Though...I'd imagine someone who counts on the extremely unlikely combination of some bouncing plastic balls as their key to financial freedom already is unhappy because they have no goals or purpose in life, and is also rather bad at handling finances.
Usually, lotto winner have no infrastructure or advisers to handle such a windfall. You know... Accountants, lawyers, financial coaches, and various other people you would generally have if you already had a business.
That is why generally, you see people who start a business and then make millions (or billions) from a windfall (say Youtube and Google) because they are generally familiar with the business process or have competent people to assist them with the transition.
My hunch is that as soon as a lotto winner wins, they generally bombarded phone calls from "financial advisers" who will assist and managing his wealth (which may or may not be in his best interest) or have family members help them out instead of actually doing the right thing with contacting a lawyer and immediately creating a trust fond or LLC to manage their wealth.
Its kind of like that scene from "Office Space" when they are debating what they would do if they ever got a million dollars and one of them goes into a diatribe how they would invest in mutual funds and so on. In truth thats probably the best way to stay rich for the long term.
Personally, if I won the lotto, I'd move to a nice but reasonably priced neighborhood and simply set up my funds to live off interest, keep driving my crappy car, and play video games all day instead of working. However, the temptation might be so overwhelming to buy a $1,000,000 home might be so overwhelming I too might fall victim to buying useless stuff I don't need and be poor within 5 years ago.
I realize that Thompson is the offline version of an internet troll (although he trolls the internet aplenty as well). Maybe if we ignore him by not posting any more articles about him, he'll just go away? I fear not however. It seems as though Thompson is not actually interested in "protecting the children" just in being seen by someone somewhere.
No. We've tried ignoring him and Main Stream Media didn't realize he was crazy and invited him to speak on Fox News for the Virginia Tech shooting where he spouts video games are to blame even before the killer is investigated.
Listen... If you don't out him as the loony that he is, he is going to get more prime time interviews by people who don't understand the video game industry. If every time he gets on a soap box we shout "The Emperor has no clothes!" than Joe Six Pack and the MSM will stop taking him seriously.
Of course MSM might enjoy him because of his controversy.
No way that someone with years of experience couldn't land a job in the computer field. If I can get job offer after job offer by just sitting on my ass after I post my resume on two sites, then you need to work on your resume skills, or your social skills. One of them is srsly out of tune.
First it depends on where you live and how the economy is. After 9/11 and the bubble burst I couldn't find a job for about 6 months and most of my friends who were in the industry were laid off too so none of us could help each other. Even one of my old jobs I had tried asking if they still needed help (even for a pay cut) had told me they had to lay off my replacement so that was out of the question.
Eventually, things got better and after a while I settled for a crap tech support job. Eventually I was able to move to a better one and so on. Keep in mind, now this was in a metropolitan area (and I'll have to admit I'm a good interviewer compared to most people) so I could only imagine how things were for someone with little experience or lack of social skills.
I would have never gone to college. My degree is useless and I'm in lots of debt thanks to school loans.
Personally, given the situation and how my life turned out, I'm glad I dropped out of college and went straight into the workforce. In my current job, I'm paid the same as many college grads with the same amount of work experience, but yet I don't have any long time debt I have to pay off.
However, I'm very lucky that I got to work for the companies I did and was able to pad my resume early on and would admit my success is pretty much pure luck of the draw.
But if I had to do it all over again, I would have gone back in time and told myself to drop computer science all together and get a major in a foreign language like Japanese and live abroad. Its kind of hard to have those kind of experiences by teaching yourself.
That and it would have gotten me out of the states and out of the American corporate lifestyle.
Well its the difference between and electrical engineer and an electrician.
You don't want to have an electrical engineer to come into your store to pull cables and try to remember all the building codes. You don't want a regular electrician to design the circuit board that it going to be used as your circuit breaker in your store's back room.
I mean... You don't need a CS grad developing your web page, but you hope that a CS grad developed the operating system the web page runs on.
No, its the share holders choice. Apple is a corporate entity that has no thoughts, feelings, emotions, or choices. Remember that... If the shareholders don't like what Steve and the board is doing they will replace them. Otherwise... Their inaction is a default choice.
Technology is being used as a fig-leaf to cover the fact that the powers that be cannot or will not use the presence of humans patrolling in uniforms as a means of catching or deterring ne'er do wells.
I believe Anthony Burgess pointed this out well in Clockwork Orange. You can use technology to make a man into an upright citizen, but it does not make him an upright citizen. It more or less destroys the nature of man.
So yes, it would almost certainly have the exact same effect on people. Imagine the best orgasm you've ever had, while eating your favorite meal, while high on your favorite intoxicant, then quadruple that. The most restrained willful human alive would turn into a drooling zap-junkie, no question at all.
One of the points I always raise when transhumanism is involved (and technically that person in this story is you could define as a low level transhumanist) is that given complete control of your brains inner workings that you would basically crank on the part for the orgasm and sit there until you starve to death or the life support system gives out.
But at the same time if you could regulation other emotions such as discontent and boredom, you might be able to get around this. Rather a proper regulated system which has to see certain stimuli before you could enjoy it and not at that scale.
Sort of like if you didn't like Beethoven's 9th but if you programmed the electrode kit to zap your happiness in your brain every time you played the mp3 file that you might start to appreciate classical music.
Or better yet... Associate learning with a video game that you have to learn certain tasks such as... Learning a Japanese phrase correctly (or any foreign language) or for ever formula you get correct on your math exam you are immediately zapped with a reward and you have a great motivation for improving yourself.
However, I supposed this could be abused if say your employer had the ability to reward its employees by giving them a zap which would create a legion of slave workers kow towing for a meager zap of the brain.
The real competition is other forms of clean power generation, like nuclear. Nuclear's costs are about the same as coal; why build a concentrated solar plant when you can just build a nuke plant?/i
Because I can't build a nuclear reactor in my backyard. I can setup a solar array.
Of course your point still stands about centralized solar panel stations.
The major advantage to solar power is that you can put it in your backyard and roof and take care of yourself without relying on a central power station. The only advantage I see with creating major solar plans is that it hopefully drives down the R&D costs in solar technology and increase solar cell efficiency. Hence... Rather than 20 years from now, I'll be able to buy cheap solar power in 10 years for home installation.
3 - Are you honestly telling me that if you saw somebody with wires sticking out of a briefcase at the airport who was ignoring the police you wouldn't be even the slightest bit nervous? And when the bomb did finally blow up you'd think the cops did the right thing, since no terrorist would be stupid enough to let the wires hang out?
No.
One of my bands on my label has to take their gear on the plane via carry on ($1,000 mini sound board and you would too rather than have it thrown around in luggage)
The have gotten funny looks by security but they always let us through.
In reality, most bombs aren't like their Hollywood counterparts and have minimum of wires and mostly explosives.
Here is a crude one made in Afghanistan (At 9 seconds into the film):
No circuit boards. No rats nest of wires. No count down timer. In the more advanced bombs you'll have a cell phone involved, but its far from anything like what that person was wearing. I can't seem to find pictures of the Palestinian bombs, but they are quite clean and neatly packed.
In reality, if a terrorist was attempting to attack an airport with a bomb (it is highly unlikely going to be targeted again since of all the attention airports receive now) they will have a valid identification and paper, look very clean cut, have no evidence of wires or irritation, have a fail deadly (shoot them and the bomb goes off anyways) and would simply blow themselves up after they realized it was too late.
Speaking of which... If terrorism was that big of a threat (as opposed to heart disease and car wrecks which kill more Americans a year than a hundred 9/11s) they would target the airport security checkpoints like they do in Iraq where everyone is waiting in line to get through.
In Israel, their checkpoints consist of concrete bunkers, video cameras, and loud speakers due to the fact that suicide bombs were attacking the soldiers there.
So no... I don't think this argument is valid because there will not be an attack unless its just by a crackpot who gets lucky. Even then you shouldn't be afraid because your more likely to die in your shower by a slip and fall accident than ever dying of a terrorist attack. (And no... I don't have a college degree but I feel like we've gone to hell in a hand basket with paranoia that is ruining this nation)
I for one would be more than happy to give up my Internet connexion so Iraqis/Haitians/everyone else can have some food on their table. Are any candidates actually addressing Human Needs?
There is nothing stopping you from canceling your ISP service right now and sending all that money to the Red Cross or Unicef.
I'll be frank with you... I don't give a damn about most of the human race and would rather not see our nation's over burdened budget used to feed other people who may or may not deserve it. Hell... They probably aren't bad people, but we can't solve the world's problems by throwing money at it.
To be fair, we can't solve the worlds problems by throwing soldiers at it either and I'm sure Iraqis would rather have my tax dollars not used to bomb them either. Bring the troops home and solve our looming financial crisis. Then we can talk about solving other people's problems.
Otherwise in 50 years we'll be asking for donations too.
Does Florida law apply to Canadian law? I'm just asking... I'm sure I've insulted enough Canadians by demanding them to say Zee instead of Zed when they are spelling something phonetically.
But one of the reasons I bother keeping comcast cable TV part is the on demand anime... Now if Xbox360 had Adult Swim episodes... I might drop the non-data part of comcast.
[quote]"(Metaplace will launch with this 2D isometric graphics view as standard)"
It's not even an immersive 3D world.[/quote]
IMO, 2D isometric is a good standard that I wish a lot of developers would go back to. Even though you run a completly 3d engine 2D isometric is actually a good thing.
One of the reason I hated EQ and preferred to play UO and Diablo was because the 2D isometric view always was static and never caused me problems nor something else to mess with. Let me play a CRPG and not a damn FPS.
It might be the fact I like to look at the world as miniatures like real life role playing games, but maybe I'm just old school.
Okay, what about the guy who wants another person's level 60 to be impotent when imported into their own world.
I suspect it would be like most real life D&D games where the DM just tells the guy with the level 20 character that he can't play in his campaign designed for the level 5 characters everyone else at the table has... And that if he wants to play he needs to re-roll.
Why is it that people wish to live a billion years yet don't have anything more productive to do with their limited life than post on Slashdot?
Because I'm forced to due the fact we live in a pre-singularity society and have to work a job to pay rent and eat and work and procreate and all the other things animals with limited time spans.
My question to you is why should I do anything productive if I'm going to die anyways? If in a 5 billions years all the humans are dead and no one cares except alien archaeologists. Then don't you think the only point to our lives is to enjoy it rather than spend all our time doing something productive for people who will all die someday too? Maybe its a bit hedonistic, but lets be realistic. Either someday a society gets to a point where technology solves mortality or they die out due to larger astronomical issues (meteor, sun dying, or gamma ray burst).
So if while your slaving away trying to be productive for a cause that will not benefit you (since you are mortal) I'm going to spend my time on slashdot enjoying my time as I see fit. I'd like to be more productive, but I don't see the point.
Exactly. There are only two motivations for theft of a laptop:
Again, you are assuming that thieves are geeks. Theft occurs usually when the thief things its valuable regardless of its real value or understanding. I had a thief steal a case of music CDRs from my car.
He probably thought it was some music CDs he could sell at a used CD store or pawn shop, but I figured he was in for a suprise when he found a pack full of data CDs that will only play on a MP3 device. (He didn't even check the glove compartment for the player)
So I'm out of $200 for a broken car window and the thief gets a free CD case and some coasters.
When someone resorts to crime they generally have no technical knowledge of the situation anyway, they just know they can sell the laptop or use it themselves (a true geek criminal would use social engineering or ebay scam anyways rather than armed robbery... less risky)
So chances are the average armed robber will no know how to reinstall windows or even format a hard drive. They'll probably take it to a pawn shop who (depending on their knowledge) may just put it on the shelf.
Its usually the more discrete criminals who will wipe the laptops. People that hang around airports or coffee shops and wait for you to go to the bathroom or turn away before grabbing your laptop. They specifically were targeting it rather than "I've got a gun in your face so I'm taking that because it looks valuable"
First thing that happens is the laptop gets wiped.
Most people stealing laptops at gun point aren't that technically inclined or professional. There have been documented instances where the thieves were viewed with the built in laptop camera. Most of the time the they only grabbed the laptop from you because it seemed valuable.
Secondly, if you go to a pawn shop and pickup a laptop you can usually get the last owners personal data.
However, thieves that target laptops professionally will probably wipe your data, but usually they'll snatch your laptop from the air port or coffee shop while your not working, but those people are extremely rare and you don't see that much anymore since laptops aren't as valuable as they used to be.
But for all we know humanity will get wiped out at the end of this decade and we're at the peak of human civilization at this moment in time.
Damn you genie and your wishes! Ok how about this wish:
"I wish to live in a time where an intelligent species (doesn't have to be human) still exists and a technological singularity has happened to that species and available to all member of that species which enables them to live forever in a time where that species is no longer in danger of being wiped out for at least billions of years nor in danger of being enslaved by other species and is currently colonizing the known universe."
There... Satisfied? I wish to live in that time frame.
Slashdot Mirror
Though...I'd imagine someone who counts on the extremely unlikely combination of some bouncing plastic balls as their key to financial freedom already is unhappy because they have no goals or purpose in life, and is also rather bad at handling finances.
Usually, lotto winner have no infrastructure or advisers to handle such a windfall. You know... Accountants, lawyers, financial coaches, and various other people you would generally have if you already had a business.
That is why generally, you see people who start a business and then make millions (or billions) from a windfall (say Youtube and Google) because they are generally familiar with the business process or have competent people to assist them with the transition.
My hunch is that as soon as a lotto winner wins, they generally bombarded phone calls from "financial advisers" who will assist and managing his wealth (which may or may not be in his best interest) or have family members help them out instead of actually doing the right thing with contacting a lawyer and immediately creating a trust fond or LLC to manage their wealth.
Its kind of like that scene from "Office Space" when they are debating what they would do if they ever got a million dollars and one of them goes into a diatribe how they would invest in mutual funds and so on. In truth thats probably the best way to stay rich for the long term.
Personally, if I won the lotto, I'd move to a nice but reasonably priced neighborhood and simply set up my funds to live off interest, keep driving my crappy car, and play video games all day instead of working. However, the temptation might be so overwhelming to buy a $1,000,000 home might be so overwhelming I too might fall victim to buying useless stuff I don't need and be poor within 5 years ago.
Not to mention not all Americans are sitting on piles of money.
Given the current rate of inflation, I'm pretty sure we can wallpaper our homes with dollar bills in about 5 years.
I realize that Thompson is the offline version of an internet troll (although he trolls the internet aplenty as well). Maybe if we ignore him by not posting any more articles about him, he'll just go away? I fear not however. It seems as though Thompson is not actually interested in "protecting the children" just in being seen by someone somewhere.
No. We've tried ignoring him and Main Stream Media didn't realize he was crazy and invited him to speak on Fox News for the Virginia Tech shooting where he spouts video games are to blame even before the killer is investigated.
Listen... If you don't out him as the loony that he is, he is going to get more prime time interviews by people who don't understand the video game industry. If every time he gets on a soap box we shout "The Emperor has no clothes!" than Joe Six Pack and the MSM will stop taking him seriously.
Of course MSM might enjoy him because of his controversy.
No way that someone with years of experience couldn't land a job in the computer field. If I can get job offer after job offer by just sitting on my ass after I post my resume on two sites, then you need to work on your resume skills, or your social skills. One of them is srsly out of tune.
First it depends on where you live and how the economy is. After 9/11 and the bubble burst I couldn't find a job for about 6 months and most of my friends who were in the industry were laid off too so none of us could help each other. Even one of my old jobs I had tried asking if they still needed help (even for a pay cut) had told me they had to lay off my replacement so that was out of the question.
Eventually, things got better and after a while I settled for a crap tech support job. Eventually I was able to move to a better one and so on. Keep in mind, now this was in a metropolitan area (and I'll have to admit I'm a good interviewer compared to most people) so I could only imagine how things were for someone with little experience or lack of social skills.
I would have never gone to college. My degree is useless and I'm in lots of debt thanks to school loans.
Personally, given the situation and how my life turned out, I'm glad I dropped out of college and went straight into the workforce. In my current job, I'm paid the same as many college grads with the same amount of work experience, but yet I don't have any long time debt I have to pay off.
However, I'm very lucky that I got to work for the companies I did and was able to pad my resume early on and would admit my success is pretty much pure luck of the draw.
But if I had to do it all over again, I would have gone back in time and told myself to drop computer science all together and get a major in a foreign language like Japanese and live abroad. Its kind of hard to have those kind of experiences by teaching yourself.
That and it would have gotten me out of the states and out of the American corporate lifestyle.
Well its the difference between and electrical engineer and an electrician.
You don't want to have an electrical engineer to come into your store to pull cables and try to remember all the building codes.
You don't want a regular electrician to design the circuit board that it going to be used as your circuit breaker in your store's back room.
I mean... You don't need a CS grad developing your web page, but you hope that a CS grad developed the operating system the web page runs on.
People already trust computers too much.
No. You can always trust the answer a computer gives you to be correct.
Its the input data that I'm worried about.
...it's Apple's choice.
No, its the share holders choice. Apple is a corporate entity that has no thoughts, feelings, emotions, or choices. Remember that... If the shareholders don't like what Steve and the board is doing they will replace them. Otherwise... Their inaction is a default choice.
Apple is a company that's trying to maximize its profits? Wha????
Short term gains do not always result in long term profits.
In fact, done in the worst possible way could result in you having toilet paper worth more than your stock price.
Technology is being used as a fig-leaf to cover the fact that the powers that be cannot or will not use the presence of humans patrolling in uniforms as a means of catching or deterring ne'er do wells.
I believe Anthony Burgess pointed this out well in Clockwork Orange. You can use technology to make a man into an upright citizen, but it does not make him an upright citizen. It more or less destroys the nature of man.
So yes, it would almost certainly have the exact same effect on people. Imagine the best orgasm you've ever had, while eating your favorite meal, while high on your favorite intoxicant, then quadruple that. The most restrained willful human alive would turn into a drooling zap-junkie, no question at all.
One of the points I always raise when transhumanism is involved (and technically that person in this story is you could define as a low level transhumanist) is that given complete control of your brains inner workings that you would basically crank on the part for the orgasm and sit there until you starve to death or the life support system gives out.
But at the same time if you could regulation other emotions such as discontent and boredom, you might be able to get around this. Rather a proper regulated system which has to see certain stimuli before you could enjoy it and not at that scale.
Sort of like if you didn't like Beethoven's 9th but if you programmed the electrode kit to zap your happiness in your brain every time you played the mp3 file that you might start to appreciate classical music.
Or better yet... Associate learning with a video game that you have to learn certain tasks such as... Learning a Japanese phrase correctly (or any foreign language) or for ever formula you get correct on your math exam you are immediately zapped with a reward and you have a great motivation for improving yourself.
However, I supposed this could be abused if say your employer had the ability to reward its employees by giving them a zap which would create a legion of slave workers kow towing for a meager zap of the brain.
I have however heard of it happening while smoking marijuana or alcohol.
But that number is still far less than those that killed under the influence of religion, collectivism, nationalism, and racism.
The real competition is other forms of clean power generation, like nuclear. Nuclear's costs are about the same as coal; why build a concentrated solar plant when you can just build a nuke plant?/i
Because I can't build a nuclear reactor in my backyard. I can setup a solar array.
Of course your point still stands about centralized solar panel stations.
The major advantage to solar power is that you can put it in your backyard and roof and take care of yourself without relying on a central power station. The only advantage I see with creating major solar plans is that it hopefully drives down the R&D costs in solar technology and increase solar cell efficiency. Hence... Rather than 20 years from now, I'll be able to buy cheap solar power in 10 years for home installation.
3 - Are you honestly telling me that if you saw somebody with wires sticking out of a briefcase at the airport who was ignoring the police you wouldn't be even the slightest bit nervous? And when the bomb did finally blow up you'd think the cops did the right thing, since no terrorist would be stupid enough to let the wires hang out?
No.
One of my bands on my label has to take their gear on the plane via carry on ($1,000 mini sound board and you would too rather than have it thrown around in luggage)
The have gotten funny looks by security but they always let us through.
In reality, most bombs aren't like their Hollywood counterparts and have minimum of wires and mostly explosives.
Here is a crude one made in Afghanistan (At 9 seconds into the film):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pek5xISalL8
No circuit boards. No rats nest of wires. No count down timer. In the more advanced bombs you'll have a cell phone involved, but its far from anything like what that person was wearing. I can't seem to find pictures of the Palestinian bombs, but they are quite clean and neatly packed.
In reality, if a terrorist was attempting to attack an airport with a bomb (it is highly unlikely going to be targeted again since of all the attention airports receive now) they will have a valid identification and paper, look very clean cut, have no evidence of wires or irritation, have a fail deadly (shoot them and the bomb goes off anyways) and would simply blow themselves up after they realized it was too late.
Speaking of which... If terrorism was that big of a threat (as opposed to heart disease and car wrecks which kill more Americans a year than a hundred 9/11s) they would target the airport security checkpoints like they do in Iraq where everyone is waiting in line to get through.
In Israel, their checkpoints consist of concrete bunkers, video cameras, and loud speakers due to the fact that suicide bombs were attacking the soldiers there.
So no... I don't think this argument is valid because there will not be an attack unless its just by a crackpot who gets lucky. Even then you shouldn't be afraid because your more likely to die in your shower by a slip and fall accident than ever dying of a terrorist attack. (And no... I don't have a college degree but I feel like we've gone to hell in a hand basket with paranoia that is ruining this nation)
I for one would be more than happy to give up my Internet connexion so Iraqis/Haitians/everyone else can have some food on their table. Are any candidates actually addressing Human Needs?
There is nothing stopping you from canceling your ISP service right now and sending all that money to the Red Cross or Unicef.
I'll be frank with you... I don't give a damn about most of the human race and would rather not see our nation's over burdened budget used to feed other people who may or may not deserve it. Hell... They probably aren't bad people, but we can't solve the world's problems by throwing money at it.
To be fair, we can't solve the worlds problems by throwing soldiers at it either and I'm sure Iraqis would rather have my tax dollars not used to bomb them either. Bring the troops home and solve our looming financial crisis. Then we can talk about solving other people's problems.
Otherwise in 50 years we'll be asking for donations too.
Does Florida law apply to Canadian law? I'm just asking... I'm sure I've insulted enough Canadians by demanding them to say Zee instead of Zed when they are spelling something phonetically.
Pretty much.
But one of the reasons I bother keeping comcast cable TV part is the on demand anime... Now if Xbox360 had Adult Swim episodes... I might drop the non-data part of comcast.
Oh boy. VRML.
Like I said on the metaspace article, VRML wasn't a bad idea as a theoretical concept, but it was implemented in the worst possible way possible.
[quote]"(Metaplace will launch with this 2D isometric graphics view as standard)"
It's not even an immersive 3D world.[/quote]
IMO, 2D isometric is a good standard that I wish a lot of developers would go back to. Even though you run a completly 3d engine 2D isometric is actually a good thing.
One of the reason I hated EQ and preferred to play UO and Diablo was because the 2D isometric view always was static and never caused me problems nor something else to mess with. Let me play a CRPG and not a damn FPS.
It might be the fact I like to look at the world as miniatures like real life role playing games, but maybe I'm just old school.
Okay, what about the guy who wants another person's level 60 to be impotent when imported into their own world.
I suspect it would be like most real life D&D games where the DM just tells the guy with the level 20 character that he can't play in his campaign designed for the level 5 characters everyone else at the table has... And that if he wants to play he needs to re-roll.
This sounds bad and reminds me of VRML and Second Life rolled up into one. Now we can define flying penises and virtual brothels in HTML markup. Phew.
There was nothing wrong with behind the idea of VRML, it was just implemented really really badly kind of like Second Life was.
Why is it that people wish to live a billion years yet don't have anything more productive to do with their limited life than post on Slashdot?
Because I'm forced to due the fact we live in a pre-singularity society and have to work a job to pay rent and eat and work and procreate and all the other things animals with limited time spans.
My question to you is why should I do anything productive if I'm going to die anyways? If in a 5 billions years all the humans are dead and no one cares except alien archaeologists. Then don't you think the only point to our lives is to enjoy it rather than spend all our time doing something productive for people who will all die someday too? Maybe its a bit hedonistic, but lets be realistic. Either someday a society gets to a point where technology solves mortality or they die out due to larger astronomical issues (meteor, sun dying, or gamma ray burst).
So if while your slaving away trying to be productive for a cause that will not benefit you (since you are mortal) I'm going to spend my time on slashdot enjoying my time as I see fit. I'd like to be more productive, but I don't see the point.
Exactly. There are only two motivations for theft of a laptop:
Again, you are assuming that thieves are geeks. Theft occurs usually when the thief things its valuable regardless of its real value or understanding. I had a thief steal a case of music CDRs from my car.
He probably thought it was some music CDs he could sell at a used CD store or pawn shop, but I figured he was in for a suprise when he found a pack full of data CDs that will only play on a MP3 device. (He didn't even check the glove compartment for the player)
So I'm out of $200 for a broken car window and the thief gets a free CD case and some coasters.
When someone resorts to crime they generally have no technical knowledge of the situation anyway, they just know they can sell the laptop or use it themselves (a true geek criminal would use social engineering or ebay scam anyways rather than armed robbery... less risky)
So chances are the average armed robber will no know how to reinstall windows or even format a hard drive. They'll probably take it to a pawn shop who (depending on their knowledge) may just put it on the shelf.
Its usually the more discrete criminals who will wipe the laptops. People that hang around airports or coffee shops and wait for you to go to the bathroom or turn away before grabbing your laptop. They specifically were targeting it rather than "I've got a gun in your face so I'm taking that because it looks valuable"
First thing that happens is the laptop gets wiped.
Most people stealing laptops at gun point aren't that technically inclined or professional. There have been documented instances where the thieves were viewed with the built in laptop camera. Most of the time the they only grabbed the laptop from you because it seemed valuable.
Secondly, if you go to a pawn shop and pickup a laptop you can usually get the last owners personal data.
However, thieves that target laptops professionally will probably wipe your data, but usually they'll snatch your laptop from the air port or coffee shop while your not working, but those people are extremely rare and you don't see that much anymore since laptops aren't as valuable as they used to be.
But for all we know humanity will get wiped out at the end of this decade and we're at the peak of human civilization at this moment in time.
Damn you genie and your wishes! Ok how about this wish:
"I wish to live in a time where an intelligent species (doesn't have to be human) still exists and a technological singularity has happened to that species and available to all member of that species which enables them to live forever in a time where that species is no longer in danger of being wiped out for at least billions of years nor in danger of being enslaved by other species and is currently colonizing the known universe."
There... Satisfied? I wish to live in that time frame.