Yeah, but libraries will probably just restrict everyone to make things easier, especially if there's a hefty fine (or imprisonment) for negligent noncompliance.
Noble, but even Ghandi at one point admitted that there is a time for violence. I think that Ghandi and MLK Jr. were the last of their kind, not for a lack of idealism, but because people have learned how to combat these things (if Ghandi had tried his famous hunger-strike-while-in-prison technique today, he would have been strapped down and force-fed.) You say that the people of the USA would not stand for this and that... well they apparently don't have any problem at all with Free Speech Zones, warrant-less search and seizures without probable cause, secret prisons, and indefinite detentions without trial (I could link you up, but goddamnit this isn't some conspiracy nutcase bullshit; this is right under our noses! Try Google news or Wikipedia.)
I think you're just a tad naive to think that it stops here, that the American people are going to suddenly grow a backbone and conduct peaceful protests and everything will be put right again. Yeah, it could still happen, I hope to God it happens, but it doesn't always work out like that. What if tomorrow a terrorist set off a small nuke in the middle of a big city? If you think that's unrealistic, then how about a fertilizer bomb laced with radioactive dust (the finer the better) so that it will contaminate a large portion of the city? Let's say that this happens several times over the course of a month--major explosions at landmarks and crowded venues, widespread radioactive contamination. Even if the radiation doesn't pose a huge health risk, even if only a few hundred people die, the people will go fucking APESHIT, and the president will be able to do whatever the hell he wants all in the name of combating terrorism. Let's say they do start throwing random people in jail and suppressing free speech and such. Let's say that a group of students do eventually come out to protest. Do you really think that a Tianamen-style smackdown is out of the question?
So let's say the president shows up himself in an armored car, ostensibly to talk to with the protestors (in reality, he never leaves the vehicle) and the secret service uses that neat law they've discovered which lets them appropriate the land around the president and arrest anyone arbitrarily who is in it (remember, this part has ALREADY HAPPENED. If you walk up to the president and tell him you disagree with his civil rights policies, the secret service can arrest you, and they have at the very least kicked out people for doing nothing more than wearing "Support Our Civil Rights!" T-shirts to functions where the president is present. The people in question did nothing else beyond wearing the T-shirts, yet they were asked to leave under threat of imprisonment) So, they force out all of the reporters into "free speech zones" and then move in with the national guard, guns blazing. Afterwards they claim that they acted in self defense, the people in the crowd were throwing rocks and maybe they found a gun on the body of one them, etc., and there won't be any decent footage to prove otherwise. And the citizens of the USA will cheer them on, because no one should be questioning our president in this time of peril!
The thing is, once started the "time of peril" never actually ends. See: 1984, the Nazi party, etc.
There is a place for guns. Guns in the hands of your populace keeps the government from plunging too far down the slippery slope. People who want to ban guns only talk about private citizens--of course the police and the national guard and the army get to keep their guns!
Sorry, but that's crap. People as a whole are inherently good, and the moment you start denying them the right and ability to defend themselves is the moment you start the inevitable corruption of those in charge who are allowed to carry guns. If any country has done this right it's Switzerland, where all males over 18 (and many females) are REQUIRED BY LAW to maintain and train in the use of a fully-automatic assault file which they must keep on hand at all times. Guess what, their violent crime rate is a hell of a lot *lower* than ours...
The buy and hold investor historically makes 15%, including down years, avraged accross all stocks.
I call bullshit. You're saying that even on down years, the average stock goes up 15%? I don't think so. You might (and I mean *might*) get a number like that after analyzing a select group of stocks (S&P 500?) for a limited timeframe, but hindsight is 20/20.
Lack of fossil fuels (or any other raw material, for that matter) will not cause deindustrialization. We won't just "run out" of anything. Supply will slowly decrease, driving up prices thereby decreasing consumption while people search for alternatives. Eventually, when gas becomes too expensive and short in supply, we'll switch to biodiesel, ethenol, or hydrogen (yes, I know people say that hydrogen = natural gas, but the fact remains you *can* make hydrogen from water, and I'm sure someone will eventually design a power plant optimized for hydrogen electrolysis.) Electricity will switch to hydro, windmills, solar, tidal, geothermal and nuclear (as stupid as people are over this issue, eventually necessity will win out over nuclear paranoia.)
Yes, it will be a painful and fairly costly switch, but it's well within our means (technologically speaking) and financial necessity will eventually force it to happen.
True, all too true. I've worked with the physically and mentally handicapped for the past 5 years, and I can definitely confirm this. If people would just admit that the valley is there, it would be a lot easier for them to overcome it. Unfortuately, most are in denial, and as you said this a primary reason for wars and strife in general.
Btw, I couldn't help noticing your nick. What side of the valley do you think Gadget is on?;-)
I think the term can apply to things other than robots. Japanese-style animation, I don't have a problem with, but I can kinda see how someone could. For me, a prime example of something that's smack dab in the middle of the valley is CG along the lines of Baby Geniuses. I never saw the movie, but the trailers were bad enough. Who the hell finds that the least bit cute? It's disturbing as hell. Now Look Who's Talking was another matter entirely. That was alright, even cute at times. It would also be OK if they went to the other side of the valley--if they could do the CG in a toned-down, mostly realistic fashion. The valley is obviously not an objective thing (hell, enough people liked the original BG that they actually made a sequel), but I think most people do have their own personal valley in regards to human-ness, and not everyone is eager to get over them. I have no desire to get over my revulsion just so I can sit through Baby Geniuses.
Similarly, I think that a lot of people will have no desire to get over being creeped out by an android like this one until the utility of having one becomes too large to ignore. Again, I wouldn't have a major problem, but I can see how a lot of people would.
And if you're doing something REALLY evil, you'd best use an OTP. If you just need to transmit text, you can fit enough entropic pad material on a DVD to last you a very, very long time. You'd need to combine it with a passphrase, though, and/or ensure that the pad is disguised as or embedded in something else.
No one uses plain DES anymore; it was broken decades ago. 3DES is fairly secure, but slow as hell. No point in using i3DES except maybe for legacy support. AES is probably good enough to guard against casual (i.e. mass) surveillence, though personally I would go wth Blowfish or Twofish due to faster large-key performance and the fact AES is likely to be cracked first by virtue of the fact that it's a government standard now and people on both sides of the fence will be trying like mad to crack it (either to gain an advantage or to prove it can withstand attack X.)
It's not overpriced, because MacOS is very much worth it. However, I'm sick of Apple fanboys (I'm a fanboy too; just not a diehard/delusional fanboy) pulling random example out of the air and then claim that Apples and PCs are equivalently priced. With a bit of hunting, you can get a new, very decent PC laptop in the $400-$600 range. Within 2 weeks of looking around, I picked up my mom a Dell 600m for just under $600, tax and shipping included, with 512 RAM, Bluetooth, 80 gig hard drive, a dual-layer DVD burner, 4 hour battery life, and it only weighs something like 6 pounds. Could you *ever* get a deal like that on a Macintosh laptop? Deals like that only take a little bit of effort (usually just setting up a few fatwallet.com alerts and waiting a few weeks.)
Desktops are still no contest. Hang around fatwallet.com for a month and you can *easily* build yourself a nice little box for under $200 ($300-$350 if you don't want to go bargain hunting.) And if you don't want to build your own, Dell routinely has deals on their desktops and servers. At least two years ago I picked up an SC420 server with PCI-E, DDR2 (this was back when everyone was still using DDR), a 2.8 Ghz HT P4 with 1 meg of cache, SATA, and gigabit ethernet for a little over $300 shipped.
Last time i checked, the cheapest desktop Mac was what... $500?
Yes, the difference between the pre-sale prices of the PC and Mac isn't as big as it once was, but it's still there, it's still very significant (especially on low-end desktops, where it approaches a 50% price difference), and the fact remains you CAN'T find decent sales on Mac laptops or Mac desktops; they just don't exist. I've had fatwallet.com alerts for years now, and Mac deals just don't come up, and even when they do they're pretty pathetic.
One more example (and yes, it's a Dell. I can't help it--they're so damn cheap!): One year ago I noticed a fatwallet alert and picked up an Inspiron 6000D laptop for $780 after tax and shipping. 1.5 Ghz Pentium M, a gig of DDR2 RAM, B/G Wifi, an *awesome* 15.x" WUXGA (that's 1920×1200 widescreen) LCD , 60 gig hard drive, CD-RW burner/DVD-ROM, and an ATI Mobile x300 graphics card with 128MB of dedicated GDDR3. Sound too good to be true? I'm using it at this very moment. And this wasn't a fluke, either--over a thousand fellow fatwallet'ers got similar deals from Dell that day.
Tell me, when was the last time Apple had a sale like that?
I should point out that Amazon.com is much much much more than a bookstore now. They *directly* carry many more items (from food to clothes to eletronics to furniture) than superstores such as Wal Mart, and they *indirectly* carry (i.e. though Amazon marketplace sellers) just about anything you could ever want to possibly buy. Their prices are generally much lower than B&M, and with the majority of their items, they offer free shipping for all orders over $25.
I prefer talking to a person to make sure I get advice
I prefer Wikipedia and Google. They're a hell of a lot more reliable than a saleperson or customer service rep, especially one from a big chain. You do have a point with returns--it's usually hassle when dealing with online business, and you might have to pay for return shipping. However, in the past 3 or 4 years of heavy online shopping for nearly all of my large-ish purchases, this has only come up a like twice. The monetary savings more than makes up for this rare hassle.
Offcourse there are people like you but might I suggest something? Are you perhaps just a modern version of the catalog shopper?
Catalog shopping was never (to my knowlege.) much cheaper than shopping at the B&M, at least not in America. The ease of visiting multiple websites within a few minutes makes online competition much fiercer, and this drives the prices down in the way that catalog competition never could.
Here in the real world, online companies have to pay rent (or construction + property tax) and utilities - they don't operate out of the back of a pickup truck. (And those premises require upkeep and maintenance too.)
They might pay 1/10 the rent of a B&M business, because they don't care if they're in the crappy part of town.
more expensive once you invite in the general public. Customers are spoiled. They must be *impressed* or at the very least satiated. On the
They don't have to pay cashiers - but they do have to pay pickers and packers. (In fact their costs are *higher*, because they have to pay for support as well as pickers and packers - where a B&M store can (and does) pay use it's cashier for all three.)
Doubtful. A cashier must have a decent appearance, be able to interact with customers in a halfway friendly manner, be trusted enough around lots of cash (or at least closely monitored around lots of cash), be trained to operate the register, etc.
On the other hand, the picker/packer must be able to 1. Read the screen and 2. Pack the items and slap a shipping label on the box. Any socially-inept slob with 5 minutes of training can be a packer. Cashiers have stricter requirements, require more training, and require more micromanagement and supervision (e.g. stealing.) Support is largely automated, and the non-automated portions can be outsourced (or at the very least provided by telecommuting employees from across the country.) Support people don't even need good people skills--they just read from a script or punch out the pregenerated reply emails.
The fact that online businesses employ more people to do the job of one B&M person doesn't change the fact that those people are probably 10x more efficient and since they don't have direct contact with cash OR the public, they're a hell of a lot easier to hire and cheaper to manage. You also neglect to take into account the types of employees that.com stores usually lack--e.g. sales or security (yes, there will be *some* security at the.com warehouse, but the lack of public access and lack of employees' direct access to cash makes this much easier--and therefore cheaper.)
Nothing has *no* overhead, but you're fooling yourself if you think that a lack of a commercial-district building open to the public isn't saving the.coms a TON of money. Commericially-zoned property is much more expensive. This means magnified rents or magnified purchase costs and property taxes. Much more money will have to be spend on interior design. The utilities bill will generally be much higher. Insurance will be MUCH higher. You must have cashiers and customer service and security around *at all times*, even when there aren't any customers. Sales people, if you have any, will steal your profit in the form of a commission (or if they're commission-less, they're either have a rather high hourly wage or they'll be very apathetic and ineffective about doing their job.) You have to pay for shopping carts and the land for the parking lot and cameras to watch over the parking lot (at least if you're a major chain) and people to WATCH the cameras that look over the parking lot. You have to hire guys to paint your building nice and pretty (.com warehouse has no problem looking rusted and shitty.) You hire guys to come in and replace your lights when they blow, service your cash registers when they go on the fritz, mop the floors when they get dirty. Yes, to an extent this is all done at the warehouse as well, but they expend maybe 1/100 of the effort as the retail store. They don't care if the floor is dirty as hell, so long as they aren't violating any OSHA regs. They don't care if they have bare incandescent bulbs hanging 5' above everyone's heads (vs. those huge flourescent bulbs hanging 20' or 30' above your head at Wal-Mart. I bet they're just *slightly* more expensive to change.) If the air conditioner in the warehouse breaks down,
I don't know. I find that the only thing I actually buy from B&M stores nowadays are perishables, things I must have immediately and things that really need to be examined (or tried on) in person. Amazon.com has cheaper prices on just about everything else. If it's not something I need *that day*, why would I want to haul my ass down to Best Buy or Walmart or Costco just for the privilege waiting in line and then paying MORE?
And hell, if you're too cheap for Amazon (and are willing to take a small risk), there's always eBay.
Letstalk.com makes B&M cell phone retailers a fucking JOKE--they literally offer dozens upon dozens of phones for hundreds less than the B&M stores--and that's before rebate. After rebate, you can get nearly anything free--RAZR, PEBL, Samsung SGH-t809, at least one of their Blackberry models... you can even get up to 5 of them free, if you're starting a family line (we recently did this and it kicks ass. Saved many hundreds of dollars, and for myself I picked up an N-Gage QD for -$50 after rebate. Don't insult it until you try it; Nokia fixed most of the design flaws with the QD revision. Basically, I'm being PAID $50 to use a very powerful, very underrated Symbian S60 smartphone. Kickass.) Just for grins we walked into a B&M retail store and asked the reps if they could give us a similar deal. They simply laughed in our faces and shook their heads.
My girlfriend and I (cue the 'liar' jokes) would've been fucking broke a long time ago if we couldn't buy our porn and sex toys online. The markup at B&M sex shops is nothing short of heart-stopping.
I'm not even going to get into fatwallet.com... let's just say that I wind up getting at least 2 or 3 INCREDIBLE deals per month. (Think over 50% off on stuff that is NEVER heavily discounted at B&M stores. Over 75% off is not uncommon. Over 90% off the typical B&M price isn't out of the question.)
The simple fact of the matter is shipping costs are nothing compared to the overhead of rent (or construction + property tax), utilities, cashiers and sales reps and customer service reps (who can't be outsourced, unlike online stores' reps), uniforms for the reps, general upkeep and maintenance, etc. We're beyond having to prove this--just walk into *any* B&M store and see how long it takes you to find something that you can't get cheaper off of Amazon or Buy.com or Outpost.com or eBay. With gas prices the way they are, I do indeed think that the internet will eventually spell the doom of the vast majority of B&M businesses. B&M currently has a lot of momentum, though, and I think it will be at least another decade or two before we see any real decline.
Making B&M obsolete isn't a joke; it's just not going to happen that quickly. Google's calendar has nothing to do with the internet retail scene. eBay is thriving, Amazon is well in the black, Buy.com is running commercials now, fatwallet.com's forums are overflowing with deal-hunters, and I seriously can't remember the last time I bought something at a B&M store that cost more than $20.
Get a RAZR. They're easily had for free after rebate with a new 1-year plan. Ignore the bluetooth and camera if you want--it has very good battery life (5-6 day battery life), very good reception, integrated aerial, a speakerphone, large buttons, compatible with wired (and wireless) headsets, has a fairly large screen, is very slimline and is made out of metal.
Even if you don't want to sign up for a year, I really don't see the big deal in paying $100-$150 for a quality phone, especially when most people are paying $50+ monthly for service. There are plenty of decent I-just-want-a-freaking-phone cell phones out there... the problem is a lot of people see the word "camera" or "mp3" and they immediately assume they suck and/or are incredibly expensive. The fact is cameras are practically a standard feature on phones nowadays, and if you don't want a camera or bluetooth or an mp3 player or whatever then don't bother to learn how to use that particular feature! Yes, certain 10-gadgets-in-one devices do have shitty cell phone capabilities, and some of them are grossly overpriced, but they aren't ALL that way, and anyone who knows how to use Google or Amazon (user reviews are handy) should know this by now.
I'm sick of smokers comparing their deadly habit to drinking. "Poison" or not, a glass or two of wine (or even beer) a day has positive effects that far outweigh the negatives. It decreases your chance of a heart attack, it increases/retains your mental sharpness as you age (at least, it's been proven in women--they haven't done a study on men yet), and as long as you don't exceed a drink or two per day, your liver will be just fine. Alcohol isn't poison any more than salt is poison. Both can kill you, but both generally do good things for your body when taken in moderation. The same *cannot* be said of smoked tobacco.
Yes, they should freaking ban smoking in public establishments because of worker health reasons. It's bad enough that I (and every other taxpayer) has to pay *your* medical bill when you're 60 years old and dying of lung cancer, let alone yours and the workers and the poor kids dragged along by their parents to a combo bar/restaurant. You want to smoke? Do it outside or in your own home.
That pretty much covers it, does it? The idea that concerts were somehow being priced extra low in order to enhance CD sales is just plain retarded. Concert tickets are priced in order to maximize their profit, period, unless the artist gives a crap and actually has control over the ticket price (unlikely.)
People keep trying to compare making music to stuff like building houses or selling apples, but it's not. In the entire history of humanity, it never has been. If you're in the year 1200 and you walk by some peasant playing his lute in the streets, you either choose to throw money in his hat or you don't. Either way, you get to enjoy the music. Fast forward to 1980--you can choose to listen to the radio, make a copy of your friend's tape, or buy a tape yourself. Now you have the option of downloading it from the internet, too. Yeah, it's a little easier than recording tapes, but it still has its share of hassles and tradeoffs (such as lower sound quality.) And ultimately, the true fans will still choose to support their favored artists because it's the right thing to do. Music is an inherently emotional, inherently personal thing. It's arguably the purest, the least practical, the most abstract out of all of the art forms. If you're good enough and lucky enough to make money by making music, consider yourself blessed. Many of the greatest musicians in history lived and died in poverty (Mozart, black American musicians pre-1970s.) If you make money, you make it by the good will of your fans alone. No one who's successful will ever have their success taken away by illegal music downloads or tape recorders. Virtually every small time independant band I've seen has strongly encouraged illegal p2p as a method of promoting themselves. Why is that, I wonder? The difference is probably only noticable at the superstar level, and even then it's probably the difference between Metallica making $5 million and them making say, $3.8 million.
Seriously, who the fuck cares whether they're very rich vs. obscenely rich? Just shut up... Shut up you stupid, greedy, selfish, fucking sellouts... and stop suing 12-year-olds. Virtually every one of my friends "pirates" (I still can't figure out who invented this stupid term) music, yet without every one of them also buys CDs. In fact, I'm the only one who doesn't regularly buy CDs and that's because I refuse to buy RIAA CDs. (My most recent CD purchases were Black Sails on the Sunset, The Art of Drowning, and AFI by AFI (A Fire Inside). If you like grunge or punk or any other form of hard rock, you owe it to yourself to check them out. I'm not normally a huge punk fan, but these songs are complex, tempo-bending, hauntingly harmonizing, multi-part masterpieces. Their most recent album is pretty decent, but not nearly as good... plus they switched to a RIAA label. You can find all of their works, RIAA and non-RIAA, on Amazon.com)
Making a song is not like making a car. Treat your fans like 'consumers' and they're likely to treat you like just another soulless, manipulative, evil corporation. Music is a luxury, and it is already quite free on the radio (unlike TV, it's very easy to avoid the commercials if you live in a big city with lots of stations.) You should be fucking thankful I like your work enough to give you money, not trying to extort more out of me via the CD-R and blank tape 'tax' or suing me because I downloaded a few songs that I kinda/sorta like but not enough to spend $15+ for.
Slashdot Mirror
What the fuck is Qwest and how the fuck can I become a customer?
Yeah, but libraries will probably just restrict everyone to make things easier, especially if there's a hefty fine (or imprisonment) for negligent noncompliance.
Noble, but even Ghandi at one point admitted that there is a time for violence. I think that Ghandi and MLK Jr. were the last of their kind, not for a lack of idealism, but because people have learned how to combat these things (if Ghandi had tried his famous hunger-strike-while-in-prison technique today, he would have been strapped down and force-fed.) You say that the people of the USA would not stand for this and that... well they apparently don't have any problem at all with Free Speech Zones, warrant-less search and seizures without probable cause, secret prisons, and indefinite detentions without trial (I could link you up, but goddamnit this isn't some conspiracy nutcase bullshit; this is right under our noses! Try Google news or Wikipedia.)
I think you're just a tad naive to think that it stops here, that the American people are going to suddenly grow a backbone and conduct peaceful protests and everything will be put right again. Yeah, it could still happen, I hope to God it happens, but it doesn't always work out like that. What if tomorrow a terrorist set off a small nuke in the middle of a big city? If you think that's unrealistic, then how about a fertilizer bomb laced with radioactive dust (the finer the better) so that it will contaminate a large portion of the city? Let's say that this happens several times over the course of a month--major explosions at landmarks and crowded venues, widespread radioactive contamination. Even if the radiation doesn't pose a huge health risk, even if only a few hundred people die, the people will go fucking APESHIT, and the president will be able to do whatever the hell he wants all in the name of combating terrorism. Let's say they do start throwing random people in jail and suppressing free speech and such. Let's say that a group of students do eventually come out to protest. Do you really think that a Tianamen-style smackdown is out of the question?
So let's say the president shows up himself in an armored car, ostensibly to talk to with the protestors (in reality, he never leaves the vehicle) and the secret service uses that neat law they've discovered which lets them appropriate the land around the president and arrest anyone arbitrarily who is in it (remember, this part has ALREADY HAPPENED. If you walk up to the president and tell him you disagree with his civil rights policies, the secret service can arrest you, and they have at the very least kicked out people for doing nothing more than wearing "Support Our Civil Rights!" T-shirts to functions where the president is present. The people in question did nothing else beyond wearing the T-shirts, yet they were asked to leave under threat of imprisonment) So, they force out all of the reporters into "free speech zones" and then move in with the national guard, guns blazing. Afterwards they claim that they acted in self defense, the people in the crowd were throwing rocks and maybe they found a gun on the body of one them, etc., and there won't be any decent footage to prove otherwise. And the citizens of the USA will cheer them on, because no one should be questioning our president in this time of peril!
The thing is, once started the "time of peril" never actually ends. See: 1984, the Nazi party, etc.
There is a place for guns. Guns in the hands of your populace keeps the government from plunging too far down the slippery slope. People who want to ban guns only talk about private citizens--of course the police and the national guard and the army get to keep their guns!
Sorry, but that's crap. People as a whole are inherently good, and the moment you start denying them the right and ability to defend themselves is the moment you start the inevitable corruption of those in charge who are allowed to carry guns. If any country has done this right it's Switzerland, where all males over 18 (and many females) are REQUIRED BY LAW to maintain and train in the use of a fully-automatic assault file which they must keep on hand at all times. Guess what, their violent crime rate is a hell of a lot *lower* than ours...
Damn, dude... thanks. I just got a new sig.
The buy and hold investor historically makes 15%, including down years, avraged accross all stocks.
I call bullshit. You're saying that even on down years, the average stock goes up 15%? I don't think so. You might (and I mean *might*) get a number like that after analyzing a select group of stocks (S&P 500?) for a limited timeframe, but hindsight is 20/20.
Lack of fossil fuels (or any other raw material, for that matter) will not cause deindustrialization. We won't just "run out" of anything. Supply will slowly decrease, driving up prices thereby decreasing consumption while people search for alternatives. Eventually, when gas becomes too expensive and short in supply, we'll switch to biodiesel, ethenol, or hydrogen (yes, I know people say that hydrogen = natural gas, but the fact remains you *can* make hydrogen from water, and I'm sure someone will eventually design a power plant optimized for hydrogen electrolysis.) Electricity will switch to hydro, windmills, solar, tidal, geothermal and nuclear (as stupid as people are over this issue, eventually necessity will win out over nuclear paranoia.)
Yes, it will be a painful and fairly costly switch, but it's well within our means (technologically speaking) and financial necessity will eventually force it to happen.
Anyone who's ever been in a Sex Shop could've made the same prediction.
Don't you mean Chuck Norris?
I mean, he did come down from the heavens.
True, all too true. I've worked with the physically and mentally handicapped for the past 5 years, and I can definitely confirm this. If people would just admit that the valley is there, it would be a lot easier for them to overcome it. Unfortuately, most are in denial, and as you said this a primary reason for wars and strife in general.
;-)
Btw, I couldn't help noticing your nick. What side of the valley do you think Gadget is on?
I think the term can apply to things other than robots. Japanese-style animation, I don't have a problem with, but I can kinda see how someone could. For me, a prime example of something that's smack dab in the middle of the valley is CG along the lines of Baby Geniuses. I never saw the movie, but the trailers were bad enough. Who the hell finds that the least bit cute? It's disturbing as hell. Now Look Who's Talking was another matter entirely. That was alright, even cute at times. It would also be OK if they went to the other side of the valley--if they could do the CG in a toned-down, mostly realistic fashion. The valley is obviously not an objective thing (hell, enough people liked the original BG that they actually made a sequel), but I think most people do have their own personal valley in regards to human-ness, and not everyone is eager to get over them. I have no desire to get over my revulsion just so I can sit through Baby Geniuses.
Similarly, I think that a lot of people will have no desire to get over being creeped out by an android like this one until the utility of having one becomes too large to ignore. Again, I wouldn't have a major problem, but I can see how a lot of people would.
I dunno, judging by the pictures it looks like we haven't quite reached the other side of the Uncanny Valley yet.
And if you're doing something REALLY evil, you'd best use an OTP. If you just need to transmit text, you can fit enough entropic pad material on a DVD to last you a very, very long time. You'd need to combine it with a passphrase, though, and/or ensure that the pad is disguised as or embedded in something else.
No one uses plain DES anymore; it was broken decades ago. 3DES is fairly secure, but slow as hell. No point in using i3DES except maybe for legacy support. AES is probably good enough to guard against casual (i.e. mass) surveillence, though personally I would go wth Blowfish or Twofish due to faster large-key performance and the fact AES is likely to be cracked first by virtue of the fact that it's a government standard now and people on both sides of the fence will be trying like mad to crack it (either to gain an advantage or to prove it can withstand attack X.)
It's not overpriced, because MacOS is very much worth it. However, I'm sick of Apple fanboys (I'm a fanboy too; just not a diehard/delusional fanboy) pulling random example out of the air and then claim that Apples and PCs are equivalently priced. With a bit of hunting, you can get a new, very decent PC laptop in the $400-$600 range. Within 2 weeks of looking around, I picked up my mom a Dell 600m for just under $600, tax and shipping included, with 512 RAM, Bluetooth, 80 gig hard drive, a dual-layer DVD burner, 4 hour battery life, and it only weighs something like 6 pounds. Could you *ever* get a deal like that on a Macintosh laptop? Deals like that only take a little bit of effort (usually just setting up a few fatwallet.com alerts and waiting a few weeks.)
Desktops are still no contest. Hang around fatwallet.com for a month and you can *easily* build yourself a nice little box for under $200 ($300-$350 if you don't want to go bargain hunting.) And if you don't want to build your own, Dell routinely has deals on their desktops and servers. At least two years ago I picked up an SC420 server with PCI-E, DDR2 (this was back when everyone was still using DDR), a 2.8 Ghz HT P4 with 1 meg of cache, SATA, and gigabit ethernet for a little over $300 shipped.
Last time i checked, the cheapest desktop Mac was what... $500? Yes, the difference between the pre-sale prices of the PC and Mac isn't as big as it once was, but it's still there, it's still very significant (especially on low-end desktops, where it approaches a 50% price difference), and the fact remains you CAN'T find decent sales on Mac laptops or Mac desktops; they just don't exist. I've had fatwallet.com alerts for years now, and Mac deals just don't come up, and even when they do they're pretty pathetic.
One more example (and yes, it's a Dell. I can't help it--they're so damn cheap!): One year ago I noticed a fatwallet alert and picked up an Inspiron 6000D laptop for $780 after tax and shipping. 1.5 Ghz Pentium M, a gig of DDR2 RAM, B/G Wifi, an *awesome* 15.x" WUXGA (that's 1920×1200 widescreen) LCD , 60 gig hard drive, CD-RW burner/DVD-ROM, and an ATI Mobile x300 graphics card with 128MB of dedicated GDDR3. Sound too good to be true? I'm using it at this very moment. And this wasn't a fluke, either--over a thousand fellow fatwallet'ers got similar deals from Dell that day. Tell me, when was the last time Apple had a sale like that?
...which is why many people (including me) will often go to the store to examine the item in person, then order it online and save 10%-50%.
So just for the sake of us Yanks, what exactly is a high street"? Two people have brought it up now.
I should point out that Amazon.com is much much much more than a bookstore now. They *directly* carry many more items (from food to clothes to eletronics to furniture) than superstores such as Wal Mart, and they *indirectly* carry (i.e. though Amazon marketplace sellers) just about anything you could ever want to possibly buy. Their prices are generally much lower than B&M, and with the majority of their items, they offer free shipping for all orders over $25.
I prefer talking to a person to make sure I get advice I prefer Wikipedia and Google. They're a hell of a lot more reliable than a saleperson or customer service rep, especially one from a big chain. You do have a point with returns--it's usually hassle when dealing with online business, and you might have to pay for return shipping. However, in the past 3 or 4 years of heavy online shopping for nearly all of my large-ish purchases, this has only come up a like twice. The monetary savings more than makes up for this rare hassle.
Offcourse there are people like you but might I suggest something? Are you perhaps just a modern version of the catalog shopper?
Catalog shopping was never (to my knowlege.) much cheaper than shopping at the B&M, at least not in America. The ease of visiting multiple websites within a few minutes makes online competition much fiercer, and this drives the prices down in the way that catalog competition never could.
wow. Beginning of that post got completely b0rked. Oh well, it's nearly 6am. Sleep > correcting typos.
Here in the real world, online companies have to pay rent (or construction + property tax) and utilities - they don't operate out of the back of a pickup truck. (And those premises require upkeep and maintenance too.) They might pay 1/10 the rent of a B&M business, because they don't care if they're in the crappy part of town.
.com stores usually lack--e.g. sales or security (yes, there will be *some* security at the .com warehouse, but the lack of public access and lack of employees' direct access to cash makes this much easier--and therefore cheaper.)
.coms a TON of money. Commericially-zoned property is much more expensive. This means magnified rents or magnified purchase costs and property taxes. Much more money will have to be spend on interior design. The utilities bill will generally be much higher. Insurance will be MUCH higher. You must have cashiers and customer service and security around *at all times*, even when there aren't any customers. Sales people, if you have any, will steal your profit in the form of a commission (or if they're commission-less, they're either have a rather high hourly wage or they'll be very apathetic and ineffective about doing their job.) You have to pay for shopping carts and the land for the parking lot and cameras to watch over the parking lot (at least if you're a major chain) and people to WATCH the cameras that look over the parking lot. You have to hire guys to paint your building nice and pretty (.com warehouse has no problem looking rusted and shitty.) You hire guys to come in and replace your lights when they blow, service your cash registers when they go on the fritz, mop the floors when they get dirty. Yes, to an extent this is all done at the warehouse as well, but they expend maybe 1/100 of the effort as the retail store. They don't care if the floor is dirty as hell, so long as they aren't violating any OSHA regs. They don't care if they have bare incandescent bulbs hanging 5' above everyone's heads (vs. those huge flourescent bulbs hanging 20' or 30' above your head at Wal-Mart. I bet they're just *slightly* more expensive to change.) If the air conditioner in the warehouse breaks down,
more expensive once you invite in the general public. Customers are spoiled. They must be *impressed* or at the very least satiated. On the They don't have to pay cashiers - but they do have to pay pickers and packers. (In fact their costs are *higher*, because they have to pay for support as well as pickers and packers - where a B&M store can (and does) pay use it's cashier for all three.)
Doubtful. A cashier must have a decent appearance, be able to interact with customers in a halfway friendly manner, be trusted enough around lots of cash (or at least closely monitored around lots of cash), be trained to operate the register, etc.
On the other hand, the picker/packer must be able to 1. Read the screen and 2. Pack the items and slap a shipping label on the box. Any socially-inept slob with 5 minutes of training can be a packer. Cashiers have stricter requirements, require more training, and require more micromanagement and supervision (e.g. stealing.) Support is largely automated, and the non-automated portions can be outsourced (or at the very least provided by telecommuting employees from across the country.) Support people don't even need good people skills--they just read from a script or punch out the pregenerated reply emails.
The fact that online businesses employ more people to do the job of one B&M person doesn't change the fact that those people are probably 10x more efficient and since they don't have direct contact with cash OR the public, they're a hell of a lot easier to hire and cheaper to manage. You also neglect to take into account the types of employees that
Nothing has *no* overhead, but you're fooling yourself if you think that a lack of a commercial-district building open to the public isn't saving the
I don't know. I find that the only thing I actually buy from B&M stores nowadays are perishables, things I must have immediately and things that really need to be examined (or tried on) in person. Amazon.com has cheaper prices on just about everything else. If it's not something I need *that day*, why would I want to haul my ass down to Best Buy or Walmart or Costco just for the privilege waiting in line and then paying MORE?
And hell, if you're too cheap for Amazon (and are willing to take a small risk), there's always eBay.
Letstalk.com makes B&M cell phone retailers a fucking JOKE--they literally offer dozens upon dozens of phones for hundreds less than the B&M stores--and that's before rebate. After rebate, you can get nearly anything free--RAZR, PEBL, Samsung SGH-t809, at least one of their Blackberry models... you can even get up to 5 of them free, if you're starting a family line (we recently did this and it kicks ass. Saved many hundreds of dollars, and for myself I picked up an N-Gage QD for -$50 after rebate. Don't insult it until you try it; Nokia fixed most of the design flaws with the QD revision. Basically, I'm being PAID $50 to use a very powerful, very underrated Symbian S60 smartphone. Kickass.) Just for grins we walked into a B&M retail store and asked the reps if they could give us a similar deal. They simply laughed in our faces and shook their heads.
My girlfriend and I (cue the 'liar' jokes) would've been fucking broke a long time ago if we couldn't buy our porn and sex toys online. The markup at B&M sex shops is nothing short of heart-stopping.
I'm not even going to get into fatwallet.com... let's just say that I wind up getting at least 2 or 3 INCREDIBLE deals per month. (Think over 50% off on stuff that is NEVER heavily discounted at B&M stores. Over 75% off is not uncommon. Over 90% off the typical B&M price isn't out of the question.)
The simple fact of the matter is shipping costs are nothing compared to the overhead of rent (or construction + property tax), utilities, cashiers and sales reps and customer service reps (who can't be outsourced, unlike online stores' reps), uniforms for the reps, general upkeep and maintenance, etc. We're beyond having to prove this--just walk into *any* B&M store and see how long it takes you to find something that you can't get cheaper off of Amazon or Buy.com or Outpost.com or eBay. With gas prices the way they are, I do indeed think that the internet will eventually spell the doom of the vast majority of B&M businesses. B&M currently has a lot of momentum, though, and I think it will be at least another decade or two before we see any real decline.
Making B&M obsolete isn't a joke; it's just not going to happen that quickly. Google's calendar has nothing to do with the internet retail scene. eBay is thriving, Amazon is well in the black, Buy.com is running commercials now, fatwallet.com's forums are overflowing with deal-hunters, and I seriously can't remember the last time I bought something at a B&M store that cost more than $20.
Get a RAZR. They're easily had for free after rebate with a new 1-year plan. Ignore the bluetooth and camera if you want--it has very good battery life (5-6 day battery life), very good reception, integrated aerial, a speakerphone, large buttons, compatible with wired (and wireless) headsets, has a fairly large screen, is very slimline and is made out of metal.
Even if you don't want to sign up for a year, I really don't see the big deal in paying $100-$150 for a quality phone, especially when most people are paying $50+ monthly for service. There are plenty of decent I-just-want-a-freaking-phone cell phones out there... the problem is a lot of people see the word "camera" or "mp3" and they immediately assume they suck and/or are incredibly expensive. The fact is cameras are practically a standard feature on phones nowadays, and if you don't want a camera or bluetooth or an mp3 player or whatever then don't bother to learn how to use that particular feature! Yes, certain 10-gadgets-in-one devices do have shitty cell phone capabilities, and some of them are grossly overpriced, but they aren't ALL that way, and anyone who knows how to use Google or Amazon (user reviews are handy) should know this by now.
I'm sick of smokers comparing their deadly habit to drinking. "Poison" or not, a glass or two of wine (or even beer) a day has positive effects that far outweigh the negatives. It decreases your chance of a heart attack, it increases/retains your mental sharpness as you age (at least, it's been proven in women--they haven't done a study on men yet), and as long as you don't exceed a drink or two per day, your liver will be just fine. Alcohol isn't poison any more than salt is poison. Both can kill you, but both generally do good things for your body when taken in moderation. The same *cannot* be said of smoked tobacco.
Yes, they should freaking ban smoking in public establishments because of worker health reasons. It's bad enough that I (and every other taxpayer) has to pay *your* medical bill when you're 60 years old and dying of lung cancer, let alone yours and the workers and the poor kids dragged along by their parents to a combo bar/restaurant. You want to smoke? Do it outside or in your own home.
I don't know if I'd call it "interesting." More like the third seal of the apocalypse has just been broken.
It's the sound of the joke whizzing over your head
"bullshit, fud, stupid, greed, evil."
That pretty much covers it, does it? The idea that concerts were somehow being priced extra low in order to enhance CD sales is just plain retarded. Concert tickets are priced in order to maximize their profit, period, unless the artist gives a crap and actually has control over the ticket price (unlikely.)
People keep trying to compare making music to stuff like building houses or selling apples, but it's not. In the entire history of humanity, it never has been. If you're in the year 1200 and you walk by some peasant playing his lute in the streets, you either choose to throw money in his hat or you don't. Either way, you get to enjoy the music. Fast forward to 1980--you can choose to listen to the radio, make a copy of your friend's tape, or buy a tape yourself. Now you have the option of downloading it from the internet, too. Yeah, it's a little easier than recording tapes, but it still has its share of hassles and tradeoffs (such as lower sound quality.) And ultimately, the true fans will still choose to support their favored artists because it's the right thing to do. Music is an inherently emotional, inherently personal thing. It's arguably the purest, the least practical, the most abstract out of all of the art forms. If you're good enough and lucky enough to make money by making music, consider yourself blessed. Many of the greatest musicians in history lived and died in poverty (Mozart, black American musicians pre-1970s.) If you make money, you make it by the good will of your fans alone. No one who's successful will ever have their success taken away by illegal music downloads or tape recorders. Virtually every small time independant band I've seen has strongly encouraged illegal p2p as a method of promoting themselves. Why is that, I wonder? The difference is probably only noticable at the superstar level, and even then it's probably the difference between Metallica making $5 million and them making say, $3.8 million.
Seriously, who the fuck cares whether they're very rich vs. obscenely rich? Just shut up... Shut up you stupid, greedy, selfish, fucking sellouts... and stop suing 12-year-olds. Virtually every one of my friends "pirates" (I still can't figure out who invented this stupid term) music, yet without every one of them also buys CDs. In fact, I'm the only one who doesn't regularly buy CDs and that's because I refuse to buy RIAA CDs. (My most recent CD purchases were Black Sails on the Sunset, The Art of Drowning, and AFI by AFI (A Fire Inside). If you like grunge or punk or any other form of hard rock, you owe it to yourself to check them out. I'm not normally a huge punk fan, but these songs are complex, tempo-bending, hauntingly harmonizing, multi-part masterpieces. Their most recent album is pretty decent, but not nearly as good... plus they switched to a RIAA label. You can find all of their works, RIAA and non-RIAA, on Amazon.com)
Making a song is not like making a car. Treat your fans like 'consumers' and they're likely to treat you like just another soulless, manipulative, evil corporation. Music is a luxury, and it is already quite free on the radio (unlike TV, it's very easy to avoid the commercials if you live in a big city with lots of stations.) You should be fucking thankful I like your work enough to give you money, not trying to extort more out of me via the CD-R and blank tape 'tax' or suing me because I downloaded a few songs that I kinda/sorta like but not enough to spend $15+ for.