It's the same patterns, over and over again. Television: weren't so bad when there were only a handful of stations; now we have 120 channels of shit on the tv to choose from, and almost all of 'em will make your eyes bleed. Radio: weren't so bad when there were only a few stations in town; now we have dozens of crap-pop teeny spooge to numb us. Slashdot: great place a few years ago, when the few hundred/few thousand users were savvy; now it's overrun by dolts and assholes.
And on and on. The more popular anything in American culture gets, the worse it gets. There's an undying, unrelenting drive toward bottom-dollar profiting, which all-too-often equates to pandering to the lowest common denominators.
It's a society driven toward making trailer-park trash feel like they're an acceptable, useful, necessary part of society.
The fool thing is, the intelligensia and privileged buy into this bullshit. They watch fucking "Survivor" and pretend that it's an acceptable way to spend an hour of one's life.
The Internet will never again be as interesting, stimulating, challenging and refreshing as it was back at the tail end of the '80s and beginning of the '90s. The unwashed, ill-bred and ignorant masses have come online, and they're ruining it as surely as they ruin everything else they touch.
[And the only thing I'm curious about, is whether anyone will self-identify with the low-class dregs of society that I've been dissin', and will take offense! Flame on, you slovenly patrons of KMart, you viewers of daytime soap operas, you wretched fans of Brittany Spears!]
Given what's falling out of the bilges of the ships that sail into SF harbour, I think the UBC Beetle should be the smallest going concern. Seen some of the dumbass stunts on Nash Bridges? That's gotta be bad for the bay.
What really tweaked the noses of Americans was this: UBC owned joO! All your bridge are belong to us!
Hey, s'alright. We Canucks are a humble bunch. We know how hard it is to admit that we r0oL you. Shucks.
I figure turning the computer off is the worst thing you can do to it.
When does a lightbulb burn out?
When you turn it on, of course. They seldom burn out when they're up to, ah, speed.
Same thing with electronic gear. That first millisecond of power-on is a bit of a strain on everything, and the first few minutes of getting everything up to running temperatures is another stressor.
Might as well leave the poor thing running...
[he says, thinking that perhaps his ACPI thingamagummy is probably actually powering off the drives (they spin down, fer sure) and putting the CPU into a heavy-duty sleep cycle... and the monitor power-saving feep probably lets it all cool down a heckuva lot, too...)
I do. But the downtime in terms of restoring partitions, reinstalling Windows2k and reinstalling applications, plus patches and tweaks and shit... gahd.
I've been toying with the idea of installing a Linux Distro. I have about 20Gb of unused drive sitting here.
But it's my bread-and-butter drive: my whole business life is on it.
I have an Asus K7V, and a big IBM drive. Apparently in that combo, Linux will eat my files. If that carried over to the Windows partitions, I'd be toast...
Think I'll keep away from Linux for a while longer. I can't afford data loss like that.
Sorry, Jon, but you try because you've bought into a particularly well-designed meme: that *you* will be saved only if *you* try to save others.
It's a malicious and destructive meme.
Indeed, it makes an excellent model for computer viruses. Imagine receiving an EMail virus that popped up a dialog box stating your two choices: (A) ignore the meme, and it will erase your hard drive; or (B) send the meme to everyone in your addressbook, and it will not erase your hard drive.
Most people would choose (B), not realizing that there is a third choice: reboot the system and erase the virus.
You've fallen hook, line and sinker for option (B), Jon. And the only people you're fooling are those people who don't realize that there's a third option.
The rest of us... well, we're kind of abhorrently amused by the antics of you and your ilk.:-)
Losing the fat isn't necessarily desirable. Fat is a perfectly healthy food, provided you're exercising enough to burn it off.
When I'm backpacking, I need a good 4000+ calories a day. Mountaineers need 7000+ calories. I don't recall offhand what Tour de France cyclists need, but it was a godawful number.
You can't get that kind of caloric intake eating carrots, man. You *gotta* eat fatty foods to do it.
If you're a peasant working your ass off, a high-fat diet may be a necessity. Hence the termite. Choc-a-bloc full o' fatty goodness!
Shya. Instead of being suspended for a couple of weeks, the principal would be canned.
Fair should be fair: kick the little shit-disturber out of that school *permanently*.
Teach some hard facts about life. Like, if you put up a fake picture of your boss fucking the dog, he's probably gonna fire you. If you put up a fake picture of your wife shaggin' the dog, she's probably gonna divorce you. Put up a faked picture of your principal doing the bad, and he's gonna kick your ass right outta there.
Another problem with glass lenses is the distortion seen by people I'm talking to. One eye is going to look normal... and the other will be shown as a big gaping hole straight through my head, what with the coke-bottle-bottom sized lense! It'd be very distracting.
The new disposable contacts are probably my first choice, followed by laser surgery. But, as I said, getting older seems to be helping.:-)
Anyway, it's not a problem right now. I function quite well with things as they are, so I don't see a need to dash out and remedy the problem.
Bah. Back in its day, OS/9 (the real OS/9, from Microware) was running circles around AmigaOS. Pre-emptive, fully re-entrant, API similar to Unix, and fit in less a 16K ROM in its most embedded form. Had a GUI system with widgets (RAVE) that were beyond any other system's capabilities at the time.
Of course, as an OS designed for the embedded controller market, it didn't see a lot of use in the home...
QNX has been around since nineteen-bloody-eighty. That's over twenty years.
How the hell do they stay in business if "nobody" uses it?
It's all over the damn place. It's a fanfuckingtastic embedded system, for starters. And it's fully mature, unlike *some* OSes I could name [kaff]linux[kaff].
Ah! Now, in an earlier post, I revealed that I've 20/10 vision in one eye, and 20/200 in the other, and that the 20/10 bit is no big deal. Hasn't improved my life at all.
But once upon a time, I did get a corrective lense for the bad eye.
My god! Did *THAT* make a difference!
You remember those old ViewMaster stereoscopic slideshows? My entire life, for the time I had the one contact lense, was lived in that. Everything within a few feet of me literally "popped out" at me. It was real trippy...
Unfortunately, it's damn difficult to wear a single lense. It feels like one eye has a sheet of plywood stuck in it... so I gave it up. Went back to flatland.
Turns out that beyond a few feet distance, your eyes don't use stereoscopic vision to tell distance. They use other visual cues. Basically, everything in my life look about as 3D as your living room does when viewed from the kitchen...
I've got 20/10 vision in one eye, and 20/200 in the other (although that's improving as I age!)
And you know what? It's no big deal. 20/10 doesn't give me superpowers. I've never found it to be unusually useful. Indeed, I can't imagine that it makes one iota of difference in my life.
The 20/200 is annoying, though. I believe I could claim to be legally blind, but that'd probably pose problems for having a drivers' license...
Anyway, I can't see the adaptive optics, 20/10 vision thing being real popular. It just wouldn't be worth the hassle of wearing all the gear.
I'm pretty sure the Jesus story is constructed of wholecloth. I figure there was a fellow running around about 2000 years ago who tried to implement reform in the Jewish church, and was killed for it.
And I figure the story has been embellished to the point of myth. Which is where the essay you refer to does quite well: it points out a bunch of myths that were used to embellish the Christ story.
And in the end, I'm believe that Christianity is not at all what the original reformist agitator had intended to accomplish.
Which is ironic, because I'm pretty sure that there are several things that are undoubtedly true about Christ's goals during his later years:
- to reform the Jewish religion (not abolish it, and not to create a new religion).
- to get people to be nice to each other (not to punish each other with threats of damnation).
- to get people to worship god (not to worship his own self).
Instead, what happened is that his reforms were hijacked by Paul, who founded a new religion based on the worship of the dead man, and got really self-righteous about being mean to people.
I'm pretty sure "Christianity" is the antithesis of what Christ wanted.
Feel free to counterargue this, but please don't resort to flaming me on a personal level. That ain't nice, and it certainly ain't Christian. (If you're not Christian, and you do flame me, please explain why!)
I'm glad to hear you've chosen to stay away from the cineplexes, and from Hollydumb films on the whole. If enough of us did that, perhaps we'd see some changes. Though I fear Bill's probably right: the great Dumbing Down of America is ensuring that the masses will be fed pap.
Look, last time I went to a Famous Players, a fire alarm sounded halfway through. When the staff stopped the film and suggested that it was time to leave, we all trooped out. Twenty minutes later, the fire department determined it was all a mistake, and let us back in.
So far, acceptable. But then some fucknut up in the projector booth decided that they'd start the film five minutes before where it was stopped. Except, of course, that you can't rewind a fucking 70mm film. And they had no idea how to thread it back into the projector, without rewinding the entire film and using the auto-loader.
After a half-hour of this bullshit, I went out to the front counter to suggest that they'd best give us some free popcorn, keep the rowdy masses quiet.
I was told that there was no way in hell they'd do that. I calmly told them that perhaps they should put customer satisfaction before twenty-five cents of popcorn kernals, but was again told that there was no bloody way they were giving it over.
I *WILL* *NOT* *EVER* *GO* *BACK*
The only way to enact change in business practices is to punish those businesses that mistreat their customers, and reward those that treat them well.
For the past six months, I've waited three extra weeks, and watched the movies in our local reporatory, at half the price, with half the crowd.
So do the same thing. Quit buying the movie food, for starters. And if you've got a classy little filmhouse that shows alternative movies, start going there instead.
You got choices, man. If you *choose* to keep supporting a theatre that runs advertisements, then quitcher whining.
"He honestly seems to support that programmers should be materially impoverished, not enriched, by their rare and highly useful talents."
I think maybe you're on to something here. RMS isn't a programmer: he is an artiste, in the fine tradition of those artistes who hole up in some godforsaken converted garage, with a hotplate for a stove and shit-all to eat because, hey, to be a truly great artist, one must suffer.
He's like some arts college kid who thinks he's the next hot-damn, and looks down his nose at the "sell-outs" like Robert Bateman, who make hundreds of thousands of dollars off the sale of their paintings. Ain't art if it's popular or demands a high price, you know. Ain't art if you can live off it.
Poor RMS. Truth is, he's never grown out of his early twenties. He still Knows Everything About Anything, has The One True Vision, and Invokes The Right To Tell Others What They Should Be Doing.
I sure hope so; I'm deeply interested in trying to apply groupware to some of my client's needs; but I'm unable to actually contribute anything, because I can't program and I'm not entirely sure what-all groupware can/should/might do...:-(
Please refer to [this post], who's author understood what I'm saying.
So we do what you say: document and study it, record it to pictures and video, and then seal the cave from all humanity.
Once sealed, *their existence is immaterial*. The crystals could vaporize, and no one would be the wiser; or they could treble in size, and no one would know. No living thing would benefit from their existence... nor would any living thing be harmed by their loss.
In effect, they become an artifact of history and their present-day existence would be mere supposition and imagination.
That's infinitely more wasteful of their existence than opening up the caves to throngs of tourists.
If you really need to get tweaked about something, then please get tweaked about something that counts. There are plenty of things happening in the Brazilian rainforests that are having deep and lasting negative impact on living plants and creatures.
For starters, you can get uppity about the destruction caused by the rock hounds who are supplying all the new age shops with their "harmonious" crystals. Most of those crystals are obtained through extremely destructive practices. Yet not a single crystal-worshipping purchasers cares to acknowledge that they're supporting the destruction of rainforests. Hypocrites.
...at developing an open-source groupware app, that I'll believe it when I see it. Sad to say, but none of the half-dozen I've investigated over the past three years ever made it past the "talk about" stage.:-(
Chow some valium, pal. It'll do you a world of good.
If you can find contentment and fulfilment just 'knowing' that the rocks are there, then they don't actually have to be there: it's a Schrodinger's Cat situation.
Myself, I'll need to see 'em to believe 'em. I'd prefer to see them in their natural setting, and I'd very much prefer that setting to last millenia and enthrall millions of people.
If they're shut off from view, well, then, they might as well be destroyed. If I have to look at old pictures or otherwise imagine that I'm seeing them, then I can just as well imagine something even more grand. The existance or non-existance of the marvel becomes immaterial, if no one's allowed to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn straight.
It's the same patterns, over and over again. Television: weren't so bad when there were only a handful of stations; now we have 120 channels of shit on the tv to choose from, and almost all of 'em will make your eyes bleed. Radio: weren't so bad when there were only a few stations in town; now we have dozens of crap-pop teeny spooge to numb us. Slashdot: great place a few years ago, when the few hundred/few thousand users were savvy; now it's overrun by dolts and assholes.
And on and on. The more popular anything in American culture gets, the worse it gets. There's an undying, unrelenting drive toward bottom-dollar profiting, which all-too-often equates to pandering to the lowest common denominators.
It's a society driven toward making trailer-park trash feel like they're an acceptable, useful, necessary part of society.
The fool thing is, the intelligensia and privileged buy into this bullshit. They watch fucking "Survivor" and pretend that it's an acceptable way to spend an hour of one's life.
The Internet will never again be as interesting, stimulating, challenging and refreshing as it was back at the tail end of the '80s and beginning of the '90s. The unwashed, ill-bred and ignorant masses have come online, and they're ruining it as surely as they ruin everything else they touch.
[And the only thing I'm curious about, is whether anyone will self-identify with the low-class dregs of society that I've been dissin', and will take offense! Flame on, you slovenly patrons of KMart, you viewers of daytime soap operas, you wretched fans of Brittany Spears!]
--
Given what's falling out of the bilges of the ships that sail into SF harbour, I think the UBC Beetle should be the smallest going concern. Seen some of the dumbass stunts on Nash Bridges? That's gotta be bad for the bay.
What really tweaked the noses of Americans was this: UBC owned joO! All your bridge are belong to us!
Hey, s'alright. We Canucks are a humble bunch. We know how hard it is to admit that we r0oL you. Shucks.
--
I figure turning the computer off is the worst thing you can do to it.
When does a lightbulb burn out?
When you turn it on, of course. They seldom burn out when they're up to, ah, speed.
Same thing with electronic gear. That first millisecond of power-on is a bit of a strain on everything, and the first few minutes of getting everything up to running temperatures is another stressor.
Might as well leave the poor thing running...
[he says, thinking that perhaps his ACPI thingamagummy is probably actually powering off the drives (they spin down, fer sure) and putting the CPU into a heavy-duty sleep cycle... and the monitor power-saving feep probably lets it all cool down a heckuva lot, too...)
--
Typo! Is an A7V.
--
I do. But the downtime in terms of restoring partitions, reinstalling Windows2k and reinstalling applications, plus patches and tweaks and shit... gahd.
--
I've been toying with the idea of installing a Linux Distro. I have about 20Gb of unused drive sitting here.
But it's my bread-and-butter drive: my whole business life is on it.
I have an Asus K7V, and a big IBM drive. Apparently in that combo, Linux will eat my files. If that carried over to the Windows partitions, I'd be toast...
Think I'll keep away from Linux for a while longer. I can't afford data loss like that.
--
LOL.
:-)
Sorry, Jon, but you try because you've bought into a particularly well-designed meme: that *you* will be saved only if *you* try to save others.
It's a malicious and destructive meme.
Indeed, it makes an excellent model for computer viruses. Imagine receiving an EMail virus that popped up a dialog box stating your two choices: (A) ignore the meme, and it will erase your hard drive; or (B) send the meme to everyone in your addressbook, and it will not erase your hard drive.
Most people would choose (B), not realizing that there is a third choice: reboot the system and erase the virus.
You've fallen hook, line and sinker for option (B), Jon. And the only people you're fooling are those people who don't realize that there's a third option.
The rest of us... well, we're kind of abhorrently amused by the antics of you and your ilk.
--
Losing the fat isn't necessarily desirable. Fat is a perfectly healthy food, provided you're exercising enough to burn it off.
When I'm backpacking, I need a good 4000+ calories a day. Mountaineers need 7000+ calories. I don't recall offhand what Tour de France cyclists need, but it was a godawful number.
You can't get that kind of caloric intake eating carrots, man. You *gotta* eat fatty foods to do it.
If you're a peasant working your ass off, a high-fat diet may be a necessity. Hence the termite. Choc-a-bloc full o' fatty goodness!
--
Shya. Instead of being suspended for a couple of weeks, the principal would be canned.
Fair should be fair: kick the little shit-disturber out of that school *permanently*.
Teach some hard facts about life. Like, if you put up a fake picture of your boss fucking the dog, he's probably gonna fire you. If you put up a fake picture of your wife shaggin' the dog, she's probably gonna divorce you. Put up a faked picture of your principal doing the bad, and he's gonna kick your ass right outta there.
--
I'll betcha that if the principal were to put up a website mocking a student, he'd get it in the fookin' goolies in a nasty way.
Nice system. Real fair.
--
Another problem with glass lenses is the distortion seen by people I'm talking to. One eye is going to look normal... and the other will be shown as a big gaping hole straight through my head, what with the coke-bottle-bottom sized lense! It'd be very distracting.
:-)
The new disposable contacts are probably my first choice, followed by laser surgery. But, as I said, getting older seems to be helping.
Anyway, it's not a problem right now. I function quite well with things as they are, so I don't see a need to dash out and remedy the problem.
--
Bah. Back in its day, OS/9 (the real OS/9, from Microware) was running circles around AmigaOS. Pre-emptive, fully re-entrant, API similar to Unix, and fit in less a 16K ROM in its most embedded form. Had a GUI system with widgets (RAVE) that were beyond any other system's capabilities at the time.
Of course, as an OS designed for the embedded controller market, it didn't see a lot of use in the home...
--
QNX has been around since nineteen-bloody-eighty. That's over twenty years.
How the hell do they stay in business if "nobody" uses it?
It's all over the damn place. It's a fanfuckingtastic embedded system, for starters. And it's fully mature, unlike *some* OSes I could name [kaff]linux[kaff].
--
Ah! Now, in an earlier post, I revealed that I've 20/10 vision in one eye, and 20/200 in the other, and that the 20/10 bit is no big deal. Hasn't improved my life at all.
But once upon a time, I did get a corrective lense for the bad eye.
My god! Did *THAT* make a difference!
You remember those old ViewMaster stereoscopic slideshows? My entire life, for the time I had the one contact lense, was lived in that. Everything within a few feet of me literally "popped out" at me. It was real trippy...
Unfortunately, it's damn difficult to wear a single lense. It feels like one eye has a sheet of plywood stuck in it... so I gave it up. Went back to flatland.
Turns out that beyond a few feet distance, your eyes don't use stereoscopic vision to tell distance. They use other visual cues. Basically, everything in my life look about as 3D as your living room does when viewed from the kitchen...
Better than being blind, I say.
--
I've got 20/10 vision in one eye, and 20/200 in the other (although that's improving as I age!)
And you know what? It's no big deal. 20/10 doesn't give me superpowers. I've never found it to be unusually useful. Indeed, I can't imagine that it makes one iota of difference in my life.
The 20/200 is annoying, though. I believe I could claim to be legally blind, but that'd probably pose problems for having a drivers' license...
Anyway, I can't see the adaptive optics, 20/10 vision thing being real popular. It just wouldn't be worth the hassle of wearing all the gear.
--
Nah, I don't believe that the essay is correct.
I'm pretty sure the Jesus story is constructed of wholecloth. I figure there was a fellow running around about 2000 years ago who tried to implement reform in the Jewish church, and was killed for it.
And I figure the story has been embellished to the point of myth. Which is where the essay you refer to does quite well: it points out a bunch of myths that were used to embellish the Christ story.
And in the end, I'm believe that Christianity is not at all what the original reformist agitator had intended to accomplish.
--
Christianity is a mighty fine death religion.
Which is ironic, because I'm pretty sure that there are several things that are undoubtedly true about Christ's goals during his later years:
- to reform the Jewish religion (not abolish it, and not to create a new religion).
- to get people to be nice to each other (not to punish each other with threats of damnation).
- to get people to worship god (not to worship his own self).
Instead, what happened is that his reforms were hijacked by Paul, who founded a new religion based on the worship of the dead man, and got really self-righteous about being mean to people.
I'm pretty sure "Christianity" is the antithesis of what Christ wanted.
Feel free to counterargue this, but please don't resort to flaming me on a personal level. That ain't nice, and it certainly ain't Christian. (If you're not Christian, and you do flame me, please explain why!)
--
Aha. So you *do* have a choice.
I'm glad to hear you've chosen to stay away from the cineplexes, and from Hollydumb films on the whole. If enough of us did that, perhaps we'd see some changes. Though I fear Bill's probably right: the great Dumbing Down of America is ensuring that the masses will be fed pap.
--
SO QUIT GOING TO THE MOVIES ALREADY!
My god.
Look, last time I went to a Famous Players, a fire alarm sounded halfway through. When the staff stopped the film and suggested that it was time to leave, we all trooped out. Twenty minutes later, the fire department determined it was all a mistake, and let us back in.
So far, acceptable. But then some fucknut up in the projector booth decided that they'd start the film five minutes before where it was stopped. Except, of course, that you can't rewind a fucking 70mm film. And they had no idea how to thread it back into the projector, without rewinding the entire film and using the auto-loader.
After a half-hour of this bullshit, I went out to the front counter to suggest that they'd best give us some free popcorn, keep the rowdy masses quiet.
I was told that there was no way in hell they'd do that. I calmly told them that perhaps they should put customer satisfaction before twenty-five cents of popcorn kernals, but was again told that there was no bloody way they were giving it over.
I *WILL* *NOT* *EVER* *GO* *BACK*
The only way to enact change in business practices is to punish those businesses that mistreat their customers, and reward those that treat them well.
For the past six months, I've waited three extra weeks, and watched the movies in our local reporatory, at half the price, with half the crowd.
So do the same thing. Quit buying the movie food, for starters. And if you've got a classy little filmhouse that shows alternative movies, start going there instead.
You got choices, man. If you *choose* to keep supporting a theatre that runs advertisements, then quitcher whining.
--
"He honestly seems to support that programmers should be materially impoverished, not enriched, by their rare and highly useful talents."
I think maybe you're on to something here. RMS isn't a programmer: he is an artiste, in the fine tradition of those artistes who hole up in some godforsaken converted garage, with a hotplate for a stove and shit-all to eat because, hey, to be a truly great artist, one must suffer.
He's like some arts college kid who thinks he's the next hot-damn, and looks down his nose at the "sell-outs" like Robert Bateman, who make hundreds of thousands of dollars off the sale of their paintings. Ain't art if it's popular or demands a high price, you know. Ain't art if you can live off it.
Poor RMS. Truth is, he's never grown out of his early twenties. He still Knows Everything About Anything, has The One True Vision, and Invokes The Right To Tell Others What They Should Be Doing.
--
I sure hope so; I'm deeply interested in trying to apply groupware to some of my client's needs; but I'm unable to actually contribute anything, because I can't program and I'm not entirely sure what-all groupware can/should/might do... :-(
--
Please refer to [this post], who's author understood what I'm saying.
So we do what you say: document and study it, record it to pictures and video, and then seal the cave from all humanity.
Once sealed, *their existence is immaterial*. The crystals could vaporize, and no one would be the wiser; or they could treble in size, and no one would know. No living thing would benefit from their existence... nor would any living thing be harmed by their loss.
In effect, they become an artifact of history and their present-day existence would be mere supposition and imagination.
That's infinitely more wasteful of their existence than opening up the caves to throngs of tourists.
If you really need to get tweaked about something, then please get tweaked about something that counts. There are plenty of things happening in the Brazilian rainforests that are having deep and lasting negative impact on living plants and creatures.
For starters, you can get uppity about the destruction caused by the rock hounds who are supplying all the new age shops with their "harmonious" crystals. Most of those crystals are obtained through extremely destructive practices. Yet not a single crystal-worshipping purchasers cares to acknowledge that they're supporting the destruction of rainforests. Hypocrites.
--
Hey, when you've seen the size of my upthrusting crystal, you'll wonder why I don't exploit it as a tourist attraction!
--
...at developing an open-source groupware app, that I'll believe it when I see it. Sad to say, but none of the half-dozen I've investigated over the past three years ever made it past the "talk about" stage. :-(
--
Chow some valium, pal. It'll do you a world of good.
If you can find contentment and fulfilment just 'knowing' that the rocks are there, then they don't actually have to be there: it's a Schrodinger's Cat situation.
Myself, I'll need to see 'em to believe 'em. I'd prefer to see them in their natural setting, and I'd very much prefer that setting to last millenia and enthrall millions of people.
If they're shut off from view, well, then, they might as well be destroyed. If I have to look at old pictures or otherwise imagine that I'm seeing them, then I can just as well imagine something even more grand. The existance or non-existance of the marvel becomes immaterial, if no one's allowed to see it.
--