> the US goverment is asking more from google than the chinese one, invading > the privacy of millions of non-US citizens. Very interesting
I had thought about this on Saturday or Sunday with respect to the NSA spying program. We hear over and over how the rights of Americans are not being infringed and how no laws are being broken.
What of the people on the other end, though? Do their governments have any laws about unwarranted wiretaps? Could Richard Cheney or George Bush be arrested next time they visit Europe the same way van der Sloot was arrested when he visited New York?
More and more I think about this and I find that it probably won't be used directly for abuse by law enforcement or political officials. What will happen is that the infrastructure necessary to support this will be enlarged. That infrastructure will require care and maintenance by human beings. Those people are socially connected with other people.
The abuse will come from people who are connected to the people who care and maintain the infrastructure for this. In short, more than enabling the trouncing of civil liberties, it will enable nascient stalkers, bitter ex-spouses, and control freaks.
The same goes for the US NSA spying program. People are right. There are probably too many checks for politicians or law enforcement officials to directly abuse the system. Some day, though, when some middle manager at the FBI/NSA/CIA/whoever is facing a tough year for performance, has a new baby, and needs house repairs... you can bet s/he'll be mining that database for all s/he's worth to put together any flimsy excuse for an investigation/detention/arrest that s/he can find. Every one of the people who has access to the databases will probably require some sort of security clearance but when it takes 10,000 techs to take care of the database there will always be some insiders who managed to slip through the process.
So while the government may not be the final criminal their pet projects are enabling the criminals--the very people they're supposed to be protecting us against.
I already know who's going to get the fat contracts for this. I already know. I'm so amused I could practically pee myself. I'll probably get picked up by the NSA by the end of the day over this... but I already know!
At my last performance evaluation, at a non-profit federal military contractor, my manager was attempting to explain to me why my job sucks so much and why he couldn't do anything about it. At the end, though, he said,"You see that 30 acre construction project we're building across the street? I don't know what kind of business the upper management is going to put in it, but I hear it's going to be all office space and it's going to have something to do with IT. I know you have some interest in IT so maybe if you can just wait until it's built we can get you into a position where we can make better use of your skills."
I promptly left. I wasn't sticking around for 3 years, fighting with myself not to sleep at my desk, just so that I could be a database jockey. But gosh-darn I already know... and what this gives me insight to is that the company already knows, and that means that the policians sitting on the committees who will dole out these contracts already know, because there's no way that a military contractor is going to drop down a $200 million dollar construction project unless they have a good idea of which contracts are going to fill it.
they'll cane billions of taxpayer dollars over 5-10 years with little to show for it except happy BMW dealers in the areas where the middleware agile on-demand service bus oriented architecture consultants live
As a bonus those billions of taxpayer dollars and consultant jobs will help bolster their reports that the job market isn't dying. Plenty of jobs will be created to shuffle the data, thousands will be created administering the clusters and servers holding the data, hundreds will be created administering the hundreds, and a few dozen will be created administering the non-profit managing the whole thing.
That is precisely the problem. Farther up the page were comments about people worried about being jailed, or shot, and posters who derided them that the government would never do that because the courts would stop them if they didn't have enough or the right kind of evidence. Here, though, you have nailed it down perfectly. This is not about being thrown in prison or being executed. This is about the slow and deliberate advance of government harassment, slowly creeping further and further into the life of a citizen, with no justification other than a well-written compilation of completely circumstantial facts.
You're recommending that everyone becomes completely introverted recluses in order to avoid government harassment? Where have we seen this before in history?
I put fresh installs of Win98 on two different systems (a Pentium2 400 and an AMD K6-3 400) about 5 weeks ago. I'm lucky to have legit licenses for both of them.
On one system I have LinkSys NC100 cards which Win98SE doesn't ship with drivers for. I have the floppies but, trouble is, the FDD is crapped (come to find out the floppies are dead, too). I had to boot back to Debian to fetch the drivers. Once connected, windowsupdate.microsoft.com had no problems sending all of the updates from the original CD installation to current to me. WMP 10, DX 9, IE 6 (with all security updates), no problem. To be honest I don't know when the last time there were any new updates added for the underlying OS but it runs tip top. The only problem I had was, 5 weeks ago, DiamondMM requested an e-mail address to send instructions on how to obtain the latest drivers for the V550 (RivaTNT) card. After applying all of the MS updates the v2.02 (original CD) drivers were nonfunctional and the v3.68 (the latest as of 2004 and the newest I had) drivers had a really nasty quirk--after about 20 seconds the top 1/4 of the screen would end up on the bottom, the screen would be pushed up with about a 1/8 screen height black bar, but the mouse would (of course) still act like the screen was fine. Have fun finding "Shut Down" in that scenario (CTRL-ALT-DEL, TAB, TAB, TAB, ENTER, ENTER). The v2.54 drivers work (it helps to keep old software sometimes) but DirectX support doesn't include 7. I just checked the DiamondMM site now and they no longer have the silly "give us an e-mail and we'll send the instructions to you" (and throw your e-mail address into our nice corporate hopper) policy--unless that's something they only pull on people who cruise in on IE but not Moz. I doubt that I'll ever reboot that system and try the new drivers, though. It runs Debian nicely. Packet forwarding also works in Debian with a little sysctl and iptables. On Win98SE the dhcpsvc.dll (I think that's what I tracked it down to) is either missing or the lib is incomplete. ICS doesn't work on 98 until after I put Norton's firewall (with a newer dhcpsvc.dll) on the system. Norton, even with a bare minimum install and turning off all the automatic notification crap, makes the system unstable as hell once it fetches the, and I'm not kidding, 10-15 updates which it needs. Talk about reboot hell.
On the other system the drivers which shipped with the Dlink DWL-G520, v4.00, don't work with a default Win98SE installation. The AirportXtreme software is installed, I can see my access point (WEP encrypted) correctly, but it never associates. I know from past experience this is fixed with the latest Dlink drivers but, since the system is connected via wireless, I had no way to get to my server and fetch them from my archive. The CDRW is here in the workstation. I didn't feel like screwing around with it so I promptly installed Debian from 2.2 CDs, put in some madwifi drivers (from an archive CD), and haven't turned the system off since.
I bet Win98 still works pretty well once you manage to get through all of the updates and reboots. The real issue is the firewall/anti-virus that's still necessary. If I put 98 systems on the 'net without the firewall/AV they'd probably run quite well. It's anyone's guess as to how long an unprotected 98 system would last on the network.
I don't know how current you mean by current. Both of these systems installed and ran Win2k quite nicely and both run Debian Potato, Woody, Sarge, or Sid with no problem. I don't have a copy of WinXP that I can try. A new laptop should be here early next week. If the manufacturer is nice enough to supply an actual WinXP CD and not just some OEM recovery image bs I might try putting XP on the workstation to check out the performance. Of course I'll have to keep it off the open network. I wouldn't want MS invalidating my brand new laptop's key because a hobby experiment tried to call home.
That's idealistic and pretty but completely unreal. Self-satisfied pride won't pay for groceries. Nor will it keep the debt collectors at bay. Nor will it explain to the insurance company why your credit is trashed when you couldn't make any payments on college loans while spending two years looking for a job. Nor will it keep you warm when your landlord evicts you. Nor will it explain to the neighbors when you're living in your parents' house at age 30. Nor will it sweeten the bitter taste in your mouth when you're jumping from one temp position to another just waiting for that "perfect job" to drop out of the sky. Self-satisfied pride won't even help you in the afterlife.
Don't get me wrong. I believed that very same thing which you're preaching. Then reality came along. There should be a warranty on PhDs. "Yes, I'd like a refund. You can have the certificate back. Apparently it's broken because it's not doing any of the things which the admissions department said it would."
They always say that there are two things you don't talk about at work, religion and politics, because it always degenerates into an argument where both sides are utterly convinced that they're correct and usually end up doing little more than slinging mud. Productive conversation comes to nil very quickly.
I'd like to say that, outside of work, there is one thing you shouldn't bother talking about and that's work. Why? Let's profile it the same way we would profile religion or politics. There are two sides. There is one side that has it good (whether because they were born into it or they got lucky) and one side that does not have it good (whether because they were born into it or because they didn't get lucky). Let's get one thing straight. How hard you work has nothing to do with it. Zero, zilch. Let's get another thing straight. How smart you work has nothing to do with it. Zero, zilch. Plenty of people will claim that they made it to success through hard work and perserverence but that is simply not true. It is a correlation and causation disconnect. Those very same people could claim, with the same statistical accuracy, that they made it to success because the weather had been just right on the day they hit their promotion, or their hair was exactly 2.5 inches long, or because they had eaten turkey the night before. Let me reiterate: the only two factors that affect the separation of the two groups are birth and luck.
So now that the two groups are defined, let's look at how the conversation will inevitably go. This is the same way that employment conversations have gone on this board, and many others, and in many pubs, and around many lunch tables, for years.
Person A is the person who has it good. Person B is the person who does not.
Conversation 1:
Person B: "My job sucks." Person A: "You're an incompetent fucktard who can't do anything right and doesn't concentrate on your job." Person B: "Fuck you." Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 2:
Person A: "My job is great." Person B: "Mine isn't." Person A: "You're an incompetent fucktard who can't do anything right and doesn't concentrate on your job." Person B: "Fuck you." Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 3:
Person B: "I'm not getting paid enough." Person A: "You should be happy just to have a job! There are people starving in China!" Person B: "Fuck you." Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 4:
Person A: "I just bought a new car!" Person B: "I wish I could afford one." Person A: "You should be happy just to have a job! There are people starving in China!" Person B: "Fuck you." Person A: "You're a loser."
And that's how it always goes. Why do we even bother anymore? Nothing ever gets resolved. Person A is always self-satisfied and, usually, doing nothing but trolling B. B is always frustrated and looking for that lucky break and wishes A would quit needling them, for just once, and offer some real advice.
30k/year is fine if you live in an area where you can walk and take a 20 minute public transportation commute to work and housing is cheap. Most large scientific employers are located in areas where 30k/year would barely pay rent and leave you enough money to nibble on soda crackers while living the live of an urban recluse.
I'd like to be a scientist... with a life. I have the energy for it. I go stir crazy staring at four bare walls and that single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.
That's so completely ignorant. I can slack off at my job, smile nice, and keep my mouth shut and get a 4% raise. I can work hard, think hard, ask hard questions, make difficult decisions, take chances, and get a 3% raise. How hard, or even how smart, you work has absolutely nothing to do with how much money you make in the scientific industry. Even if you're paid hourly, most scientific jobs only have sporadic opportunities for overtime. The vast majority also have exclusivity agreements. That means that, if your manager stops off at the gas station or orders a meal at Olive Garden and you happen to be working there you can be legally fired the very next day.
I'm calling BS on you. You obviously have approximately zero clue what you're talking about.
that can only occur if the format can only be read by a non-open source application that is only available in binary format and where the hardware to run that program becomes unavailable
I see a degenerating algorithm here. Paintings or carvings in rock or pottery have been in use for, I'm guessing, on the order of hundreds of thousands of years. Painting or punches on/in paper has been in use for, I'm guessing, on the order of tens of thousands of years. The rolling of paper into scrolls probably wasn't much further behind. I have no idea when the concept of segmented paper (books/sheafs) began. The introduction of a mechanical playback device came somewhere around the 1860 and very few player pianos remain. It's worthy to note that the multiple channel capability of player pianos is a significant phenomena over single channel linear data on scrolls. The spindlized data returned to single channel and was coiled around the orthogonal axis and returned to a hard form (first demonstrated recording capability around 1850 but with no playback capability) around 1877 and lasted to the 1940s with cylinder recordings. Few players of those remain. Around 1881 the cylindrical recording was flattened out and made lateral (78s were first introduced in 1915). Those are still in use though fading. Around 1946 the data reverted its layout structure, returning to linear, but the format changed from a physical phenomenon into a magnetic one with magnetic wire recording (reel-to-reel, endless loop, 4-track/8-track) and can still be found in somewhat common form today as audio cassettes. In 1950 magnetic data took on the helical form with a drum type hard disc drive and, a few short years later, laterized into disc format. Magnetic floppy discs seem to have emerged in the 1960s. Cursory online research indicates that data jumped from a magnetic form to a photonic form as early as 1967 but again reverted to a serial physical layout. I've never seen photonic tape though the histories seem to indicate that's what was initially invented in 1967. Linear photonic media exists, arguably, as barcodes but I can't say that I've ever seen helical photonic media. It's not until 1972 that the photonic format realized that it could bypass the helical form and proceed directly to the lateral disc format.
I tried to summarize all of that into a nice neat little table but the lameness filter sucks ass and HTML sucks double ass and eats gas.
Suffice it to say that communication data has characteristics: Medium, method, encoding (channels), alignment, and lifespan. If you could have seen the table (lameness filter sucks, HTML sucks harder) it looks very similar to a vertical printout of prime numbers or vertical table of Pythagorean triples. There seems to be a pattern to the way data has evolved but it always avoids a clear mathematical definition.
One trend that is clear though, is that new technologies are coming out at increasingly shorter intervals and they're also dying out more rapidly. It's going to be a long time before we replace a linear arrangement of glyphs and that will probably never become extinct technology. Things like a cylindrical drum single channel magnetic hard drive didn't last very long, the multi-channel digital audio tape is a pretty fringe player, I don't know that multichannel floppy lateral disc magnetic media ever existed, multichannel fixed lateral disc magnetic media is only arguable as the number of heads on hard drives have increased and I've never seen single channel fixed or floppy linear photonic media.
I won't buy any more media after photonic compact discs and DVDs for entertainment. I've found a musical genre that I've enjoyed on a day to day basis for eight years. I'm happy with the way that it evolves and I never become attached enough to any one piece to really need to keep my own historical copy. I feel sorry for the people who insist on continuing to try and create their own personalized collection of music which gets older every day because the trend is that it will be playable for increasingly shorter periods of time before the hardware breaks and the media encoding format is made obsolete.
This has been a disturbing thought for me for at least four years now. Who the heck needs that kind of storage? I'm not real comfortable with governments the world over keeping internet logs of everything forever. It's a sign of world-wide genocide waiting to happen. In an effort to "cleanse" the human race we're soon going to see that anyone who has ever looked at "questionable" material will be moved into moral cleansing camps where they'll either be shot outright or allowed to rot away in their own incarceration. That questionable material, of course, will be happily provided by ISPs who have every digital transaction stored since the network began.
I have two 80 gb and one 40 gb in two systems and I'm barely hitting 10% usage--most of which is just standard OS installs. People must be complete digital packrats. People need to start asking themselves,"In ten years... Am I really going to use any of this?" What are we going to do: pass this stuff on to our great-grandchildren as heirlooms? I've been trying to apply the ten-year test to everything I own. If it doesn't pass the ten year test there's a 98% probability that it won't pass the rm -rf test.
The next time I move I'll probably end up ditching all but my favorite CDs, most of my college texts, and a good portion of my clothes. Stuff like blank stationary is always handy to keep around as scratchpads though.
It's quite clear that there's little room for speculation. In the future we may find out that the redshift which you pooh-pooh with such veracity has a much more complex effect than is currently known. At one time the earth was flat, the atom was unsplittable, and a photon could not possibly be both a wave and a particle.
Clearly you know everything there is to possibly know about astronomy. Don't expect me to quit speculating.
Slashdot Mirror
> the US goverment is asking more from google than the chinese one, invading
> the privacy of millions of non-US citizens. Very interesting
I had thought about this on Saturday or Sunday with respect to the NSA spying program. We hear over and over how the rights of Americans are not being infringed and how no laws are being broken.
What of the people on the other end, though? Do their governments have any laws about unwarranted wiretaps? Could Richard Cheney or George Bush be arrested next time they visit Europe the same way van der Sloot was arrested when he visited New York?
As opposed to just telling jokes about it and passing around crudely drawn cartoons like we did in grade school before the internet?
Aside from the type-os that was pretty spot on.
More and more I think about this and I find that it probably won't be used directly for abuse by law enforcement or political officials. What will happen is that the infrastructure necessary to support this will be enlarged. That infrastructure will require care and maintenance by human beings. Those people are socially connected with other people.
The abuse will come from people who are connected to the people who care and maintain the infrastructure for this. In short, more than enabling the trouncing of civil liberties, it will enable nascient stalkers, bitter ex-spouses, and control freaks.
The same goes for the US NSA spying program. People are right. There are probably too many checks for politicians or law enforcement officials to directly abuse the system. Some day, though, when some middle manager at the FBI/NSA/CIA/whoever is facing a tough year for performance, has a new baby, and needs house repairs... you can bet s/he'll be mining that database for all s/he's worth to put together any flimsy excuse for an investigation/detention/arrest that s/he can find. Every one of the people who has access to the databases will probably require some sort of security clearance but when it takes 10,000 techs to take care of the database there will always be some insiders who managed to slip through the process.
So while the government may not be the final criminal their pet projects are enabling the criminals--the very people they're supposed to be protecting us against.
Not what I said at all, not even implied. Perhaps you read it wrong.
Okay, a troll, or some priveleged member of society, would say,"What's the problem? Just go out and find a different job!"
But me, haha, I can completely identify with that. Your statement describes the last 8 years of my employment.
Haha. Or, for an 18 year old,"Sign here or you can start looking for another place to live."
I already know who's going to get the fat contracts for this. I already know. I'm so amused I could practically pee myself. I'll probably get picked up by the NSA by the end of the day over this... but I already know!
At my last performance evaluation, at a non-profit federal military contractor, my manager was attempting to explain to me why my job sucks so much and why he couldn't do anything about it. At the end, though, he said,"You see that 30 acre construction project we're building across the street? I don't know what kind of business the upper management is going to put in it, but I hear it's going to be all office space and it's going to have something to do with IT. I know you have some interest in IT so maybe if you can just wait until it's built we can get you into a position where we can make better use of your skills."
I promptly left. I wasn't sticking around for 3 years, fighting with myself not to sleep at my desk, just so that I could be a database jockey. But gosh-darn I already know... and what this gives me insight to is that the company already knows, and that means that the policians sitting on the committees who will dole out these contracts already know, because there's no way that a military contractor is going to drop down a $200 million dollar construction project unless they have a good idea of which contracts are going to fill it.
Haha! It's off to Gitmo I go...
What a crock.
That is precisely the problem. Farther up the page were comments about people worried about being jailed, or shot, and posters who derided them that the government would never do that because the courts would stop them if they didn't have enough or the right kind of evidence. Here, though, you have nailed it down perfectly. This is not about being thrown in prison or being executed. This is about the slow and deliberate advance of government harassment, slowly creeping further and further into the life of a citizen, with no justification other than a well-written compilation of completely circumstantial facts.
The US isn't totalitarian. It's democratically elected. How could that possibly go wrong?
You're recommending that everyone becomes completely introverted recluses in order to avoid government harassment? Where have we seen this before in history?
> I'm sorry you were despirate enough
Me and the other 15000 people who work for that company, eh?
Save the pity position.
> deal with your own life and quit bitching
You've proven my point nicely. Troll, troll, troll your boat...
I put fresh installs of Win98 on two different systems (a Pentium2 400 and an AMD K6-3 400) about 5 weeks ago. I'm lucky to have legit licenses for both of them.
On one system I have LinkSys NC100 cards which Win98SE doesn't ship with drivers for. I have the floppies but, trouble is, the FDD is crapped (come to find out the floppies are dead, too). I had to boot back to Debian to fetch the drivers. Once connected, windowsupdate.microsoft.com had no problems sending all of the updates from the original CD installation to current to me. WMP 10, DX 9, IE 6 (with all security updates), no problem. To be honest I don't know when the last time there were any new updates added for the underlying OS but it runs tip top. The only problem I had was, 5 weeks ago, DiamondMM requested an e-mail address to send instructions on how to obtain the latest drivers for the V550 (RivaTNT) card. After applying all of the MS updates the v2.02 (original CD) drivers were nonfunctional and the v3.68 (the latest as of 2004 and the newest I had) drivers had a really nasty quirk--after about 20 seconds the top 1/4 of the screen would end up on the bottom, the screen would be pushed up with about a 1/8 screen height black bar, but the mouse would (of course) still act like the screen was fine. Have fun finding "Shut Down" in that scenario (CTRL-ALT-DEL, TAB, TAB, TAB, ENTER, ENTER). The v2.54 drivers work (it helps to keep old software sometimes) but DirectX support doesn't include 7. I just checked the DiamondMM site now and they no longer have the silly "give us an e-mail and we'll send the instructions to you" (and throw your e-mail address into our nice corporate hopper) policy--unless that's something they only pull on people who cruise in on IE but not Moz. I doubt that I'll ever reboot that system and try the new drivers, though. It runs Debian nicely. Packet forwarding also works in Debian with a little sysctl and iptables. On Win98SE the dhcpsvc.dll (I think that's what I tracked it down to) is either missing or the lib is incomplete. ICS doesn't work on 98 until after I put Norton's firewall (with a newer dhcpsvc.dll) on the system. Norton, even with a bare minimum install and turning off all the automatic notification crap, makes the system unstable as hell once it fetches the, and I'm not kidding, 10-15 updates which it needs. Talk about reboot hell.
On the other system the drivers which shipped with the Dlink DWL-G520, v4.00, don't work with a default Win98SE installation. The AirportXtreme software is installed, I can see my access point (WEP encrypted) correctly, but it never associates. I know from past experience this is fixed with the latest Dlink drivers but, since the system is connected via wireless, I had no way to get to my server and fetch them from my archive. The CDRW is here in the workstation. I didn't feel like screwing around with it so I promptly installed Debian from 2.2 CDs, put in some madwifi drivers (from an archive CD), and haven't turned the system off since.
I bet Win98 still works pretty well once you manage to get through all of the updates and reboots. The real issue is the firewall/anti-virus that's still necessary. If I put 98 systems on the 'net without the firewall/AV they'd probably run quite well. It's anyone's guess as to how long an unprotected 98 system would last on the network.
I don't know how current you mean by current. Both of these systems installed and ran Win2k quite nicely and both run Debian Potato, Woody, Sarge, or Sid with no problem. I don't have a copy of WinXP that I can try. A new laptop should be here early next week. If the manufacturer is nice enough to supply an actual WinXP CD and not just some OEM recovery image bs I might try putting XP on the workstation to check out the performance. Of course I'll have to keep it off the open network. I wouldn't want MS invalidating my brand new laptop's key because a hobby experiment tried to call home.
That's idealistic and pretty but completely unreal. Self-satisfied pride won't pay for groceries. Nor will it keep the debt collectors at bay. Nor will it explain to the insurance company why your credit is trashed when you couldn't make any payments on college loans while spending two years looking for a job. Nor will it keep you warm when your landlord evicts you. Nor will it explain to the neighbors when you're living in your parents' house at age 30. Nor will it sweeten the bitter taste in your mouth when you're jumping from one temp position to another just waiting for that "perfect job" to drop out of the sky. Self-satisfied pride won't even help you in the afterlife.
Don't get me wrong. I believed that very same thing which you're preaching. Then reality came along. There should be a warranty on PhDs. "Yes, I'd like a refund. You can have the certificate back. Apparently it's broken because it's not doing any of the things which the admissions department said it would."
They always say that there are two things you don't talk about at work, religion and politics, because it always degenerates into an argument where both sides are utterly convinced that they're correct and usually end up doing little more than slinging mud. Productive conversation comes to nil very quickly.
I'd like to say that, outside of work, there is one thing you shouldn't bother talking about and that's work. Why? Let's profile it the same way we would profile religion or politics. There are two sides. There is one side that has it good (whether because they were born into it or they got lucky) and one side that does not have it good (whether because they were born into it or because they didn't get lucky). Let's get one thing straight. How hard you work has nothing to do with it. Zero, zilch. Let's get another thing straight. How smart you work has nothing to do with it. Zero, zilch. Plenty of people will claim that they made it to success through hard work and perserverence but that is simply not true. It is a correlation and causation disconnect. Those very same people could claim, with the same statistical accuracy, that they made it to success because the weather had been just right on the day they hit their promotion, or their hair was exactly 2.5 inches long, or because they had eaten turkey the night before. Let me reiterate: the only two factors that affect the separation of the two groups are birth and luck.
So now that the two groups are defined, let's look at how the conversation will inevitably go. This is the same way that employment conversations have gone on this board, and many others, and in many pubs, and around many lunch tables, for years.
Person A is the person who has it good. Person B is the person who does not.
Conversation 1:
Person B: "My job sucks."
Person A: "You're an incompetent fucktard who can't do anything right and doesn't concentrate on your job."
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 2:
Person A: "My job is great."
Person B: "Mine isn't."
Person A: "You're an incompetent fucktard who can't do anything right and doesn't concentrate on your job."
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 3:
Person B: "I'm not getting paid enough."
Person A: "You should be happy just to have a job! There are people starving in China!"
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
Conversation 4:
Person A: "I just bought a new car!"
Person B: "I wish I could afford one."
Person A: "You should be happy just to have a job! There are people starving in China!"
Person B: "Fuck you."
Person A: "You're a loser."
And that's how it always goes. Why do we even bother anymore? Nothing ever gets resolved. Person A is always self-satisfied and, usually, doing nothing but trolling B. B is always frustrated and looking for that lucky break and wishes A would quit needling them, for just once, and offer some real advice.
Who wrote this script? It's getting old.
30k/year is fine if you live in an area where you can walk and take a 20 minute public transportation commute to work and housing is cheap. Most large scientific employers are located in areas where 30k/year would barely pay rent and leave you enough money to nibble on soda crackers while living the live of an urban recluse.
I'd like to be a scientist... with a life. I have the energy for it. I go stir crazy staring at four bare walls and that single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.
> bust your hump for money
That's so completely ignorant. I can slack off at my job, smile nice, and keep my mouth shut and get a 4% raise. I can work hard, think hard, ask hard questions, make difficult decisions, take chances, and get a 3% raise. How hard, or even how smart, you work has absolutely nothing to do with how much money you make in the scientific industry. Even if you're paid hourly, most scientific jobs only have sporadic opportunities for overtime. The vast majority also have exclusivity agreements. That means that, if your manager stops off at the gas station or orders a meal at Olive Garden and you happen to be working there you can be legally fired the very next day.
I'm calling BS on you. You obviously have approximately zero clue what you're talking about.
The vulture dudes were "Skeksis". I forget what the monkish guys were called. And yes, my head asploded as well when the wings showed up.
I tried to summarize all of that into a nice neat little table but the lameness filter sucks ass and HTML sucks double ass and eats gas.
Suffice it to say that communication data has characteristics: Medium, method, encoding (channels), alignment, and lifespan. If you could have seen the table (lameness filter sucks, HTML sucks harder) it looks very similar to a vertical printout of prime numbers or vertical table of Pythagorean triples. There seems to be a pattern to the way data has evolved but it always avoids a clear mathematical definition.
One trend that is clear though, is that new technologies are coming out at increasingly shorter intervals and they're also dying out more rapidly. It's going to be a long time before we replace a linear arrangement of glyphs and that will probably never become extinct technology. Things like a cylindrical drum single channel magnetic hard drive didn't last very long, the multi-channel digital audio tape is a pretty fringe player, I don't know that multichannel floppy lateral disc magnetic media ever existed, multichannel fixed lateral disc magnetic media is only arguable as the number of heads on hard drives have increased and I've never seen single channel fixed or floppy linear photonic media.
I won't buy any more media after photonic compact discs and DVDs for entertainment. I've found a musical genre that I've enjoyed on a day to day basis for eight years. I'm happy with the way that it evolves and I never become attached enough to any one piece to really need to keep my own historical copy. I feel sorry for the people who insist on continuing to try and create their own personalized collection of music which gets older every day because the trend is that it will be playable for increasingly shorter periods of time before the hardware breaks and the media encoding format is made obsolete.
I made no analogy.
Holy cow. How many different colors of lipstick, fingernail polish, or different pairs of shoes do you take with you?
This has been a disturbing thought for me for at least four years now. Who the heck needs that kind of storage? I'm not real comfortable with governments the world over keeping internet logs of everything forever. It's a sign of world-wide genocide waiting to happen. In an effort to "cleanse" the human race we're soon going to see that anyone who has ever looked at "questionable" material will be moved into moral cleansing camps where they'll either be shot outright or allowed to rot away in their own incarceration. That questionable material, of course, will be happily provided by ISPs who have every digital transaction stored since the network began.
I have two 80 gb and one 40 gb in two systems and I'm barely hitting 10% usage--most of which is just standard OS installs. People must be complete digital packrats. People need to start asking themselves,"In ten years... Am I really going to use any of this?" What are we going to do: pass this stuff on to our great-grandchildren as heirlooms? I've been trying to apply the ten-year test to everything I own. If it doesn't pass the ten year test there's a 98% probability that it won't pass the rm -rf test.
The next time I move I'll probably end up ditching all but my favorite CDs, most of my college texts, and a good portion of my clothes. Stuff like blank stationary is always handy to keep around as scratchpads though.
It's quite clear that there's little room for speculation. In the future we may find out that the redshift which you pooh-pooh with such veracity has a much more complex effect than is currently known. At one time the earth was flat, the atom was unsplittable, and a photon could not possibly be both a wave and a particle.
Clearly you know everything there is to possibly know about astronomy. Don't expect me to quit speculating.