It's not our fault that business and media have mistaken the geek riddled, dimestore internet for some sort of Calaveras gold rush. Most of these people who were sitting around talking about web based business models and IPOs in the late 90s have since crapped the bed and gone back to whatever they were doing before they tried to annoy all of us with their web initiatives and incessant commercialization hassles.
What, is the media industry lagged in this sense?
People don't want to pay for anything (or register for anything) on the internet unless it's tactile and special. They don't want cookies, trackers, flashers, spyware, popups, e-mail spam, IM spam, blogspam, trojans, viruses, AOL CDs, or any other intrusive shit that parasitic strangers come up with to try and fuck up their day and ruin their mood by reminding them of the ubiquitously ulterior selfishness that characterizes our very existence.
In the case of news, if another FREE source of information (non-tactile) exists, then people will find it, as frugality is a basic and innate survival skill. Didn't these people get special degrees in psychology and marketing?
There is a large percentage of the population, consisting of very choosy and/or non-materialistic people upon whom marketing is truly wasted; people who are dangerously immune to the power of suggestion, and if the world of marketing REALLY wants to make some unexpected money, they ought to create some sort of [profitable] consortium or collective of participating businesses which offers consumers the opportunity to obtain a license which grants them permanent immunity from advertisements under penalty of law. As of yet, the only instances of this license are called "the wilderness" and "death," and I think a more practical one would be in high demand, because advertisement smells worse than fetid beer shit.
I don't understand why people think that the orderly, predictable nature of payola is somehow worse than having some random druggie DJ choosing overproduced songs based on his or her own tastes...we all have different tastes, and for me, having my ears proxied by some random stranger who just weaseled his way into a corporate DJ job is really no more attractive to me than being advertised to. Hint: Both options suck. Turn off the radio. Didn't you see the movie Airheads? You're just mad because you've been suckers since Motown, believing that some young, pure, messianic songwriter has just magically ascended to the top of the heap and into your view, when really every single band who has ever participated in the music industry has blood on their hands. Yes, even your special favorite one. Your hero is a whore.
Listen to music made by people you know. If their music sucks, meet more people. This is the indy way. People listened to folk music, made by friends and family for thousands of years, and now suddenly as of the 20th century, everyone has been made tremendously lazy due to marketed convenience, and people act like "good" music can only come from a giant corporate juggernaut, and to make matters worse, this *elective* juggernaut needs to operate the way I want it to, or I am going to whine!:(:(:( Aurally indentured ambivalence!! Consumptively co-opted codependency!! Mrr! Me0w Me0w!
In my car, the radio is what happens when I eject the CD. Fuck a radio.
If you don't like the idea of a commercial radio station engaging in COMMERCE, then don't LISTEN to a COMMERCIAL radio station. Listen to one of the many not for profit radio stations out there like http://www.ipmradio.com or http://www.di.fm/.
buffalo spammah
dreaded impostah
there was a buffalo spammah
stealing part of America
Stole my decision, sent to prison
ay yay yay ay yay yay ayy BRAP BRAP!
ay yay yay ya yay ya ya ya
For the last few years I'd been in the habit of drinking around 5-7 regular Cokes a day, which gave my diet a caloric surplus of around 750-1050 calories/day. In February I merely replaced these cokes with unsweetened green tea, and I've lost about 20 pounds in 3 months, without even increasing my exercise or decreasing my alcohol or caffeine intake. A pound of bodyweight is roughly equivalent to 3500 calories, so if you're drinking a 6 pack of coke a day, you may be adding a pound of slimy caramel fat to your body every week.
Cola is fscking EVIL. Even in the absence of the ever-present "health nut water bottle,"you're still far better off chugging unsweetened coffee or tea. Caffeine is not the enemy, sugar is. So think about dumping the soda. You WILL lose weight, and your teeth will thank you for it. You're a human, not a hummingbird.
Yeah while we're at it, let's add some guilt trips to the consumption of oxygen. Life isn't hard enough as it is without feeling vaguely interrogated by both the left and the right.
-The one that causes people to continually misspeel the word "schizophrenia."
-The one that causes people to first confuse the disorder with Multiple Personality Disorder, and THEN to make terribly unfunny jokes about it.
Ex:
"Yeah I was diagnosed as schizophrenic."
"Hahaha well I wish you all the best of luck with that!!!"
Yeah, but due to the low cost nature of spamming, spammers can afford to be indiscriminate scavengers, ie they don't care if a user has openly declared a disinterest in marketing, because it wastes almost no resources to spam their email. *Phone calls* are a little more expensive, so even if the DNC list fell into the wrong hands, it would probably not be economically viable to spam it.
Google overheated my coffee and it burned my crotch!
Make me a superstar! Infantile trailer logic. Attorneys ought to be disbarred for abusing the legal system and encouraging these sorts of grandstanding court cases.
Exactly my point. That's not flamebait, that's a fact. The lower the barriers to entry in any field, the worse the signal:noise ratio. Sure, some good music came out of mp3.com, but nowhere near the amount of good music that results from even small indie label signings.
Sorry, but most of what appeared on the old mp3.com appeared there because the artists were too lazy and too insecure (read, too immature as artists) to bother with releasing CDs or registering domains. Most of it never deserved to be world distributed in the first place, and I really won't miss it. Whenever someone sent me an mp3.com link, my first thought was always, "Oh, here comes some crap."
Any two products are which are capable of generating excessive amounts of brand loyality, sparking a decade long, tiresome geek chestbeating debate, are necessarily indistinguishable from one another in their actual social value, and thus their technical merits become inconsequential and they are declared essentially "equal," if not "for all intents and purposes," then at least for the sake of argument. Because arguments are stupid.
The task at hand is signal, the brand loyalty noise.
Examples:
Intel vs. AMD (equal)
Novell vs. NT (equal)
Windows vs. Linux (equal)
Linux vs. BSD (equal)
Mac vs. PC (equal)
BMW vs. Mercedes (equal)
Blondes vs. Brunettes (brunettes. sorry. all science has error.)
Use a master password and have at least one other person you trust implicitly, who knows it.
"Security risk," blah blah. If you don't even have one person in the world who you can trust with your passwords while alive, then there really isn't anyone important enough to need your data when you're dead. I trust pacts more than passwords. Pacts can't be cracked.
Really, it was the Baby Boomers who allowed themselves to become smitten with mass media and they effectively built that vice into Gen X as a form of surrogate parent.
Television is what people focus on in social situations. Television programs re-enforce all the wrong values. Any child these days attempting to mold an identity is starting from a deficit point, because immense peer and even familial pressure is placed on him/her to base that identity around the television icons and values ushered in by the boomers.
Some generation, some time, has to consciously break that insidious cycle. BE that generation.
Having the chutzpah is not the hard part--the hard part is tempering it with enough self-control such that you don't end up filling up the body bags and going to the big house. Western men are expected to maintain exactly the correct amount of machismo.
In a utopian society, machismo would not be necessary. And in a primitive one, it was open ended. Both scenarios are far easier to manage than being a "post-modern man," responsible for his parameterized manliness, IMO.
Odd, I've heard that exact same "mile wide/inch deep" metaphor often used to describe the ISC^2 CISSP, and last I checked, it was one of the most lucrative certs available with an average salary in the 80k range.
Popping a CD-R into the microwave tends to reduce the lifespan of a CD-R dramatically, but oh boy is the light show worth it.
Remember kids: Redundancy is longevity. Data which exists in only one place effectively does not exist at all. Be sure to make two copies of every CD-R, throw the other one in the microwave for kicks, and then pray that the first one does not deteriorate. Always gamble with the persistence of your data--because fire and sparks are more important than data recovery.
Or better yet, give them no prison or fine at all, but make the sole stipulation that for a period of time consisting of one day for each spam they've ever sent, they must consent to random interruptions in whatever they are doing, at the hands of people they've spammed. Phone calls, emails, in person conversations, whatever. No MATTER what the spammee wants to talk to them about, for that period of time, the spammer MUST listen, to completion, or face jail time. This is Hammurabi in action.
I'd walk up and shake his hand and be all like "Steve, you *can* have a bigger dong today. I like horses. Sometimes they bray. I've been to the beach in the fall. It is very beautiful. Care for a Vicodin?" etc etc etc for about an hour...then I'd punch him in the nuts and go get a Guinness
Slashdot Mirror
It's not our fault that business and media have mistaken the geek riddled, dimestore internet for some sort of Calaveras gold rush. Most of these people who were sitting around talking about web based business models and IPOs in the late 90s have since crapped the bed and gone back to whatever they were doing before they tried to annoy all of us with their web initiatives and incessant commercialization hassles.
What, is the media industry lagged in this sense?
People don't want to pay for anything (or register for anything) on the internet unless it's tactile and special. They don't want cookies, trackers, flashers, spyware, popups, e-mail spam, IM spam, blogspam, trojans, viruses, AOL CDs, or any other intrusive shit that parasitic strangers come up with to try and fuck up their day and ruin their mood by reminding them of the ubiquitously ulterior selfishness that characterizes our very existence.
In the case of news, if another FREE source of information (non-tactile) exists, then people will find it, as frugality is a basic and innate survival skill. Didn't these people get special degrees in psychology and marketing?
There is a large percentage of the population, consisting of very choosy and/or non-materialistic people upon whom marketing is truly wasted; people who are dangerously immune to the power of suggestion, and if the world of marketing REALLY wants to make some unexpected money, they ought to create some sort of [profitable] consortium or collective of participating businesses which offers consumers the opportunity to obtain a license which grants them permanent immunity from advertisements under penalty of law. As of yet, the only instances of this license are called "the wilderness" and "death," and I think a more practical one would be in high demand, because advertisement smells worse than fetid beer shit.
No, *THAT* was a great post. :o)
I don't understand why people think that the orderly, predictable nature of payola is somehow worse than having some random druggie DJ choosing overproduced songs based on his or her own tastes...we all have different tastes, and for me, having my ears proxied by some random stranger who just weaseled his way into a corporate DJ job is really no more attractive to me than being advertised to. Hint: Both options suck. Turn off the radio. Didn't you see the movie Airheads? You're just mad because you've been suckers since Motown, believing that some young, pure, messianic songwriter has just magically ascended to the top of the heap and into your view, when really every single band who has ever participated in the music industry has blood on their hands. Yes, even your special favorite one. Your hero is a whore.
:( :( :( Aurally indentured ambivalence!! Consumptively co-opted codependency!! Mrr! Me0w Me0w!
Listen to music made by people you know. If their music sucks, meet more people. This is the indy way. People listened to folk music, made by friends and family for thousands of years, and now suddenly as of the 20th century, everyone has been made tremendously lazy due to marketed convenience, and people act like "good" music can only come from a giant corporate juggernaut, and to make matters worse, this *elective* juggernaut needs to operate the way I want it to, or I am going to whine!
In my car, the radio is what happens when I eject the CD. Fuck a radio.
If you don't like the idea of a commercial radio station engaging in COMMERCE, then don't LISTEN to a COMMERCIAL radio station. Listen to one of the many not for profit radio stations out there like http://www.ipmradio.com or http://www.di.fm/.
Go see it.
Suggestions:
- Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
- Try different keywords.
- Try more general keywords.
- Try fewer keywords.
buffalo spammah dreaded impostah there was a buffalo spammah stealing part of America Stole my decision, sent to prison ay yay yay ay yay yay ayy BRAP BRAP! ay yay yay ya yay ya ya ya
http://sushi-x.com/gallery/4d/chicxulub.zip
Time to hire more janitors and double the amount of toilet paper in all public bathrooms.
Cola is fscking EVIL. Even in the absence of the ever-present "health nut water bottle,"you're still far better off chugging unsweetened coffee or tea. Caffeine is not the enemy, sugar is. So think about dumping the soda. You WILL lose weight, and your teeth will thank you for it. You're a human, not a hummingbird.
but we managed to ditch him by speeding. Just thought you might want to know.
Yeah while we're at it, let's add some guilt trips to the consumption of oxygen. Life isn't hard enough as it is without feeling vaguely interrogated by both the left and the right.
-The one that causes people to continually misspeel the word "schizophrenia."
-The one that causes people to first confuse the disorder with Multiple Personality Disorder, and THEN to make terribly unfunny jokes about it.
Ex:
"Yeah I was diagnosed as schizophrenic."
"Hahaha well I wish you all the best of luck with that!!!"
Rimshot, gunshot.
Yeah, but due to the low cost nature of spamming, spammers can afford to be indiscriminate scavengers, ie they don't care if a user has openly declared a disinterest in marketing, because it wastes almost no resources to spam their email. *Phone calls* are a little more expensive, so even if the DNC list fell into the wrong hands, it would probably not be economically viable to spam it.
Google overheated my coffee and it burned my crotch! Make me a superstar! Infantile trailer logic. Attorneys ought to be disbarred for abusing the legal system and encouraging these sorts of grandstanding court cases.
Exactly my point. That's not flamebait, that's a fact. The lower the barriers to entry in any field, the worse the signal:noise ratio. Sure, some good music came out of mp3.com, but nowhere near the amount of good music that results from even small indie label signings.
Sorry, but most of what appeared on the old mp3.com appeared there because the artists were too lazy and too insecure (read, too immature as artists) to bother with releasing CDs or registering domains. Most of it never deserved to be world distributed in the first place, and I really won't miss it. Whenever someone sent me an mp3.com link, my first thought was always, "Oh, here comes some crap."
That's cool, as long as they don't start posting dark poetry.
Any two products are which are capable of generating excessive amounts of brand loyality, sparking a decade long, tiresome geek chestbeating debate, are necessarily indistinguishable from one another in their actual social value, and thus their technical merits become inconsequential and they are declared essentially "equal," if not "for all intents and purposes," then at least for the sake of argument. Because arguments are stupid.
The task at hand is signal, the brand loyalty noise.
Examples:
Intel vs. AMD (equal)
Novell vs. NT (equal)
Windows vs. Linux (equal)
Linux vs. BSD (equal)
Mac vs. PC (equal)
BMW vs. Mercedes (equal)
Blondes vs. Brunettes (brunettes. sorry. all science has error.)
I enjoy my simple little world.
Use a master password and have at least one other person you trust implicitly, who knows it. "Security risk," blah blah. If you don't even have one person in the world who you can trust with your passwords while alive, then there really isn't anyone important enough to need your data when you're dead. I trust pacts more than passwords. Pacts can't be cracked.
Really, it was the Baby Boomers who allowed themselves to become smitten with mass media and they effectively built that vice into Gen X as a form of surrogate parent. Television is what people focus on in social situations. Television programs re-enforce all the wrong values. Any child these days attempting to mold an identity is starting from a deficit point, because immense peer and even familial pressure is placed on him/her to base that identity around the television icons and values ushered in by the boomers. Some generation, some time, has to consciously break that insidious cycle. BE that generation.
Having the chutzpah is not the hard part--the hard part is tempering it with enough self-control such that you don't end up filling up the body bags and going to the big house. Western men are expected to maintain exactly the correct amount of machismo. In a utopian society, machismo would not be necessary. And in a primitive one, it was open ended. Both scenarios are far easier to manage than being a "post-modern man," responsible for his parameterized manliness, IMO.
Head downtown! Stick your hand in the jar! Tasty! Jailed! Arrowed!
Odd, I've heard that exact same "mile wide/inch deep" metaphor often used to describe the ISC^2 CISSP, and last I checked, it was one of the most lucrative certs available with an average salary in the 80k range.
Popping a CD-R into the microwave tends to reduce the lifespan of a CD-R dramatically, but oh boy is the light show worth it. Remember kids: Redundancy is longevity. Data which exists in only one place effectively does not exist at all. Be sure to make two copies of every CD-R, throw the other one in the microwave for kicks, and then pray that the first one does not deteriorate. Always gamble with the persistence of your data--because fire and sparks are more important than data recovery.
Or better yet, give them no prison or fine at all, but make the sole stipulation that for a period of time consisting of one day for each spam they've ever sent, they must consent to random interruptions in whatever they are doing, at the hands of people they've spammed. Phone calls, emails, in person conversations, whatever. No MATTER what the spammee wants to talk to them about, for that period of time, the spammer MUST listen, to completion, or face jail time. This is Hammurabi in action. I'd walk up and shake his hand and be all like "Steve, you *can* have a bigger dong today. I like horses. Sometimes they bray. I've been to the beach in the fall. It is very beautiful. Care for a Vicodin?" etc etc etc for about an hour...then I'd punch him in the nuts and go get a Guinness