(i.e. getting someone's home machine cleaned up and back to normal email & web browsing capability)
Give them a Knoppix CD, tell them to open a web-based email account at Hotmail or Yahoo (if they don't have one already) and they'll be back to email & web browsing capability in 2 minutes. Charge them $5 for the media and your time burning it.
If they need more extensive services, like being able to play Windoze games again, tell them the going rate is $80 an hour, you're a knowledgable expert, and you won't go lower than that. I bet this will weed out majority of the requests, but the Knoppix will have helped them and you won't feel bad about brushing them off.
The heroin market is a perfect example of this, and lately methamphetamines. Recently there was a prominent article in one of the major papers (either LA or NY Times I think) about the growing Meth underground economy. In fact it's gotten so bad, several of the Midwest states are in the process of enacting laws to limit over-the-counter allergy pill sales and have drugstore clerks record the identity of purchasers. We're talking about Nyquil and Tylenol Cold here, pretty innocuous stuff. But they contain ingredients that Meth labs use to distill into methemphatamines.
This is a perfect example of the natural law of supply and demand, like the parent post said. They can pass all the laws in the world, but as long as the demand is there (and the demand for Meth is skyrocketing), there WILL be a supply. I totally understand and agree with this.
But guess what, when the gov't throws its hands up and says, "We give up! We can't control it" and leaves the forces of supply and demand to settle into their own natural accord, you end up with a situation that is less than ideal. China in late 19th century to 1945 was pretty much in this state of just letting the opium supply and demand run its course. And it did. I don't know what the exact numbers are but something like an overwhelming majority of adult male population in China was addicted to opium and smoking it on a daily basis. Graciously supplied by Great Britain. (oh yeah there was a pretty funny footage in "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" of a China opium house from the 30's.)
Needless to say, China was not a very healthy society or a pleasant place to live during this era. The opium problem only got under control with the incoming Communist government - basically they just shot and killed anyone caught possessing opium, often on the spot. That reduced the demand pretty quick.
Okay I know you're gonna say, "There's a big difference between illegal Meth and downloading some XviD moviez". Yes, there are differences. Watching downloaded moviez doesn't destroy your nervous system and gradually turn you into a psychotic dope fiend that ends in your early demise. But just for illustration, let me apply the same principle and see where it might end.
So let's say the xxAA stops suing downloaders and the gov't decides copyright laws are unenforceable - supply and demand, you know. Courts refuse to hear copyright infringement suits. People are completely free to download any movie, book or music, burn to a disc and sell it on the street corner, with complete confidence that nothing bad will ever come of it. What's gonna happen? Well, it's gonna destroy the movie industry in America. Movies will still get made, but they will be low budget indie-type movies made by artists for art's sake. And they will, 99% of them, suck donkey dick. I've seen low budget films, and they are just BAD. Good movies require millions of dollars to make. Name the last 10 really good movies you saw. Or 20, or 50. How many were low budget (something you or I could make) and how many had budget in the tens of millions?
Books are a little different because one guy with no budget can turn up a masterpiece. But it's still safe to say that the number of quality titles coming out each year will go down in a copyright-free society, because the percentage of authors who write to make a living will cease writing when the income is gone.
Okay I didn't want this reply to be so damn long, so I'll just end here with this: take a look at the periods and societies in history that had (or still has) no concept of intellectual property, and those that did (or still do). Determine which is more conducive to the advancement of art, literature and entertainment.
My earliest CD-R dates back to early '98. That's when I was introduced to this newfangled thing called MP3. My buddy gave me an el-cheapo disc (no brand name) full of mp3s he ripped from his personal CD collection.
Fortunately, the disc is still good! My NEC dual-layer DVD burner still reads the disc just fine. Unfortunately, it contains stuff I *never* listen to - mostly Eagles and Beatles and other old fogey songs.
...if it can't account for past data. For instance, from historical records we know that temperatures around 1300 A.D. were warmer than they are now, and that around 1500-1700 it was considerably colder, warming up again afterwards up to today.
Until a model can take past data and accurately come up with conditions we have today, it's worthless other than as an interesting exercise in "what if?". More on this here.
Now climate prediction is complex and difficult, and I understand that you have to start somewhere, and that government-funded climatologists need something to do. But sensationalist media's penchant for crying "THE SKY IS FALLING!" and reporting these simulations as gospels of truth is not to be taken seriously.
"The ultimate goal of this concept is a symbiotic interaction of astronaut and spacesuit like that between humans and terrestrial plants in which the astronaut's waste carbon dioxide and water vapor are converted back into respirable oxygen in the suit walls using environmental energy sources."
Don't the Fremen use stillsuits that are just like this?
22 megabytes for a little 300x200 video that's mostly 4 minutes of still scenes? I never use it so I dunno, but surely Quicktime's got to be more capable than this??
The Mac people need to download Xvid and learn how to do 2-pass VBR encoding in Mpeg4.... this video should be 3 megabytes tops at this quality level.
On another note, when the Mac speaks the text-to-speech thing, it sounds like GOVERNOR ARNOLD!
...or whatever. Every once in a while you read about a survey result that makes you go, "How can people be sooo STUPID?"
I mean, I don't consider myself all that super intelligent, esp. compared to some of the programmers/developers/sysadmins on places like slashdot. I know a guy who has a CS degree from Caltech, and just looking at the classes you need to pass to graduate makes me run in fear. But compared to the typical man on the street, I'm a fucking genius.
The idea of a big nanny state knowing what's best for the little people and making all the decisions for them... almost makes me agree.
Aside from the fact that he is an irritating know-it-all, he is also full of crap. Yeah, like people are really gonna go out and buy an HDTV with a DVI connection for their Mini, then spend the next 24 hours downloading a HD movie over their crappy 512kbps SBC Yahoo! DSL. Maybe in 2010 when everybody in America has real broadband.
Oh and his wise suggestion to Apple to sell the Mini for $249 each and incur $1 billion in losses was just amazing! Amazingly stupid. Like Wall Street really rewards companies that burn up cash by selling products at a loss.
I distinctly remember seeing a rotory phone hooked up to an acoustic coupler in the movie. It had an automatic mechanical thingie that worked the rotory dial. Morpheus used it to hack into the Matrix!
true, except for the fact that India and China have such huge populations that the equilibrium point will probably be their average standard-of-living rising a little bit while ours falling dramatically.
PC Magazine had a poll thing where readers submit ratings for various makes of printers. HP was rated WORST when it comes to "How satisfied are you with replacement ink prices?" Cannon came out best.
They had a blurb quoting a few prices for HP ink and Canon ink, and Canon was almost half the price of HP ink. (I wish I could find the damn magazine so I can quote exact numbers.... gotta clean my room)
Building a space elevator requires that you haul lots of mass into orbit. That's very expensive so it will never get built until orbital launches become cheap. But when we do have cheap access to space, you lose the whole point of building a space elevator in the first place.
Well, Windows by itself is not harmful to anyone else other than its user. It's the criminals who break into a Windows computer and hijack it that's causing the harm.
Taking your analogy further, it's a fact that some cars are easier to break into than others. Should Ford be held responsible because the Pinto has such a flimsy ignition lock that it's the preferred vehicle of bank robbers for stealing and using during robberies?
They're going after businesses that are 100% reliant on their internet connection. Online casinos get hit a lot because they fit the bill, and they're not so big that they can put up an effective defense (and they don't have much clout with law enforcement). Plus gambling operators have been known to put up the ransom money before - they're pretty shady operators themselves so they understand this kind of tactic.
I agree with you though, gambling operators get zero sympathy from me. Just desserts I say, for their spamming us with popup ads containing spyware.
But there was an online electronics store owner who got extorted, and he does get my sympathy. And also the credit card processing company.
Not in the US. The freedom of speech and the freedom not to incriminate yourself includes the right to shut up when they ask for the key.
Actually this is debatable. The exact wording of the 5th Amendment is:
"... nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself"
When a judge orders you to hand over a key, you are not being forced to testify against yourself; you are being ordered produce an object that the court wants to see. Let's say you have 100 pounds of cocaine locked up in an unbreakable vault in your basement. Judge can order you to give him the key. If you refuse, he can jail you indefinitely for contempt of court until you comply.
As I said, this is open to interpretation. In a real case the lawyers on both sides will be arguing about it back and forth.
they're real good about protecting their customers from hijackers. They were one of the first ones to lock down outside domain transfers when that whole domain expiration thing happened a few months ago.
This is but the latest in a long-running attempt to study and influence consumer behavior. Madison Ave has been doing research for decades and they have a huge amount of data on this.
Ever wonder why you see bears and tigers so often in commercials? Or certain colors? Or themes? ("I am different") That's because the powers-that-be have determined through exhaustive surveys that these are the things that push people's buttons the best.
Now I guess they're going high tech and studying the brain directly with MRI machines and stuff.
I have a suggestion for the big boys: Make a good product and sell it at a reasonable price.
He once shot a man (to death) just for snoring too loud. He is reported to have killed 40 men during his career, making him one of the most feared gunfighters in the Old West.
Can you imagine if this guy were alive today, and surfing the internet (NRA website no doubt), and gets all kinds of spam in his Outlook? He would go nuts!
at the risk of sounding like a wannabe elitist, and possibly getting modded down to 'Troll'.... I have to say that it was probably never that good an idea for everyone and their Grandma to be on the Net.
If everybody was equally strong or if everyone could run the 100 meter dash in 10 seconds, there would be no mechanism to weed out the weak. There would be no evolution. (inability to reproduce due to death is THE way evolution happens) And as we all know, evolution/natural selection leads to progress and advancement.
One way of looking at the virus/spyware flood is as predatory force. The Net is simply reclaiming a balance, a natural order of things. Thus only the skilled and knowledable will survive. The dumb, the ignorant, the old, and the too-lazy-to-RTFM will not. And those that do survive will reap the great rewards that a connected cyberspace will offer.
I'm old enough that I remember when I was going to school, it was a MINORITY of students who owned their own computers. And I was one of the few, the proud. There was no Internet (well there was, but I hadn't heard of it). But for those who were connected to 2400-baud BBS's... well, we were Kings!
Minable asteroids, as the above poster said, and zero-G manufacturing. All economic goldmines easily exploitable for $profit$, if/when orbital launch costs become cheap enough.
As for human space travel having nowhere to go, that's just a lack of imagination. Mars is an awesome place and adaptable for permanent human habitation! So are several moons of Jupiter and Saturn (maybe). So is our own Luna actually. I'm guessing parent poster is not a Heinlein fan.
As for the Antarctica comparison... well, Antarctica is on earth. It's mundane. There's no point in living there, when you can just drive to Florida. Of course if you *wanted* to, you could live in Antarctica fairly easily. Just dig underground for warmth, set up an energy source (nuclear reactor or a constant supply of oil via Exxon), and pitch some vinyl greenhouses for subsistance farming. All it takes is money and desire, no new orbital technology needed.
Any argument/reasoning for and against human space exploration is moot IMHO. Develop the technology and make the trip cheap enough, and people will go, period. It's in our blood.
All the bickering about whether NASA should stop sending astronauts into space and focus more on robotic explorations and space telescopes etc. are all due to the fact that going to space is VERY EXPENSIVE. And at this moment, I'm inclined to side with the pro-robotic anti-astronaut crowd. Spending $1 billion per Shuttle launch (yes, some estimates do run that high) is ridiculous. It's a waste of taxpayer money. You could send a whole fleet of little Mars probes for the cost of one manned Shuttle mission.
But pretty soon we should be able to buy a suborbital ride on Virgin for $190,000. Now if lots of good stuff happens and that $190,000 ticket will buy an ORBITAL ride for one person and 50 pounds of baggage, I'm guessing a whole lots of people will mortage their house and go. Hell, at that price point, about $1 million might be able to get you to Mars. When that happens I'll bet they won't be able to build the rockets fast enough, so many people will be wanting to go. I know I will. I don't have $1 million but when my dad dies I will inherit his house, and it's worth about $1.2 million. It's not even a mansion or anything, it's just an average house in a nicer part of Los Angeles. I will gladly sell it and relocate myself to Mars, permanently:D
I RTFA for a change, and basically it just says that Bezos applied for some permits to open a space launching facility. That and a brief description of Blue Origin and how it's trying to develop suborbital spacecraft in the near future. *yawn*
I don't know what Bezos is like as a person, but I guess he's not an attention hog (unlike some Apple/Pixar execs) and he doesn't mind quietly working in the background while his competitor (Burt) steals all the limelight and wins public adulation. One good thing for sure, if Bezos gets his bird airborne, the competition might force Virgin Galactic to lower their $190,000 ticket price:)
Slashdot Mirror
Give them a Knoppix CD, tell them to open a web-based email account at Hotmail or Yahoo (if they don't have one already) and they'll be back to email & web browsing capability in 2 minutes. Charge them $5 for the media and your time burning it.
If they need more extensive services, like being able to play Windoze games again, tell them the going rate is $80 an hour, you're a knowledgable expert, and you won't go lower than that. I bet this will weed out majority of the requests, but the Knoppix will have helped them and you won't feel bad about brushing them off.
The heroin market is a perfect example of this, and lately methamphetamines. Recently there was a prominent article in one of the major papers (either LA or NY Times I think) about the growing Meth underground economy. In fact it's gotten so bad, several of the Midwest states are in the process of enacting laws to limit over-the-counter allergy pill sales and have drugstore clerks record the identity of purchasers. We're talking about Nyquil and Tylenol Cold here, pretty innocuous stuff. But they contain ingredients that Meth labs use to distill into methemphatamines.
This is a perfect example of the natural law of supply and demand, like the parent post said. They can pass all the laws in the world, but as long as the demand is there (and the demand for Meth is skyrocketing), there WILL be a supply. I totally understand and agree with this.
But guess what, when the gov't throws its hands up and says, "We give up! We can't control it" and leaves the forces of supply and demand to settle into their own natural accord, you end up with a situation that is less than ideal. China in late 19th century to 1945 was pretty much in this state of just letting the opium supply and demand run its course. And it did. I don't know what the exact numbers are but something like an overwhelming majority of adult male population in China was addicted to opium and smoking it on a daily basis. Graciously supplied by Great Britain. (oh yeah there was a pretty funny footage in "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story" of a China opium house from the 30's.)
Needless to say, China was not a very healthy society or a pleasant place to live during this era. The opium problem only got under control with the incoming Communist government - basically they just shot and killed anyone caught possessing opium, often on the spot. That reduced the demand pretty quick.
Okay I know you're gonna say, "There's a big difference between illegal Meth and downloading some XviD moviez". Yes, there are differences. Watching downloaded moviez doesn't destroy your nervous system and gradually turn you into a psychotic dope fiend that ends in your early demise. But just for illustration, let me apply the same principle and see where it might end.
So let's say the xxAA stops suing downloaders and the gov't decides copyright laws are unenforceable - supply and demand, you know. Courts refuse to hear copyright infringement suits. People are completely free to download any movie, book or music, burn to a disc and sell it on the street corner, with complete confidence that nothing bad will ever come of it. What's gonna happen? Well, it's gonna destroy the movie industry in America. Movies will still get made, but they will be low budget indie-type movies made by artists for art's sake. And they will, 99% of them, suck donkey dick. I've seen low budget films, and they are just BAD. Good movies require millions of dollars to make. Name the last 10 really good movies you saw. Or 20, or 50. How many were low budget (something you or I could make) and how many had budget in the tens of millions?
Books are a little different because one guy with no budget can turn up a masterpiece. But it's still safe to say that the number of quality titles coming out each year will go down in a copyright-free society, because the percentage of authors who write to make a living will cease writing when the income is gone.
Okay I didn't want this reply to be so damn long, so I'll just end here with this: take a look at the periods and societies in history that had (or still has) no concept of intellectual property, and those that did (or still do). Determine which is more conducive to the advancement of art, literature and entertainment.
Fortunately, the disc is still good! My NEC dual-layer DVD burner still reads the disc just fine. Unfortunately, it contains stuff I *never* listen to - mostly Eagles and Beatles and other old fogey songs.
Until a model can take past data and accurately come up with conditions we have today, it's worthless other than as an interesting exercise in "what if?". More on this here.
Now climate prediction is complex and difficult, and I understand that you have to start somewhere, and that government-funded climatologists need something to do. But sensationalist media's penchant for crying "THE SKY IS FALLING!" and reporting these simulations as gospels of truth is not to be taken seriously.
Don't the Fremen use stillsuits that are just like this?
The Mac people need to download Xvid and learn how to do 2-pass VBR encoding in Mpeg4.... this video should be 3 megabytes tops at this quality level.
On another note, when the Mac speaks the text-to-speech thing, it sounds like GOVERNOR ARNOLD!
I mean, I don't consider myself all that super intelligent, esp. compared to some of the programmers/developers/sysadmins on places like slashdot. I know a guy who has a CS degree from Caltech, and just looking at the classes you need to pass to graduate makes me run in fear. But compared to the typical man on the street, I'm a fucking genius.
The idea of a big nanny state knowing what's best for the little people and making all the decisions for them... almost makes me agree.
Oh and his wise suggestion to Apple to sell the Mini for $249 each and incur $1 billion in losses was just amazing! Amazingly stupid. Like Wall Street really rewards companies that burn up cash by selling products at a loss.
I distinctly remember seeing a rotory phone hooked up to an acoustic coupler in the movie. It had an automatic mechanical thingie that worked the rotory dial. Morpheus used it to hack into the Matrix!
true, except for the fact that India and China have such huge populations that the equilibrium point will probably be their average standard-of-living rising a little bit while ours falling dramatically.
Summary: Indian workers are doing great, American corporations are doing great, American workers are doing lousy.
Oh and tech companies are still lobbying hard for more H1B visas.
They had a blurb quoting a few prices for HP ink and Canon ink, and Canon was almost half the price of HP ink. (I wish I could find the damn magazine so I can quote exact numbers.... gotta clean my room)
Building a space elevator requires that you haul lots of mass into orbit. That's very expensive so it will never get built until orbital launches become cheap. But when we do have cheap access to space, you lose the whole point of building a space elevator in the first place.
See, you don't need exotic new technologies for cheap(er) space access... just cut the NASA fat.
Taking your analogy further, it's a fact that some cars are easier to break into than others. Should Ford be held responsible because the Pinto has such a flimsy ignition lock that it's the preferred vehicle of bank robbers for stealing and using during robberies?
I agree with you though, gambling operators get zero sympathy from me. Just desserts I say, for their spamming us with popup ads containing spyware.
But there was an online electronics store owner who got extorted, and he does get my sympathy. And also the credit card processing company.
Actually this is debatable. The exact wording of the 5th Amendment is:
"... nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself"
When a judge orders you to hand over a key, you are not being forced to testify against yourself; you are being ordered produce an object that the court wants to see. Let's say you have 100 pounds of cocaine locked up in an unbreakable vault in your basement. Judge can order you to give him the key. If you refuse, he can jail you indefinitely for contempt of court until you comply.
As I said, this is open to interpretation. In a real case the lawyers on both sides will be arguing about it back and forth.
they're real good about protecting their customers from hijackers. They were one of the first ones to lock down outside domain transfers when that whole domain expiration thing happened a few months ago.
Ever wonder why you see bears and tigers so often in commercials? Or certain colors? Or themes? ("I am different") That's because the powers-that-be have determined through exhaustive surveys that these are the things that push people's buttons the best.
Now I guess they're going high tech and studying the brain directly with MRI machines and stuff.
I have a suggestion for the big boys: Make a good product and sell it at a reasonable price.
Norton Antivirus got to do with this web technology?
Can you imagine if this guy were alive today, and surfing the internet (NRA website no doubt), and gets all kinds of spam in his Outlook? He would go nuts!
Seems like just the man we need now ;)
If everybody was equally strong or if everyone could run the 100 meter dash in 10 seconds, there would be no mechanism to weed out the weak. There would be no evolution. (inability to reproduce due to death is THE way evolution happens) And as we all know, evolution/natural selection leads to progress and advancement.
One way of looking at the virus/spyware flood is as predatory force. The Net is simply reclaiming a balance, a natural order of things. Thus only the skilled and knowledable will survive. The dumb, the ignorant, the old, and the too-lazy-to-RTFM will not. And those that do survive will reap the great rewards that a connected cyberspace will offer.
I'm old enough that I remember when I was going to school, it was a MINORITY of students who owned their own computers. And I was one of the few, the proud. There was no Internet (well there was, but I hadn't heard of it). But for those who were connected to 2400-baud BBS's... well, we were Kings!
As for human space travel having nowhere to go, that's just a lack of imagination. Mars is an awesome place and adaptable for permanent human habitation! So are several moons of Jupiter and Saturn (maybe). So is our own Luna actually. I'm guessing parent poster is not a Heinlein fan.
As for the Antarctica comparison... well, Antarctica is on earth. It's mundane. There's no point in living there, when you can just drive to Florida. Of course if you *wanted* to, you could live in Antarctica fairly easily. Just dig underground for warmth, set up an energy source (nuclear reactor or a constant supply of oil via Exxon), and pitch some vinyl greenhouses for subsistance farming. All it takes is money and desire, no new orbital technology needed.
All the bickering about whether NASA should stop sending astronauts into space and focus more on robotic explorations and space telescopes etc. are all due to the fact that going to space is VERY EXPENSIVE. And at this moment, I'm inclined to side with the pro-robotic anti-astronaut crowd. Spending $1 billion per Shuttle launch (yes, some estimates do run that high) is ridiculous. It's a waste of taxpayer money. You could send a whole fleet of little Mars probes for the cost of one manned Shuttle mission.
But pretty soon we should be able to buy a suborbital ride on Virgin for $190,000. Now if lots of good stuff happens and that $190,000 ticket will buy an ORBITAL ride for one person and 50 pounds of baggage, I'm guessing a whole lots of people will mortage their house and go. Hell, at that price point, about $1 million might be able to get you to Mars. When that happens I'll bet they won't be able to build the rockets fast enough, so many people will be wanting to go. I know I will. I don't have $1 million but when my dad dies I will inherit his house, and it's worth about $1.2 million. It's not even a mansion or anything, it's just an average house in a nicer part of Los Angeles. I will gladly sell it and relocate myself to Mars, permanently :D
I don't know what Bezos is like as a person, but I guess he's not an attention hog (unlike some Apple/Pixar execs) and he doesn't mind quietly working in the background while his competitor (Burt) steals all the limelight and wins public adulation. One good thing for sure, if Bezos gets his bird airborne, the competition might force Virgin Galactic to lower their $190,000 ticket price :)