There's not a whole lot an individual can do about that. Too bad the GP is an AC, because that was an insightful comment that unfortunately will be little seen.
When I was in Thailand in 1974 it cost a nickle to ride a bus anywhere in the country. Dinner for four at a decent restaurant cost a dollar. I bought a tailored shirt for five bucks, my bungalow was $30 a month. The median wage was about $1000 per year, yet they weren't really poor.
It took two decades for them to industrialize, and the average Thai is no better off now than they were then.
They always have the option to move to a country where the works are published lawfully.
Yes, if they're filthy rich. Not all of us are jet setters.
They always have the option to buy the appropriate brand of computer or game console and watch it on that.
Yes, if they're filthy rich. It's unreasonable to expect someone to buy a different machine for each format.
And since when has a PC been able to tell whether its VGA, DVI, or HDMI output is headed to a "TV" as opposed to a "computer monitor"?
Don't forget S-Video. Works with old ten year old CRT TVs that predate HDMI even.
They always have the option to buy tickets to watch the game in person.
Yes, if they're filthy rich. IMO anybody not filthy rich who pays $100 to see a damned game is just stupid. And if it's not sold out, And they don't mind watching ants playing baseball in blistering heat, with no replays.
What is reasonable to you is not always reasonable to the work's author.
"Reasonable" means there's a reason for it and isn't subject to opinion.
Missing a keystroke isn't bad grammar, it's a simple typoo anybody can make. If I wasn't sure your "Nazi's" was a deliberate joke I'd think you were an alliterate moron.
However "lack of needed goods" is on the bottom of the list.
True, but lack of wanted goods is at the top if you discount laws against illegal drugs.
However "idle hands are the devil's workshop
I've never seen any indication, let alone proof, that there's any truth to that old saying. I come from long-lived families, and none of them ever resorted to crime after retirement. My dad's been retired for twenty years and tells me he doesn't know how he ever found time to work before he retired!
Visit any neighborhood bar on a Wednesday afternoon and you'll find half a dozen retired geezers doing nothing worse than destroying their livers. How many retired people get arrested? Damned few!
A lot of those old sayings are completely false. I've eaten many free lunches, and often paid for more than I got, for instance.
There's a book on my shelf Asimov edited, that contains a story or two by him, titled "Supermen". Also futuristic fantasy. As To Star Wars, I agree -- it isn't fantasy, it's just that some of its science is unknown to us.
People bash it for mitichlorians, forgetting that these not only aren't humans but are in a completely different galaxy! The only fantasy is space aliens who look human. I find that incredibly unlikely, but most film sci-fi does it.
I seldom respond to an AC sitting at an invisible zero, but that comment made me laugh, especially the "His wife actually did die of cancer while he was cheating on her, but since you are a liberal shill you will probably deny that as well."
So I'm being paid by the DNC to post at slashdot? Now THAT'S funny! The only Republican Governor I ever voted against was George Ryan (twice), who is where he belongs right now -- in Federal prison. His corruption as Secretary of State killed people! He barely squeaked by in a close election despite outspending his opponent ten to one. I voted against Clinton his first term, for him when I saw he'd done a good job. I voted for Blago the first time because I knew people who knew Jim Ryan personally and none had anything good to say about him, but voted against his reelection because he SUCKED as a Governor.
No way in hell could I ever vote for John Edwards. He and Gingrich are twins, ethically speaking. Blago (in prison next month) is like Shrub -- appointing unqualified to jobs they have no chance of performing well. Bush bankrupted the country, Blago bankrupted the state.
But of course anyone who bashes any Republican is a liberal shill. To my mind, anyone who votes straight party (any party) is a blind idiot.
How is it in any way the same? In a union, the employees of a single employer bargain with the employer collectively. Management of that single employer are a collective as well; they have negotiators, lawyers, all sorts of backup. A union evens the odds against the single employer's managers bargaining collectively against a single worker.
you can't automate writing software, movies, music, or books; there will always be a job market for the creators of these things
There will always be people who will gladly do these things for free, because they're enjoyable to do. If you had no need for a job, you'd have plenty of time to learn the guitar, make that movie and write that book, and you wouldn't have any reason to need a salary for it.
If everyone had everything they needed, why would you need law enforcement? To keep them from smoking pot? Why would anyone steal what was free? Crime comes from lack of needed goods.
The only choices left are which depressing SF/SciFi/SyFy dystopia you like
SyFy != Sci Fi. Sci fi is Asimov and Heinlein and Star Wars and 2001. SyFy is stupid shit on a useless cable channel that is an embarrasment to anybody with half a brain.
Can you remember the last piece of technology hardware you had which outlived its warranty?
I'm not senile YET. I'm working on an old PC for a friend who was given an old Dell with a 500 mz chip, 256 meg memory and Windows XP. The only thing wrong with it is whoever owned it before was dumb enough to load it down with crap, including 5 different AVs. The hardware is working fine (just reinstalled Windows for him, it still had the disks).
I bought my TV in 2002. My car was five years old when I bought it in 2007 and it still runs fine. In fact, I don't think I own a single thing that's still under warranty. But of course, they're not under the hellish conditions the rovers are operating in.
Where are you buying your crap, Tiger Electronics?
You'll either have to prove Einstein wrong or find some sort of a loophole for that to happen. But who knows, maybe they will? I never thought I'd be able to get a cyborg implant that not only let me throw my thick glasses away but even gave me better than 20/20 vision, so who knows? I'm probably wrong, my journal next Wednesday will demonstrat how abysmal I am at predicting the future. I suck as a prophet...
I would say exactly the opposite is more likely to be true: any alien species aggressive and inventive enough to explore space is guaranteed to have endured warfare and ecological destruction in recent memory.
Your mistake is that exploration isn't driven by agression, but by curiosity or necessity.
Species that lose their aggression will stay at home smoking pot, eating takeout, and watching cartoons until they all die of boredom and/or congestive heart failure.
Nope, not losing agression but losing curiosity. And the loss of agression comes after smoking the pot, not before. And cartoons? Dude, this IS a nerd site, you know. Lots of us LIKE cartoons.
if a space-faring race was highly collectivist (either by evolution or by engineering), they might find our individuality and the violence that it often leads to incomprehensible.
You live in Texas, don't you? We are a social species, and that is our greatest strength. Nobody can build a skyscraper by himself. If we were the individualists you think we are, we would have died out as a species fifty thousand years ago.
If we were inherently individualistic, the guy that discovered that you could kill food with a sharp stick woudn't have shown others how he did it. That is how human progress has gone for 100,000 years -- someobody discovers or thinks of something, or develops some technique, which is taught to other people, who in turn improve that discovery, invention, or technique.
As a species, we are, in fact, collectivist. Were we not there would never be wars, only fights between individuals rather than between groups. There would be no groups.
...and they'll probably engage in practices that we would find abhorrent, like compulsory euthanasia.
The reason we find compulsory eithanasia abhorrent is because we ARE a social species. If we were individualist we wouldn't give a damn.
personally find it more likely that intelligent life rarely makes it out of their home solar system in person
You finally got something right, but for the wrong reason. Few if any get out of their solar system due to the fact that you can't go faster than C, and interstellar distances are unimaginable huge. The Voyagers have been travelling for over 40 years and are still not all the way out of the system yet, and if they were aiming straight at Alpha Proxima it would be hundreds of thousands of years before they reached it.
It sounds like you were far better at hacking hardware than software. I just used a thick rubber band to keep it from dying, and never had problems with memory. 16K? Gees, that was a ton of memory!
I think it's hilarious that viruses are bigger than that these days. Back in the boot floppy days (a little later than the Sinclair) they had viruses that were under 100 bytes. I wrote a six byte program named "reboot.com" that would boot a PC. I used it in a batch file kludge to run DOS programs from a Win 95 PC to play DOS games.
Not always. I have a "ten years ago today" journal I plan on posting Wednesday that shows how much I suck at prophesy (the original post is no longer on the internet, the wayback machine didn't spider the site in 2002), and the prediction was based on the exact same assumption the GP makes. Because of their horrible customer service, which lost them the sale of a $2000 laptop that Circuit City gained by their good customer service, I predicted that Circuit City would prosper and gave Best Buy three years before dying.
I was wrong. Circuit City is gone, Best Buy is alive and as shitty as ever.
I'm happy with my cheapskate Pre-Paid mobile and basic DSL at home.
I'm using Boost for my cell phone and AT&T for intenet (I have my PC plugged into the TV, who needs cable?). They're trying to get me to bundle, too. They also doubled my monthly bill. If they keep it up, I'll have to (*wretch gag*) go back to Comcast, the only other provider here. They, too, keep sending me "bundling" offers.
Internet -- yep, I need that. Cable? Nope, I get all my TV from the internet. Landline? WTF for, I live by myself, why would I need more than one phone. Mobile? Why, when I'm paying a flat monthy $45 fee for unlimited service with Boost?
I may even go back to using unsecured wifi for internet if these bozos don't get their acts together; there are at least 3 unsecured or poorly secured hotspots on my block.
3. Intelligent life has a propensity to kill itself off.
What's your evidence? So far we only know of one intelligent species, and it hasn't managed to commit suicide yet. OTOH, a non-intelligent life form killed itself off by introducing oxygen into the atmosphere long before intelligence developed.
Now, killing OTHER species off, that's a different matter.
I think you completely misunderstand evolution. Evolution isn't a fight, it's an adaptation. If the environment changes, you adapt to the new environment or you die. If the envoronment stays the same and you change, you'll likely die. You could say that lions were competing with gazelles, but it would be incorrect -- if the gazelles die, so do the lions. If you eat all the food, you starve. If it gets warm enough that your sustinance no longer grows, you either adapt and eat other things, or you starve.
Competetion doesn't drive evolution, change does. And your "successful person" is completely off the mark. Single organisms don't evolve, populations do. One of the biggest reasons humans have dominated the planet is because of our social structure, whic is probably our greatest strength and why sociopathy is, in fact, a disease.
It is our cooperation, not our competetion, that has made our species dominant. We evolved that cooperation because without it we would have become extinct, and perhaps that's why we're still here and the Neanderthals aren't -- they were the "capitalist man alone" species while we are the "socialist" species. Snce there's some DNA evidence that there was some interbreeding, perhaps that explains Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and their antisocial psychopathy and their greedy, heartless mental diseases.
Just wanted to make that clear for younger folks reading along. Kit assemblers our age were not of the same ilk as the hobbyists who designed their own.
Depends on what you were assembling. I built a Heathkit guitar amp when I was sixteen, and when I plugged it in... nothing. I had to study the schematics to discover that the installation instructions were in error.
And often, a hack was pretty simple, like when I turned $10 transistor radios into $250 guitar fuzzboxes using $2 worth of parts; that was incredibly trivial, despite the fact that I'd not heard of anyone doing it before. Diagnosing and repairing the amp that was built using erroneous plans was a LOT harder.
Seriously, the system is going to break the first time these developers are introduced to WOMEN.
No, it will break the first time somebody who bought the same style of shoes as you sits down at your terminal and pens a nasty email to the CEO. Less liklihood with women, who HATE it when any part of their apparrel is the same as another woman's.
I believe I'm about to be educated a little more today. Could you elaborate? After all, we consider Jupiter to be a gas giant, does it lack a core? Europa is covered in ice, what is it considered to be (and yes, I know it's a sattelite)?
Why isn't water considered when discussing what a planet's surface is?
I was 12 when I built my first computer, too, but it wasn't a Sinclair. It wasn't even digital! Actually it was more of an electric slide rule, but it would compute. But what would you expect from a 12 year old in 1964? Things were pretty primitive back then, I'll tell you.
Slashdot Mirror
There's not a whole lot an individual can do about that. Too bad the GP is an AC, because that was an insightful comment that unfortunately will be little seen.
When I was in Thailand in 1974 it cost a nickle to ride a bus anywhere in the country. Dinner for four at a decent restaurant cost a dollar. I bought a tailored shirt for five bucks, my bungalow was $30 a month. The median wage was about $1000 per year, yet they weren't really poor.
It took two decades for them to industrialize, and the average Thai is no better off now than they were then.
They always have the option to move to a country where the works are published lawfully.
Yes, if they're filthy rich. Not all of us are jet setters.
They always have the option to buy the appropriate brand of computer or game console and watch it on that.
Yes, if they're filthy rich. It's unreasonable to expect someone to buy a different machine for each format.
And since when has a PC been able to tell whether its VGA, DVI, or HDMI output is headed to a "TV" as opposed to a "computer monitor"?
Don't forget S-Video. Works with old ten year old CRT TVs that predate HDMI even.
They always have the option to buy tickets to watch the game in person.
Yes, if they're filthy rich. IMO anybody not filthy rich who pays $100 to see a damned game is just stupid. And if it's not sold out, And they don't mind watching ants playing baseball in blistering heat, with no replays.
What is reasonable to you is not always reasonable to the work's author.
"Reasonable" means there's a reason for it and isn't subject to opinion.
*groan*
Missing a keystroke isn't bad grammar, it's a simple typoo anybody can make. If I wasn't sure your "Nazi's" was a deliberate joke I'd think you were an alliterate moron.
Yes, the "typoo" was deliberate as well.
However "lack of needed goods" is on the bottom of the list.
True, but lack of wanted goods is at the top if you discount laws against illegal drugs.
However "idle hands are the devil's workshop
I've never seen any indication, let alone proof, that there's any truth to that old saying. I come from long-lived families, and none of them ever resorted to crime after retirement. My dad's been retired for twenty years and tells me he doesn't know how he ever found time to work before he retired!
Visit any neighborhood bar on a Wednesday afternoon and you'll find half a dozen retired geezers doing nothing worse than destroying their livers. How many retired people get arrested? Damned few!
A lot of those old sayings are completely false. I've eaten many free lunches, and often paid for more than I got, for instance.
There's a book on my shelf Asimov edited, that contains a story or two by him, titled "Supermen". Also futuristic fantasy. As To Star Wars, I agree -- it isn't fantasy, it's just that some of its science is unknown to us.
People bash it for mitichlorians, forgetting that these not only aren't humans but are in a completely different galaxy! The only fantasy is space aliens who look human. I find that incredibly unlikely, but most film sci-fi does it.
I seldom respond to an AC sitting at an invisible zero, but that comment made me laugh, especially the "His wife actually did die of cancer while he was cheating on her, but since you are a liberal shill you will probably deny that as well."
So I'm being paid by the DNC to post at slashdot? Now THAT'S funny! The only Republican Governor I ever voted against was George Ryan (twice), who is where he belongs right now -- in Federal prison. His corruption as Secretary of State killed people! He barely squeaked by in a close election despite outspending his opponent ten to one. I voted against Clinton his first term, for him when I saw he'd done a good job. I voted for Blago the first time because I knew people who knew Jim Ryan personally and none had anything good to say about him, but voted against his reelection because he SUCKED as a Governor.
No way in hell could I ever vote for John Edwards. He and Gingrich are twins, ethically speaking. Blago (in prison next month) is like Shrub -- appointing unqualified to jobs they have no chance of performing well. Bush bankrupted the country, Blago bankrupted the state.
But of course anyone who bashes any Republican is a liberal shill. To my mind, anyone who votes straight party (any party) is a blind idiot.
I agree with everything in your comment... especially your sig. Conservatives are against ALL of Christ's teachings.
The thing is, the office of US President should be held to higher moral standards than most other jobs.
And you think Gingrich should be president? *head asplodes*
That's engineering, not science. And they've had them since the '60s, if you have the cash go for it.
How is it in any way the same? In a union, the employees of a single employer bargain with the employer collectively. Management of that single employer are a collective as well; they have negotiators, lawyers, all sorts of backup. A union evens the odds against the single employer's managers bargaining collectively against a single worker.
There's no comparison at all.
you can't automate writing software, movies, music, or books; there will always be a job market for the creators of these things
There will always be people who will gladly do these things for free, because they're enjoyable to do. If you had no need for a job, you'd have plenty of time to learn the guitar, make that movie and write that book, and you wouldn't have any reason to need a salary for it.
If everyone had everything they needed, why would you need law enforcement? To keep them from smoking pot? Why would anyone steal what was free? Crime comes from lack of needed goods.
The only choices left are which depressing SF/SciFi/SyFy dystopia you like
SyFy != Sci Fi. Sci fi is Asimov and Heinlein and Star Wars and 2001. SyFy is stupid shit on a useless cable channel that is an embarrasment to anybody with half a brain.
Can you remember the last piece of technology hardware you had which outlived its warranty?
I'm not senile YET. I'm working on an old PC for a friend who was given an old Dell with a 500 mz chip, 256 meg memory and Windows XP. The only thing wrong with it is whoever owned it before was dumb enough to load it down with crap, including 5 different AVs. The hardware is working fine (just reinstalled Windows for him, it still had the disks).
I bought my TV in 2002. My car was five years old when I bought it in 2007 and it still runs fine. In fact, I don't think I own a single thing that's still under warranty. But of course, they're not under the hellish conditions the rovers are operating in.
Where are you buying your crap, Tiger Electronics?
You'll either have to prove Einstein wrong or find some sort of a loophole for that to happen. But who knows, maybe they will? I never thought I'd be able to get a cyborg implant that not only let me throw my thick glasses away but even gave me better than 20/20 vision, so who knows? I'm probably wrong, my journal next Wednesday will demonstrat how abysmal I am at predicting the future. I suck as a prophet...
I would say exactly the opposite is more likely to be true: any alien species aggressive and inventive enough to explore space is guaranteed to have endured warfare and ecological destruction in recent memory.
Your mistake is that exploration isn't driven by agression, but by curiosity or necessity.
Species that lose their aggression will stay at home smoking pot, eating takeout, and watching cartoons until they all die of boredom and/or congestive heart failure.
Nope, not losing agression but losing curiosity. And the loss of agression comes after smoking the pot, not before. And cartoons? Dude, this IS a nerd site, you know. Lots of us LIKE cartoons.
if a space-faring race was highly collectivist (either by evolution or by engineering), they might find our individuality and the violence that it often leads to incomprehensible.
You live in Texas, don't you? We are a social species, and that is our greatest strength. Nobody can build a skyscraper by himself. If we were the individualists you think we are, we would have died out as a species fifty thousand years ago.
If we were inherently individualistic, the guy that discovered that you could kill food with a sharp stick woudn't have shown others how he did it. That is how human progress has gone for 100,000 years -- someobody discovers or thinks of something, or develops some technique, which is taught to other people, who in turn improve that discovery, invention, or technique.
As a species, we are, in fact, collectivist. Were we not there would never be wars, only fights between individuals rather than between groups. There would be no groups.
The reason we find compulsory eithanasia abhorrent is because we ARE a social species. If we were individualist we wouldn't give a damn.
personally find it more likely that intelligent life rarely makes it out of their home solar system in person
You finally got something right, but for the wrong reason. Few if any get out of their solar system due to the fact that you can't go faster than C, and interstellar distances are unimaginable huge. The Voyagers have been travelling for over 40 years and are still not all the way out of the system yet, and if they were aiming straight at Alpha Proxima it would be hundreds of thousands of years before they reached it.
It sounds like you were far better at hacking hardware than software. I just used a thick rubber band to keep it from dying, and never had problems with memory. 16K? Gees, that was a ton of memory!
I think it's hilarious that viruses are bigger than that these days. Back in the boot floppy days (a little later than the Sinclair) they had viruses that were under 100 bytes. I wrote a six byte program named "reboot.com" that would boot a PC. I used it in a batch file kludge to run DOS programs from a Win 95 PC to play DOS games.
Investors too.
Not always. I have a "ten years ago today" journal I plan on posting Wednesday that shows how much I suck at prophesy (the original post is no longer on the internet, the wayback machine didn't spider the site in 2002), and the prediction was based on the exact same assumption the GP makes. Because of their horrible customer service, which lost them the sale of a $2000 laptop that Circuit City gained by their good customer service, I predicted that Circuit City would prosper and gave Best Buy three years before dying.
I was wrong. Circuit City is gone, Best Buy is alive and as shitty as ever.
I'm happy with my cheapskate Pre-Paid mobile and basic DSL at home.
I'm using Boost for my cell phone and AT&T for intenet (I have my PC plugged into the TV, who needs cable?). They're trying to get me to bundle, too. They also doubled my monthly bill. If they keep it up, I'll have to (*wretch gag*) go back to Comcast, the only other provider here. They, too, keep sending me "bundling" offers.
Internet -- yep, I need that. Cable? Nope, I get all my TV from the internet. Landline? WTF for, I live by myself, why would I need more than one phone. Mobile? Why, when I'm paying a flat monthy $45 fee for unlimited service with Boost?
I may even go back to using unsecured wifi for internet if these bozos don't get their acts together; there are at least 3 unsecured or poorly secured hotspots on my block.
3. Intelligent life has a propensity to kill itself off.
What's your evidence? So far we only know of one intelligent species, and it hasn't managed to commit suicide yet. OTOH, a non-intelligent life form killed itself off by introducing oxygen into the atmosphere long before intelligence developed.
Now, killing OTHER species off, that's a different matter.
To evolve we need competition.
I think you completely misunderstand evolution. Evolution isn't a fight, it's an adaptation. If the environment changes, you adapt to the new environment or you die. If the envoronment stays the same and you change, you'll likely die. You could say that lions were competing with gazelles, but it would be incorrect -- if the gazelles die, so do the lions. If you eat all the food, you starve. If it gets warm enough that your sustinance no longer grows, you either adapt and eat other things, or you starve.
Competetion doesn't drive evolution, change does. And your "successful person" is completely off the mark. Single organisms don't evolve, populations do. One of the biggest reasons humans have dominated the planet is because of our social structure, whic is probably our greatest strength and why sociopathy is, in fact, a disease.
It is our cooperation, not our competetion, that has made our species dominant. We evolved that cooperation because without it we would have become extinct, and perhaps that's why we're still here and the Neanderthals aren't -- they were the "capitalist man alone" species while we are the "socialist" species. Snce there's some DNA evidence that there was some interbreeding, perhaps that explains Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and their antisocial psychopathy and their greedy, heartless mental diseases.
We already have one a mere eight light-minutes away!
Just wanted to make that clear for younger folks reading along. Kit assemblers our age were not of the same ilk as the hobbyists who designed their own.
Depends on what you were assembling. I built a Heathkit guitar amp when I was sixteen, and when I plugged it in... nothing. I had to study the schematics to discover that the installation instructions were in error.
And often, a hack was pretty simple, like when I turned $10 transistor radios into $250 guitar fuzzboxes using $2 worth of parts; that was incredibly trivial, despite the fact that I'd not heard of anyone doing it before. Diagnosing and repairing the amp that was built using erroneous plans was a LOT harder.
Seriously, the system is going to break the first time these developers are introduced to WOMEN.
No, it will break the first time somebody who bought the same style of shoes as you sits down at your terminal and pens a nasty email to the CEO. Less liklihood with women, who HATE it when any part of their apparrel is the same as another woman's.
I believe I'm about to be educated a little more today. Could you elaborate? After all, we consider Jupiter to be a gas giant, does it lack a core? Europa is covered in ice, what is it considered to be (and yes, I know it's a sattelite)?
Why isn't water considered when discussing what a planet's surface is?
I was 12 when I built my first computer, too, but it wasn't a Sinclair. It wasn't even digital! Actually it was more of an electric slide rule, but it would compute. But what would you expect from a 12 year old in 1964? Things were pretty primitive back then, I'll tell you.
In my line of business, if somebody wants to poach another person's team (Such as all of the brokers in a office or a analyst team)...
Brokers? As in stock brokers? No wonder the world's economy crashed if they're as poorly educated as you seem to be.