It was a peculiar form of narcissism that ever led people to think anyone gave a crap about their day-to-day lives in the first place.
I dunno. It might not be interesting now, but someone in 100 or 500 years might be interested.
Suffice to say, at least the 21st century has opened made the whole process redundant so future historians won't to worry about a fire burning down the Great Library of Alexandria again.
This is dangerous: studies have shown that when you give extrinsic motivation for something, the intrinsic motivation tends to die away.
True, but isn't this how the United States civilization works?
You stop paying someone to do something and then they stop doing that something? You know like what the RIAA and MPAA says about artists? If they don't get paid money, then no art will ever be made?
Maybe I'm being a bit facetious here but considering how the "grown up" world works in regards to doing something only out of the benefit of being paid, we might as teach our kids early there is no such thing as charity.
Also- I personally believe statistics aren't all they're cracked up to be. When I'm in control of a situation VS when I'm not. I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding... Maybe only a few percentage points, but still- statistics are cold hard ideas, but don't account for personal decisions.
Control is an illusion. There are so many variables when driving in a car that you have no control over despite your best efforts.
What if the brakes spontaneously fail because of a manufacture defect? What if you get blindsided by a Mac truck when you are going through a green stop light? What if you get a head on collision of a drunk driver who crosses over the median?
And I could sit here all day talking about instances were you get into a car accident where you had no control or chance to prevent it because it just wasn't your fault and you had no time to act defensively.
Well I suppose you could control it by just not leaving the house or always taking the bus but that would be impractical.
The point that is even if you mitigate by driving carefully and defensively, you would still have a astronomically greater chance of dying in a car wreck than dying in a plane wreck even if you flew every day of the year.
The reason for this is that aircraft have a pretty good system of traffic control while local traffic does not and people aren't very good at controlling how to deal with traffic even though they like that sense of control
Of course if they ever automate cars in the future like they did with the DARPA Grand challenge, I'd argue that driving in a car would be more safe than flying in a plane.
Laws are not optional. They're protected by force and imposed on everyone in the area. And they have penalties, too.
In reality laws are optional to society for the following reasons:
1. The people who pass them often ignore them when it applies to them. 2. The people who enforce them selectively enforce what they like or do not like. 3. The people who the laws were made for often don't even know about the laws or willfully choose to not follow them sometimes because they are impractical to follow.
Yes, laws are supposed to be followed all the time but sometimes political opinions, morality, and practicality gets in they way.
Like how the DOJ ignored the anti-trust laws because they have CEO friends. Like some police officers let people go for speeding because the driver was a cute girl. Like how its impractical for the average citizen to file his taxes correctly every year (heck the IRS doesn't expect you to fill it to the exact cent).
But sometimes ignoring the law can be a good thing. Like how some people in 3rd Reich sheltered Jews when it went against German law, or how the underground railroad helped Slaves escape when it was illegal to do so in Southern States.
See... Laws aren't always moral or practical to enforce. The problem we have today is that our legal system keeps building more laws that it makes criminals out of everyone and even lawyers are scratching their heads at what to do.
We need a body of government that job is to look at laws and throw them or ask congress to revise them. The supreme court is sort of supposed to do that but its too slow at the process.
We'd need an "anti-congress" whose role is to review legislation and destroy them by vote like how the new congress creates them by vote.
Its either that or in 200 years we'll have so many laws that our descendants will all have to lawyers just to step out of the house.
Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
That's rather funny come to think of it.
I had bought a house a few years back and didn't notice it didn't have phone jacks. It was a refurb where they gutted an old abandoned house and made it completely new.
Didn't notice until had a conversation one day about how much we hated a particular Cable company because they were increasing their rates.
My room mate said "Why don't we go with the phone company DSL?" I looked around and said "You know I never noticed but we don't have phone jacks."
(Note the pone company has a bad rep with DSL here anyways so its a moot point.
And frankly it seems to be a common issue because I realized the last two houses I had rented before buying in the city didn't have phone jacks either because they too were refurbs and we always used cable and cell phones.
Hell even the alarms are cellular these days.
Either way, if they are there don't bother tearing them out, but I would suspect in a few more years when FiOS is more popular, you'll have to tear them out anyways.
My home burglar alarm has a duress code. If someone should ever force me to disarm it at gunpoint, I use a secondary code that will act in the exact same manner as the normal code, while it silently sends a duress signal, and hello SWAT team.
I think it would be just as easy to create a "Zero balance" code to show the assailant you are broke when you are not.
Actually, I think the last scenario is the most likely. Who would you trust to write and verify correct code for a device which interfaced directly to your brain?
This is why you need to learn to encrypt your thoughts.
Though to tell you the truth I can only manage thinking in ROT13 before I get a headache.
Well that is the problem with having massive storage space and a extremely large music collection...
You'll never be able to listen to it all much less listen to new things.
I've been rather overwhelmed by my music collection lately and its all legal rips and downloads so I never can figure out what I want to listen too even on shuffle and that precludes new music.
So I use Pandora to listen to music I own and find new music I don't.
I've bought a bit of music simply because streaming lets me listen to it at random but sometimes I want to listen to it now so owning it helps with that.
Economics isn't like that. The "fundamental particle" of economics is people, and people are adaptive. Under many conditions is it possible to predict how they will behave--assuming rational self-interest (i.e. sanity) and decent psychological models of their personal value scales--but all that breaks down when someone attempts to use the models to control the outcome.
I see what you are saying, but you haves to realize humans are irrational, not random.
And that irrationality can sometimes be easily predicted on the macro level when you are looking at crowd behavior.
And no one has a true random number generator involved in making decision processes in their daily lives. Well if you do, then you are pretty cool.
There is a serious flaw in thinking that computers can accurately model macroeconomics, or predict systematic collapses, any better than commonsense and basic logic can.
Are you saying that human irrationality is defined by something other than the laws of physics, genetics, and chemistry?
If we are to believe that the universe does have a set of laws applied to it, then by understanding those rules can lead to models that will predict otherwise seemly irrational universe.
You just have to have the right model and a computer powerful enough to compute all the date required to get something use.
And you have to sometimes build something as big as the LHC to figure what model you should use.
To assume that this cannot assumes that universe does not have rational rules and is ruled by something else like a supernatural force.
Re:Another kind of Twilight Zone
on
Tetris Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
Wait a minute... are you implying that intellectual property should be considered property?
Actually if they respected the intellectual property, they would have paid the Soviet Union and not the author simply because all copyrightable works were deemed property of the state who got the licensing fees.
Of course to be fair, the Soviet government still paid you know matter what your performance was after that so its pretty much the same as what the RIAA and MPAA want for their works.... Eternal socialist government guaranteed income regardless of quality.
Until we have that kind of knowledge, I don't see how any kind of eye replacement, whether via transplant or some kind of bionic prosthesis, will be possible. Of course, IANANB (I Am Not A Neurobiologist).
Umm... So are you saying because we don't have the knowledge we are going to fail because we don't have the knowledge?
I think the whole point of the research was to learn how to do it so they wouldn't fail at it.
The point of research us to learn about something we know nothing about.
To be fair going to jury duty is an ordeal in surviving in itself having to sit in that room all day as they question everyone.
If anyone who reads this ever gets called... Go. Its more important that you participate instead of making up some excuse not to go. There are a lot of people who in our jails who don't need to be there.
A court of law could have decided this, and there's a good chance they might have decided against him and his punishment would have been even worse than this.
I think the key problems for this person is:
1. He didn't plead the 5th when police custody. 2. He didn't have a lawyer or a competent one (see 1) 3. He didn't reach out to the ACLU or the EFF when 1 or 2 failed. 4. He didn't take his chances with trial by jury.
If your crime involves jail time (sedition, drugs, tax evasion, OJ Simpson etc) you never deal or talk unless they are willing to give you immunity because if you plead guilty the judge will simply assign the default required mandatory sentence regardless of the situation.
If you ever find yourself in the situation where you are facing jail time:
Do not talk. Demand a lawyer. Demand a trial by jury*.
This is your right as an American citizen and no matter how frustrated you make the authorities and no matter how minor you think your crime is, they are required to respect this.
And having to declare bankruptcy and loosing all your wealth is far better than being branded for life or having to spend a good deal of it in jail.
*Yeah, juries are a crap shoot usually made up by people who too stupid to find an excuse to get out of jury duty, but its a better chance than nothing. And if you are lucky, you'll get someone who believes in jury nullification and believes the law is morally wrong. Keep in mind every time I am called I go with the full intention of surviving even if means lost wages at my job and if I feel the law goes against my conscious, I'll side with the defendant. I'm sure there are more like me.
Unless it's a Mac, as soon as the thief discovers it has Linux installed, he's going to wipe the system and install Windows, and cron or your scripts won't be available.
Can you create a bootloader that tricks a windows CD into installing in a virtual machine? That way you still get access to the hardware and the theif won't be the wiser.
Personally, I think the best solution is to encrypt the internal disk and lock the bios down with something so secure that he'll have to at least take the laptop apart and know how to remove the chip or flash it.
By then he'll most likely just throw it in the trash. I'll be out of a laptop but so will he.
If he can get past the bios then he'll still have to format the drive leaving personal data safe.
Any reviewer measuring FPS in relation to SSD performance should go get a job painting fences.
Why was this modded insightful? Some games need to load things from the HD on the fly and write on the fly because some programmers know that people hate looking at loading screens.
Especially on games with open worlds like Morrowind. If the hard drive can't keep up, then the cpu and video card will sit there with nothing do to.
Yes, if the game programmers did it right then you won't have a true drop in FPS because the GPU can keep going on whatever last information, but the game performance will degrade because the player cannot advance until the hard drive has caught up.
I think it is an absolute disgrace that the USA is a junior ITER partner and is not building its own ITER reactor
Why would they?
They already have the NIF which are going to start their device up next month for a test run of a Fusion reaction with expected results around 2010-12ish.
On a side note, for digital download service I'd recommend Gamer's Gate simply because most of the games (especially the Paradox Interactive ones) do not have DRM.
Yes, you do have a valid account, but any game you download can be copied to any other computers locally and backed up and installed without checking the servers. Yes, you do have to register to download patches, but its their bandwidth and they pay that bill.
No cd, no server check, no hassle, and if they go bust one day you'll still have your games as long as you keep good backups.
Such thought processes have traditionally permeated our culture to the point where every child strives to be that hero. To save the world as it were. The results can be seen in everything from local government (simply amazing small towns built out of nothing) to the larger scale of US resolve during WWII and the later Space Race. Thus the communal aspects of working together have always been a strength for us.
However, by the time they are 18 they are taught to be the faceless storm troopers and like it or fail miserably at life.
Not everyone can be a sports star, Nobel prize winner, CEO, or the president. Statistics are against even for the best and brightest. For every successful start up business, there is 1,000 failed ones.
Not that I am skeptical of the human dream of being the hero, I'm just saying its a naive one that we should look at pragmatically.
Perhaps that is where the internet can fill in the gap. We can do and succeed at a lot more online than we could in the brick and mortar world if nothing more than posting thoughts about different topics on a message forum (hrm....)
Eventually, (I believe) virtual things will eventually become more valuable to people than physical things. After basic needs are met and a shift of core set of beliefs towards what is valuable or not, people will view software and communities more important than physical assets. This will of course lower the barriers to entry (because well the cost of most things virtual can be basically $0) and possible create communism that works in the future.
Language, culture and blood are much stronger long-term ties than country.
Last I heard, a good deal of South Koreans aren't interested in unification.
Yes, they want to visit lost relatives and see North Korea end up with a democratic government, but it would be particularly devastating to the South Korean economy if they attempted to unify. This is not particular lost of those who live south of the DMZ.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a peculiar form of narcissism that ever led people to think anyone gave a crap about their day-to-day lives in the first place.
I dunno. It might not be interesting now, but someone in 100 or 500 years might be interested.
Suffice to say, at least the 21st century has opened made the whole process redundant so future historians won't to worry about a fire burning down the Great Library of Alexandria again.
This is dangerous: studies have shown that when you give extrinsic motivation for something, the intrinsic motivation tends to die away.
True, but isn't this how the United States civilization works?
You stop paying someone to do something and then they stop doing that something? You know like what the RIAA and MPAA says about artists? If they don't get paid money, then no art will ever be made?
Maybe I'm being a bit facetious here but considering how the "grown up" world works in regards to doing something only out of the benefit of being paid, we might as teach our kids early there is no such thing as charity.
Also- I personally believe statistics aren't all they're cracked up to be. When I'm in control of a situation VS when I'm not. I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding... Maybe only a few percentage points, but still- statistics are cold hard ideas, but don't account for personal decisions.
Control is an illusion. There are so many variables when driving in a car that you have no control over despite your best efforts.
What if the brakes spontaneously fail because of a manufacture defect?
What if you get blindsided by a Mac truck when you are going through a green stop light?
What if you get a head on collision of a drunk driver who crosses over the median?
And I could sit here all day talking about instances were you get into a car accident where you had no control or chance to prevent it because it just wasn't your fault and you had no time to act defensively.
Well I suppose you could control it by just not leaving the house or always taking the bus but that would be impractical.
The point that is even if you mitigate by driving carefully and defensively, you would still have a astronomically greater chance of dying in a car wreck than dying in a plane wreck even if you flew every day of the year.
The reason for this is that aircraft have a pretty good system of traffic control while local traffic does not and people aren't very good at controlling how to deal with traffic even though they like that sense of control
Of course if they ever automate cars in the future like they did with the DARPA Grand challenge, I'd argue that driving in a car would be more safe than flying in a plane.
Laws are not optional. They're protected by force and imposed on everyone in the area. And they have penalties, too.
In reality laws are optional to society for the following reasons:
1. The people who pass them often ignore them when it applies to them.
2. The people who enforce them selectively enforce what they like or do not like.
3. The people who the laws were made for often don't even know about the laws or willfully choose to not follow them sometimes because they are impractical to follow.
Yes, laws are supposed to be followed all the time but sometimes political opinions, morality, and practicality gets in they way.
Like how the DOJ ignored the anti-trust laws because they have CEO friends. Like some police officers let people go for speeding because the driver was a cute girl. Like how its impractical for the average citizen to file his taxes correctly every year (heck the IRS doesn't expect you to fill it to the exact cent).
But sometimes ignoring the law can be a good thing. Like how some people in 3rd Reich sheltered Jews when it went against German law, or how the underground railroad helped Slaves escape when it was illegal to do so in Southern States.
See... Laws aren't always moral or practical to enforce. The problem we have today is that our legal system keeps building more laws that it makes criminals out of everyone and even lawyers are scratching their heads at what to do.
We need a body of government that job is to look at laws and throw them or ask congress to revise them. The supreme court is sort of supposed to do that but its too slow at the process.
We'd need an "anti-congress" whose role is to review legislation and destroy them by vote like how the new congress creates them by vote.
Its either that or in 200 years we'll have so many laws that our descendants will all have to lawyers just to step out of the house.
Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
That's rather funny come to think of it.
I had bought a house a few years back and didn't notice it didn't have phone jacks. It was a refurb where they gutted an old abandoned house and made it completely new.
Didn't notice until had a conversation one day about how much we hated a particular Cable company because they were increasing their rates.
My room mate said "Why don't we go with the phone company DSL?"
I looked around and said "You know I never noticed but we don't have phone jacks."
(Note the pone company has a bad rep with DSL here anyways so its a moot point.
And frankly it seems to be a common issue because I realized the last two houses I had rented before buying in the city didn't have phone jacks either because they too were refurbs and we always used cable and cell phones.
Hell even the alarms are cellular these days.
Either way, if they are there don't bother tearing them out, but I would suspect in a few more years when FiOS is more popular, you'll have to tear them out anyways.
My home burglar alarm has a duress code. If someone should ever force me to disarm it at gunpoint, I use a secondary code that will act in the exact same manner as the normal code, while it silently sends a duress signal, and hello SWAT team.
I think it would be just as easy to create a "Zero balance" code to show the assailant you are broke when you are not.
Some of us don't need that though.
Am I the only one see truncated green border around the posts? I see this on my MAC and Linux machines. It started happening about a week ago.
Yeah. I went into the /. user preferences and switched to "classic view" and it resolved that issue.
Actually, I think the last scenario is the most likely. Who would you trust to write and verify correct code for a device which interfaced directly to your brain?
This is why you need to learn to encrypt your thoughts.
Though to tell you the truth I can only manage thinking in ROT13 before I get a headache.
Sometimes, I want something to actually be MINE.
Well that is the problem with having massive storage space and a extremely large music collection...
You'll never be able to listen to it all much less listen to new things.
I've been rather overwhelmed by my music collection lately and its all legal rips and downloads so I never can figure out what I want to listen too even on shuffle and that precludes new music.
So I use Pandora to listen to music I own and find new music I don't.
I've bought a bit of music simply because streaming lets me listen to it at random but sometimes I want to listen to it now so owning it helps with that.
Economics isn't like that. The "fundamental particle" of economics is people, and people are adaptive. Under many conditions is it possible to predict how they will behave--assuming rational self-interest (i.e. sanity) and decent psychological models of their personal value scales--but all that breaks down when someone attempts to use the models to control the outcome.
I see what you are saying, but you haves to realize humans are irrational, not random.
And that irrationality can sometimes be easily predicted on the macro level when you are looking at crowd behavior.
And no one has a true random number generator involved in making decision processes in their daily lives. Well if you do, then you are pretty cool.
There is a serious flaw in thinking that computers can accurately model macroeconomics, or predict systematic collapses, any better than commonsense and basic logic can.
Are you saying that human irrationality is defined by something other than the laws of physics, genetics, and chemistry?
If we are to believe that the universe does have a set of laws applied to it, then by understanding those rules can lead to models that will predict otherwise seemly irrational universe.
You just have to have the right model and a computer powerful enough to compute all the date required to get something use.
And you have to sometimes build something as big as the LHC to figure what model you should use.
To assume that this cannot assumes that universe does not have rational rules and is ruled by something else like a supernatural force.
Like you know... Like a Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Don't we already have this? It's called voting.
The USSR had voting and they only had one less candidate to choose from.
The problem with the American system is that "first past the post" system really disenfranchises 49% of the population.
You would need something like Proportional Representation (like Ireland and Israel) to resolve this issue.
Wait a minute... are you implying that intellectual property should be considered property?
Actually if they respected the intellectual property, they would have paid the Soviet Union and not the author simply because all copyrightable works were deemed property of the state who got the licensing fees.
Of course to be fair, the Soviet government still paid you know matter what your performance was after that so its pretty much the same as what the RIAA and MPAA want for their works.... Eternal socialist government guaranteed income regardless of quality.
Until we have that kind of knowledge, I don't see how any kind of eye replacement, whether via transplant or some kind of bionic prosthesis, will be possible. Of course, IANANB (I Am Not A Neurobiologist).
Umm... So are you saying because we don't have the knowledge we are going to fail because we don't have the knowledge?
I think the whole point of the research was to learn how to do it so they wouldn't fail at it.
The point of research us to learn about something we know nothing about.
surviving = serving
To be fair going to jury duty is an ordeal in surviving in itself having to sit in that room all day as they question everyone.
If anyone who reads this ever gets called... Go. Its more important that you participate instead of making up some excuse not to go. There are a lot of people who in our jails who don't need to be there.
A court of law could have decided this, and there's a good chance they might have decided against him and his punishment would have been even worse than this.
I think the key problems for this person is:
1. He didn't plead the 5th when police custody.
2. He didn't have a lawyer or a competent one (see 1)
3. He didn't reach out to the ACLU or the EFF when 1 or 2 failed.
4. He didn't take his chances with trial by jury.
If your crime involves jail time (sedition, drugs, tax evasion, OJ Simpson etc) you never deal or talk unless they are willing to give you immunity because if you plead guilty the judge will simply assign the default required mandatory sentence regardless of the situation.
If you ever find yourself in the situation where you are facing jail time:
Do not talk. Demand a lawyer. Demand a trial by jury*.
This is your right as an American citizen and no matter how frustrated you make the authorities and no matter how minor you think your crime is, they are required to respect this.
And having to declare bankruptcy and loosing all your wealth is far better than being branded for life or having to spend a good deal of it in jail.
*Yeah, juries are a crap shoot usually made up by people who too stupid to find an excuse to get out of jury duty, but its a better chance than nothing. And if you are lucky, you'll get someone who believes in jury nullification and believes the law is morally wrong. Keep in mind every time I am called I go with the full intention of surviving even if means lost wages at my job and if I feel the law goes against my conscious, I'll side with the defendant. I'm sure there are more like me.
Unless it's a Mac, as soon as the thief discovers it has Linux installed, he's going to wipe the system and install Windows, and cron or your scripts won't be available.
Can you create a bootloader that tricks a windows CD into installing in a virtual machine? That way you still get access to the hardware and the theif won't be the wiser.
Personally, I think the best solution is to encrypt the internal disk and lock the bios down with something so secure that he'll have to at least take the laptop apart and know how to remove the chip or flash it.
By then he'll most likely just throw it in the trash. I'll be out of a laptop but so will he.
If he can get past the bios then he'll still have to format the drive leaving personal data safe.
Any reviewer measuring FPS in relation to SSD performance should go get a job painting fences.
Why was this modded insightful? Some games need to load things from the HD on the fly and write on the fly because some programmers know that people hate looking at loading screens.
Especially on games with open worlds like Morrowind. If the hard drive can't keep up, then the cpu and video card will sit there with nothing do to.
Yes, if the game programmers did it right then you won't have a true drop in FPS because the GPU can keep going on whatever last information, but the game performance will degrade because the player cannot advance until the hard drive has caught up.
This information is irrelevant to many of us; for a frame of reference, how does HD performance on 7 compare with XP?
Mechanical HDs will be irrelevant in less than 5 years.
The question you should be asking yourself is "When can I get an SSD at an affordable price?" rather than "How well does the old HD perform?"
The key issue with Win7 is that it does include the TRIM command that improves SSD performance and longevity where WinXP and Vista does not.
That said, SSD improves any OS performance, it is just that Win7 was made with SSD file systems in mind.
I think it is an absolute disgrace that the USA is a junior ITER partner and is not building its own ITER reactor
Why would they?
They already have the NIF which are going to start their device up next month for a test run of a Fusion reaction with expected results around 2010-12ish.
What happens when steam goes bust?
On a side note, for digital download service I'd recommend Gamer's Gate simply because most of the games (especially the Paradox Interactive ones) do not have DRM.
Yes, you do have a valid account, but any game you download can be copied to any other computers locally and backed up and installed without checking the servers. Yes, you do have to register to download patches, but its their bandwidth and they pay that bill.
No cd, no server check, no hassle, and if they go bust one day you'll still have your games as long as you keep good backups.
Such thought processes have traditionally permeated our culture to the point where every child strives to be that hero. To save the world as it were. The results can be seen in everything from local government (simply amazing small towns built out of nothing) to the larger scale of US resolve during WWII and the later Space Race. Thus the communal aspects of working together have always been a strength for us.
However, by the time they are 18 they are taught to be the faceless storm troopers and like it or fail miserably at life.
Not everyone can be a sports star, Nobel prize winner, CEO, or the president. Statistics are against even for the best and brightest. For every successful start up business, there is 1,000 failed ones.
Not that I am skeptical of the human dream of being the hero, I'm just saying its a naive one that we should look at pragmatically.
Perhaps that is where the internet can fill in the gap. We can do and succeed at a lot more online than we could in the brick and mortar world if nothing more than posting thoughts about different topics on a message forum (hrm....)
Eventually, (I believe) virtual things will eventually become more valuable to people than physical things. After basic needs are met and a shift of core set of beliefs towards what is valuable or not, people will view software and communities more important than physical assets. This will of course lower the barriers to entry (because well the cost of most things virtual can be basically $0) and possible create communism that works in the future.
(assuming your net connection stays up).
That is what the $30 a month tethering plan with the iPhone is for.
See where is this is leading us.
Language, culture and blood are much stronger long-term ties than country.
Last I heard, a good deal of South Koreans aren't interested in unification.
Yes, they want to visit lost relatives and see North Korea end up with a democratic government, but it would be particularly devastating to the South Korean economy if they attempted to unify. This is not particular lost of those who live south of the DMZ.
Surely it's possible for an individual to spend a few hours away from an internet connection?
Tell that to the VP screaming he can't get email.