Paying teachers more and putting more money into our crumbling infrastructure is not going to cut it. The American empire and its culture are rotting from the inside out and if you can't see it, you surely must be able to smell it. Look around the world. Whoever figures out the solution to free energy (economical fusion, solar, or whatever) first, and can most effectively couple this advance with information technology to propagate their culture, will win the century. Pardon my cynicism, but I think the 21st century will not belong to America.
It doesn't matter in the end -- electing Obama might stave off some of the inevitable decline we are facing. We transmillenial Americans won't suffer terribly, but we won't be setting the human agenda in 2100, either.
If all of these things come about, the internet will be like cable TV and there will be no free press.
You're forgetting the millions of wifi radios embedded in personal computing devices in the United States alone. Free software will gradually make these devices more, not less, useful for wireless mesh networking. Access to the "free" internet might be a little bit spotty at first.
Bring it on. I haven't got any idea who paid for the Internet connection I used to post this message, nor do I care. You're still reading it, aren't you? I could just as easily have sent you a copy of any recent movie, or any popular or rare CD, or any book.
This will only get easier. My eeepc can serve a hidden TOR site from my bag while I'm getting a haircut, and keep doing so while I have lunch at Panera.
I was in fourth grade when I first played with the Zork triology of text-adventure games on the C-64. An innocent kid and budding geek, I tried feeding novel combinations of nouns and verbs to the primitive parser.
I tried "EAT LAMP"... got back "You can't eat the lamp."
"EAT BREAD"... "That was delicious."... Etc.
I tried "EAT ME". I couldn't comprehend why my dad, who had just bought the game for me and was supervising over my shoulder, started laughing so hard.
Several years later I finally understood why he laughed even harder when the computer responded:
"Auto-cannibalism is not the answer."
You can mod this offtopic, but those 1983 game designers had a real sense of humor and subtly implemented it in 64KB.
... Oh, you don't like it when I recycle old jokes!? You must be new here...
I'll bet neither have the fundie Christians or Islamists done anything directly to harm you and yours.
Yeah, I suppose preaching hatred against gays, so they get spit on or cursed at or their friends get beaten up on the street, that doesn't count as "direct" harm.
We (humanity) will face far more serious problems in this century, than suboptimal efficiency in our use of fossil fuels.
Hauling vast quantities of cargo around the world simply to exploit cheaper labor elsewhere, while consuming vast quantities of nonrenewable resources, is not sustainable.
We need to solve the energy problem NOW. We need to learn how to extract most of our energy from renewable resources (solar, wind, tidal [and nuclear as a stopgap]), and then work out the bioengineering we will need to regulate the atmosphere, prevent undesirable climate change, and produce additional energy and the materials for 21st century manufacturing.
The information technology revolution of the past few decades (at the expense of the environment) is what will have made all of that possible.
Strapping kites onto oil tankers will only help perpetuate the outdated, unsustainable economies we rely on today. Developing technologies that save the shipping company $1600/day is a waste of time and effort.
The goal should be, 20 years from now, that we don't need oil tankers anymore.
Then we can work on undoing the environmental damage caused by the industrial and information revolutions, and get started fixing the rest of our social problems.
Why not just contribute some time and/or money to your local public school system, and leave out the contributions to sustain a socially detrimental government program (legalized gambling)?
Forget your subjective feelings. You're just as likely to win with 1-2-3-4-5 as 4-8-16-23-42 or 19-20-21-22-23 or any other combination. So you might as well play 24-25-26-27-28. Or 2-3-5-7-11. Or 11-13-17-19-23. Or 12-14-16-18-19.
If you think any of these combinations is better than any others (in terms of absolute likelihood of coming up, not in terms of actual prize winnings due to multiple winners sharing the jackpot), you shouldn't be gambling.
An appropriate Halloween metaphor for the media middleman industry.
You media conglomerate networks and telecom provider companies don't seem to get it. We (the viewers) want you (the companies in control of the wires and the infrastructure) to simply deliver to us what we like. Without a hassle. That means that until I can get my Bill Maher every Friday night, until I can grab my Jon Stewart and Bear Grylls and Stephen Colbert and Ellen Degeneres and Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers and Alton Brown and Mike Rowe and Keith Olbermann, on demand, by paying something to you for it, I'll get what I want for free, via torrents or video blogs or other means.
As it stands right now, I would have to subscribe to a cable company's entire digital cable lineup to get all of these stations, and I'd be subsidizing Fox News, CNN, ABC, CBS, Home Shopping Network, Lifetime, Hallmark, and who knows what other garbage.
I'm not doing that anymore. I've nearly convinced my mom to drop her cable along with me. That's $55 something per month each, $110 * 12 = $1320 per year, we're paying for 100 ad-drenched channels, most of which we never watch anyway. Do you see how useless you've become in the internet age? Wake up and fix your problems, or you'll be gone in less than a decade.
Modern global society is doing it wrong. The current regime of patents and copyrights is completely outdated and old-fashioned. Global digital communication has made copyright irrelevant, and it's absurd to think you can patent an idea.
I can only hope we'll look back on these early decades of the 21th century and laugh at how silly our laws were.
I'm going outside now to watch the Orionids. Good thing you can't copyright an experience.
Epidemiological data mining. Google Earth overlays, with clusters of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, tooth decay, and E. coli infections near fast food restaurants. There might be clusters of radon-related lung cancer. There are some really nifty things you could find out by centralizing medical records. Alter or improve traffic patterns in neighborhoods where statistically more people are getting hit by cars.
I'm not advocating that we actually do all this, just pointing out some possibilities.
It's not so funny when it happens to you or your family. Wait until someone you know gets it. You won't be laughing anymore.
Haha, that guy has a limp. Haha, that woman is blind. Haha, that kid
is retarded. Hahaha. Fucking hilarious.
Whatever you do, don't get Alzheimer's disease. It sucks.
My grandmother just turned 94 and has advanced Alzheimer's disease. She can barely walk anymore. I devote a few hours of my life every single day to caregiving. If you've never known someone like this, you really have no idea what's involved. Yeah, we could put her in a home. We could watch her die sooner that way, wearing diapers and ceaselessly, hopelessly calling out for someone to please take her home. As it is now, she wears diapers, but at least we always change them. In nursing homes, they don't.
Have you ever had someone you know and love, who helped raise you and even changed *your* diapers and then helped teach you how to count and how to read and how to do puzzles and math and typing and how to play games, who taught you the names of the plants that grow out in the back yard? And now she can smile and say "Hello", and tell you to get the hell out because she don't know who you are a moment later?
That's Alzheimer's. You can be helping to manage her most intimate financial affairs completely honestly, you can be doing her laundry and getting her medicine and bringing her groceries and cooking her meals and washing her dishes and vacuuming her floors and helping her get to the doctor and even wiping her ass, when she cannot do it herself anymore, and yet she'll still tell you she loves you one night, and the next morning she wants you to go away, go to hell, or just please, please take her home. Because she doesn't know what home means anymore. She's already at home, and she doesn't know who you are anymore.
She knows what she knew in 1920 or 1930 sometimes, funny stories she can still tell sometimes, but she mixes up everyone's names; she doesn't know who is who anymore. She used to speak three languages, English, German, and French. But now she often speaks gibberish, a weird combination of whatever words she still can recall. She can't always understand simple sentences. She's like a kid who cannot learn.
Alzheimer's sucks; nursing homes suck. Go visit one someday if you doubt me. My grandmother's genes and her circumstances allowed her to outlive two of her children. She never got cancer, but that's what killed her elder son at 50. She had a heart attack thirty years ago, but she didn't die of heart disease. That's what killed her elder daughter at 60. Yet my grandmother lives on, as her mind slowly disintegrates.
She still likes to watch children playing, or to meet a drooling baby, maybe a child of someone who helps care for her, brought over to visit. She still likes to pet her cats and smile and watch them roll on the floor with catnip at her feet, she still can interface with her two grandchildren, she still has a sense of humor that we all can understand and sometimes laugh about together.
She doesn't know what year it is or what day it is, and sometimes she can't remember how to properly hold a spoon (or she'll try drinking from it like a straw). But she especially likes bananas and squash and sweet potatoes and chocolate chip cookies. I know this because I'm there sometimes to remind her to take another bite. She says "This is good, thank you!"
And sometimes when you help lift her into bed at night, she'll tell you she loves you. I guess that helps make it all worthwhile.
Anyway, this is what will happen to you if you don't die of anything else or get hit by a bus before your brain starts to degrade. I suppose it hasn't been all bad, I have learned a lot caring for my grandmother. But she is no longer able to offer her opinion.
[yeah, it's my own copypasta, but it's relevant]
Well, there is one thing: don't purchase it. As enraged as people seem to get about these things, though, nobody actually stops buying.
So show me a brand of bananas, gasoline, toilet paper, toothpaste, or automobiles, which is not advertised by corporations who purchase advertising that contains popular music and thereby give money to the RIAA and associated companies.
Every modern consumer product costs a little more that it otherwise would, because there is a built-in tax paid to the advertising industry and the music Mafia. The global corporate profit machine has its tentacles wrapped around all our necks, and is no longer realistically subject to boycott.
You can refuse to buy music from Sony or Universal or BMG, but the minute you buy a sandwich at McDonald's or a shirt from Target, a fraction of a cent of the price flows into their bank accounts anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard they've got heat rays and chemical weapons (and other weapons of mass destruction).
Should I keep going? Okay, I cheated and got The Crow from Google Sets :p
then that sorry sack that was going 2 mph under the speed limit in the middle lane...
That was me, you little jerk. I always slow down and stay out of the left lane while shaving and/or eating lunch.
Paying teachers more and putting more money into our crumbling infrastructure is not going to cut it. The American empire and its culture are rotting from the inside out and if you can't see it, you surely must be able to smell it. Look around the world. Whoever figures out the solution to free energy (economical fusion, solar, or whatever) first, and can most effectively couple this advance with information technology to propagate their culture, will win the century. Pardon my cynicism, but I think the 21st century will not belong to America.
It doesn't matter in the end -- electing Obama might stave off some of the inevitable decline we are facing. We transmillenial Americans won't suffer terribly, but we won't be setting the human agenda in 2100, either.
If all of these things come about, the internet will be like cable TV and there will be no free press.
You're forgetting the millions of wifi radios embedded in personal computing devices in the United States alone. Free software will gradually make these devices more, not less, useful for wireless mesh networking. Access to the "free" internet might be a little bit spotty at first.
Bring it on. I haven't got any idea who paid for the Internet connection I used to post this message, nor do I care. You're still reading it, aren't you? I could just as easily have sent you a copy of any recent movie, or any popular or rare CD, or any book.
This will only get easier. My eeepc can serve a hidden TOR site from my bag while I'm getting a haircut, and keep doing so while I have lunch at Panera.
The censors have no idea what they're up against.
Why do LED clocks jiggle up and down when I'm eating crunchy things?
I was in fourth grade when I first played with the Zork triology of text-adventure games on the C-64. An innocent kid and budding geek, I tried feeding novel combinations of nouns and verbs to the primitive parser.
I tried "EAT LAMP"... got back "You can't eat the lamp."
"EAT BREAD"... "That was delicious."... Etc.
I tried "EAT ME". I couldn't comprehend why my dad, who had just bought the game for me and was supervising over my shoulder, started laughing so hard.
Several years later I finally understood why he laughed even harder when the computer responded:
"Auto-cannibalism is not the answer."
You can mod this offtopic, but those 1983 game designers had a real sense of humor and subtly implemented it in 64KB.
I'll bet neither have the fundie Christians or Islamists done anything directly to harm you and yours.
Yeah, I suppose preaching hatred against gays, so they get spit on or cursed at or their friends get beaten up on the street, that doesn't count as "direct" harm.
We're never going to give them up, never going to let them down.
Wow, an inline rickroll.
Fuck. I just now got ABBA out of my head, and I was going to go to sleep. Take a chance on me. FUCK.
Except "these people" haven't done anything to directly harm me or my family or friends.
I'm more concerned about the fundamentalist Christianists and Islamists (yes, in that order, at least here in the U.S.).
Most people know the Scientologists are nuts. But most "moderate" religious people tolerate the extremists among their ranks.
Gathering cobwebs?
We (humanity) will face far more serious problems in this century, than suboptimal efficiency in our use of fossil fuels.
Hauling vast quantities of cargo around the world simply to exploit cheaper labor elsewhere, while consuming vast quantities of nonrenewable resources, is not sustainable.
We need to solve the energy problem NOW. We need to learn how to extract most of our energy from renewable resources (solar, wind, tidal [and nuclear as a stopgap]), and then work out the bioengineering we will need to regulate the atmosphere, prevent undesirable climate change, and produce additional energy and the materials for 21st century manufacturing.
The information technology revolution of the past few decades (at the expense of the environment) is what will have made all of that possible.
Strapping kites onto oil tankers will only help perpetuate the outdated, unsustainable economies we rely on today. Developing technologies that save the shipping company $1600/day is a waste of time and effort.
The goal should be, 20 years from now, that we don't need oil tankers anymore.
Then we can work on undoing the environmental damage caused by the industrial and information revolutions, and get started fixing the rest of our social problems.
Why not just contribute some time and/or money to your local public school system, and leave out the contributions to sustain a socially detrimental government program (legalized gambling)?
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
Forget your subjective feelings. You're just as likely to win with 1-2-3-4-5 as 4-8-16-23-42 or 19-20-21-22-23 or any other combination. So you might as well play 24-25-26-27-28. Or 2-3-5-7-11. Or 11-13-17-19-23. Or 12-14-16-18-19.
If you think any of these combinations is better than any others (in terms of absolute likelihood of coming up, not in terms of actual prize winnings due to multiple winners sharing the jackpot), you shouldn't be gambling.
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and call you a LIAR.
An appropriate Halloween metaphor for the media middleman industry.
You media conglomerate networks and telecom provider companies don't seem to get it. We (the viewers) want you (the companies in control of the wires and the infrastructure) to simply deliver to us what we like. Without a hassle. That means that until I can get my Bill Maher every Friday night, until I can grab my Jon Stewart and Bear Grylls and Stephen Colbert and Ellen Degeneres and Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers and Alton Brown and Mike Rowe and Keith Olbermann, on demand, by paying something to you for it, I'll get what I want for free, via torrents or video blogs or other means.
As it stands right now, I would have to subscribe to a cable company's entire digital cable lineup to get all of these stations, and I'd be subsidizing Fox News, CNN, ABC, CBS, Home Shopping Network, Lifetime, Hallmark, and who knows what other garbage.
I'm not doing that anymore. I've nearly convinced my mom to drop her cable along with me. That's $55 something per month each, $110 * 12 = $1320 per year, we're paying for 100 ad-drenched channels, most of which we never watch anyway. Do you see how useless you've become in the internet age? Wake up and fix your problems, or you'll be gone in less than a decade.
Modern global society is doing it wrong. The current regime of patents and copyrights is completely outdated and old-fashioned. Global digital communication has made copyright irrelevant, and it's absurd to think you can patent an idea.
I can only hope we'll look back on these early decades of the 21th century and laugh at how silly our laws were.
I'm going outside now to watch the Orionids. Good thing you can't copyright an experience.
Epidemiological data mining. Google Earth overlays, with clusters of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, tooth decay, and E. coli infections near fast food restaurants. There might be clusters of radon-related lung cancer. There are some really nifty things you could find out by centralizing medical records. Alter or improve traffic patterns in neighborhoods where statistically more people are getting hit by cars.
I'm not advocating that we actually do all this, just pointing out some possibilities.
Caskets
Looking for Caskets?
Find exactly what you want today!
www.eBay.com
Life Insurance
Compare rates from top companies.
Save up to 70% on life insurance.
www.insurance.com
Haha, "New friends every day." Get it?! LOL.
It's not so funny when it happens to you or your family. Wait until someone you know gets it. You won't be laughing anymore.
Haha, that guy has a limp. Haha, that woman is blind. Haha, that kid is retarded. Hahaha. Fucking hilarious.
Whatever you do, don't get Alzheimer's disease. It sucks.
My grandmother just turned 94 and has advanced Alzheimer's disease. She can barely walk anymore. I devote a few hours of my life every single day to caregiving. If you've never known someone like this, you really have no idea what's involved. Yeah, we could put her in a home. We could watch her die sooner that way, wearing diapers and ceaselessly, hopelessly calling out for someone to please take her home. As it is now, she wears diapers, but at least we always change them. In nursing homes, they don't.
Have you ever had someone you know and love, who helped raise you and even changed *your* diapers and then helped teach you how to count and how to read and how to do puzzles and math and typing and how to play games, who taught you the names of the plants that grow out in the back yard? And now she can smile and say "Hello", and tell you to get the hell out because she don't know who you are a moment later?
That's Alzheimer's. You can be helping to manage her most intimate financial affairs completely honestly, you can be doing her laundry and getting her medicine and bringing her groceries and cooking her meals and washing her dishes and vacuuming her floors and helping her get to the doctor and even wiping her ass, when she cannot do it herself anymore, and yet she'll still tell you she loves you one night, and the next morning she wants you to go away, go to hell, or just please, please take her home. Because she doesn't know what home means anymore. She's already at home, and she doesn't know who you are anymore.
She knows what she knew in 1920 or 1930 sometimes, funny stories she can still tell sometimes, but she mixes up everyone's names; she doesn't know who is who anymore. She used to speak three languages, English, German, and French. But now she often speaks gibberish, a weird combination of whatever words she still can recall. She can't always understand simple sentences. She's like a kid who cannot learn.
Alzheimer's sucks; nursing homes suck. Go visit one someday if you doubt me. My grandmother's genes and her circumstances allowed her to outlive two of her children. She never got cancer, but that's what killed her elder son at 50. She had a heart attack thirty years ago, but she didn't die of heart disease. That's what killed her elder daughter at 60. Yet my grandmother lives on, as her mind slowly disintegrates.
She still likes to watch children playing, or to meet a drooling baby, maybe a child of someone who helps care for her, brought over to visit. She still likes to pet her cats and smile and watch them roll on the floor with catnip at her feet, she still can interface with her two grandchildren, she still has a sense of humor that we all can understand and sometimes laugh about together.
She doesn't know what year it is or what day it is, and sometimes she can't remember how to properly hold a spoon (or she'll try drinking from it like a straw). But she especially likes bananas and squash and sweet potatoes and chocolate chip cookies. I know this because I'm there sometimes to remind her to take another bite. She says "This is good, thank you!"
And sometimes when you help lift her into bed at night, she'll tell you she loves you. I guess that helps make it all worthwhile.
Anyway, this is what will happen to you if you don't die of anything else or get hit by a bus before your brain starts to degrade. I suppose it hasn't been all bad, I have learned a lot caring for my grandmother. But she is no longer able to offer her opinion. [yeah, it's my own copypasta, but it's relevant]
I'm not obsessed with reading Slashdot. I just happened to log in here in the middle of the night to get the first post, after having lots of sex.
Alright, I lied. Stroke my ego, mod me funny.
So, why is copyright now longer (and more inclusive) than it was when the country was founded?
Because the people who own the copyrights also own the people who write the copyright laws.
Well, there is one thing: don't purchase it. As enraged as people seem to get about these things, though, nobody actually stops buying.
So show me a brand of bananas, gasoline, toilet paper, toothpaste, or automobiles, which is not advertised by corporations who purchase advertising that contains popular music and thereby give money to the RIAA and associated companies.
Every modern consumer product costs a little more that it otherwise would, because there is a built-in tax paid to the advertising industry and the music Mafia. The global corporate profit machine has its tentacles wrapped around all our necks, and is no longer realistically subject to boycott.
You can refuse to buy music from Sony or Universal or BMG, but the minute you buy a sandwich at McDonald's or a shirt from Target, a fraction of a cent of the price flows into their bank accounts anyway.
We're all already pwned.
I have both Comcast cable and AT&T DSL.
Wow. Have you ever tried seeding a torrent to yourself?