but all too many 'scientists' are Gaians or worse.
You must work for Faux News, eh? Nice mud slinging, without any sort of support. Personally, I went to Case Western Reserver U, an engineering school, and the only people I met who would even consider believing in Gaia were some of the few liberal arts / english majors there.
Under what authority do you lay claim to dictate how me and others live our lives?
Under the same authority you claim gives you the right to do whatever you want. I have the right to not be inconvenienced by you. You don't have to be doing physical harm to me to be infringing on my personal liberty and happiness.
But until the threat is at LEAST as proven as Saddam's threat was; please piss off and stop trying to run everyone else's life.
Well, that's easy. Considering no WMDs have been found, and it's been verified that Saddam *wanted* WMDs but was *not* producing them because of the sanctions, then we're already there!
Unless you happen to be one of the ones who loses their livelihood in the economic chaos that signing Kyoto would bring.
So, your livelihood is polluting? You make money off of that? Somehow, companies have survived even as pollution reducing techniques have been implemented.
The data on smoking was pretty damned clear. The Tobacco industry was forced to keep up a front on the issue because they realized what the trial lawyers were trying to do... what they DID do eventually.
Heh. The only reason they got in trouble is because they LIED about their research. If, instead, they had said "yeah, this is bad for you, but look how cool you are* *BTW, don't blame us when you die", then the blame would have been with the users. But, see, in the name of profits, they lied about the safety of their product. They did it to themselves, and they were fucking stupid to play it that way. The only thing more stupid is to act as if they were the victim.
It looks to me as if an American heard a native Spanish speaker quickly pronounce the English words "blue jeans", wrote down how he thought this mysterious foreign word should be spelled, and then asked the Spanish speaker what it meant. The fact that an official body is thinking of adopting the word sounds kind of... insulting. But, if people are actually using it (rather than saying "blue jeans" with a heavy accent), then I guess it's the thing to do.
I don't know if whole-house protectors work the same, but I know that regular plug-in surge-protectors degrade over time and need replaced every 3-5 years. And, they only help for 1 strike, so you need to replace them after a suspected incident (well, the insurance on them only covers that).
So, I don't know if it would be worth installing something that protects the whole house. In any case, it would only protect from a relatively distant strike to the electrical lines, and not a closer strike that put current into the system on the other side of the protection (i.e., through the ground or structure and then directly into the wires).
The rest of what you're saying makes perfect sense to me and begs the question:
l states, among other things:
NO!
NO, IT DOESN'T!
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/begs.htm
An argument that improperly assumes as true the very point the speaker is trying to argue for is said in formal logic to "beg the question." Here is an example of a question-begging argument: "This painting is trash because it is obviously worthless."
Sorry, I'm not trying to be a grammar Nazi, but after my meetings with a certain crowd over the last 2 weeks, I can't take it anymore. If I don't snap here, it'll happen in front of people I can't afford to spaz out in front of.
Yes, they should. Unfortunately, "society" is the Law, and the proof is in the pudding regarding how well America's laws actually protect from the abuse of corporations.
Yeah, but it's the "they operate on razor thin margins" line that always gets repeated to make it sound as if they're about to go under, even though plenty of money is being made. (another example of this is gas stations)
He's just using "profit" as the common concept of "I brought in $100 today and spent $10 on supplies, so I made $90 profit", rather than the corporate version of "I brought in $100 today, spent $10 on supplies, and paid myself $89; so I only made $1 profit today!".
Yeah, I've heard a little about it. I guess that helps some. If there were a good way to try skills out before picking them permanently, that would make me happy.
Hmm, I never really ran into that, and only saw it once. I played a fair bit on a number of servers, usually with ranged chars, and one fire spec. *shrug*
So, back when the neandrethals were wrestling in the mud, none of them were staring at the stars and the bubling brooks and imagining?
Heck, there might have even been a Roman who preferred to stay home and tinker in his workshop than to attend the games!
Hell that's why they went from 40 cable ribbons to 80 cable ribbons. It's just to add extra space because the faster speeds increase more interference.
It's not extra space, it's extra ground wires; but, yeah, it's to decrease interference at higher signal frequencies.
The thing is, by folding the cable back on itself so that the wires are right next to eachother, you could cause harmful interference. I'm assuming that the writer was lucky that most of his folds were at 90 degrees, thus minimising this problem, but I think he mentioned a couple 180 degree fold-overs.
Also, the 90 degree folds are making nice pointy angles, which are decent antennas.
I'll also mention that I was having problems with one of my hard drives that went away when I corrected the crink in my 80 wire cable. It's come and gone a couple times since then because I tend to put a certain force on the cable when trying to get to other components, and I'm too lazy to unhook the cable. The recognition and performance problems always go away when I straighten the cable back out. Yes, this may be caused by a short and not EMI.
As another data point: I have a Thunderbird 1GHz, GeForce 2MX 400, 512MB, and a DSL line with a good ping AFAIK. Sure, I turn down sprites, etc., but my framerate only ever slows down when I'm in a large group (6-8) with a lot of people doing AoE.
I don't know for sure in this case, but most MMORPG betas have the difficulty turned way down so that the testers will be able to test much more content in much less time than paying customers. The developers might think a power is working OK, but the marketers say "hmm, if you slow the travel powers down by 10%, it will take them that much longer to do what they want, and we'll make that much more money", and changes are made.
It was probably realization that not many of today's gamers have 6 friends to stack a team with that can play together on such a very basis, and getting a group of random people like that together is difficult and time consuming. I.E., the majority of the users aren't going to try and play the system like that.
That amounts to pretty much the same thing, unless you have a large item craft and sell aspect. Still, they could always point out that you could play another character while your "dead" one times out.
Yes, but it sounds like a cop-out to me. Maybe I'm being overly harsh, but one of the biggest reasons I wanted to play CoH was because they weren't going to force the characters into the typical Tank, Mage, and Healer roles. Then, they changed their minds, and the game feels pretty much exactly like any D&D game. The travel powers add some divergent novelty, and you can't discount those because you have to do a LOT of running around, especially if you are doing a Task Force or trying to find a shop that you can't remember the exact location of.
Sorry, but I can't believe that with all the effort they put into re-doing the skill system that they couldn't have come up with a reasonable way to limit newbies to certain combinations and still allow the flexibility they originally advertised. Reading his responses, I got the very distinct impression that he didn't like the tank-mage soloers because they don't fit his view of what a MMORPG experience should be, so they implemented the typical class system to force grouping.
Here's a question: Why can't you auto-cash the enhancements you pick up, instead of having to carry them back and sell them?
This would help gameplay quite a bit, and allow you to hold on to enhancements until the next level without having to sacrifice all your cashflow.
Here's another: Why can't you un-train skills?
[removed a big rant about all the reasons, which should be obvious to any MMORPG player anyway]
The answers seem simple and obvious: This stuff adds to the timewasting treadmill, and, thus, to revenue. Same as the Task Force missions that have you running from one end of a zone to the other end of another, just to get some information from somebody (which is to run back to where you just were for more info, or, if you're lucky, a fight).
I pre-ordered CoH, and played it for a good while. But, not being able to untrain skills has actually made me afraid to level my many 13-18s up any higher because I don't want to permenantly screw them up. And it's not that I'll pick one bad skill. It's that, with every pick, I have a good chance of regretting it forever, and in the end my character will be a mishmash of uncomplimentary and non roleplay-matched skills. (the latter due to poor descriptions that aren't even consistent between char-gen and in-game)
Yeah, I'm still paying my monthly fee, even though I haven't played in 3 months. But, that will probably change this month. Same as with SW Galaxies. The only reason I held onto it for so long was because they promised to actually finish the game they advertised they were selling (adding mounts, etc.). Too little too late there.
Ahh. I thought you were saying to go back to a system directly connected to precious minerals and tradable goods.
I have to agree with the GP.
Let's take one example: the DOT. You're saying that the government should either produce millions a month in order to pay road construction costs, or pay the road workers nearly nothing so that inflation doesn't get out of hand. I don't see that working. As it is, tax money is taken from the majority and redistributed to the minority doing such work. How would your system pay for public services?
Also, what's wrong with money not being based on physical materials any more? There are only so many natural resources, and if inflation is supposed to counteract the increasing output in productivity, then you're going to run out of natural resources at some point. Today's lifestyle isn't such that each person can give a pig to the government in order to feed government workers. It probably isn't practical to work directly for the government for X months of the year, in a direct trade of your labor/expertise for governmental services.
In any case, the government paid for everything simply by printing money, you'd get either hyper deflation or nobody willing to do the work for 2-3% of what they used to get paid to do the job.
This all depends heavily on the resolution needed to actually reproduce "conciousness". It's easy to copy a bit pattern because you don't need to worry about the spin of every electron in the area storing the bit. I have my doubts that such resolution is actually needed for recording a brain's state, either. (Mostly because I don't believe that the human body is capable of reading, modifying, and maintaining such delicate information; especially maintaining it over long time periods).
To be more consultant like, work for a consulting / headhunter firm. You get the feast-or-famine experience, you get to learn the ropes of consulting, you get to look at how a large company does its contracts to cover its ass, you get to be independant. Sure, you're making other people money. But, if you get the right company, you also get health insurance and pay during times where they can't find you work.