Not if they lost their grip on the media system, too..
Before you can have a democracy you must first have a country of free thinking people.
We have a country of brainwashed people who vote the way CNN, Fox, MSNBC, AOLTW, etc. would have them vote. Get rid of AOLTW, Fox, MSNBC and you MIGHT have a chance at having a fair democracy.
After my video cards started playing my games faster than my monitor can refresh I started finding other criteria for comparison.
Now when I shop for a card I look for something that doesn't have too many fans, good heat disipation, small die size, decent GPU performance (if I need that sort of thing), good image quality, and the right price. If it doesn't perform to my expectation then something is horribly wrong with the card. I expect my cards to be able to play UT. Anything beyond that is find by me, but I'm not going to fork $500 over for it.
It plays my OpenGL games just fine. Plays my movies and TV shows just fine. Flips between virtual desks faster than I can blink. What's this slowness everyone keeps talking about?
Maybe everyone buys the same video cards or something, I don't know. I don't have any complaints.
I want my electronic voting system to be released under the GPL and get an md5sum of both the client and server binaries, which are posted publicly on the internet, as my reciept. Personally I think I should be able to vote from any computer connected to the internet at anytime I choose for all relevant (federal/state/local) items I would normally be asked to vote on. Voting is something that should not be once or twice a year but an ongoing thing. As society finds new obstacles it needs feedback from the public to make the right decisions.
But right now I'm more worried that people don't really care whether they make a right decision or not in our current economic/political climate, as long as they make the money.
And who today buys a video card based on performance? I buy all my cards based on price and compatibility. Performance only concerns me if the card is horribly underpowered by today's standards.
That's just it. I don't think any individual human understand society completely. But I think a lot of us have a clear perception of the small parts of society we have experienced through our lives. Our collective perception and communication on the topic, I think, can help us educate eachother about the right way to do things.
For example your idea that there are a bunch of engineers who just love to build things makes sense. I knew when I was a kid that all I wanted to do when I grew up was program computers. You couldn't make me go outside and play when I was a kid. I would spend the whole weekend locked up along in my dark room hacking on my C128. But nobody offerred to give me a computer when I moved away from home. Nobody offerred to teach me or even provide me the free materials to learn. Instead I was told that I had equal opportunity like everybody else.
What I am saying is that is not enough. We need to give these people computers and books and teachers who know the material for free so they can do what they love to do. Provide us with cool software and maybe one day free food.
And there's a difference between majority propoganda and the major news networks. If they support the President its rather difficult for any indi media to reach that audience. Everyone can be saying its wrong, but if the only thing people see when they flip to CNN on their TV sets is that its for freedom, justice and the American way they'll buy into that just as easily. But even today with the facts that Halburton got those contracts does anyone question their choices? And if they did would it make a difference?
It all just makes me want to go watch Wag the Dog again and smoke a bowl.
What he said doesn't matter, what he was saying is that some new type of DVD formats are using multiple layers. Making a generic optical disc would probably be rather difficult unless the layering was done through a hologram or color or some other type of optical illusion. I read somewhere that there are certain types of crystal that can hold extreme amounts of write-once data by using up to 180,000+ different distinguishible colors of laser light per cell. Once burned that cell would only allow those colors of light to pass through. But I read that a long time ago so take it with a grain of salt.
Because I think I understand a little about how our media system works. See, a few weeks ago CNN was running several front-page headlines on their Technology section covering the topic of internet spam. One of the articles was how AOL was fighting it in Virginia or something by using legislation that was enacted in that state. These types of articles being published on CNN or Fox can easily be the catalyst for action from our representatives, who probably keep well informed about the News.
Its interesting because its not just our executive branch that gets their news from CNN and Fox. Our financial analysts get their information from the same companies. Its funny to think that perhaps the dotcomcrash would have never happened if CNN and Fox didn't make it a financial best seller when the time was right.
the matrix was more synonymous of capitalist society than religion. Most of the population except the few that took psychedelic drugs were oblivious to the facts that they were living in a dream work constructed to make them live out their lives, working, keeping busy, but never knowing the truth.
In our society we try to make more jobs, more work, for people to do. This is so they can eat, right? Wrong. We have the technology to automate the production of food. Meaning if we put the thought, time and resources behind it we could give everyone the food they need to live without asking for money in return.
Do most people do productive jobs or are they some psychology major sitting in some marketting department thinking up new ways to get people to spend their money?
I think the message in The Matrix is society doesn't have to be a complex matrix of propoganda designed to keep us independant and greedy. Society could be anything we want to make of it.
Is it logical to raise cows so every human can eat a steak? No. But some people would rather live in a society that would destroy our environment so they could eat steak everynight, blissfully ignorant of reality.
I do xvid encodes on an AMD MP box with Linux. I use DVDRip and set all my encodes to run at a nice level of 19. My system is very usable for listening to music, watching movies, webbrowsing, etc. all while I'm encoding up to 3 videos at the same time. And I get between 20 and 60 fps depending on the media and settings.
Still working out minor timing issues and correct deinterlacing from NTSC sources.
I don't know, can you explain? I am implying that the current economic system in the US is based on capitalism. And I am implying that any system that requires the management of currency is inefficient by design.
The way you put it sounds so void of love. And that IS the problem. We don't care enough for our fellow mankind to even make the attempt at giving them a decent life. So we conform to the lowest denominator. That's sad.
I'm sorry, but I expect better from the most intelligent species on this planet. Most people maintain that we are so perfect that we are a divine creation. If we're so smart, if we're so perfect, then why is it so hard for us to even imagine a society that doesn't have one simple thing.. money? Is a moneyless society so difficult for our awesome brains to fathom?
The purpose of life is to fight chaos and entropy. So let's use our heads to organize and automate the fuck out of civilization so our children NEVER have to work again. That should be the goal, not to make money.
You have one life to live. Do you want to live it working and pursuing money? Or would you rather live it playing and pursuing happiness?
Work can be play. Hard or dangerous jobs can be automated. And there are no excuses, for anything.
QA is what prevents this sort of thing from happening. And in my experience QA should be the buffer between your scientists, engineers and your customers. But most companies don't want to pay for the proper QA and most don't even want to pay for the proper R&D. They just want to sell their products, even if the name is the only thing carrying them.
Of course that could be said about anything. I own several AMD systems. The first ones I bought, when the Athlon was initially released, had many problems. The motherboards would only work properly with certain types of video cards, etc. After a couple generations these systems are far more stable and trustworthy.
I believe all of this is related to our greedy decisions to release products prematurely. Afterall we're only making these products so we can make money. I doubt a single exec at Intel cares about the low level details of their chips.
taxes hurt small business a lot more than they hurt large ones
And there's no difference between a small business and an internet based business. They can both be small in physical size.
In fact sales taxes should be illegal. We have all been taxed on this money already. That's what income taxes are. So why the need for more taxes? And why are there so many people supporting these taxes?
Does giving the government help us? What does the government do for you? Are your roads exceptionally well built? Are your schools providing real education? Or did they just make a frustrating system that is only good at one thing, spending our money?
We act like the government and the people are two different things. In a democracy. In a fair democracy, they do not have to be.
My idea of a fair democracy is one which any citizen has complete access to all information and their voice is heard by all relevent parties, etc. A fair democracy would have the government writing software that provides people in an automated fassion with all the information they would like to recieve. Nothing would be hidden out of malice or someone's selfish personal agenda. A fair democracy is possible when people are more concerned about eachother than their possessions.
Honestly, how many politicians care more about a bum than their BMW?
But that politician could never build a BMW by themselves in a million years. They're not that intelligent. However, that bum could be taught by a team of engineers how to build one. With enough education and placed in the proper environment, surrounded by people who care about them, they could even one day learn how to create and design their own vehicle.
Intelligence is only about 30% genetic. Our environment makes up most of what we are. But do we trust that some selfish politician is going to create the proper environment for everyone to maximize their potential? They don't care if you're intelligent. In fact it is much easier to persuade you to give away your money or not pay attention to political issues if you are not intelligent. So there is more incentive to hold you back or make you compete with eachother than to have you working together.
It is my opinion that capitalism is designed to be extremely inefficient and make people work their whole lives for nothing.
When we have the technology to create an automated farm that manages our soil and provides us with nicely packaged foods its rather childish of us to require payment for that food. Instead we should use our propoganda machine to encourage work in the fields of computerized automation and trust that our fellow human is honorable enough to help out.
I'm arguing for a system that has never been tried before, anywhere.
When did the communists have an internet or enough free software to implement a completely open government where all people within a nation could participate? When did any communist nation ever have leadership focused on taking care of their people's needs, wants, desires, etc? When has there ever been a humanitarian country? Not a country that cares about economics and money and ending poverty, but a country that cares about its people, providing for all of them, using technology to benefit mankind.
Re:Howto - Legalized Price Fixing
on
DRAM Price Fixing
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Or look at the RIAA and MPAA.
Many media companies have formed into these happy associations that just happen to set the price of CDs or DVDs around $15.
We all know the costs in making and distributing a 5" plastic disc are less than $1 and songs that have been off the charts for a couple years won't produce a profit. But that doesn't stop them from "price fixing".
The problem is not the artists, the developers, the manufacturers. The problem is that capitalism is a broken system. Its a system designed to allow people to screw eachother over. Shit happens all the time, everywhere. The whole point of capitalism is to make as much money as you can, which means by the end of your life you might end up with a lot of money but everyone else would have had to slave away their whole lives while you screwed them over to provide you with your valuable possessions.
These things. These items we place so much economic value in. Are they really that important to our lives? So important that we would sell our kids into a lifetime of slavery just to prove our point that Capitalists are wealthy or that money doesn't grow on trees?
But money does grow on trees, like every other paper product we produce.
Slashdot Mirror
Not if they lost their grip on the media system, too..
Before you can have a democracy you must first have a country of free thinking people.
We have a country of brainwashed people who vote the way CNN, Fox, MSNBC, AOLTW, etc. would have them vote. Get rid of AOLTW, Fox, MSNBC and you MIGHT have a chance at having a fair democracy.
Why?
After my video cards started playing my games faster than my monitor can refresh I started finding other criteria for comparison.
Now when I shop for a card I look for something that doesn't have too many fans, good heat disipation, small die size, decent GPU performance (if I need that sort of thing), good image quality, and the right price. If it doesn't perform to my expectation then something is horribly wrong with the card. I expect my cards to be able to play UT. Anything beyond that is find by me, but I'm not going to fork $500 over for it.
What is slow about X?
It plays my OpenGL games just fine. Plays my movies and TV shows just fine. Flips between virtual desks faster than I can blink. What's this slowness everyone keeps talking about?
Maybe everyone buys the same video cards or something, I don't know. I don't have any complaints.
I want my electronic voting system to be released under the GPL and get an md5sum of both the client and server binaries, which are posted publicly on the internet, as my reciept. Personally I think I should be able to vote from any computer connected to the internet at anytime I choose for all relevant (federal/state/local) items I would normally be asked to vote on. Voting is something that should not be once or twice a year but an ongoing thing. As society finds new obstacles it needs feedback from the public to make the right decisions.
But right now I'm more worried that people don't really care whether they make a right decision or not in our current economic/political climate, as long as they make the money.
And who today buys a video card based on performance? I buy all my cards based on price and compatibility. Performance only concerns me if the card is horribly underpowered by today's standards.
I applaud your creative solution to one of the world's great problems.
And what would that be? Now I'm curious. Is it AIDS, being gay, sex and fucking, computers, people, or all of the above?
For BOTH sides, huh? But who gets to hold the remote?
That's just it. I don't think any individual human understand society completely. But I think a lot of us have a clear perception of the small parts of society we have experienced through our lives. Our collective perception and communication on the topic, I think, can help us educate eachother about the right way to do things.
For example your idea that there are a bunch of engineers who just love to build things makes sense. I knew when I was a kid that all I wanted to do when I grew up was program computers. You couldn't make me go outside and play when I was a kid. I would spend the whole weekend locked up along in my dark room hacking on my C128. But nobody offerred to give me a computer when I moved away from home. Nobody offerred to teach me or even provide me the free materials to learn. Instead I was told that I had equal opportunity like everybody else.
What I am saying is that is not enough. We need to give these people computers and books and teachers who know the material for free so they can do what they love to do. Provide us with cool software and maybe one day free food.
And there's a difference between majority propoganda and the major news networks. If they support the President its rather difficult for any indi media to reach that audience. Everyone can be saying its wrong, but if the only thing people see when they flip to CNN on their TV sets is that its for freedom, justice and the American way they'll buy into that just as easily. But even today with the facts that Halburton got those contracts does anyone question their choices? And if they did would it make a difference?
It all just makes me want to go watch Wag the Dog again and smoke a bowl.
please people switch to a secure OS.
ocaml and let this=be.that
What he said doesn't matter, what he was saying is that some new type of DVD formats are using multiple layers. Making a generic optical disc would probably be rather difficult unless the layering was done through a hologram or color or some other type of optical illusion.
I read somewhere that there are certain types of crystal that can hold extreme amounts of write-once data by using up to 180,000+ different distinguishible colors of laser light per cell. Once burned that cell would only allow those colors of light to pass through. But I read that a long time ago so take it with a grain of salt.
Because I think I understand a little about how our media system works. See, a few weeks ago CNN was running several front-page headlines on their Technology section covering the topic of internet spam. One of the articles was how AOL was fighting it in Virginia or something by using legislation that was enacted in that state. These types of articles being published on CNN or Fox can easily be the catalyst for action from our representatives, who probably keep well informed about the News.
Its interesting because its not just our executive branch that gets their news from CNN and Fox. Our financial analysts get their information from the same companies. Its funny to think that perhaps the dotcomcrash would have never happened if CNN and Fox didn't make it a financial best seller when the time was right.
and so freedom becomes the right to eat steak everynight but not the right to take psychedelic drugs.
the matrix was more synonymous of capitalist society than religion. Most of the population except the few that took psychedelic drugs were oblivious to the facts that they were living in a dream work constructed to make them live out their lives, working, keeping busy, but never knowing the truth.
In our society we try to make more jobs, more work, for people to do. This is so they can eat, right? Wrong. We have the technology to automate the production of food. Meaning if we put the thought, time and resources behind it we could give everyone the food they need to live without asking for money in return.
Do most people do productive jobs or are they some psychology major sitting in some marketting department thinking up new ways to get people to spend their money?
I think the message in The Matrix is society doesn't have to be a complex matrix of propoganda designed to keep us independant and greedy. Society could be anything we want to make of it.
Is it logical to raise cows so every human can eat a steak? No. But some people would rather live in a society that would destroy our environment so they could eat steak everynight, blissfully ignorant of reality.
Dooooood!
I do xvid encodes on an AMD MP box with Linux. I use DVDRip and set all my encodes to run at a nice level of 19. My system is very usable for listening to music, watching movies, webbrowsing, etc. all while I'm encoding up to 3 videos at the same time. And I get between 20 and 60 fps depending on the media and settings.
Still working out minor timing issues and correct deinterlacing from NTSC sources.
Doh! Kinda throws my whole arguement out the window. :P
I don't know, can you explain? I am implying that the current economic system in the US is based on capitalism. And I am implying that any system that requires the management of currency is inefficient by design.
ethics and capitalism. That's interesting.
The way you put it sounds so void of love. And that IS the problem. We don't care enough for our fellow mankind to even make the attempt at giving them a decent life. So we conform to the lowest denominator. That's sad.
I'm sorry, but I expect better from the most intelligent species on this planet. Most people maintain that we are so perfect that we are a divine creation. If we're so smart, if we're so perfect, then why is it so hard for us to even imagine a society that doesn't have one simple thing.. money? Is a moneyless society so difficult for our awesome brains to fathom?
The purpose of life is to fight chaos and entropy. So let's use our heads to organize and automate the fuck out of civilization so our children NEVER have to work again. That should be the goal, not to make money.
You have one life to live. Do you want to live it working and pursuing money? Or would you rather live it playing and pursuing happiness?
Work can be play. Hard or dangerous jobs can be automated. And there are no excuses, for anything.
QA is what prevents this sort of thing from happening. And in my experience QA should be the buffer between your scientists, engineers and your customers. But most companies don't want to pay for the proper QA and most don't even want to pay for the proper R&D. They just want to sell their products, even if the name is the only thing carrying them.
Of course that could be said about anything. I own several AMD systems. The first ones I bought, when the Athlon was initially released, had many problems. The motherboards would only work properly with certain types of video cards, etc. After a couple generations these systems are far more stable and trustworthy.
I believe all of this is related to our greedy decisions to release products prematurely. Afterall we're only making these products so we can make money. I doubt a single exec at Intel cares about the low level details of their chips.
taxes hurt small business a lot more than they hurt large ones
And there's no difference between a small business and an internet based business. They can both be small in physical size.
In fact sales taxes should be illegal. We have all been taxed on this money already. That's what income taxes are. So why the need for more taxes? And why are there so many people supporting these taxes?
Does giving the government help us? What does the government do for you? Are your roads exceptionally well built? Are your schools providing real education? Or did they just make a frustrating system that is only good at one thing, spending our money?
We act like the government and the people are two different things. In a democracy. In a fair democracy, they do not have to be.
My idea of a fair democracy is one which any citizen has complete access to all information and their voice is heard by all relevent parties, etc. A fair democracy would have the government writing software that provides people in an automated fassion with all the information they would like to recieve. Nothing would be hidden out of malice or someone's selfish personal agenda.
A fair democracy is possible when people are more concerned about eachother than their possessions.
Honestly, how many politicians care more about a bum than their BMW?
But that politician could never build a BMW by themselves in a million years. They're not that intelligent. However, that bum could be taught by a team of engineers how to build one. With enough education and placed in the proper environment, surrounded by people who care about them, they could even one day learn how to create and design their own vehicle.
Intelligence is only about 30% genetic. Our environment makes up most of what we are. But do we trust that some selfish politician is going to create the proper environment for everyone to maximize their potential? They don't care if you're intelligent. In fact it is much easier to persuade you to give away your money or not pay attention to political issues if you are not intelligent. So there is more incentive to hold you back or make you compete with eachother than to have you working together.
It is my opinion that capitalism is designed to be extremely inefficient and make people work their whole lives for nothing.
When we have the technology to create an automated farm that manages our soil and provides us with nicely packaged foods its rather childish of us to require payment for that food. Instead we should use our propoganda machine to encourage work in the fields of computerized automation and trust that our fellow human is honorable enough to help out.
I'm arguing for a system that has never been tried before, anywhere.
When did the communists have an internet or enough free software to implement a completely open government where all people within a nation could participate? When did any communist nation ever have leadership focused on taking care of their people's needs, wants, desires, etc? When has there ever been a humanitarian country? Not a country that cares about economics and money and ending poverty, but a country that cares about its people, providing for all of them, using technology to benefit mankind.
Or look at the RIAA and MPAA.
Many media companies have formed into these happy associations that just happen to set the price of CDs or DVDs around $15.
We all know the costs in making and distributing a 5" plastic disc are less than $1 and songs that have been off the charts for a couple years won't produce a profit. But that doesn't stop them from "price fixing".
The problem is not the artists, the developers, the manufacturers. The problem is that capitalism is a broken system. Its a system designed to allow people to screw eachother over. Shit happens all the time, everywhere. The whole point of capitalism is to make as much money as you can, which means by the end of your life you might end up with a lot of money but everyone else would have had to slave away their whole lives while you screwed them over to provide you with your valuable possessions.
These things. These items we place so much economic value in. Are they really that important to our lives? So important that we would sell our kids into a lifetime of slavery just to prove our point that Capitalists are wealthy or that money doesn't grow on trees?
But money does grow on trees, like every other paper product we produce.